#GO DO SOME REAL WORK LIKE VOTING AND COMMUNITY OUTREACH | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

for-the-ninth · 2 months ago

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It happens like clockwork every election cycle.

Republican gets elected, people rage and foist all the blame onto third party voters or people who didn't vote. They post their hot takes about the brain dead red states who vote against their own interests and claim the only reason any of us are in this mess at all is because people won't "do the work," when their own definition of "the work" really just comes down to voting Democrat every four years, encouraging others to do the same, and resorting to shame when some of them inevitably don't.

These are often, though not always, folks who don't really know what The Work is. They aren't grounded in the struggle. They are comfortable enough that the only thing that really fazes them is someone like Trump getting elected. They aren't participating in community outreach or mutual aid networks. They are comfortable in many ways they probably take for granted, and the reason they want Dems in office is, in part, to protect that comfort.

What they don't realize, and often refuse to realize no matter how many activists of the present and past tell them, is that liberalism and electoral politics was never going to save us. Democrats have long been committed to the status quo. They cosplay as revolutionaries and leaders of the resistance whenever the next Republican dickhead gets voted in. They co-opt the movement despite having no real stake in it, because they are centrists with no genuine desire to propel the country in a radically progressive direction. And when folks too far left of center step up to the plate, like Bernie Sanders, the rest of the party refuses to put their weight behind them.

It's the same sorry set of excuses every time: oh, but we'll lose the swing voters! and we have to try to win over moderate Republicans! the nation isn't ready for someone so radical! When we all know that's bullshit. Anyone who's tired of crying over their grocery bill - and that's damn near everyone - is ready for radical change.

But sure, let's continue blaming people who didn't vote or voted third party for the result of one of many election cycles during which the Dems failed to provide us with a compelling progressive candidate with policies geared toward uplifting the working class and working poor.

By all means, let's continue doing the work of the imperialists for them, cause the more time we spend fighting each other over minor ideological differences (and yes, if your only beef with someone's ideology is that they didn't bother voting, that is a minor difference and not something worth seething over) the less time we'll spend organizing. The more isolated from each other we'll be. If we blame each other then we're less likely to blame them, for putting all of us in this hellscape.

And make no mistake - they know that. There's a reason Democratic politicians are so quick to disparage working class folks in southern states. If we blame them for just being sooooo willfully stupid and deplorable AND we blame everyone else for having the audacity not to vOTe bLue No MaTtRr wHo then there's no blame left to hurl at the Dems. They want so badly for us to believe that people like Obama, Harris, and Biden - who are all centrists, through and through - will save us if enough of us vote for them. And then when they do get voted in there's a million excuses for why they can't push any meaningful legislation through.

I hate watching so many of you buy right into it. Crucifying each other over not voting for the lesser of two evils like it isn't deeply fucked up that they're our only two options to begin with. Touting Harris like she's some sort of saint by comparison when she stood up on a national platform to say she wanted our military to be the most lethal in the world. Amidst calls for a ceasefire and an arms embargo, she said that shit with her whole chest, and y'all think Donald Trump is the only fascist? Get. A. Grip.

Electoral politics are not going to save us. Kamala Harris was never going to save us. We are the only people who can save us and we do that by building a grassroots movement grounded in class solidarity.

If you're still blaming people who voted third party or didn't vote at all, you're not ready for that movement. If you're still denigrating working class voters in red states for falling victim to the propaganda machine because you're Oh So Smart and that could never be you, you're not ready for the movement.

And if the only "work" you do is urging people to vote every 4 years and writing spicy posts after the fact about how you no longer give a shit about the people who "betrayed" you by not relying on electoral politics to save us - many of whom I can promise you are doing real, tangible work to benefit the people in their own communities - do me and everyone else a favor, and get grounded. Get rooted in the struggle. Stop spewing reactionary nonsense and put that energy into your community - including people who didn't fucking vote for Harris. Cause I can promise you, organizers and activists aren't checking anyone's voting record when they serve up meals at the soup kitchen or fund mutual aid requests for rent money. Folks who are "actually doing the work" don't have time for that petty shit.

#if you think this post is about you it is #yes I'm talking to you person who donates to national charities but knows nothing about mutual aid networks in your city #yes I'm talking to you person who makes fun of working class voters who have significantly less access to political education than you #and before you say bUt GooGLe is FrEe you know many Americans still read on a sixth grade level right?#election #harris

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shakespearean-snape · 1 year ago

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Volunteer at anything. Get your asses off Tumblr with your virtue signaling like Instagram influencers with carefully cultivated content for the serotonin of the likes and followers and go practice a little of what you preach for real and learn a few things in the act of doing so.

Go volunteer and get involved with your local political races and campaigns. Instead of cynically sneering and calling for a revolution of the way things are done without a clear working knowledge of HOW things are even done go volunteer and get some real-world working experience and then ask yourself what steps can reasonably be taken to change the things that are broken instead of passively liking and reblogging content to your blog that signals you're fucking Katniss Everdeen and so edgy you don't vote because fuck this electoral college everyone is talking about and fuck the government and blah, blah, blah. BE THE CHANGE.

Go volunteer at community outreaches, look them up, and find out where you can make a difference. My first working experiences through high school were this way instead of retail or fast food or other after-school jobs and it changed me and made me a more aware person than I ever could have been scrolling through Tumblr cultivating my blog content for likes and followers. I went through grad school just to get the qualifications I needed to head over a position with a community outreach program I am passionate about and have been dedicating my time to since I was a teenager.

Get inspired. Get motivated. Get active. Get off Tumblr with this cynical don't vote, wait for the revolution to come to you bullshit and go out and GET INVOLVED. The only way change happens is when you stop waiting and start doing.

Even Katniss started shit by volunteering.

listen i am not american. i understand that even democrats fucking suck and its a genuinely shitty situation to be in. im so sorry. but hey, hey look at me. why are you guys bullying people for saying "you should still vote blue?" Like im curious about the alternatives youve got. voting red? firebombing walmart? tumblr user catboyssepticbutthole, i know you will not be firebombing walmart.

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theliterarywolf · 4 years ago

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How was the sequel to Tales from The Hood, a shitshow?

The original Tales from the Hood, while having some campy horror elements, still managed to present its stories and tone competently while still incorporating themes of struggles of black Americans in urban areas.

Examples:

A black politician who’s been trying to fight against police corruption gets beaten to death and injected with drugs post-mortem by said corrupt cops to slander his name. The politician returns from the dead to exact vengeance. Obviously this short tackles police brutality and corruption.

A little boy and his mother who are constantly beaten and abused by what he draws and identifies as a ‘monster’ who, it turns out, is the mother’s new boyfriend. The theme here is Domestic Violence and how often people try to brush it under the rug as just a way of life in the community.

A former klansman-turned senator buys a building called ‘The Dollhouse’ that is of high historical significance to the local black community, despite their wishes and complaints, to serve as the headquarters for his racist campaign to become governor. The house in of itself was where a confederate-supporter, after the loss of the Civil War, decided to murder all of his slaves rather than see them freed. Their restless souls haunted the place until a ‘voodoo woman’ managed to calm their souls and place them into dolls. You can pretty much guess where this is going and the themes.

The final entry centers around a gang-member who, after getting hunted and shot down by rival gang-members, is taken into police custody and is given one last chance for freedom by a doctor’s new, radical behavioral therapy program. Said therapy takes a note right out of A Clockwork Orange and bombards our main character with alternating images of brutal gang-violence and KKK lynchings. After which, he is berated with apparitions of all the people he’s shot and killed; including a little girl who was a victim during one of his drive-by shootings. Of course, this kind of therapy will only be successful if the subject shows some remorse...

And all of this is wrapped in a framing device of three gang-members trying to find some drugs at a funeral-home, even harassing the funeral-director, which turns out to be a portal into hell.

... *deep breath*

I have to do a ‘Read More’ because this post got long. But I implore you guys to read on to see the abyss of insanity and bad directions that were taken in regards to the sequel of this movie. Please.

The sequel decided to throw ALL NUANCE AND TACT out of the window and give us such wonderful stories as:

A white girl and a black girl are on a road-trip and decide to go to the... ugh... Museum of Negrosity where the owner chastises them on thinking that the uncomfortable racist memorabilia he owns (collections of minstrel show cartoons, golliwog and pickaninny dolls) are things of the past instead of acknowledging them as parts of America’s racist past. And, for some reason, the white girl is obsessed with buying one of the golliwog dolls because she had one when she was little. Anyway, they sneak back in later with the white girl’s brother who happens to be the black girl’s boyfriend, so they can steal one of the dolls. Through hijinks, the doll comes to life and grows to the size of a human being. The brother/boyfriend gets whipped to death, the black girl gets cut in half by a minstrel-colored guillotine, and the white girl... Fucks the giant golliwog doll, gets pregnant, and a few days later, has her stomach torn open as a bunch of baby versions of the doll go flying out everywhere.

Some gang-members track down a former pimp who’s changed his ways to try and shake him down for some owed money. He doesn’t comply, so they kill him but, golly-gee! How are they going to get the money now~? Oh, I know! Hold a scam medium hostage so he can perform a seance to talk to the pimp to find out about the money. But, oh no~ It looks like the medium’s powers decide to actually work this time~ Ooh~

Two douchebags hookup with two hot chicks and, after the world’s worst game of Cards Against Humanity, they decide to roofie the girls so they can record themselves raping them so they can post it to ‘le dark web’. ... Lo’ and behold, the girls turn out to be vampires who were playing 4D chess to rope the two douchebags in so they can use them for their own recording-something-brutal-to-post-online scheme.

And... The LAST one. Oh my God, the LAST ONE. *deep breath* Okay.

So we follow a black republican councilman who is married to a white woman and they’re expecting a baby after a long line of miscarriages. But the wife is having weird bouts of bad dreams and insomnia. What are the bad dreams about?

... I need you guys to understand. That I am not shitposting when I type the following words. *deep breath* Okay.

The wife is being haunted by the ghost of Emmett Till telling her that she doesn’t deserve to have her baby. You know? Emmett Till? The victim of one of the most brutal, horrific murders in America due to one of the most disgusting, vile acts of racism? THAT EMMETT TILL?!

So..! The black councilman is working for a white politician who... I’m just going to put a direct quote from the movie so you can get where they were coming from.

“That man wants to close down ten more voting locations, all of them in black districts!”

Anyway, after a house-call from a doctor who brushes off the dreams as hormones, the councilman hosts a party for the politician who’s running slogan is ‘Let’s take Mississippi back!’ Gee-golly-willickers! Can’t imagine where they were coming from with that one!!

So the party goes on, the politician even congratulating our councilman on his ‘white wife’, but said wife rushes downstairs after having another dream; ranting about ‘that boy from the field has decided to LIVE! And if he lives, our baby’s going to die!’ And she runs outside with a machete to try and kill the ghost of Emmett Till (who, again, very real person and victim of racist brutality).

So the councilman’s mother and the local voodoo expert drive up and the voodoo expert tells the councilman that Emmett Till is trying to talk to him about the nature of sacrifice. The next day, the wife is talking about how her stomach is getting smaller, but the councilman doesn’t want to hear any of it and calls the doctor again. And, guys..?! If shit hadn’t jumped the rails before?! The train just starts doing cartwheels from here.

The doctor is suspiciously short-tempered with the politician this time around and he does examine the wife to confirm that her stomach is indeed shrinking. However, when he’s told that the councilman is the father, he storms out and snaps “I don’t work for coloreds!”

Then the wife runs out of bed and tells the doctor that the councilman isn’t her husband and that he kidnapped and raped her. So both the wife and the doctor drive off and the councilman realizes that the world has somehow gone back to the era of Jim Crow.

... Oooh my gosh, typing this is making me want to commit toaster-bath but it gets so much worse..!

So, after the voodoo expert comes to chastise the councilman about not ‘respecting the sacrifices that have been gifted to you’, he is able to see the ghost of Emmett Till (who was a real person, why is this happening..?!) who is there to tell him that he’s decided that he wants to live. Which means that the world will never see the brutal images of his body at his funeral and that will cause a Butterfly Effect in history that will make it so that the Civil Rights Movement never happened.

You may be questioning the logistics of this, but don’t worry! The ghosts of the girls killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham come to explain and further berate the councilman about ‘respecting the sacrifices that have been gifted to him’ and working for a racist politician.

But wait! There’s more! *whines* I keep crying out to God but he won’t answer...

They’re soon joined by the ghosts of the three Freedom Riders who were killed during the Mississippi Burning Murders, the ghost of Civil Rights Activist Medgar Evers, and DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Not to mention several other unnamed figures who walk up while everyone else starts chanting about ‘respecting the sacrifices that have been gifted to you’, who look like Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass, just to name a few.

... I need a drink. I need a cold, stiff drink. ... Almost done.

So, in comes the Klan. You know, the white-robed bastards; I hear they have an outreach center a few cities away from me. Sure, fine, whatever. The wife is leading them along with the white politician who hits the councilman’s mother in the face with a baton and Emmett Till stops time just as reinforcements show up to tell the councilman that, in order for everything to go back to normal, he has to join the ranks of those who sacrificed.

“If what you want is worth us dying for, how come its not worth you dying for?!”

And, at first, the councilman disagrees; even being dragged away by Klansmen. However! It’s his wife angrily spitting in his face that makes him realize that this world isn’t the world he wants to live in. So he runs over to Emmett Till to tell him that he will join him... And then he’s beaten to death, becoming a sacrifice to get the world back to normal. And, once it is, his spirit joins Emmett Till’s and walks off into the great beyond.

So! Not only did this schlocky, B-movie horror movie sequel decide to use a REAL LIFE VICTIM of racism-driven brutality as a story-device, but it also wants to put forth the message that the people who lost their lives during the Civil Rights Movement? Yeah, they HAD to die! Otherwise the Civil Rights Movement would never have happened~!

You see why I hate the sequel to Tales from the Hood so much? Not even mentioning the terrible framing segments of a racial-profiling robot being told these stories so it knows what ‘criminals’ to go after, but this movie is just a temple of ‘WHY?! WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?!?!?!’

#Anonymous #replies

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comrade-meow · 3 years ago

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The market is said to control the price of rent. However, landlords own large chunks of property and will often withhold property in order to artificially inflate the market prices of rented accommodation.

The cost of rent is forecast to rise by 15% in Britain over the next five years and real wages are stagnating. Whilst this is the result of capitalism’s inherent contradictions, there are many ways in which people have fought and continue to fight to effect real change whilst we progress towards revolution. One of the strongest tactics people have employed against unfair rent, is through rent strikes.

The Communist Party played an integral part in the rent strikes. One popular tactic was for party members to go around all the houses in a street and ask the tenants to pay only the regular amount of rent, not the extra that had just been hiked up.

Women played a particularly prominent role in the rent strikes. The women of the Communist Party were lynchpins who helped organise resistance to landlords. Another popular tactic was where women would switch the nameplates on the doors, in order to confuse the bailiffs who were unfamiliar with the area.

Sometimes these tactics were not quite enough and when someone was facing eviction, the tactic of direct action was employed. Entire streets worth of tenants would flood the street to stop the bailiffs passing.

Another form of rent strike is the use of squatting. Squatting is where people occupy an empty piece of private property that has sat dormant and is not being used to house people. The squatters do not pay any rent to the landlord whilst they are squatting there.

The Connolly Youth Movement in Ireland have had great success at implementing squatting within a communist framework. The movement have implemented communism’s rejection of private property by taking over a former house that has been allowed to become derelict through the hoarding of accommodation under capitalist notions of private property.

The stereotypical view of squats is that they are unsanitary places, but the Connolly Youth Movement have implemented cleaning rotas and principles of democratic centralism, that make for an efficient way of occupying capitalist private property.

There is a proud real socialist history of rent strikes in Britain, although this could be the subject of a whole book, we have tried to cover what we found the most relevant and intriguing.

In the summer of 1939 some 45,000 council housed tenants in Birmingham stood up to Tory rent increases via a mass strike. The 30s’ in Brum was ripe with working class resistance, such as prominent trade unionist Jessie Eden leading 10,000 women out to the Joseph Lucas Motors picket line in 31’, in refusal to the new ‘Beaux’ system introduced in which pay depended on a dubiously measured level of productivity. This women’s strike amongst more industrial action defeated the Lucas bosses, heralding the headline of the 29th January 1932 Daily Worker to be ‘VICTORY! BEDAUX SYSTEM SMASHED!’.

Jessie Eden, Communist of Peaky Blinders fame, was a well known industrial and tenants leader in 1930’s Birmingham. You can read more about her as part of the YCL’s International Women’s Day Series in 2019.

In the advent of further successful industrial action and the slight restabilising of the economy, towards the late 30s’, small sections of Birmingham’s proletariat were receiving a few extra crumbs from the table of the bourgeois, this became an excuse for the Tory council to hugely increase rent on municipal homes, although the real reason was simply so they could lower council tax for their core voter base of middle class home owners.

The rent rises were questionably means tested, based on the size of one’s house, hitting hardest families who had bigger homes to facilitate their children. The Tories sent out forms to means test people in the communities. These did not get filled in. They attempted further coercion by offering temporarily rebated increases for lower income tenants. This did not change many perspectives.

Soon enough Birmingham’s Central Tenants Association got involved, headed by Communist party member Ted Smallbone, with previously mentioned Jesse Eden (now also in the CP) as vice secretary.

Close to when the increases were to be introduced, the CTA arranged a vote regarding a rent strike throughout Birmingham’s estates in the April of 39’. Around 92% were in favour. In a fierce battle, tenants withheld rent from the council for ten weeks. Whole communities were in a state of militancy, protecting their communities from the force of bailiffs and rent collectors. The CTAs own paper, ‘The Tenant’ was used to propagate and maintain the strike, with its circulation of 40,000, using this, signs stating ‘’No rent: On strike’’ were given to tenants and put onto thousands of windows.

The high level of organisation in the strike and the frequency of mass street protests struck fear in the hearts of Birmingham’s elite, showcasing the irrefutable power of an organised working class. The establishment paper The Birmingham Post desperately attempted to break the strike by claiming that most tenants were secretly paying their rent and merely pretended to be striking in fear of ostracization. There was little to no evidence to confirm this. The strike continued at full pace. The council was put into a corner they could not escape, and on the 3rd of July 1939, closing in on the outbreak of world war, the council caved in and abolished the rent increases, maintain the rebated rents and even ushered a promise of 50,000 new municipal homes. These huge compromises showed the power and potential of this rent strike movement, perhaps there would have been a lot of revolutionary potential had it not been just before WWII. Albeit, this brought the Communist Party to the forefront of the rent movement.

Despite the positive effect of post-war housing reform, Britain’s bourgeoisie inevitably still had the intention to squeeze as much as they could out of tenants, which was of course met with fierce resistance.

A notable event being the 1959-61 St Pancras rent strikes. Instigated because of the 1957 Rent Act, which stated that the level of rent would be based on rateable value and also because of the Tories taking control of the Borough in 59’, further increasing the rents. The United Tenants Association, comprised of 35 different labour organisations, suggested a strike, this was carried out by 8,000 tenants, all then threatened with eviction by the council.

It all kicked off on the 22nd of September 1960, when the council sent five bailiffs, accompanied by eight hundred police to evict two leaders of the strike; Arthur Rowe and Don Cook. The community was quickly alerted to what had happened and rushed out of bed to help on that climacteric early Thursday morning. Soon enough, there was a full-on battle between tenants and the police. Their batons were matched with whatever could be found; rocks, sticks, milk bottles…

There were dozens of injuries and arrests, all for the sake of working-class solidarity against the systemic exploitation imposed on them by these policies of Rachmanism. The strikes eventually came to nothing due to the brutal repression by the class traitors within the police, despite this, it reaffirmed the revolutionary potential of mass strikes and showed that there’s an alternative to the conventional politics of pleas, polls and petitions.

There were other significant rent strikes post WWII. One was the East London rent strike of 1968-70. The Tory ran Greater London Council (which was the biggest municipal housing authority in the country), proposed a policy to try and match the price of social housing to that of the private market, which would have increased rent by an average of 70% over the next three years, this resulted in thousands striking and 20,000 protesting on Trafalgar square in solidarity.

In July 1970 the GLC wrote to tenants that if they did not pay up in three weeks they would be evicted; this prompted the creation of an anti-eviction committee and further protests outside the city hall. Eventually the government were forced to step in, shook again by the fear of strong popular resistance, and forced the Greater London Council to retract the increases.

Albeit, my research began to dry up when looking for rent strikes in the 80s’ and beyond. This we have put down too many factors, particularly due to the ‘quieting down’ of real left-wing politics and the rise of Neo-Liberalism. This manifested itself with the elections of the likes of Reagan and Thatcher, the imperialistic destruction of Allende’s socialist project in Chile and the rise of reactionary nationalism in Britain, with the Falklands war and the breaking up of the Britain’s Communist party in 88’.

These are among a plethora of grim events. This period can be defined as an age of nihilism as far as the cause of building a better world is concerned. Nevertheless, to borrow from Engels, this period seems to be withering away. In Scotland, the grassroots tenant’s union, Living Rent, with many Party and YCL members involved, are building a strong network of resistance against exploitative private landlords and unifying local authority tenants who have been too long neglected by the council. This can be seen with their outreach programme in the Muirhouse estate of Edinburgh.

There is also ACORN, Living Rent’s sister union, operating in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Their work has liberated thousands of tenants from unfair evictions and unjust money grabbing from previously unchallenged landlords. Only time will tell what the future brings, but the power of British communists and therefore the working class is inevitably on its way up.

#Anglo.txt

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evilelitest2 · 4 years ago

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Hey there. I recently wondered why Sanders didn't manage to be primary candidate for the democratic party (at least in terms of popularity). In fact, I got the impression that despite even social media hyping him up, quite a few weren't really that invested on what he had to say/wanted to do. As a non-American, I get the feeling that Americans themselves might be a bit averse to change, even though many do want it. Is the US generally more socially conservative which might explain Bernie's los?

Eh, its a mix. The general conservatism of the US did mean that Sanders had a staunch opposition right from the word go, but I think Sanders also made a ton of mistakes during the 2020 race on top of that. Because he really should have done better than in 2016, unlike then he had massive name recogonition, the DNC didn’t have the more sleezy rules anymore, he already had a massive fundraising apparatus, Biden was a weaker candidate, and the donor class/centrist politicians were divided. But he made a few mistakes and I’m still of the opinion that he shouldn’t have run in 2020, and let somebody younger with less bad blood take up the torch. So what went wrong beyond a centrists not liking socialism

1) Sanders was too old. This isn’t entirely his fault, but a 78 year old who had a heart attack on campaign is at a huge disadvantage, and people are wary for voting for him because of that. Now Biden is a 77 year old man with his own health concerns, but it really didn’t help, doubly so with the heart attack

2) Sander has earned a lot of enemies for the 2016 election, sometimes for shit he did and often times for shit he didn’t do, but he was a divisive figure in a way that somebody like Warren would not be. His hyper confrontational style made a lot of people dislike him, and probably helped contribute to the centrists dropping out when they did .

3) The vote was split with Elizabeth Warren, which he never found a solution too (see below)

4) Ok but those first three things weren’t really his fault. One of the things that was his fault is that he didn’t really...bother to campaign . At least in the traditional sense. Sander’s entire strategy was to win the prmiary with only 30-35% of the vote, assuming that the Centrists would divide themselves until it was too late. Not only was this not true in terms of Centrist unity, the problem with this plan is that it meant he didn’t really bother trying to win over the remaining 70% of the race. Which mean that even though he won the first three states, he didn’t manage to capitalize on this by convincing people, if you didn’t like Sanders after Iowa, you weren’t going to like him after New Hampshire.

5) He made no effort to court specific leaders. This was the most evident with the Black Community (See below) but just in general, Sanders aimed his campaign at rallying people who liked him, and not on getting existing Democratic leaders to endorse him. And I get that sentiment, but it really fucked him over in South Carolina. He didn’t even bother to ask for Clyburn’s endorsement

6) Young people don’t come out to vote and his entire plan was based on the youth vote

7) Unlike a lot of class oriented Leftist, Sanders does believe in internationality (see below) but he still has a bit of a tin ear on the issues of women and minority issues. hIs platform on both were good and I don’t think he is a sexist or a racist, but he tends to fall into this “A rising tide raises all ships” mentality which isn’t that helpful, he has always struggled to take his larger rhetoric of social revolution and apply it to racial issues or gender issues, which is very frustrating because race more than class has defined American politics. A lot of black people didn’t really feel like he “got” how their issues are unique beyond just class, even though his platform was pretty good.

8) Antisemitism. It was a factor we shouldn’t ignore it

9) He ran his campaign more on changing the dialogue about Socialism than he did to actually win. Which in many ways is a really admirable strategy, and he did a great job on changing American minds on a lot of issues but it doesn’t help you actually win a race

10) Americans, especially Black Americans, didn’t really want to take a risk in 2020. A lot of leftists in 2016 thought “oh Clinton lost so the dems will embrace a leftist” when in reality the message the Dems got was “Ok,....embrace a white man with a less controversial record” And Biden is seen as safe. The Black community in particular, who have been really hurt by the Trump administration, didn’t want to take any risks.

11) In 2016 Sanders got a ton of working class whites in rural/industrial areas to support him against Clinton, so the assumption was “hey these guys are open to socialism”. And in 2020 they all went to Biden, because it turns out they weren’t for Sanders, they just hated Clinton, and sexism played no little part in that

12) Sanders didn’t do a good job reaching out to Warren. He didn’t even bother to ask her for an endorsement until after Super Tuesday. After that one debate (ugg) Sanders made no effort to reach out and or do Damage control, which effectively alienated him from the other wing of the Progressive Left.

13) Sanders and especially his fans, did not take Biden seriously. The entire primary assumption was that Biden was going to be like Jeb Bush in 2016, and the real threat would be Mayor Pete/Bloomberg/Harris/Warren/Booker/the ghost of Hillary Clinton’s career, anything but Biden himself. And so Biden kinda...avoided most of the Ire of the Sanders campaign, and when he went into South Carolina, he had very little that actually hurt him. Biden was the Front Runner from the start, and nobody really bothered to knock him off that perch

14) Ok now we need to talk about the ugly side of things. Sanders himself is a good man and not a bigot. Some of his fans though...not so much. The so called ‘Dirtbag Left” or the “Red Brown Alliance”, basically Class Reductionist “Anti Identity Politics” leftists who openly indulge in racism, sexism, homophobia and all types of abusive internet tactics. Its a tiny minority of Sanders fans, but because they are super active online (and make a habit of harassing journalists) they start to dominate the conversation. Podcasts like Chapo House, Cumbucket, True Anon, or Red Scare, pundits like Angela Nagle or Glenn Greenwald, or Taibbi, there is an entire cottage industry of so called “Socialists” who spend most of their time peddling conspiracy theories, indulging in bigotry (but its ok because they support Universal Healthcare) and above all harassing people online. And a toxic fandom ruins your ability to reach out to people, which is sort of the point of an election. This isn’t really Sanders fault because he is a 78 year old grandpa, but his campaign really didn’t make any effort to clamp down on the toxic fanbase that surrounded the movement and it ruined their ability to do outreach. The tweeting of snakes at warren was a big part of this

#ask EvilElitest #Dirtbag left #Bernie Sanders #Elizabeth Warren #2020 primary

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

There was Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Bill Bradley in 2000. There was Howard Dean in 2004 and Bernie Sanders in 2016. Candidates running as liberal or populist alternatives to more center-left, establishment candidates have often lost in Democratic primaries. And while the party has shifted left on policy and some of its most compelling figures (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Elizabeth Warren) are very liberal, the center left has generally won head-to-head battles with the left over the last four years, whether the battlefield was policy debates on Capitol Hill or congressional and gubernatorial primaries. So in late December it seemed likely that former Vice President Joe Biden was on course to win the nomination — a fairly unsurprising outcome, as he is the kind of center-left establishment candidate Democrats often choose.

Biden is now almost certainly going to win the nomination. But watching the process in the moment, Biden’s victory didn’t seem at all like a foregone conclusion; Sanders was the clear front-runner in the period between the Nevada caucuses and Super Tuesday, and Biden looked fairly weak then.

So assuming Sanders doesn’t make a miraculous comeback, it’s worth asking: Did the left broadly and Sanders and Warren in particular blow the 2020 campaign?1 Or did Sanders, Warren and the left always have a narrow path to victory because Democrats have tended to prefer more centrist candidates, and the period between Nevada and Super Tuesday a bit of a mirage?

Let’s look at both perspectives.

The deck was stacked against the left

There are a bunch of reasons to subscribe to this theory:

Most Democrats are not unabashedly liberal or looking for Sanders-style policies. At most, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party amounts to about a third of the primary electorate. Democrats who identify as “very liberal” accounted for between 20 and 30 percent of the electorate in most states that have voted so far in the 2020 primaries, according to exit polls.

Democratic primary voters, largely because of their antipathy toward President Trump, were obsessed with electability from the start of the 2020 campaign and were likely more wary of female or leftist candidates on that basis.

The media largely covered the race through the frame of electability, as opposed to a more policy-focused frame like candidates’ pitch for “structural change.” This cast leftward policy ideas as a barrier to electoral victory.

Biden was an especially strong candidate because of his pre-campaign popularity with black voters and the fact that primary voters were already focused on electability, which turned his centrism, gender and race into advantages in a way they might not have been if Democrats were not so nervous about Trump.

The wealthy have disproportionate power in American politics and they’re wary of populist candidates, so they used their money and influence to weaken Sanders and Warren.

There was a virtually unprecedented mobilization of the Democratic establishment to stop Sanders ahead of Super Tuesday.

The center left borrowed many of the left’s ideas, making it harder for the liberal candidates to distinguish themselves without taking controversial stands.

That last point is hard to disagree with — and hard to pin on Sanders or Warren. Indeed, it’s in part a testament to their success. In early 2015, the Obama administration started pushing for what was a fairly bold idea at the time: free community college across America. The Democratic Party’s main health care goal was to make sure the Affordable Care Act was implemented broadly. Now, both wings of the party have shifted left: The party’s more centrist wing is advocating for free four-year college for most Americans and providing Medicare-style coverage for everyone who wants it, and Sanders took up the banner for free college for everyone and Medicare for All.

You can see this on issue after issue — the center of gravity in Democratic policymaking has moved left. If you think of Sanders as essentially running a five-year campaign to move the Democratic Party closer to him on policy (rather than campaigning to become president himself), he has been fairly successful.

But the center left shifting leftward probably makes it harder for more liberal candidates like Sanders to actually win. If Biden ran on just maintaining Obamacare, it would have been easier for Sanders to distinguish himself on health care. Instead, Biden embraced a Medicare-style public option that is very popular and also a shift left from the status quo.

Biden “has already adopted a lot of progressive policies,” said Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at Yale and a longtime advocate of a Medicare-style public option.

The other point in that list that’s pretty undebatable is the effort to stop Sanders. What happened in the three days between the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday — in particular, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar dropping out of the race and flying to Texas to endorse Biden — was surprising and without much precedent in recent primaries.

“I have never seen my party do anything it deemed strategically necessary as quickly and decisively as it did here,” said Brian Fallon, a longtime Democratic operative who was Hillary Clinton’s national press secretary for her 2016 presidential campaign.

The other explanations for the left’s weaknesses that I listed above are more debatable. For example, it’s true that most Democrats don’t call themselves “very liberal,” but the plurality of Democrats in most states described themselves as “somewhat liberal,” and that is a group Sanders and Warren should have been trying to appeal to as well. Warren, in particular, had a period of fairly favorable media coverage during which she made inroads with those “somewhat liberal” voters. It just didn’t last. And there were other openings for Sanders and Warren in the electorate; Biden, while strong with some blocs in the party, had almost no support among younger voters until fairly recently.

Overall, however, I think there is a decent case that the left was always going to have a hard time defeating a center left in 2020.

“The Sanders/Warren wing is smaller than the Obama/Clinton/Biden wing of the party, even though the Sanders/Warren wing tends to be more active and visible, especially online,” said Benjamin Knoll, who teaches American politics at Kentucky’s Centre College. “The Sanders wing of the party is hugely popular among younger Democrats, and time and time again they simply don’t show up to vote in primaries at the same rate as older voters.”

He added, “In 2016, the ‘establishment’ wing coalesced around a single candidate, Hillary Clinton, and was able to beat back Sanders. This time it may have been possible for Sanders to follow the 2016 Trump route by having a core third of the party and splitting the establishment vote, allowing him to emerge with a plurality. But the Democratic primary electorate coalesced around Biden after South Carolina.”

The left blew it

Of course, that’s not to say you can’t make a compelling argument that 2020 represented a golden opportunity for the left and they simply fumbled it.

The left embraced two Northeastern liberals with entirely predictable weaknesses with older black voters, and neither Sanders nor Warren did much to connect with those voters.

Sanders and Warren did not focus enough on convincing voters that they were as electable as Biden, even as polls showed Democratic voters were obsessed with picking a candidate who could beat Trump.

Sanders and Warren embraced getting rid of private insurance in favor of Medicare for All, a position that is controversial even among Democrats and was easy for the center left to cast as both impractical and a barrier to defeating Trump.

Neither Sanders nor Warren had effective strategies for defending themselves from attacks from the party’s center left after they surged in the polls.

After his win in Nevada, Sanders did little to engage Democrats who didn’t already support him; in fact, he antagonized them.

Warren was unwilling to drop out and endorse Sanders before Super Tuesday, even as the weaker center-left candidates consolidated around Biden.

Sanders’s campaign apparently planned to win the nomination by getting a plurality of the vote (30 to 35 percent) in a crowded field and it didn’t appear to have a real plan for a one-on-one contest against Biden.

It’s likely that all of these campaign-centric factors combined to represent a relatively big barrier to either Sanders or Warren winning the nomination. That said, figuring out which one of these factors was singularly important is really complicated. And in my interviews with Democratic operatives, people tended to highlight shortcomings of the left that aligned with their own preexisting views — more centrist Democrats argued that Sanders and Warren ran on platforms that were too liberal and that those candidates didn’t focus on electability enough, while African American activists said those campaigns did too little outreach to black people, and people aligned with Warren said Sanders didn’t do enough to court the party establishment.

Also, a lot of campaign tactics seem clearly misguided in hindsight but were entirely defensible in the moment. And looking at Warren and Sanders’s campaigns combined is helpful in illustrating this point. For example, it’s hard to claim that Sanders lost because he didn’t court the party establishment enough if you consider how much Warren pursued party elites to little avail. Perhaps Warren should have talked about electability more when she was surging in the polls, but Sanders emphasized his ability to build support among people who backed Trump in 2016 from the beginning of his campaign and Democratic voters still thought Biden was the safest choice.

Finally, some of the more campaign-centric narratives seem clearly contradicted by the structural case I laid out above. Biden’s support among black voters was strong before he formally started his campaign, and none of the other candidates — including two prominent black ones (Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris) — ever really dented it, so it’s hard to say that flawed black outreach was a particular failing of Sanders or Warren.

But the full-scale push for Medicare for All by Sanders, Warren and the broader left — even after it was clear that they were losing the primary debate on that issue — seems like it was a mistake electorally, even if it was a righteous cause. (The massive numbers of people losing their jobs as businesses shut down to slow the spread the coronavirus has probably bolstered the case that Americans’ health insurance should not be tied to their jobs, as Sanders aides are now arguing.) Once Biden entered the race and started pushing back against Medicare for All, Buttigieg and Harris, who are fairly savvy about seeing shifts in the political winds, started backtracking from the idea. Warren and Sanders could have done the same. Some Democrats doubted Warren’s electability for reasons that were somewhat unfair to her (she is a woman and lives in Massachusetts), but her embrace of Medicare for All freed her critics to argue that they were worried her policies made her unelectable, not her gender.

After all, basically no one thinks Medicare for All has any chance of passing Congress anytime soon. Warren, after months of criticism, eventually started pushing for a phased-in Medicare for All plan that would start with a Medicare-style public option, along the lines of what Biden and Buttigieg were proposing. Sanders never backtracked from Medicare for All, but one of his top surrogates, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, conceded in February that a Medicare buy-in might be all that could get passed in Congress, at least in the short term.

Medicare for All “has taken a lot of the oxygen out of the room for more popular health care ideas,” said Julian NoiseCat, vice president for policy and strategy at Data for Progress, a think tank allied with the party’s left wing.

And the Medicare for All issue can be tied to a broader narrative of the left failing that goes something like this: In an environment where it was fairly predictable that a candidate backed by black voters and electability-minded voters would do well, the party’s left wing championed Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, neither of whom had history of connecting with black voters or running based on electability. Both ran campaigns that emphasized their leftism, particularly on Medicare for All. Neither campaign seemed well prepared for the backlash against leftism from the party’s center-left elites, nor did they seem to have any plan to convince voters who aren’t very liberal that they could get elected on these liberal ideas and then implement them as president.

And that focus on leftist policies likely made it even harder for these candidates to win over black voters. “Black Democrats may be a lot more skeptical of big promises from the government; a lot of these ideas fail the black voter smell-test,” said Hakeem Jefferson, a Stanford University professor who studies black political attitudes.

Like a lot of things, the truth here probably lies somewhere in between these two arguments. Sanders and Warren struggled in 2020 because of big, structural factors outside of their control, but also because of a few major missteps along the way. Anyway, does it really matter if Sanders’s likely loss was 20 percent, 50 percent or 80 percent his fault?

Yes, actually. There is already a discussion underway about what the party’s left wing should do in the future. One view, which fits with the general argument that left-wing Democrats faced structural challenges in 2020, is that time is on the side of the progressives. Younger Democrats tend to support more liberal candidates, so the party could gradually move left as the millennial and Gen Z generations become larger shares of the electorate.

But NoiseCat, arguing that winning is within the left’s control now, says that progressives need to make some strategic shifts post-Sanders: pushing liberal ideas that also poll well, building closer ties with the party’s establishment wing and doing more to persuade Democratic voters that leftist ideas are both achievable and not electorally dangerous.

“With Bernie Sanders losing,” NoiseCat said, “the silver lining is we get to define a progressive movement post-Bernie that is not attached to him.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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didanawisgi · 5 years ago

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Virginia: Let’s get down to the heart of the Issue.

by The Culpeper Minutemen

“As we sit here on Christmas Eve, we can reflect on the overwhelming groundswell response across Virginia, to the threats of tyranny from Richmond. The MSM is carefully not mentioning any of it. Yet the vast majority of counties and towns have declared themselves as either 2A Sanctuaries, or Constitutional Counties. This has resulted in more rhetoric from Richmond, including threats of violence against the citizens of Virginia.

None of this is complicated. You do not need to be an attorney to understand the Constitution. In regards to the 2A, it says right there:

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed…..”

This is really a struggle about rights, although focused at this time on the Second Amendment. It is about the rights of the citizens in opposition to the increasing tyranny of the leftists. However, the mindset of those tyrants in Richmond is fascinating: They do not appear to see the predicament they have put themselves in. They are doubling down. You see, they believe their own propaganda. It is clear to any sensible citizen that they are preparing to enact a huge tyranny across Virginia. But the left does not see it that way; they twist the meaning of ‘Constitutional’ and believe that they can pass ‘laws’ that are in fact repugnant to the Constitution, and have them validated by black-robed leftists in a corrupt court system. There have already been statements that any law enforcement officer, not enforcing these proposed new laws, will be fired. Even threats of raising the National Guard for employment in violence against the Citizens of the State. I won’t bore with a full summary, most of you know what is going on.

However, the real reason I decided to sit down and write this article was something I am tracking in comments across the board. It is fear. What do I mean by that? Essentially, it is your normalcy bias not registering the seriousness of our situation. This forces you to act in what you see as a ‘rational’ way, but that in fact is an advantage to the leftists in Richmond.

You see, you are in fear of ‘the authorities.’ You are in fear of saying something that may get you in trouble. You don’t want to cause a fuss. You are a ‘law abiding citizen.’ The usual response to these sort of gun ‘laws’ coming down the pike, as seen in other States, is for people to scuttle and run, and look to ways they can ‘sort of’ get around the ‘laws.’ But God Bless Virginia! Things have gone differently here, and we have a chance. We have a chance to push back on this tyranny, and maybe even create a wave going back into other lost States where they may be able to stand and reclaim their Liberty. Because make no mistake, the leftists are playing for keeps, and if We (The People) lose this now, we will lose it forever, for our kids and grand kids, forever.

The whole Virginia thing has been great so far. However, it may seem to you to be a political / Facebook struggle right now. Making some noise to hope to avoid the promised plans from the Democrat majority in the 2020 session. Posting a meme is fairly low effort, low risk. But make no mistake, this is EXACTLY the kind of tyranny that the 2A is there to prevent. Do not sit in denial. Thus, it is possible that on July 1st 2020, you may become a felon, for standing by your natural and enumerated right to self-defense. It is your duty as a free citizen to NOT ALLOW THE 2A TO BE INFRINGED.

We mostly don’t want to think about it, but there may come a time, and it may be soon, where we face an armed struggle for our rights. If this happens, it will be absolutely because Richmond tried to enact tyranny and force it down our throats. Don’t be duped by the way they talk about ‘laws’ and having them obeyed. Any Virginia Citizen knows their Constitution, and knows what is right and what is wrong. Be absolutely clear in your mind that if this comes to violence, it will be the fault of Richmond. This is why I am writing this article – because I don’t think many of you are there yet. You need to get your mindset right. You need to have your kit packed and ready to go, in case Richmond sends armed men against us.

We are not here making threats. Chest beating is pointless. I’m not one for spurious rhetoric. We are standing by as free citizens, and you need to get your head in the game in terms of what it may mean depending on what comes down the pike from Richmond. To me, there is no course of action other than to ensure that YOUR RIGHTS are not infringed. As such, you will very likely need to be prepared to ACT in SELF-DEFENSE should Richmond send armed men against you. That this may happen is totally un-American, and seems almost impossible in our times of peace and prosperity. But it appears we are there, on the very cusp of that tyranny. If we do not stand, then we lose it for all that come after us. It is a civic duty as free American citizens.

Reminder: If a right is not defended, then it is not a right, and is lost.

Here in Culpeper, we are doing all that we can to avoid such a situation. Through the Culpeper County 2A movement (and Facebook page) we succeeded in having Culpeper voted as a Constitutional County by the Board of Supervisors. We are working on the Culpeper Town Council. We are working on campaigns and rallies, because becoming a Sanctuary is just the beginning.

I have created, as a subsection of Culpeper County 2A, a Facebook Group called Culpeper Volunteers. No, it isn’t a militia, but a pro-bono community outreach of Max Velocity Tactical, where will put on some free training. Nothing we are planning involves violence, or terrorism, or civil disorder of any kind: we simply want to lawfully improve the readiness of County residents to protect their family and community should the need arise. As part of this, I am creating specific threads on the MVT Forum, posted to the Culpeper Volunteers group, in order to address specific issues such as equipping the Patriot etc.

But despite all this, what happens if you, as a law abiding citizen, become a felon in 2020? Because it seems these leftists in Richmond are hell bent on passing these laws, they have the majority, and they think they are in the right. I would not even be surprised, if due to the possible attendance at Lobby Day on January 20th 2020, that something (false flag?) happens to create a situation. It may even go hot. What happens then? That does not give us the six months to campaign that we currently think we have. What if, at some point, a state of Insurrection is declared in Virginia?

It may even be that once the laws are enacted, nothing specifically happens. However, as I stated above, what you need to do is not scuttle and hide. You need to stand up as a responsible Citizen. What could this mean? Perhaps business as usual with going to the range, wherever that is, even in your backyard? Do not acknowledge that any ‘laws’ have even been enacted. Carry on as normal. Particularly if your County has already declared itself a Sanctuary. It may be the case that raids are conducted by armed men in the employ of the State in order to create an example – I would suggest the creation of mutual support groups in your area, in order to make that impossible.

I personally am sick and tired of the laws in this Country being corrupted in the name of tyranny, so we now have a situation where even writing what I have written today is something that will be avoided, for fear of consequences. I would like to see some Federal support for Virginia from the Trump Presidency, perhaps even stopping Governor Northam’s proposed raising of the National Guard to enforce his tyranny. But this is where we have the essential issue – we have a Deep State and elites who are forcing this upon us, and a corrupted government security apparatus. Anyone working for the sort of Agency that will read this, should have sworn an oath to the Constitution. To act against normal American citizens who are only standing for their Constitutional rights is criminal. This has got to stop. There are many things that standing up to this tyranny from Richmond may achieve – and throwing off the yoke of Tyranny is perhaps the most noble. This may be our one and only chance. Put the middle finger up to Richmond!

I advise you to work on your preparations. Physical fitness, equipment, and training. You have to understand that what is happening in Virginia is not the normal way of things. It has not gone this way in other States; normally, the tyranny is simply enacted. In Virginia, the people are reacting and saying NO. This is unique. However, in that unique way, it may lead to places not normally contemplated in our affluent and lazy society. When the Regulars marched to Lexington, they were faced by people who were certainly terrified of the consequences of defying the tyranny of the Crown. And recall, at that time they DID NOT EVEN HAVE the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to hang their hats on; simply an idea of Liberty that must be defended. Whoever fired that shot, it was certainly heard around the world. In our case, we must not fire any shots first, but we must be prepared to act in self-defense should the State act in tyranny and send armed men against us.

1859. Tick-Tock.”

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arcanalogue · 5 years ago

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ON TYRANNY - An Unsolicited Tarot Tour, pt. II

In my initial post groping for symbolic parallels between the Major Arcana and Timothy Snyder’s ON TYRANNY, we covered The Fool and The Magician.

In the few days then (just to show how fast time seems to move during a budding oligarchy), video has surfaced of the President speaking to rich donors at one of his own hotels, in which he says: “The European Union is a group of countries that got together to screw the United States, it’s as simple as that.” He goes on to explain why this is surprising: “We’re all sort of from there, right?”

He also tweeted a thinly-veiled threat suggesting that Adam Schiff, the US rep who gave a rousing speech in the impeachment trial the other day, “has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!”

There’s also video of his pick for Special Advisor to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative, Paula White, working this bit into a sermon: “We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.”

And just for fun, a case of the Wuhan coronavirus was detected near Los Angeles, and today officials are reporting that, as feared, the disease is contagious before the appearance of symptoms. There are still plenty of good folks left at the CDC, right? The lights are on, at least?

But if we let paroxysms of fear induced by bad headlines stop us from going about our day, pretty much none of us would have made it through 2017 — and yet here we are, two full years beyond that point, still rallying, still cracking jokes, still helping each other get things back on track. And sure, my beard and chest hair are suddenly growing in all white, but that’s fine! The sharper contrast will be dazzling against all of my goth attire. How’s that for a silver lining?

Anyway, on to the cards.

The High Priestess represents everything we take for granted about our own awareness. She’s the source of our inspiration, the dream we awaken from that colors our perception of the day; she’s the vapors sighing from a crack in the earth, and she’s also the Pythia who hears and interprets those whispers.

Most of us realize we’re more than just our cognition, or our memories, but it’s still quite easy to lose track of the various pillars our interior world is formed around... until one of them is suddenly swept away.

And it’s the same with our exterior life, because “interior” and “exterior” are only matters of scale, baby. Your mind is your own (for now), but how did it become what it became? What unseen protections was it afforded?

Most people probably think of libraries, or organizations, or certain publications when they hear the word “institutions.” But so many different things fall under this category, it’s actually mind-boggling! It really makes you ponder about the particular framework of your community. Some are more fragile or less corporeal than others; to LGBTQ people, a bar can serve as an institution. Hell, in Brooklyn a taco restaurant can be described as a “mainstay” if it manages to last 15 years.

Some institutions are really only useful to those who created them, and others or who are well-adapted to them, and are bound to crumble naturally with time. A lot of what history has thought to provide will be useless to people in the coming century and beyond; their needs are evolving drastically, right in front of our eyes. This is why we also need to create safe and fertile territory for new institutions to be formed, and try not to take it too personally when the world just moves on. Memento mori, and all that.

But this entropy is not what Snyder’s talking about: he says DEFEND institutions, implying they are under attack. And some of this is very easy to watch for, because we think we know what an attack looks like. But as Snyder’s chapter points out:

“Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order, instead of resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung.”

You know, like appointing industrial tycoons to manage the EPA and the Department of Education, or leaving countless government positions unfilled so that none of the departments can function quite as they used to.

No one can look after all of them, and none of us knows which we’ll depend on most in a key moment. That means we all have to fan out and each claim a different piece of the puzzle. But which one? And how?

Reflect on the mental architecture that contributed to the formation of your own mind, and then let the Priestess guide you.

The tarot-ticklers of antiquity may have determined that The Emperor’s power trumps that of The Empress (as the cards are ordered so that each one “triumphs” over the one that preceded it), but he can’t exist without her, and everyone in the kingdom knows it.

In this chapter Snyder invokes the popular saying “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” adding:

“When we think of this saying today, we imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outward, against misguided and hostile others... But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.”

In readings I often explain to people that The Emperor represents the outward-looking ruler, the conqueror, the prospector, the warlord. The Empress is the inward looking ruler, tending to the needs of the people, governing, presiding over everything that gives life meaning.

I mentioned above that the very concept of interior/exterior is only a matter of scale. Those terms are used very flexibly, aren’t they? There’s the interior of my body, and the interior of my home, and the interior of my apartment complex, and so on. At some point it stops being “my” anything. Suddenly we’re looking beyond my town, or my state, or my country. Sometimes others draw those lines for us, and other times we have to be The Emperor, pushing back against that line, drawing one of our own, defending what’s rightfully ours.

Regarding our own interior as a nation: in case you hadn’t heard (HAHA!) we’re about to stagger through a series of important elections. The one thing we know for sure is that the results of these elections will be disputed, no matter what they happen to be. If we can no longer trust the outcome of an election — due to internal fiddling, not just foreign — then what’s the point of having them at all? You can already sense everyone’s fatigue, ripe to be exploited.

The GOP is already slavering for it, canceling primaries left and right so that Trump will run unopposed for reelection. A “one-party” election suits them just fine. Debates only raise questions, and give a platform to challengers. In order for Trump 2020 to seem like an inevitable choice, he has to be the only choice.

Ruining the public’s faith in American democracy is part of the strategy, because of course it is. Later in Chapter III, Snyder offers yet another popular saying: “Where annual elections end, tyranny begins.”

The work required to protect the upcoming election, and make sure people still care about the outcome, can only be done by Americans organizing and working together on every level: personal, local, national. The fatalism and cynicism everyone’s feeling is understandable, but it ought to drive one toward active participation in preserving what little democracy we have left.

Otherwise, what’s the point? If it’s more important to have your worst fears confirmed, to be able to say “I told you so,” to bargain with the inevitability of fascism, then you’re rooting against The Empress and the rest of us. You’re part of the rot in your own kingdom.

If you’re someone who does Empress-related work, this is your new practice: she is calling you to serve as guardian and minister of the interior. Whatever inspiration you manage to muster, your role is to imbue others with it, and resist whatever negativity you may encounter as you do so.

Are your friends and family registered to vote? Are they sure? Do your representatives in Congress have a plan in place for when Trump refuses to concede? What communities near you could use a leg up in terms of outreach? Ask questions. Get creative. Be a constructive part of the pressure.

What you manage to accomplish on your own may seem meager, but pouring energy into these concerns will remind others why this fight still matters, and it will encourage those who never forgot. We need everyone in this fight.

Our last “real” election can’t already be behind us. The Empress is counting on us to make sure of it.

This is Part II in a series of posts about Timothy Snyder’s ON TYRANNY, which can be purchased via your local bookstore, and also here.

#the empress #the high priestess #major arcana #timothy snyder #on tyranny #tarot cards

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suffermylove · 6 years ago

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Mercy Junction is being kicked out of our building.

As I write these words I realize I am not sad, I am angry.

We are a church, a community, a ministry led by Trans Women.

I’m not sad, I am not surprised, I am angry.

When I received the call to Pastor at Mercy Junction a year and a half ago Mercy had just gone through a catastrophe that it had barely survived. Funding was gone, our building was mostly empty, and the council of elders had voted to end Mercy Junction pending a few days of prayer. When the council came back together they decided to continue, to see what could be done to keep it going. With the heroic effort of our former Director Beth Foster, things slowly turned around. As our founding Pastor Brian Merritt began an interim position several states away, I was brought on as the new Pastor.

At the time I was working full time and as Mercy was barely able to keep the lights on I received the modest stipend of $200 a month. It’s what could be afforded, and I was happy for the chance to minister.

Most of us don't get that chance.

As a trans woman minister I had no real hope of ever leading a church. I was realistic. It seems God isn't a realist though as I was put where I was needed. And I was definitely needed. The work was endless and by the end of October I had quit my job to minister full time.

I did so on faith.

And by faith I don't mean belief. I knew my family and I would struggle. I did not “believe” we wouldn’t. But it was what needed to be done.

Faith is an action you do because you believe in the moral necessity of a thing more than the rationality of it. Faith isn’t just an action, faith is a purposed risky action.

Part of the reason I was willing to do that, to take that path, is that when I received the call, I knew Mercy would suffer for me.

That is a difficult truth, but it is honest. There is a reason there are (AFAIK) less than 10 trans women serving as Head Pastor in any church in the US. To put it mildly, I practiced my faith for Mercy because Mercy practiced their faith in me.

In January, though we had been through hell and were still struggling; the board that own St. Andrews center, which had been established to promote social justice and to encourage community growth, renewed our management contract for another 3 years.

We settled in to do the work. We built community, we stood boldly against white supremacist groups, we continued our relationship with the Poor People's Campaign, we did the work of justice, the tiring but fulfilling work. We had beautiful services, provided hospitality, a free store, and welcomed our unhoused neighbors in on the coldest nights of the year and hottest days of summer. We practiced our mission. We did our work. And at some point I even started getting paid my $200 weekly instead of monthly.

But then, in September, our director left to work with a sister ministry and she appointed me to take over her leadership responsibilities.

This was, it soon became apparent, too much for some to take.

Almost immediately I was met with resistance, including an elder becoming violent in a council meeting.

Up to this point I had very little reason to have anything but surface level interactions with my former co-director. His job mainly consisted of maintaining the building while Beth handled finances, outreach and activism. I knew he was uncomfortable with me as a trans person but hoped he would work past it. Instead, when I challenged him on an attempt at shifting resources away from ministry during our first council meeting, he responded by smashing a glass case and kicking over things in our hospitality room.

He refused to apologize in the coming weeks and instead sent an email containing lightly veiled transphobia aimed at myself and the other two trans women present: My Lay Minister of Hospitality who is a Cherokee two-spirit woman, and our seminarian.

That would have been my final interaction with him, but he squatted within our building and has refused to leave. And here I should add, he is the president of the St. Andrews Board, the board that owns our building.

From that point forward he and another man on the St. Andrews board began making wild accusations about Mercy Junction, myself, and my Lay Minister. Everything from misappropriation of funds to her being a sexual predator (the classic transphobic fallback).

Instead of letting the situation drag us under, we focused on the ministry. We doubled down on serving our community. We started new projects, we expanded service hours, we made plans for the future. And it’s one of those plans that I think might be the real reason we are losing the building we have called our home for years.

Though under fire I was not willing to back off our mission. Our mission is one of radical hospitality. And because we take that seriously our plan for 2019 was (and still is) to open a low-cost / no-cost Transgender Hostel.

Before I began working at Mercy I started the Trans Crisis Ministry Network and over the years I have seen a deep sustained need for low-cost or no-cost housing for trans folk. It is Mercy Junction’s desire to see that need fulfilled. To do so we had planned on renovating a portion of the Center and had begun lining up the funds to do just that. But now we are in a bind.

The board has seen fit to end their contract with Mercy two years early. When asked for a reason, none was given. Though we are in a better place financially than when it was renewed, though we are doing more for the community, serving more people, sheltering more people, helping more people. Though we are doing the work Mercy Junction was brought in to do, the answer I received when I asked was “we don't have to give you one”. Transphobia and mudslinging were seemingly enough of a reason.

So In the coldest time of the year, we will no longer be able to provide a space for people to find shelter for “no reason”.

In the time of the year when people are struggling the most, we will no longer be able to serve a warm meal for “no reason”.

In the time of the year when we pass out mountains of blankets and jackets, we will watch our neighbors grow cold for “no reason”.

Because some people who don't want to do the work refuse to recognize the basic humanity of those who are.

Mercy Junction is suffering because they called a trans woman to be their pastor.

Mercy Junction is suffering because they asked a trans woman to lead.

So I plan on leading.

This is not just a sad story or even just a reason to get angry. This is a call to action.

If you believe in the work of Mercy Junction then I implore you to give.

If you believe that a church led by trans women is needed, I implore you to give.

If you believe that trans people should have a safe place to go, I implore you to give.

We aren’t done. People like us are born into the fight and we don't give up easily.

This is the work of the church. Radical Equality, Radical Hospitality, Radical Justice.

Mercy Junction needs you. We are currently looking for a new space, we are currently looking toward the future. Help us get there. Faith is purposed risky action. We need you to have faith in us. Take action however you can. Risk betting on us. On our vision. On our mission. On our dedication to our brothers and sisters and siblings who need us. We need your help so we can help others.

With Faith and Love,

Rev. Alaina Cobb and the Elders of Mercy Junction

Donations can be sent to [email protected] by Paypal or by clicking the link below.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=HHKAXQ4ADHADJ&source=url

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berniesrevolution · 7 years ago

Photo

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

It took a little while to nail down Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for an interview, because she’s been a little busy over the last two weeks.

In a primary victory in New York’s fourteenth district that nearly no one saw coming, Ocasio-Cortez defeated ten-term incumbent and Democratic Party power player Joe Crowley. A twenty-eight-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who was working as a bartender last year unseated a potential Democratic House speaker.

Daniel Denvir spoke with Ocasio-Cortez this week for his Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig, covering the nuts and bolts of her campaign, why centrist Democrats throughout the country are vulnerable to left-wing challengers, the necessity of candidates putting forward a bold political vision, voter disenfranchisement, the political status of Puerto Rico, and much more. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

Daniel Denvir:

Let’s start with a pragmatic question: how did you win? What did the on-the-ground field operation look like?

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez:

Starting off the campaign, I didn’t know everything I was getting into, but I knew the kind of campaign that my opponent was going to run: a standard DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee], corporate Democrat campaign. Usually those campaigns don’t focus on the field. I was coming into this race with a background as an organizer. From the beginning, I was always focused on organizing people, building a coalition, and deepening that coalition with other organizers. The campaign was almost entirely focused on physical organizing and digital outreach to reinforce that physical organizing.

Almost everybody involved in this campaign was a first-time organizer. I built relationships with other previous organizers, but many of the organizers I knew were not electoral organizers. I come from a background focused more on education, so a lot of the activists and organizers that I knew were very cynical towards electoral politics. Most of them deliberately do not get involved in electoral politics. I spent a good six months building trust with grassroots organizations and earning some of that trust and credibility to turn out people who normally do not believe in electoral politics.

We knocked on 120,000 doors. We sent 170,000 text messages. We did another 120,000 phone calls. Before we even got to that phase of the Democratic turnout, a year earlier, we ran an entire get-out-the-registration campaign, because New York is one of the most suppressive states for voting in America. If you’re already registered to vote in New York and you’re an independent or unaffiliated voter, you have to switch your party registration almost a year in advance to be able to vote in the next year’s primary.

Daniel Denvir:

That hurt the Bernie campaign a lot.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez:

Yeah, we have three million independent and unaffiliated voters in New York State. It’s the largest voting bloc, and they are consistently disenfranchised.

A year before the election we did a registration drive where we pulled our voter file and pulled every independent and unaffiliated voter. We made another about 10 to 13,000 phone calls a year ago letting people know, “Hey, there’s going to be a progressive candidate running for Congress next year. She doesn’t take corporate money. But the only way we can win this election is if folks like you decide to register as a Democrat so we can count on your vote next year.”

Honestly, that was the hardest canvassing of the entire campaign, a year ago. That was the most slammed doors I got, the most people yelling at me. I picked up the phone, and people would be cussing me out. And I said, “Listen, I get it. I get why you don’t want to be a Democrat.” We don’t even know how effective that organizing was, because the state (understandably) gives you no real method of tracking whether that person actually registered once you sent them to that page.

That effort a year ago, whether it was successful or unsuccessful, really helped us cut our teeth in the basics of door-to-door electoral organizing: cutting the turf, identifying your supporters. That was the basis for our entire campaign.

We didn’t rely on people who knew how to do these things. We counted on having a message that got people fired up. Once they were fired up and asked, “What can I do?” we trained them ourselves. We said, “Hey, listen, it’s not that hard. Download this app. Here’s what you do.”

Electoral organizing is not that difficult. Sure, there’s a little process to it, but it takes an hour or so of practicing and then you just learn while you’re out in the field. That’s exactly what we did. We trained everyday people who wanted to get involved and we taught them the ABCs of doing it.

Our field operation was pretty much our entire campaign. We didn’t run any television ads. My opponent ran ads the entire month of June. He sent ten to fifteen glossy mailers to almost every single registered Democrat in the district. I call them the Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Daniel Denvir:

Straight to the recycling bin.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez:

Yeah, they’re this four-color glossy thing with a headshot on the front. And people’s mailboxes were getting buried with them. We sent about three postcards to about fifty thousand people because that’s what we could afford. So we were completely outspent in commercials and at the mailbox.

But we were not outworked in the street. There was a very light field presence. He had people out there, but it wasn’t that many. We had hundreds of volunteers coming in. Towards the end, people were driving in from Massachusetts, from Ohio. A guy flew in from Iowa. That is the advantage of an enthusiasm gap. The media may not have been paying attention to our race, but everyday people very much were.

Daniel Denvir:

Establishment figures have attempted to reduce your win to you better matching your district’s demographics, which seemed to me a very convenient way to deny the magnitude of the insurgency underway that poses a threat to those very same people. What do you make of how the system that you ran against is interpreting and spinning your win?

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez:

I’m not too concerned with it. At the beginning, within those first twenty-four to forty-eight hours, I saw all of the excuses that were being tossed out about my win. It didn’t bother me, because none of these people had studied this race or paid any attention to it.

I also knew that part of the dynamic was that it was a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes situation for both the political establishment and for a lot of mainstream media, because this huge, shocking national political development happened and nobody was paying attention to it.

A lot of these people that were scrambling and trying to make sense of this race, they all had pitches from my campaign explaining everything. I had spent hours talking to New York Timesreporters before my race, so it wasn’t that they hadn’t been talked to about it. I had talked to reporters about who I was. They decided not to cover the race. It wasn’t that it was this little thing that was under the radar. The story seems to have come from nowhere, but it didn’t.

Before the win, it wasn’t like I had no social media presence. Now things are completely different, but I had fifty thousand people following me on Twitter before our win — reporters from CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC. When I went on Chris Hayes’s show after the win, he said on air, “I’ve been following your race for quite some time.”

People were paying attention to this race. I think that it was an issue of networks — and probably an issue of the political establishment — making active decisions not to cover it. Honestly, that’s fine, because in a way it was an advantage to my campaign.

I remember being taken so aback because after this whole week of insane back-to-back-to-back media, many journalists were asking the same exact questions. Multiple reporters at Univision that I had sat down with asked me, “How do you define yourself?” That was the first time that a reporter, especially one at a TV network, asked me that question.

Daniel Denvir:

What was your answer?

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez:

I said, “I’m an educator, I’m an organizer, and I am an unapologetic champion for working families.” The way that I think of myself is as an organizer. No other network allowed me to tell that story, and that’s fine. Honestly, it’s good. It’s a good thing if the political establishment wants to dismiss my win for superficial reasons. If someone is going to say that my win is due to demographic reasons — frankly, I think it’s a form of intellectual laziness, but let that happen.

Let them not learn the lessons, because the people, the progressive movement, the movement for working families, the movement for economic, social, and racial justice, the movement to empower working-class people, the movement for Puerto Rico, the movement for Ferguson, the movement for criminal justice reform — those people are paying attention. Those people are saying, “How did she actually win?”

You’re asking me this question. DSA wants to know this question. They authentically want to know, because these are the communities that we built a coalition of.

DSA played a very important role, but so did Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, so did Justice Democrats, so did a lot of labor and tenant organizers, Muslim community organizers, young Jewish organizations. We were very deliberate about building a coalition of people that were on the forefront of activism in the progressive movement.

I could not have won without the support of DSA, but our success isn’t entirely thanks to one individual group. If there was, it would probably be Justice Democrats or Brand New Congress, because they’re the ones that convinced me to run in the first place. I would not have chosen to run if they hadn’t nudged me, but our electoral organizing was successful because we built a coalition.

Daniel Denvir:

There was this incredibly powerful moment in your televised debate with Crowley when he pledged to support you in the general election if you won the primary. Then he tried to set a trap by asking if you would do the same if he won. Your response was that you’d have to go back to the organized people who backed you, groups like DSA, and ask them — that you couldn’t make that decision on your own.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez:

I was not anticipating him to ask that question. I came up with that answer so quickly because I personally did the work of all this coalition building. I didn’t send anybody. It wasn’t even that I had brought their organizers onto “my team” or anything. I physically had to go in person to all of these organizations. DSA, I had to go to the Queens electoral group, the Bronx electoral group, then the Queens general, then the Bronx general, then the Citywide. And that was just for one organization.

This question had come up before. I had been asked by these groups. So when I was asked that question live on this televised debate, I knew that there were people that would take serious issue with me making any kind of unilateral decision live on television.

My candidacy is a movement candidacy. It operates in a very unusual way, because when I first started this race, I thought about how people just do this for themselves. I still can’t believe that someone will wake up and say, “I want to be the congressman or a senator.” They organize their entire campaign around that person’s individual identity. They’ll say, “I’m the best person for this job,” and then they literally try to organize thousands of people around the rallying cry of, “I’m awesome.”

For me, that’s way too much pressure. And I don’t think that that’s what resonates with people. Even when you look at how people rallied around Barack Obama — regardless of how you feel about his politics, it wasn’t just him, it was what he represented to so many people. For me, on that stage, I knew that I represented a movement — a movement that operated with input.

I got a lot of heat from the establishment afterwards, but the only people that were upset about that [comment] were people that already work for the Democratic Party. I got a lot of respect from voters for that. I went to the bodega a week or two after the debate, and my cousin was there with some friends. They watched the debate, and everyone was like, “That was gangster.”

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #alexandria ocasio cortez #DSA #Democratic Socialists of America #progressive #progressive movement #democratic socialism

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master-sass-blast · 6 years ago

Text

Strong as Stone --Part Twenty-Eight

Well, hello there! Welcome to some good times!

Last time we got to see some snapshots of O’Chenga’s, M’Baku’s, Ayo’s, and Aneka’s lives. This time, we get to see kindergartners try to climb M’Baku like a tree!

That’s right, it’s the promised and long awaited fluff update! We’re back in America, but this time we’re just having a bunch of fun!

Rating: T for mild language.

Pairings: Okoye x M’Baku, T’Challa x Nakia, and Shuri x OC.

Many thanks to @ginghampearlsandsweettea to helping me come up with different things to do in this update (and future updates as well)!

@the-last-hair-bender, @skysynclair19

Loss of perspective is deadly. Perhaps not in the sense of literal death, but in the sense that you will lose yourself.

Don’t lose sight of the true purpose in what you do. Don’t confuse the challenges you face with the reason you started the journey in the first place.

Keep your eyes set on the right goals, my dears. It may end up saving you in the end.

“Sorry I’m late!” Nakia dashed into the dining room with a shocked, if pleased, expression on her face. “You’re not going to believe what I just found out about.”

Okoye raised an eyebrow. “I can only imagine.”

“The apocalypse happened and it was way more anti-climatic than any of us were expecting?” Dewani suggested as she tried --and failed--to sneak food off Shuri’s plate.

“It’s entirely possible.” Nakia held up a tablet which had an article from the Associated Press on the screen. “Trump’s been impeached.”

“About damn time,” M’Baku muttered as he took a long sip of wine.

“What happened?” Ramonda asked.

“According to an official report from Congress, his increasingly inflammatory behavior over the sexual assault lawsuit from Wakandan official, General Okoye, prompted an emergency session in the governing bodies of the nation, who voted that the President’s misconduct was sufficient grounds for impeachment. An overwhelming majority of the senators voted to convict, and the President was removed from office the following morning. Vice President Mike Pence stands to be inaugurated into the office of President, as follows the regular traditions and practices,” Nakia read off her tablet. She stopped and looked up, eyes wide. “It’s real. He was escorted from the White House this afternoon.”

Okoye realized that everyone was looking at her, and suddenly felt like she was a slide under a microscope. She picked up her glass of wine and stared down at the dark red liquid. Thank Bast, it’s done. Now, if everyone would just stop staring at me...

Honestly, what were they expecting? Tears? A victory dance? A rant?

Candidly, all of those would probably happen later, but in private, with only M’Baku or Ayo and Aneka to bear witness. It definitely, however, was not going to happen in front of the King, the Princess, and the Queen Mother.

I’d rather shove a fork in my eye.

“Anyway,” Dewani chirped as she quickly snatched a piece of mango off Shuri’s plate and tucked it in her cheek. “Glad that’s over. What’s next?”

Okoye a discreet ‘thank you’ at her, to which Dewani winked in return.

“Well--” Shuri eyed Dewani with mock annoyance “--I’m going on my United States college tour to give demonstrations of Wakandan scientific development.” She frowned when both T’Challa and Okoye grimaced. “What? Why do you two look like you just sucked on a lemon?”

“It’s just been... exhausting to deal with the American policy makers. I guess you could say we’re feeling a little...”

“Burnt out?” Okoye suggested grimly, quietly, when T’Challa trailed off.

“Well, no wonder. You’ve been focusing on the wrong things.”

The corner of T’Challa’s mouth lifted as he raised an eyebrow at his sister. “Have we?”

“Obviously. You’ve lost sight of why we’re doing the outreach program. It’s not for the policy makers. It’s for the communities we’re reaching out to. Duh.”

“Shuri,” Ramonda said as she expertly smothered a smile. “Be nice.”

“Sorry. Anyway, you ought to come with me! It’ll be good for you to connect to the communities a little. Give you an image of what you’re working for when you have to deal with the policy makers.”

“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” Nakia said. “It’d be good for all of us to see some positivity out of all of this so we don’t become too jaded.”

“Nakia--”

“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun!”

M’Baku shrugs. “I was already going for part of the time to keep an eye on Dewani.”

“It’s like you don’t trust me,” Dewani fake complained as she slipped a bite of fried eggplant off M’Baku’s plate. “I honestly don’t get it.”

“Just my older brother instincts. Eat off your own plate please.”

Admittedly, Okoye didn’t seem too much appeal in going back to America. She’d had enough of the environment and the chaos for the time being. All she really wanted to do was hole up in her apartment for a few days and keep to her own schedule as she damn well pleased.

But Nakia was right. Finding positivity in a difficult situation was important. And if was possible --more than likely, even--that her and T’Challa’s burn out was coming from misplaced focus; if that was the case, then resetting that focus as soon as possible would be crucial to keep the burn out from setting in too deeply.

Plus, it would mean that she’d get to spend time with M’Baku...

Okoye shrugged. What the hell. “I’m in.”

“Okay, I’m fine with the dress, but why do I have to wear these?” Dewani held up a pair of pump heels like they were an about-to-explode bomb.

They were back in Washington D.C., starting Shuri’s college tour with her at Howard University.

“It’s a historically black college,” Shuri had explained on their flight to the United States. “It was established in 1867 to serve African American communities during apartheid and the segregation era. They’re ranked eighty-ninth in national universities, thirty-fourth in best undergraduate teaching, seventy-third in best value schools, have a sixty percent graduation rate, and it’s well known for its excellent science programs.”

“Well, that explains why you’re going,” T’Challa had said with a smile.

“Appearance and presentation is important at Howard University,” Shuri explained as she took the shoes out of Dewani’s hands. “We’re dressing with the crowd. But I think you’ll be happier with these.” She handed her girlfriend a pair of low heeled --but still stylish--ankle boots. “They’ll be more comfortable.”

“I knew there was a reason I loved you.”

Okoye smiled slightly as Dewani and Shuri chattered together --then smiled broader as M’Baku’s arms settled around her shoulders and leaned back against his solid chest. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” His lips pressed against her temple in a way that was chaste and sensual all at once. “You look a picture, ‘koye.”

“Thank you.” She turned, eyed the suit he wore and the elegant kente scarf draped across his chest, and eyed him a way that she knew hid absolutely none of the sudden hunger she feels for him --which, of course, was exactly what she was going for. “You look good, too.”

M’Baku raised an eyebrow and smirked down at her. “Do I now?”

“Of course.”

There was a knock at the door, and then it swung open to reveal a rather exasperated looking T’Challa. “Shuri. We need to leave now or we’re going to be late.”

“Yes, yes, hold on to your shorts! I’m just finishing up!”

“Shuri, I said leaving, not--”

Shuri tsked as she put on her plum colored overcoat and extended the handle on her rolling lab bag. “Relax, brother. Are you always so nervous?”

Okoye hid an amused smile into the back of her hand as T’Challa rolled his eyes while Shuri breezed past him with Dewani.

M’Baku nudged her shoulder, then held out his arm to her when she looked up. “Are you ready, my lady?”

Okoye grinned and looped her arm through his. “That I am.”

Okoye watched from the background as Shuri went through the paces of demonstrating the various capabilities of Wakandan technology. She didn’t pretend to understand all of it --she wasn’t incompetent, by any means, but she wasn’t on Shuri’s level either--but she could tell that the Princess was having quite the effect on the crowd.

The students were all in various states of awe, eyes wide and more mouths hanging open than not. Some were hastily taking notes while Shuri talked, while others were just sitting back and taking everything in.

Even though she’d grown up sheltered from the outside world, she still knew that things were undeniably stacked against the African diaspora. Slavery. Segregation. Apartheid. The Jim Crow era. Everything N’Jadaka had cited in his reasons for waging war on the outside world and more.

She was lucky, she realized. She’d grown up with countless role models and inspirations that looked like her, in a society where people like her were celebrated.

Tragic as it was, that wasn’t even close to a universally common experience.

But, as Okoye watched countless students of color watch Shuri with stars in their eyes, she realized it could be. That the outreach program could help make growing up admiring and aspiring to be like role models that looked like you a more common facet of life.

She smiled as she felt the burned out feeling that made her limbs weary fade, replaced by new energy and determination. This. This is what we’re here for.

They stayed for a while after the demonstration ended so that Shuri could meet and talk to the students. They clamored around her like excited children, asking her questions about Wakanda and her life there and different advancements in technology.

“Wakanda is amazing --though being the sister of a king isn’t as exciting as you might think,” she said with a cheeky wink in T’Challa’s direction.

“Very funny,” T’Challa replied, good natured, when everyone laughed.

“Is it true that the Wakandan Outreach Program is going to offer scholarship opportunities and financial aid for students?” another student asked.

“That is one of our goals, but coordinating with different colleges and universities is making things a little difficult,” Shuri said with a nod. “We are confident, though, that we’ll be able to start offering different options to members of the program by the end of next year.”

A rush of murmurs went through the students, various grumblings about loans and vows to get connected with the outreach program as soon as they could.

Okoye narrowed her eyes and leaned towards T’Challa. “How does Howard University rank as far as financial aid options and tuition costs?”

“Not bad, but the United States isn’t exactly known for its inexpensive education.”

Well, that was no small secret. Between the regular reports that Wakanda got on other nations’ financial status and Shuri’s seemingly omniscient connection to social media, Okoye knew all too well that too many students were shot in the foot with debt before they even graduated.

“I wish there was something we could do about that,” Nakia murmured as she watched Shuri and Dewani field questions from the students and take selfies with them.

Okoye didn’t miss the contemplative gleam in T’Challa’s eyes, and she carefully suppressed a smile. Bast, I know he’s planning something, and I know it’s going to be good.

“Okay, I’m back from the university. There’s no one to see any texts or overhear any phone calls. Now, will you please tell me why you made an impromptu trip to the university President’s office without telling me?”

Okoye smirked. Barely two seconds in the door and she’s already asking questions.

Some things about Shuri never changed, no matter how old she got or how much of the world she’d seen.

“If you really must know,” T’Challa said with an amused smile. “We were just settling the issue of who would be the commencement speaker for the upcoming Spring graduation.”

Shuri blinked, then grinned, wide and bright. “Really? You’re going to be the commencement speaker?”

“I think I know how to give a speech, Shuri.”

“Debatable.” She surged forward and wrapped her arms around her brother’s shoulders. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

Shuri shrugged, still smiling as she stepped back. “For not giving up.”

T’Challa smiled back. “So, I know we can’t accompany you to the lab observations for safety reasons. Do you have any recommendations for what we do while you’re busy?”

“Funny you should ask... I might’ve taken the liberty of booking a couple things for you.”

The corner of Okoye’s mouth turned up in a smile as T’Challa rolled his eyes. This ought to be good.

It was good. It was really good.

Shuri had arranged a series of ‘meet and greets’ at some local elementary, middle, and high schools for them over the next couple of days. Each time they walked into a gym or a crowded auditorium, they were greeted with excited chatter and cheers.

Today was no exception. They were surrounded by a group of excited kindergartners, answering questions about life in Wakanda and learning more about life in the United States. They were shocked to find out that Wakanda didn’t have things like Poptarts, Oreos, and other Western staples --and even more thrilled to learn about the Dora Milaje.

Everywhere she went, no matter what their background, young girls loved finding out that there was an entire group of soldiers comprised only of women. No matter how many successful missions she cleared or how many places she traveled to, seeing the look of excitement on young girls’ faces when they saw other women being powerful in their own right was always --would always be--Okoye’s favorite part of her job.

She --carefully--showed her spear to the class, explaining how it worked and --very carefully--demonstrated how she twirled it.

Perhaps the funniest moment of the day, though, was how well the students took to M’Baku. They bobbed around him, ridiculously tiny compared to his sheer size, asking him questions about the Jabari lands and the differences between the Jabari and the rest of Wakanda.

Then, one student tried to climb him like they would a tree, and it was all over from there.

M’Baku, to his credit, took everything in his usual relaxed stride. He patiently answered each question in turn and happily let the students clamber all over him until the teacher told them to settle back down.

Okoye couldn’t help but grin as he lifted two students, one gripping to each hand, as he would a pair of weights. She chuckled when he jibed at T’Challa about the might of the Jabari, but she was all too aware of the warmth settling in her lower abdomen. He looks good when he works with kids.

Not for the first time, she was grateful she had her own hotel room for this trip. It would make dealing with these... feelings much, much easier.

“Would you want to have a boy first, or a girl?”

They were back at the hotel, lying in the center of Okoye’s bed, propped up on pillows as they cuddled together and enjoyed some time alone together.

“I mean, obviously them being healthy and happy is the biggest priority, and I suppose the gender doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things,” Okoye said. “But I am genuinely curious.”

“I get what you’re saying,” M’Baku said as he rubbed his hand up and down her back. He kissed the top of her head. “It’s one of those things people ask. I wouldn’t be upset with either a son or a daughter, but... I kind of want a boy first.” He grinned. “I’ve already raised a girl, technically. I want to try my hand with a boy.”

“Makes sense. Would Dewani be their older sister, or their aunt?”

“Aunt. She and I already talked about it; that’s what she wants.”

Okoye raised an eyebrow at him. “The two of you have talked about us wanting kids?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not what I’m referring to. She’s always known that I’ll need to have biological children of my own some day. I check in with her about once a year or so, to see if her opinion’s changed, but she’s always wanted to be an aunt. For as much as I’ve done my best to raise her well, we’ve never quite fit into a ‘father-daughter’ dynamic.”

“You two do your own thing,” Okoye agreed.

M’Baku chuckled and pulled her in closer. “That we do.”

“Is it wrong if I say I’d rather be with the students than here?”

Okoye closed her hand over M’Baku’s and squeezed it reassuringly. “No. But this time will be better.”

They were sitting in front of the White House again. Her attorney had contacted her a few days ago, informing her that she could expect the settlement payment in approximately five days and that the newly minted President Pence would be holding a press conference to offer an official apology to her and anyone else harmed by the former President’s behavior.

If she was being honest, Okoye was just glad it was all over with.

She watched as President Pence walked up to a podium, expression stoic. She kept her expression neutral as his calm gaze flicked over to her and M’Baku, then to T’Challa and Nakia. Bast, can we please just get on with this?

Fortunately, it seemed that the Panther goddess was smiling down on her after all; at that moment, the new President cleared his throat and began his apology speech.

Okoye sat back and partially listened as he apologized to her, specifically, and to any other women that had been harmed by Trump’s behaviors and encouragement. Mostly, though, his words just seemed wash over her, flowing past her and dissipating somewhere behind her.

She appreciated the apology, really, but it was also really obvious that it was a politically correct formality. Here they were, in front of a group of reporters, hearing a televised speech that wasn’t even fully addressed to her and the frustration she’d had to endure for the past couple months.

Politically, she understood why they were doing things the way they were, but she wasn’t a political entity. She was a person. And, sometimes, she wanted to just be treated like a person, dammit.

Screw them, Okoye decided. She focused her thoughts on the high school students that had come dressed in Dora Milaje costumes, on the kindergartners that had gasped when she’d showed them the workings of her spear, and the college students that had been sitting in near dumbstruck awe as they watched Shuri demonstrate the capabilities of Wakandan technology. We’re not here for the politics, and we’re not here for the politicians; we’re here for the people.

That was the truth of it. The Outreach program had never been for politics, never been for looking good. It had been for people. For trying to rectify the damage they’d done in sitting in the shadows and doing nothing.

She let go of the nuances of what she found wrong with the apology and found peace in sitting back and focusing on the past few days. It’s an end to the madness, she told herself about the apology. Let it stay that way. They don’t deserve any more of your energy.

Breathe in, breathe out. Be like the stones in the river.

She breathed in.

She breathed out.

She was at peace.

#sass writes #black panther fanfiction #okoye x m'baku #t'challa x nakia #shuri x oc #fluff fluff fluff #just a bunch of good times #everyone's happy #and relaxed #it's just a good time #black panther imagine #wakanda forever

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southeastasianists · 7 years ago

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Singapore’s two main public universities have risen in global reputation, lifted by the state’s economic might. For most Singaporeans – as well as many of the region’s brightest students – getting a place to study at the National University of Singapore or Nanyang Technological University is a proud accomplishment. In several fields, our universities have become research powerhouses, worthy of mention alongside the traditional brand names of the West.

But the NUS and NTU suffer from stunted development. Even as they rise in global rankings, their contribution to the country’s intellectual life is relatively modest. Particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, they are largely absent precisely when their expertise is most needed – when complex and controversial issues call for the clarity, context and research-based insight that we academics claim to be able to provide. This retreat from the public sphere has been so complete and enduring that it is no longer noticed. It doesn’t occur to most Singaporeans that our universities could be playing a much broader social role.

I hasten to clarify that the public shouldn’t expect university departments to replicate thinktanks, which are meant to insert themselves directly into current policy debates. Given how compressed news cycles are getting, with controversies exploding and fizzling out within a week, it would be a mistake for academics to flit about, reacting to every matter that grabs people’s attention. That shouldn’t be the job of serious scholars.

But a strong university department or scholarly association should be visible in major public debates that are relevant to its field. At the very least, universities should be able to serve as honest brokers, convening discussions on challenging topics. After all, they are the only institutions in our society that give their employees the time and resources – largely taxpayer-funded – to think differently. They are not pressed to arrive at policy positions. They are not required to be popular or profitable. They can examine problems deeply, challenge conventional wisdom, clarify issues, offer insights that are counter-intuitive and keep contrarian viewpoints bubbling on the back burner for future reference. One might even say that they have a moral responsibility to do all this.

Singapore’s two public universities have very busy calendars, but their activities focus on non-Singaporean matters. While many other universities are seeking desperately to overcome their parochialism and climb university rankings by internationalising, ours have the opposite problem (rankings organisations don’t really measure a university’s local relevance – it probably hasn’t occurred to them that universities might fail to be local enough). Singapore has already emerged as one of the top centres of learning for anyone interested in Asia; it is academia’s contribution to Singapore’s own intellectual and cultural life that is lacking. Consider, for example, the government’s move to amend the Constitution to reserve presidential elections periodically for candidates from Singapore’s racial minority groups. There were individual academics interested enough to make submissions to 2016’s Constitutional Commission, but the activity fell far short of what would be considered normal elsewhere, perhaps for want of a critical mass of such scholars. In a different setting, universities would have been falling over themselves to convene public events to discuss such a major move before the parliamentary vote. Legal scholars and political scientists would explore constitutional implications and issues concerning political representation. Sociologists might want to showcase their research into ethnic identity and politics. For anthropologists, this could be an opportunity to share their research on the construction of race. In a normal developed country, local universities might run a series of public seminars on such subjects. Not in Singapore.

Some Singaporeans might feel that there is nothing wrong with universities staying focused on teaching enrolled, fee-paying students without the distractions of public outreach. But one can’t really compartmentalise a university’s mission this way. Universities have to fertilise the soil they depend on. Just as our national orchestras give free concerts at the Botanic Gardens to help cultivate an appreciation for music, research universities need to be out there showing the public that their intellectual work is worth supporting. Furthermore, schooling that’s confined to textbooks and classroom learning, by professors who show no interest in the real world passing by their window, wouldn’t amount to much of an education.

The lack of engagement in the local can compromise institutions’ ability to mount even basic Singapore-related courses. Our universities do have a Singapore studies requirement in their undergraduate curricula, but departments often struggle to mount relevant courses, sometimes relying on adjuncts or faculty borrowed from other departments. When I worked at NTU’s communication school, I taught a freshman course called Media in Singapore, introducing all communication majors to our media industries and their political, economic and cultural contexts. Since the school’s founding, this course – or earlier iterations of it – had been considered important enough to be listed as a compulsory module. But when I left, the school didn’t consider it a priority to find a replacement teacher. It simply dropped the course. After a year, the course was revived – but no longer as a core requirement; it became an elective.

The most disappointing case of going regional and global at the expense of the local must be political science at the NUS. I’ve followed public forums on local politics for decades. In recent years, one thing that has become practically guaranteed is that none of the speakers on Singapore politics will come from the NUS department of political science. To understand why, visit the department’s website and study the faculty profiles. At the time of writing, of 29 full-time faculty members, only one – a veteran now in his sixties – claims Singapore’s domestic politics as a research interest. In contrast, 22 colleagues – including all seven assistant professors – do not have “Singapore” anywhere on their research profiles or publication lists. Just five of the department’s scholars list at least one published work with “Singapore” in the title, and only two of these publications are more recent than 2013. You have to go back to Chan Heng Chee in the 1980s to find an NUS political science don who has made a seminal contribution to our understanding of Singapore politics. It’s a situation that would be unthinkable in virtually all developed countries.

Political science is an extreme but not unique case. If you scanned the research interests and backgrounds of faculty in NUS economics, for instance, you’d have a hard time guessing which country or even region the department belonged to. You might think it was based in Greater China, or perhaps in a US university with an Asia-Pacific focus. When I checked one commonly used database of scholarly articles, I was able to find 152 articles on Singapore categorised under “economics” published since 2015, but only one was by someone currently listed as a regular faculty member of the NUS economics department. The NUS accounted for about 30 other articles, but these came from elsewhere on campus, such as the public policy and business schools, and the real estate department.

NTU’s history department website suggests that perhaps three out of 22 faculty members could claim a focus on Singapore history. The history department at the NUS is more illustrious but is nevertheless short on local expertise. Consider the books that have been published on Singapore history: the National Library has compiled a useful bibliography. Of the 27 recommended titles covering Singapore’s history up to 1964, just one is (co-)authored by a current faculty member of the NUS history department.

There are two fairly obvious reasons for our universities’ C-minus performance in Singapore studies: the lack of academic freedom and the absence of a Singaporean core in many departments. Political restrictions date back to the first decade and a half of independence from Malaysia, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the government cracked down on activism in what were then the University of Singapore and Nanyang University. From the ashes, the new NUS and NTU rose like phoenixes – with a permanent phobia of the fires of politics.

In many fields, academics are also thwarted by a lack of access to government data. For this reason, one can hardly blame economists for choosing not to specialise in Singapore. Historians have a different problem. They know too much. Declassified British records in London offer a rich vein of evidence concerning Singapore’s pre-independence history – but mining this lode puts historians on a collision course with the government’s official narrative. Sadly, this has meant that young academic historians of Singapore are able to find work more easily outside the country.

It would be simplistic, however, to blame only the government. The universities’ problems are partly own goals scored by administrators obsessed by the research productivity game. This rewards those who churn out papers in so-called top-tier journals, ignoring the fact that these journals are published in, by and for the West. To illustrate how this bias works in practice, consider an American political scientist writing a 6,000-word article about voting patterns in Ohio. He can quickly get to the heart of his findings and theoretical contributions. In contrast, a scholar researching Singaporean elections would have to devote half her paper to justifying why Singapore is worth studying, and would need to explain the local context in painstaking detail for an audience of mystified journal editors – all before she’s finally able to discuss her actual study. The problem is compounded by the fact that the off-the-shelf theoretical frameworks currently in circulation were mostly developed in the US and Europe and might not fit Singapore. It’s therefore much harder for scholars working on Singapore to sail on the main theoretical currents in their fields.

This bias results from the uneven distribution of power in global academia. The US and its concerns lie at the core of most disciplines; the rest of the world is peripheral. It is a frustration familiar not only to scholars of Singapore, but also to academics in Australia, the UK, Hong Kong and elsewhere. In these other societies, however, universities put up stiffer resistance to the imposition of key performance indicators that would undermine their core mission to study their own locales. Top-tier journal publication is still prized – but not at the expense of neglecting impactful local research or teaching needs. Our universities could do the same, prioritising Singapore-focused research even if it is likely to generate lower citation scores. Bibliometrics are not ends in themselves, but merely crude proxy measures for research impact. Our university leaders and education policymakers are free to adopt different yardsticks. As things stand, the metrics don’t encourage research into our own milieu. Furthermore, it is an open secret that, in many departments, hiring and promotion decisions focus more on a candidate’s research numbers than on what he or she is able to teach – hence the problem of not having enough faculty to teach Singapore content well.

Responding to these market signals, many locals and almost all foreigners decide to focus on regional or international topics or on purely abstract theoretical work that is not grounded in any particular context. There are still scholars who, despite the disincentives, persist and study their first love – Singapore. But in many social science and humanities fields, they lack clout. The situation suits the foreign faculty who now dominate departments – and in many cases run them. Singapore is the only place in the world where foreigners can work at a top-ranked university without feeling any shame at knowing nothing about their host society; where, indeed, such ignorance is often more of an asset than a liability.

Singaporean economists Pang Eng Fong and Linda Lim have similarly commented on the lack of a strong local core in our universities ( “Singapore’s fling with global stars sidelines local talent” , News, 24 August). But one shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that foreign faculty as such are a problem. It’s simplistic to equate local origins with local commitment. Some foreigners have had a transformative impact on Singapore studies. The NUS archaeologist John Miksic is a prominent example. Others have been conscientious institution-builders for Singapore. I personally benefited from the mentorship of two such giants, Taiwan-born sociologist Eddie Kuo, the founding dean of NTU’s communication school, and historian Anthony Reid from New Zealand, founding director of the Asia Research Institute at the NUS. Philip Holden, a professor of English at the NUS, is another model foreign-born scholar. He became a respected authority on the Singapore literary scene. But after more than 20 years, he began facing problems maintaining his permanent resident status. When his application for citizenship was denied, he and his Singaporean wife decided to relocate to Canada. Hearing this sad news, a former student who had become an English teacher commented on his Facebook wall: “Without you, a generation of Singaporeans wouldn’t have known what SingLit was, and SingLit would be nowhere near what it is today.”

Whatever the mix of reasons for the lack of emphasis on Singapore-focused work, the overall pattern is striking. The government’s new Social Science Research Council is trying to come to the rescue with substantial funds earmarked for research relevant to Singapore, but the problem has never been money. Grants alone won’t counterbalance the factors weighing against independent research on Singaporean society, especially if, as with arts funding, the council denies money to projects that are seen as critical of the government.

The university has a role that goes beyond equipping and credentialing students for employment; beyond serving the needs of industry; and beyond developing its region’s pulling power as an educational and research hub – all great strengths of the NUS and NTU. It also has a civilising mission, to show how the pursuit of knowledge and reasoned deliberation are the best ways for a society to manage its contemporary and future challenges. This can be achieved only if a university is engaged with the society of which it is part. And this is where Singapore’s institutions of higher learning should do much more to live up to their stratospheric global rankings.

Cherian George, a Singaporean, is professor of media studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. This essay is an edited extract from his new book, Singapore, Incomplete: Reflections on a First World Nation’s Arrested Political Development (Singapore: Woodsville News, 2017).

#Southeast Asia #Singapore #Education #Cherian George #Censorship #Southeast Asian Studies

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

There is a simple explanation for why Sen. Bernie Sanders, who officially suspended his presidential campaign on Wednesday, lost the Democratic nomination: Former Vice President Joe Biden trounced the Vermont senator when the race narrowed to a one-on-one contest after Super Tuesday. The results of the caucuses and primaries before and on Super Tuesday left Sanders trailing Biden by 83 pledged delegates — a significant, but perhaps not insurmountable, deficit.1 But the Vermont senator lost eight of the 11 contests after Super Tuesday,2 winning only North Dakota, the Northern Mariana Islands and among Democrats who are American citizens but living abroad. Moreover, many of Biden’s wins were blowouts, ballooning his pledged delegate lead to 311, a margin that is essentially insurmountable.

Of course, the simple explanation for Sanders’s loss begs a deeper question: Why did Sanders do so badly in a one-on-one contest against Biden? I’d offer three explanations, none of which are mutually exclusive from the other two.

Sanders didn’t run a smart enough campaign

In 2016, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money, but lost to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. In 2020, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money but lost to Biden, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. Sanders got almost no backing from elected Democrats in 2016, and didn’t court the party establishment that much in 2020 either. That was a major barrier to his candidacy — not only did Sanders again get little support from the party elite, but that same elite was instrumental in helping Biden consolidate the field and winnow the race to a two-man contest.

Both Clinton and Biden were strong opponents, each having deep connections to a recent Democratic president. But it’s fair to criticize Sanders for losing in 2020 in a fairly similar way to 2016.

By all indications, Sanders and his team did make some attempts to avoid the pitfalls of his 2016 run. It’s hard to measure this, but it seems like Sanders’s outreach to black voters in 2020 was more extensive than four years ago, even if it didn’t bear much fruit. But Sanders’s failure to expand his coalition to older voters, minorities and establishment Democrats all but doomed his campaign.

Sanders and his aides also made new mistakes in 2020. There were some clear indications that some of Sanders’s success in 2016 — among white voters without college degrees, in particular — had more to do with anti-Clinton sentiment than strong support for Sanders. But the senator’s advisers seemed to think that Sanders had a unique appeal to white working-class voters that would simply continue in 2020. So the Sanders campaign decided to invest heavily in the March 10 primary in Michigan, a state packed with white voters without a college degree. Biden not only won Michigan easily, but he won overall among white voters without a college degree (and pretty comfortably).

Sanders stayed in the race for about a month after Michigan, but that loss was really the end of his campaign. It undermined one of Sanders’s central arguments — that his brand of politics appealed to white voters without a degree in a way that the more centrist vision of Biden and Clinton did not, making the Vermont senator a stronger candidate than Biden in the general election.

Sanders and his team also expected that he would boost turnout among younger voters. This did not pan out.

Sanders is clearly a skilled politician — he was probably a few breaks away from winning the nomination in a crowded field that included some formidable figures. But former President Barack Obama (in 2008 against Hillary Clinton) and President Trump (in 2016 against former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush) were able to defeat primary rivals who entered the race with strong political pedigrees. Sanders fell short.

Democrats were wary of a very liberal nominee

We made this case in more detail in an article earlier this week, arguing that Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic left were always going to face an uphill climb in the 2020 primary. Democrats’ overriding priority in 2020 has been defeating Trump, and many in the party view left-leaning ideas as something that makes it harder to win over swing voters. The boomlets around former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, neither of whom had the traditional qualifications for a presidential nominee, had the feeling of the Democratic Party desperately searching for a white, male, centrist-y candidate to take on Trump. The party landing on Biden (white male, centrist-y) fits that general narrative.

In this view, any mistakes that the Sanders campaign made likely played a trivial role compared to the core elements of his political persona, such as identifying as a democratic socialist and favoring fairly left-wing ideas like Medicare for All. Maybe Democrats would have taken a chance on someone like Sanders at another time, but not with the specter of another four years of Trump if the party’s nominee loses in November.

“If Sanders had this well-organized of a supporter base in 2016, he might well have won,” David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University who specializes in political communication and media, told me. “2016 was defined by deciding the future of the party in power. 2020 was defined by trying to remove the party in power. Those are just completely different dynamics.”

Trump aside, Sanders was always a weird fit as the Democratic nominee

Sanders has finished in second place in the Democratic nomination process the past two cycles. But it’s worth asking: Was Sanders, a white male democratic socialist in his 70s who is not officially a Democrat, really the second-most likely candidate to win the nomination in either 2016 or 2020? Clinton was a strong front-runner in 2016 and basically cleared the field. If she had opted against running in 2016, it’s fairly likely that other prominent Democrats — say, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Biden or Warren — would have run, and it’s not clear that Sanders could have defeated them either.

The way the primary process played out, with Sanders the clear front-runner after the Nevada caucuses and Biden needing a surprising comeback to win, suggests that Sanders could have won in 2020. But it would have been somewhat fluky if a candidate (Biden) who led in the polls for basically the entire race crashed without the party’s establishment able to mobilize behind any alternative. Had Biden not run in 2020 or faltered fairly early, could Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Sens. Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, or even Warren have defeated the Vermont senator in the same way Biden did, by getting into a one-on-one race with Sanders, running to his right and receiving the bulk of support from the party’s establishment? That seems entirely possible.

Sanders being an older white man is probably relevant here too. In 2016, Democrats opted for a historic choice in nominating a female candidate. In 2020, they nominated a centrist white guy who they believe is the most electable candidate. It’s hard to imagine Democrats in 2016 blocking the first-ever female major-party nominee in favor of a white socialist man — or in 2020 for them to choose a white socialist man over a white centrist man.

In other words, even though a Sanders win seemed plausible and even likely after Nevada, are we really surprised that Sanders is not the Democratic nominee? In the context of modern presidential primaries, the real surprise would have been if Democrats had chosen Sanders over a slew of other candidates running on either Bill Clinton-style electoral centrism (Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, Biden, Klobuchar) or Obama-style hope and change (Booker, Buttigieg, Harris, O’Rourke). Sanders has pushed the Democratic Party to the left on policy and ideology — but now the party has pushed him back to the U.S. Capitol.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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