Fear and Loathing in the Democratic Primaries: #bullying, #gaslighting, and #wolfpackjournalism

Sources: Darrell Nance / CC BY-SA Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America / CC BY-SA; AFGE CCBY

An audio podcast version is available on my Squarespace.com blog, Apple Podcasts and Spotify

What follows are some thoughts on the deteriorating political climate within and outside the Democratic Party. As with my previous article on Mike Bloomberg’s corporate raid on the Democratic Party, my worry is about the fate of the progressive and liberal wing of the party and its allied movements and organizations, especially at the hands of resolutely hostile mainstream media organizations.

Whipsaw Politics

The ups and downs of the Democratic primaries have witnessed:

· the spectacle of a panicked party establishment and its allies under pressure from:

- the faltering campaign of preferred candidate Joe Biden

- the surge of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, especially after the Nevada caucuses, that was based on a widening base of diverse support including Latino and union voters and the “army” of “hordes” of Sanders supporters

- the aggressive candidacy of Mike Bloomberg, initially welcomed by some Democratic elected officials and members of the DNC, but whose vast campaign operations ($500M on advertising alone) and resources threatened to upend the primaries by bypassing some of them, foregoing outside donations, having the DNC bend existing rules to allow him to debate, and calling on Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar to withdraw before the Nevada debate, a high-pressure demand that spectacularly backfired

Then came:

· the evisceration of Mike Bloomberg in the Nevada and South Carolina debates by Elizabeth Warren for his political and business record and public statements regarding women and communities of color

· the rapid consolidation of senior party leader support behind Biden after Biden’s 30-point win in South Carolina following important endorsement of Congressman Jim Clyburn, and the return of (mostly older) southern Black voters as a force in the Democratic Party

· the suspension of Amy Klobuchar’ and Pete Buttigieg’s campaigns before Super Tuesday and their endorsement of Biden

· Biden’s exceptionally strong performance in Super Tuesday leaving him with a delegate lead over Sanders, and more important, a tremendous political momentum

· The suspension of Bloomberg campaign after Super Tuesday and his endorsement of Biden

· Elizabeth Warren’s suspension her progressive campaign after, not before, Super Tuesday. She has yet to endorse any candidate

The Mainstream Media’s Targeting of Political Candidates

Beyond the whipsawing nature of these events, my experience as a longtime student of political intimidation and public bullying in the U.S. and Europe has taught me that this has much to do with the dominant mainstream media discourse. Political and economic establishments and their media allies push back hard when they feel challenged by progressive or liberal candidates’ social or political identity (Geraldine Ferraro, Ralph Nader, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren), past record (Vietnam veteran John Kerry’ anti-war activism), or platform (Howard Dean’s anti-war candidacy in 2004, Ralph Nader’s and Jill Stein’s green policies, Bernie Sanders’ economic populism). Each of these candidates experienced disrespectful treatment by the press including in some cases by important segments of the so-called liberal media.

The aggressive methods employed have generally been the same. The focus is on manipulating appearances and using aggressive timing:

· preemptive attack (the element of surprise is crucial in a media-saturated environment; creating a sensation or buzz is everything)

· extreme content (saying the unthinkable)

· guilt by association (however tenuous)

· stigmatizing one’s identity

· invidious interpretations of ambiguous statements or appearances

· taking statements out of context

· the most effective method is impugning a candidate’s character or motive (as opposed to questioning their record) because it is difficult to disprove in a cynical media environment and dominates the 24/7 news cycle before it can be stopped

· all the above are often done via passive-aggressive rumor-mongering (“I hear but don’t know…”; “Some people say…”; “Anonymous sources claim…”)

The point is to put the target in a defensive, reactive position with the ultimate goal of humiliating and dishonoring the target in the eyes of the public and of creating an impression of weakness, or of a potential weakness, one that may not manifest itself now but could at any time. In the current political theater of dominance this can be fatal. The sheer volume of lies and allegations ends up gaslighting the candidate, his or her supporters, and the general public alike. It constructs a wall of “common sense,” a negative frame that forever casts a shadow over the target’s every future statement and action. It reaches a point where no matter what the candidate says or does, she or he is perceived as, to cite past and present examples, “nasty,” “angry,” “rude,” a “screamer,” or even “violent.” The loss of control over one’s public image is irremediable. Such is the transformative power of this kind of verbal and psychological violence.

In this scenario and depending on one’s identity, one is always out of place and all too “present.” Just showing up can be perceived as “aggressive.” So the trap has been set, and, perversely, the potential for verbal or psychological violence has been transferred to the victim from the perpetrator. And as in any classic bullying scenario, should the victim respond and name the aggression for what it is, the bully answers, “Are you being hostile?” and then freely claims victimhood for her or himself.

I have written on this extensively beginning 10 years ago and again in my recent book on public bullying and political intimidation. Even Hillary Clinton, despite her deep ties with economic and political elites, wasn’t spared in 2016 any more than she was when she first entered the White House in January 1993 as an avowed feminist. Devoted as they were to speculative hearsay and cheap cynicism media reporting focused on the bogus Benghazi affair, her private email server, and her dysfunctional staff. In 2016 cable news organizations spent something less than 100 minutes on substantive discussion of her record and platform. The print media, including the New York Times were scarcely better.

The Politics of Destruction: Wolfpack Journalism

Let’s return to the present where my focus will be primarily on the case of Bernie Sanders.

Why so?

Because Sanders currently has been the object of disrespectful treatment by the media pretty much unmatched by any other candidate by virtue of his triple outsider status: in terms of his platform (anti-establishment economic populist), his record (progressive), and his identity (independent, longtime democratic-socialist and, less openly acknowledged in public discussions, secular Jew, who is also critical of current Israeli policies towards Palestinians).

Until the beginning of the year, mainstream media including CNN and MSNBC had ignored the Sanders campaign much in the way they did during the primaries in 2016 when media observers termed this non-reporting a media “blackout.” And at those times when they did turn their attention to him, it was almost always negative; the peak was reached by the Washington Post when in 2016 it ran sixteen negative stories in 16 hours according the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). This year with the first primaries he began to come into view but the coverage was uniformly negative. With his 26-point win in Nevada that made him front runner, there was an awkward, almost comical moment when some TV anchors treated him with a modicum of curiosity mixed with respect (it’s America after all: we admire winners) but it lasted perhaps no more than 48 hours.

Even before the grace period was up, panicked pundits and anchors felt free to engage in over the top slandering of Sanders: MSNBC’s Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd read a rightwing blog posting characterizing Sanders supporters as the “brownshirt brigade,” which earned him a public protest from the Anti-Defamation League; Chris Matthews likened Sanders’ Nevada landslide victory to the Nazi conquest of France in 1940 and insinuated that he would be executed under a Sanders presidency (which, among surely other but unstated reasons, may have cost him his job); and Democratic political consultant James Carville, who had previously termed Sanders a “communist” and his supporters a “cult,” after the Nevada results were in declared,”the happiest person right now is Putin.” These all occurred on liberal MSNBC/NBC newscasts.

Such statements recall the worst days on Hillary Clinton’s first years in the White House (deemed to be the murderer of lawyer White House Vincent Foster who had committed suicide) and attacks not so long ago on Obama by Fox and other Murdoch media as not American and a “socialist” and their claims that the Affordable Care Act had plans to create “death camps.” However, perhaps just as serious has been the relentless piling on in print, cable, and social media against Bernie Sanders and his campaign that have gone beyond legitimate adversarial journalism to create an unremitting negative consensus. This what former Village Voice columnist Alexander Cockburn used to call “wolfpack journalism.” It has effectively erased Sanders’ exceptionally consistent record on issues that liberals and progressives and their organizations presumably hold dear: civil rights, war and peace, immigration reform, the criminal justice system, women’s issues, LGBTQ issues, healthcare, student debt, global warming, etc. Finally, on cable television, anchors and their guests now feel free to interrupt and talk over Sanders national campaign co-chair Nina Turner, and one Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen lectured Turner (who is Black) on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Case of Elizabeth Warren

It is interesting to note that Elizabeth Warren has a similar progressive record and a strong populist, anti-Wall Street stance as policymaker and now as Senator and candidate. (This is why Sanders and activists associated with Occupy Wall St. had initially asked her to run in 2016; she turned them down.) In her case she has had to face the brunt of the reigning public misogyny hostile towards highly successful professional women, but it would appear that its expression has been more in the ballot box than in mainstream cable TV and print media. She hasn’t had to deal with quite the same level of active hostility from the so-called liberal news outlets as Sanders, though her healthcare and wealth tax proposals were not fairly considered in the press.

Warren has even enjoyed the endorsement of the editorial board of the New York Times and the active support of influential Nobelist economist and op-ed columnist Paul Krugman. This may have to do with her insider credentials as Harvard law professor and former Obama administration official that Sanders clearly does not possess. By contrast, and perhaps for in part for these very same reasons, Krugman has felt free to relentlessly mock Sanders’ socialist identity and Medicare for All and anti-free market proposals. Remarkably, Krugman has been joined by New York Times op-ed writers from across the political spectrum (up to three articles a day): from Michelle Goldberg, Timothy Egan, Roger Cohen, and Nicholas D. Kristof to Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Brett Stephens.

The differential treatment of the two progressive candidates by the mainstream liberal media was also made apparent in the lengthy interviews of Warren and Sanders conducted by MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow on March 4 and 5. There Sanders faced a set of leading questions from a smiling but hostile host narrowly focused on the disappointing results of Super Tuesday primaries that was capped off with a query about his age, gender, race, and sexual orientation status. By contrast, Warren was warmly greeted by Maddow and met with genuinely broad and stimulating questions concerning the unique nature and power of her campaign and what its legacy might be with a long segment devoted to the Bernie Bro phenomenon.

The Destructive Legacy of the Cold War Era

The New York Times op-ed writers’ consensus has been more than matched by the News Department that has published a drumbeat of news articles critical of Sanders and his followers. Rare is the in-depth feature that examines the reasons for his expanding, diverse base, his popularity among African American voters that surpassed Biden’s in nationwide polls prior to the South Carolina primary, his strength among working-class voters in the crucial upper Midwest, or his proven ability to attract moderate, centrist and even conservative rural voters in a less crowded field during the 2016 primaries. It would appear that the New York Times has a version of internal “wolfpack journalism” all its very own.

The negative reporting reached a high point on March 6 when the New York Times published a front-page article titled, “Soviet Papers Recount Ties with Sanders” and online, “As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity” claiming his bid to form a sister-city relationship as mayor of Burlington, Vermont with Yaroslavl, Russia was a tool of Soviet propaganda. This earned the paper of record a sharp rebuke from Ronald Reagan’s former ambassador to the USSR for distorting history by omitting that this was actually in line with an official policy of the U.S. government and enjoyed its full support.

The days of pretending to keep in check misleading and slanderous reporting when a Public Editor like Margaret Sullivan was present are apparently gone. That position is now defunct. The liberties with which the Times News Department took with the historical record of Sanders’ visit speaks volumes about the current forbidding political environment in which we live. It is hard not to think that such high-handed reporting has been enabled by the revival old Cold War hysteria associated with the U.S.’s rivalry with the communist Soviet Union by the breathless press coverage over the last three years of Trump’s presumed conspiracy with Russian meddling in U.S. elections.

As a child of the Cold War and former participant in 1960s social movements, I’ve watched with apprehension how liberal pundits and Democrats have started wielding once again the same old cudgel that Republicans such as Joe McCarthy routinely applied to Democrats and liberals (for example, Dr. Martin Luther King and the labor and civil rights movements) in an attempt to dismantle the social and economic achievements of the New Deal. But I have to remind myself that already back in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s the same tactics were also applied by a good number of Democrats against progressives and the anti-Vietnam War and other social movements. Perhaps red-baiting of Bernie Sanders also shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since the recent media and political frenzy around Russiagate also seems to have re-empowered members of the Democratic leadership, journalists, and pundits who are obsessed with national security and take pride in their close relationships with the Pentagon and national intelligence and law enforcement agencies, government entities that have a record of surveilling, discrediting, and disrupting domestic progressive political movements.

The Power of Social Media

Finally, matters are made infinitely worse by online bullying, especially via tweets and anonymous postings whose destructive capacity to provoke and spread fear are quite real. Online aggression is all the more powerful in that while the toxic content is all too easy to interpret, it is another thing all together to measure its amplitude, reliably and quickly identify the perpetrators who hide behind tweeter handles, and make them accountable for their actions. As anxious users, swimming in the gaslit internet, we can always find what we fear and dread in the corners of the internet, but how to interpret what we encounter is no simple task. This task is all the more urgent as progressives and liberal grapple with reports from among their own ranks about aggressive “Bernie Bros” who have bullied followers of opponents, Warren supporters who have attacked indigenous critics of Warren’s testing for evidence of indigenous DNA, and followers of Buttigieg who sent abusive emails to Russian-American New Yorker writer Masha Gessen when she voiced mild criticism of their candidate. And then there’s always the threat of manipulation by provocateurs sowing division and divisiveness among the Democratic left to worry about.

Conclusion

Given the unique virulence and scope of public denigration of Bernie Sanders and his campaign, its goal would seem to want to destroy more than Sanders himself but preferably his entire movement, which, ultimately, in my view, is deemed to be the real threat by the Democratic Party establishment and its allies. For the deep commitments of Sanders’ followers exceed his single candidacy and are devoted as much to the issues they care about and to responding to the current political emergency as to his person. These millions of followers are something party leaders can’t reliably control, unlike — in their minds at least — other electoral groups they call “firewalls” whose votes they take have come to take for granted.

There is much more that can be said but I’ll close by saying that the current public derogatory treatment of Bernie Sanders by the media and many pundits associated with the Democratic establishment approaches that which Jeremy Corbyn received during the last parliamentary elections in the UK that helped destroy the Labor Party campaign. Following that script, the next turn of the screw may indeed be to accuse Bernie Sanders and his followers of being anti-Semites and Sanders as a self-hating Jew. This is already underway among Likud-identified Jewish organizations and press, and it may be not long before it migrates to the mainstream media and political worlds in the U.S.

Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus, UC San Diego (rreid@ucsd.edu) and is author of Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond.

Creating Courageous & Robust Strategies, Part II: Confronting Acts of Political Violence & Domestic Terrorism

Article also available here in Medium.com.

Author’s note: This is Part Two of a two-part article on how the Democratic Party and its liberal and progressive allies should anticipate and counter rightwing political intimidation and violence. I argue that if ignored, such violence could threaten to undo the achievements of the Blue Wave and cause to founder the best efforts of Indivisible, Swing Left, and other new activist organizations to “pave the way to the post-Trump era” (Indivisible on Offense, p. 2).
Part One, “Indivisible on Offense and Galvanizing the Democratic Party in the Current Climate of Political Violence,” (published Nov. 20, 2018) focused on how to renew the Democratic Party as an effective political force in today’s harsh national environment. Part Two below reviews the challenges of dealing with the threat of rightwing domestic terrorism in the U.S. as a political problem and proposes possible responses to it as an existential threat to democratic institutions and progressive values.
Fallout
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are now busily pursuing their investigations of the attempted mail bombings targeting Democratic politicians and Trump critics as well as the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and the failed attempt to shoot congregants of a Black church in Jeffersontown, Kentucky by avowed white nationalists just before the midterm elections. It is astonishing to note that these extraordinary incidents of political violence had virtually disappeared from the press and social media two weeks after they occurred. Thanks to the news media’s short attention span and to the rush of events — from the midterm elections and the firing of Attorney-General Jeff Session to the California wildfires and the mass shooting in a restaurant in Thousand Oaks, CA — today these acts of domestic terrorism have largely dropped out of the national conversation in old and new media. Even Donald Trump, Republican and Democratic politicians, and progressive and liberal groups have fallen silent on the topic, though it must be noted that the House did pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism on Nov. 15th. Perhaps part of the story also has to do with the longstanding tendency of the U.S. as a former settlement colony and one of the most violent industrial democracies simply to forget and repress its violent past, especially its political past. But, as I argue below, also part of the story is that it has become all too apparent that our political and legal culture is poorly equipped to deal with the roots and methods of political violence in its various forms.
It is not clear what direct effect, if any, these horrific events had on the elections. We will have to await the findings of post-election research, but it would appear that they did not deter voters, for voter turnout reached historic levels for both Republicans and Democrats. The wider political fallout is unclear as well: Trump’s overall approval rating remained unchanged even as he continued his attacks on George Soros and other “globalists” (the revived codeword for Jewish financiers) after news broke that one of the mail bombs was destined for George Soros himself, or Trump blamed the Tree of Life’s small congregation for not having posted an armed guard. At 43% it is about the same as Barack Obama’s two years into his first term at the end of 2010 when the Democrats lost a record 64 seats in the House. This is a far cry from Richard Nixon’s ratings (24%) when he left office in 1973 under the threat of impending impeachment proceedings for his role in the Watergate scandal.
Call It by Any Other Name
Since the kick-off in 2015 of the last presidential campaign, a climate of fear and intimidation has dominated national life in the United States to a degree not seen in a long time, poisoning our politics and reaching into our very relationships with family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. Trump and his Republican allies do not hesitate to deploy all manner of political intimidation and public bullying against their opponents including publicly encouraging violent acts by supporters or otherwise unstable citizens and residents through straightforward racist and anti-Semitic appeals. With the rash of acts of political violence on the eve of the midterm elections, the unthinkable has now happened striking fear in the body politic and risks transforming our political landscape for many years to come.
Unprecedented acts of intimidation and domestic terrorism demand an equally unprecedented response. However, any robust response to rightwing political violence and acts of domestic terrorism in the U.S. immediately comes up against a legal and bureaucratic void: there are no terms designating this type of violence or its perpetrators as such. Simply naming the problem is a challenge in and of itself. There are several reasons for this. As the Nov. 3, 2018 New York Times Magazine overview by Rolling Stone investigative journalist Janet Reitman reminds us, domestic terrorism is not a criminal category nor is domestic terrorist a criminal identity (p. 49). There is “international terrorism” committed on U.S. soil by either “international terrorists” from abroad or “homegrown violent extremists” (or, H.V.E.s, born in the U.S. but inspired by foreign ideologies or groups). But no domestic terrorists supported or encouraged by U.S. organizations. There are domestic “hate crimes” that target victims because of their membership in a certain social group or race but they are not considered “political” (tied to a political ideology or group); and there are “violent extremists” who often commit them but who, if they are white nationalists or supremacists, are not rigorously tracked by national law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This government omission has been partially filled by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League that focuses on anti-Semitism.
Why is this the case? Perhaps most obviously, there is the fallout from 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. and the prosecution of the War on Terror. The international terrorist threat posed by Muslim jihadists absorbed the resources and attention of the FBI and other agencies as well as those re-organized under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. This fixation continued right up through the Obama administration. Many readers will recall their frustration upon learning that both Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey declined to designate Dylann Roof, the young white supremacist who shot to death nine Black congregants in Charleston, S.C. in 2015, a domestic terrorist even though he presented his act as meant to “protect the white race.” Like virtually all mass shootings and bombings targeting specific groups in the U.S., it was classified as a hate crime emptying it of practically any political valence. It also had the effect of reducing his motivation to personal animus as opposed to viewing it as an expression of white supremacist violence pure and simple worthy of law enforcement’s attention.
Perhaps Reitman’s most important point was this: the neglect by law enforcement and intelligent agencies of threats to public safety by white nationalist groups was the result of a political process whereby Congressional Republicans and their rightwing allies including veterans groups effectively had them removed as an object of governmental expert policy and public concern by pressuring successfully for rescinding a Homeland Security 2009 report on violent white supremacist groups, banishing the term “rightwing extremism” from the law enforcement lexicon, and halting investigation of far-right groups promoting violence (p. 47).
Trust in Legal Institutions
Further hampering effective responses to the threat of rightwing domestic terrorism is the apparent willingness among Democrats and their liberal allies to trust in existing law and legal institutions alone to carry the day as if writing criminal statues, issuing court rulings, and practicing law enforcement existed in a political vacuum. This would appear to be especially the case among well-known jurists and legal journalists. For example, in response to the nomination of a Brett Kavanaugh, who had been groomed by the rightwing Federalist Society and led a well-documented career as a political operative and deeply conservative jurist, prominent liberal commentators refused to see his appointment in political terms (the culmination of a thirty-year GOP strategy to create a hard-right Supreme Court majority) or as an agent of a political agenda.
Rather some argued that he was very well qualified for the job and that his testimony should determine his fitness for the job (ACLU Legal Director David Cole). Legal reporters were content to note that his views on lying as an impeachable offense had somehow “evolved” from supporting it when Democrat Bill Clinton was president to being against it when Republican George W. Bush became president (New York Times correspondent Adam Liptak). Similarly, former FBI Director James Comey in an op-ed piece urged readers to trust the FBI to do a thorough investigation of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault — as if the FBI were naturally immune to political pressure or couldn’t be set up to fail in its task by a resolutely hostile administration and Republican Senate majority (which is exactly what transpired).
Later, such idealistic thinking appeared to extend to the Florida recount when after Election Day, Republicans sent operatives and angry crowds to intimidate the Broward County Supervisor of Elections and her staff chanting “Lock her up!” in what appeared to be a repeat of the 2000 Florida recount fiasco. The initial Democratic response was to reassure TV viewers that they had matters well in hand and would appeal to the courts. They left matters at that. No call was made to mobilize local Democratic voters to counter or deflect them so the recount could proceed unhindered. This is hardly an inspiring reply to what seemed to be a breaking political emergency. In the end Broward County failed to meet the deadline for submitting totals for the recounted ballots.
It is discouraging to observe that after decades of documented GOP skullduggery and political intimidation, Democrats continue to pursue strategies that assume that the law or existing protocols and procedures will triumph in face of opponents determined to corrupt current statutes and overtly politicize the courts, law enforcement, and the electoral process.
Relying on the First Amendment
Finally, buttressing Democratic and liberal trust in legal institutions is the interpretative tradition of the First Amendment that defends robust, uninhibited, and wide-open political debate as essential to effective self-government and focuses on the consequences of utterances rather than on their content. It stems from court rulings going back to the 1920s that views all public forms of speech as free trade in “the marketplace of ideas” and thus protected by U.S. law however hateful and injurious they may be unless they lead (so-called “fighting words”) immediately to acts of physical violence. This has been the basis of Supreme Court decisions up through the 2010 Westboro Church ruling and for the ACLU’s opposition to “hate speech” codes, which the courts have systematically struck down.
It also is the rationale for the ACLU’s support for granting public permits to march or hold rallies to groups with records of violence including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan to parade in full regalia through heavily Jewish neighborhoods with many Holocaust survivors and the neo-Nazis and white nationalists to march through Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. The implication of this unbending stance has been that by protecting freedom of expression so defined, the First Amendment will foster liberal democracy and that our institutions are sound enough to repel the siren call of white supremacy and neo-fascism. The assumption seems to be that the state is the principal source of threats to democracy, not civil society groups, that governmental authorities who might be called upon to regulate public speech generally pose a greater threat to democracy than the speech and actions of demonstrably violent rightwing organizations.
However, it did not take long for the alt-right and white nationalists to figure out how to manipulate and “weaponize” this interpretation of the First Amendment and to deploy it very successfully to intimidate and threaten opponents and incite followers to violence in any space deemed “public.” They are quite aware that rare is public speech that has been blocked because of its violent intent or content. Instead of a positive tool of political dissidence in majoritarian democracies, in their hands the constitutional right of free speech has become one of political intimidation and dominance.
In international legal parlance, the existing U.S. doctrine of freedom of expression is termed “absolutist,” namely, one of no “proportionality,” that, as Berkeley philosopher Judith Butler points out, is not balanced by consideration of other constitutional rights and social values such as safety, privacy, dignity, equality, respect, and so forth and can overlook the distinction between protected “speech” and unprotected “conduct.” It is deemed “exceptional” in international law, and one that its defenders claim to be one of the defining features of U.S. democracy that sets it above all other constitutional democracies — and, in the minds of some, essential to the functioning of democracy pure and simple as if public speech weren’t regulated at all in the U.S., unlike under other existing governments. As Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has commented, “A great many Americans are convinced that the right to free speech in this country is absolute, as though various American authorities did not police pornography, the portrayal of sex in movies, and the language used by broadcast media, to name just a few of the most obvious speech-regulation practices that Americans encounter every day.” Of this First Amendment tradition the work of Dartmouth historian of anti-fascist movements Mark Bray asks the hard question: What if the First Amendment as currently interpreted and contemporary legal practices related to it don’t prevent rightwing violence, let alone stop what I am calling here acts of domestic terrorism? Where does that leave us as concerned citizens and residents?
Psychologizing Political Violence and Domestic Terrorism
Working within the narrow interpretive frame of the First Amendment it is virtually impossible to draw a meaningful causal line between individual and group speech and actions inciting violence on the one hand and actual physical assaults including shootings and bombings that occur “later” on the other. Compounding this difficulty is the marked preference by law enforcement officials and the press to view perpetrators of acts of violence as mentally “unstable” or disturbed. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine that authors of such heinous crimes possessing a balanced, normal psychological profile. But in such a view it is as if the psychological and political motivations operated in entirely separate spheres of human activity. It conveniently disconnects personal actions from larger social contexts and makes them a matter of individual psychology or idiosyncracy devoid of any political significance or consequence. Thus the family background of the accused becomes the center of investigation not, say, the enabling discourses and exemplary actions (that render such crimes sayable, thinkable, and doable) and the organizations that propagate them or carry them out.
This is the same script from which politicians, news outlets, and pundits preferred to read in their reaction to an earlier act of domestic political terrorism — the attempted assassination of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Tucson) in January 2011. Clarence W. Dupnik, the local sheriff overseeing the investigation, begged to disagree and demonstrated a better understanding of how political intimidation can work to incite unstable citizens to engage in political violence:
“There’s reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol. People tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences….”
In other words, Dupnik suggests, psychological and political motivations can go hand in hand even if current juridical practice is reluctant to acknowledge it. Adroit rightwing demagogues are perfectly aware of this, even if our political elites prefer to look the other way. They seem to count on it in their fiery speeches and to assume that the targets of their attacks understand this, too, in hopes of achieving the desired result of plunging their victims into a state of abject fear with the full knowledge that under existing law they stand exposed without any meaningful legal redress or protection. Taunting their political opponents, some speakers openly speculate that some disturbed listener may act on their words for which they deny in advance any responsibility.
Countering Political Violence and Domestic Terrorism
The attempted mail bombings and the shootings in Pittsburgh and Kentucky just two weeks before the elections plunged the nation into the political unknown: the unthinkable had happened and left the usual brokers of national agendas at a loss for what to do. As I have attempted to show, their political and legal toolkit has proven itself to be inadequate to the task. Building on the suggestions made in Part One that the Democratic Party and allied organizations adopt a more combative and resolute posture in political conflicts in government and the public media, below I list possible ways to anticipate and respond to acts of political violence and domestic terrorism. The new House Democratic majority will have a crucial role to play here, and, once again, Indivisble.org’s new action plans will be essential guides to galvanizing the new House majority into availing itself of the body’s full legislative, investigatory, and media powers.
As before during the last two years, this effort will require the mobilization of the activist groups that helped create the Blue Wave. To repeat some of our key points from Part One, this initiative will require departing from ingrained political habits of the past: 1) taking rightwing violence seriously; 2) ending the fixed practice of silence; 3) dropping a purely reactive stance; 4) developing a nimble politics of anticipation and imagining the unimaginable; 5) creating a rapid response infrastructure; 6) adopting a non-nonsense posture and going on offense. Just how “public” and how “discreet” these different types of activities should be will be a matter of careful strategy and forethought. It is question of smart political stagecraft:
· Naming it: perhaps one of the greatest tests of a new, no-nonsense Democratic Party will be its willingness to call out — not debate — political violence and domestic terrorism for what they are and not bury them: their authors, their violent rightwing and white nationalist organizations, their anti-democratic motivations, their methods and acts, examples of willing GOP collusion, other active enablers, support among law enforcement, and their political consequences. The operative meme would be “protecting democracy,” something Democrats are already considering as a leading theme in the months ahead. It would connect interlocking goals such as undoing voter suppression initiatives with pushing back against campaigns of political intimidation including threats of incarceration and assassination, racist and anti-Semitic speech, and inciting crowds to commit physical aggression. There are plenty of existing documentation and data to draw on in the public domain plus confidential private and government documents that could be subpoenaed.
· Educate the public and the press: start a considered campaign on what are political intimidation and violence, how they work, how they transform politics and poison national life, and how they can undermine democracy. It would include consideration of the limits of existing legal and political protections including the First Amendment. This effort involves more than issuing occasional high-sounding statements and press releases but creating a constant drumbeat in the press, local town halls, Congressional offices, and the halls of power. A start towards achieving this may be perhaps found in the next points:
· Take seriously the fearful legacy of past political violence, especially in the case of the Democratic Party whose leaders and allies still remember well the systematic violence practiced by the authorities and civilians alike against the Civil Rights and other social movements and the decapitation of liberal and progressive leadership by assassins in the 1960s and 1970s (John F. and Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Harvey Milk). It arguably still casts a shadow today over any Democratic Party or liberal initiative against political violence.
· Anticipate fierce GOP resistance and retaliation (especially once the Democrats assume power in the House and begin holding hearings and launching investigations): everything from attempts to co-opt and trivialize the issue of political violence much in the way Mitch McConnell after the Kavanaugh hearings called on Congressional colleagues to practice bipartisanship to personal smears and repeating accusations that the Democratic Party abets domestic terrorists (i.e, undocumented immigrants), that Jews and Blacks are fomenting violence (per 2017 NRA video), etc. to issuing straightforward threats of physical harm. To which Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to state that there is currently one political party — not just a single personality — that has made political intimidation and violence an entire political program and form of governing.
· Put domestic terrorism and political violence on the national agenda:
o the new Democratic leadership in the House can initiate a series of hearings on the inadequacies of current statutes and policies. They would compel officials from law enforcement and national security agencies to explain their domestic anti-terrorism policies (such as they are), and why they have ceased tracking white nationalist groups with a demonstrated record of political violence.
o Study the policies of other countries including Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. There is much to learn from their experience — both what to avoid (abuses of governmental authority, restrictions on democratic liberties) and perhaps what perhaps to borrow.
o Develop policy options. For example, one could include revisiting the FBI’s list of violent groups under surveillance; the recent reclassification of the far-right Proud Boys as an extremist group has already helped disrupt their activities. Another option is to consider how to move against imminent threats. Study examples of missed opportunities for discrediting political violence, nipping it in the bud, or breaking its momentum, such as the Gabrielle Giffords attempted assassination in Tucson, Arizona in 2011, the Charlottesville march of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in 2017, or abroad, the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 after an anti-violence rally in support of the Oslo Accords in Tel Aviv in the wake of an extremely violent Likud Party campaign to have him removed from office.
o Moreover, the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the Judiciary Committee, and the Homeland Security Committee could launch investigations into cases of egregious foot-dragging and failings by these agencies, possible support of rightwing terrorism by politicians and media companies, law enforcement agents’ relationships with violent rightwing extremists, and the political process whereby “violent rightwing extremists” were removed from law enforcement’s lexicon. This would have the added benefit of bringing House Democrats focused on national security (Schiff, Swalwell, Pelosi) to devote some of their considerable energy to these domestic threats to our democracy.
o The House hearings and investigations could be followed up by legislative “messaging bills” meant to correct lacunae in criminal statutes and law enforcement surveillance. They would have the advantage of signaling to voters the problem of white nationalist violence and domestic terrorism as a priority for the Democrats and of forcing Republicans to go on record on this issue (Indivisible on Offense, p. 8)
o These initiatives will be met by the full force of the GOP and rightwing media machine.
· Use budget authorization bills, perhaps even leveraging “must-pass” legislation to force Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and other agencies to change their inadequate policies (Indivisible on Offense, pp.11–12)
Conclusion
Rewriting the current inadequate script on political intimidation and violence from which politicians, the press, and citizens and residents have been reading will be no mean task, especially in the current harsh national climate that leaves little room for new thinking and innovative and courageous policymaking. It will be an eminently political process driven more by open conflict than by consensus. As such, it will draw establishment Democrats out of their traditional comfort zone of hopeful bipartisanship and will mean taking political risks of a kind quite alien to them. Which is why confronting political violence and domestic terrorism as a political problem will require the transformation of the Democratic Party in terms of its self-image, public posture, and overall approach to political conflict that I laid out in Part One. This transformation will come from below and outside. From newer and younger elected officials and people assembled in Congressional offices and hallways, town halls, and the streets. This will be a strenuous endeavor. and there isn’t much time to take back our democracy and restore dignity and safety to public life.
Thanks to the Blue Wave, U.S. “democracy is now back on life support,” and for now the steady march towards legal authoritarianism and illiberal democracy has been slowed. But the onrush of violent events has not diminished but rather has accelerated, and there is a political party and its allies that have willingly committed themselves to a program of fear-mongering, intimidation, and acts of skullduggery for decades and have no demonstrable interest in stopping the wave of political violence.
Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus, UC San Diego (rreid@ucsd.edu) and author of Confronting Political intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond (2017). He is a member of Indivisible San Francisco.

Creating Courageous & Robust Strategies, Part I: “Indivisible on Offense" and Galvanizing the Democratic Party in the Current Climate of Political Violence

Roddey Reid

Source: U.S. Congress, photo via Wikimedia Commons; Indivisble.org; 

photo via Wikimedia Commons (BY SA 4.0)

Article also available here on Medium .com.

In the wake of the publication of my last blog posting, “We Have Been Here Before: Political Violence’s Transformative Power” (Medium.com, Oct. 27, 2018) that was prompted by acts of domestic political terrorism just before the elections, a fellow member of Indivisible San Francisco asked me to flesh out my call for “a robust and courageous counter-strategy, which is what is needed to anticipate and combat the growing waves of right-wing and white nationalist violence in our country that has acquired a momentum that now feeds on itself.”

Today, in light of the electoral Blue Wave that caught most observers by surprise, and the release last week by Indivisible.org of its new activist guide (Indivisible on Offense: A Practical Guide to the New Democratic House), I want to offer several ideas about not only how to anticipate and counter political violence but also how over the next two years Democrats — and liberals and progressives generally — should confront Republican acts of intimidation. This is no small task as Republicans — now more than ever — have undergone accelerated radicalization over the last 10 years at the hands of first the Tea Party and its funders, then Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and finally Donald Trump. They do not hesitate to deploy all manner of political intimidation and public bullying against their opponents including publicly encouraging violent acts by supporters or otherwise unstable citizens and residents through straightforward racist and anti-Semitic appeals.

I want to argue that confronting the aggressive tactics of such remorseless opponents will require a transformation of the Democratic Party in terms of its self-image, public postures, and overall approach to political conflict in governmental institutions and the public media. As a Hungarian colleague, who has watched apprehensively as the U.S. has edged closer to the kind of legal authoritarianism or illiberal democracy already in place in his home country, put it, thanks to the Blue Wave “democracy in America is now back on life support.” But absent changes in Democratic politics and a strategy for countering political intimidation and violence, the best efforts of Indivisible and other new activist organizations to “pave the way to the post-Trump era” (Indivisible on Offense, p. 2) may well founder. I worry that Democratic leaders, under the pressure from a rush of events (domestic terrorist attacks, a constitutional crisis, what have you) will revert back to their old strategies that met Republican aggression with tepid responses that command the respect of no one. Remaking the country entails, I argue, remaking the strategies of the Democratic Party and its allied organizations.

As I wrote previously, there are now signs of a new awareness that the GOP’s rightwing violence is not just an ethical problem or one of “civility” but a political one as well. It has often worked for them very well but now poses a threat to our democracy. After the discovery of mail bombs targeting Democratic politicians and Trump critics, for once Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer cast aside their reflexive expressions of hopeful bipartisanhip and issued an aggressive rebuke to Trump and Republicans for creating the harsh national climate that enables such heinous actions. They finally seemed to realize that even-handed, bipartisan approaches meant to reassure the public in the past are simply not equipped to deal with the roots and methods of contemporary political violence. But one statement, however strong, does not constitute a robust strategy, which is what is needed now, all the more so in that acts of political skullduggery and intimidation continue to occur almost daily as the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and GOP attempts to discredit and stop the Florida recount make clear.

Most likely, things will only get worse over the next two months during the legislative lame duck sessions before Republicans cede control of the House of Representatives and seven state legislatures to victorious Democrats. The Blue Wave did not come as a surprise to the GOP although its very depth most likely did. But I doubt it will destabilize or paralyze them in any way (the case may be different for Trump). Let’s not forget: the Republicans are masters of the long game, and they probably made the cold political calculation that achieving a hard-right majority on the Supreme Court for thirty years via the Kavanaugh appointment would cost them the majority in the House and some state legislatures in 2018, which they could always win back in 2020 or 2022. It was a price they were willing to pay.

Countering the Republican Attack Machine and the Threat of Political Violence

By now political intimidation and public bullying have become a well-oiled — and successful — political tool that in the hands of the current administration and its right-wing allies is no longer a reprehensible method of campaigning but has become a form of daily governing. To be effective it entails an element of surprise that pre-emptively seizes the initiative, dominates the news cycle, and throws opponents off-balance by virtue of its aggressive timing, speed, and volume (streams of tweets, disciplined talking points, Internet bots and trolls), and extreme content (saying and doing the unthinkable). It can even incite people to cross the line and commit outright acts of terrorism against opponents.

So what are Democrats and their liberal and progressives allies to do?

Many of the answers lie right before our eyes. In a sense they are simply extensions of what activist groups like Indivisible.org, Swing Left, Sister District Project, and Democratic Socialists of America have been doing all along over the last two years, which have been largely ignored by the press and mainstream media. They performed the patient, detailed work of nuts and bolts policymaking, lobbying, stiffening liberal politicians’ resolve, holding them accountable, promoting new candidates, registering new voters, and turning out the vote. They also joined the more public, direct actions of Black Lives Matter, #TakeAKnee, Muslim ban protests and the massive Women’s March and March for Our Lives meant to restore a sense of dignity and safety to public life, and supported the work of these groups’ fearless organizers.

Both kinds of aggressive responses to the new administration’s agenda created the groundwork that made the Blue Wave happen. But it is not clear that the lessons of their dogged and courageous political actions were fully appreciated by the Democratic Party leadership, although recent concessions made by Nancy Pelosi to the House’s growing Progressive Caucus is a good sign, at least of a shift in internal party power dynamics if not in the leadership’s fundamental approach to the political challenges facing us all.

So here are a few ideas in the form of suggestions for fresh — and perhaps more effective — approaches to the ongoing political crisis. They are divided into two parts to be published separately: Part One below is devoted to renewing the Democratic Party as an effective force in the current harsh climate of political intimidation and public bullying; and Part Two formulates suggestions of how to deal with the threat of rightwing domestic terrorism as a political problem and existential threat to democratic institutions and progressive values. The suggestions in Part One provide the basis for and lead to those in Part Two in a follow-up posting.

Part One: Robust Strategies and Counterstrategies

This involves good defense but also good offense now that Democrats will control the House and seven additional state legislatures starting next January. I want to argue that the most robust strategies will continue to include both the nuts and bolts legislative and electoral activism outlined in great detail in Indivisible’s original and new guides and the pressure of numbers outside of the ballot box as in the mobilization of citizens and residents in politicians’ offices, legislative chambers, and in the streets.

Good Defense

· Exit the fixed practice of silence: simply ignoring Republican and right-wing provocations and aggression or greeting them with enunciations of lofty principles not backed up by meaningful action hands the political field — and the news cycle and its dominant narratives — to the perpetrators. Examples go as far back as the racist Willie Horton ads that helped destroy Michael Dukakis’ candidacy in 1988 and up to Brett Kavanaugh’s and Lindsay Graham’s recent denigration of the motives of their Democratic colleagues in terms of wild conspiracy allegations reminiscent of the worst days of McCarthyism. In the face of endless baiting by Republicans, choosing whether and how to respond is no easy task, but a rigid policy of non-response is self-defeating.

· Drop a purely reactive stance. Waiting for Republicans to act again leaves them with the initiative and makes Democrats and their allies look weak, a fatal flaw in the current gladiatorial theater of dominance.

· Develop a nimble politics of anticipation:

o Think of this as the political equivalent of earthquake preparedness.

o Take seriously right-wing violence in all its forms because it has often worked — from smears and character assassination, disinformation and “gaslighting,” and fear-mongering to verbal threats of physical assault and assassination and actual acts of violence. Think through how politically damaging they have been

o Develop a rapid response infrastructure for if and when you decide to respond in the form of not only political messaging and talking points but also mobilization of supporters to gather in offices, halls of government, or on the sidewalk to put pressure on right-wing politicians and their allies. This is something that Indivisble.org, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, and other groups have excelled at and from which the Democratic Party could learn. Such an infrastructure would have perhaps come in handy two weeks ago when the GOP sent hundreds of operatives and supporters to Broward County, Florida to help block and discredit the recount. One striking example of a successful rapid response is Black Lives Matter’s reply to a video released by the NRA June 2017 featuring Dana Loesch who accused Jews and Blacks of fomenting violence and threatening them with retaliation. Displaying a mastery of quick response, Black Lives Matter issued a powerful video that countered slander within the same news cycle and demanded that the NRA retract the inflammatory tape.

o Examine points of vulnerability. In other words, look in the mirror and review past and present statements, policies, and actions — and even personal biographies — for potential weaknesses (misleading appearances and associations, ambiguities that need clarifying, inconsistencies, etc.) that political enemies can seize upon and exploit. Remember there is no psychological, social, or ethical boundary that can’t be violated. The essence of intimidation is doing the unthinkable to destabilize an opponent. For that reason alone, intimidation is hard to live with and hard to anticipate. Sadly, in today’s politics appearances — and their manipulation — are everything, and we can’t afford to overlook them.

o So, spend some time imagining the unimaginable from the point of view of a hostile and ruthless opponent and sensationalist mainstream media that are quick to indulge in cheap cynicism and skeptical hearsay and take steps to pre-empt or ward off such attacks. In 2016 Hillary Clinton ran a defiant campaign but she failed to take seriously how vulnerable her candidacy would be to issues concerning her private email server, hacked emails, speeches to the Wall Street firm Goldmann-Sachs, and dysfunctional campaign staff until it was too late.

Good Offense

As Indivisible on Offense writes, “Offense is exciting, but it’s more complex than defense” (p. 2). Why is that so? In part, the document seems to suggest, because we now have the opportunity of defining the issues, setting agendas, and initiating action instead of simply responding to Republican policies and legislation. But in order to do this, Democrats have to abandon past ways of dealing with the harsh climate of political intimidation infecting our public life:

· Break with traditional Democratic cautiousness that seems to come into play whatever the electoral outcome: lose, party leaders preach “caution” and win, they still urge “caution.” The caution is always directed at their liberal/progressive base, never towards the centrists that have populated the upper ranks of the party and who are responsible for many of the electoral failures of the past 30 years. Such Democratic actions reveal a fundamental commitment of energies and resources regardless of circumstance to a narrow strategy of predictable electoral outcomes and, it must be said, internal control. It has not been an expansive, risk-taking approach but rather one based on a zero-sum model of political authority and capital that are viewed as always prone to atrophy: if you use it or share it, you lose it. It can never truly grow. In this view, additional investments and expenditures in the way of adopting new narrative frames or themes, pursuing new strategies, appealing to disgruntled or apathetic never-voters, expanding its voter constituency, or opening up party echelons to new blood, can only deplete the party’s strength, never increase it. It would seem that its political capital must be saved for a future time — a time that is almost always deferred and rarely materializes.

· Adopt a no-nonsense posture and take the offensive. This is probably the toughest task awaiting party leaders and their allies, especially since they have shown themselves to be invariably risk-adverse. Just recently, they wrapped themselves in the mantle of “civility” without explaining what they mean. Thus they left it up to the media and the Republicans to define it for them in a way that always discriminates against progressive causes and deems any form of non-violent direct action illegitimate. Even Hillary Clinton now has expressed doubts about the wisdom of civility as a political stance. And given news media outlets’ tendency to apply a double standard to Democrats (when they attempt to occupy the “higher ground” in the face of smears and intimidation) and to engage in staging superficial, false “equivalences” between the parties, powerful messaging is all the more needed. The goal is to render a more offensive political posture entirely reasonable and legitimate to the press and the general public and, last but not least, positively feared by Republicans.

o To do this Democrats have to prepare their supporters, the public, and the media for this new, more energetic profile. This will require no small effort, for the image of past timidity and inaction weighs heavily on any new Democratic initiative. As any good sociologist or business consultant will tell you, in large organizations in decline, a sclerotic, risk-adverse leadership generally is incapable of renewing itself on its own, committed as it is to past policies, strategies, personnel, methods, etc. It will be no less true of Congressional leaders, the Democratic Leadership Council, and the Democratic National Committee. It will take pressure from younger, newly elected officials, Democratic voters, and liberal and progressive activist groups whose unstinting efforts helped create the electoral Blue Wave.

o This also involves new narratives and rallying cries on issues that voters care about and will continue to care about for years to come. It also includes a new combative tone that goes beyond outrage to communicate firmness and resolve as well as an unwavering commitment to protect and take care of their constituents and vulnerable citizens and residents generally. The backbone of this new combativeness is more than attitude: it involves pursuing set of policies about issues citizens and residents hold dear: a living wage, defending Obamacare and extending the healthcare protections of Medicare and Medicaid, a secure retirement, a robust infrastructure, access to public services, and a humane immigration policy. Instead of following the script adopted by the mainstream media and Republicans, Democrats, liberals, and progressives must constantly re-write it themselves and flood the Internet and cable outlets with it seizing control of the news cycle and talking points. Call it Indivisible’s “agenda-setting power” on steroids (pp. 5–6).

o This fearless posture will thrill the base and put the opposition on notice not to mess with you. It will also impress onlookers. People are attracted to dynamic, self-confident, and active organizations that appeared poised to get things done and stand ready to take care of their own. Nothing elicits more contempt than failed paternalists who demand all control but take no responsibility and leave their members unprotected in face of the assaults by their opponents.

· Cease issuing automatic calls for bipartisanship. This is especially important when such calls are publicized without making clear that there would be political consequences for the GOP for not accepting them. As Indivisible on Offense aptly puts it, “No one from the Senate Republican caucus is going to save us, so Democrats must refuse to ‘go along to get along’” (p.19). Make bipartisanship conditional, not an inflexible principle or identity. Standard Democratic boilerplate for years, appeals to bipartisanship now seem tired and empty, and in light of the Party’s record of ineffective responses to GOP’s scorched-earth tactics, weak:

o These tactics do not reassure liberal and progressive voters who thirst for inspiring, courageous leadership willing to take chances

o but they do encourage Republicans who know they do not face determined opposition

o they tie the hands of Democratic politicians and their allies for when the time comes to push back against the GOP and go on offense

Absent a robust defense and offense, I fear that the Democratic Party will continue to be the largely ineffective force it is today in Washington and state capitals.

Conclusion

Being subjected to daily barrages of political intimidation is exhausting. For many it has even been traumatic. Such political violence is meant to drive us from the political arena and keep us home, off the streets and away from the halls of power. It will surely continue. And possibly so will acts of domestic political terrorism that pose an even more existential threat to our institutions and progressive values (see Part Two). So we shouldn’t let the success of the Blue Wave delude us into thinking that the national nightmare is almost over. Rather, “democracy is now back on life support,” and we could still lose it. Thus there is a lot of work to do. That is one of the points of Indivisible’s new guide.

In the end, it’s about converting some of the style and substance of new activist groups and public marches into tactics and strategies of Democratic politicians and their allies. It’s about combining passion with craftiness, energy with strategy, in other words, developing political street smarts that invest as much in meaningful actions as in a lofty self-image.

The point is to re-galvanize our sclerotic political process, take back our stolen future, and restore dignity and safety to public life.

UP NEXT: “Creating Courageous and Robust Political Strategies, Part II: Countering Acts of Political Violence and Domestic Terrorism”

Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus, UC San Diego (rreid@ucsd.edu) and author of Confronting Political intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond (2017). He is a member of Indivisible San Francisco.