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 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.

We’ve Been Here Before: Political Violence’s Transformative Power

We’ve Been Here Before: Political Violence’s Transformative Power

The Way We Live Now, Part Four

 Sources: Common Dreams; Michael Vachon; CNN

Author’s Note: Just as I was finishing this essay, the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh occurred, one of the most violent anti-Semitic acts in modern American history.

In Plain Sight

As federal and local law enforcement agencies pursue their investigation of the multiple pipe-bombing attempts targeting Democratic politicians and Donald Trump’s critics, the horror of this act of domestic political terrorism shouldn’t make us forget that we have been here before and that the current crisis is one in a long series of threats and actual acts of physical violence going back many years. Politicians, the mainstream news outlets, and pundits are struggling to come to grips with the gravity of the situation and the necessity of developing concrete counterstrategies but the evidence that this exact scenario was in the offing has been in plain sight for some time. References have begun to crop up in social media to the over 40 bombings of abortion clinics in the U.S. as well as to deadly LGBTQT bashings but apparently absent from public memory is the call to armed insurrection issued by Fox News host Glenn Beck and CNN’s Lou Dobbs right after Barack Obama’s January 2009 inauguration, for which they paid no penalty. Also forgotten are the Tea Party rallies fall 2010 that were held in close proximity to official town hall meetings hosted by Obama on the proposed Affordable Care Act at which members of the audience showed up with loaded weapons. In both cases Democrats responded with silence. These incidents were a potent reminder, if ever one was needed, that many of the accumulated 300 million guns in the U.S.—twice as many as in 1968—had a purpose other than personal enjoyment, one that was profoundly political and served as a silent—and not so silent—form of intimidation of political opponents.

The Tucson Assassination Attempt

Two years later, in January 2011, the threat of armed political violence culminated in the mass shooting by a gunman who targeted a staunch defender of the Affordable Care Act, (Jewish) Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), at an outdoor meeting with her constituents, and left her severely wounded and six other people dead. This was perhaps at the time the most consequential act of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing by white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in 1995 that killed 168 people, most of them government employees. The assassination attempt came after a hard-fought electoral campaign in which Giffords’ opponent Jesse Kelly, an ex-Marine and Tea Party member, distributed flyers calling for voters to come out to a meeting and shoot an assault rifle to support him in defeating her (“Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully-automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly” [sic]). During the same election, former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin had even featured an electoral map of congressional districts of Democratic members of Congress, including Giffords’, who had voted for the Affordable Care Act, with crosshairs of a gunsight superimposed on each district. After the Tucson shooting Palin remained defiantly unapologetic. Similar images would later re-appear plastered on the van of Cesar Sayoc, the alleged mail bomber of Democratic politicians and liberal supporters, featuring this time around Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton in the crosshairs.

How did Democrats respond? As did Republicans, by denouncing the attack as a national tragedy and issuing calls for the cooling of political rhetoric, as if both parties were equally culpable. The theater of bipartisanship won the day at the expense of clear-eyed analysis. The local sheriff overseeing the investigation, Clarence W. Dupnik, had no such qualms and demonstrated an 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….

When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.

 

Denial: Not Taking Political Violence Seriously

Nearly two years since Trump’s Electoral College victory, with the exception of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, Democratic leaders have largely continued to conduct themselves as if they are not interested in taking the full measure of the destructive methods of their opponents, or worse, as if they are looking for reasons not to take political violence seriously. His campaign was a breakthrough that unleashed frightening and uncontrollable public dynamics, and the overtly violent political culture and white nationalism that he has mainstreamed have reshaped American politics for years to come. Until Trump supporters revived the anti-Hilary chant “Lock her up!” at Trump’s rallies this fall and extended the threat to Senator Diane Feinstein after the Kavanaugh hearings, and Michael Moore released his film 11/9 with his clear-eyed view of recent political violence and skullduggery, the liberal political establishment and the mainstream media as if by common agreement, rarely made mention of Trump’s call for the incarceration of his opponent should he win the election, and for her assassination by the Second Amendment People (i.e., gun owners and members of the NRA) should she win. And Trump’s successful incitement of crowds to rough up protestors and the members of press have been passed under virtually universal silence. There were a few exceptions like New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Democratic leaders and journalists acted as if they hoped that the intimidation and threats would cease or go away, much in the way of an abused partner or spouse who pleads, “Oh, honey, you really didn’t mean it, did you?” But, of course “honey” did mean it, or rather, sees no reason to stop and can’t help himself or herself (philandering, drinking, physical violence, verbal abuse, psychological harassment, etc.) and will do it again. And again. One of the goals of the massive January 21st Women’s March was to disabuse party leaders of that illusion early on, but successful as it was, it is not clear their message got through to the Democratic establishment. One has only to think of the case of James Comey, then director of the FBI whose re-opening of the Bureau’s investigation into Hilary Clinton’s email server helped seal the fate of her campaign. After his firing in May 2017, it appeared that all was forgotten and forgiven by Democrats and liberal pundits, as he took up cudgels against Trump.

Our Transformed Politics

The 2016 presidential campaign took place in a public climate of uncontrolled violence as the United States witnessed acts of domestic terrorism and mass shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, Orlando, Florida, and San Bernardino, California, brutal treatment by private security contractors of Native American protestors at Standing Rock, North Dakota, and a wave of video recordings of unprovoked police killings of African-American men. In this harrowing context, the primaries and general election constituted a traumatic lesson to forgetful Democratic politicians of the power of right-wing intimidation and violence to affect the outcome of election campaigns. They were a reminder that threats and fear-mongering are not occasional excesses of contemporary right-wing politics and policies but an integral part of them. They also recalled to those who had eyes to see and ears to hear political violence’s transformative power: it affects not only targets but also perpetrators, and it doesn’t leave the political field as it found it. It can re-write the political script from which politicians, the news media, and pundits all read. Not only can smears, physical threats, and skullduggery paralyze and defeat opponents, but especially when they come from the White House, they can also legitimize the most authoritarian politics and energize the movement or party that deploys them, be it through political speeches, tweets, rallies, or protests. Republican politicians and their right-wing followers now revel in intimidating and threatening others, glory in it, and find each other and bond through it, even forge a new group identity by means of it.

For many supporters Trump’s violence is the very measure of his liberty and authenticity. Perhaps as much as the fulfillment of any one of his electoral promises or policies (that of course contain their own violence) from tax cuts for corporations and the 1% and appointing a hard-right majority to the Supreme Court to erecting protectionist trade barriers and building a wall against immigrants. He is the fantasy figure of the defiant white man. It was striking how quickly Trump’s verbal intimidation and threats against immigrants and the news media after his inauguration no longer put off establishment conservatives but rather drew them in; they fell behind him, not the reverse. The GOP did not transform him; rather he re-made the Republican Party in his own image proving Beltway insiders wrong again. His approval ratings among registered Republicans has remained largely steady at 80-85% and his overall approval rating among likely or registered voters is as high as it has ever been--44%.

In the hands of the current GOP leadership and Donald Trump, threats of political violence, public intimidation, and acts of skullduggery are not just occasional tools of rough and tumble political campaigns but rather an entire political program and even a form of governing. During the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings Brett Kavanaugh and Lindsay Graham countered the poised, careful but emotional testimony of Professor Christine Blasey Ford in response to questions by a Republican prosecutor with a violent preemptive denigration of the motives of their Democratic colleagues. To the wild conspiracy allegations reminiscent of the worst days of McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Democratic Senators remained silent allowing the GOP slanders and staged outrage to course through media outlets unanswered. This has been their preferred tactic to acts of Republican intimidation and character assassination over the last 30 years going all the way back to the racist Willie Horton ads targeting the candidacy of Michael Dukakis in 1988. Seizing on their new-found advantage since Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the Republican leadership and Trump, like the seasoned bullies that they are, are now smearing the #MeToo movement as the threat of mob rule in a bid to divide Democrats and delegitimize the Democratic Party as “too extreme and too dangerous to govern.” 

Since the launch of the last presidential campaign, our political atmosphere has crackled with the threat of potential violence. Fear and dread proliferate and paralyze; at their most powerful they can even shape people’s responses, provoking blind panic and, in some cases, counterviolence. The current climate recalls some of the most traumatic years in our recent political history—the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and the Iraq invasion, the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton but perhaps also the stolen presidential elections of 2000. The latter was a case of political thuggery carried out in full view of TV cameras. Many readers will recall, as the Florida vote recount proceeded and reports of physical assaults on poll workers by Republican operatives came in, the air became thick with the threat of political violence. You could cut the mounting climate of fear and dread with a knife, and Al Gore and old guard Democrats hesitated and relented, as if haunted and paralyzed by the unspoken traumatic memory of multiple political assassinations in the 1960s—from civil rights workers and John F. and Robert Kennedy to Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and (later on) gay rights politician Harvey Milk. When the Republican partisans on the Supreme Court put a stop to the recount, Democratic politicians woke up to find themselves ejected from the political arena by a coup d’état and did not muster the courage to say so to the nation.

As we try to make our way through the ongoing pipe bomb crisis—twelve bombs and counting and a prime suspect in custody—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. This is a far cry from their public reaction to the Gabrielle Giffords’ assassination attempt and a welcome departure from their usual lackluster response to political intimidation and public bullying. There are now signs of a new awareness that GOP violence is not just an ethical problem or one of “civility” but a political one as well: namely, it has worked for them very well and poses a threat to our democracy. However, one statement, however strong, does not constitute 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. The genie is out of the bottle: just am I finishing this essay one of the most violent anti-Semitic acts in modern American history has occurred, the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. It comes on the heels of Trump’s attacks on George Soros and other “globalists” (the revived codeword for Jewish financiers) that he continued even after news broke that one of the mail bombs was destined for George Soros himself.

Author’s Note 2: This is the fourth installment in a series, The Way We Live Now, on the current public climate of fear and intimidation in the United States that has been building for years and since the kick-off of the last presidential campaign in 2015 has come to poison our politics and reached into our very relationships with family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Part One, “The Emotional Toll of Public Bullying and Political Intimidation,” focused on the experience of the sheer power and psychological effects of bullying in general and public bullying and political intimidation in particular. Part Two, “How Political Bullying and Intimidation Work: A Practical Guide,” looked at how public bullying works as a concrete method and set of political tools dating back to the 1980s and provided readers with a map through this potent minefield and a way to anticipate future acts of aggression. Part Three, “Political Thuggery & Party Identities,” explored why over the years Republicans and their right-wing supporters have freely resorted to extremely aggressive political tactics—and just as important--why Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies have often failed to take seriously such acts of political violence and skullduggery by their opponents and respond accordingly. Part of the answer, I argue, lies in their respective practices of loyalty and identity, social composition, and conceptions of governing.