Improvable Objects: Politics Not Sensitive to Concerns and Circumstance of People

Many years ago when I started this Blog, I thought about what to call it. At the time, I remember thinking about Paul Wellstone as he described what he believed politics should be about. He said, "A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail." A failure I recognized in pure progressive politics is that it does not always account for the differences that wealth and values create for people. Populism, it seemed to me was the missing piece. Giving the people what they agreed they needed seemed to be inherently important to the success of a progressive movement.

   As we know, the progressive left pushed a type of populism under Bernie Sander's leadership that came up a day late and many dollars short of capturing the Democratic Party's nomination. He spoke to the pain that poor and middle class Americans were experiencing, but was running against Hillary Clinton. Clinton, while not the most progressive Democrat was seen as the right woman for the job by many party faithful (particularly after Elizabeth Warren thought better of running against her). The "I'm with Her" bankrollers and supporters, with the success of Barack Obama breaking through the color barrier that served as the glass ceiling for African Americans, believed it was the time for women to do the same.
 
   What Democrats failed to see was the clapback that had been fomenting in the Age of Obama. Sure people were aware that angry people were saying and doing despicable things to showcase their bigotry, but conventional wisdom held that this was a relatively small group of disaffected people and that they were living life in the rear view window, living in America of their imagined past. Progressives and others dismissed these voices as they might anything they assessed as politically incorrect, as fodder for late night talk show monologues or assuring themselves that now that we had, in their estimation by electing Obama twice, accepted that "Black Lives Matter" as the new reality.

   What I and others did not count on was what would happen if populism came at us from the Conservative side of the yard. While we thought the Tea Party movement was "astroturf" as opposed to "grass roots" politics, it turns out that the righteous anger of unheard people could be turned into a type of populism/Nativism that found enough votes in the right places to elect Freedom Caucus members and eventually Donald Trump as our President.

   Paul Wellstone's voice reminds me that "intellectually arrogant politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives...deserves to fail" is what generally what happens after the election. No matter which party wins. Before the election, people have been surveyed and focus-grouped to learn what will move them to vote this way or that.Then the communications are formed and framed around winning the vote--from the top of the ticket to the volunteer calling you at home. You, dear voter, are a fish to be caught in a net. In fact, if you vote early, that's even better, you are still in the net if the candidate says or does something stupid, like say what he or she really thinks.

But after the election, you are a form-letter recipient when the person who you elected does something that he or she told you they wouldn't. Because now, they don't work for you or even try that hard to represent you. Now, they work for special interest groups or self-interested groups. The most self-interested groups are the political parties that are trying to grab and maintain power and pulling the strings behind them are the business and issue groups who want to make sure their interests are properly looked after. There is a country club made up solely of elites and you and I are not invited.

   While those are politics Wellstone said "deserve to fail," the truth is that those politics fail us, not the practitioners of them. Hence a people-powered political base is the only possible solution to the poison in the well of politics. Not a small marginalized group of people, but a large, organized mob of people who realize they have been bamboozled by politics as usual and resort to politics that are unusual. They run for office independent of party bosses and win. Then they win some more. Until finally, the politics of the unusual become the usual politics when people see that their lives are improving by them.

   To be sure, the elite will not go quietly, they will use their resources and knowledge seeking to drive wedges into such a movement. But history tells us that if we have resolve and trust that we will win, even the most corrupting of forces will fail to hold sway against such an army of every day women and men.

    So, I hope you are finally getting a view of what I am seeing so clearly; politics where the "radicals" win is probably a better brand of politics for people when the only other options are supplication or bloody revolution. The radicals on the left and right share something very basic, these are people who want the power in the hands of the people versus the elite. Right or left, it is the same battle. Defeat the political elites and then a politics that is sensitive to the people is truly possible, both before and after the elections.

Johnny (Edwards) Come Lately?

From Politifact Edwards not new to populism

SUMMARY: Barack Obama criticized John Edwards as not being a "raging populist" back in 2004. But if you look at Edwards' first run for Senate in 1998 and his two runs for president, you'll find Edwards has consistently campaigned on defending the interests of regular people against big business.

With the Democratic caucus in Iowa turning into a close three-way race among Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama, the candidates are starting to throw some sharp elbows. They don’t call it going negative; they call it drawing distinctions between themselves and the other candidates.

John Edwards, for instance, has charged that Clinton and Obama would be too willing to compromise with special interests. In response, Obama took the opportunity during an interview with the Washington Post on Nov. 8, 2007, to jab back at Edwards’ record.

“John wasn’t this raging populist four years ago when he ran” for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama said. “He certainly wasn’t when he ran for the U.S. Senate. He was in the U.S. Senate for six years, and as far as I can tell wasn’t taking on the lobbyists and special interests. It’s a matter of, do you walk the walk that you talk?”

So is Edwards a Johnny-come-lately to populism? It’s an important question, because analysts regularly give Edwards credit for keeping poverty and economic inequality in the national spotlight.

Populism is a political philosophy that defends the interests of ordinary people from an elite, said Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor who studies social movements and politics. Republicans typically focus on cultural populism, such as their appeals to conservative evangelicals. Democrats, meanwhile, focus on economic populism, arguing against corporations and big business. As for Edwards, Kazin said, “He obviously fits in with the economic side of it” with his theme of two Americas, one rich and one struggling.

Edwards has run for major office three times: He ran for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina in 1998, and he’s run for president in 2004 and 2008. News reports from his 1998 race show Edwards was described as a populist early on, running as “the people’s senator” and saying he would help fight powerful interests like the insurance lobby, just as he did in his career as a successful trial lawyer.

Ferrel Guillory, a longtime Edwards watcher and director of the Program on Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, analyzed Edwards as a “suburban populist” back in 1998. In a 2007 interview with PolitiFact.com, Guillory recalled that first race. “The way Edwards framed himself was very much in tune with the modern suburban Southern middle class, who have anxieties about their medical care, about the quality of their children’s education, and about their future,” he said.

If Obama didn’t think of Edwards as a populist in 2004, a lot of other people seemed to. The Los Angeles Times wrote of Edwards, “The North Carolina senator lays his populist cards on the table in New Hampshire,” while David Brooks wrote a column about Edwards titled, “The Happy Populist.” Brooks, a conservative columnist, criticized Edwards’ ideas as “false” and “too facile,” but he painted a striking picture of classic populist rhetoric: “The emotional climax of his speech comes when he describes how he used to represent ‘people like you’ against teams of highly paid, distinguished corporate lawyers. ‘And you know what happened? I beat them, and I beat them, and I beat them again!’ The crowds go crazy...”

Guillory said Edwards has struck populist themes his entire political life, but that’s not to say Edwards hasn’t sharpened his rhetoric and branched out to other populist issues over the years. During the course of the two presidential campaigns, Edwards has increased his support of unions, a crucial Democratic constituency, and spoken out more about international trade policy.

“Edwards is in a different place than he was in 1998,” Guillory said. “But it’s not like he couldn’t go back and give his speeches from 1998. He’s just running for a different office in a different context.”

Edwards also has a long-standing policy of refusing money from federal lobbyists, starting with the 1998 Senate race. He has been criticized for accepting money from trial lawyers and from state political action groups, but so does Obama. (See our previous checks on Edwards’ and Obama’s fundraising claims here and here.) Mostly, though, Edwards has funded his campaign with the millions he earned as a trial lawyer.

The best ground for Obama to criticize Edwards on is his populist Senate record. Edwards’ most highly regarded policy work was on the Patient’s Bill of Rights, which passed the Senate in 2001 but couldn’t get a vote in the House of Representatives. Edwards served only a single term in the Senate, and during part of that time he was either running for president or running as vice president with nominee John Kerry — not a formula for substantial legislative achievement in “taking on the lobbyists and special interests.”

But as Obama, a one-term senator himself, would surely say, there’s more to a candidate’s political platform than legislation passed and enacted.

Considering Edwards’ entire political career, we give Obama a False ruling on his remark that Edwards came to populism recently. His Senate record may not be the most substantial, but Edwards has consistently raised issues of economic inequality his entire political career.