Tag: sanders

Who’s Afraid of Communism?

The story of communism’s struggle against fascism and white supremacy has been repressed for generations, but this grip on our collective memory is slipping fast.

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Source: New Republic

Author: Malcom Harris

Emphasis Mine

With the Berlin Wall barely a memory and Airbnb in Havana, American anti-communism is probably at its historical nadir. Bernie Sanders has proven the word “socialism” doesn’t scare the next generation; a lot of us even seem to like the idea. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, remembers a different time, when griping about the Reds was an American hobby. She writes fondly about it in her memoir Living History: “We sometimes ice-skated on the Des Plaines River while our fathers warmed themselves over a fire and talked about how the spread of communism was threatening our way of life.”

During the April Democratic primary debate, the candidates were asked about NATO, and a curious thing happened. Donald Trump had called for European nations to contribute more to the organization’s budget; Bernie Sanders more or less agreed. But when it came her turn, Hillary Clinton praised NATO, calling it “the most successful military alliance in probably human history.” Neither the moderators or Sanders pressed her on this point, but it’s a bizarre assertion, on par with some of Trump’s goofier statements. In its 67-year history, NATO has conducted a handful of major military operations, all centered on the breakup of Yugoslavia or the (disastrous) American-led War on Terror. The most powerful? Maybe. The most successful? Not a chance. 

The only way anyone could possibly think of NATO as among the most successful military alliances in human history is if they thought NATO won World War II. But NATO was formed in 1949, and World War II ended in 1945. Still, weren’t the Allies a sort of proto-NATO? For millennials in particular, that makes a lot of sense: Forged in the victory over Nazi Germany, the story goes, a group of Western democracies (led by the U.S., U.K., and France) formed a mutual-defense pact to prevent the same thing from happening again. World War I gave us the UN, and its sequel gave us NATO. But anyone over 35 should know this story’s wrong; there’s a character missing.

The Soviet Union didn’t just help win World War II; they were, by most metrics, the most important player. They lost the most people, 50 times as many as America did. But even in formerly occupied territory, the memory of the USSR’s role seems to be fading along with its monuments. In a post about this particular lapse in historical recollection at Vox—tellingly titled “The successful 70-year campaign to convince people the USA and not the USSR beat Hitler”—Dylan Matthews cites the French blogger Olivier Berruyer’s analysis of poll data. Asked to choose from the U.S., the U.K., and the USSR, 58 percent of French citizens credited America with doing the most to defeat Germany, while 20 percent picked the Soviets. In 1945, with the liberation just complete, those numbers were reversed. 

I imagine that if you asked the average young American what army liberated Auschwitz, they would say ours. Which is wrong, but it’s hard to blame them: Capitalism won, and we’ve moved on to new bogeymen. If you don’t need to warn innocent children away from Soviet seduction, there isn’t much need to tell them about communism at all. We can fill the gaps in the history books with patriotism. 

Ignoring history, however, won’t make it go away. Without the Soviet threat, the anti-communist barricades are a little understaffed. And with faulty censors, who will stop the culture industry from making communism seem cool? The two most famous Soviets right now are probably Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, the KGB spy stars of the critically acclaimed F/X show The Americans. Despite having been created by a former CIA agent and set in the 1980s, Elizabeth and Philip aren’t the bad guys. They’re the good ones. In Nicaragua, in El Salvador, in South Africa, in Afghanistan, the American government’s policies are portrayed as worth fighting against by any means necessary. It’s a more honest description of the history than Clinton’s, in her memoir. “In the past,” she writes of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere, “American policy in the region led to the funneling of foreign aid to military juntas that opposed communism and socialism but sometimes repressed their own citizens.”

Anti-communism has been a powerful force within American politics and culture for over 150 years. In their book The American Slave Coast, Ned and Constance Sublette date its inauguration to the 1850 Nashville convention on Southern secession, when Langdon Cheves, former Speaker of the House and South Carolina congressman, denounced abolitionists as communists:

What we call the rights of man, or the admission of great masses to the power of self-government, has brought into action the minds of persons utterly unqualified to judge of the subject practically, who have generated the wildest theories…. This agitation has recently reached the United States…, and has brought under its delusions the subject of African slavery in the Southern States. It is of the family of communism, it is the doctrine of Proudhon, that property is a crime.

Cheves’s speech, the Sublettes write, was no fluke: “Proslavery writers formulated the first generation of American anticommunist rhetoric.” Cheves and co. weren’t wrong: Communists (including Karl Marx) really did want to destroy slavery, but patriotic American history books don’t have room for left-wing internationalism. Anyone involved in creating one of those textbooks grew up in a time when Marxists were the Bad Guys and people who questioned that got in trouble.  

You might not know it from the history books, but American communism has always been racialized. When Jim Crow laws banned interracial organization, the Communist Party was the only group that dared to flout the rule. In 1932, when the Birmingham, Alabama police went to shut down a Party meeting, a present national guardsman wrote his superior: “The police played their only trump by enforcing a city ordinance for segregation which, of course, is contrary to Communist principles.” Now we tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement within liberal parameters, but everyone who fought for black liberation was called a communist at one time or another, and not always inaccurately. 

This legacy might be largely forgotten in the United States, but it isn’t gone. President Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told The Atlantic that the rapprochement with Cuba began at the funeral for Nelson Mandela, where Obama shared the stage with Raul Castro:

We had used the black-and-white version of history to justify Cuba policy that didn’t make much sense; that was far past its expiration date. I think that he had enough of an understanding of history to know that whatever we think about the Cuban government’s political system and human-rights practices that, in fact, when it came to the anti-apartheid movement, they had a place on that dais at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, and he was not going to, essentially, disrespect the legacy of Nelson Mandela by carrying forward that history and snubbing the Cuban president because of our bilateral relationship.

Mandela, in addition to being a hero to American liberals, was most likely a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party. And while America was denying that NATO’s attention to the shipping lanes around the South Atlantic had anything to do with supporting apartheid, tiny Cuba was sending tens of thousands of soldiers to fight against white nationalism in Angola on principle. Many historians credit Cuban intervention with delivering the deathblow to apartheid; at the time, The New York Times Magazine called the Cuban mission “strange.” If Obama wanted to share the stage with Castro, he had to drop decades of American bullshit.  

The story of communism’s struggle against fascism and white supremacy has been repressed for generations, but this grip on our collective memory is slipping fast. David Simon is planning a series about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—American leftists who fought against fascism in Spain. Steve McQueen is doing a Paul Robeson biopic, whose 1956 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee is already the most cinematic thing I’ve ever heard. When asked about his membership in the Party, he invoked the Fifth Amendment (“Loudly”), at great personal cost. “Wherever I’ve been in the world,” he told them, “the first to die in the struggle against fascism were the communists.” 

A new poll of adults under 30 found that 51 percent “do not support capitalism.” Zach Lustbader, a college senior involved in conducting the poll, told The Washington Post: “The word ‘capitalism’ doesn’t mean what it used to.” And if capitalism isn’t the Good Guy, young people might go looking for a more nuanced version of the Cold War narrative. Hollywood might even bring it to us first. Without the anti-communist lid, it’s hard to tell what we’ll find, and how the political landscape will change.

Hillary Clinton’s shoddy but common recollection can’t withstand a tablespoon of earnest scrutiny. As a new generation of Americans starts digging through the records, we’re going to hear a lot more questions.

Malcolm Harris is a writer and an editor at The New Inquiry. On Twitter, he’s @bigmeaninternet.

See:https://newrepublic.com/article/133132/whos-afraid-communism?utm_source=New+Republic&utm_campaign=b08e8b5665-The_Spain_Orwell_Never_Saw4_28_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c4ad0aba7e-b08e8b5665-59481477

No One Thought It Was Possible: 12 Ways the Sanders Revolution Has Transformed Politics

Sanders’ hugely successful campaign might just have a lasting impact.

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Steve Rosenfeld

Emphasis Mine

When Bernie Sanders launched his presidential campaign a year ago with a brazen call for an American revolution in politics, economics and social justice, no one, not even the candidate himself, could have imagined what the campaign would bring.

“The media likes to portray this as a fair fight on even footing,” campaign manager Jeff Weaver said last week. “They seem to forget that when we started our campaign on April 30, we barely registered in the polls. We didn’t have a political organization. We didn’t have millionaires waiting in the wings. Quite frankly, we didn’t have a whole lot. And then millions of people came together in a political revolution.”

Sanders hasn’t just climbed from a 55-point deficit in national polls to being just 1.4 percent behind Hillary Clinton (who, counting her husband’s, is waging her fourth presidential campaign); he has fundamentally changed the national political landscape for the better by reviving the very best progressive traditions and principles within the Democratic Party.

Here are 12 ways Sanders’ revolution has changed American politics.

1. Revived Democrats’ progressive wing. Starting in the 1990s, before Bill Clinton was elected president, the Democratic Party leadership made a concrete choice to trade Main Street for Wall Street. You saw it in its national fundraising apparatus. You saw it in the bills pushed through Congress, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, and backtracking on social justice issues, such as punitive welfare reform and criminal sentencing laws. Sanders has flipped that script, railing against American oligarchs and resurrecting the New Deal economic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Society safety net priorities of Lyndon Johnson. He’s sparked a wholesale revival of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing and heritage.

2. Introduced a new generation to progressive politics. Sanders’ overwhelming support from people under 45 is not just remarkable, it’s been extraordinarily instructive. Sanders’ followers, who keep showing up at his rallies by the tens of thousands, have memorized his speeches, know his punchlines and recite them as if they are singing along at a concert. But these aren’t pop lyrics, they’re fundamental ideas, analyses and remedies for a more just political system and society. That’s unprecedented for any presidential candidate of either major party in recent memory.

3. Stopped socialist from being a dirty word. No one has to be reminded that being called a socialist by the mainstream media or defending socialism in the political system has, for years, been a kiss of death—even if recent polls find public attitudes changing. Sanders has rebranded the word in the American public’s mind, so it simply means greater democratic participation and sharing of economic rights and responsibilities. Among young people in college and in their 20s, polls last fall found majorities had a more favorable view of socialism than capitalism.

4. Showed grassroots, small-donor campaigns are viable. Sanders’ small-donor fundraising has been nothing if not remarkable, raising $182 million in the last year, according to analyses of federal campaign finance reports—the same sum as Clinton, though she had a $30 million headstart. He wasn’t the first presidential candidate to tap the power of small donations—Howard Dean did it and so did Jerry Brown—but Sanders has inspired millions of people across America who are averging under $30 a pop. That’s come as the country has seen political campaigns dominated by a handful of superwealthy individuals or billionaires backing super PACs, which he doesn’t have though the Clinton campaign does. That contrast alone is significant, but there’s more to it. His campaign has disproved many of the political establishment’s longstanding precepts: that an engaged citizenry won’t support candidates; that candidates have to pander to the rich to fund their campaigns; and that small-donor public financing systems aren’t sufficient when it comes to the political big leagues.

5. Showed the public responds to principled politicans. Sanders has defied the cliché that good people who enter politics will eventually be corrupted and compromised because they have to sell out along the way to win. He’s proven that a candidate and officeholder who has been principled and consistent and is honest and treats the public with integrity can succeed. In months of polls, the public has consistently said that Sanders is more trustworthy than either Clinton or Donald Trump. The public knows when they are being lied to or played for fools, and nobody running in 2016 has been as forthright, straightforward or honest as Sanders.

6. Showed it’s possible to run without throwing much mud. Until last week’s heated New York primary, where his composure was tested and frayed, he has run an issue-oriented campaign almost entirely devoid of personal attacks. Clinton supporters will take exception to that, but it’s true—how does one compare and contrast one’s values and judgments with their opponents, if they are in it to win, without saying that they believe they are better qualified? The larger point is that the 2016 Democratic nominating contest has been waged as a war of ideas, accompishments and temperament. Politics isn’t for the meek, but it doesn’t have to be all mud all the time like the GOP’s nominating contest, and Sanders has shown that in state after state.

7. Shown Democrats what an engaged citizenry looks like. From rallies attended by thousands and thousands to the remarkably energetic efforts of legions of his grassroots supporters, the Sanders campaign has vividly reminded the Democratic Party what an engaged base and electorate looks like. Moreover, that outpouring of enthusiasm reveals a fervent desire to take more radical stances on issues and solutions than what the party’s Washington-based establishment wants to admit or embrace. It also sets the expectation that a Democratic presidency and recaptured Congress had better seriously try to deliver a bold new agenda, if that’s the outcome in November.

8. Brought America’s progressive organizers together. Sanders has given other progressive-minded Democrats running in 2008 room to take anti-corporate stances, such as candidates endorsed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, Working Families Party and others. He has also brought together the country’s progressive groups and the best organizers in the country, who have long worked on their issues in silos and are providing him with a fantastic campaign infrastructure. Democrats have typically relied on labor unions to provide needed volunteers. Labor is a big part of the Sanders campaign, but it’s part of a much wider coalition of like-minded people. That symbiosis is remarkable and raises the question of what will happen after the 2016 campaign concludes.

9. Pushed Hillary Clinton to the left. There is no doubt that Sanders has pushed the Democratic establishment’s heir apparent further to the left, making her take stronger and less ambiguous stances on many issues, such as promising not to roll back Social Security as part of any grand-bargain federal budget deal or new benefit-calculation formula. Should Clinton get the 2016 nomination, the open question is, how long will she stay to the left? He’s also made her a better candidate, forcing her to clarify and defend her positions, which she arguably might not do unless pressed by as vigorous a debater as Sanders.

10. Challenged everyone on free tuition. There are a number of issues where his agenda has put ideas and solutions before the country that mainstream political America hasn’t wanted to acknowledge or embrace. One is the need for public universities to be tuition-free, just as K-12 education is. As important, Sanders has proposed how to pay for that step, which is an increasing necessity in today’s global economy, by imposing a transaction tax on high-volume Wall Street traders. That kind of thinking, which would help millions of households, can no longer be called fringe.

11. Called out Wall Street’s purpose and business model. Everybody knows that Sanders is no friend of America’s largest corporations, which in field after field have near-monopoly control of goods, services and pricing. But he has especially gone after the financial sector, saying its business model is built on private greed and has a more than questionable public purpose. By identifying the culprits in decades-old wage stagnation and an undermining of the American middle and working classes, Sanders is reminding everyone that being in a democracy comes with rights and responsibilities, such as taking care of the vulnerable and pushing for racial and social justice.

12. Showed a Jew can call out Israel. For decades, American politicans, like a great many Jewish Americans, have faced great pressure never to criticize anything Israel does and reflexively to blame the Palestinians for the area’s ongoing violence. Sanders doesn’t make a big deal of his Jewish heritage—like many Jews, he is a living example of faith’s secular humanist tradition. Before the New York primary, he said that Israel’s military response to the last attacks from Gaza was unnecessary and disproportionate, prompting the ire of the Israel lobby. But his comments were cut from a larger foreign policy cloth that values restraint and prioritizes seeking political solutions.

A Revolution or New Normal?

Sanders supporters and political observers will surely cite more examples, but what stands out to progressives about many aspects of Sanders’ campaign and agenda is that what he is calling for isn’t revolutionary at all—it’s sane, and if anything, overdue. The passion and public purpose of his campaign has struck deep and wide notes precisely because of that. More than anything, Sanders has reminded vast swaths of the country that his democratic socialist agenda is exactly what they want America to be—a fairer and more dignified, tolerant, responsible and conscientious country. And he’s reminded the Democratic Party that its most engaged and visible base wants substantial change, even if those remedies seem radical to the Washington status quo.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of “Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting” (AlterNet Books, 2008).

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/no-one-thought-it-was-possible-12-ways-sanders-revolution-has-transformed-politics?akid=14192.123424.2tlIzG&rd=1&src=newsletter1055207&t=4

Bernie’s Most Valuable Lesson: The Democratic Party Does Not Do Enough to Represent the Values of Progressive Americans

Sanders has laid bare for all to see the political expediency that drives the Democratic establishment.

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Conor Lynch/Salon

Emphasis Mine

Over the past year, the insurgent political campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders has revealed quite a bit about the reasoning of partisan Democrats, and thus separated the progressives from the liberals. As a populist candidate who has refused support from Super PACs and big monied interests, Sanders has shined a light on the unpleasant reality that the Democratic party — and its likely presidential nominee — is almost as reliant on funding from billionaires and Wall Street as the detested Republican party is.

Now, when it comes to criticizing Republicans, progressives and establishment Democrats generally see eye to eye. The Republican party is shamelessly anti-democratic and under the thumb of special interests; there is no debate about that. However, the other major party in American politics, while less shameless, is certainly no paragon of virtue. This has become increasingly evident as the 2016 primaries have progressed — and many Democrats are furious that the Sanders campaign has exposed this truth.

In recent weeks, the Sanders campaign has been increasingly vocal about the Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s many troubling positions and her ties to Wall Street and other industries. Sanders has criticized Clinton’s high-prices speeches for Goldman Sachs (for which she has flatly refused to release the transcripts), the $15 million raised from Wall Street by one of her Super PACs, and the fact that top donors throughout her career have been individuals working at banks like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase.

Clinton and her supporters have defended these connections with a simple retort: You can’t prove quid pro quo. International Business Times reporter David Sirota recently mocked this argument on Twitter: “Logic I learned from Clinton: nobody should worry [about] oil cash going to the climate-denying GOP, unless theres proof of a clear quid pro quo.”

If the quid pro quo defense sounds familiar, it’s because it is the exact same reasoning that right-wing Supreme Court justices make when striking down campaign finance laws, as in the 2014 case, McCutcheon v. FEC, which eliminated limits on how much an individual can donate to national parties over a two year period. Justice John Roberts wrote in the decision:

“Any regulation must instead target what we have called ‘quid pro quo’ corruption or its appearance. That Latin phrase captures the notion of a direct exchange of an official act for money.”

Of course, when it comes to climate change-denying Republicans, Clinton and her supporters realize that the influence of big money corrupts and is a threat to democracy. In fact, Clinton makes the point herself:

“We have to end the flood of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political system, and drowning out the voices of too many everyday Americans. Our democracy should be about expanding the franchise, not charging an entrance fee.”

As with money in politics, Democrats rightly condemn Republicans for voter disenfranchisement. But at Tuesday’s primaries in New York — one of the bluest states in America — franchise was not expanded, but narrowed, and many partisan Democrats quickly dismissed concerns about possible voter suppression as bitterness from Sanders supporters after Clinton won a decisive victory. Almost 30 percent of New York’s registered voters, including Erica Garner, a Sanders surrogate and the daughter of Eric Garner, could not participate in the primaries because they were not registered with either of the two major parties, and missed the deadline to switch six months earlier (the longest such deadline in the country).

Conor Lynch is a writer and journalist living in New York City. His work has appeared on Salon, The Hill, AlterNet, and openDemocracy. Follow him on Twitter.

 

 

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernies-most-valuable-lesson-democratic-party-does-not-represent-values-progressive?akid=14191.123424.T6930e&rd=1&src=newsletter1055175&t=6

Why Do Voters Say Hillary Clinton Is Untrustworthy?

Even using objective measures of trustworthiness, like Politifact’s Truth-O-Meter scale, she rates as the most honest compared to every other candidate in the 2016 race.

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Photo: Hillary Clinton: Whoever you want her to be? REUTERS/Mike Stone
Photo: Hillary Clinton: Whoever you want her to be? REUTERS/Mike Stone

Source: National Memo

Author: Stephanie Schwartz

Emphasis Mine

Hillary Clinton is not trustworthy.

That’s the belief of many, many Americans – and in this case, let’s exclude the right-wing orthodoxy, who have hated Hillary since she first said she’d rather not stay home baking chocolate-chip cookies in 1992.

Forty percent of Democratic primary voters, according to March CBS/New York Times poll, believe that Mrs. Clinton is politically calculating; somone they don’t trust with the presidency. She’s been asked about it in debates and on the stump, and there’s a whole genre of literature devoted to her “fabrications.”

But even journalists like Jill Abramson, who has covered Clinton for decades as the the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief, managing editor and executive editor, have defended Clinton against mostly-baseless accusations that she is “dishonest.”

Abramson, in an op-ed in The Guardian, writes that while Hillary has shown bad judgment before – she specifically refers to her use of a private email server while Secretary of State, over which Clinton will be speaking to the FBI, and her taking Wall Street money for speeches she’s given – she suffers from a level of scrutiny not given to male candidates, and her long record in politics gives her opponents ample fodder.

This type of criticism, which many use as a feminist defense, might fall on hostile ears. But as Chaz Pazienza argues in The Daily Banter, it’s Clinton’s reputation, for good or for ill, that makes it so impossible for many voters to look at her objectively: The “personality” that’s been sold to the American electorate is largely manufactured, and not by Clinton herself (another facet of the smear: that she’s a phony). The reality is that Clinton was one of the most liberal members of the Senate during her time there, ranking within ten points of progressive messiah Bernie Sanders and her history as a crusader for progressive causes is precisely what so motivated the GOP to destroy her in the first place. As far as the right was concerned, Clinton stepped far over the line when she pushed for healthcare reform way back in 1993 and her activist past informed a future as a “difficult woman.” Even using objective measures of trustworthiness, like Politifact’s Truth-O-Meter scale, she rates as the most honest compared to every other candidate in the 2016 race. (Let’s not even go into the GOP frontrunner, who’s entire candidacy is based upon saying the most outrageous lie he can think of in any given moment.)

But unlike other politicians, the supposed scandals stick. You might be sick of hearing about Hillary’s damn emails, but they’re still getting coverage.

Hillary has learned to become guarded through her decades in public life. When the most intimate details of your life are splayed across front pages for everyone to see – and judge and scold and criticize – it’s natural that she would carefully take pains to draw her private life around her as much as possible. And that’s made blunders about her lack of transparency – like not releasing transcripts of her private speeches to Wall Street – make her look like she’s hiding something, even if it’s just embarrassment or hypocrisy.

As Abramson points out, this doesn’t mean that Hillary is above scrutiny, and she’s not excusing her record. But Abramson isn’t alone in finding Clinton’s “liar” reputation extremely dubious.

After all, America has elected prevaricating politicians before.

See:http://www.nationalmemo.com/why-do-voters-say-hillary-clinton-is-untrustworthy/

Why Bernie’s Revolution Has Just Begun

With each primary victory—and each close call—Sanders has shown us our own strength.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: D.D. Guttenplan/The Nation

Emphasis Mine

Well, we’ll always have Michigan….

A week after Bernie Sanders stunned pollsters with a victory that nobody predicted, lifting his campaign—and his supporters’ expectations—those hopes came crashing down to earth yesterday with defeats in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, and North Carolina. Hillary Clinton’s late-breaking win in Missouri gives her a clean sweep on a night that was meant to mark the turn in the tide for Sanders, who poured time and money into Ohio, where Clinton took every big city on her way to a convincing 14-point victory, and Illinois, where Sanders hoped to profit from dissatisfaction with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a longtime Clinton ally. Though voters did punish Cook County prosecutor Anita Alvarez for her handling of the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, favoring challenger Kim Foxx by a margin of 2 to 1, Clinton carried Cook County by a comfortable 8 points.

Yes, it’s true that the rest of the primary calendar is more favorable to Sanders—who has won more states, garnered many more votes, and has a larger share of the delegates than any of the Republicans challenging Donald Trump. Whose presumptive grasp on his party’s nomination is denied almost daily by the same media who have been burying Sanders—when they could be bothered to write about him—from Iowa onward. We never said this was going to be easy—or a fair fight.

Hillary Clinton has always been the favored candidate of the party establishment. And unlike 2008, when the powerful Cook County portion of that establishment broke for Obama, a favorite son, this time the establishment remains unified in the face of the Sanders insurgency. Which would be reason enough for Sanders to carry on his fight all the way to Philadelphia, even if it really were mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination—a point we are still unlikely to reach before California votes on June 7. The strength of Sanders’s challenge, and the enthusiasm of his supporters, have already pulled Hillary Clinton off dead center on police violence, trade policy, access to education, and making the wealthy pay their share of taxes. 

As long as he stays in the race, and stays true to his beliefs, Sanders will keep winning those arguments, even if Clinton’s willingness to steal her opponent’s best ideas—and even some of his best lines—help her to win voters who will be crucial in defeating Trump in November. Turnout remains the Democrats’ Achilles’ heel: In Ohio, where Trump came second, he still got more votes than either Democrat. Clinton herself seems to get this, and yesterday declined to endorse calls for Sanders to drop out. Any other course would leave Trump in sole possession of the media for the next four months.

Speaking of the Donald, it also seems odd that while his impact on the Republican party is endlessly analyzed, almost nothing has been said about the way Trump’s likely nomination has influenced Democratic primary voters. My own guess is that fear of Trump probably carried Clinton over the line in Illinois and Missouri.

Keeping Clinton from reverting to a neoliberal default isn’t the only reason for Sanders to stay in the race—or the most important. As Sanders has always said, his aim is “a political revolution.” Winning the nomination would be nice, but is neither necessary nor sufficient to bring that about. Building a nationwide, durable network of mobilized, active supporters prepared to keep working for universal healthcare, a living wage, ending Wall Street welfare and America’s endless wars—including the drug wars—in numbers great enough to Occupy the Democratic Party and take it back from its corporate funders is absolutely crucial. So, too, is the difficult work of stitching together movements like #BlackLivesMatter, Fight for 15, immigrant rights, climate justice, and voting rights into a coalition prepared to march together, vote together, and transform our politics—and our country. Yet that is the task we face.

Are the odds against us? Of course. That’s what it means to live inside a rigged system. But remember where we were only a few months ago. With each primary victory—and each close call—Sanders shows us our own strength. With each packed rally we see the claim that socialism is un-American exposed as a lie, that a world where no one starves, healthcare is not rationed by wealth, and energy companies aren’t allowed to rape the earth for profit and leave the rest of us to take the consequences is not only possible but popular.

Why cut off that momentum? Especially when, as Daniel Cantor of the Working Families Party points out, Sanders actually keeps getting stronger: “Bernie’s North Carolina performance was 15 points better than his South Carolina performance last month, and 5 points better than his Virginia performance two weeks ago. Meanwhile, the margin in Cook County, Illinois, is half of that in Wayne County, Michigan.”

So we fight on—to July, November, and beyond. For the nomination, so long as that remains a possibility. For our country—which may in November face as stark a choice as any in our lifetimes. And for our future, which is far too precious a prize to abandon for the sake of a few thousand votes.

 See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/why-bernies-revolution-has-just-begun?akid=14080.123424.MZYW4e&rd=1&src=newsletter1052897&t=4

The Bernie Sanders Era Is Upon Us: Why Iowa Was a Watershed Moment for American Politics

The Vermont senator’s Iowa showing indicates that something is changing in American politics.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Paul Blest/Salon

Emphasis Mine

On Monday night, a self-described socialist who has spent his entire career railing against the two-party system brought his first primary matchup — with the most visible and popular non-presidential Democrat over the past quarter-century — down to a couple of coin tosses. It is truly the most remarkable and unexpected event in American politics in a long time, and it could leave a lasting impression on the Democratic Party, the American left, and in particular on how those two entities interact with each other for years.

Bernie Sanders has done this against the conventional wisdom of the pundit class (he readily admits that he’d raise middle class taxes to pay for universal healthcare) and the infrastructure of an entire political party, one that has refused to take him seriously. Aside from Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden, an ally of Sanders on national security, there are few endorsements left that haven’t gone toward Hillary Clinton; with the first caucus in the books, Sanders’ only major nods have come from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Reps. Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva, the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Clinton, by comparison, has endorsements from 38 out of the 44 sitting Democratic senators.

Clinton, whose Health Security Act in 1993 inadvertently started the Democratic Party’s long hibernation away from welfare liberalism due to its failure in Congress, recognizes this. She has spent the primary trying to tack to Sanders’ left on various issues including gun control and (misleadingly) Wall Street reform, has positioned herself as the only candidate willing to protect and continue Barack Obama’s legacy, and made a line from one of the Democratic debates — “I’m a progressive who gets things done” — a rallying cry for her whole campaign. Her choice of the word “progressive,” rather than “liberal,” gives an indication that she’d like to paint herself as “forward” rather than “left,” but the message to potential voters is implied: If you want to keep the country moving in a leftward direction — even at a snail’s pace — vote for me.

But on Monday night, rather than attack her only challenger remaining in the Democratic race, Clinton sought to reach out to Sanders supporters, saying that it was “rare that we have the opportunity to have a real contest of ideas…to really think hard about what the Democratic Party stands for and what we want the future to look like.” It doesn’t show that she’s going to pursue any of the policy goals Sanders got in the race to champion in the first place, but it does show that she’s taking Sanders, his supporters and the future of the party where she’s spent her life’s work seriously.

Sanders drawing Clinton in Iowa obviously doesn’t change the party overnight. Clinton still has the support of roughly half of the Democratic super-delegates locked up, and the current makeup of the party in Congress shows many self-described progressives yet very few who are truly sympathetic to pursuing policy goals like free college and universal healthcare. The Democratic Party has to go a long way before it becomes a party that someone with the politics of Seattle’s socialist councilwoman Kshama Sawant could feel at home in.

But even before Iowa, the Sanders campaign had already started making an impact. In down-ticket races, congressional candidates like populist Tim Canova and anti-corruption crusader Zephyr Teachout represent a new breed of Democratic politician more sympathetic to Bernie Sanders than Bill Clinton and maybe even Barack Obama. Elizabeth Warren might be the most high-profile endorsement either candidate could want right now. And in August, the Democratic Party made a $15 national minimum wage a part of its platform.

These are all people and positions that have been slammed by centrists and Third Way Democrats as being just as big of an obstacle to the way they’d like to govern as ultraconservative Republicans, and maybe even more of a nuisance. Now, after taking Clinton the distance in Iowa and with a strong shot to win in New Hampshire, this movement has proven that it is legitimate.

Still, we won’t know what Monday night truly meant until we start to see the many Sanders staffers, volunteers and supporters who are working in politics for the first time make their own forays in government and elected office. And even then, it’s impossible to predict future political trends and how committed to the same principles the Sanders coalition will be 10, 15 or 20 years down the line. We do know one thing for certain, however: Sanders’ Iowa showing indicates that something is changing in American politics. And for liberals and socialists alike who are looking for a movement where “the government belongs to all of us” (as Sanders said on Monday night), this couldn’t be better news.

Paul Blest is a freelance writer baed in Raleigh, North Carolina. Paul’s work has appeared in Vice, Salon, Noisey, New Republic, Indy Week and Deadspin. Follow him on Twitter @pblest.

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-sanders-era-upon-us-why-iowa-was-watershed-moment-american-politics?akid=13952.123424.Fn62Zy&rd=1&src=newsletter1050206&t=8

Stop Comparing Trump and Sanders: The Two Candidates Aren’t Equal and Opposite Radicals

Both candidates’ supporters are fed up with their country, but the sources of their rage are radically different.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Matthew Rozsa/The Good Men Project

Emphasis Mine

This piece originally appeared on The Good Men Project.

As the 2016 presidential election gathers steam, it’s tempting to compare the Bernie Sanders surge among Democrats with the Donald Trump phenomenon among Republicans. After all, both candidates are marshalling support from the ideological grassroots in their respective parties (the left in Sanders’ case, the right for Trump), and both have successfully tapped into a deeper anger that animates their campaigns.

When you reflect on the nature of that anger, however, a crucial distinction between the two candidates emerges: Sanders is drawing on a compassionate anger, while Trump is fanning the flames of a selfish anger. This may seem like a small difference, but it’s one that will literally determine the fate of millions. First, a quick moment of clarification. When I discuss “compassionate” and “selfish” forms of anger, I’m referring to the underlying philosophy embedded in a given set of frustrations. Although both forms of anger tap into a visceral sense of outrage within their listeners, the former insists that they exhibit empathy for others, while the latter encourages them to focus on advancing their own interests at the expense of others. Thus – to use the analogy of a schoolyard setting – the practitioner of empathetic anger will demand that the rules be fair and the toys be shared, while the practitioner of selfish anger will raise a fuss whenever he’s losing the game or doesn’t have as many toys as he’d like… regardless of whether real cheating or unjust inequality is actually involved.

This brings us to the current election cycle. As the most recent Democratic debate demonstrated, Sanders is practically monomaniacal in his focus on the problem of income inequality in America. Whether he’s discussing the importance of raising the minimum wage, proposing a substitute for Obamacare that would guarantee free health coverage for everyone, or advocating policies that would lower college tuition and student loan rates, all of his positions are bound by a common thread. Sanders sees an America that, despite proclaiming itself the “land of opportunity,” is clearly rigged to offer better opportunities for the affluent than the poor.

Similarly, despite its nickname as the “land of the free,” Sanders vocalizes a widespread outrage at the notion that anyone can have a freedom worth having while languishing in insurmountable poverty. Listening to his rhetoric, one hears undeniable echoes of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous Economic Bill of Rights:

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

Whereas Sanders’ campaign has been fueled by a consistent ideology of economic progressivism (or, as he likes to call it, democratic socialism), the Trump boom has gathered momentum by pitting various groups of Americans against each other. It’s easy to forget that when Trump skyrocketed to his current frontrunner status over the summer, it was by vilifying undocumented Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. Since that time, his campaign has wallowed in the depth of misogyny, racism, and Islamophobia, with Trump garnering headlines and gaining support by openly promoting the prejudices that have marginalized non-white males in the past. While it’s tempting to identify this pattern of bigotry as the common thread tying his campaign themes together, this wouldn’t be precisely accurate. The actual thread is Trump’s cynical awareness of the fact that, by shattering the so-called “politically correct” taboos against attacking traditionally oppressed groups of people, he can simultaneously speak on behalf of the privileged while making both them and himself seem like the underdogs.

Indeed, the evidence of this can be found not on the many occasions when Trump’s hate mongering has succeeded, but on the numerous times it has failed. Take his anti-Semitic comments during a speech in front of the Republican Jewish Coalition; when he declared to his appalled audience that “you’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” he clearly intended to position himself as a brave challenger of a Jew-controlled status quo. This approach didn’t gain traction, so naturally he abandoned it, but structurally it was identical to the rhetoric he has successfully used against Mexicans or Muslims – insinuate that racist assumptions about those groups are correct, feed off of the media outrage regarding his remarks, and profit from the support that rallies behind him for “speaking the truth.” The same thing can be said of his efforts to mobilize a bigoted reaction against the Cuban heritage of his chief rival, Ted Cruz; when he urged an Iowa audience to remember that “not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba,” the goal was once again to politically weaponized what he hoped would be the racist inclinations of his own supporters. The fact that this tactic didn’t work against Cubans (and thus Cruz) simply proves that Trump’s strategy, though often successful, is still a hit-and-miss affair. Of course, because the hits yield such great rewards and the misses have yet to hurt him politically, Trump has no particular incentive to stop.

Even though Trump will probably never redeem the quality of his anger, though, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from his actions. If Americans truly want to elevate the quality of their political discourse, it is imperative to start by distinguishing between the type of anger that speaks to legitimate needs among the vulnerable and the type of anger that only sows seeds of dissent and hatred. This is an issue that transcends the Sanders and Trump campaigns, or indeed the 2016 presidential election entirely. At its core, this is about what it means to be a responsible citizen within a democratic society – something that Sanders clearly understands, and Trump just as clearly does not.

Matthew Rozsa is a Ph.D. student in history at Lehigh University as well as a political columnist. His editorials have been published in “The Morning Call,” “The Express-Times,” “The Newark Star-Ledger,” “The Baltimore Sun,” and various college newspapers and blogs. He actively encourages people to reach out to him at matt.rozsa@gmail.co

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/stop-comparing-trump-and-sanders-two-candidates-arent-equal-and-opposite-radicals?akid=13935.123424.2TWQRD&rd=1&src=newsletter1049911&t=8

Striking Fact: Trump’s Corporate Media Coverage Outnumbers Bernie’s 81 to 1

Trump has received more network coverage than all the Democratic candidates combined.

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Source:AlterNet

Author: Eric Boehlert

Emphasis Mine

Does that ratio seem out of whack? That’s the ratio of TV airtime that ABCWorld News Tonight has devoted to Donald Trump’s campaign (81 minutes) versus the amount of TV time World News Tonight has devoted to Bernie Sanders’ campaign this year. And even that one minute for Sanders is misleading because the actual number is closer to 20 second.

For the entire year.

That’s the rather stunning revelation from the Tyndall Report, which tracks the various flagship nightly news programs on NBC, CBS and ABC. The Report’s campaign findings cover the network evening newscasts from January 1 through the end of November.

The results confirm two media extremes in play this year, and not just at ABC News. The network newscasts are wildly overplaying Trump, who regularly attracts between 20-30 percent of primary voter support, while at the same time wildly underplaying Sanders, who

regularly attracts between 20-30 percent of primary voter support. (Sanders’ supporters have long complained about the candidate’s lack of coverage.)

Obviously, Trump is the GOP frontrunner and its reasonable that he would get more attention than Sanders, who’s running second for the Democrats. But 234 total network minutes for Trump compared to just 10 network minutes for Sanders, as the Tyndall Report found?

Andrew Tyndall provided the breakdown by network of Sanders’ 10 minutes of coverage, via email [emphasis added]:

  1. CBS Evening News: 6.4 minutes
  2. NBC Nightly News: 2.9 minutes
  3. ABC World News Tonight: 0.3 minutes

But how can they be? ABC News, for instance, clearly devoted more than 20 seconds to covering the Democratic debates, which featured news of Sanders, right?

As Tyndall explained to me, the number “counts stories filed about the Sanders campaign or from the Sanders campaign. Obviously he is mentioned in passing in other coverage of the Democratic field overall, specifically his performance in the debates.”

So in terms of stand-alone campaign stories this year, it’s been 234 minutes for Trump, compared to 10 minutes for Sanders. And at ABC World News Tonight, it’s been 81 minutes for Trump and less than one minute for Sanders.

Other Tyndall Report findings:

  • *Trump has received more network coverage than all the Democratic candidates combined.
  • *Trump has accounted for 27 percent of all campaign coverage his year.
  • *Republican Jeb Bush received 56 minutes of coverage, followed by Ben Carson’s 54 minutes and Marco Rubio’s 22.

Did you notice the Bush figure? He’s garnered 56 minutes of network news coverage, far outpacing Sanders, even though he is currently wallowing in fifth place in the polls among Republicans. And you know who has also received 56 minutes of network news compared to Sanders’ 10? Joe Biden and his decision not to run for president.

Meanwhile, I can hear supporters of Ted Cruz complaining that based on Tyndall’s analysis, the Texas Republican has only received seven minutes of coverage this year and look where he is in the polls. That’s a fair point. But also note that Cruz has only recently risen in the primary polls, whereas Sanders has been a solid second for many, many months. (A new poll this week shows Sanders leading the New Hampshire primary.)

Close observers of trends in network news might also say ABC’s paltry Sanders coverage isn’t surprising considering the network’s flagship news program has recently backed off political coverage, as well as hard news in general.

From the Washington Post this summer:

“World News” devoted half as many minutes to Washington stories as CBS did during the first four months of the year, and about 40 percent less than did NBC, according to Andrew Tyndall, who tracks the networks’ newscasts through his eponymous newsletter.

In perhaps a first for a national newscast, “World News” no longer has a full-time correspondent reporting on Congress. Such stories are handled on an ad hoc basis by reporter Jonathan Karl, whose primary beats are the White

House and political campaign this case though, that explanation doesn’t work because while World News Tonight might be shying away from news out of Washington, D.C., Tyndall’s analysis shows ABC has produced more campaign coverage this year thanCBS Evening News; 261 minutes vs. 247 minutes for CBS.

Look at that ABC number again: 261 minutes devoted to campaign coverage this year, and less than one minute of that has specifically been for Sanders. How does that even happen?

So no, Sanders didn’t get virtually ignored this year by World News Tonight because the show’s cutting back on campaign coverage. Sanders got virtually ignored by ABC because there was a conscious decision to do so.

And before anyone suggests ABC has somehow been in the pocket of the Clinton campaign and that’s why Sanders got slighted, note that World NewsTonight has set aside roughly the same amount of time this year to cover Republican-fed controversies surrounding Clinton’s email and details about the Benghazi terror attack, as it has to cover Clinton’s actual campaign.

Any way you look at it, 81:1 is a ratio that means there’s something very wrong with the campaign coverage.

 

Eric Boehlert is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of “Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over for Bush.” He can be reached at eboehlert@aol.com.

See:http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/everything-thats-wrong-our-political-press-single-depressing-statistic?akid=13768.123424.dwQqfw&rd=1&src=newsletter1047248&t=8

Bernie Won All the Focus Groups & Online Polls – So Why Is the Media Saying Hillary Won the Debate?

What the public wants out of a candidate and what the beltway press does appear to be two entirely different things.

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Source:AlterNet

Author:Adam Johnson

Emphasis Mine 

Who “won” a debate is inherently subjective. The idea of “winning” a debate necessarily entails a goal to be achieved. What this goal is, therefore, says as much about the person judging its achievement than the goal itself. Pundits are ostensibly supposed to judge whether or not a candidate said what “the voters” want to hear. But what ends up happening, invariably, is they end up judging whether or not the candidate said what they think voters wanted to hear. This, after all, is why pundits exist, to act a clergy class charged with interpreting people’s own inscrutable opinions for them. The chasm between what the pundits saw and what the public was quite big last night.

Bernie Sanders by all objective measures won the debate. Hands down. I don’t say this as a personal analysis of the debate – the very idea of “winning” a debate is silly to me. I say this because based on the only relatively objective metric we have, online polls and focus groups, he did win.  And it’s not even close.

Sanders won the CNN focus group, the Fusion focus group, and the Fox News focus group – in the latter, he even converted several Hillary supporters. He won the Slate online poll, the CNN/Time online poll, 9News Colorado, The Street online poll, Fox5 poll, the conservative Drudge online poll and the liberal Daily Kos online poll. There wasn’t, to this writer’s knowledge, a poll he didn’t win by at least an 18 point margin.  But you wouldn’t know this from reading the establishment press. The New York Times, The New Yorker, CNN,Politico, Slate, New York Magazine, and Vox all of which unanimously say Hillary Clinton cleaned house. What gives?

Firstly, it’s important to point out that online polls, and to a lesser extent focus groups, are obviously not scientific. But it’s also important to point out that the echo chamber musings of establishment liberal pundits is far, far less scientific. It wasn’t that the online polls and focus groups had Sanders winning, it’s that they had him winning by a lot. And it wasn’t just that the pundit classes has Clinton winning, it’s that they had her winning by a lot. This gap speaks to a larger gap that we’ve seen since the beginning of Sanders campaign. The mainstream media writes off Bernie and is constantly shocked when his polls numbers go up. What explains this phenomenon? Freddie DeBoer, writing about the gap between what the pundits saw and what the public saw, had this to say:

This morning, I’ve been pointing out on Twitter that the unanimity of pro-Hillary Clinton journalism coming from the mouthpieces of establishment Democratic politics — Slate, Vox, New York Magazine, etc. — is entirely predictable and has no meaningful relationship to her actual performance at the debate last night. That’s because, one, the Democrats are a centrist party that is interested in maintaining the stranglehold of the DNC establishment on their presidential politics, and these publications toe that line. And second, because Clinton has long been assumed to be the heavy favorite to win the presidency, these publications are in a heated battle to produce the most sympathetic coverage, in order to gain access. That is a tried-and-true method of career advancement in political journalism. Ezra Klein was a well-regarded blogger and journalist. He became the most influential journalist in DC (and someone, I can tell you with great confidence, that young political journalists are terrified of crossing) through his rabid defense of Obamacare, and subsequent access to the President. That people would try and play the same role with Clinton is as natural and unsurprising as I can imagine.

So many establishment journalists were in a hurry to declare Clinton not just the winner of the debate, but the election. One fairly creepy exchange between Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker and Alec MacGillis summed it up nicely: “Pretend” there’s a race? Isn’t that sort of the whole point of democracy? To have as much debate and vetting as possible before nominating a potential leader of the free world? Matt Yglesias at Vox also dismissed this entire primary process out of hand: It’s unclear what the rush is. The first primary is months away and they’re ready to call it based entirely on they and their pundit buddies ad hoc analysis of one debate. This tweet by Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe would perfectly sum up mainstream media’s cluelessness…

A “protest candidate”? If Cohen hasn’t noticed the electorate is full of piss and vinegar and rancor which is precisely why an otherwise obscure, self-described socialist has rose in the polls the way he has.

But the question still remains: why the rush to write off Sanders? Why the constant gap between how the public perceives Sanders and how the mainstream media does?  Why, most of all, would anyone listen to the very same pundit class that was wrong in ’08 and continues to be wrong in 2015? 

Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter at@adamjohnsonnyc.

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/media/bernie-won-all-focus-groups-online-polls-so-why-media-saying-hillary-won-debate?akid=13575.123424.33yFJd&rd=1&src=newsletter1044066&t=2

A Psychologist Puts Trump and the GOP on the Couch

What’s going on in the Republican mind?

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Source:AlterNet

Author:Michael Bader

Emphasis Mine

Rather than simply reacting with self-righteous contempt for the current crop of GOP presidential candidates, liberals like myself should try to also understand their appeal, however much we might believe it’s not strong enough to put any of them in the White House. The pre-scripted kabuki dances on display in their debates have made them easy targets for disdain, so easy that it’s a bit like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey with your eyes open. Trump is an obviously racist bloviator, the creepiest and most blatantly disturbed of the bunch, for sure, but the lot of them come across as empty suits projecting poll-driven personas that their handlers believe will resonate with their base of angry and/or older white men. Moments of “authenticity” (e.g., they love their parents, spouses and children—imagine that!) are, themselves, always wooden, overly-crafted and ginned up with phony emotion and reported breathlessly by a media itself unable to stand on its own two feet and tell truth from fiction when it comes from these conservative wind-up dolls.

The Democrats will stage manage their personalities and manipulate their messages, too. Sanders is by far the most authentic, but he had to pivot in order to re-emphasize his record on race and women’s rights. Hillary will try to “present” herself as a human being (she’s a grandmother, after all), and the other guys—whoever they are—will do something similar when they can.

All of this is politics as usual, dutifully but cynically covered by a press corps that has surrendered even the pretense of critical thinking, instead sucking up to what they see as the basest cravings of their readers and viewers for the political version of reality television.

But while all politicians pander and throw authenticity under the bus of political expediency, the current plague of high-visibility GOP candidates project two especially pathological themes that they’ve decided will resonate with the feelings of millions of voters: paranoia and grandiosity.

As a liberal and a psychologist, I think it’s important to understand the nature and meaning of this resonance. The fears and insecurities that paranoia and grandiosity seek to diminish are feelings that a liberal agenda should be better able to address. Undecided voters can be drawn to the left or the right, and the more we understand the appeal of the American Right, the better able we might be to counter it with a more progressive and healthy message and platform. But we will never know if that’s possible or how to do it if we don’t understand the psychological dynamics behind the appeal of right-wing paranoia and grandiosity.

Let’s start with grandiosity, a term familiar to psychologists in our work with patients who need to inflate their self-esteem and self-assessments in order to ward off feelings of inferiority or helplessness. But just as individuals identify with, say, a sports team, so too do individuals identify with their nation—e.g., Team America. In our case, the political or collective version of personal grandiosity is what is known as “American Exceptionalism,” namely the tapestry of stories about the specialness of the United States when it comes to personal freedom, economic opportunity and growth, and military superiority. These stories have gained mythic proportions. They’re all captured by one unquestioned assumption: We are the greatest country in the history of the world. Period. This is a core part of the relentless drumbeat we hear from the conservative echo chamber.

But this braggadocio—what former Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright called “The Arrogance of Power”—requires that the ideal of American “greatness” be cleansed of any blemishes, just as a grandiose or narcissistic patient has to deny his or her human frailty and fallibility. This is where paranoia comes in handy. It’s easier to believe you are exceptional if you are comparing yourself with others and if you are proving your remarkable strength against naysayers or challengers. It helps, in other words, to have an enemy who is threatening your greatness.

Thus, the rhetoric of the current crop of Republican politicians, including, especially, the GOP clowns running for president, combines grandiosity and paranoia. Our nation’s greatness isn’t threatened by simple human fallibility but by Obama, Muslims, immigrants, Democrats, Planned Parenthood and Big Government. The second Republican presidential debate was laced with echoes of these beliefs, sometimes baldly stated, other times expressed as Obama-bashing. According to Carly Fiorina, “The United States of America is back in the leadership business.” Trump coughed up this hairball:  “We’ll make our country rich again, and we’ll have a great life all together.”

In other words, we’re in danger of losing our place in the front of the line, and only a Republican president has enough sinew and muscular confidence in American greatness to make sure that doesn’t happen. Grandiosity and paranoia—we’re the greatest, but we have to vigilantly remind ourselves and everyone else of that fact because we’re also threatened. A great “us” has to be continually reinforced by invoking threats from a demeaned “them.”

The current frontrunners for a “them” that threatens our perfect national collective are immigrants and radical Islamic extremists. Like the Red scares of the 1950s, our current xenophobia is based on the same paranoid view of ourselves and the world. The first thing Ted Cruz would apparently do as president is to “shred Obama’s catastrophic Iran deal.” Trump is the poster child for paranoia with his dumb “we’ll build a wall but put in a beautiful gate” through which we’ll ostensibly let in only beautiful people, and keep out the “bad dudes.” And, of course, his racist demagoguery reached a peak recently when he appeared to welcome a statement from a man in the audience who asserted: “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. You know, our President is one. You know he’s not even an American.”

What does psychology tell us about the origins of paranoia and grandiosity? It tells us that pathological attitudes and states of mind are best understood as attempts, however irrational they may seem, to feel safe and secure.

All of us seek safety and security.

Paranoia, for example, simply reflects an attempt to locate a frightening or painful thought outside the self, to get rid of threatening feelings, project them onto others, and then turn an internal struggle with bad feelings into an external struggle with bad people. For example, if I’m suffering from feelings of weakness or worthlessness, the belief, however false, that someone else is causing me to feel this way can temporarily help restore my sense of innocence and self-respect. There’s nothing wrong with me that getting rid of you won’t cure. In fact, in this paranoid version of reality, I’m a good or even great guy defending himself against an external danger. What emerges in the therapist’s consulting room is that paranoia solves an internal problem by making it an external one, even at the price of denying reality.

For example, Donald Trump is actually a balding misogynist, but he doesn’t have to feel like one if he wears a toupee (allegedly made from the hair of the critically-endangered Brown Spider Monkey) and tells himself and others that Megyn Kelly was menstruating and had it out for him.

In this sense, Trump shows us what happens when the personal becomes political. Like the United States itself, he is great and good, not declining and mean. Paranoia works pretty well when you’re feeling off your game.

Grandiosity works similarly as a defense against painful internal states. Thus, the grandiosity inherent in the axiomatic assertion that “we are the greatest nation in the history of the world” uses stories and images of American perfection, greatness and omnipotence to counteract narratives that we might be a nation in decline, or reeking on the inside from toxic inequality and a callous indifference to the welfare of the unfortunate. Combine grandiosity and paranoia and you have the current Republican talking points.

When individual psychopathology becomes a collective filter for understanding the political world, we see—as we do in the rhetoric and vision of today’s GOP—a pathological set of values guaranteed to lead to pathological policies. If I were to try to list the essential psychological dynamics underlying grandiosity and paranoia in the patients I see, and you were to simply replace the personal pronoun “I” with “America” or “the American people” and “you” and “them” with one of the scapegoats demonized by the GOP (e.g., people with darker skins, the wrong religion or different sexual orientation), the symmetry between crazy individuals and crazy politics becomes clearer. Again, to oversimplify:

“I’m not small; I’m big.” (American is not small; it’s/we’re big, etc.)

“I’m not bad; I’m the essence of goodness.”

“I’m not hurting others; I’m always helping them.”

“I’m not failing or losing; I’m a successful winner.”

“The problem isn’t in me; it’s in you.”

“If I could get rid of you; I’d be great and perfect and happy again.”

You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see that the adolescent tough-guy primping we see on the GOP presidential debate stages is the political manifestation of commonplace psychological mechanisms regularly seen in individuals, namely, desperate attempts to defend against dangerous and painful feelings and fears. And just as in therapy, the important challenge is to understand those feelings and fears, because when a Donald Trump wants to build a wall to protect America, he is subliminally playing to a wish in his supporters to protect themselves. But, again, the question is: protect themselves from what? What is being denied or defended against?

The answer is that the threats that grandiose and paranoid attitudes defend against involve feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness and self-hatred—all of which are arguably greater now than ever in our culture. American exceptionalism and xenophobia offer symbolic antidotes in the political world to the more personal distress of millions of Americans today. Trump and the other airheads on the GOP stage today offer a distorted vision of the world that, like the Donald’s orange wig, helps to cover up genuine feelings of vulnerability and impotence.

For many people, the Great Recession of 2008 dashed the American Dream to which they had come to aspire or which they believed they were actually living. Millions of people lost their homes, their IRAs and other savings that were allocated for retirement and for their children’s education. These losses—the result of financial shenanigans far, far away—were accompanied by great feelings of helplessness that caused stress levels to go through the ceiling. Mortgages went underwater and people took on second or third jobs, reinforcing a sense of insecurity along with feelings of helplessness and depression. And while being overwhelmed and powerless to stop the feeling of losing ground, people saw hedge fund managers and bankers getting bailed out. Because we think we live in a meritocracy in which rewards are distributed according to ability, people blamed themselves for not being able to make ends meet, or hold on to their jobs, or for losing money in the stock market, or for having tapped into their home equity too much. I heard these self-criticisms and doubts in my consulting room every day—feelings of helplessness, pessimism, isolation and self-blame.

In 1990, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that 50% of Americans thought their children would be better off in 20 years. In 2015, a full 76% of Americans expressed skepticism that their children’s lives would be better off than their own. Even though millions of Americans were in the same boat, feelings of isolation and self-blame became more prevalent and debilitating. The ethic of individualism in our culture invariably leads people to blame themselves for their “lot” in life, even if that lot was caused by forces beyond their control. So, as the quality of life has deteriorated, the amount of depression and self-blaming has increased.

Further, as researchers such as John Cacioppo and Robert Putnam have documented, the breakdown of community organizations and bonds has resulted in increased social isolation, especially among the elderly (an important part of the Republican base, of course). In 2009, a study by Kodak revealed that most Americans felt that “we have fewer meaningful relationships than we had five years ago.” This trend has only worsened.

So we have a social landscape in which people feel increasingly pessimistic, helpless, isolated and self-blaming—feelings perfectly addressed by GOP platitudes intended to reassure us that we’re really great, all-powerful, and that it’s someone else’s fault if we’re not.

Ultimately, the appeal to an imaginary but reassuring sense of community undergirds all of these platitudes about American greatness, strength and antipathy toward the “other.” The latent message is: there is an “us” here, a great “us” full of power and noble intentions, an “us” to which everyone can belong as long as we keep “them” away or subjugated in ways that render them non-threatening (bombing them, building walls, deportation, etc.). Who doesn’t want to belong? To be part of an “us?”

The myths of American greatness serve this purpose perfectly. What is a better tonic to the pain of isolation and helplessness brought on by our market-driven and pathological ethos of individualism than to belong to Dream Team America, the greatest and most powerful nation that ever existed in the history of the world?

That the GOP has been instrumental in creating the conditions that it then seeks to heal with its so-called “muscular” foreign and military policy and jingoistic attacks on immigrants is an inconvenient truth that isn’t mentioned, but has been thoroughly described and discussed by progressive political analysts and sociologists. The Right helped create the problems that their racist warmongering and so-called patriotism aim to remedy. Psychology can’t fix these problems, but it can hopefully help us understand the mindset behind a system in which victims support their victimizers.

Michael Bader is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in San Francisco who has written extensively on issues found at the intersection of psychology, culture, and progressive politics. His recent book, More Than Bread and Butter: A Psychologist Speaks to Progressives About What People Really Need in Order to Win an Change the World is available on Amazon.com and on his website: www.michaelbader.com

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/psychologist-puts-trump-and-gop-couch?akid=13536.123424.-bDFYQ&rd=1&src=newsletter1043311&t=2