In the summer of 2016, I took a position as an organizer with the Clinton campaign in Iowa. I’d grown up just across the northwest border of Iowa in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and drove down from my father’s house on a Tuesday in July for training in Ames, Iowa. Prior to spending three and a half months canvassing for candidates up and down the ballot in Iowa, I’d only really been to Steve King’s district in Northwest Iowa or to my cousins’ former home along the Mississippi in Burlington, on the far east side of the state. The entire middle area was unknown to me, but I was assigned Marion and Mahaska Counties, two areas with a solid Democratic base outnumbered by Republicans and gerrymandered in 2010 to eliminate a previous democratic state house district.

I leaned heavily on the established party structure in both counties—a structure that was still feeling raw after the failed election of 2014. I learned the geographies of my counties, and learned which county officials were friendly and which ones would need someone not directly from the campaign to drop off voter registrations so the registrations from our Hispanic voters wouldn’t face challenges to their requests.

And I knocked on doors. Every day, I was out in the streets, driving from town to town, leaving pamphlets, answering voter questions, encouraging people to early vote and sign up for absentee ballots. I spent most of my days in towns of less than 2,000 people. In one particularly memorable incident, I was in a small town that had one major intersection consisting of a four way stop. I had to use the bathroom, so I pulled over to the only gas station in town and walked in. Every person in the store looked up at me as if to say, “I don’t recognize you.”

I was definitely in rural America.

“Rural America” has become many politicians’ favorite euphemism when talking about who needs courting in upcoming elections. Sen. Bernie Sanders recently called on coalitions to understand the pain and suffering many in rural (aka white, non-liberal) America feel, as a failure to do so resulted in Trump’s win. The Economist says Democrats abandoned “kitchen table issues,” leaving these voters feeling alienated and anxious. And Sen. Claire McCaskill blamed Democrats’ refusal to compromise on core issues on their failure to “gain enough trust with rural Americans.” They’re not prejudiced, just disillusioned with the Democrats’ inability to understand the issues that face them.

But I found a great universe of Democrats there. Many of the local volunteers were people from marginalized positions in society—queer people, Latinx people, many lifelong Democrats dedicated to bringing about change in their hometowns. I trained these volunteers on discussions from the campaign, discussed the policies of the candidates on the ballot, and talked about what was good for rural Iowa. I went to bat for my rural counties with the data people in Des Moines, insisting that some of the tactics passed down from Brooklyn wouldn’t work in rural Iowa—I couldn’t make thousands of unique phone calls in a week because I simply didn’t have enough active Democrats to call different ones each day. My counties combined were 55,000 people, one third of which were under 18. The counties are 97% white, mostly rural, and mostly Republican. In Mahaska county in 2016, only about 10,000 people voted in total.

Many of the local volunteers were people from marginalized positions in society—queer people, Latinx people, many lifelong Democrats dedicated to bringing about change in their hometowns.
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So needless to say, I got to know my rural voters. And consistently, I encountered white male members of rural communities who insisted that, despite being registered Democrats, despite having voted for Democrats in the past, they would not be voting for Clinton in 2016—because she’s a woman, because she’s a baby killer, because they bought into narratives about Benghazi.

The only time one of my voters brought up disillusionment over a Democratic failure to reach the white working class, the person was an upper middle class professor in a largely well-off college town.

Otherwise, my interactions with the rural white working class followed along a certain narrative. Older white men expressed concern about voting for women. One voter I spoke to the week before the election told me he’d already gone to the courthouse to vote early—for Trump—because “I can’t stand that female.” Another who spoke with me for 20 minutes outside his barn on his farm told me all about his disabled daughter being on social security, and yet he was worried about the Mexicans at the border, coming in and living off the government dime. When I pointed out that his own daughter is living off Democratic social safety net programs, he shrugged his shoulders and said “She needs it. Others don’t.”

I encountered white male members of rural communities who insisted...they would not be voting for Clinton in 2016—because she’s a woman, because she’s a baby killer, because they bought into narratives about Benghazi.
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I don’t say all this to relitigate 2016. That election is over and done with. But rather, I say all this to divorce “Rural America” from rural whites, and to point out that the ongoing narratives from liberals about what concerns the rural whites and the white working class is not “economic anxiety.” Like liberals in cities, white Dems out in rural areas are concerned about social issues—but many, in those areas, tend toward conservative. I was asked repeatedly about abortion, about immigration, about gay rights, about Black Lives Matter. The vast majority of my canvassers were queer people or people of color, working hard to change their hometowns by being an active presence in them. And they recognized, cogently, that their own liberation was bound up in the issues of their neighbors, which led them to reach out their hand and knock on those doors.

Many members of what might be called the Sanders wing of the party harbor a lot of bitterness over 2016, continuing to emphasize narratives of economic anxiety. But, in my own experience, economic anxiety, while relevant to people’s lives, wasn’t the driving issue that brought them to the polls. They care about their community, and the social issues that impact it—they care deeply about identity, especially if they’re an old white man who feels like his community is being threatened by minorities. Pursuing these voters would mean sacrificing the progressive social politics that make us the party of diversity, the party of queer people, of people of color, of women—the party of civil rights heroes. To win white rural America would mean giving up what makes us progressives, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to do that.

Tuesday night was a victory.

American media tends to overcorrect in the name of a false balance that caters to the endless caterwauling of conservatives, and there were some rumblings that the much ballyhooed “blue wave” washed out in spite of a torrent of good results for Democrats.

A forthright victory in the House, combined with some significant ballot initiatives and governor’s mansion pickups in various states, added up to a repudiation of reactionary politics from coast to coast. In a media-cycle dominated by hand wringing and pseudo even handedness, there is a temptation to cast the election results as a “split decision.”

But the real story of November 6th, 2018, was a tale of conviction triumphing over cynicism. In all 50 states there was real cause for hope, and, at last, a legislative bulwark was thrown up against Trump’s heinous agenda.

But let us first deal with the night’s disappointments.

It would be the height of foolishness to read the losses of Andrew Gillum and Beto O’Rourke — as some have suggested — as an indictment of values-based campaigning. They fought extraordinarily close races, with O’Rourke winning votes in places Dems haven’t been competitive for a long time and his coattails were long enough to contribute to that House victory that we’re all celebrating.

“Moral victories” don’t win close votes in the legislature, but there’s a lot to be said for how close these races were fought and what they portend. In Florida, Gillum’s campaign almost certainly buoyed a voting rights initiative that restored the ballot to felons, ending a uniquely American injustice in that state. If that battle was winnable, even as Gillum himself fell short, that portends victory down the road.

But the real story of November 6th, 2018, was a tale of conviction triumphing over cynicism.
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Leftists and progressives always face stiff headwinds. Status-quo bias isn’t merely psychological, it distorts political trends as well. Our road is always uphill, always rock-strewn, always stormy; what we face is never easy to overcome.

But what 2018 demonstrates is that we are winning an argument and winning allies in the long fight against reactionary politics; even where we lost, these were narrow losses that spooked those in power, losses that came perilously close to pouring over their ramparts.

And then there are the many, many places we did win. Convincingly, and with ideals and identities that put the lie to so much conventional wisdom. The Democrats’ victors on election night managed to run the extra yard that candidates like O’Rourke couldn’t; that we’re so close to the line in either direction is a portentous victory in its own right.

We must never forget: a close race in a hitherto Republican state or district is still something to celebrate. In the U.S., which doesn’t make “swings” a critical feature of election reporting, ordinary voters may not be informed of important trends in their electorates—trends that are lost in winner-take-all reporting.

The swing against Republicans was convincing, dampened only by gerrymandering, partisan chicanery (especially in states like Georgia), and a Senate-electoral structure deliberately designed to thwart sudden changes in the popular mood.

But there is so much more to celebrate: Native American women taking their seats in a House that legislated against them for centuries, Black women marching to Congress for the first time in certain districts, Muslim women greeting us in Arabic as our representatives, trans people decisively defeating an initiative that would have curtailed our rights in Massachusetts, voting rights restored to millions, marijuana and nonpartisan districting legalized in Michigan; this all matters in profound, life-changing ways.

We must never forget: a close race in a hitherto Republican state or district is still something to celebrate.
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The Democrats flipped districts across the country—to the point where Ann Coulter declared Kansas to be “dead to me.” No less than noted fascist zombie Steve Bannon wondered aloud on his lightly-watched election stream if his side’s “constant barrage of racism, nativism and all that, has that worked?”

It is worth remembering that, by design, the race for the House constitutes a national referendum in a way Senate races cannot. To be sure, all elections were local this year — many Democrats triumphed by aping Danica Roem’s focus on local issues, district by district, state by state — but the House, by its very nature, also reflects a national mood. As I write this, The New York Times had the Dems winning the popular vote by over 7 percent, and turnout was breaking records.

As hard-right Republicans from Kansas to Wisconsin fall, it feels like there’s a convincing answer to Bannon’s agonized question. Trump’s nakedly nationalistic and racist appeals have profound limits when the public is organized.

That brings us to election night’s ultimate lesson — and the words I’d have written no matter what the results were.

What the hour demands is power: the building of it, the securing of it, the wielding of it. I had no patience for the cynicism of those leftists who, with an unbecoming eagerness, all but pissed on the utility of voting. But the more reasoned among their number were quite right to say that a ballot was a beginning, not an end.

Combatting Trumpian fascism demands more than a willingness to wear a sticker after a state-sanctioned exercise; it commands us to honor the stranger, shelter the refugee, break unjust laws, and fight for what is truly moral, even if that fight takes you into the streets.

The work neither began nor ended with the canvassing for Election 2018; so much more remains to be done.

Trump’s troops are still at our southern border; innocents still languish in detention centers nationwide, ferried by planes that cross our vast landmass; the dignity of your fellow citizen is under threat from coast to coast. There will be dark hours that demand sit-ins and late night phone calls to make bail for the unjustly incarcerated, or nights where you may have to shelter someone in your home who is unjustly pursued by the state.

The chimes of that fateful clock will sound, and you must answer.

The Democrats have a bumper crop of officials now. A legion of new legislators, and governors who, for the first time in years, represent a majority of Americans. But voting is about choosing who you will struggle with, and the next two years will be a test; these new Democratic pols won’t mean a damn unless they’re relentlessly pressed to do the right thing.

That will, in turn, demand everything from protests to petitions. Above all else it demands your continued engagement. It demands more than the unbecoming, supine posture adopted by Democratic leadership Tuesday night; we need a willingness to fight, not adherence to spreadsheet politics.

There is no “marketplace of ideas,” as Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi would have it. There is, lamentably, only a battlefield before us.

Combatting Trumpian fascism demands more than a willingness to wear a sticker after a state-sanctioned exercise.
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On October 27th, I woke up to my partner, who sat bolt upright in bed. She didn’t speak in soothing tones, none of the kind indulgences that normally greeted my sleepyheadedness; she was glued to her phone and told me that a synagogue in Pittsburgh had been attacked. I had the unhappy task of informing my other partner by text. Both are Jewish.

I had already been reeling that week from news of the criminally underreported Kroger shooting, which saw a white supremacist attempt to massacre worshippers at a Black church. Thwarted by a locked door, he went to a nearby supermarket and killed two Black shoppers.

Now, his ideological twin murdered eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue. Each was enlivened by the white supremacism that Trump has so thoroughly vivified these past two years.

We talk so often about the stakes in any given election. Days before most Americans went to the polls, I saw the stakes drawn in the blood of my own communities. People who could have been my friends, colleagues, loved ones, were gunned down across the land by Trump’s ideological children; there was never any compromising with this, never any intellectualizing to be done. This was never an election with two equal sides, much less two equally survivable sides.

I could keep trying to persuade you that last night constitutes “good news,” athwart so much media hand-wringing. But as I think back to the aftermath of that bloody week, I recall a quote — stitched together from different ideas in the Talmud — that has, mercifully, found currency among many progressives. It serves as a reminder of our obligations, regardless of election returns, and remains a polestar for our times.

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

For, as a beloved reverend friend put it, “we’ve got more of a fighting chance than we had.”

By Ebony Slaughter-Johnson

At his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President Trump sent out a clarion call that portends where he will set his legislative sights next. “We can lift our citizens from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity,” Trump insisted.

Translation: Expect cuts in the social safety net.

As the path of the Republican tax plan toward passage grew clearer, so did the threat to the social safety net. With major, permanent tax cuts for corporations, and by extension the wealthiest Americans, and (temporary) tax cuts to individuals that also disproportionately benefit the wealthy, experts argue this bill will contribute as much as $1.5 trillion to the deficit. House Speaker Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues have made clear that they intend to use the social safety net to finance the tax cuts. Said Republican Representative Rod Blum, “For us to achieve three percent GDP growth over the next 10 years from tax reform, we have to have welfare reform.”

Now that the bill has passed and been signed into law, the threat to the social safety net is existential. While making the rounds on the various morning talk shows boasting of the Republicans’ “accomplishment,” Speaker Ryan argued (and Trump later echoed), “People want able-bodied people who are on welfare to go to work, they want us to get people out of poverty, into the workforce.”

It’s hard to understand the logic behind undermining the funding streams for programs that keep people out of poverty in order to “get people out of poverty,” but clearly the Speaker is not the only one who subscribes to that line of thinking. Reports suggest that the White House is finalizing an executive order demanding a review of the federal programs that comprise the social safety net. One can only presume that the conclusions of this review will justify major changes to the programs conservatives have derided for years as wasteful and ineffective. On the potential chopping block are the traditional targets: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, often called food stamps), housing assistance programs, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, a cash assistance program), and health care. Even now the White House is allowing states to apply new work requirements to certain Medicaid enrollees, potentially undermining their access to care.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are reportedly quietly writing legislation that could tighten eligibility standards for social safety net programs, in ways that could collectively remove millions from the rosters.

It’s hard to understand the logic behind undermining the funding streams for programs that keep people out of poverty in order to ‘get people out of poverty.’
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SNAP seems to be particularly vulnerable. At the beginning of December, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the program, circulated a memo that promised “coming flexibilities aimed at transitioning people into independence.” Flexibility is a well-known code word for policies that empower states to attach more stringent work requirements and drug tests with an eye toward, again, excising current enrollees. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue alluded to these changes himself at the end of January.

In October, Congress passed a joint budget resolution that loosely codified proposed cuts to the social safety net over the next 10 years. An analysis from the Urban Institute offers some insight as to what “welfare reform” might specifically entail and what is at stake should it come to fruition. In the event that flexibilities translate into restricting benefit access, changes to SNAP would affect 23.4 million families who would lose about $600 per year per family, or stated another way, 430 meals annually. Of those families, almost 20 million would see a reduction in their SNAP benefits. The rest would totally lose their access to SNAP. Anticipated reductions to the federal contribution to TANF was estimated to impact 260,000 families throughout the country in the form of $2,580 less each year in distributed TANF assistance.

Holding the Line

Progressives knew exactly whom to thank for the defeat of accused child molester and Republican candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate election — black voters, who turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote for Democratic candidate Doug Jones.

In the aftermath of Jones’ upset, social media was flooded with posts thanking black Alabamians, particularly black women, for “saving America” from its worst impulses.

At least one member of the national Democratic Party apparatus agreed: Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez asserted, “Let me be clear: We won in Alabama and Virginia because black women led us to victory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we can’t take that for granted. Period.”

If progressive Americans, voters, activists, and politicians are serious about giving more than verbal acknowledgement to black voters for protecting the country from extremism (and the subsequent embarrassment of having to seat an alleged child molester in the United States Senate), then they must proactively take actions to protect black voters, especially poor ones. Such actions should begin with ensuring that the social safety net programs that are most impactful for disenfranchised black voters be maintained (or expanded) and not diminished, as it appears congressional Republicans are poised to do.

To be sure, congressional Democrats have so far held the line in opposing Republicans’ efforts to weaken the social safety net and generally debilitate poor Americans. Not a single Democrat voted for House Republicans’ American Health Care Act, which attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Not a single Democrat voted for any version of the Senate Republicans’ ACA repeal legislation.

Congressional Democrats must continue to hold the line. They may be the minority party in both houses of Congress, but they have a number of powerful legislative and administrative tools at their disposal, including the filibuster and the budget writing process. For proof of their effectiveness, look no further than the DACA debate: The overwhelming majority of Democrats banded together to prevent congressional Republicans (and President Trump) from sabotagingDeferred Action for Childhood Arrivals’ Dreamers during the government shutdown dispute. In doing so, the Democrats in the Senate were able to bring Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to the table to discuss a bipartisan DACA solution.

These tools must be employed to stop congressional Republicans from undermining the social safety net because a weakened social safety net would spell disaster for black Americans across the country.

Black Americans Need the Social Safety Net

Although black Americans are only 13 percent of the total population, they comprise 22 percent of the country’s poor. High rates of unemployment and low wages, the result of generations of commingling of economic oppression and institutionalized racism, have depreciated black incomes and wealth to the extent that in 2011, black Americans took home only 59 cents for every dollar white households did. Black Americans have the lowest household income among all racial groups, which has translated into few opportunities to build wealth. Black Americans had a median liquid wealth of $200 as compared to $23,000 for whites in 2011.

Poverty has an unusually tight grip on the black community: Most black Americans who are born poor remain poor into adulthood. Middle-class black families are not immune from this grip either. Black Americans are uniquely downwardly mobile, especially compared to whites, with 70 percent of middle-income black Americans joining the ranks of lower-income Americans by adulthood.

Even the nature of black poverty is different. Unlike poor whites, poor blacks tend to live in areas with concentrated poverty, surrounded by other poor families. Concentrated poverty for black Americans, wrought in large part by discrimination in the labor market, geographically concentrated public housing complexes and gentrification, means that they are often confronted with poorly performing schools, insufficient access to health care providers and food deserts.

Although black Americans are only 13 percent of the total population, they comprise 22 percent of the country’s poor.
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In this context, it’s not surprising that black Americans experience high levels of food insecurity: More than one in five black households were food insecure in 2015, compared to one in eight of all American households. SNAP has been a critical factor in helping black families stave off food insecurity and poverty, helping to feed 13 million black families in a given month in 2015. More than 2 million black families, including 1.1 million children, used SNAP to stay on the other side of financial disaster in 2014. An additional 1.1 million black families were insulated from “deep poverty” that year as well, thanks to SNAP.

Black Americans comprised 21 percent of Medicaid enrollees in 2013 and are highly concentrated in five of the 11 states identified by the Kaiser Family Foundation as being the most vulnerable states to ensuing challenges from cuts to Medicaid. Those five states, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, have the highest black populations in the country. Weakening Medicaid could mean a return to the days when more than 20 percent of black adults were uninsured and 30 percent reported not having a consistent source of health care.

Even now, black Americans, with the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and Medicare fully intact, are uninsured at higher rates than their white counterparts and are more likely to suffer dire health outcomes as a result: Maternal mortality rates for black women in some parts of the country rival those of women in sub-Saharan African.

Perhaps nowhere is the existence of black poverty and the need for the social safety net more apparent than in Alabama, where the poverty rate is 18.5 percent. Concentrated poverty strongly correlates to black residence in the stretch of the state referred to as the “Black Belt,” where black families are between three and four times as likely to live in poverty as white families.

Alabama recently attained international attention in the wake of a special report from the United Nations, which gave the state the dubious distinction of being one of the most impoverished regions in the developed world. Lowndes County, a county in the Black Belt where 35 percent of black residents live in poverty as compared to only 4.1 percent of white residents, was singled out as an example of Alabama poverty at its most extreme.

The Far Left Is Still Out Of Touch With Black Voters

Dismantling the social safety net could mean the duplication of the conditions that plague Alabama’s Black Belt throughout the country. If anything, congressional reform efforts to the social safety net should focus on making it more equitable, not less, with the Democratic Party leading the charge.

As things currently stand, social safety net programs, as critical as they are to the financial stability of black families, can disadvantage black families in their own right. TANF, of which blacks represent 29.7 percent of total enrollees, has been shown to have its benefits distributed by the states in a discriminatory fashion, according to the Urban Institute. States with high numbers of black residents distribute fewer TANF dollars to families and for shorter amounts of time compared to states with whiter populations. Oregon, a state in which black Americans make up a mere 1.8 percent of the population, allows an eligible single-parent-led family of three $506 in TANF assistance per month. In Mississippi, where the population is 38 percent black, a similarly situated family is only eligible to receive $170 each month.

Benefit generosity is based not only on the dollar amount offered, but on the number of impoverished families serviced. To this point, the Urban Institute found that states with high black representation were more limited in terms of how their social safety net services were distributed. Louisiana and Arkansas, where black Americans make up significant portions of the population, have some of the lowest TANF-to-poverty ratios in the nation, with TANF benefits being offered to four for every 100 in poverty and seven for every 100 in poverty, respectively. Over half of all black Americans live in the 25 states with the lowest TANF-to-poverty ratios, meaning that TANF’s benefits disproportionately accrue to whites.

Not only is the social safety net not as generous as it could or should be to recipients, it has gaping holes that have left or pushed many eligible Americans out into the cold.

Data from 2014 shows that TANF covered 850,000 adults and their 2.5 million children, a fraction of those covered at its inception in 1996. Between 1996 and 2013, while poverty and deep poverty increased, TANF covered 60 percentfewer recipients. Stated differently, before the transition from the more generous Aid to Families with Dependent Children to TANF, which marked the “end of welfare as we know it,” seven in 10 poor families received cash assistance. Today, two in 10 do.

Experts anticipate that the amount of money that goes directly to families will decline further in the years to come even without being hastened along by the Republicans in Congress.

Making Good on Promises

The black community is one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting blocks. Using survey data collected from some 400 black interviewees, political scientist Theodore Johnson created a number of hypothetical political situations to assess black voting patterns. Party was an overwhelming factor in their political decision-making; faced with Republican and Democratic contenders with identical policy positions in identical social climates, the black respondents resoundingly chose the Democrat.

Unfortunately, their loyalty has not always been repaid with proportionate policy responsiveness, most disappointingly from Democrats. Political scientist Nick Stephanopoulos conducted a study to determine the extent of group political power on effecting policy outcomes at the state and federal levels. Unsurprisingly, black voters had less power than whites: Unanimous support among whites for a federal policy corresponded to a 60 percent chance of adoption, while unanimous support among black Americans for such a policy corresponded to a 10 percent chance of adoption. Somewhat correspondingly then, Stephanopoulos found that the less support a policy had among black Americans, the higher its likelihood of enactment. A policy with no black support had a 40 percent chance of enactment compared to the aforementioned 10 percent for a policy with unanimous support.

Analysis from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies corroborated Stephanopoulos’ 2015 findings. With data collected between 1972 and 2010, researchers found that black voters were “policy winners” 31.9 percent of the time, while white voters were “winners” 37.6 percent of the time. Less power means less policy.

The black community is one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting blocks.
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Political scientist Paul Frymer first articulated the underpinnings of these studies in his 1999 book, Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America. He observed that politicians focus their appeals and energy toward white swing voters at the expense of black voters, thereby rendering them politically inert. The result of the need to entice white voters is that explicit argumentsfor racial reconciliation during presidential campaigns have been waning since the 1970s, lest they turn white voters off.

In light of this history, it’s difficult to know exactly to what extent the party will advocate for black voters. However, there are encouraging signs to be found. In 2016, the Democratic Party platform pledged “to make it clear that black lives matter.” The party promised to commit itself to addressing issues that more explicitly affect the black community, including the racial wealth gap, and that implicitly affect them, like attempts to cut funding from SNAP and Medicaid. They actionized those promises in December 2017: Not a single Democrat in the House or the Senate voted for the Republican tax plan, a massive payout to the top one percent that will widen the racial wealth gap.

Progressives in the Democratic Party have every reason to buck their history of neglect, having seen what black voters can do electorally. In spite of a history of electoral disenfranchisement, electoral neglect, gerrymandering, and voting purges, black voters have potential to flip elections when they turn out at a time when Democrats desperately need them to. Furthermore, the party itself has explicitly acknowledged that it needs to do better. Mirroring Chairman Perez, Virgie Rollins, chair of the DNC’s Black Caucus, insisted that the party apparatus is well aware of this: “We learned valuable lessons last month and last night; when we invest in our communities, we win. The DNC knows black voters are a force to be reckoned with at the ballot box.”

The midterm elections are nine months from now. Progressives in the Democratic Party must actively compete for black votes, running not only on an anti-Trump platform, but on one that offers tangible protections from Republican assaults and tangible solutions to the challenges the black community faces. Not only is advocating for black Americans the right thing for the Democratic Party to do morally, but it also makes sense politically. Loyalty from the black community cannot be taken for granted, especially at a moment when the stakes of doing the opposite are so high.

This story first appeared at AlterNet and is republished here with permission.

Right now, many would have you be another reason why we wait. You would be another reason why we harbor abusers.

Dear Al,

I don’t know if you remember me, but I snapped this selfie of us a little over a year ago. I was at the airport, waiting to board a quick flight from Seattle to Portland, when some middle-aged soccer-dad-looking white dude started waving and pointing frantically at his wife.

“Look!” he tried to whisper as loudly as possible as he pantomimed at a row of chairs a few feet away. His wife looked up at what he was pointing at, then looked at her husband and shrugged, disinterested. In absolute desperation he turned to me, since I was…there and obviously eavesdropping.

“SERIOUSLY. LOOK OVER THERE!” He mouthed at me and I looked where he pointed and right across from me, about 10 feet away, there you were. Al Franken. In real life. I just about lost my shit.

You saw me staring at you like I might actually explode and you kindly waved me over. I don’t know what it looked like to you or anyone else there — a 6-foot-tall, fat, black, 35-year-old woman blubbering like a dork about how much she loves you and how she’d had copies of your books since she was 15 years old, and how you kept her laughing through a Political Science degree — but I didn’t care. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a few celebrities in my life, but meeting you — even thinking about it today, it makes me feel a little starstruck.

When I finally got up the courage to ask for a picture, as we were waiting for our luggage to be unloaded after the flight, you smiled and said, “sure.” You looked like somebody’s really nice dad. As we took a picture you said, “I really don’t like Mike Pence.” It was such a simple, yet weird, and yet completely accurate thing to say, and I thought I would die from happiness. I immediately changed my profile picture to the selfie of us and basked in the jealousy of all my political nerd friends.

Al, I’m so very sad at you. Is that a thing? I mean, I’m mad at you too, but mostly, I’m very very very sad at you. How fucking stupid and selfish of you to ruin yourself for us like this. We really needed you.

Al, I’m so very sad at you.

When the first allegations against you came out and your name started popping up on social media, I started googling, while a voice inside me was repeating a prayer of, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” When I saw the picture of you groping a sleeping Leeann Tweeden with a smile on your face, I closed my laptop and just said, “Fuck.”

I wasn’t shocked. I’m a woman in America. I stopped being shocked at finding out that men I admired and respected were capable of being predators by the time I graduated from second grade. I was…embarrassed. I have spent much of my adult life around the comedy crowd. My brother is a former comedian, and some of my dear friends are comedians. Your behavior didn’t seem at all shocking for the world of comedy — a world where today if you were to have a beer with just about any comedy dude, he would eventually tell you that he doesn’t think that anything Louis CK did was a big deal. In a profession that is seething with its hatred of women, you would have been considered one of the good dudes. One of the safer dudes. But these dudes are assholes. Young, gross, assholes.

I look at the smile on your face as you grope a sleeping woman like you are a 13-year-old misbehaving boy and she’s a cardboard movie cutout and not an actual human being, but you aren’t 13 in that picture, you’re 56 years old. And she’s a person. A person whose body you are using for a shitty joke. You were a 56-year-old man gearing up to run for U.S. Senate, and you still felt perfectly safe treating a woman like shit.

I’m not surprised you felt so safe doing it. I’m not surprised you also felt safe trying to kiss other women without permission, or grabbing their asses or boobs. I’m just deeply disappointed that you wanted to. I thought you’d be good enough to not want to.

I live in Seattle. Right now I’m surrounded by good liberal men who are lining up to say how much they believe women. Who are clamoring to express their outrage at the horrific stories they are reading as so many women say #metoo. But some of these men — a lot of them — are abusers themselves. A lot of them have taken advantage, forced kisses on unsuspecting women, groped women, exposed themselves to women, tried to manipulate women into having sex with them. While they are expressing their outrage, they are secretly hoping that their name won’t show up in a woman’s story. They have an opportunity right now to start to make things right. To come clean, take responsibility, and begin the work of growth and redemption. But they opt for just playing the role of a hero instead. They collect praise for saying all of the right things while kicking aside their victims.

Al, you could have done the right thing so many times. When you were condemning Trump for his abuses against women, you could have held yourself accountable as well. When you were offering support to women at the beginning of the Weinstein allegations and encouraging them to come forward, you could have decided to save your victims the pain of coming forward against you. The path to redemption then might have looked different than it does now. But you didn’t, and that really sucks. So now, it’s harder. Now, we all pay a little more.

When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean, What CAN You Do?

Because you were elected to represent the people of Minnesota, and in your power and fame you represent so much more. You are a part of the story of sexual abuse and assault in this country now. And as much as so many of my friends want to blame the “political operatives” of the right for your demise — you did this. You and your hubris and your feelings of entitlement to the bodies of women did this. You did this to yourself and us.

As the reports surfaced last night that you were planning to resign, I was trying to explain to my 10-year-old son why I was so sad about this. I explained that I had really admired you and had for most of my life, and I thought you were a really great Senator. But you had really mistreated some women, and you hadn’t been honest about it. And because we need Senators who respect women, and Senators who are honest and take responsibility for their wrongdoing, you had to leave. And now we all had to pay. We had to pay because as a society, we had been so permissive of the violation of women that even you — yes you, Al — thought that it was okay to treat women like objects.

My son asked, “So….is it a good thing that he’s leaving? Or bad?” And I answered, “There’s nothing good about any of this. But if he didn’t leave, it would be worse.”

Due Process Is Needed For Sexual Harassment Accusations — But For Whom?

When I was sexually abused, nobody believed me, because they preferred to believe that I was a liar than to believe a man was an abuser. When I was sexually harassed, people believed me, but they preferred to see me suffer in silence than to hold a man accountable. My humanity would need to wait for a more convenient time. So often women are told that when you look at the big picture, their humanity is just too inconvenient. When Donald Trump, a man with multiple sexual assault accusations against him — a man who admitted on tape to assaulting women — was elected president, tens of millions of Americans decided that the humanity of all of the women of America would have to wait until their guy wasn’t running for office.

And now Al, many in my own party are trying to convince me that the humanity of your victims needs to wait until a more convenient time. It needs to wait until we get the Senate back. It needs to wait until Trump is impeached. It needs to wait until Roy Moore is defeated. There will always be a reason to wait until a better time to do the right thing. And right now, many would have you be another reason why we wait. You would be another reason why Democrats don’t live their values. You would be another reason why we harbor abusers. And I would have never wanted that for you, but more importantly I do not want that for your victims.

You have an opportunity now to be a part of a new story, a story of justice and accountability and growth, and I’m glad that you are taking it.

Many in my own party are trying to convince me that the humanity of your victims needs to wait until a more convenient time.

You are not falling on your sword. You are not a martyr. You are not being heroic. And you are certainly not a victim. You are facing consequences for your actions. Consequences that hurt us all a lot. Not because they exist, but because you were able to rise all the way to U.S. Senate without facing them. So maybe this is what we, as a society and as a party that has always pretended to be better than this but never actually was, deserve. I’m sure you will not be the last hard loss on our path to redemption.

I don’t hate you. I haven’t deemed you trash and discarded you. I’m not getting rid of that picture of us. I’m not throwing out your books. But you can’t matter anymore. You can’t be a priority anymore. Your career and your power and what you could have been in the Senate cannot be the focus anymore. This last, long essay will be the last time I place you — and my feelings about you and my hopes for you — at the center of this. Because we’ve centered men like you for too long. There are women who can pick up where you left off. There are women who can go even further. And maybe now, now that we’ve shown that it might actually be possible to hold men accountable for their abuses against them, they will be more encouraged to do so.

I’m going to really miss who I thought you were, Al. And I really hope that one day you’ll be that person — I certainly think it’s possible, even probable. But right now, it’s time to see what women can be.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/hilary-clinton-is-neither-a-saint-nor-a-demoness-b7dcc7dd008a/ Fri, 15 Sep 2017 01:24:16 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3210 Read more]]>

The reaction to Clinton’s new book ‘What Happened’ has been, predictably, wildly divided. Where does the truth lie?

I t seems like another century ago when we were all eagerly awaiting Election Night 2016 — for no reason other than the fact that it seemed to promise an end to the whirling merry-go-round of misery that had been unleashed by the bruising Democratic primary. Whatever challenges we’d face the morning after, at least the Hillary/Bernie bickering, with its self-important posturing and out of control hero-worship, would be consigned to the crematorium of history where it belonged.

How so very naive we were to think so.

The launch of Hillary Clinton’s election memoir What Happened has seen the usual invective directed at Clinton reach a crescendo. According to The Hill, one former Clinton fundraiser said “The best thing she could do is disappear…She’s doing harm to all of us because of her own selfishness. Honestly, I wish she’d just shut the f — — up and go away.” One Obama aide laments, “It’s the Hillary Show, 100 percent. A lot of us are scratching our heads and wondering what she’s trying to do. It’s certainly not helpful.” Vanity Fair’s T.A. Frank asks, “Can Hillary Clinton please go quietly into the night?” California Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman said that, “There is a collective groan whenever there’s another news cycle about [Clinton].” All that in an op-ed by former Clinton pollster Douglas E. Schoen, who argued “Sticking to an unpopular candidate with an unpopular message will only leave the [Democratic] party continuously unpopular,” adding she needs to “exit the stage.” “Go back to the woods” is a popular enough phrase on Twitter that merely searching for it brings up a bipartisan chorus singing the phrase, all day every day.

In response to a Clinton quote about the challenges faced by powerful women, one characteristic Trump supporter said, “Bullcrap @HillaryClinton people just don’t like you because you are an evil woman who leaves people for dead! Go back to the woods.”

The launch of ‘What Happened’ has seen the usual invective directed at Clinton reach a crescendo.

Meanwhile, Martin Shkreli, already awaiting sentencing for fraud, was thrown in jail early for putting out a $5,000 bounty on a lock of Clinton’s hair.

And, as if this sort of weirdness weren’t enough, Slate’s Christina Cauterucci shows us there’s a subgenre of thinkpiece that casts Clinton as a blame-obsessed loser who says everyone’s responsible for her loss but her.

But as Clinton herself writes in the book, “I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want — but I was the candidate. It was my campaign. Those were my decisions.”

Such words could never be enough for wounded liberals, Democrats, and leftists who seem to reserve more bona fide scorn for Clinton, for losing to Trump, than they do for Trump and his entire fascist agenda. The Woman Who Failed You is a difficult figure to forgive, especially when she’s already been cast as an unfeeling, power-mad harpy rather than the warm maternal figure we’re all taught to seek in women. There cannot and must not be any doubt that so much of the animus to Clinton is motivated by the audacity of her seeking power while female; it magnifies her real failings into demonic proportions, fit only to be screamed at.

Hillary Clinton And The Unending Burden Of Women’s Work

As Sarah Kendzior put it quite well in The Globe and Mail, “The wrath Ms. Clinton’s book inspired feels like an almost nostalgic aggression, a misdirected anxiety harkening to a time when Ms. Clinton could be judged as a threat and Mr. Trump dismissed as a joke.”

Even the most doctrinaire leftists, for whom Democrat is a four letter word, see Clinton as uniquely execrable. Similarly situated liberal men simply aren’t scapegoated the way she has been. It’s impossible to imagine this level of scorn being levelled at some other milquetoast liberal who ran against Trump and lost (certainly Tim Kaine commands only a small fraction of the hatred doled out to his erstwhile boss, despite being more conservative than her). And it’s impossible to imagine this milquetoast liberal man being told by such a towering chorus to “go away.”

Al Gore has built a post-electoral career that’s kept him in spotlights so bright, he’s even on the silver screen. He too won the popular vote, and lost a winnable election to a sentient mayonnaise jar who went on to ruin the country. But he doesn’t summon the scorn Clinton does, and there isn’t a horde of Democrats, liberals, centrists, and leftists alike telling him to naff off. The double standard is real and undeniable; it must be the starting point in any debate about Clinton, and seen as a bias to constantly acknowledge and correct for in one’s criticism.

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But criticism is merited, and the publication of What Happened is an ideal time to share it. So long as Trump and his cronies are yammering on camera and online, Clinton should have every right to the public square; but she is not our future. There is a polar opposite sentiment to Clinton hate — and it’s Clinton-worship: seeing her as a fallen goddess-queen, a martyr of whom we are all unworthy. She’s a president in exile and the queen of our hearts, a tragic heroine who Did Nothing Wrong. All discourse must bend toward redeeming her, and even, hope against hope, making her President as she so richly deserves.

This sort of nonsense simply sends us face first into a different moral, discursive cowpat. Though many attacks against her are irrational and viciously founded in sexism, the ineluctable fact remains that she is a flawed human being at the end of the day, and a politician at that. While I would argue that politicians can be heroic, lionizing them into demideities is always a fraught affair, as 2016 should’ve taught us with painful clarity. A different species of sexism, the kind that seeks Madonnahood in women in direct contrast to its opposite, drives some of us to see Clinton as a perfect heroine, paying only lip service to the errors in judgement and terrible beliefs that she is unequivocally responsible for.

She is neither a saint nor a demoness. Just a politician.

Politicians can be heroic, but lionizing them into demideities is always a fraught affair.

A politician is someone you nominate to office so that you might struggle with them; they are not your friend, they are not your mother, not your queen, and certainly not an alabaster angel. The cult of personality around Bernie Sanders has led to the obnoxious myopia surrounding his neverending campaign, and it does much the same with Clinton and her die-hard supporters as well.

This reached an embarrassing nadir when former Clinton surrogate Peter Daou actually built a tech start-up around redeeming Clinton’s legacy, the bizzare Verrit. Verrit is a link aggregation site with cards at the top of each page (the eponymous verrits) containing a quote or some factoid, whose veracity is confirmed by the seven-digit authentication code in its corner. Yes, I know. At any rate, it quickly turned into a sorry spectacle where pro-Sanders memes clashed with the wounded pride of Daou and other diehards. In this it was a microcosm of so much liberal-left discourse since the election: leftists with sick owns on twitter dot com matched up against sanctimonious liberals who fiddle with “facts” while Rome burns, each wasting the other’s time with insipid and occasionally hilarious nonsense that feels more and more like a surrender with each passing day.

This cycle is fed by each side digging in its heels and seeking to relitigate the 2016 Democratic Primary (hence the “Bernie Would’ve Won” meme). But there remains a fundamental fact buried in all this. While Bernie Sanders isn’t the future, neither is Clinton. It seems to me that if there is hope left in the Democratic Party, then 2020’s deliverance will most likely come from someone whose name we don’t yet know — and, frankly, from all of us working for that change.

Dear Hillary, I Wanted You To Win, But Now I Want Something Bigger

Clinton should continue being a public figure — her stature is undeniable and she’s earned that right as surely as Gore, Kerry, and McCain. Her book, love it or hate it, was as necessary as it was inevitable and it needed to be written. Her insights on our moment should be welcome; she learned from the best, after all.

For when Clinton diehards asseverate “she was right!” they leave a key truth unspoken: Women of color were right about the fascism on the horizon. Clinton’s wisdom lay in heeding us, at least in part. She, like Sanders, was pushed into getting our agenda on the national stage. But Clinton is not a martyr to rally around for that fact. We should organize around and with the people fighting on the frontlines now, at airports, in the Great Plains, in city streets, at the border — people who live and are fighting for those who yet live. Not devote our energies to redeem the reputation of a politician who has enough well-paid PR people to do that for her full-time.

What Clinton got right during her campaign came, in large measure, from young activists who had forced critical issues onto the agenda — criminal justice reform, intersectional feminism, trans justice — and they’re still out there leading the real battles that are bearing fruit. Who among these many women of color might make a good president?

I’m game to find out.

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