Why don’t you go ahead and. I’m not a fan of the Democratic Party, and I guess my audience by now fully understand what my politic on them is. Why don’t you explain, take us to the summary of that piece, what you feel and what your analysis is as far as this is concerned?
In my understanding of the Democratic
Party, they are the sort of slightly better between the two Capitalist parties.
That’s an interesting. Everybody keeps saying that they haven’t learned
the things I mentioned, but my question is: Is it even possible for them to
learn something? Given the way the Party is structured, I don’t think that it’s
going to be able to have this ah-ha moment. I think the best thing they can do
is to continue to do the exactly the same thing, but put up a better show.
Yeah, I totally agree with you.
And that’s something a lot of people are coming to that conclusion now. So the
piece says, “These Elites, the Rich, in general can’t save us.” That’s who the
Democratic Party ultimately is. To rely on, those are the kind of only people
they listen to. So I quite agree with you. “So what do we do?” Right? That’s how this conversations always go.
Before we ask what we do, it’s kind of important that we’re all on the
same page about what the problem. I think we’re in many ways still not quite there. I identify maybe a few things
here. “Nick, you know, you’re being too curious. You try to do purity Politics
then you won’t have any elected officials and you won’t have anything ever.” I’m
always saying, “Well, if you don’t actually draw the hard lines. They just do
whatever and you have no control over them.” What do you think the actual
balance comes from? Where do you think is the actual balance, or do you think
it’s a valid critique?
I think it’s mixed sense people think that way, because we
understand Power as solely having elected officials. My understanding is a little bit different. I think
Power comes just as much from broadening political space outside of the elected
officials. Putting forward movements to actually demand certain really
progressive and radical reforms. And if you build a strong movement, oftentimes officials that
is no way progressive in any sense, regular center-line Democrats, will still
end up passing thosse policies to co-opt the movement. So to me, it’s
not «Either/Or». You can work outside the Party and still have electoral impact
in the end. But that’s an understanding, I think, a lot of people [don’t have].
We don’t see Power coming anywhere except from elected officials. But we
actually don’t understand what brings them to support progressive policies. I
advocate focusing outside of the Party myself. But you have to have that conversation
with people, for sure.
It’s interesting that you mention Power. I’ll probably do a show on
Power one of these days. Just think about it. We think about our elected
officials. I always fee like they’re not necessarily, they’re not really the
Power, they’re really not the People who are doing things; they’re more like an
instrument of the real Power in our Society. And oftentimes that is the people who
own the Society, they are the power and the politicians are the instrument. So
when you say that we misunderstand Power and we assume that politicians agree
with us or on our side when you implement policies. I think you’re kind of hitting
along the same lines there, because everybody believes that when
politicians agree with you they pass your policy. And I think that’s the common understanding of how it
works. And I think that’s totally wrong. It doesn’t have empirical analysis to
back it up. It’s just kind of lazy analysis, and I think we’re suffering from
that. What would you say is the instances in History where that kind of model
has come to fruition?
Where
politicians agree with [static]?
Where a
broad movement of people and a politician who was forced to do something and
who wouldn’t have done something?
Sure. I think there [is] a
couple of Eras that is really illustrative of this. So first of all, what we
think of FDR’s big policy, the New Deal, Working People back to Work. But he
also was dealing with incredibly militant mass Labour movement at the time. If you look at
what the Unions were advocating, it was even more radical than what FDR
ultimately passed. But because they were demanding almost Socialism in
many sense in that term, FDR understood what would happen if he didn’t pass
progressive policy, and he came up with the New Deal as a compromise measure.
This is something we look back on, and this is one of the greatest policies the
United States ever passed, but it was actually a compromise measure in the face
of militant movement.
And I think you can find
similar instances in the Civil Rights Movement. Whether it is Voting Rights Act. And we
have the President sitting down with Martin Luther King, “Look, I’ll pass this
if you control your Movement, if you act as a measure to [statics].” [statics] more radical demands. So that’s
how I see this dynamic always working. But I think those two Eras
when we really had strong mass movement, and you see those examples then.
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