Why Progressives Need a Long-Term Strategy, Built on Values - BY JOHN ATCHESON

Found here. My comments in bold.

This post originally appeared at Common Dreams.

Ever since Trump got elected, there’s been a lot of talk about resistance. As the country marked Trump’s first 100 days, it reached a crescendo. Then Republicans in the House passed Trump care — one of the cruelest Bills in recent memory. (That's quite a statement, considering the upheaval caused by ACA.)

The reason they can screw so many people with relative impunity, is that they’ve invested decades in creating a mega-narrative that insulates them from consequences. (The author is projecting. The central leftist idea is to part people from their money, simultaneously shouting them down from dissent.)

Certainly, we must resist Trump’s destructive agenda in every way we can. (I thought elections mattered? I thought democracy was valuable? Why don't you just deal with it that you lost?)

But if progressives are to recapture the hearts and minds of America it will take far more than just resisting. (Yes, it will require a non-stop barrage of name calling and exclusion of competing ideas, the very techniques the Left has used for decades.)

It will require that progressives develop a long-term strategy that addresses the needs of people, not plutocrats, that is based on values, not tactics. (Actually, a strategy that fuels the outrage and envy of their interest groups.

"Values" is a leftist buzzword embraced because of focus groups. It is an effort to make them more appealing to center-right voters and ameliorate the prevalent idea that they are godless reprobates.)

And that has to start with reclaiming the Democratic Party from the neoliberals. (Democrats have been engaged in an inexorable march to the left for the past 50 years. Reagan's famous statement  “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me” encapsulates this shift. If anything, the Left has appropriated the Democratic party, and has been on a downward slide ever since.

Part of the reason for the slide is the rise of alternative media, which has been regularly spotlighting the outrageous statements and initiatives of these leftist democrats. People are more informed, and the Left no longer has carte blanche to install its destructive agenda.)

The alternative is to continue to lose elections at all levels, as Democrats have been doing with increasing frequency since they abandoned the New Deal and adopted the raw deal. ("Abandoned the New Deal?" Whaa? The legacy of the New Deal is still being fervently defended by the "progressive" Left. And how is it that a program installed 80 years ago is "progressive?" The advancement of the nanny state via the New Deal and the Great Society programs has not slowed at all.)

And if progressives cannot take over the Democratic Party (They have! The extreme Left dominates the Democratic agenda.)

we will have to start the long, slow slog toward building a third party and hope that there’s enough left of the country and the planet to salvage by the time we succeed.

How Conservatives Took Over America 

(I doubt the author will get this right, especially since conservatives have not taken over America.)

We can learn a lot from conservatives, (Actually, conservatives have learned from leftists. And leftists don't like it when conservatives use the same techniques and strategies. The author will make this very point in an upcoming paragraph.)

because they executed a successful silent coup, more than four decades in the making, funded by and conducted on behalf of the oligarchy. We’re not talking about some shadowy conspiracy featuring clandestine meetings, passwords, secret handshakes, James Bond supervillains, Freemasons or…gasp…even the Trilateral Commission. This coup was more like a flock of vultures moving in tandem only because they were pursuing a shared vision of their own self-interest — which was to relentlessly fleece us to feather their own foul nests. But if it wasn’t a coherent junta, it was fueled by money. Lots and lots of money. And it had a blueprint — The Powell Memo.

The strategy focused on:

• creating a conservative infrastructure in the form of foundations, think tanks, endowed academic chairs and media-savvy spokespeople at all levels; (That is, conservatives responded in kind.)
• deregulating the media, Wall Street, banks and industry in general (and purchasing the media outright once regulatory constraints were removed); (I guess the Right should have done nothing in the face of encroaching leftism. The author tacitly admits that the Left controlled media and didn't want diverse opinions.)
• discrediting government as the source of anything good or valuable; (That is, pointing out the many failures of government damages the leftist narrative, and they certainly can't allow that.)
• starving government of receipts with the purpose of shrinking it, assuring government couldn’t function; (This is a howler of a lie. Review this chart a tell me where the government has ever been starved of revenue.)
• creating wedge issues to exploit hate, fear, greed, xenophobia and other aspects of the lizard brain; and (The Left has been pounding us for decades with wedge issues designed to dismantle society and create hate, suspicion and fear.)
• creating the myth that markets would provide all good things by pure serendipity. (A claim the Right has not made. It is not happenstance that people engage in mutually beneficial transactions. It is a natural outcome of free association.)

The author's bullet points omit the real factors that contributed to the rise of opposition to leftism. Some of those include

• The failure of Big Government to actually solve any societal problem
• The hypocrisy of the Left when it comes to inclusiveness, tolerance, and equality
• The exploding size of government and the national debt
• The arrogance of leftists
• The astounding opposition of the Left to constitutional principles like free speech
• The huge corruption factor related to crony capitalism, payoffs, and sweetheart deals perpetrated by Democrats
• The demonization and dehumanization of their political opponents
• The failure of gun control 
• The failure of regulating business and/or economy

Until the Left can accurately assess the situation, their prescriptions will most certainly fail.)

The strategy has culminated in their spectacular success at all levels of government — they now control both branches of the legislature in 32 states and the governorship in 24 of those states, as well as both houses of Congress and the presidency at the federal level. (We note for the record that the success of Republicans is not the same thing as the success of conservatism.)

But an even starker measure of their success is how corporations and the uber-rich have prospered at the expense of the rest of us. (This assertion is based on a faulty idea, that the system is closed and not dynamic. We should also note that wealth inequality has increased under Obama.)

The top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans now have as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, democracy is all but dead in the Unites States, (Democracy vs. wealth distribution is a Category Error. And by the way, we note for the zillionth time that America is not a democracy, it is a representative republic.)

the press is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Oligarchy and both parties dance to its tune. (Remember when the author decried the rise of conservative thinktanks, media outlets, and savvy media spokesman? Why would this have happened if there wasn't a need for it? In other words, if media is really a "wholly owned subsidiary of the Oligarchy," why would conservative alternatives arise? Well, the media is overwhelmingly Left. The media actually dances to the leftist tune.)  

Government — once the champion of the working man, (I'd like the author to cite the constitutional provision that elucidates this.)

the author of the New Deal and the architect of the longest sustained and broadly share period of prosperity in US history, (Another howler. Government certainly doesn't deserve credit for creating prosperity, Americans do. Business does. Hard working, innovate people do. Government is an obstacle, an impediment, a dampener of prosperity. It has only foster prosperity when it got out of the way.)

has become the enemy. (The author never tells us why this assertion is wrong.)

Meanwhile, the free market, which exploited workers, (Did not.)

defiled the environment (Did not.)

and operated outside of any moral framework, (Did not.)

is now believed to be the font of all things good, delivered by pure serendipity. As a result, broad sections of society — including much of the press, the establishment wing the Democratic Party, much of academia and the public policy infrastructure and of course Republicans — believe taxes are bad, (No, excessive, arbitrary, and punitive taxes are bad.)

regulations are bad, (No, excessive, arbitrary, and punitive regulations are bad.) 

small government is good, (No, limited, constitutional government is good.)

public programs are bad, (No, unlimited, unconstitutional public programs are bad.)

and the markets (i.e. the oligarchy) will automatically provide great things if we just get government out of the way. (No, the markets will allow freedom, and some will prosper while others will fail. The only difference between the markets and government is that government picks the winners and losers.

And by the way, we will no longer tolerate the author's penchant for attempting to re-define terms and misrepresent concepts. Free markets are not oligarchy.) 

This is the camouflage under which such nonsense as laissez-faire, trickle-down and supply-side economics keep getting resurrected, no matter how often it fails. (Which it has not. Government has failed, every time it intervenes in the markets in its ill-advised attempts at controlling outcomes.)


Republicans Strategic Approach Will Make it difficult to Win the House until 2022

For another example of the power of long-term strategic thinking over mere opposition or identity politics, consider project Redmap — a Karl Rove effort that all but assures that Republicans will control the House until at least 2022 — and that assumes Democrats stop navigating by their hood ornaments and get strategic. If they don’t, then Republicans will control the House for much longer.

As recounted in David Daley’s Ratf**ked, Republicans targeted key races in the state legislatures with an eye toward gerrymandering the hell out of the House elections. (A time-honored leftist technique. It has only become bad when the Republicans started doing it.)
The results have been dramatic. In 2012, the first year the full effect of redistricting could be seen, Democrats got 1.7 million more votes than Republicans, but Republicans won 33 more congressional seats. And for all the talk — and the need — to take back Congress in 2018, it will be extraordinarily difficult for Democrats to do in the face of such a stacked deck. (Um, a re-stacked deck. Democrats have been stacking the deck for decades. Ever heard of the Chicago machine?)

Here’s the timeline for leveling the playing field. Democrats would have to launch an effective attack on Republican legislators (A telling choice of words, launching an "attack." That's exactly what the Left does when opposed, they attack.)

at the state level in 2018 and 2020, then wait for the census results and draw reasonable districts that actually represent the people. As a result, the first time Democrats could face Republicans without their gerrymandered advantage will be 2022, again, assuming Democrats get their act together.

If this frightens you, it should. Even more frightening is the fact that Republicans are just two states shy of being able to convene a constitutional convention and the Koch Brothers — funders of the coup — are pumping money into an effort to put them over the top. (Um, George Soros, Tom Steyer?)


How Democrats Lost America – and Why They’ll Continue to if They Don’t Change Course 

(Once again, I doubt the author will be able to recognize why leftists have been losing.)

While conservatives are playing political chess and thinking several moves ahead, Democrats are playing political checkers and focusing on short-term excuses for losing the election — like the Russian email hacks — which as Norman Soloman pointed out, gives them a pretext to continue to blame their defeat on the Russians, rather than the fact that they ran candidates who put Wall Street over Main Street. (Shocker. He got one right.)

It is precisely this embrace of neoliberalism that has caused the Democratic Party’s long, slow slide into irrelevance. Back in the 1960s, half the registered voters claimed to be Democrats; today, 29 percent do. Republicans have been hovering somewhere near 25 percent during the same period, while winning elections. (Actually, it's the embrace of hard leftism, which requires lock step orthodoxy to its extreme ideas. No dissent is tolerated. One slip of the tongue will send you packing. This is the legacy of leftism in the country.)

If Democrats want to win again, they will need to embrace real progressive values, (That is, the values which have led to their long slide. It's exactly like their philosophy of government. "Golly, that didn't work. Let's do even more of it.")

restore a measure of diversity to the press (You can bet he doesn't mean that the leftist stranglehold should be broken.)

and media by restoring regulations that allowed the FCC to bust monopolies, and invest in the needed infrastructure — foundations, think tanks, academic chairs, etc., (As if there isn't hundreds of these already.)

to carry a populist message and to reveal the treachery of the Republicans’ economic con game.The reason Republicans win as a minority party (This is incorrect. "The American public is significantly more likely to identify as conservative or moderate than as liberal, leaving a situation in which about 4 in 10 Americans call themselves conservative, 4 in 10 call themselves moderates, and only about 2 in 10 call themselves liberal.")

is because Democrats have embraced neoliberalism and rejected true progressivism and the New Deal. As a result, turnouts at election time are typically low, and it’s the Democrats and disaffected independents who don’t turn out. The difference between the “trickle-down, supply-side” con of the Republican Party and the Democrats’ embrace of the free market, deregulation, lower taxes, markets-know-best agenda that Bill Clinton brought to the party with the Democratic Leadership Council is simply too small to excite the people. (I thought Clinton was a hero, one of the best presidents of modern times?)

As you read this, there’s a fight on for control of the Democratic Party. Incredibly, the old-guard neoliberal establishment is doing all they can to hold onto the status quo that enabled a dangerous know-nothing like Trump to assume the presidency.

Scary stuff.