A Show of Strength

I want to thank the people who put together the Women’s Marches across the country yesterday. The period from November 9 to January 20 is a very small window to put something like this together, which makes the turnout yesterday all the more extraordinary. I want also to thank everyone who attended; I was not able to physically join you, but I was and am with you in spirit.

The pictures and reports of yesterday’s march, especially the one in Washington DC, took me back fifty years, to my childhood. Media reports yesterday noted that this was not the largest demonstration on record; that was the 1969 march against the Vietnam War. I went to that one as a nine year old boy, with my father and brothers. As happened yesterday, there were differing estimates of the size of the crowd, but it was announced from the stage that we were one million strong. The Vietnam War did not end that year or the next or the next, so we did not end it that day. Likewise, I have already seen articles which I agree with, pointing out that yesterday’s march will not in and of itself stop the agenda of Trump and the Republicans in Congress. But that does not mean that the Women’s March was not important. It was even more important than that demonstration I attended in 1969.

The election of Donald Trump on November 9 was a violation for those of us who opposed him. We were promised a Clinton presidency by all of the pundits and pollsters going in, but it was worse than that. Trump was and is the worst human being ever to win the office of President. He boasted of sexually assaulting women, mocked the disabled, and generally promoted hatred, division, and even violence on his way to victory. A popular majority of almost three million votes was not enough to keep him out. On election night, I and so many others were in shock over the results, and we were not encouraged as the new administration with its venal and unqualified cabinet took shape. Overall, we were feeling demoralized and isolated. So the cause of resisting all of this may not have been directly advanced yesterday, but it was an essential show of strength. Sure, Donald Trump and his friends in Congress know now that we are not going away, and they can not control us. But more importantly, we now have a powerful reminder that we are far from alone. I remember from 1969 what an amazing feeling it is to be part of something this big, and we needed that even more this year than we did then.

The question now, of course, is how do we translate our power into meaningful action? I hope the organizers of yesterday’s demonstrations took advantage of modern technology. If so, they now have a huge list of contacts who can receive information and calls to action. They can spread reliable information about what is going on in Washington, and generally counteract the continuing flood of distortions and outright falsehoods in the media. They can serve as gatekeepers, screening out bad information generated from both the right and the left. They can, of course, organize future demonstrations, which, with more time to put them together, should be even bigger than the ones yesterday.

But most of all, I hope they can get everyone who attended or wanted to attend to vote. That is our true power, and too many of us stayed home November 9. The ability to organize an event like the one yesterday can be translated into efforts to counteract voter suppression by helping those who need it to get their IDs in order, and arranging transportation to the polls. Where there are fees to obtain IDs, fundraising can be done. Time is a key here, because the 2017 elections are important. We will be choosing the first wave of officials who will determine what the 2020 redistricting looks like, so this is how we counter gerrymandering. Put another way, this is how we go about seating a more progressive House of Representatives to work with our next president. These off year elections also give us the best chance to seat progressives in local positions. We can build a farm team of people with experience governing for the bigger races in the future, but we have to start small and build up. This is something the Tea Party realized and began working on many years ago, but the Green Party never did. The Tea Party also understood that their best path to power was within the Republican Party. If they had tried to build a third party instead, they would have split the right wing vote as they became more powerful, giving up important races to the Democrats. We saw our power yesterday. It is enough to reform the Democratic Party and begin notching some victories. But we must go from showing and sharing our strength to putting it to use.

I want to share this in closing. It is not the slickest or most polished music video, but it seems to me to be the most appropriate:

Do the Math

Politics, in the end, is a branch of mathematics. The candidates must decide how to attract voters and donations to their causes. These calculations involve millions of voters and dollars. But much smaller numbers can be just as important.The political math I have been thinking about lately involves the numbers one and two.

One is the size of a possible Democratic majority in the Senate. It could be that close, so every seat will be essential. I live in New Jersey. We do not elect a Senator this year, but we are also a solid blue state. I can usually vote my conscience. But, to gain a Democratic majority this year, not everyone will have that luxury. It might come down to what happens in Indiana, for example. Evan Bayh is nobody’s idea of a progressive, although his voting record is better than I would have expected. But a victory for him is a progressive victory. To see why, you first have to understand that Indiana is not going to elect a true progressive to the Senate. Remember, this is a state that thinks having Mike Pence for their governor is a good idea. But if a Bayh victory means the Democrats control the Senate, the Democrats would gain the chairmanships of all of the Senate committees. Surely some of those chairpersons would be progressives. Beyond that though, a Democratic Senate would mean that Clinton could nominate a more progressive judge to the Supreme Court than she would if the Republicans retained control. A Democratic Judiciary Committee chairman would allow this nomination to get out of committee to be voted on by the full Senate.

Two is the number of terms a president can serve since the ratification of the 22nd amendment in 1951. Lately I have been seeing a lot of posts advocating term limits for the House and Senate. A recent one also called for cutting the lifetime pensions for Congressmen from the current level of, if I remember correctly, $117,000 a year. Two assumptions are involved in this. One is that $117,000 is a lot of money. To most members of Congress, it is not. The majority of members of both the house and Senate are millionaires. More to the point, many parlay their government experience and connections into high paying lobbying positions when they leave congress. Cutting the pension would only create a greater incentive to do so. The second assumption term limit advocates make is that outgoing legislators would be replaced by better people. That’s just silly. If that were possible, the person you wanted replaced would not have been elected in the first place. Term limits are also a blunt instrument, forcing out both good and bad people. Again, I live in New Jersey, and we had the good fortune to have as our Senator Frank Lautenberg. Lautenberg was elected to five terms, and he had one of the most progressive records in the Senate over that time. It does no good for me to sit in New Jersey and call for term limits as a way to remove Mitch McConnell from his Senate seat in Kentucky. It is up to progressives in Kentucky to mobilize and work for McConnell’s defeat. Otherwise, whoever replaced McConnell might not have the power that his long service has brought, but he or she would be no better otherwise. In the House, term limits are a particularly bad idea. A person could only serve for a total of four years, all of which would be spent campaigning for that lobbyist job. A much better way to counter the power of entrenched legislators is to be in the habit of casting meaningful votes in Congressional election years. Progressives have been terrible at this recently; we were almost invisible in the 2010 and 2014 elections, allowing Republicans to gain and extend their majorities in those years.

Related to this last point, and also a matter of numbers, is the balance of power in the House of Representatives. Most experts predict that the Democrats will not be able to take the House this year, because there are too many safe Republican districts. These are the result of gerrymandering. We can deplore it all we like, but we as progressive voters must learn to do more. Gerrymandering happens when redistricting is done every ten years. At that time, each state draws its districts to favor the party that controls the state house and state legislature. These posts are decided in odd-year elections, and we progressives have been almost completely absent in these elections. In 2015, Bernie Sanders was calling for his political revolution, but his supporters did not show up to vote. The Tea Party never makes that mistake. They made a point at first of always voting, even when the available Republican was not conservative enough for them. Over time, they were able to take over the process, and elect the candidates they wanted. As a result, their electees controlled the redistricting process in much of the country in 2010. We have only until 2020, when the next redistricting happens, to try to reverse this trend.

All of these political equations yield the same result. We must vote meaningfully. As things stand, that means supporting some candidates who are not perfect. But as we become the likely voters that are the pollsters’ sole concern, we will start to have more candidates we can feel good about. In the meantime, we must understand that our votes for the least bad candidate in one place can empower a better candidate somewhere else. They can also create more chances to get better candidates elected. To unseat those who have gained the power to block action on our issues, we must do the hard work of actually winning an election against the odds. Even if Bernie Sanders had actually won the nomination and the presidency, that would not have been enough to solve these equations. That will take time, commitment, and patience.