GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

Time to Think Big

Donald Trump is president. I don’t like it. I wish it weren’t true. But he is, and we have to find a way to respond to that without falling prey to the distorting impact that the Mueller investigation is having on our politics.

I don’t want to imply hat the Mueller investigation is somehow unnecessary or futile. And I certainly do not wish to imply that it’s illegitimate. Robert Mueller must be allowed to continue and to follow his investigation where it leads.

My point is this: Trump is unlikely to be impeached, not in 2018 and not before his term ends in 2020, regardless of whether the Democrats take over the House and Senate in the fall. Trump, therefore, is likely to remain in office for at least the next 30 months, giving him control of the executive branch and an ability to pack the judiciary with right-wingers.

I know this sounds depressing. It should. But it also should anger us, spur us to a greater level of action and activism than we are witnessing at the moment. There was a flurry of reaction to Trump shortly after his election, with the Women’s March and an aggressive push back by immigration advocates to his initial ban on Muslims entering the country, which took the form of a ban on entry from seven majority Muslim nations. And there have been other protests taking place — the activism by teens following the Parkland shooting, smaller, targeted protests, etc.

But progressive attention has too often been on Russia-gate to the exclusion of most of their efforts. It’s why, I think, that even though Democrats have a shot at taking back at least one house of Congress, it is unlikely to energize Democrats or have a long-term effect on American political culture.

Popular wisdom has it that the Democrats must move to the center to win. The evidence offered tends to focus on Conor Lamb, a Democrat who won a long-held Republican seat in a special election earlier this year. Lamb is pro-gun and ran “against” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. He also was pro-union rights, and he talked about redevelopment and economic fairness — themes Democrats need to press if they are to build long-term strength.

Elections matter, and Lamb’s win will help the Democrats break the lock on the federal government held by the Republicans, but it does not mean the end of the Trump/Tea Party agenda, and in fact could return us to a reprise of the Clinton era Democratic Party, with its focus on deregulation, compromise, and moderation.

Remember, it was Clinton who gave us welfare reform, which made it much more difficult for those in need to get help. It was Clinton who signed the banking reforms that set the stage for the 2007-2009 meltdown; the bankruptcy reforms that made the banks happy but imposed hardship on those living at the economic margins; who pressed ahead with a punitive crime bill that not only increased criminal penalties and extended the federal death penalty, but expanded the militarization of police departments started under Reagan and tied what was left of the safety net to behavior.

This appears to be the direction the so-called party machine wants to go. They’ve put their finger on the scale in several (most?) races, and the profile of candidates going forward to November looks a lot more like Conor Lamb than Bernie Sander, even though an aggressive and progressive approach has proven successful in Virginia.

A lot of progressives are angry that the party has jumped into the fray like this, but we need to look more closely at ourselves. Progressives did well in races where there was a serious on-the-ground progressive activism, but failed when their efforts were purely electoral.

It’s why, though I think we need to use the ballot box to help rein in Trump, we can’t assume that purely institutional efforts will work. If we are to shift the debate in this country in a more progressive direction, we need to actively engage — and that means both working for candidates, but also organizing at the neighborhood and precinct level, in unions, and with marginalized groups, thinking boldly and presenting a clear narrative about what we want this nation to look like going forward.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter @kaletjournalism; Facebook.com/Hank.kalet; tumblr, hankkalet.tumblr.com.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2018

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