"Here are two very concrete things that should become, today, immediately, the standard position of any progressive: Getting rid of the filibuster, which allows a minority to thwart the will of the majority in the Senate; and either expanding the Supreme Court (best) or putting term limits on the Supreme Court (not as good, but better than nothing). There should not be a single day’s extra discussion about these things."
I've been turning this over in my head over-and-over today. I agree with it. Truly, I do.
Here's the thing I'm struggling with. And I cannot stress enough this is all anecdotal so take that fwiw...
In my lefty crank Facebook days, I was friends with a wide political range of folks. This is the nature of my job where you truly have to work with all persons (clergy). I had sanded down my page enough so by 2018, the only people left I would argue with were mealy-mouth centrists and white boomer libs.
I've kind of made my peace with the white boomer lib worldview. I hate it but I get where it comes from, how it's evolved. Rebecca Traister's piece on Dianne Feinstein is so critical to understanding how movements grow, become stagnant, die and are reborn into something else, usually bad.
I'd argue with them over a lot of things but I cannot emphasize enough: the Supreme Court is the most sacred of institutions. Disagreements became personal. People dismissed my suggestions (expanded court, voting for judges, rotating randomly through DC circuit), as "stupid," "implausible," "non-American." One of them condescended me relentlessly when I used the term countermajoritarian, treating me like I was a nine-year old saying a ten-dollar word.
I ditched Facebook in 2021 and am all the better for it. But...
These are the people showing up to the polls right now. These are the people who have an outsized say in the Democratic Party because they are reliable voters. And I think changing their views on SCOTUS is going to be hard.
Now it's impossible to deny the Left has won major gains, even if it's hard to see. Bernie Sanders' two campaigns changed the party permanently. By default, Biden might be the best President of my lifetime.
But I would love to know a strategy for convincing older liberals that the Supreme Court needs to be changed in any way.
Maybe this ruling, or Dobbs, or whatever else is a wake up call for them (like I said, I got off FB in 2021 and my in-person conversations with boomer libs don't really exist outside of my church and mom). I agree with the strategy, the sentiment. I worry about it being an uphill climb, perhaps too steep.
Agree with the sentiment, am on board for it. Just hoping it can yield good fruit with the libs who for better and worse are a big part of this coalition.
I think the argument is just that absent reforming the Supreme Court there is no avenue for progressive (legal) change in America for potentially decades. Either or.
Great obituary for our alleged liberal democracy. Just two quibbles.
Hamilton passed over that great as the sociopathic capitalists’ game plan has been, the Democratic Party since at least the late 1980s, probably even the Carter ad, has consistently been a boon. Resistance has been minimal.
Just for a single example: imagine if Obama made a big issue out of the Garland debacle. Maybe we’d have gotten Clinton and a blue senate resulting in a SCOTUS without anything like the current majority. OTOH, anyone who expects much from a party that supports insider trading for elected officials, well…
You know; like if we had an opposition party that opposed, who knows where we’d be?
Hamilton is correct about the role for labor going forward. But it, the huge headwinds ahead…
Also huge since Monday: the news about the nation being on the cusp of an existential crisis has been obsoleted. We are now in one as sufficiently described by the Dotard-in-Chief Monday. (Of course, there’s a legit argument that we’ve been in one for years already.)
I agree and try to make this case to the seemingly well intentioned moderates and liberals I encounter, with some success. To still believe in liberal institutions living in the South takes a special kind of faith that can be hard to shake though, and putting that faith into the labor movement has been systemically drilled out of Southerners for a long time. At least what I've experienced here in the South is pervasive disengagement such that the idea there's anything anyone can do to make things better is seen as pie in the sky, if not reckless given the fear of speaking up.
It's worth distinguishing between the working class folks with these ideas (& some amount of the middle class ones) vs. the actual Democratic power brokers who are themselves typically part of the capitalist elite.
Like Zappa said, necessity is a mother. Nothing was going to change without a major crisis. Institutions at best keep us from drowning but they are shit at promoting actual flourishing. Maybe this 'place' we're in now is where we kinda have to be right now. I get the feeling that Shawn Fain is gonna loom large in this 'moment' in the best possible way. The UAW strikes haven't gotten SHIT attention-wise in the media, proportionate to how huge it was/is ( for obvious reasons). In a way that lack of media attention allows for a level of stealth that wouldn't be available if they were ACTIVELY paying attention
If I may add, the partisan composition of state legislatures over the last 40-50 years has also slid from under the feet of Democrats. IMO, the acts of SCOTUS, the acts of Trump, the acts of the McConnell Senate, the disfunction of the House, they all emanate from the cratering of Democratic majorities in rural seats in multiple state legislatures since the 1970s (thanks in part to the flight toward car-dependent suburbs in the South), as well as the comparative lack of safeguards against gerrymandering until very recently. Democrats have not held the national majority of legislative seats nor legislative chambers since 2010, which was the second time since the end of WWII that Democrats lost that majority.
Nonpartisan redistricting by the states has arrived too little and too late to stop the smash-and-grab raid on federal institutions in the short or middle term, but wherever and however it becomes possible in the short term (like Wisconsin and hopefully Ohio), it may start to curb the rot at the state level where it first started. The resolution will take years, perhaps going into the next decade to resolve.
Finally, going back to the shifting of population from the North to the South, I personally subscribe to the belief that we should be relocating away from the South and toward swing states with a history of organized labor and democratic elasticity, as well as advocating for said blue and purple states to legalize upzoning and allow for housing construction. I say this, btw, as a Georgia resident since 1993.
So I agree that organized labor is extremely key as an institution which must be resolved to creatively challenge government and corporate power, and that both the institutions of federal government as well as the pure insistence upon voting are likely dead to us in the short term. We should be creative in addressing this tyranny, and our creativity should start at the state level: not just voting with our ballots, not just signing petitions, but also helping each other vote with our feet.
The scalpel-esque, seeping droplets of frozen horror one gets down the back on hearing "you have (cancer, leprosy, syphyllis, lechmaniasis, etc.)" followed immediately by an absolute committment to do basically anything to cure it. That's what this is. This is that very moment. The time for circumspection, caution, and convening of various hand-wringing minyans is looong gone.
It is time to regroup, and to plan strategy. Otherwise, no merry little Christmas will be had.
It is time to march to Dharsana, to make salt and to shake an empire to its foundations. It is time to take the blows and to resist. It is time to make passivity active.
It doesn't matter, in the end, whether Joe stays or goes. You have six months. You can sit and do nothing, and hope and pray that everything will turn out just fine, like mom's apple pie.
Or you can grasp the immunity that the Supreme Court of the United States has just so benevolently bestowed upon the presidency, and use it, if not wisely, then ruthlessly. There is no more "he wouldn't dare". That's what we learned yesterday.
I'm taking a bit of consolation in the inexorable fact that actually exercising power and holding on to it is a whole different ballgame from consolidating it.
Getting to this point has been largely under the radar. Now they have to "uncloak".
We're about to see just how disciplined they really are.
I would like to hear you and two others on our general side of things engage in a three-way discussion comparable to the tech/billionaire/right wing podcast All In. While it's an ugly sight, they do mash the ideas around and get attention. It can start out clownish but proceeds into informed critique -- of their own world, true, but enlightening.
I thought this piece was going to advocate "burning it all down" (our institutions) until it said we should get rid of the filibuster and add more members to the Supreme Court. Those are logical, necessary steps and (in my view) not anti-institutional but rather about reforming our institutions.
Good piece. That being said, I think it is overly simplistic. Labor Unions don't exist in an environment outside of the state and institutions. Erik Loomis and Eric Blanc have made this abundantly clear in their work. Historically speaking, the U.S. Labor Movement has only succeeded when the state and capital are not on the same page to crush labor. We need to organize in the streets, in our workplaces, AND institutions. We can and must do all of this.
Debt is the biggest issue facing the working class and the labor movement is not structured to take on that issue. We need a mass movement that can embrace labor, renters, debt, climate change, and also engage electorally. I’m not talking about a third party, at least not now, but a mass organization that can coordinate actions. It could also go beyond movement activism and embrace mutual aid.
Seeing “organized labor” as the only remaining answer is just another quixotic fixation. All institutional power in the US, and especially the business unionism in what little remains of worker rights, is subservient to business.
Term limits for theocrats in robes and process rules for theocratic debate clubs are the mildest of sedatives for a terminal illness.
The only force with any possible matching power against this supersystem is, unfortunately, the violence of collapse.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe the corpse of George Meany returns to guide us all.
There's a difference between "reverence" for the constitution, and merely understanding the magnitude of what it would take to relitigate the Constitution. We're way too quick to rationalize why the structures we are stuck with are Good Actually. It's fair to critique and dislike our structures and laws, because they are compromises made in the past. But, we must remember that the military takes an oath to the constitution, and that relitigating the constitution can only be done through civil war. That's the way it is, but we don't have to like it
"Here are two very concrete things that should become, today, immediately, the standard position of any progressive: Getting rid of the filibuster, which allows a minority to thwart the will of the majority in the Senate; and either expanding the Supreme Court (best) or putting term limits on the Supreme Court (not as good, but better than nothing). There should not be a single day’s extra discussion about these things."
I've been turning this over in my head over-and-over today. I agree with it. Truly, I do.
Here's the thing I'm struggling with. And I cannot stress enough this is all anecdotal so take that fwiw...
In my lefty crank Facebook days, I was friends with a wide political range of folks. This is the nature of my job where you truly have to work with all persons (clergy). I had sanded down my page enough so by 2018, the only people left I would argue with were mealy-mouth centrists and white boomer libs.
I've kind of made my peace with the white boomer lib worldview. I hate it but I get where it comes from, how it's evolved. Rebecca Traister's piece on Dianne Feinstein is so critical to understanding how movements grow, become stagnant, die and are reborn into something else, usually bad.
I'd argue with them over a lot of things but I cannot emphasize enough: the Supreme Court is the most sacred of institutions. Disagreements became personal. People dismissed my suggestions (expanded court, voting for judges, rotating randomly through DC circuit), as "stupid," "implausible," "non-American." One of them condescended me relentlessly when I used the term countermajoritarian, treating me like I was a nine-year old saying a ten-dollar word.
I ditched Facebook in 2021 and am all the better for it. But...
These are the people showing up to the polls right now. These are the people who have an outsized say in the Democratic Party because they are reliable voters. And I think changing their views on SCOTUS is going to be hard.
Now it's impossible to deny the Left has won major gains, even if it's hard to see. Bernie Sanders' two campaigns changed the party permanently. By default, Biden might be the best President of my lifetime.
But I would love to know a strategy for convincing older liberals that the Supreme Court needs to be changed in any way.
Maybe this ruling, or Dobbs, or whatever else is a wake up call for them (like I said, I got off FB in 2021 and my in-person conversations with boomer libs don't really exist outside of my church and mom). I agree with the strategy, the sentiment. I worry about it being an uphill climb, perhaps too steep.
Agree with the sentiment, am on board for it. Just hoping it can yield good fruit with the libs who for better and worse are a big part of this coalition.
I think the argument is just that absent reforming the Supreme Court there is no avenue for progressive (legal) change in America for potentially decades. Either or.
Great obituary for our alleged liberal democracy. Just two quibbles.
Hamilton passed over that great as the sociopathic capitalists’ game plan has been, the Democratic Party since at least the late 1980s, probably even the Carter ad, has consistently been a boon. Resistance has been minimal.
Just for a single example: imagine if Obama made a big issue out of the Garland debacle. Maybe we’d have gotten Clinton and a blue senate resulting in a SCOTUS without anything like the current majority. OTOH, anyone who expects much from a party that supports insider trading for elected officials, well…
You know; like if we had an opposition party that opposed, who knows where we’d be?
Hamilton is correct about the role for labor going forward. But it, the huge headwinds ahead…
Also huge since Monday: the news about the nation being on the cusp of an existential crisis has been obsoleted. We are now in one as sufficiently described by the Dotard-in-Chief Monday. (Of course, there’s a legit argument that we’ve been in one for years already.)
May we live interesting times indeed…
I would really love to live in boring times...
😂😭
I agree and try to make this case to the seemingly well intentioned moderates and liberals I encounter, with some success. To still believe in liberal institutions living in the South takes a special kind of faith that can be hard to shake though, and putting that faith into the labor movement has been systemically drilled out of Southerners for a long time. At least what I've experienced here in the South is pervasive disengagement such that the idea there's anything anyone can do to make things better is seen as pie in the sky, if not reckless given the fear of speaking up.
It's worth distinguishing between the working class folks with these ideas (& some amount of the middle class ones) vs. the actual Democratic power brokers who are themselves typically part of the capitalist elite.
Like Zappa said, necessity is a mother. Nothing was going to change without a major crisis. Institutions at best keep us from drowning but they are shit at promoting actual flourishing. Maybe this 'place' we're in now is where we kinda have to be right now. I get the feeling that Shawn Fain is gonna loom large in this 'moment' in the best possible way. The UAW strikes haven't gotten SHIT attention-wise in the media, proportionate to how huge it was/is ( for obvious reasons). In a way that lack of media attention allows for a level of stealth that wouldn't be available if they were ACTIVELY paying attention
If I may add, the partisan composition of state legislatures over the last 40-50 years has also slid from under the feet of Democrats. IMO, the acts of SCOTUS, the acts of Trump, the acts of the McConnell Senate, the disfunction of the House, they all emanate from the cratering of Democratic majorities in rural seats in multiple state legislatures since the 1970s (thanks in part to the flight toward car-dependent suburbs in the South), as well as the comparative lack of safeguards against gerrymandering until very recently. Democrats have not held the national majority of legislative seats nor legislative chambers since 2010, which was the second time since the end of WWII that Democrats lost that majority.
Nonpartisan redistricting by the states has arrived too little and too late to stop the smash-and-grab raid on federal institutions in the short or middle term, but wherever and however it becomes possible in the short term (like Wisconsin and hopefully Ohio), it may start to curb the rot at the state level where it first started. The resolution will take years, perhaps going into the next decade to resolve.
Finally, going back to the shifting of population from the North to the South, I personally subscribe to the belief that we should be relocating away from the South and toward swing states with a history of organized labor and democratic elasticity, as well as advocating for said blue and purple states to legalize upzoning and allow for housing construction. I say this, btw, as a Georgia resident since 1993.
So I agree that organized labor is extremely key as an institution which must be resolved to creatively challenge government and corporate power, and that both the institutions of federal government as well as the pure insistence upon voting are likely dead to us in the short term. We should be creative in addressing this tyranny, and our creativity should start at the state level: not just voting with our ballots, not just signing petitions, but also helping each other vote with our feet.
The scalpel-esque, seeping droplets of frozen horror one gets down the back on hearing "you have (cancer, leprosy, syphyllis, lechmaniasis, etc.)" followed immediately by an absolute committment to do basically anything to cure it. That's what this is. This is that very moment. The time for circumspection, caution, and convening of various hand-wringing minyans is looong gone.
This is great, thank you!
It is time to regroup, and to plan strategy. Otherwise, no merry little Christmas will be had.
It is time to march to Dharsana, to make salt and to shake an empire to its foundations. It is time to take the blows and to resist. It is time to make passivity active.
It doesn't matter, in the end, whether Joe stays or goes. You have six months. You can sit and do nothing, and hope and pray that everything will turn out just fine, like mom's apple pie.
Or you can grasp the immunity that the Supreme Court of the United States has just so benevolently bestowed upon the presidency, and use it, if not wisely, then ruthlessly. There is no more "he wouldn't dare". That's what we learned yesterday.
Speak now, or forever hold your peace.
I'm taking a bit of consolation in the inexorable fact that actually exercising power and holding on to it is a whole different ballgame from consolidating it.
Getting to this point has been largely under the radar. Now they have to "uncloak".
We're about to see just how disciplined they really are.
Right on!
Really brought it on this one, Hamilton.
I would like to hear you and two others on our general side of things engage in a three-way discussion comparable to the tech/billionaire/right wing podcast All In. While it's an ugly sight, they do mash the ideas around and get attention. It can start out clownish but proceeds into informed critique -- of their own world, true, but enlightening.
I thought this piece was going to advocate "burning it all down" (our institutions) until it said we should get rid of the filibuster and add more members to the Supreme Court. Those are logical, necessary steps and (in my view) not anti-institutional but rather about reforming our institutions.
Good piece. That being said, I think it is overly simplistic. Labor Unions don't exist in an environment outside of the state and institutions. Erik Loomis and Eric Blanc have made this abundantly clear in their work. Historically speaking, the U.S. Labor Movement has only succeeded when the state and capital are not on the same page to crush labor. We need to organize in the streets, in our workplaces, AND institutions. We can and must do all of this.
Debt is the biggest issue facing the working class and the labor movement is not structured to take on that issue. We need a mass movement that can embrace labor, renters, debt, climate change, and also engage electorally. I’m not talking about a third party, at least not now, but a mass organization that can coordinate actions. It could also go beyond movement activism and embrace mutual aid.
Seeing “organized labor” as the only remaining answer is just another quixotic fixation. All institutional power in the US, and especially the business unionism in what little remains of worker rights, is subservient to business.
Term limits for theocrats in robes and process rules for theocratic debate clubs are the mildest of sedatives for a terminal illness.
The only force with any possible matching power against this supersystem is, unfortunately, the violence of collapse.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe the corpse of George Meany returns to guide us all.
There's a difference between "reverence" for the constitution, and merely understanding the magnitude of what it would take to relitigate the Constitution. We're way too quick to rationalize why the structures we are stuck with are Good Actually. It's fair to critique and dislike our structures and laws, because they are compromises made in the past. But, we must remember that the military takes an oath to the constitution, and that relitigating the constitution can only be done through civil war. That's the way it is, but we don't have to like it
The constitution has many amendments that did not come about by civil war.
Yes, but the amendment process requires consensus. A powerful minority will not consent to its disempowerment.