Crossposted

Crossposted to DailyKos

What happens next, after the convention? This is an historic showdown. It’s been brewing since 1964. Maybe since 1865.

Through the Republican Party, this country’s owners—the elite who control financial power—have knowingly and deliberately allied themselves with white privilege and white racism. Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Reagan’s carefully crafted nods to the KKK. Trump’s out-and-out race baiting.

This isn’t just prejudice, or bias, or bigotry. Business leaders pursued a cynical electoral alliance with white people who want, consciously or unconsciously, institutionally or violently, to defend the free passes they get up and down the class ladder.

That alliance is finally going down to defeat, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act the following year.

Don’t decry the country’s polarization. It’s a good thing.

Opposition to Black political power existed in both parties in 1964. (Remember Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party?)

That continued all the way through the ensuing decades. Remember Jimmy Carter’s comment about “preserving ethnic purity”? Or Bill Clinton’s attack on welfare and hyping of crime? To get elected then, Democratic politicians had to give a nod to white racism.

But that opposition to Black political power became concentrated as white-flight suburbs became integrated, and turned blue, and the exurbs and rural areas, to which the angriest and most fearful whites retreated (or holed up in) turned more and more red.

Now we’re down to a handful of swing states, and victory depends mostly on turning out the base. We’re going to do it, with all this love and enthusiasm.

Then what?

The most realistic scenario for the House is that we’ll win it narrowly. Hakeem Jefferies becomes speaker. The most realistic scenario for the Senate is that it stays the same, except Justice replaces Manchin in West Virginia and Gallego beats Lake and replaces Sinema in Arizona. Casey, Tester, and Brown keep their seats. Then the Senate is 50-50, with Tim Walz presiding and breaking tie votes.

And then: Schumer moves to bust the filibuster, which he would have done successfully in 2021-2022 if it weren’t for Manchin and Sinema. And then the House and Senate move the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and an updated Freedom to Vote Act and send it to Harris to sign. And follow up, quite possibly, with statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.

(If the Democrats win the trifecta and leadership doesn’t do this, we should pillory them. Right wing fascism has always been part of our politics, since before Joe McCarthy, and Nixon, and Goldwater. Voting rights and enfranchisement for DC residents and Puerto Ricans means permanent marginalization of the fascists. And it means Democratic politicians will no longer need to make that nod to white racism.)

Great, right? But it sets up a bigger showdown.

While big business has continued to back the racist, right-wing Republican Party as it drifted further and further into MAGA, Democrats built their coalition based on an ever-more social-democratic economic appeal—higher taxes on the rich, consumer protections, public investment, public schools, affordable health care. That’s been the Joe Biden/Nancy Pelosi formula for victory.

So now—if Democrats win the trifecta, and bust the filibuster, and pass voting rights legislation, and add two new states—they can win and exert Federal power without a nod to white racism, and also without fealty to big business and its neoliberal ideology and vision.

So big business is freaking out. And they are trying to figure out how to strike back. That’s what’s behind their pundits’ misrepresentation and panning of Harris’ anti-price-gouging proposal. That proposal is an indication of what could come: a pro-labor Harris administration that has proved its economic chops, following up on Biden’s industrial policy (the CHIPs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and more). More pro-labor policies (card check, anyone?) and pro-consumer policies (Elizabeth Warren and the CFPB unleashed) are sure to follow.

So what’s coming? In the next 77 days, big business is going to strike back at Harris, and strike back at Democratic House and Senate candidates. They might recognize that Trump is not viable, and that the chaos he brings is ultimately bad for profits. What big business really wants is an administration brought to heel—preferably a divided government that they can influence and bend to support their profit-making.

I think they are too late, and too wrong-footed, to be effective. I think that on November 5, we’ll win that most realistic scenario and get the trifecta.

That outcome would set up 2025-2026 to be interesting times. The Democratic administration will be primed, with high expectations from the base (us), to make major changes in the US economy—even greater changes than were made during the Democratic trifectas of 1993-94, 2009-2010, and 2021-2022. This time Democratic politicians needn’t be held back by the threat that business will help juice the GOP’s midterm white backlash, as happened in 1994 and 2010 (and 2022, but less potently)—because the dam will have been broken on voting rights and statehood, and our majority will be permanent.

Big business’ remaining option will be to negotiate with a Democratic administration empowered by an enduring electoral majority that is united around a solidly center-left, social democratic economic agenda.

They are not going to like it.

I signed on to the call last night and was bumped to the YouTube stream. I sent money and watched for 40 minutes—a long enough time, I figured, to be counted.

On the subject of organizing and taking action as a group of white dudes, it wasn’t terrible—I never cringed—but it was lacking.

This is fraught territory.

From the New York Times:

Before Monday’s call, Ross Morales Rocketto, a Democratic organizer who helped start the group, acknowledged the discomfort some might feel about the group’s name.

“I don’t blame them,” he said in an interview. “Throughout American history, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that when white men organize, it’s often with pointy hats on, and it doesn’t end well.”

“What we are really trying to do is engage a group of people that the left has largely ignored for the last few years,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “There’s a silent majority of white men who aren’t MAGA Republicans, and we haven’t done anything to try to capture those votes.”

This is not terrible, but it isn’t revealing or insightful, either. Rocketto acknowledges the underlying discomfort, but the words he uses to assuage that discomfort are inaccurate and not completely honest.

Take any left venue—say, Daily Kos. Are white men largely ignored? Hardly. In politics, white men are the object of political persuasion, disproportionate to their actual numbers, the same way white men are disproportionately the object of any other kind of messaging, just about anywhere. That’s how dominance works.

That acknowledgement a good place to start.

The next step, I think, is to investigate what special political roles and responsibilities accrue to those of us who, by chance of birth, are on the dominant side.

The first lesson of being a white dude leftist is to step back, to be aware that one is holding a louder megaphone, and free up space for others to step forward. But that’s not what we’re getting at with a “White Dudes for Harris” group. This is a space, in fact, to step forward.

To what end?

I think that doesn’t have a fair answer, a complete enough answer, without acknowledging the social construction, the unreality, of our whiteness—and even, for that matter, our maleness as we know it. Our ultimate objective is to annihilate our white, male identity. That’s a radical concept for most people, but without it, I’m going to continue to be uncomfortable being a “White Dude for…” anything.

Because what I really want to say to fellow white dudes, whether they are my fellow progressives, or the legions of the uninformed and uninvolved, or the nutty MAGA types, is this:

The old world was built around the white patriarchy, around imperialist domination, sexual domination, exploitation and destruction of nature. Now that old world has to die, because as long as power accrues on that basis, the horrors of inequality and war will go on, right up until the time the planet becomes completely uninhabitable. We have to change.

But more than that. When we white dudes give up our white, male identity and the privileges that go with it, in part or in whole, individually or collectively… whenever we do that, even a little bit, we make ourselves individually more free, and we make our fellow white dudes more free, and we make everyone else more free.

I don’t pretend that is easy, or that it’s obvious how to do it or when to do it in each aspect of our political lives and our everyday lives. Sometimes its difficult to defend one’s humanity—to set boundaries and to pursue aspirations that every human being deserves to keep and to have—without invoking the identity that has been given to us. But we can try to be aware of the differences between our universal rights on the one hand and our special privileges on the other.

What I do know is that when I do it—when I do yield and fold under my special status as a white dude—I feel more empowered, not less. I feel more able—not less—to provide, to protect, to guide, to watch over. I am more of a man for it.

And maybe working to make a Black woman President can be part of that experience.

And I know that I want to spread the word about that.

Cross posted at Daily Kos

It was painful to watch Joe Biden last night, as he read from the teleprompter, as he struggled to speak with cadence, to find pauses, to use his voice to emphasis where emphasis belonged. His face was mostly frozen, masked; there was no warm smile, no cocking of the head, no basking in the limelight, only the words spilling out, wonderful words, historic words, uplifting words that were delivered as if from within a deep vault weighed down with a heavy lid.

I felt badly for him, and for us.

Joe Biden, whose whole schtick was warmth, touch, empathic looks, an ease with children, caring and compassion for the disabled—Joe Biden had always been a real man who carried his insides on his outsides and his emotions on his sleeve. Where is that man now?

I’m sure he’s still there, inside; that Dr. Jill can see him, and all those close to him can see him given some time and patience and a quiet room. On the TV last night, that Joe Biden was hard to see.

There’s some irony in that, because Joe Biden is a man who lived and worked through this whole television era, the era you can say began with the Nixon-Kennedy debate, in 1960, the first televised Presidential debate, when Joe Biden was just 17. As time went on, public life became more and more about communicating an ineffable sense of being genuine, of being real and integrated, to the camera and the airwaves and to make that ineffable thing come through, via pixelated rendering, to people’s living rooms. Joe Biden had it mastered; when he said the ACA was big fuckin’ deal, you knew he believed it was a big fuckin’ deal, and when he told that boy not to worry about his own stutter, you knew Joe was bringing forward oodles of love and encouragement from somewhere deep in his heart.

There’s more irony. We’re living in a time where words matter a lot less than they used to, especially the words of politicians, because nobody believes what anybody says anymore; anything anybody says has to be filtered by the way they say it. “That’s so real,” kids will say—as if they are aware that most of what they hear, day in and day out, is not real.

Which it isn’t.

The real is our weapon, our ace in the hole, because the other side—the Republicans, Republican politicians, and dyed-in-the-wool regular Republican people, whether they are the kind of Republicans who brag that they walked their high school graduation when they actually didn’t, I mean rural drug users like my neighbors, or whether they are the other kind of Republicans, well-coiffed polyester-clad old people driving their Lincolns—those people on the other side don’t have access to real, because their own real (the real they have deep inside them) is encrusted in an impenetrable shell of white privilege, which is so impenetrable they’ve never experienced their own real themselves. So when these Republicans cheer each other on, and cheer on Trump, the whole noisy business of it resounds with fake, fake, fake, and it’s the same— boring and predictable—regardless of whether it’s Representative TalkingHead on CNN or somebody being interviewed at the town diner and acting like they seriously had a real opinion, which they don’t, or somebody’s drunk uncle riding shotgun in the pickup truck with his head hanging out the window. Fake.

Real is, in fact, our ace in the hole because so-called swing voters are people who are inured to logic or anything that involved parsing words, anything that would require thinking through propositions such as: Are Nazis bad? Or: Should hungry kids should be fed lunch? and who live as if any and all facts can simply be dismissed with shrug and a redirection of their attention to the immediate needs of the day. And these people respond—if they respond at all—to that feeling of real, the feeling that cuts through the words, and decide whether they like Candidate A or Candidate B based on that feeling, regardless of whether Candidate A is a felon who wants to inject them with bleach vs. Candidate B who has spent their whole life trying to protect vulnerable people from felons armed with hypodermics. The swing voters don’t believe anything either way, and they don’t really care about anything either, but they know who how they feel and who gives them that warm feeling of connection, of mutual identification. Joe could give them that, but he can’t anymore, because he has a progressive neurological disease that’s only going to get worse, even as he has good days and bad days.

Which brings me to the unreality—by which I mean a lack of empathetic understanding—that characterized most Democrats’ reaction to poor Joe’s condition. Most Democrats didn’t see the man and his suffering; they saw only his role with regard to the election, like he wasn’t a human being at all, like he should continue, for everyone else’s benefit, to play the role of the candidate we needed even as it was clear he couldn’t do it anymore, which was something that he didn’t want to admit and those closest to him didn’t want to admit (they’d lose their jobs, or their power, or both) and that most of us minor players didn’t want to admit either. Finally, Joe had to admit it to himself, although he couldn’t admit it in the speech last night, because then he’d have to resign the Presidency too, so he said something about passing the torch, a pat phrase which served adequately, even if it wasn’t really believable and wasn’t really real.

Last night I found myself wishing he didn’t have to do that, and that we all didn’t have do that. Wishing that we could all just share our appreciation and love with him and with each other, as in Joe, what a great job you’ve done, and we’re sorry to see what’s happening to you, but it is happening; we see it, and you know what? You rest and take care, and we’ll be fine. Joe’s embarking on a new part of life’s journey; he’s going to learn things about himself and when he learns them he’ll wish he’d known them all along, because that’s what happens when the flesh weakens and the cacophony of thoughts slows. I’m getting old, and I’m experiencing it myself. It’s not bad.

I’m wishing we all didn’t have to do that—the posturing and pretending that most everybody here at dKos demanded we all do, the whole time from June 27 to last Sunday—because when you allow yourself to feel the real, to see the human there, in each of us, see, you get a little of that superpower Joe had, or maybe still has but can’t express so well anymore, and that Kamala Harris has—god love her and keep her safe—that superpower to change somebody. Not to change their mind, but to change their feelings, so that they can change their own mind.

And that, in significant part, is how we’re going to win this election.

Biden should resign the Presidency now and allow Kamala Harris to be sworn in. Then he should release his delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

If Biden can’t campaign effectively, then he can’t govern effectively either. Being President is at least as challenging as running for President, and the stakes are just as high. If Joe Biden can’t go toe-to-toe with our own wannabe dictator, how well will he do in ongoing confrontations with our nation’s adversaries?

Did Biden have “a bad debate,” “a bad night”? That’s a weak argument. Being able to self-regulate, think, and act under pressure, and do so consistently, are key qualifications for the Presidency, as for any high-level management job. You can’t go create a disaster on Thursday and make up for it the following week. Nor is it convincing to say he can run on his record. That was then, before what we all saw July 27. This is now.

This situation is why we elected Kamala Harris to be Vice President. To step in if Joe Biden is unable to serve. Kamala should serve he remaining four months of Biden’s term while running for re-election as the incumbent President.

If Biden resigns as President now, Democrats will unite behind Kamala Harris at the August convention. Sure, there are plenty of ambitious egos out there, but you can bet they’ll all fall in line rather than challenge an incumbent President Harris for the nomination.

Harris will make a fine President. We already decided that four years ago. And, as the incumbent, she’ll make a fine 2024 candidate.

• She can take full credit for this administration’s accomplishments, because she was part of the team that won them.
• Her youth and vigor change the perceived dynamic of the race. It will no longer be between two old, white men.
• She represents change, and can run against “more of the same.”
• She appeals to core Democratic constituencies. A solid Black vote will keep Georgia and North Carolina in play. Compared to Biden, she isn’t as compromised with Arab-Americans. And she has an advantage with Asian-American voters.
• Of all potential candidates, she is best-suited to focus the election narrative on abortion rights.
• She’s got a law-enforcement background, as a big-city District Attorney and state Attorney General.
• She has a stellar resume, having won repeatedly won statewide office in a big, diverse state, served in the Senate and then as Biden’s VP candidate and VP. She’s exceptionally qualified to run for President and to be President.

Most of all, we’ve seen that Kamala can take it to Trump, relentlessly calling out his corruption and lies—and do so energetically and articulately. She can rally opposition to what most of the country agrees is an existential threat to democracy. Matched against hypothetical Democrats, she holds her own, but that’s not what’s at stake here. Head-to-head against Trump, she can make the contrast clear—responsible, sane, and knowledgeable vs. off-the-rails narcissistic, demented, and above all, old.

Does Kamala have negatives? Of course. Her approval/disapproval ratings are only a little bit better than Biden’s or Trump’s. Every candidate has negatives. But not every candidate is sitting VP and can be made the incumbent President and presumptive nominee instantly, by the action of one person—Joe Biden. Kamala can. Joe should act now.