Are We Winning Yet ?

 

It may be impossible to mentally survive the onslaught of these times if you track every piece of news. The actions under the Trump/Musk regime are a barrage: rolling back civil rights, watching government run by idiots, every institution weaponized, and dystopian spectacle passed off as governance. The sheer velocity can numb the senses, tempting us to shut down, to turn off the feed, to retreat.

But you also cannot be good to the world — or yourself — if you keep your head down and pay attention to nothing. Withdrawal is understandable, even necessary at times—but permanent disengagement only cedes ground to the authoritarian momentum as it reinforces our image of ourselves as powerless. So: How do we observe what’s happening without being crushed by its weight?

This is where the work of social psychologist Kurt Lewin offers a powerful tool. Lewin, a Jewish intellectual who fled Nazi Germany, developed force field analysis to understand how power, behavior, and transformation occur in real social systems.

He saw that any given situation is held in place by a dynamic equilibrium between forces pushing for change and those resisting it. To shift the status quo, you don’t necessarily need to move everything at once—you can focus strategically on specific forces or actors that influence the whole.

In activist training, I was taught force field analysis thusly: you make a list of forces and organizations pushing towards the dreary authoritarian oligarchy-controlled vision. And then the list of forces pushing towards a reordered society that’s deeply democratic and where wealth is shared.

Those forces are in tension. Pushing towards authoritarianism, Trump’s FBI ordered the arrest of a state judge for allegedly trying to prevent ICE from detaining a man in her courtroom.

But then the judges, lawyers, and plaintiffs who are defeating Trump 93% of the time in court because his orders are sloppy and patently illegal. And notably, most of the time Trump’s regime has quietly followed the judge’s orders.

Pushing the other direction, Trump’s deportation of people to El Salvadoran prison and open defiance of the courts. And the Supreme Court temporarily upholding Trump’s cruelly-written ban on trans people in the military.

But then there’s Harvard standing up to Trump’s intimidation tactics — alongside a growing body of universities organizing in resistance. To add: Harvard wanted to make a deal but veered towards resistance because of Trump’s henchmen being so casually reckless — so their stupidity works in our favor.

Yes, but all authoritarians promote loyalty above competence. And Trump is still fighting Harvard, and trying to take over museums, too.

Sure, but have you met librarians? They are not going down without a fight. They’ve refused, rebuffed, and redoubled efforts to give people the facts.

It’s worth pausing here to note our feelings in these tense times. Many days it’s easy to ask “Are we winning? Are we losing?” Like a basketball game, many of us do a kind of score keeping about how many points are we down? But, just to walk further into the sports analogy, this is more like soccer — where a lot of the game isn’t about immediate scoring but about positioning, repositioning, quick advances, quick retreats. Progress may not always be visible or immediate, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

A Colombian elder — who has lived her whole life in the shadow of war — told me recently, “You USers are obsessed with winning and it’s very unhealthy in moments like this. You keep wanting to know if it’s going well or not — and these times can’t be analyzed in headlines or moments. Sometimes it just is what it is. It’s losing and winning. The yardstick is measured in hearts and the timeline is generations of work on people’s attitudes and views.”

Lewin’s brilliance was in recognizing that seeing the whole doesn’t mean acting on everything. So we begin to paint the picture of what’s out there and the different forces at play. Forces for good. Forces against. And some forces that are mixed. Crucially, in his analysis you then assess which of these forces can be strengthened or weakened.

And here it’s helpful to get pretty practical. Courage anywhere begets courage everywhere. Because Trump has picked a strategy of everywhere all at once — nearly every group has a chance to stand up and support each other to be more bold. Hundreds of nonprofits signing to support Harvard fighting for its nonprofit status. Lawyers taking the street to do a most unusual thing: retaking their oaths to the Constitution in public. Employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — as elsewhere — attempting “work-on without collaboration” where they resisted unauthorized access by DOGE but continue their important work.

In practical terms, this might mean focusing not on Musk or Trump directly, but on amplifying local election protections, funding investigative journalism, or supporting tech workers organizing against misuse of platforms. You don’t need to tackle the entire regime to weaken its foundation. You need leverage points—clear, concrete places to act.

Using Lewin’s tool helps prevent burnout. It turns despair into direction. It gives structure to what might otherwise feel like flailing.

So, yes: these are hard days. But it’s not all bad or good — it’s a force field in motion. Even small acts, strategically placed, can shift the balance. We are not powerless — we are participants.

In closing, a quote from some of the resistance park rangers calling themselves Alt Acadia National Park:

A quick experiment for you. Go out to the store and buy a set of legos. Drop one on the floor, preferably in a high traffic area of your house, and forget about it. The inevitable will happen and you will eventually step on it. How do you feel about the power of that one lego brick? It’s only one brick.…

Another nice thing about lego bricks is that you can stack them, build with them. Create something more than the sum of their parts. One becomes two becomes three becomes 70,000+ Junior Rangers moving together, empowering each other, and making a difference. We’ll be here with you all the way, building a better future.

One lego brick at a time.

The Resistance Starts Now !

 

The Resistance Starts Now

I still have faith in America, but we must mobilize to protect those at risk if Trump achieves his worst impulses.

ROBERT REICH

NOV 06, 2024

•  

Friends,

I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too. 

Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.

I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.

Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.

Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.

America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.

Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.

Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.

Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.

Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.

We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.

We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.

We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.

We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.

We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.

How will we conduct this resistance?

By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.

We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.

But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.

We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.

We the people will fight for the general welfare.

We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.

This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.

I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.

If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.

All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.

We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.

Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.

It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.

We will never give up on America.

The resistance starts now.

 

 

Four Stages of a Coup

 Robert Reich, 

Trump’s attempted coup against the United States continues. We are now in Phase 3.

Phase 1 was his refusal to concede the loss of the 2020 election and his big lie that the election was “stolen” from him, without any basis in fact.

Trump’s actions in Phase 1 were not illegal, but they were immoral. They violated the norms that every president before Trump had dutifully followed.

Phase 2 was his plot to overturn the result of the 2020 election.

Phase 2 was hatched even before Election Day. On October 31, 2020, Trump confidante Steve Bannon told associates that Trump planned to declare he won and claim Biden’s expected victory fraudulent. Audio footage recently available shows that two days before the election, Trump lieutenant Roger Stone was already planning for alternative slates of electors.

Then came Trump’s efforts to strong-arm election officials in swing states to alter votes, persuade Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of electors, get the Justice Department to find fraud in the election process, come up with slates of fake electors, persuade Republican members of Congress to reject the certification, defame and intimidate poll workers, and invite supporters to Washington on the day of the certification — which led inexorably to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Phase 2 was illegal. It violated both statutory laws and the Constitution. Trump is only now starting to be held accountable for these violations, in federal court in Washington and in state court in Georgia.

Phase 3 is his current attempt to discredit and undermine the criminal justice system that’s seeking to hold him accountable for Phase 2.

Trump is smearing presiding judges, excoriating prosecutors, and harassing and intimidating potential witnesses and jurors.

He’s telling another big lie: that the prosecutors, grand juries, judges, potential jurors, and witnesses who are prepared to try him are corrupt and partisan — engaged in a plot to prevent him from being reelected. Like his original big lie, this one has no basis in fact.

Trump’s efforts in Phase 3 are illegal. By publicly threatening people who are or will soon be participating in his trials, he is violating the explicit terms of his release pending trial, which prohibited him from engaging in harassment or intimidation.

In seeking to silence or intimidate judges, prosecutors, and potential jurors and witnesses, Trump is attempting to obstruct justice.

Whether Trump is held accountable for Phase 3 of his attempted coup will be up to the judges and prosecutors now engaged in trying to hold him accountable for Phase 2.

Which brings us to what is likely to be Phase 4 of his attempted coup — his campaign for reelection.

As his trials approach in the months ahead, Trump is likely to escalate his lies that the election system and the criminal justice system are both rigged against him, and therefore against his supporters.

It is too early to know what additional illegal or unconstitutional means he will employ in Phase 4, but there is no reason to believe Trump will treat the upcoming election any more respectfully than he treated the 2020 election or has treated efforts to hold him accountable for what he did then.

Notwithstanding Trump’s ongoing attempted coup, the most recent New York Times/Siena poll shows Trump in a dead heat with Biden for the presidency. Last week’s Quinnipiac poll also shows Trump and Biden in a virtual tie.

Polls are fallible, of course, and the election is 15 months away. But the closeness of the race should be of concern, especially given that Trump has now been indicted for seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump’s attempted coup continues. Since before the 2020 election, he has been engaged in a concerted attempt to undermine the institutions of the United States government. 

Everyone who cares about American democracy should be duly warned — and prepared for Phase 4. 

Robert Reich, 

There are numerous posts by Robert Reich for our seminar.  Use the search engine on this blog for more,

 

 

Still Democracy's Death Watch

 

Still Democracy’s Death Watch

Saving democracy does not resonate when the forces of reaction are gearing up for the next offensive.

BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

 

NOVEMBER 17, 2022

 

 

Expand

ROSS D. FRANKLIN/AP PHOTO

Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a “Save America” rally, July 22, 2022, in Prescott, Arizona.

To understand why nothing has changed in America after the midterm elections of 2022, fire up the wayback machine and decamp to the weeks after voters sent Barack Obama to the White House. Elevate one Black man to the presidency and America declares racism dead and white supremacy so much ancient history.

Obama was Martin Luther King’s dream made real: Mississippi would be transformed into “an oasis of freedom and justice,” Black and white children in Alabama would “join hands as sisters and brothers,” and the sons of former slaves and slave owners in Georgia would commune “at the table of brotherhood.” But many Black folk rejoiced for a minute and then returned to the collective business of being Black in America. It took longer for the Black president and kindred spirits to wake up from the reverie of a post-racial America to realize that racism was not only not dead, it was healthy and thriving.

The heirs to the great white supremacist project had no interest in setting foot in wherever a post-racial America is, or working with a Black man who had somehow managed to navigate the series of evasive maneuvers known as elections. The counterreaction to the 44th president set in almost immediately. Republican shape-shifters threw off the pretenses of the so-called compassionate conservatism that animated George W. Bush for more aggressive stances. All that remained after Obama departed was for the once and current presidential candidate Donald Trump to take the bitterness that had surfaced and sculpt it into a sinister but not unfamiliar force, at least to African Americans.

The 2008 election did not open the portals to a post-racial America, nor will Democrats’ current midterm gains save democracy. This delusion is still in its early days, but the all-too-American propensity for exquisite self-deception is already evident. Somehow, the most successful showing by the president’s party in 20 years is a bulwark against authoritarianism. But that conclusion ignores the salient fact that the forces of “interposition and nullification” that King ascribed to Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1963 are ascendant after three decades of single-minded pursuit of reactionary goals like eviscerating reproductive rights.

“None of the narratives that we read in white commercial media reflect what happened on Tuesday,” Greg Carr, a Howard University associate professor of Afro-American studies, told a national town hall forum on the midterms’ impact on Black America and the Pan-African world last week. “What happened on Tuesday is we bought some time and if we can seize the moment, there is some opportunity here to reimagine our relationship with this state polity we call the United States of America.” He held out statehouse victories (in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan) as “firewalls” protecting Democratic Party gains in 2024. But he warned that the clock is ticking. “We’ve got now 24 months, not even,” he said.

Indeed, the saving democracy project, like the beta version of the post-racial America project, is withering on the vine in real time. The average American voter is collateral damage in the disinformation war that forces people to plow through relentlessly partisan news programming, misleading voter information materials, doctored photos, fake news sites, Russian bots, political ads, and more. Nor is any of that offset by the Fourth Estate’s cancerous preoccupation with horse-race journalism that has reduced elections to poll-dissecting contests that, as the midterms made plain, trivialize voters’ concerns about complex, interrelated factors and transform them into simplistic rankings devoid of nuance.

The 2008 election did not open the portals to a post-racial America, nor will Democrats’ current midterm gains save democracy.

Behind the insistence on an inflation/economy narrative as the issue preoccupying voters was a shaky construct, namely that the average voter is unable to hold multiple concepts like abortion, inflation, and threats to democracy in adjacent brain cells in order to engage in decision-making about their local, state, and national officeholders. At the town hall, Julianne Malveaux, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, asked and answered this question: “Do they care about abortion or inflation? I would posit that Black women can care about both things at the same time.”

November 8 did not erase voter suppression. It remains to be seen how Georgia’s voter suppression laws (one provision, a prohibition on providing water and snacks to voters waiting in line, evoked widespread derision) will be brought to bear on the Sen. Raphael Warnock/Herschel Walker run-off contest. Warnock has already filed suit to force election officials to allow Saturday voting (otherwise, due to a twisted law involving the day after Thanksgiving and a Confederate general that only a Southern legislature could perfect, this runoff will have no weekend voting days).

Democracy on the Ballot: It Won !

 

Democracy Was on the Ballot—And Won Tom Nichols  November 9, 2022 The Atlantic The American crisis isn’t over, but the midterms were a good sign.

American flags in the US Capitol. , (Samuel Corum / Getty)

Let’s get the bad news out of the way: In yesterday’s midterm elections, a fair number of odious candidates managed to buy tickets to Washington. Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson is going back to the Senate, where he will be joined by Ohio’s would-be hillbilly whisperer J. D. Vance, whose campaign will stand for years to come as a monument to cynicism and hypocrisy. We don’t know yet if Kari Lake—or as my friend Tim Miller calls her, the “Empress of Trollistan”—will become governor of Arizona. And we still don’t know who will control Congress. Nonetheless, yesterday was a good day for democracy. Some of the worst election deniers and kookiest candidates were sent packing, in many cases by larger margins than anyone—including me—expected. Among those who must now go back to writing angry Facebook posts and griping on conservative podcasts were such notables as Don Bolduc, the retired general who promised to get to the bottom of the Great Kitty Litter Mystery, and Mehmet Oz, the carpetbagging celebrity doctor. At the state level, things look even brighter for the protection of democracy, as voters turned back a fleet of extremists and outright weirdos. Michigan, whose Democratic governor was the target of a bizarre kidnap plot two years ago, is now under a unified Democratic government for the first time in nearly 40 years. A crackpot running as the GOP candidate for governor in Pennsylvania was drubbed in a double-digit loss to an utterly conventional Democrat. And let’s even give a cheer as well for one Republican: Brad Raffensperger, who had to endure death threats for defying Donald Trump’s demands to upend the 2020 vote in Georgia, was reelected as secretary of state. As the elections analyst Sean Trende said today on Twitter: “It turns out that selecting your candidates from the Star Wars cantina might not be a recipe for electoral success.” If you want to know how bad a night it was for Republicans, check Trump’s temperature, which apparently zoomed last night past “boiling,” through “molten lead,” and is now somewhere near “the surface of the sun.” And rightly so: Some in the GOP are holding Trump responsible for their party’s losses and are now trying to push him out of the way. Even Trump’s conservative hometown paper, the New York Post, twisted the knife this morning with a cover photo of Governor Ron DeSantis and a one word caption: “DeFuture.” The best news in all of this is that the pundits and advisers who told Democrats to talk only about the economy and inflation and avoid any boring yakety-yak about democracy were wrong. As my colleague McKay Coppins tweeted after looking at an AP VoteCast poll, “it’s striking how many voters were motivated by concern for American democracy.” I have been arguing for months that voters are in fact capable of thinking about more than one thing at a time, but I admit that I also was starting to wonder whether fears about GOP authoritarianism could break through the noise. And so I was especially glad that Biden made the case for democracy in his closing argument at Union Station, because I thought it was his duty as president to speak on the threats to our system and warn the voters of what was at stake. In any case, to argue over grocery prices while ignoring Republican threats to stomp on our rights and nullify elections would have been malpractice, with Democrats taking the bait to apologize for the economy (much of which no one can fix right now) while giving a pass to unhinged candidates who couldn’t care less how much a gallon of milk costs.

Uncomfortable Truths That Could Yet Defeat Fascism

 Saving Democracy: Pro democracy forces.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/opinion/midterm-democracy-crisis.html

 

By Anand Giridharadas

Mr. Giridharadas is the author, most recently, of “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy.”

Polls swing this way and that way, but the larger story they tell is unmistakable. With the midterm elections, Americans are being offered a clear choice between continued and expanded liberal democracy, on the one hand, and fascism, on the other. And it’s more or less a dead heat.

It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds.

The pro-democracy side can still very much prevail. But it needs to go beyond its present modus operandi, a mix of fatalism and despair and living in perpetual reaction to the right and policy wonkiness and praying for indictments. It needs to build a new and improved movement — feisty, galvanizing, magnanimous, rooted and expansionary — that can outcompete the fascists and seize the age.

I believe pro-democracy forces can do this because I spent the past few years reporting on people full of hope who show a way forward, organizers who refuse to give in to fatalism about their country or its citizens. These organizers are doing yeoman’s work changing minds and expanding support for true multiracial democracy, and they recognize what more of their allies on the left must: The fascists are doing as well as they are because they understand people as they are and cater to deep unmet needs, and any pro-democracy movement worth its salt needs to match them at that — but for good

Continue reading the main story

 their own circles and sometimes in public, these organizers warn that the right is outcompeting small-d democrats in its psychological insight into voters and their anxieties, its messaging, its knack for narrative, its instinct to make its cause not just a policy program but also a home offering meaning, comfort and belonging. They worry, meanwhile, that their own allies can be hamstrung by a naïve and high-minded view of human nature, a bias for the wonky over the guttural, a self-sabotaging coolness toward those who don’t perfectly understand, a quaint belief in going high against opponents who keep stooping to new lows and a lack of fight and a lack of talent at seizing the mic and telling the kinds of galvanizing stories that bend nations’ arcs.

The organizers I’ve been following believe they have a playbook for a pro-democracy movement that can go beyond merely resisting to winning. It involves more than just serving up sound public policy and warning that the other side is dangerous; it also means creating an approachable, edifying, transcendent movement to dazzle and pull people in. For many on the left, embracing the organizers’ playbook will require leaving behind old habits and learning new ones. What is at stake, of course, is everything.

Command Attention

Democrats Should Make a Much Bigger Deal of the Threat Posed by Trump

 

Democrats will suffer in the midterms if they don’t make absolutely clear the possible consequences of the former president’s disdain for democracy and the rule of law.

By John Nichols for The Nation, June 19, 5:00 am

Republicans recognize that the fundamental issue of the 2022 midterm elections is whether the United States will continue as a constitutional republic or warp into an authoritarian state where the rule of law and the will of the people are casually disregarded. The question is whether Democrats understand that this is what the election is about, and whether they will fight as hard to defend democratic norms as Republicans are fighting to dismantle them.

The GOP is answering the existential question of the era by signaling that it is prepared to abandon the basic premises of the American experiment in order to move toward an authoritarian governance founded on the cult of defeated former president Donald Trump. To that end, Republicans have refashioned their party as the blunt instrument of Trumpism: rejecting even the most conservative members of Congress who voted to impeach a sitting president for inciting insurrection, blocking a bipartisan inquiry into Trump’s plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, andpromising to punish Democrats and Republicans who have pursued investigations of last year’s January 6 Capitol attack. The party has prioritized attacking voting rights and election oversight in the statehouses it controls. It has turned to European white nationalist strongmen, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for inspiration. 

The GOP’s singular focus on dismantling democracy and rejecting the rule of law came into stark relief on the morning of August 8, when FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in Florida. An apoplectic Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted“DEFUND THE FBI!” and vowed, “In January, we take on the enemy within.” Instead of a rebuke, Greene’s extremism earned an echo from House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.): “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” he declared. “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.” Leaving no doubt about his desire to intimidate the Department of Justice, McCarthy told Attorney General Merrick Garland to “preserve your documents and clear your calendar.” The Republican who could be the next speaker of the House was proposing nothing less than obstruction of justice in order to defend Trump.

There is no longer any question about where the GOP stands. But where exactly do the Democrats stand?

Sanders : Our Democracy is Under Attack

Bernie Sanders.

 

Democracy   1-6/2022

One year ago today, a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol with the hope of overturning the results of the presidential election. The images Americans saw that day made visibly clear what many of us have realized for a long time:

Our democracy is under severe attack.

But the truth is that the attack on our democracy goes far deeper than the violence of January 6, 2021. 

Our democracy is under attack from Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures across the country who are doing everything in their power to suppress the vote and make it harder for people of color and young people to vote. These political cowards are also engaging in extreme gerrymandering and are drawing the lines of their districts so they pick their voters instead of voters picking their representatives. They are intent on establishing permanent majorities.

Our democracy is under attack when many Republicans, at all levels of government, promote the Big Lie that the presidential election was stolen and increasingly call into question the results of any election they lose.

Our democracy is under attack when election officials are being harassed and threatened and when efforts are being made to allow partisan legislatures to determine election winners and losers.

But let’s be clear. It is not just the subversion of democratic norms and voting rights that is undermining our democracy.

Our democracy is also under attack because all across this country people increasingly believe democracy itself, and our government, does not work for them. 

For the vast majority of Americans there is a huge disconnect between the reality of their lives and what goes on in Washington, D.C. The people see the politicians talking, talking and talking, they watch the 30 second TV ads and they hear the promises that are made — but never kept. They remember what Lincoln said about "government of the people, by the people and for the people," and they know how far removed we are from that today.

They see the very rich become much richer while politicians and the corporate media ignore the collapse of the middle class and the painful realities facing working families — low wages, dead end jobs, debt, homelessness, lack of health care or educational opportunity, declining life expectancy, substance abuse, impoverished retirement.

Democrat or Republican. Who cares? Nothing changes or, if it does, it's usually for the worse.

Millions of Americans are unable to make it on starvation wages and many of them struggle to put food on the table, but Congress is unable to raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

Over 80 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, with millions going into bankruptcy because of unpaid medical bills, but Congress is unable to do what every other major country does — guarantee health care as a human right.

One out of four Americans are unable to afford the prescription drugs they need but Congress is unable to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry which charges us, by far, the highest prices in the world.

Almost 43 million Americans are struggling with student debt but Congress, busy giving tax breaks to the rich and well-connected, is unable to forgive that burden which is crushing the dreams of so many.

In homes across this country seniors are being forced to live out their later years without teeth in their mouths or the ability to see or hear properly, but Congress is unable to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision. 

And, while climate change ravages our country and the world, Congress is unable to confront the fossil fuel industry, cut carbon emissions and leave future generations a planet that will be healthy and habitable. 

So it is no great surprise that people look at the process that produces these outcomes and say, “Nope. Not for me. I don’t know what these guys are doing but it's not relevant to my life.” 

So yes, Congress must hold responsible those who engaged in insurrection at the Capitol and make sure there is never again any doubt about the peaceful transition of power in this country.

Yes, Congress must take action immediately to end voter suppression and make it easier for people in every state in this country to participate in the political process.

But, if we are really going to save democracy and make it relevant to people's lives, Congress must boldly address the long-neglected crises facing the working people of this country. In other words, dare I say, Congress must represent the needs of ordinary Americans and not just wealthy campaign contributors.

The choice before us is whether we move into oligarchy, where our economic and political life is dominated by a handful of billionaires, or whether we create a vibrant democracy where the voices of the people are heard, and where their needs are addressed. 

As we enter the new year I look forward to working with you to create a country in which our children and parents are not living in poverty, in which young people can afford to go to college and in which working families have the health care and prescription drugs they need. I will fight for policies which will save the planet for future generations. Will we succeed? I can’t guarantee you that.

But I can tell you there is no chance unless we are in this together.

Not me. Us.

The struggle to create a nation and world of economic and social justice and environmental sanity is not an easy one. The struggle to try and create a more peaceful world will be extremely difficult. But this I know: despair is not an option if we care about our kids and grandchildren. Giving up is not an option if we want to prevent irreparable harm to our planet.

We must stand up and fight back. We must continue our commitment to a political revolution which engages millions of Americans from all walks of life in the struggle for real change. 

This country belongs to all of us, not just the billionaire class. And that is what our work is about.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

 

  

One year after an attack on our democracy

 

Randi Weingarten

Follow

Jan 6 · 4 min read

One year ago today we witnessed firsthand an attack on our country: an insurrection by political extremists at the U.S. Capitol.

I was in Washington D.C., blocks from the Capitol building, which I can see from my office. I watched on television along with the rest of the country as throngs of violent protesters, intent on stopping the certification of the 2020 presidential election, defaced our government and threatened the very core of our democracy. I knew that it was a pivotal moment for America and our fundamental promise of free and fair elections.

We’re one year out from that treacherous day, and Congress has yet to pass meaningful reforms to secure the right to vote and protect the integrity of our elections. Meanwhile, states and counties are passing their own laws meant to disenfranchise voters and undermine those who are responsible for counting votes and running fair elections. If we care about our democracy and our way of life, we can’t sit idly by.

I’m a civics teacher who has the honor of serving as the president of the American Federation of Teachers. As I reflect on what the anniversary of the insurrection means, I’m grounded in those two things. At Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., I taught about the values underlying our democracy. The people are supposed to decide who governs them: Eligible Americans get to vote, their votes are tallied, and win or lose, we respect the outcome of the election. One of the many great things about America is that, despite our differences, we believe in peaceful protest, peaceful transfer of power, and the right to vote. And my students, who fiercely debated these fundamentals, learned that debate can be fierce but still respectful, based on ideas and facts, not bullying or misinformation.

But Donald Trump and his enablers went into overdrive when the 2020 election was called for Joe Biden, determined to undermine these precepts of our democracy. They are trying to choose who can vote because they don’t like how the majority of people voted. They are trying to make it harder for those they think will vote by restricting access to voting. They actively tried to throw out legitimate votes, mostly votes of people of color, because they didn’t like how they voted. They’re trying to redraw districts so that they choose the voters, the voters don’t choose them. And now they’re bullying and threatening election officials across the country — because of supposed voter fraud that didn’t happen.

Trump’s claim that the election was stolen — his “big lie” — is a fabrication. There is no evidence to support that claim; in fact, the evidence refutes it. It’s been rejected by the courts. It’s been disproven by independent experts. His supporters’ plan is to repeat the lie so often that people start believing it.

That’s the lie that laid the groundwork for the insurrection. Thousands of people believed Trump and stormed the Capitol in an act of domestic terrorism that caused millions of dollars in damages, led to several deaths, including of Capitol police, and hurt our nation. And that is the lie that fuels potential future violence against our democracy and the people who tend to it.

As Congress continues to investigate the attack on the Capitol, I want to be clear that our commitment to democracy is as strong as ever. That’s why we’re fighting for key pieces of legislation that will help make America better. We need the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to ensure the right to vote is protected for all Americans. Arcane Senate rules like the filibuster must not stand in the way of securing these fundamental rights. We need the Protecting Our Democracy Act to secure our nation from future abuses of power like Trump’s. We need the Protecting Our Right to Organize Act, the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act and the Build Back Better Act to help workers across the country recover from this pandemic. And we need to support the full investigation being done by the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee.

There are people across the country wondering what they can do right now to help protect our democracy. Here are a few places to get started:

First, write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Tell them that the Senate needs to pass voting rights legislation now. Our tool will help you do that.

Second, for educators and parents who want to teach and learn about democracy, there are free lesson plans and resources from Share My Lesson.

Third, call your senators and tell them it’s time for the Senate to work on behalf of the American people. Tell them they cannot let a handful of politicians hide behind obscure Senate bureaucracy to block votes to protect our elections and our fundamental freedoms. It’s time to fix the Senate and protect our right to vote. Call now: 202–224–3121.

Finally, make sure you read up on fascism and how democracies fall. For the last few years I’ve recommended Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. It’s a great starting point for people who want to learn more and be able to discuss what’s happening in this country.

I hope we all take time to reflect on the events of last Jan. 6 — the day our democracy almost died — and recommit ourselves to fighting the misinformation and lies that make this a perilous time for our way of life.