Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People

Danny Katch

• Editorial: Haymarket Books
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781608468737
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Democracy

The election of Donald Trump has sent U.S. and the world into uncharted waters, with a bigoted, petty man-child at the head of the planet’s most powerful empire. Danny Katch indicts the hollowness of U.S. political system which led to Trump’s rise and puts forward a vision for a real alternative, a democracy that works for the people.

PART I

Democracy in America—Would Be Nice

1

Enter the Wormhole

Imagine coming out of a long coma and finding out that a worm is now in charge of your country. Not a metaphorical worm but an actual giant night crawler—one that can stand upright, wear a suit, and tweet, but otherwise a typical worm that has no eyes to see beauty or suffering and no ears to listen to the wisdom of other points of view. Instead this thing that is now president is equipped only with the primal fear of the unknown shared by all living things, plus a set of chemoreceptors all over his slimy skin that pick up even the faintest scents of money and celebrity that he’s been crawling toward throughout his dim and miserable life.

If you woke up in this strange world, your first question wouldn’t be about the damn worm, but about what the hell had happened to everything else to get to this point. This book aims to give some answers.

Donald Trump is undeniably compelling. I could spend hours watching him speak, mesmerized by the waves of his ego breaking on the rocks of his attention span. But he’s not a pied piper who mysteriously put the electorate into a trance. On the contrary, he’s been loathed by a majority of the country from the day he announced his candidacy to the day I’m writing these words and every moment in between. He’s the least popular person to win the White House in at least a century—possibly ever, but I’m not going to pretend to know what voters in the 1800s thought about Grover Cleveland or Millard Fillmore (although with names like those, I’m guessing they were either laughingstocks or the baddest mothers to ever take office).

Trump started with a small but fervent base among cops, small business owners, and people who enjoy hearing that their neighbor has been deported. He expanded this small following, first among pockets of blue-collar workers in Rust Belt regions that felt betrayed by the Democratic Party, and then, after winning the party nomination, he received reluctant backing from the rest of Republican voters, most of whom would vote for a punch in the face over a Democrat. But this still represents a minority of the country, and Trump is horrible at broadening his support any further. The first few months in office are supposed to be a honeymoon between a country and its new president; Trump and Sean Spicer spent them screaming at us and dumping our possessions on the White House lawn. Trump’s strengths are media manipulation and connecting with enraged male impotence. His weaknesses are being unlikeable and unintelligent, a rough combination for success in any field beyond owning a professional sports team and starring in a Real Housewives franchise.

The president has his own signature way of dealing with being unpopular: “Any negative polls are fake news. Just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election.” That’s what Trump tweeted during his first attempt to ban entry to people from seven predominantly Muslim countries, a shocking and absurd act that filled airports across the country with stranded travelers and angry protesters. The new president had practically shut down his country’s air hubs with his own racist memo, and polls unsurprisingly showed that most people didn’t approve. Trump’s response to these polls was to lie, as he did throughout his campaign, but now with a new frighteningly authoritarian twist: since the media had incorrectly predicted that Clinton would win the election, any subsequent negative reporting about the White House could be dismissed as false.

Trump is famous for blatantly lying about things we can easily disprove, like the size of his inauguration crowd or whether he mocked a disabled reporter. It’s a power move more common to military dictatorships whose message is that the truth is whatever the leader says it is, and it’s one of many aspects of Trump that the establishment finds distasteful. They prefer to propagate their ideology through more respectable means. Howard Zinn described this approach in the introduction to his classic A People’s History of the United States, writing about the treatment given in most textbooks to the Native American genocide:

Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery, which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in this world.

There was a similar dynamic to the torrent of media coverage in the weeks and months after Trump’s shocking election victory. A few simple truths that were fundamental to understanding what had happened—millions of poor and nonwhite people weren’t allowed to vote and many millions more were so disillusioned they chose not to—were occasionally and briefly acknowledged and then buried under a mass of punditry, speculation, and hot takes. This burial wasn’t a conscious conspiracy but a routine journalistic determination that these key facts were nothing new and therefore boring. And that in itself might be the most revealing truth of all, not just about Trump’s victory but about the system that produced it.

Trump is a tumor, not the cancer. He can do deadly harm if we don’t stop him, but we also have to treat the deeper sickness. Everything about the 2016 election points to the undemocratic nature of US democracy, from Trump’s winning despite getting almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton to the pair of Trump and Clinton being the two most unpopular candidates in modern history. To put it more boldly, talking about democracy in a country that has hundreds of billionaires and hundreds of thousands who are homeless is a joke. There is no such thing as an equal vote in the midst of wildly unequal power and wealth, and what we call democracy has little to do with the word’s original meaning of rule by the majority.

What we have instead is an awkward contraption made up of three elements. The first is the original system created by the Constitution, which intended to give a voice only to a minority of well-off “stakeholders.” As women, African Americans, and others successfully fought over the next 150 years to expand voting rights to most of the adult population, the system developed two more contradictory but interlocking features: a severely limited input from the majority of ordinary people, combined with a cooptation of that majority into political machines run by competing sections of the elite.

Trump may not be popular, but he didn’t need majority support to get elected in our dysfunctional democracy, and he doesn’t need it to push through his destructive aims. To stop him, we have to organize ourselves into a force that’s powerful enough to resist his agenda—and dynamic enough to advance our own. Some of that can take place in voting booths, but most of it will be in unions and grassroots organizations that have been at the heart of every major victory for equality and justice in this country’s history.

These arguments won’t be popular with everybody who is simply “anti-Trump.” They could even create divisions between those who just want to replace Trump and get things back to normal, and those who think that “normal” is what got us here. Let’s have those debates, so that we can fight the rising right with a genuine left instead of once again retreating into a mushy and meaningless center. The way to take on the worm king isn’t to close our eyes and hope that when we wake up it will turn out to have been a bad dream. It’s to look around and see that we’ve been surrounded by mud and dirt our whole lives, and it’s time to start digging ourselves out.

2

What’s the Matter with Wisconsin?

The most surprising state that Donald Trump carried on his way to the presidency was Wisconsin. Hillary Clinton was so confident she would win it that she didn’t even bother visiting once in the final months of the campaign, and you can understand why. The state hadn’t voted for a Republican president in over thirty years. Hell, even their football team is communist—the Green Bay Packers are publicly owned by their fans.

Wisconsin was one of several Midwest states that swung from Democratic to Republican in 2016, a trend that led many to focus on why some of the region’s white male blue-collar workers would vote for a billionaire (supposedly) New York City real estate developer. It’s a variation on the question that progressives have been asking for decades about people voting “against their economic interest”—most famously in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Racism clearly played a role in Trump’s victory—in Wisconsin and everywhere else—but not enough to fully explain how he won a state that gave big victories in 2008 and 2012 to Barack Obama. (Who’s … you know … Black.) In fact, the vote totals in Wisconsin tell a story of an electorate that wasn’t fired up by right-wing demagoguery but disillusioned by disappointments. Trump actually received fewer votes than the 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney—one of the least inspiring candidates imaginable—but won the state because Hillary Clinton got a full 200,000 votes fewer than Obama had four years earlier. What happened in Wisconsin was similar to what happened in many parts of the country: Trump won because Clinton and the Democrats lost.

The thing about Wisconsin that’s a bit different is that, five years before Trump’s election, the state capitol was the site of a massive protest and occupation that not only inspired and influenced social movements for years to come but also showed the vast difference between the mass participation of popular assemblies and the hollow democracy of the politics-as-usual that followed and helped pave the way for 2016.

The protest started in February 2011 when Scott Walker, the newly elected Republican governor and human sock puppet for the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, launched a sneak attack of massive budget cuts and an attempt to practically wipe out public-sector unions, neither of which had been emphasized during his campaign. The response was immediate and electrifying. A protest by graduate student employees led to a three-day public schoolteachers’ “sick-out,” which led to a 24/7 occupation of the capitol building in Madison by teachers, firefighters, and other workers across the state, while Democratic lawmakers walked out to deny the Republicans the quorum they needed to pass the bill. The “Cheddar Revolution” was on. What started as a protest against Walker within days also became a joyous celebration by working people of the fact that they were finally standing up for themselves after decades of taking worse and worse deals. All that happiness was sickening, of course, to the dark overlords of right-wing radio. Rush Limbaugh and others repeatedly referred to the smiling teachers staging their sick-out as “union thugs.” As if Monday morning at Osh Kosh Elementary is like a scene from Goodfellas: “Psst. Don’t fuck with Mrs. Lemke in the Enrichment Center. Your body might end up at the bottom of a sandbox.”

There was a “people’s mic” in the capitol rotunda, open to all—one of many ways that Madison was a forerunner of the Occupy Wall Street movement that broke out later in the year. For people who were there and the millions of us who watched the livestreams, it was the first time in our lives we had seen government buildings actually becoming forums for genuine public discussion. Just imagine if corporate lobbyists had to do their business in the rotundas of capitol buildings instead of behind the closed doors of their private offices: Hi, everybody. My name is Phil and I work for Koch Industries. I think you should support this clause that exempts us from having to pay the standard rate of corporate taxes because it will make us a boatload of money. Whaddaya say?

Democracy is supposed to be about self-rule: we the people don’t need a monarch to tell us how to live, because we can solve our own problems and determine our own fate. It almost never really works that way, but that was the situation that confronted Wisconsinites in 2011. The occupation grew quickly because people had to physically stop the Republican-dominated legislature from ramming through Walker’s bill. Symbolic protest wouldn’t do. That’s how “See you in November” became “We’ll see your ass every day until we win.” That’s how “I’m a union member and I vote” became “I’m a teacher and I call out sick.” Walker’s attack forced the Wisconsin labor movement to rediscover a long-forgotten lesson: Protests can … try to win. Workers can strike—or at least call out sick for three days, like the teachers did. State senators who oppose bad legislation can walk out. And everyone else can stay.

But while the occupation and protests succeeded in delaying the passage of the bill, it was going to take even stronger resistance to defeat it. For the first time in generations, people who raised the idea of a general strike were not considered crazy—or worse, European. So what happened when Scott Walker upped the stakes by illegally passing his bill, without public notice, in the middle of the night? One hundred and fifty thousand workers assembled in Madison, and union leaders vowed to … gather signatures to recall the governor the next year.

Walker’s bill would crush public-sector unions not the next year but immediately. Wasn’t there something more immediate and direct that could be done? Don’t workers have a weapon more powerful than the campaign contribution or the trifold brochure? We don’t celebrate the great Flint Phone Bank of 1937 or remember how Eugene V. Debs organized railroad workers to go door-knocking in swing states. By responding to Walker’s passage of the bill with a recall campaign instead of a strike, labor leaders essentially brought an online petition to a gunfight. Sometimes I think that if a typical union president saw his house go up in flames, he would dash off to the bank to get money for the first Democrat who promised to put out the fire once he got into office.

Even worse, the Democrat who ran against Walker in the 2012 recall election, Tom Barrett, didn’t even promise to restore union rights or most of Walker’s budget cuts!¹ Despite the fact that the recall was only possible because of the Madison protests, the Barrett campaign was a typical operation, in which the grassroots was given no input into the candidate’s platform. The occupation of the capitol building breathed new life into the national labor movement and directly inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement, but when its participants turned their energies toward a recall election, they were easily swallowed up by the Democratic Party machine.

One of the unexpected ways that the Madison protests went viral was the popularity of protest signs reflecting the working-class gallows humor of government employees:

My Kindergarteners Are Better Listeners than My Governor

Hey Walker WI Ranger: Who’s Gonna Wipe Your Ass When You Have a Stroke?

I Protect Your Family From the Criminally Insane. Remember That.

These signs weren’t just funny. They built national support by showing that the protesters were the people we all work with. Want to know a sign that doesn’t get a lot of clicks? Vote Tom Barrett for Governor. Walker easily won the 2012 recall, but in truth our side had lost long before.

The results have been disastrous in Wisconsin and beyond. Walker’s law against public-sector unions stood, and soon he passed another one against private-sector unions. Other Republican governors in the Midwest soon followed Walker’s lead and passed so-called right-to-work laws that have gutted the historic heart of the US labor movement—the fact that this also weakens the most powerful organizations that get out the votes for Democrats is a nice bonus for them, too.

But what’s especially relevant to the subject of democracy is the way the recall election served to legitimize the very same policies that had originally led people to occupy their state building. Governor Walker’s bold attempt at union busting was seen as a coup that had to be directly resisted. A year later there was an election in which neither candidate stood for the protesters’ demands, but somehow this was seen as a legitimate procedure because it gave people a chance to vote—just not any input as to what they could vote for.

What happened in Wisconsin from 2011 to 2012 matters not just because it helps explain how Trump was able to win the state years later, but also because it has lessons about the type of opposition we’re going to need to build against him. You will hear many arguments in the coming months and years that protesting against deportations, police violence, and climate change is great, but it will only really matter if we turn those numbers into votes in the next elections. I say the opposite: those elections will only matter if we have politicians and parties that are accountable to the things we’re demanding in our protests. If not, then those elections will only serve to officially mark our defeat, no matter which candidate wins.

1 In fact, as mayor of Milwaukee Barrett used a section of Walker’s antiunion law to force concessions from city workers.

3

We Choose, They Decide

When coup leaders take to the airwaves to announce martial law, they usually go for the tough-guy image: military uniforms, dark sunglasses, the whole bit. On a Sunday morning early in his presidency, Donald Trump tried it with Stephen Miller, a dweeby-looking policy advisor whose right-wing origin story is the trauma of being unpopular in his liberal Santa Monica...