One of my favorite actors, André Holland, was recently interviewed by David Canfield for Vanity Fair.
Writes Canfield in the introduction to his conversation with Holland:
[I]t’s clear that selectiveness has served him well – even if it led to some moments of serious self-doubt. He broke out on the big screen in 2016 with his wrenching final-act turn in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, before going on to lead Netflix projects helmed by Steven Soderbergh (High Flying Bird) and Damien Chazelle (The Eddy). Next week sees the release of arguably his most impressive film performance to date, as an acclaimed painter forced to confront his abusive father in Titus Kaphar’s Exhibiting Forgiveness. And more projects are in the pipeline as well [including] The Knick’s long-delayed third season.
Following are excerpts from David Canfield’s October 8, 2024 Vanity Fair interview with André Holland. Enjoy!
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Vanity Fair: You’ve said you gave everything to [Exhibiting Forgiveness]. What did that mean to you?
André Holland: To speak candidly about it, when I first got the script, I was going through a pretty tough time personally. My father was battling cancer, having some very serious health issues. When I read the story, it felt like there was a sense of alignment. Obviously, my relationship with my father is nothing like what’s depicted in the film, but [my character] Tarrell had been living for many years in the absence of his father. I was at a place where I was approaching the beginning of the absence of my father. I knew it was going to call for an emotional honesty and availability – and that the things that were going on in my own life, I wasn’t going to be able to tuck away or to hide. I had to bring all of that to the part, which is a scary thing to do. But that’s the calling, man.
The other thing you had to do with this project is learn how to paint. That’s a more practical education, right?
AH: And I had absolutely zero art training whatsoever. I was a kid in school where a teacher would say, “We’re going to draw a fire engine” or whatever, and I’d draw it and mine would come out looking like a cat or something. [Laughs] But Titus and I started in the studio before we really even started working on the text, and so I would go up and spend time with him and just paint. We would do everything. We’d read books about painting, we’d go to the museum together. We did blind contour drawings, we did mixing paint. We did all of it, and we both felt really passionately about wanting to make sure that the actual art, making the actual painting wasn’t something that we had to fake or cut around a whole lot.
I wanted to know what that felt like to put paint on canvas. We spent probably about three, three and a half months working together on that aspect of it, and then slowly started to work on the text, and then we continued to work on the painting throughout the project. We were painting even all the way up until the very last day.
. . . [A]s someone who, on screen at least, has often played the role of a character actor, [what's it like] getting two scenes and needing to make them count?
AH: That’s a really good point. You made me think about Moonlight when you said that – thinking about that last scene in that diner. I remember reading that and thinking, I’m coming in at the very end. That’s a lot of responsibility to make sure to honor the work that the other actors have already done, and then you’ve got to carry the whole story and all of that – while wanting to make an impact. That’s really true. It also makes me think back to the early days when I was doing Shakespeare in the Park and I was in the back holding a spear for an hour and a half, and had my three lines: “Yes, my Lord.” “No, my Lord.” “I beseech you, my Lord.” Whatever it was, standing there and feeling like, “That moment’s coming.” I want to make sure I do the best with it. Maybe that is something that’s a part of my practice that I hadn’t really considered.
There’s a lot to mine there, probably, especially because this year, you have this film, and you played Huey P. Newton in the Apple series The Big Cigar – both pretty demanding lead roles. Does it feel different for you as an actor to occupy that space?
AH: It does feel different, and I really like it. For a long time I wondered whether I would be given chances to do that, and when you wonder about that for awhile, sometimes it can erode your confidence. There were moments where I thought, “Am I up to it?” But then getting to do it a handful of times now, I feel very well-equipped to do it, and it’s so much more exciting. Not just the acting part of it – that’s obviously thrilling – but also the way you sort of become a more prominent storyteller or keeper of the story. You feel a sense of responsibility.
Can you share a little bit more about that confidence crisis? Was it not getting parts you were going out for, or not even getting in the room for those parts?
AH: It’s probably a combination of those things, plus also just an internal struggle around self-confidence, which is something that I went to war with and still sometimes have to work on.
I would love to ask you a little bit about Moonlight [above] in that context. Both materially and in terms of how you saw yourself as an actor, how did it change things for you?
AH: It did open up a lot of other opportunities for me. People were more aware of who I am, and people were so kind. Tarell [Alvin McCraney], who wrote the original [play], he and I met when we just came out of grad school – he had come out of Yale, I came out of NYU . . . and then we started doing plays together. Moonlight felt almost like a natural extension of that collaboration. It has been a conversation, a collaboration, an investigation that the two of us had been experiencing together for years. The character that I played in Moonlight is very much an archetype of the character that I played in several of his plays. In a way, that scene that people really responded well to was the product not just of those three weeks of shooting, but also the years of us thinking about: What does it mean to be this person that you meet at the crossroads in your life? I can go on and on about that, but it changed a lot, man. Materially, practically.
And it was a wonderful acting challenge – a really, really wonderful challenge. I loved every second of it. It also set the bar for me of, This is the kind of work that I want to do.
I have to do my journalistic duty and ask you where season three of The Knick is, if anywhere.
AH: We’re still fighting the good fight. It’s taking longer than any of us wanted it to take. At this point, we’re waiting on a brave soul to step up and say, “Let’s go make the show.” We’ve got all the pieces in place and we’re in some good conversations. It’s just a matter of somebody fully committing. Barry’s still in the boat, and I am, and the writers are on – like I said, we’ve got all the pieces. It’s just a matter of finding the right home for it. The period thing scares a lot of people these days. I still think there’s a place in the world for this show. I know that there is – and I’m not going to rest until we get it done.
I know way too many people who are way too excited about the idea of it for there not to be enough of a demand for it.
AH: Seriously. Out of everything I’ve done, that is the one thing that no matter where I go, people always come up to me and say, “What’s going on with The Knick?” It doesn’t matter where I am. It’s happening in France, Italy – all over the world. Folks from all walks of life. I know there’s a place for it. Keep talking about it, man. We’re going to make it happen.
To read David Canfield's interview with André Holland in its entirety, click here.
I conclude this post with André’s 12-minute interview with BET Talks, an interview that was conducted earlier this week. In this interview, André discusses his latest film, Exhibiting Forgiveness. In doing so, he “delves into the deeply emotional themes of the movie, sharing insights about his character’s journey and how the film reflects real-life struggles with letting go and moving forward.”
I find the following by Julia Cameron to be very timely and meaningful. Perhaps you will too. It’s from her book, Transitions: Prayers and Declarations for a Changing Life
One life, one energy runs through all of creation. This life is Spirit, an inner river that can be tapped into at any time. Knowing this, we are divinely guided at all times. In any place, in any circumstance, the Inner Voice has clarity and direction for me, if I will seek it out. Often it is just an act of focusing that brings the sense of direction more fully into play. When outward events jostle me with their velocity and turbulence, I must actively turn within, seeking higher perceptions.
Today, I release the urgency of outer events. I listen to the inner rhythm of God. I set my pace by divine guidance. The world and its busy agendas do not control my soul. My soul rests in God.
It’s the ’70s storytelling. It’s the slow burn, the backstory, and then the payoff. All that time building the foundation is exponentially repaid because everything mattered along the way.
Andor stars Diego Luna (left), reprising his role as Cassian Andor in Rogue One. Like Rogue One, Andor has a much grittier look and feel, and far more complex characters than any other movie or TV series in the Star Wars franchise. This definitely goes a long way in accounting for my interest in, and appreciation for, both Rogue One and Andor.
The first season of Andor was released on the Disney+ streaming platform in 2022. The second (and final) season is scheduled for release early next year.
In the lead-up to season two I’m sharing a series of posts celebrating Andor. Tonight’s installment features two Andor-related pieces. First, an excerpt from a January 4, 2023 Wiredarticle that asserts that Andor is “a masterclass in good writing.” The piece goes on to say the following.
The Star Wars series Andor, a prequel to the 2016 film Rogue One, is a dramatic examination of the early days of the Rebel Alliance. Science fiction author Matt London was impressed by the show’s sophisticated characterization and dialog.
“There’s so much subtext in the dialog of Andor, and there’s so much communicated in the silences,” London says in Episode 533 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s not passive viewing. I think it takes an active mind to engage. It’s not a kid’s show.”
TV writer Andrea Kail agrees that Andor is a mature, complex piece of storytelling. “In every other Star Wars, there’s black and there’s white,” she says. “There’s no crossover. Everything in this show is about moral ambiguity. It’s about the gray tones in every single situation. And that, for me, is why this is an adult show. Nothing is black and white in the world. Everybody makes choices, and some of those choices hurt other people. That’s the way life is, and that’s the way war is.”
Andor largely eschews many Star Wars staples, such as wacky creatures and funny droids, focusing instead on the realities of power and violence. Fantasy author Erin Lindsey, who worked for many years as a U.N. aid worker, found the show’s depiction of politics to be completely believable. “I think there are clearly people on the writing team who are students of spy novels like [those by] John le Carré and who are students of politics and students of history, who are really looking at how revolution has happened here on Earth and what that looks like,” she says.
The second thing I share this evening is a 16-minute video review of Andor by “Spaceman.”
This review, entitled “Andor is a Star Wars Masterpiece from 1978,” received the Dilectio Sapientiae Award at the 2023 Miami International Science-Fiction and Film Festival. Its title reflects the late-1970s look and feel of Andor, which of course was the time period when the film it serves as a sequel to (1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope) was made.
What matters to Donald Trump is total loyalty. If you want to create a dictatorship in the United States, there are two things Donald has to do to fulfill his statement that he’s going to be dictator, though he claims for one day. You have to control the enforcement of the laws. And there are more than 100,000 people at the Justice Department. The FBI is under the attorney general, for example. And then, secondly, you have to fire those general officers, admirals and generals, who will not do your bidding and ignore their oath of office, and replace them with craven junior officers who will do your bidding, politicizing the American military. Those are the two key levers to creating a Trump dictatorship.
The Republican Party used this say that it stood for freedom, for individual freedom. It’s very clear that it now stands for authoritarian control. And the [Department of Justice] is part of that. You will behave the way we want you to do in the Trump administration, or we will find ways to punish you; we will find ways to take away money, to shut down your non-profit organization on a whim, a mere accusation with no proof. And remember that under the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity decision, anything Donald Trump does in his official capacity is beyond review by anyone anywhere. The Supreme Court majority has effectively set up a dictatorship for Trump. The question is: Does he have the competence to execute it? No. Does he have people around him who are competent to execute it? Absolutely.
The Green Party’s 2024 presidential and vice presidential candidates Jill Stein and Butch Ware have given their first interview after the November 5 U.S. presidential election. The Stein/Ware ticket secured 730,939 votes in the 2024 presidential election, which translates as 0.5% of the national vote.
Speaking yesterday on The Katie Halper Show, Stein and Ware talked about a number of things, including how they see the Biden/Harris administration’s unconditional support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a key factor in the Democratic Party’s defeat. They also responded to recent derogatory remarks about “third parties” made by Lawrence O’Donnell, and to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s earlier accusation that the Green Party is “predatory.” Finally, Stein and Ware reflected on things that, in retrospect, they would have done differently in their campaign.
NOTE: The segment of the following Katie Halper Show featuring Jill Stein and Butch Ware begins at the 52:45 mark.
11/27/24 UPDATE: As a financial supporter of the Green Party and the Stein/Ware campaign of 2024, I received today the following e-mail message from Jill Stein.
Michael,
As we power up for the next phase of this movement, I want to send you my deepest heartfelt gratitude. For you are a paragon of courage, the unstoppable force we need for an America and a world that works for all of us! Together we have changed history, and our work has only begun.
Despite the extraordinary effort to silence, smear and intimidate us, you stood strong to challenge genocide, endless war, oligarchy, inequality, climate collapse, rising fascism, nuclear armageddon and more.
You forced solutions into the election dialogue that would otherwise have been ignored – from a weapons embargo to end Israel’s genocide, to ending endless war, a $25 dollar minimum wage, rent control, Medicare for All, a real Green New Deal, reparations, land back, an end to mass incarceration and police violence, and ending the migration crisis by ending predatory US policies driving mass migration in the first place - from endless war and neo-colonialism to the war on drugs and more.
It is a tribute to you that we emerge with the third highest vote count in the race, some 770,000 votes and counting. In fact, among people-powered parties, we have the highest vote count of all, making us the leading political alternative – as we continue building collaboration across like-minded parties and movements. We also helped maintain Green ballot access in 17 states across the country, no small feat given the extraordinary effort to deny our ballot access.
We did all of this despite the most extreme propaganda and political repression I’ve seen in my lifetime: the DNC “war room” to smear and censor us; their “army of lawyers” to kick us off the ballot; their job postings to solicit spies and infiltrators; and for the first time ever, a billion-dollar campaign had to buy smear ads against a grassroots candidate. Every time their attack dogs pounced – like AOC, DNC chair Jaime Harrison, Thom Hartmann, Angela Rye, Mark Ruffalo and more – they were deservedly ridiculed on social media.
Don’t be discouraged by a vote count more distorted than ever by billionaire money, ballot access obstruction, censorship, disinformation, and fear-mongering. In ways that count the most, we emerge stronger than ever – in our resolve to keep building and in the breadth and depth of new partnerships with the Muslim American, Arab American, student, radical labor, immigrant and Black Liberation movements.
More than one in three eligible voters stayed home, rejecting both parties that have thrown them under the bus. These voters are largely young, low income and people of color. This is why Democrats worked so hard to disappear our campaign, fearing the potential for disenfranchised voters to discover a campaign fighting for them. Unaware of a people-powered option, millions of working people stayed home or swung to Trump. But Trump’s agenda of deportations and tariffs will cause massive economic chaos and inflation, while tax giveaways for the rich and obscene military expenditures will squander resources needed for health care, housing and climate survival. All of this will leave Americans more desperate than ever for a politics for working people. It’s only a matter of time and concerted outreach for us to reach voters hungry for what we’re offering.
Our campaign was never just about a single election – it has always been about building a lasting movement for change. That work continues, and I invite you to join us in taking the next steps.
Getting active with the Green Party is an important way for us to stay connected and keep up the momentum. You can connect with your state party, sign up for the national Green Party newsletter, and join a caucus through the embedded links. Through your state party, you can be appointed to a national working committee (including Ballot Access, Campaign Coordination, Diversity, Eco-Action, Fundraising, IT, Media, Outreach, Peace Action, Platform and more). Stay tuned for a labor committee and Muslim caucus currently being formed.
I hope you’ll get involved today so we can keep organizing together – and stay tuned for more to come on next steps!
This is not the end – it’s a new beginning. I’ll be in touch through ongoing social media, occasional emails, and a biweekly livestream beginning in the new year. As we face unprecedented crises threatening our rights, our lives, and life on Earth itself, by standing together, we can transform our world into one that truly works for all of us.
Thank you for being part of this incredible journey. Your passion, commitment, and belief in this movement inspire me every day. Let’s keep the momentum going and build a future rooted in justice, sustainability, and peace.
Finally, I want to share a short video that captures the spirit of this campaign and what many of us believe lies ahead. Huge thanks to our amazing team member Mar Kamal (@grinvites on Instagram) for this inspiration.
It’s been just over a week since last Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election and the stunning defeat of the Democratic Party by the Donald Trump-led Republican Party which now controls the presidency, the senate and the house. It was an unprecedented “red wave” that swept all in its path.
Significantly, the Democratic Party and its selected candidate Kamala Harris were defeated in all seven swing states and, nationally, lost by a margin greater than all third party votes combined. This latter reality means that the so-called “spoiler effect” of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein can’t be used as an excuse for the Democrats’ decisive loss.
In the time since Team Blue’s electoral trouncing, a lot of folks have expressed dismay at what they perceive as a “blame game” taking place within the Democratic Party as party officials, pundits, and voters try to figure out where and how it all went so terribly wrong. I don’t see what’s going on as a “blame game” but rather as a much needed and long overdue process of holding those in positions of power and influence accountable.
Longtime Democratic National Committee (DNC) member James Zogby agrees, noting that members of the Democratic Party establishment/elite, their consultancy groups, and their corporate media sycophants “will find fault with the voters and their choices [but] not with the poor decisions they themselves made.”
It is in this spirit of holding those in positions of power and influence accountable that I share the following perspectives on what went wrong for the Democrats in last Tuesday’s national elections, including the presidential election.
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Every election since 2008 has been a referendum on the system and the change candidate has won. Obama was able to hold onto the presidency in 2012 due to sheer charisma and his ability to still wear the cloak of change agent.
2016 Trump was the change agent, 2020 it was Biden, 2024 Kamala’s unwillingness to break with Biden or even name a single thing she would do differently cemented Trump as the agent of change.
So many of our political problems today stem from Obama and the Democrats inability or unwillingness to provide meaningful change after the 2008 mandate. No accountability for the Wall Street criminals, no accountability for Bush and Cheney war mongering and lies, no systemic change to the political system which is incapable of solving problems and no change to the economic system that ensures the majority of Americans live in perpetual insecurity.
As time goes on and the average worker’s lot in life gets worse – worse standard of living, less job security, more financial anxiety, increased costs to basic necessities – the more polarized and radical people’s politics become. The Democrats effectively crushed any populist energy from their left flank in 2016 and again in 2020. This has left people no where to go but right, and that’s where they’ve gone.
I don’t think people are stuck in this position, but as long as the power structure and political system make it impossible for a true populist left movement to emerge, people will continue to get sucked into this right wing trap. And let me be perfectly clear, this outcome is preferable to the Democratic Party establishment and the capitalist power structure. A Trump is much preferred to a Bernie to the DNC and business elite.
There is a lot of anger in the country, much justified, nearly all of it wrongly placed. It’s not immigrants or China that’s destroying this country, it’s the wealthiest among us who want to keep us poor, stupid, and bitterly divided. It’s easier for them to rip us off this way.
From the outside, Harris’s entire campaign seemed to be about saving an economic system (neoliberalism) that she described falsely as “democracy,” which isn’t working for large segments of both the political left and right; at the same time she and Biden were flouting an international system of laws in order to arm and finance a genocide in Gaza. The hypocrisies were too transparent to sustain.
. . . Harris’s flip-flop on fracking is emblematic of her entire campaign, a relatively minor issue that gave devastating insight into her vacuous political character. She could never explain it because the only explanation was pure political calculation (and a bad one). She was willing to invalidate her climate policy to court a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania. It was the equivalent of Hillary telling Goldman Sachs she had one policy in public and another in private. But even more inept. How could you make the campaign about honesty and trust, once you’d shown yourself to be dishonest and untrustworthy on an issue you’d described as being an existential threat to human life on earth? Harris sold out the climate movement (and the climate) and still lost Pennsylvania.
. . . In the end, Harris didn’t outperform Biden in a single county in the country.
2024 has taught us a hard lesson: in a global society defined by consumption rather than production, voters loathe price increases and are ready to punish rulers who preside over them. Across the biggest election year in modern history, with billions voting worldwide, incumbents have taken a beating, left, right, and center: the Tories in Britain, Emmanuel Macron in France, the African National Congress in South Africa, Narendra Modi’s BJP in India, Kirchnerism in Argentina last fall. Today post-pandemic inflation, aggravated by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has claimed the scalp of yet another incumbent government.
In America, the Democrats’ position was doubly dire. Across the last decade, the defining pattern of national politics has been class dealignment: a vast migration of working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, matched by a flood of professional-class voters away from the Republicans. This was the decisive factor in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was toppled by the same Rust Belt proletarians who had elected Barack Obama. And it continued, more quietly but with unchecked motion, in the years when Democrats made up for their losses by winning more suburban professionals, in 2018, 2020, and 2022.
Kamala Harris’s campaign was an embodiment of this shift. She herself ran a cautious but mostly competent race, moving to the right on the border, as voters seemed to demand, pummeling Trump on abortion, and – at least in her paid messages – wooing working-class voters with a bread-and-butter focus. But in the end, these narrow tactical decisions were overwhelmed by the altered nature of the Democratic Party as a whole.
Even as Harris herself tried to avoid the toxic identity politics of Hillary 2016, she was overtaken by the “shadow party” – a constellation of NGOs, media organizations, and foundation-funded activists who now constitute the Democrats’ institutional rank and file. Thus “White Dudes For Harris” and its kindred, the effort to promote Never Trump Republicans in media, and the embarrassing attempts to win over black men with promises of legal marijuana and protections for crypto investments. These shadow party interventions in the race helped raise historic sums of money – over $1 billion in just a few months – but also marked Harris as the property of an educated professional class, focused entirely on “democracy,” abortion rights, and personal identity but largely uninterested in material questions.
. . . Above all, Harris and the Democrats failed to reach voters who have a negative view of the economy — not just Republican partisans but two-thirds of yesterday’s electorate. With her modest bundle of targeted economic initiatives, joined occasionally to a half-hearted populist rhetoric, is it a surprise that she failed to convince these frustrated voters? Almost 80 percent of the voters who listed the economy as their top issue cast a ballot for Trump. How much can a few months of targeted advertising do, compared to a broader Democratic shadow party that has been trumpeting the health of the economy — low unemployment, wage growth, and a booming stock market — for over a year now? If voters did not believe that Harris had a real plan to make their lives better, materially, it is hard to fault them.
Following is a November 7 interview with author, activist, and former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. As my friend Mark notes about this particular ABC News Live interview:
I sense much grace and soberness in Marianne Williamson’s voice as she diffuses the “vindication” slur/giddiness pitched at her in this interview. I’m curious as to what my peers are feeling they’re being guided toward over the next four years so as to find a path towards environmental and humanitarian hopes of leadership within the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party abandoned the working class. Kamala Harris ran on a ticket of moving toward the right, you know, shifting, pivoting toward the right, bragging that Liz Cheney is endorsing her. And so, there was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board.
. . . We have a class that’s suffering, but we don’t have a class that thinks of itself as a class. If we had a class that thought of itself as a class, then working people would say, “We refuse deportation. We refuse racism. We refuse transphobia,” because that’s what the class does. Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we, as a class, you know, have to protect each other. Trump is seen as the person who can fix things, the person who represents the CEO who could step in and solve problems in a culture in which the only solidarity we’re seeing, the primary solidarity, is coming from the capitalist class, you know? So, I’m not sure that there’s such a radical shift from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. It’s a failure of the Democratic Party. And even under Biden, the Democratic Party actually pivoted a little bit toward labor, in a way that the Harris campaign did not.
. . . The absence of cohesion has to do with the general – two things, I think. One, the general absence of solidarity in a long-standing kind of neoliberal culture where people are taught to solve their own problems, a kind of deep individualism, and that corporate interests are the only ones — in other words, private interests are the ones that can solve your problem. Government is a problem. Government gets in the way. This is the kind of discourse that we’ve been seeing for at least three, four decades.
And so, even though we see amazing developments in the labor movement with the UAW, we see discussions and talk of solidarity – the Boeing strike, for example – but in terms of those who are either unorganized or at the sort of edges of a concierge economy that is no longer based in high-wage manufacturing, what ends up happening, it’s almost impossible to organize people and to think as a class. You know, the Amazon strike in Bessemer is a really good example of what could have been, but how the combination of fear, insecurity and the failure to really think of solidarity – in other words, the care for our neighbor, the care for those who are not us but maybe we share the same class, that sense of solidarity, that Audre Lorde talks about at the beginning of my piece, that’s missing. And we haven’t done the work, the political education work, to build that sense of cohesion.
. . . [S]omehow the right, for many people, is attractive. And we have to figure out why it’s attractive. And if we don’t think of ourselves as a class, a class with power, a class in which the state could be the lever of equality rather than deep inequality, then we’re going to be stuck supporting Trump[-like figures] for generations.
Let this be a reckoning. In 2016, I warned that Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders alone, could defeat Donald Trump. The country was ready – desperate – for transformational change. The air was thick with a demand for something real, something that spoke to the soul of working people. Yet, the Democratic establishment fought this truth tooth and nail. They threw their weight behind Hillary Clinton – the so-called “safe choice” – dismissing those of us who saw the storm coming. They believed the path to victory lay in moderation, in reaching to the middle, as the books and scholars of traditional politics have always taught.
And here we are again. In 2024, they turn to Kamala Harris, who walks beside Liz Cheney, while Sanders is cast to the shadows. The outcome? Trump has won the popular vote. Once again, the establishment was wrong. Wrong in 2016, wrong in 2024 – will you be wrong again in 2028?
. . . And let me say this, to those who’ve been ignored, belittled, and alienated for nearly a decade: to the supporters of Sanders, to those who stayed home [last] Tuesday because they could no longer recognize the party that once claimed to fight for them – we owe you an apology. A true one, unflinching. And we must give you a reason to believe in us again.
Following is a 10-minute segment from the Politics Done Right podcast’s November 9 show. This segment highlights Dr. Eddie Glaude’s recent on-air exchange with MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle on why Kamala Harris did not win. According to Politics Done Right host Egberto Willies, how Glaude speaks about the reasons Harris lost is how we all “should be tackling racism, sexism, and misogyny.” (NOTE: Other progressive voices disagree that Harris's loss essentially boils down to sexism and racism rather than her policies – or lack thereof. See, for example, Sabrina Salvati’s video commentary here.)
The last eight years have demonstrated that reforming neo-conservative, Wall Street Democrats is a fool’s errand. Post-1970s Dems have proven to be the greatest threat to the American left, and the Democratic Party has become the graveyard of progressive movements.
You want to make a difference, House and Senate “progressives?” Easy peasy: Dem-EXIT en masse and declare yourselves Green Party representatives and senators. Your first order of business: agitate like angry hornets for sweeping election and campaign finance reform, complete with instant-runoff voting, so progressives don’t get attacked every 2-4 years by malignant, genocidal, right-wing “centrists” with delusions of liberalism.
On issues of importance to progressives, duopoly-liberated Green Party representatives and senators can caucus with whichever party holds positions we agree with. We can caucus with the Republicans pushing to end the Ukraine War, and we can caucus with Democrats if they ever push for Medicare-for-All or anything else of value.
But only a mass-defection from the neo-fascist Democratic Party by principled liberals and progressives has a chance of putting this country on the right track.
The rest of the “leftists” who sheepdog for Team Blue without making a single demand – and the precipitously-endorsing “progressive” activists who beg and beg Democrats to do the right thing – are pissing in the wind.
Until you advocate for a complete abandonment of the Democratic Party that abandoned us decades ago, you are part of the problem.
You’re why Trump – and worse demagogues to come – have such an easy path to victory. You stand for nothing and fight for less.
Speaking of the Green Party, here’s a 16-minute segment taken from Breakthrough News’ Election Night coverage featuring Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein sharing her thoughts on the election results.
On the day after the election, renowned consumer advocate, corporate critic, and four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader was a guest on Democracy Now!. Here he talked about the “collapse of the Democratic Party” and the roots of Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris.
It all started when the Democrats . . . started getting corporate cash in 1979, dialing for the same commercial values [as the Republicans]. That blurred their difference from the New Deal-type Democrats to the corporate Democrats. Then they contracted out the election to these corporate-conflicted profiteering consulting firms, which the mass media never seemed to want to investigate in this campaign. And then they abandoned public media. Basically, they abandoned radio to the Rush Limbaughs and created the Reagan Democrats. And then they never learn from their mistakes. They didn’t learn from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Then, they never fire anybody after they lose, in one state after another, to the worst Republican Party in history.
And so, what is the message that they gave to the American people? The message is Trump is terrible, and you can’t believe how bad the Republican Party is. It’s too general a message, too simple. A vast majority of people think corporations have too much control over their lives. They didn’t fill the blanks, denial of healthcare benefits. And they didn’t fill the blanks on a living wage. They didn’t fill the blanks on cracking down on corporate crooks. They didn’t fill the blanks on reversing a tax system which undertaxes the very wealthy and the big corporations. They didn’t reverse themselves really on trade. They didn’t know how to rebut Trump on immigration. He called the people coming in rapists, criminals, drug traffickers, etc. Instead of saying, “Well, they’re fleeing oppressive countries that are backed by the U.S., dictators and oligarchs in Central and South America,” they didn’t say that millions of Americans trust immigrants to harvest their food, to care for their children, to care for elderly, to provide critical services that nobody wants to work in in the U.S.
So, you know, there’s such a bill of particulars against this Democratic Party. And what’s happened, of course, is that millions of people are basically saying, “We’re sick of throwaway lines. We’re sick of not having the government return the benefits of massive taxation to us. We’re sick of – all we hear about is empire abroad. All we hear about is more military budgets by the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress, giving the generals more than they ask for, eating the public budgets that should be providing public services and public infrastructure in communities all over the country, creating key jobs.”
The following is a 25-minute segment from Marc Lamont Hill’s Upfront show on the Al Jazeera network. In this segment. Lamont Hill speaks with Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University; Katie Halper, co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast; Ryan Grim, reporter and co-founder of Drop Site News; and Emma Doyle, former Deputy Chief of Staff under the Trump administration.
I close with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister Chris Hedges’s insights on the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.
This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides – especially among middle-aged white males – morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative – destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base – 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The American dream has become an American nightmare.
. . . We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
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