Renowned political activist and author Ralph Nader’s analysis of President Trump’s address Tuesday to a joint session of Congress is both sobering and insightful.
[Trump’s speech] was a declaration of war against the American people, including Trump voters, in favor of the super-rich and the giant corporations. What Trump did last night was set a record for lies, delusionary fantasies, predictions of future broken promises – a rerun of his first term – boasts about progress that don’t exist. In practice, he has launched a trade war. He has launched an arms race with China and Russia. He has perpetuated and even worsened the genocidal support against the Palestinians. He never mentioned the Palestinians once. And he’s taken Biden’s genocidal policies one step further by demanding the evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza.
But taking it as a whole, what we’re seeing here defies most of dictionary adjectives. What Trump and Musk and Vance and the supine Republicans are doing are installing an imperial, militaristic domestic dictatorship that is going to end up in a police state. You can see his appointments are yes people bent on suppression of civil liberties, civil rights. You can see his breakthrough, after over 120 years, of announcing conquest of Panama Canal. He’s basically said, one way or another, he’s going to take Greenland. These are not just imperial controls of countries overseas or overthrowing them; it’s actually seizing land. Now, on the Greenland thing, Greenland is a province of Denmark, which is a member of NATO. He is ready to basically conquer a part of Denmark in violation of Section 5 of NATO, at the same time that he has displayed full-throated support for a hardcore communist dictator, Vladimir Putin, who started out with the Russian version of the CIA under the Soviet Union and now has over 20 years of communist dictatorship, allied, of course, with a number of oligarchs, a kind of kleptocracy. And the Republicans are buying all this in Congress. This is complete reversal of everything that the Republicans stood for against communist dictators.
. . . And where are the Democrats? I mean, look at Senator Slotkin’s response [to Trump’s address]. It was a typical re-run of a feeble, weak Democratic rebuttal. Just like the Democrats in 2024, which led to Trump’s victory, she couldn’t get herself to talk specifically and authentically about raising the minimum wage, expanding healthcare, cracking down on corporate crooks that are bleeding out the incomes of hard-pressed American workers and the poor. [Democrats] can’t get themselves to talk about increasing frozen Social Security budgets for 50 years, that 200 Democrats supported raising, but Nancy Pelosi, when she was speaker, kept them from taking John Larson’s bill to the House floor. That’s why they lose. Look at her speech. It was so vague and general. They chose her because she was in the national security state. She was a former CIA. They chose her because they wanted to promote the losing version of the Democratic Party, instead of choosing Elizabeth Warren [or Rep. Summer Lee] or Bernie Sanders, the most popular polled politician in America today. That’s who they chose.
So, as long as the Democrats monopolize the opposition and crush third-party efforts to push them into more progressive realms, the Republican, plutocratic, Wall Street, war machine declaration of war against the American people will continue. We’re heading into the most serious crisis in American history. There’s no comparison.
For Democracy Now!’s complete interview with Ralph Nader, click here.
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.
In 2016 Trump was the change agent; in 2020 it was Biden. In 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 extreme 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.”
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.
The Democratic National Convention (DNC) begins today in Chicago amidst protests against the unconditional supplying of military aid to Israel by the current Biden/Harris administration and a potential Harris/Walz administration.
Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, the U.S. has given the far right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu over $20 billion dollars in unconditional military aid, including direct arms sales. These weapons are U.S.-made. Also, most of the financial military aid is used by Israel to purchase additional U.S.-made weaponry. Not surprisingly, profits are soaring for U.S. “defense” contractors and weapons manufacturers, in particular RTX Corporation, formerly Raytheon Technologies. For its part, the Israeli government is using these U.S.-made weapons in its ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza, a war that has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and which is viewed by many as a “genocidal project.”
I briefly thought about traveling to Chicago with a contingent of local justice and peace activites to participate in the DNC protests but ultimately chose not to. Although I’ll watch some news so as to follow the protests, I doubt I’ll follow the actual convention, just as I didn’t tune-in to any great extent to the Republican National Convention back in July. I dare say I’ll check Democracy Now!’s coverage of the convention, and maybe Rising’s, but I’ll be passing on the corporate mainstream media’s coverage. Why? Because corporate media outlets will be taking their cues from the Democratic Party establishment and focusing on what the late, great historian Howard Zinn once referred to as “election madness,” complete this time around with, in Paul Street words, “big notes of spurious identitarian (race, gender, and age) harmony.”
What we won’t hear from the heavily scripted speakers on the DNC stage, and thus from corporate media, is anything about radical system change, anything about the corporate capture of our democracy, anything about the climate emergency before us. This is both tragic and frustrating, as these deeper realties are what most need to be named and seriously and meaningfully addressed.
Sharing voices
So what I’ve decided to do during this week of the DNC is to share voices that do name and address the issues that really matter. In this sharing there will be no “vibe politics” at the expense of “policy politics,” no rhapsodizing over certain political personalities, no emphasis on identity politics at the expense of the broader issues of classism and economic justice. And most importantly, there’ll be no pandering to working Americans with mere platitudes, progressive buzzwords, and economic plans that fail to acknowledge and challenge both the reality that corporate money has, for all intents and purposes, replaced the vote of citizens and thus their voice in congress, and that a morally bankrupt neoliberal establishment (which has coronated one of its own) continues to pave the way for authoritarianism and fascism.
After all, when the machinary of government (regardless of whether this government is Republican- or Democratic-led) has been seized by a corporate cabal committed to empire and war-profiteering for its own enrichment and empowerment at the expense of the rest of the citizenry, one inevitable consequence is, in the words of author and former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson (left), “large groups of desperate people.” Such groups, says Williamson “have always been and should always be considered a national security risk, a petri dish full of citizens dangerously vulnerable to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces.”
“No one should be that shocked by the emergence of Donald Trump in 2016,” continues Williamsom, “and no one should be naïve about the danger that is still lurking [now and moving forward] if the Democrats don’t fundamentally alter the patterns of economic injustice that still plague our society. And incremental change does not represent a fundamental alteration.”
Will presidential nominee Kamala Harris and the Democratic establishment that selected her move beyond “incremental change” and commit instead to “fundamentally alter[ing] the patterns of economic injustice”? I sure do hope so, but at the same time I and many others have serious questions and doubts – none of which I sense will be acknowledged or discussed at the DNC. All the more reason, then, to lift up voices that do talk about the need for fundamental economic change and the radical (in the truest and best sense of the word*) transformation of our political system.
Ralph Nader on the 2024 election
I start this week-long series with an insightful 25-minute interview with Ralph Nader, renowned consumer advocate, tireless corporate critic, and arguably the most famous third-party candidate in United States election history, having run for president four times.
In this interview, conducted August 13 by Alexandra Locke of Al Jazeera’s podcast The Take, Nader discusses why third-party candidates are so crucial for the positive transformation of the U.S. political system. He also shares his thoughts on both the 2000 Gore/Bush controversy (in which he was labeled a “spoiler”) and this year’s presidential race.
* All too often the word “radical” is erroneously equated with extremism of one kind or another. Yet that’s not what “radical” actually means. It means to go to the root, to recognize and address the underlying essence of a given reality, along with deep-seated issues, questions and/or problems associated with this reality.
It’s important to say that all presidents violate laws. [Trump has] just taken it to a new and diverse height. But he’s doing it so brazenly that if he gets away with it, he will continue to contribute to the institutionalization of lawlessness by presidents of the United States.
Let’s face it: Bush, Obama and Trump have violated all kinds of laws in extending the [American] empire. Obama, for example, decreed, informally, that he could pick out anybody in the world and, as prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner, and in secret, wipe that person out. And he did it. Of course, Bush was the big war criminal, with Cheney, invading Iraq. But then Obama took out the regime in Libya without a congressional debate, without a congressional authorization, appropriation of funds or declaration of war. And that’s, to this day, producing chaos and violence, goaded by Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, who pushed Obama to do this, and he later admitted it was the biggest mistake of his administration.
. . . [With Trump] we have all kinds of other tax violations, obstruction of voting, campaign finance violations, never mind his assault and battery of women, which he seemed to be proud of. So [his arraignment] yesterday represents the first turnaround. Why did the Democrats wait so long? They had twelve impeachable offenses in 2019. We’ve got them in the Congressional Record, December 19th; Congressman John Larson put them in. Nancy Pelosi just went with the Ukraine matter. . . . So you had one party letting the other party get away with it, in part because the Democrats also violated laws at the presidential level.
So I think the American people have got to see this as an opportunity, a gateway, to reverse the process where presidents are above the law. They have been above the law. People around the world have suffered and died because these presidents have been above the law. So, we have to broaden it out, because what the GOP is going to try to do is focus on yesterday and [Attorney] Alvin Bragg’s prosecution [of Trump], when the criminal lawlessness of Trump is massive.
For Democracy Now!’s complete interview with Ralph Nader, click here.
Published in the November 3-16, 2000 edition of Lavender magazine, this op-ed was in support of Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
My commentary was more than an attempt to get the Minnesota LGBTQI community on board with “Nader for President.” At a deeper level, it sought to shine a light on the underlying issues of corporate domination of our political system and the duplicity of both the Republican and Democratic parties in this domination, one that to this day continues to undermine and threaten our democracy.
Looking back on what I wrote, I must admit I’m somewhat in awe of how consistent I’ve been in my political perspective. It’s a radical perspective, to be sure. But radical in the best and truest sense of the word. [i]
Here’s how Nader talked about this same perspective in the context of his 2000 presidential campaign:
I’m running for President because concentrated corporate power is on a collision course with American democracy, and the voice of everyday citizens has been shut out of the political process. The Democratic and Republican parties have become Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee – one party with two heads, wearing different make-up – and taking their marching orders from the same corporate paymasters.
It’s no wonder that, years later, I would be such a passionate supporter of the presidential campaigns of both Bernie Sanders and Marianne Williamson. I share with them and with Nader the same perspective, one unapologetically grounded in the democractic and humanitarian principles upon which the U.S. was founded, principles that place people before corporate profits and thus call for big money out of politics.
This perspective, which in my case was born, in large part, from my late-1990s involvement in the Twin Cities’ justice and peace community, remains unchanged for me.
Twenty-two years on, I stand by every word I wrote in my Lavender commentary. At the time, many of my liberal friends were critical of my support for the Ralph Nader/Winona LaDuke[ii] ticket in the 2000 presidential election. And to this day there are many who blame Nader for George W. Bush’s election “win.” It's a charge that others compellingly refute.
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Fight Fear – Vote Green!
By Michael Bayly
Lavender
November 3-16, 2000
The experience of coming out is perhaps the most significant event in the lives of GLBT people. At the core of this transformative experience is the conscious decision to step beyond a fear-dominated, inauthentic existence and into a life in which one’s sexuality is positively integrated into all aspects of one’s being – a life filled with the promise of new beginnings and, accordingly, a life marked by a commitment to self-awareness, community-building, connection-making, and risk-taking.
In light of this awareness and experience gained from coming out, I was extremely dismayed and disappointed to read, especially during the week that included National Coming Out Day, the fear-induced commentary of editor Rudy Renaud regarding Ralph Nader’s presidential candidacy (Lavender, Oct. 6).
In terms of gay-specific issues, no candidate is more progressive than Nader, and no political party is more dedicated to GLBT issues than the Green Party. It’s that simple.
Renaud declares that, ultimately, what GLBT and other marginalized minorities want is equality. Yet socio-economic equality can only be cultivated in a climate of authentic democracy. Sadly, we presently do not have such a climate. What we have is a two-party system in which both parties have shamelessly sold out to profit-obsessed corporate interests. What we have, in other words, is a plutocracy.
Indeed, true democracy (the rule of the people) is the last thing those currently in power want as it is the ultimate threat to plutocracy (the rule of money). Accordingly, we can’t expect deliverance from the current state of socio-economic inequality by anyone whose vision is limited by the two-party system – be that person Republican or Democrat. Furthermore, we are not going to stem the downward spiral that such a system is fueling by fearfully choosing the lesser of two evils, and this is exactly want a vote for Al Gore amounts to. Renaud’s editorial implies that just such an inauthentic choice is necessary and will serve the GLBT community’s best interests.
Let’s get real here. As GLBT people, empowered already with the courage to speak words of truth in the face of hostility and oppression, we should be among the most vocal supporters of the Green presidential bid and all that it represents. We should draw strength from our coming out experiences and be willing to model a way of life unfettered by any form of fear that limits our human capacity to envision, to dream, and to work for the positive transformation of our lives and our world.
If as GLBT people we no longer want to be treated like “second-class citizens,” then we have to start dedicating ourselves to the issues that affect everybody. We need to get out of our “cool, trendy, urban, self-conscious coffee shops,” cast our vision beyond individual interest groups, and recognize that the agenda the Green Party is promoting – grassroots democracy, ecological sustainability, economic justice, and respect for diversity – comprises the raw materials for building the democracy and equality we all so desperately want.
Because such issues are so vital to the building of a multi-party democratic system, we find that they are ignored, minimalized, and/or distorted by the keepers of the two-party plutocratic system. It is no surprise, then, to see Nader excluded from the presidential debates – organized and controlled, as they are, by a commission composed of Democrats and Republicans, and dedicated to the promotion of the two-party system.
The real tragedy is that before the majority of Americans finally mobilize and demand an authentically democratic system of government, we may have to endure the mayhem of an ultra-conservative, Republican-dominated Supreme Court, or the negative societal impact of four more years of corporate-led globalization, militarism, environmental degradation, and under-funding of education, welfare, and healthcare under either Democrats or Republicans – take your pick!
Then again, we could all save ourselves the time and energy, and cast our vote for Raplh Nader on November 7.
Michael Bayly is the founder of Queers United for Radical Action.[iii]
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NOTES
[i] Being radical means going to the root or heart of a situation, issue, or problem in order to truly understand, correct, resolve and/or transform it. This process is often understood to be necessary only in the political realm, yet it actually needs to occur in our personal lives as well in order for it to be truly effective in the political and societal realms of which we’re a part – individually and collectively. Accordingly, to be radical also means being willing to go deep within one’s own life and experience so as to identify, name, and embody the healing and transformation within ourselves that we want to see in the world. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body [i.e., our inner life]. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” (Of course, many of us have heard the truth of these words expressed in a quote which, although powerful and true, has been erroneously attributed to Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”)
[ii] The Green Party vice presidential candidate in 2000 was Ojibwe economist, environmentalist, and writer Winona LaDuke, who I dare say will go down in history for, among other things, the best ever campaign poster! I got to photograph both Ralph Nader and Winona LadUke at a campaign event in Minneapolis in September 2000. Said La Duke at the time: “My goal in the campaign is to change the content of American democracy and to transform American democracy so it's actually functional. [Achieving such a goal] will require building a multi-party system that allows broader participation and a wider range of ideas . . . The U.S. is lagging behind in its democracy. Almost every other so-called developed country has a multi-party system . . . I went to the Beijing Conference [in 1995]. You saw the women there from all over the world, and they said 'get control of your country.' The U.S. is a rogue nation. This country has immense potential that's totally squandered.”
[iii] Queers United for Radical Action (QURA) was a network of Twin Cities-based LGBTQI activists dedicated to educating ourselves and the wider LGBTQI community on the threats to democracy, human life, and the environment posed by the nexus of corporate globalization, militarism, and environmental degradation. We also sought to organize and participate in educational and non-violent direct action events in order to facilitate positive and radical social and economic change, and to facilitate and share a uniquely queer spirit of resistance to all forms of oppression. (For more about QURA, see this previous Wild Reed post.)
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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