What Trump’s claim of a ‘stolen election’ means for activists today
George Lakey has played a part in direct action campaigns for over six decades. He has recently retired from Swarthmore College. Some of history giving him a background in social issues include being arrested in the civil rights movement and most recently in the climate justice movement. George has facilitated 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national and international levels. Waging Nonviolence
Briefly and what I am reading in public and in the comments section here, I think it “might” be of interest to our readers also.
HT to Juan Cole at Informed Comment for featuring this commentary.
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I’m encountering a great deal of alarm among progressive activists regarding continued Republican claims of a stolen election. Do these anti-democratic efforts mean a coup attempt is under way?
Despite being among the first to write about the possibilities of a coup, I have to say (as of this moment) the answer is “No.” My colleagues at Choose Democracy — who have been preparing Americans to defeat a power grab for the past several months — have also stopped short of describing what we’ve seen and heard this week as a coup. In a release today, they said: “What we have seen has been slow, poorly rolled out, and has none of the surprise elements associated with a traditional coup.”
So what are we to make of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits, Republicans refusing to honor the election results and the Department of Justice looking into “allegations” of supposed voter fraud? If this isn’t a coup, then what is it?
The politics of grievance
I believe Trump’s “stolen election” claim is a choice to continue a kind of politics that has served him well in the past — so well that he’s re-shaped the Republican Party in its image. Trump specializes in the politics of grievance.
Millions of words have been written since 2016 about manipulating grievance to gain political power. The question for the politics of grievance is never whether or not something is true — it can be laughably untrue. The claim that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States was obviously bogus, but it was useful as a way to reduce his legitimacy as president and fit nicely into the politics of grievance.
I believe the point of claiming a stolen election is not to set the stage for a coup, but to add more juice to the right’s list of grievances for building political power in the future. The bigger the publicity that’s produced around this claim, the more juice is created — and that’s what they are trying to do now.
Count on it: the juice will ferment in 2021 and be stronger in 2022. Everything that hurts Americans will be laid on the door of Biden, “who was fraudulently elected!”
What can we do about it?
First, as the Choose Democracy team advises, “Breathe.” Our anxiety doesn’t actually serve us in this case. Additional immediate action steps are also recommended on the site, including writing elected officials and supporting and thanking poll workers.
Second, in the coming months pay attention to the grievances that arise from the circumstances of living in a declining empire. It’s no accident that exit polls showed more people who earned less than $50,000 favored Biden than those with higher incomes. That was also true for those who didn’t work full time. More people also favored Biden who saw the nation’s economy as “not good” or “poor.”
It makes sense: More well-off people supported Trump more often because they are more able to insulate themselves from the deteriorating conditions of American life.
The Green New Deal is a vision that pays attention to some of the real grievances: job insecurity, climate disasters, neglected infrastructure, exploding rents.
The third thing we can do is build a liberatory political culture that substitutes empathy for political correctness. The electoral map makes plain the results of bi-coastal condescension. If you were looked down on, why wouldn’t you want a champion who says “Fuck you” to elitists? This is a grievance that’s within the power of progressives to do something about. As I’ve explained many times, the make-over starts with a sober examination of how classism distorts our understanding of oppression.
A great place to start is with sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s beautifully-written book about Republicans in Louisiana, “Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.”
We have momentum
In some ways we’re in good shape for growing in numbers and power in the Biden years. On multiple issues we’ve been on the move, and we’re not likely to make the tragic mistake of progressives in the Obama years of expecting the Democratic Party to do the job for us. The neoliberal Democratic Party leadership will do what Democrats did last time: allow conditions to grow that invite a grievance-based Republican take-over in the next election.
Empathic social movements that retain a big picture of our country and world — and stay independent of co-optative moves from the Democrats — can grow rapidly by developing visions like “Medicare for All” that respond to the real needs of people, especially in rural areas, who otherwise are tempted by the grievance party. Police and public safety are one example of an issue mired in the dynamics of racism until more work in alternative visioning is done.
We can do all this. The workshops of Choose Democracy were designed to help prepare for movement-building on the chance we wouldn’t need to defeat a serious coup attempt. That chance has arrived.
Via Waging Nonviolence, What Trump’s claim of a ‘stolen election’ means for activists today, George Lackey, November 11, 2020
Thanks, Run. This is fabulous. Hallelujah, amen brother.
We are better off when we do not surrender to our worst instincts, but instead organize, educate, and act.
The only problem with George Lackey is that he is 83 years old. I pray that the institution that he has built will live on after him. No surprise, but Lakey is Quaker affiliated. Most of my support in the sixties came from Quakers.
MLK had SCLC, but most of us just had Quakers, Unitarians, and (probably surprisingly to many) Catholics.
Following the links I find Lakey talking about understanding class. In this case we have some people who choose to be in the class which is unwilling to recognize that Trump is a professional con man. I suggest it will take removing Trump as a topic for the discussion to make any headway.
Arne
it is in the nature of con men that their marks refuse to recognize that they have been conned.
All politicians are con men. They have to be. Tell people the truth, they will not understand it and go look for someone who tells them what they want to believe.
We are lucky that we have inherited the fruits of an earlier generation who wanted to believe good things. But even Roosevelt had to con the people to let him do good things.
I don’t know that a coup has to come suddenly and by force. I have been expecting the Supreme Court to side with Trump, and the nation puts up with it the way they put up with the Supreme Court handing the election to Bush.
At the moment that looks less likely in near terms. More likely that Trump the clown has lost his usefulness to the real coup in progress, but he has created the infrastructure (75 million voters) for the coup to continue gradually and without a shot.
I tend to agree with the author, but I can’t take “write your elected officials” seriously.
There are aspects of “declining empire” but when ten percent of the population has half the money, the problem is closer to home.
I hope the workshops succeed, but I’m not hearing anything that makes it sound hopeful
The only way to accomplish political change is to organize, educate, and act. The particulars of political change vary from votes and petitions to demonstrations and civil disobedience to guns (pitchforks and guillotines are now considered archaic) and violence. Those are our only choices. There is no need to invent a better mousetrap, just consolidate the public will to catch mice.
Coberly,
“but I can’t take ‘write your elected officials’ seriously.”
[Politics is a numbers racket. One or two letters will NOT do anything, but one or two hundred thousand letters WILL do anything.]
ron
you are right. but i can’t imagine 299,999 people having anything useful to say… other than “ouch”, which I think was Jeffersons take on an “informed electorate.”
Coberly,
Letters to elected officials are not graded on originality. Each one counts the same, as a probable vote in the next election. There is nothing that elected officials care more about than the next election. They got staff that actually skims the communications from voters. Politicians just need to know the numbers. Take the “writing elected officials” link which tells us what we need to say.
Collectively the governed decide how to act, if they act at all, to achieve the necessary critical mass, whether by votes and petitions or demonstrations and civil disobedience or guns and violence. An effectively consolidated electoral majority need do no more than use their power of voting, bolstered between elections by petitions, tweets, letters, E-mails, and supporting institutions. A minority under duress must resort to demonstrations and civil disobedience until such time as they have afforded themselves majority support. Where there is no electoral power among the citizenry and free speech is severely restricted, then there is no other effective choice than revolution such as Russia, China, and Cuba found necessary. In emerging industrial economies, then revolutionary socialism is a natural evolution from tyranny to a far greater extent than it is a satisfactory social solution.
Individually then each of us must choose to either lead, follow, or get out of the way. Leaders are products of circumstances more than they are results of choice. I have never been a leader. I was a good follower when I was a young man. Now I just stay out of the way and watch. It does not mean that I do not have an opinion. That is what blogs are for. OTOH, my activist days are over.
If I were to have an elected official that was on a different page than Lakey or if they compromised their resolve, then I would at least E-mail as instructed in the link. However, as consequence of my choice to live where I do, then my state legislative representatives and my House congressman are among the most progressive in their respective chambers (while all being quite black). My elected honkies (Governor & US Senators) are each a moderate Democrat at worst.
It was not the politics that brought me here, but rather the wage class folk, which just so happens to be of a 2 to 1 black majority in Sandston, VA. The local politics was just a bonus.
Run,
Off topic, but I’d like to read your take on Sanders’ M4A bill.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1129/cosponsors?searchResultViewType=expanded
EM:
1. Bernie’s bill uses ACOs just like the ACA does so it can not be classified as Single Payer which Medicare4All is intended to be. ACOs are similar to HMOs. Like HMOs, they are corporations that own or contract with chains of hospitals and clinics; they have the equivalent of enrollees; they attempt to keep their “enrollees” from seeking care outside their networks; they bear insurance risk (that is, they are paid on a per-enrollee basis and in exchange are obligated to provide medically necessary services to their enrollees); and because they are risk-bearing organizations, they generate overhead costs similar to those created by traditional insurance companies.
ACOs resemble insurance companies, nearly half of them already have contracts with insurance companies to help them carry out insurance-related tasks. The largest insurance companies – Aetna, Humana, and United Healthcare, for example – are already deeply embedded in the ACO industry.
ACO “enrollees” are assigned to ACOs (usually without their knowledge) whereas HMO enrollees choose to enroll, and HMOs bear all insurance risk while ACOs split the risk of loss or savings with another insurer (in Medicare’s case, risk is shared with the Medicare program). Both of these differences are being eroded. Many ACOs are saying they should be allowed to enroll people so they can restrict enrollee use of out-of-ACO providers, and some influential ACO proponents are proposing that ACOs be paid premiums so they can absorb total losses and keep total profits.
One other important similarity between ACOs and HMOs: ACOs have failed to cut Medicare’s costs just as the CBO predicted. The reason Vermont’s attempt at Single Payer failed was the costs of it brought on by the the use of ACOs. 20-25% of the cost of healthcare is clerical function in paying the bills from many insurers and now ACO. Single Payer has only one payer, itself.
2. Absence of hospital budgets
An American single-payer system could reduce total spending by 10 to 15 percent (I said 20-25%) by eliminating excess administrative costs. A large portion of the savings would come in the form of reduced administrative costs for hospitals (the rest comes from reduced administrative costs in the insurer and physician sectors). Hospitals would enjoy lower overhead costs in single-payer systems for two reasons:
First, they are paid from annual budgets, not on a per-patient or per-procedure basis, which means they don’t have to keep track of every pill and x-ray for every patient.
Second for the covered services; hospitals, doctors, etc. deal with only one payer, not hundreds of insurance companies of which each having their own hoops to jump through.
Unlike Representative Jayapal’s bill, Senator Sanders’ bill does not authorize hospital budgets. There is a reason for that: It is not possible to set premiums for 1,000 or 2,000 ACOs, which consist of hospital-clinic chains with an insurance company or department plopped on top of it, and at the same time set budgets for each of the nation’s 5,500 hospitals. One has to choose one or the other: Premium payments for ACOs, or budgets for hospitals. Sanders chose ACOs. Jayapal chose hospital budgets.
Jayapal’s bill is closer to Single Payer.
Rep Jayapal and Sen Sanders’ Have Introduced Medicare for All Bills: Part 1
Rep Jayapal and Sen Sanders Have Introduced Medicare For All Bills: Part 2
Run,
Thanks.