RANT #437: THIS AND THAT AND MY BEERS AND HISTORY REPEATING

Every once in a while the pressure builds and must be released or the pipes burst. In no particular order...

HEAT WAVE

For the third time this year, temps have climbed over 100F in our corner of France. And we're not the only ones effected. Much of Europe is under the gun. Yes, one expects heat in the summer in the south of France. And yes, it's been as hot as this before. But in 12 years, we don't remember so much heat, so often, starting so early. Climate change is doing a good job making itself seem real instead of the hoax that everyone knows that it is. (Sarcasm, for those unused to its use.)

 

MY BEERS 

We've never been to a movie in the multiplex in the small city of Narbonne down the road, but we do catch sight of the building often while on our way to other places. Recently, I noticed a new sign on the building's wall. MY BEERS. Odd. In French, the sign should read Mes Bières. What up? So I did some research. Turns out that MY BEERS is a franchise with several dozen locations throughout the country, describing itself as being inspired by, and I quote, Anglo-Saxon after-work culture. Apparently, we Anglos are into a dozen different beers on tap - including fruity concoctions that taste like medicine - as well as a couple of hundred different brands of bottled beers from around Europe on offer. Add what MY BEERS calls street food - burgers and fries and mozzarella sticks and wings and onion rings and the like. Play the World Cup on strategically located televisions. And play party music through the speakers. Somebody's concept of Anglo heaven, I guess.

 

Well, the burgers were serviceable, the dark beer from the tap was tasty and cold, the fries were hot and plentiful, and the wings weren't bad either. But I really went to see if they had some of that crunchy dark Belgian beer that I tasted on a recent trip to Brussels. Yes. Three different brands of Belgian dark. I bought two bottles of each for less than 4€ a bottle. This Anglo shall return. 

 

HISTORY REPEATING

I suppose there are those who blame Nixon for the demise of the Republican Party as we used to know it. Even go as far back as Goldwater if you're looking for a pull to the right. But in my view, the real culprit was Ronald Reagan. I don't just condemn him and his co-conspirator Thatcher across the Pond for popularizing the idea that government is the problem and not the solution. And it's not just about the failed notion that tax cuts to the rich act as a general stimulus to the economy. No, I blame Ronnie and Nancy for providing a platform for conspicuous wealth to infiltrate the political landscape. And their wealthy benefactors had agendas, agendas that folks like Bill Bennett and James Watt and Cap Weinberger and Ed Meese tried to put into place on Reagan’s watch

The influence of money in politics is not why I called this meeting, however. By this time, the fact that money has flooded the halls of Washington to the detriment of policies based on the public's interest should be self-evident. No, I called you here today to discuss the Tea Party. I'm not going to get into the weeds of Tea Party politics, which were often self-contradictory. Nor am I going to parse the people behind the purse strings of that supposedly grass roots movement. Rather, I want to discuss the consequences of demanding purity of thought and deed when it comes to the electoral process. I want to discuss the practice of 'primarying' incumbent elected officials.

First off, the scholarship on the subject of primarying currently suggests that the challenging of party-endorsed incumbents by outsiders is not mainly due to the radicalization of segments of the electorate but rather is a consequence of a failure of the party elites to endorse quality candidates. For instance, the ability to fund raise independently of party can be a deciding factor over the ability to articulate platform and policy when it comes to party endorsement. Other possible influences on the shift to the fringes, according to those writing books on the subject, may include the effects of gerrymandering, leading to battles within a party in otherwise safe districts, as well as the natural ebb and flow of voter sentiment over time. Movement to the fringes of political norms due to the targeting of radicalized primary voters themselves is discounted in relation to these other factors. That's current scholarship. I respectfully disagree. It's like the scholarship that sometimes insists that the Civil War was not about slavery. Scholars seem inclined to ignore the elephant in the room in their search for more esoteric fauna.

The Republican propensity for primarying those considered unpure began right around the time that the Tea Party peaked and has only grown in frequency ever since. And it's not about conservative versus RINO any more. The practice has morphed into something completely different. Some of the most doctrinaire conservative Republicans have been subject to attack, and not because of stances on issues. The party of economic conservatism is piling up debt at a staggering rate. The party that shunned foreign entanglements is now entangled in messy military affairs in two hemispheres. No, it's not about policy in a party that has shattered commitment to policy. It's about failure to adapt to a party that has become more rigid, more Christian nationalist, and more like a cult. Bend the knee, pledge loyalty to the cult, or You're Fired. Long-serving elected officials are no longer insulated from attack. Republicans have weeded out the dissent to the point that Mitch McConnell has become a poster boy for dissent within his own party. Who'da thunk it? 

Why, oh why, have Democrats decided to jump on that very bandwagon of destruction? What leads them to think that the USofA is ready for democratic socialism? Bernie Sanders got beat in 2016. No matter what anybody says, he got beat fair and square. And he specifically got beat when Democrats voted rather than caucused. His best showings were in late March and early April, before the East Coast settled things. Of nine contests, Sanders won eight. Six of the eight were caucuses. Over the following few weeks, voting primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Connecticut all went for Hillary. Bernie got beat. Deal with it.

Next we have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who successfully primaryed a senior Congressional Democrat in 2018, in a primary in which 30,000 people voted. In the general election in a D+29 district, 125,000 votes were cast. She won. Currently, AOC and Rashida Tlaib are the only members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress. After eight years, three election cycles. Two DSAs.

And now we come to the poster boy of the DSA, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In one of the bluest cities in America, running against a discredited sexist pig named Cuomo and perpetual gadfly Curtis Sliwa in the general election for mayor, Mamdani managed less than 51% of the vote. I have difficulty understanding how that can be celebrated as a defining victory. But that's the characterization. And that characterization, flawed as it may be, has led to primarying in the next round of Congressional elections just recently by Mamdani-endorsed candidates who have taken down two incumbents. In discussing that outcome with NPR, the transcript reports that Mamdani's answer to the first three questions on the subject featured the phrase 'working people'. 

Nearly 40% of American adults are not working people. They may be disabled. They may have become discouraged and dropped out of the work force entirely, no longer looking for work. They may even have invested well and are retiring early. But the fact remains, 1,000,000 people simply up and left the workforce last year. And not just the old or infirm. Folks in their prime working years. Politicians don't hammer home a phrase without intention. What was Mamdani's intention? I fear that the answer may be because it sets up a conflict, sets up an Us Versus Them mentality. For my entire life, that's how the political parties recruited young people. Republican v Democrat meant Conservative v Liberal. Meant Business v Labor. Meant Fiscal Restraint v Safety Net Spending. Mamdani was setting up a more modern conflict. Working People v The Elite. And I have a problem with Mamdani's definition of The Elite.

Us means Mamdani. Them means the NY Democratic Party. Us means AOC. Them means Chuck Schumer. Us means the DSA. Them means Me. Me.

I live in a country that leans to democratic socialism on a continent where the happiest populations are governed by democratic socialists. I have no quarrel with the concept. My quarrel is with political strategies whose endgame appears to be to divide the American electorate into three tribes: one-third way over to the right, one-third way over to the left, and one-third wondering where the hell the center went that we thought that we inhabited. No room for Nelson Rockefeller or Dick Gephardt. No room for me.

FROM DEMOCRACY TO FASCISM TO SOCIALISM

 DEMOCRATS ARE COMMIES WHO HATE AMERICA!!!!!

Every once in a while, a friend of a friend on Facebook worms her way onto my feed and yells stuff like that into the ether. She's swallowed the Kool-Aid whole, full on MAGA. The fact that Putin is the BFF of her savior Donald Trump doesn't bother her. Maybe she's mad at those other Commies, the Chinese. After all, the Chinese are better than the USofA at capitalism, and that must hurt.

What's that, you ask? China better at capitalism? Think about it. Capitalism profits most by forcing cheap labor to work in intolerable conditions, creating products using inferior components in order to meet a particular price point and designed to fall apart the day after the warranty expires. Who does that better than the Chinese? 

Wikipedia stops listing the name of Chinese billionaires after the first 100. That doesn't sound very much like a communist state to me. 

Why are we talking about Commies at all?

Didn't you know that those crafty democratic socialists are really Commies in disguise? So, no difference.

OK. Where am I going with this? What got me to thinking about this stuff? Why does the progress of social orders move as it does in the title of this rant? While streaming a panel discussion recently, a talking head posited that democracies cannot move to socialism without first dealing with fascism. The 1% will not abide the diminishing profits that socialism would bring about without a fight. And that fight will center on grabbing control of the economy through any means necessary - centralizing power, gutting regulation, marginalizing the courts. In America’s democracy, the 1% floods money and favors into the political process, creating a political class willing to further their agenda in hopes of enriching themselves and joining the monied class. Their political platform is jingoistic, populist, and nativist. Ideologues are welcome as long as their ideology includes bending the knee to their patrons when it comes to legislation, regulation, or judicial rulings.

To be clear, Trump and Musk and Ellison wouldn't be wasting so much time doing what they're doing if there wasn't money in it. Big money. They manipulate democracy, and they've got real fascists doing their work for them, but they are not in it because of political philosophy. Democracy isn't the problem. Capitalism is.

So, I'm feeling uncomfortable that the hypothetical has democracy as its starting point. If the problem is money, and if in the USofA the money that has undermined the system comes from uber capitalists, maybe capitalism should be where the discussion begins. 

Only internal revolution or external intervention could end such a fascist state, the panel continued. Think of the end of the fascist National Socialism in Germany - never really socialism at all, regardless of the name. Once National Socialism had been defeated and the dust settled, Europe was built from the bottom up. Governments throughout the continent re-imagined themselves as one form or another of social democracy. 

OK. I assume that we can agree that fascism is not desirable. But now I'm uncomfortable with the implied ideal landing place for a post-fascist society in the title. It's not socialism. It's democratic socialism.

Take the example of Norway, for many years listed as the most democratic society in the world by multiple organizations that rank such things.

Norway's constitutional monarchy was established in 1905, the year that the country separated for the final time from Sweden. (Don't get either a Swede or a Norwegian talking about the relations between their two countries unless you have a lots of time and a full glass,) Having been occupied by the Germans during WWII, Norway reorganized its constitutional monarchy after regaining control of its government at the end of the war, but with one important change. Norway decided to maintain sufficient stake to be in virtual control of a number of strategic industries that the Germans had seized - banking, telecommunications, energy production and the like. 

But Norway also has its share of billionaires. Not as many as China, certainly. But you can make good money in Norway farming, in real estate, selling groceries, and running cruise ships - Viking Cruises, in this case.

Thus, I end where I should have started. Fascism must be overcome if a society is to move from capitalism to social democracy. Of course, what we need now is a fully formed definition of democratic socialism as applied to the USofA. Tricky that, without knowing the manner of death inflicted on the emergent American fascism. Topic for another day.

ELECTION OF 2024: WHAT AMERICA HAS BECOME

If I have been stupid enough to publish occasional social commentary in the past, I surely cannot ignore the recent 2024 Presidential election in the USofA. I refuse to pretend that I have a complete handle on just what the hell is going on in the country of my birth. But I have a few ideas.

* A majority of the voting citizenry of the USofA chose a lying, narcissistic, sexual predator to be the face of their nation. They chose a serial evader of the consequences of his acts to be their Chief Executive. The bankrupter of a casino will lead the American economy. A man who routinely insults the military will be their Commander in Chief. In general, these attributes were not hidden from his supporters. Character didn't matter to them. This is what America has become.

* Obama's election normalized hate. Hate is a stronger emotion in the voting booth than love. 

* Democrats have chosen to take up the causes of marginalized people. I'm not saying that's wrong, but it's a lousy electoral strategy. By definition, marginalized people do not constitute a majority. You can argue that, taken together, they do add up to a majority. The problem with that thinking is that marginalized groups have different, sometimes conflicting concerns. Being pulled in different directions does not lead to coherent electoral strategy. To address that array of concerns, you first have to get elected. And bumper stickers, not manifestos, get you elected. Snow White was a white woman who lived with seven little white men. She was kissed without her consent by a white Prince. Deal with it. Don't make it a campaign issue.

* Progressives want Democrats to double down on the Progressive agenda. But Red states are not Red because Democrats are not sufficiently woke. I fear that the opposite is true. AOC demonstrated her chops by moving to the center early, even if ever so slightly. (Did I really say that?) By the demographics, Democrats have become the party of the elites. And the concerns of people with resources sufficient so that they don't have to worry about the next rent payment or where the next meal is coming from are not the concerns of a majority of the country. It's the economy stupid.

I believe that the Western European model of democratic socialism is the proper governance model for a modern, enlightened state. I also believe that the proper economic model for such a state is properly regulated capitalism. Those two statements are not oxymoronic. Renault-Nissan is the largest automaker in the world, they make excellent cars, and it's 15% owned by the French government. That's a big enough stake to make certain that the corporate types don't screw up. The French, German and Spanish governments combined own just over 25% of Airbus and Airbus is kicking Boeing's butt. So capitalism is alive and functioning reasonably well in Western Europe. But at the same time, Europe has embraced single-payer healthcare and strong quality-of-life guarantees for workers. After 10 years and multiple hospital procedures, both day surgeries and overnights, my wife and I are convinced that French healthcare workers, first and foremost, care about helping us. We are not treated as profit points by anyone in the system.

If that's the type of system that we want for Americans, we need to be as dedicated to a long-term strategy as Republicans have been. We need to vote in every election, from local school boards on up. We need to require schools to teach basics first. When I give the clerk at the counter $1.01 for a $.51 order, there should be no head scratching about the amount of change that I'm due. Critical thinking does not seem to follow if you can't read, rite, and do rithmatic. Our elected officials, whether in the minority or the majority, must be even more ruthless than the Republicans have been since Obama was first elected, ruthless against the opposition, ruthless against distractions within our own party.

JUSTICE DEMOCRATS ENDORSE EUGENE V. DEBS FOR 2020

Spokesman Mel N. Yull announced that the progressive Justice Democrats would be endorsing the candidacy of Eugene V. Debs for President of the United States in 2020. The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

BLOGGER: That's quite a surprise. Why did you decide to endorse Debs?

MEL N. YULL: Debs was a great orator, an unabashed socialist. He's...

BLOGGER: He's dead. You know that, right?

MEL N. YULL: Of course. And he was an old white guy before he died. But we can overlook that.

BLOGGER: Do you think that the voters can? Do you think that you can elect a dead man, old and white or otherwise?

MEL N. YULL: Of course not. But that's not the point. Purity is the point. And there's nobody who can represent Democratic Socialism better than Debs.

BLOGGER: So winning doesn't matter.

MEL N. YULL: Look, Justice Democrats endorsed 79 candidates in Democratic primaries in 2018. Seven made it to Congress. If winning mattered, we'd have been kicked to the sidelines long ago. Winning doesn't matter. Twitter followers matter.

BLOGGER: Have you picked a running mate for Debs yet?

MEL N. YULL: We're keeping our options open. Some of us wanted to cross party lines and consider John McCain. But two dead white guys was simply too much. Harriet Tubman has a great backstory but wasn't political enough. Shirley Chisholm gets my vote.

BLOGGER: She's dead. You know that, right? What am I saying? Of course you do. Let me ask you this. When do you envision electing a candidate endorsed by Justice Democrats to the Presidency?

MEL N. YULL: What difference does it make? As long as that candidate is pure.

BLOGGER: And breathing?

MEL N. YULL: That would be ideal but not necessary.