RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 308 Norman Solomon on Trump, Voting, Morality, and Political Divides
Episode 308 of RevolutionZ has as guest Norman Solomon to talk about election 2024. Does who is in the White House matter in general, and in this election? Is there contradiction or synergy between personal conscience and the broader ethical responsibilities of electoral decisions? Is voting for Harris in swing states not only how to beat Trump but also how to advance progressive post-election prospects in coming months and years and thus compatible with conscience for organizers--or is the better choice third party voting or abstention? What are the diverse motivations and thoughts of Trump supporters? How might organizers relate effectively with Trump's half of the voting population, and, for that matter, with Harris's half.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is to be our 308th episode, and my guest is Norman Solomon. Norman is a US journalist, media critic, author and activist. His latest book, war Made Invisible how America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published by the New Press in 2023. In a starred review, kirkus Reviews called the book a powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy. Norman has a dozen other books, including War Made Easy how Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Norman is the founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy, where he is executive director. He is co-founder and national director of the online organization RootsActionorg, which now has 1.2 million online supporters. He was elected as a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions, where he was a coordinator of the independent Bernie Delegates Network. Norman wrote the nationally syndicated Media Beat weekly column from 1992 to 2009. So, norman welcome.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot, Michael.
Speaker 1:So about two weeks from now, the US election will happen. I know you've been very energetic in writing to provide information and thoughts regarding it, so let's start there and maybe even a bit personally about why that is, why write about it so much. I mean, I'm asked that all the time because I'm doing it too. What is your thinking in deciding to address it and in deciding what to say about it?
Speaker 2:My thinking is really largely drawn from the last 50 years that I've lived through. I'm in my 70s now and, as an activist in the 1970s and 80s, I really agreed with something that I heard 80s, I really agreed with something that I heard which was that it's much more important who's sitting in in protests than who's sitting in the Oval Office, and I think that attitude has been proven wrong in terms of the impact on society and the world over the last several decades. The effects of the Reagan eight years are still with us and the fact that the militarism and the neoliberal policies of the Democratic Party have to be challenged. That reality doesn't change the fact that it really does matter who is in control of the executive branch and, for that matter, congress, and then, by sort of extension, the judicial, and so, on the one hand, while the left is always fighting for better policies coming from the government, it's a disconnect if we don't really deal with reality that it matters who is running the government, and so, to take it up to now, a Trump administration going forward would be a brick wall and progressives, the left, would be up against the wall. We would be virtually entirely on the defensive in terms of foreign policy and federal domestic policy and being on the defensive is not a good way to have the kind of changes that this country and the world desperately needs.
Speaker 2:And I'd say as sort of a footnote, that, implicit and sometimes explicit in the attitudes that we sometimes hear from groups about how we get bigger demonstrations if there's a right winger in the White House, is sort of bass-ackwards. It's an attitude that, well, the worst things get, at least we can up the subscriptions to our magazines and have bigger turnouts at our protests. That is not what this is about. It's about creating movements that have effect in terms of social change, instead of the world sliding further backward. To sort of sum up, michael, I'd say that the left has two overwhelming responsibilities One is to fight the right, the xenophobes, the racists, the misogynists, the nativists, and the other is to effectively organize for progressive social change.
Speaker 1:Obviously, I agree. I guess I would add one thing, and I wonder what you think of it which is that you know it's one thing when the presidential election is between is literally between, two wings of one party, the Republican and the Democratic wing of a corporate, system-defending party, but it's another thing when one of those parties is still a corporate-defending, system-defending party and the other one has gone entirely off the rails and is, if not already, in line to be a fascist party. It seems that that makes the election, at least in my mind, of who's going to be the next president and therefore who's going to be in the Oval Office for the next four years, and therefore whether you're going to be on the defensive or able to be on seeking positive gains, even more pressing.
Speaker 2:There is something special about or so it seems to me the problem that Donald Trump represents, embodies and really has been a catalyst for bringing to the surface and mobilizing for state power. I think some of what has really scrambled the deck, so to speak, for how some on the left perceive our moment is a sharper than ever distinction between domestic and foreign policy among the two parties. There have always been distinctions, but there's never been anywhere near such a sharp distinction between the domestic policies of the Democratic and Republican parties and the foreign policy. I mean, we can talk about the nuanced differences and I'm setting aside climate here but otherwise the nuanced differences on global policy between Democrats and Republicans, and I think they're both terrible, dangerous policies, as we've seen in the last almost four years, testament to in terms of Democrats. But when you get to domestic policy, which includes who's going to be able to exercise power in the short and long run in the USS government and the courts and the executive and legislative branches of the feds, it is just preposterous.
Speaker 2:When there are efforts among some small but I think significant elements of the left to claim there's no significant difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, I mean I sometimes really wonder, not to be too polemical about it, what planet someone would need to be on to believe that there's no major difference between the policies, the rhetoric, the aspirations that are expressed between, say, donald Trump and Kamala Harris. I think it's just intellectually insulting, as we are hearing from, say, jill Stein from the Green Party, that there's no difference in the evils of the two parties. You go to Texas and tell a woman who can't get an abortion that there's no difference. You tell people whose social safety net will be shredded that there's no difference. You can go up and down the line of policies and for understandable reasons, for emotional reasons magnified by the Democratic Party at the top, supporting the genocide in Gaza totally understandable emotions. But we need some sort of cognizance and dialectical relationship with these various factors so that we can not simply sort of self-immolate ourselves because of our rage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, again, you know, we agree what.
Speaker 1:I want to do, if we can, however, is to, at least for a moment, get beyond what seems to be the most prevalent dynamics that are at work, to one that is somewhat more subtle and is, I think, behind many people's feelings.
Speaker 1:So, on the one hand, it's certainly true that many people are feeling good Lord, there's no greater evil than genocide, or how can I possibly vote for, emotionally, somebody who's involved in that kind of phenomena? Okay, that's one set of feelings, but there is another set, which is it is the right thing, the strategic thing, the thing that will, in the long run or even maybe the medium run, they think, I'm not sure benefit movements of all sorts, and that argument is the I don't know what to precisely call it the. We need to punish the Democrats so that the Democrats will be more open to and more receptive to paying attention to and being impacted by the left, and so the argument goes left. And so the argument goes if we can show them that they can't win without us, whichever the us constituency might happen to be, then they will have to and they will listen to us. So, somewheres down the road, four years, eight years, whatever we'll be in a better position. So that's the argument that I hear often, and I'm wondering how you react to it.
Speaker 2:It's a very time-worn argument. On the surface it might seem to make sense. The only problem with it is history. If you ignore actual experience in history, it's a great argument. When you look at history, it is without any capacity to hold water, is without any capacity to hold water.
Speaker 2:The laboratory in the real world not in the polemics of a columnist or whatever is the year 2000. And we can talk all we want about whether the Ralph Nader Green Party presidential campaign in the year 2000 was pivotal or not. I think at the very least you can make a strong argument that it helped George W Bush become president. If ever there was an instance to test this theory, it would be what happened in 2000. And it is very significant that at least the Democratic Party hierarchy believed that the 2000 NATO campaign cost them the presidency. So what happened after that? The Democratic Party kept moving further to the right. That's what happened became more corporatist, became more quote new Democrat more militaristic in foreign policy. So it really is an argument that is a theory that bumps up against reality.
Speaker 2:Hang on to, because it's sort of a rationale that goes along with other rationales, I think a, if not exactly, related one. There's sort of a concentric relationship between the individual argument that I can't vote for Harris because my conscience doesn't allow me, and as a movement with integrity we have to oppose Harris, as has been said quite explicitly, caused her the election. Sawant, the often admirable city council member from Seattle, has been explicit campaigning in Michigan with Jill Stein in the last few weeks. We're going to punish Kamala Harris. We want to cost her the election and Jill Stein has been campaigning in swing stakes, explicitly saying that it doesn't matter who wins and implicitly, through behavior and emphasis, denouncing Harris much more than denouncing Trump. There is a message that we want to cause to Harris the election. So in this context, we have purportedly left people saying they want to help a fascist be elected president, and I just think that's almost Sir Pathet's understanding in terms of any rationality in terms of any rationality.
Speaker 1:I keep trying to understand and I'm having trouble also, but let's keep trying anyway, because our task obviously or I would say our task is okay. How do we speak, write, promote publications of things, not things that show that the writer or the venue is radical because they don't like Democrats? We have two weeks left. The task of demonstrating that you are radical, especially if you've been radical or revolutionary for 40 or 50 years doesn't seem like a high priority compared to the task of trying to impact the election, and it seems to me that the only way that somebody on the left can impact the election who wants to stop Trump, is by impacting those voters who actually hate Trump, who actually don't. You know, they're certainly not in favor of Trump, but for some reason they are on the verge of voting in a fashion that would help Trump, I think it's helpful to really focus on the swing states and that, if you live in New York, california, massachusetts or any of the other 40 plus, states that aren't swing, it's not even a conversation worth having explicitly with those voters.
Speaker 2:But we have a national discourse going on and if something's on Z Network site or Common Dreams or whatever, it will affect people in the seven swing states, and I think that's one useful aspect to go at this. Another is to say that it's not about you, and this focus on my conscience should raise us a counterposing question what kind of conscience would impel you to do something that will hurt other people? Your conscience will impel you to vote in a way that will or not vote in a way that will help Donald Trump become president again, with foreseeable, really horrible consequences, including taking lives of many people inside the United States. And yet my conscience is more important than that. It's a sort of a solipsistic attitude about how we function or should function, and I always thought that the socialist imperative is to think of the collective good, the larger good, so that we're serving that good rather than serving some notion of how we might get to a metaphorical version of progressive heaven because of our virtuous behavior during our lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't even like using the word conscience in regard to it, because I'm voting my conscience, that is. You know well, I'm in a safe state. I'm voting my conscience. I'm not going to vote for Harris, I'm not going to vote for harris and even though I'm not in a contested, a swing state, I'm writing my ass off for harris, not for harris against trump.
Speaker 2:yes, it requires that you vote harris as a word and maybe as a concept. Even conscience can be very slippery, because all sorts of people do all sorts of things for conscience, including the people who are blockading reproductive services clinics because they believe that abortion is murder and their conscience tells them to do that. So we don't get a pass just because we say we're doing something for our conscience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right. Well, let me raise up another difficult issue. I think it's one thing for you or I, or whoever, to say to a person who's about to vote for Stein or West or is about to abstain in a swing state that helps Trump. Do you really want to help Trump? Is that really a strategy, an approach that's going to work, particularly taking into account that it means that we'll be fighting against Trump to get back to the likes of Harris for the next four years, instead of fighting the likes of Harris to go forward? Okay, fine, there's another set of constituencies, constituencies who are moved by, overwhelmingly, what's going on in Palestine, which is certainly understandable, given that what's going on in Palestine is absolutely grotesque, as they would put it. I think. How can there be a greater evil than genocide? And, of course, that one question all by itself is compelling how can there be a? I mean, what do you do beyond genocide?
Speaker 2:Well, there is a greater evil than genocide, and that is a bigger genocide.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it seems pretty obvious.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one would think, and in this context, the reality is, and Mehdi Hassan put out a tweet on this a few days ago, showing a video from Donald Trump just days ago, where he basically said that Biden has been too restraining on Netanyahu and Netanyahu should just be encouraged to do whatever he wants because he's been doing really great. Well, of course, what the Biden administration has been doing is horrific. I personally believe, and it can plausibly be said, that when Netanyahu, if he ever, is brought to the Hague, biden should also be brought there as an accessory, an armor, of someone engaging in genocide, ethnic cleansing and the rest of the horrors going on. That doesn't change the fact that things can always get worse, and this is one of the mythologies I think that can be prevalent from people who are being more theoretical about it. The idea is that things can't ever get worse, and I think that is just plain wrong.
Speaker 2:One of the great books I think of our lifetimes is the Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg, and he talks about. When he got to the Kennedy administration as a nuclear war planner in 1961, he was handed a piece of paper that showed that the US planned attacks. Contingency attacks on China, russia, eastern Europe would result in 600 million deaths, deaths, and he thought about what that would mean to humanity. And then, decades later, he wrote about it in terms of that's a hundred holocausts. Well, capital H holocausts. Well, I mean a little bit of a side note.
Speaker 2:The first holoca Holocaust of the 20th century was in Congo, exerted by the Belgians. And you know these are not unique events. You know these horrors are not. You know, even the word Holocaust is perhaps culturally driven by assigning it only capital H to one event where millions were killed in Congo.
Speaker 2:But anyway, what Dan Ellsberg was saying was that, as horrific as the 6 million Jews killed and of course we know there were communists, gypsies, others killed as well by the Third Reich directly in the camps that what was underway in terms of planning was 100 times that in 1961. And when you do the math now with nuclear winter, it's actually a thousand times more than the Holocaust under the Third Reich. So people could say well, you can't get any worse than the Holocaust of the Nazis, and emotionally that's totally understandable. So to take it to now, of course, the genocide in Gaza is so horrific it's unimaginable that anything could be worse. It's clear that Netanyahu is doing everything he can to get Trump elected, and it would be logical to ask why. Because he feels he would have even a freer hand and more support from the US government if Trump becomes president again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's another dimension, I guess, of it is the assessment by people that is based upon effect on them. So I've had people from Europe say to me well, yeah, he might be worse for some Americans, but what difference is it going to make for Europe? And, aside from wanting to scream, I say but you're a leftist, Is that how we want to think about things? Is that our approach to thinking about things? But it gravitates into the question I was going to ask a little while ago, because there is a delicate or a difficult, let's call it. I don't think it's substantively delicate, I think it's a pragmatically difficult question or issue arising In Michigan. I don't know, You're going to know the figures better than me. I think there are 300,000 Arab Americans. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Something like that that most of the Arab Americans in Michigan are Christian and that often the media coverage is well, you know the Muslims who are Arab Americans where actually there's so many Muslims who are not Arab Americans in Michigan. So he toted up that we're really talking about and I can't remember the exact figure but way more than a couple hundred thousand people in, but way more than a couple hundred thousand people in Michigan who presumably often at a very visceral level, as Muslims and or as Arab Americans, feel especially passionate about what's going on in Gaza.
Speaker 1:Of course, all of us should feel passionate about the genocide. Yeah, so the question arises now, as a commentator, as a speaker, as a writer, how do you who wants to try to impact constituencies who may not vote Harris in a swing state, to vote Harris in a swing state? How do you address that constituency? How do you address people who have lost family members, people who have, and so on? It's not easy, because it's one thing to be right, it's another thing to communicate something that is valid and worthy, and I'm not sure there's a good answer to this that works. You mentioned Mehdi Hassan, who is doing a good job, I think, in trying to address these communities, as well as the I guess white is, for want of a better word sometimes young, but not only young communities who think it's the radical thing to do to oppose Harris, to not vote for Harris. So I don't know, have you sort of dealt with this in your own mind?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think our role ought to be not telling people how to vote, but our best assessment of consequences of the results of the vote, and mapping that out I think is very helpful, even in the very specific realm of Israel. I mean, the four years under Trump were horrible for Palestinians in terms of moving symbolically and otherwise moving the capital, the US embassy, wise, moving the capital, the US embassy, to Jerusalem, and a lot of other ways. And, as we were just talking about foreseeably incomprehensible as it is, it will be worse if Trump is elected than even a Biden-Harris sort of formulaic policy, if we can extrapolate from the last four years. So that's one point to make that do we want things to be really bad or even worse, worse, worse than really bad? Obviously we don't want either, but we're dealing with the real world, so I think that's part of it.
Speaker 2:Another is just a broader question. I think of solidarity and thinking longer term that as much as ethnic, religious, racial solidarity feelings come up, as humans we all might have them. Enabled Zionists to bring about solidarity with mass murder and genocide by tapping into that sort of tribalism, as real as that is. There's 8 billion people on the planet and a lot of them are affected by the 4% of humanity in the United States and the political structures that we have. Fascism is not going to be good for anyone in the world if it exists in the United States.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I mean. That's one of the things that I've said to Europeans is who do you think Victor Orban is rooting for in the American future and what do you think is going to happen?
Speaker 2:That's a great point, michael, and I think that I have experienced that as well when I have traveled in Europe a number of years ago. And the realities of the US Supreme Court, for instance, totally abstraction. People in Europe they just don't connect to. And yet who is on the Supreme York Times make a good point. And sometimes there's this attitude. I think of it.
Speaker 2:I think it was in Ringlardner Jr's autobiography. He talked about how when he was in the Communist Party, he assumed that everything in the New York Times was a lie. And so when they said that Stalin was massacring people en masse, he assumed that was a lie. And I think there's sometimes that sort of knee-jerk response because people we abhor in their neoliberal policies talk to us about how the Supreme Court is in jeopardy or will get even worse if Republicans win. There's a tendency to say, well, that's a liberal argument, that's a Democratic Party corporate argument. We reject that argument. It happens to be a valid argument, as we can see from what the Supreme Court is doing again and again, and we can see that across the board, where perhaps we have a tendency to discount an argument, a point made by those with whom we disagree, even if it's a very valid point in that specific instance.
Speaker 1:It's easy for people and there's a tendency for people probably ourselves included when somebody disagrees with you and you feel strongly and you think you know, I'm right, I'm right, you start to think either the person disagreeing is stupid, or the person disagreeing hadn't thought about it, or the person disagreeing there's some emotional factor that is intervening. So there are sort of real disputes where there's substantive differences, there are facts that are in question, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's this other stuff. And I have to admit, as much as I've been trying to find substantive reasons for Stein-like positions, much less Sawant-like positions and similar kinds of it's hard. I find it hard to conceive that people are arriving at these positions without another factor weighing in and the other factors. There's two other factors weighing in. One is I just don't want to be on the side of evil. Weighing in One is I just don't want to be on the side of evil, I just don't. You know that kind of factor. And then I think there's another one, which is the same thing, from an opposite direction I want to be radical, I want to, I want to be revolutionary, me too.
Speaker 1:And somehow I think that to give an inch to the Democratic Party or to Harris by voting for them is a slippery slope, and I will become what I abhor. I will become somebody who will rationalize and even support and abet genocide. I will become somebody who is a system defender rather than a system critic and an effort to overthrow it. And I simply don't understand that slippery slope. I mean, I just don't. Why do people feel they will slip slide that way? Do you worry about it? Why do people feel that if they vote for, or if they advocate voting Harris to stop Trump, they will become wishy-washy defenders of the status quo?
Speaker 2:They have examples of it. But it doesn't have to be a slippery slope at all. It can be a very realistic, pragmatic, dare I say, wise decision about what makes sense. There are competing truths. I think that's really hard for us, maybe, as humans, to sometimes accept. There's a truth in one direction, there's a truth in another direction. There's a multiplicity of realities and sometimes they seem to clash and I rarely hear the word dialectics anymore. I think, in many ways, the position that we need to do everything we can to defeat Trump and that means doing everything we can to get Harris to defeat him I think that's a much farther left position than to say emotionally, I just can't bear the thought that I could vote, or urge anybody else to vote for Harris in a swing state. This is a realm where I often think about how the line between political analysis and psychoanalysis is very thin and sometimes it seems almost non-existent. We have a political culture and it seeps into a lot of or some of the left anyway where being analytical is much less important than being emotional.
Speaker 1:Have you succeeded? I remember when I was in school and college at MIT, I used to yell and scream at faculty and administrators who showed no emotion about Vietnam. I would argue the points, argue the substance, and then I would also say what the hell's the matter with your. You know that you just feel nothing about all this. So I certainly understand that tactical or the pragmatic or whatever words you want to use assessment that wait a minute. I'm not really voting for radical change. I'm abetting and aiding Trump, no matter what. Voting for Harris feels like it's what is radical at this moment, at this particular instance in time, which is just what you just said. But have you been able to get that across with any consistency? And therefore, can we do it over the next two weeks? Of course, it's ridiculous that we're down to the last two weeks.
Speaker 2:It's hard to gauge impact. Like you, I've been writing some articles with this theme that we need to analyze carefully and recognize the genuine fascistic threat coming from a Trump victory. I know I've gotten some blowback and negativity from things I've written. I've tried to make a logical case, including pieces that have run on the Z-Net website, Z-Network and Common Dreams and elsewhere some hostile responses. On the other hand, someone I know in Philadelphia sent me a note saying that he changed his mind from voting for Stein to vote for Harris based on what presumably was a logical set of arguments. So we're chipping away and I think the tension of it is boosted because, imprecise as polls are, we really have indications this could be a very close election in the swing states that will make all the difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does seem so, but now we come to the flip side, or the complete 180 degree turn. Why is that the case? That is to say, what is going on in the minds of the people who are forget about not voting Harris for a minute, voting Trump. Also, what's going on in the mind of the left, viewing those people and thinking about or not thinking about, literally dismissing the importance of addressing Trump voters?
Speaker 2:I've read different articles running a gamut from it's all about racism to it's all about class, which neither seem very plausible to me. Maybe there's a temptation of writers, pundits, including on the progressive end of things, to want to be categorical about what's the saying. It's binary? No, it's not. There's a lot of different factors. A very big and complex country.
Speaker 2:I think racism is part of it, but then the point is Obama was elected twice, response from the neoliberal order to grinding down people's standard of living as it's measured economically and, one might say, socially. That's a good argument too. So I think it's that mixture and, speaking to people who want to vote for Trump, it's very difficult. I think that the Harris campaign is sort of grasping and flailing to try to do that and different people are going to hear it in different ways. I think we have that experience as activists and organizers that some people want a very methodical, methodical, intellectual explanation for why it's not appropriate to bomb Afghanistan or Iraq or whatever, and for some people it's seeing a picture of a child being bloodied and maimed by a US weapon and or some mixture.
Speaker 2:And I know from my experience when the film War Made Easy came out, based on my book. I had many different responses from people who said I'm really glad that you, as a person on screen, a narrator, interspersed with the examples of the carnage and the lies, dispersed with the examples of the carnage and the lies, I'm really glad that you sounded straightforward and calm. And yet I also remember one time I was at a film festival and a woman came up to me after the film and she was furious at me that I didn't sound angry and enraged on the screen. So you know, to coin a phrase, different strokes for different folks.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you your reaction to one other thing you described for the Trump voters. I'm not talking about the strongest MAGA supporters, right, but the broader. We're talking half the voting population, roughly speaking. So the broader sector of that is that half his voters. Is it three quarters of his voters? I don't know, I hope it's more.
Speaker 1:But in explaining you mentioned, okay, there's the racial dynamics and there's the class or economic dynamics I want to suggest I've begun to think that the third leg of the stool that the left usually sees things as sitting on the gender one may be the paramount one. It's beginning to look to me like take even the Haitians eating cats and dogs. Trump doesn't believe it, Vance doesn't believe it. I don't think that most of their supporters believe a whit of it. So to then say that it's racism, okay, but except what if they don't even believe it? What if it's not right? But I don't think Trump is stupid and I don't think Vance is stupid. And they put it forward because they think it works somehow. It's touching something. So what's it touching? I think it's touching fear, a fear that neighborhood life, rural life, maybe family life, is under threat and that it's not so much that the threat is Haitian black. It's that the threat is culturally different habits that are different, different ways of interacting, and then it's exacerbated by Trump and made into racism.
Speaker 1:Yes, and on the gender thing, let me just extend this question one more step. There's this giant, gigantic gap now between women and men. Okay, so what happened? One thing happened Roe v Wade and the escalation of abortion into not rhetoric. Everybody now knows and everybody accepts Trump will decimate reproductive rights. So it's a real issue.
Speaker 1:The let's make it even just the white working class female population, or the female population, swung very dramatically. That suggests that maybe a lot of what's going on with what Trump says goes by them. The same way, it goes by a lot of leftists who don't believe that he'll do those things. You know what I mean. In other words, when there was something concrete that everybody really agreed on, all of a sudden the polls dramatically shifted for women. Now, it's a sad commentary on men that it didn't shift for men also as much, but still, I think it does say something. It's not misogyny that caused white women to vote for Trump. It's not rampant sexism that caused white women and a certain amount of non-white women to vote for Trump. It's something else and that doesn't make it not dangerous, it doesn't make it right, but I'm not sure we're addressing these things properly or effectively.
Speaker 2:Some of this goes under the heading, broadly, of culture. I think there are so many layers there where a sense of threat can move people in very different directions. As you say, the sense of threat of bodily autonomy and freedom, really of an individual life has really moved a lot of women towards the left. The sense of threat, I think, of the rural vote which has been so badly lost by Democrats as the corporatization of farming and the decimation of neoliberalism has had such terrible effects that Democrats have basically not been able to speak to that and the apparently younger adults, even males, who are not as women, are moving leftward. There's that excellent piece that Sonali Kulhatkar wrote in the last week or so where she really outlined and analyzed how young men are often more conservative, and I think there's a sense of threat and that could play into some of the appeal of Trump. You know, I think of Wilhelm Reich who wrote about the. You know, the need for the daddy, the big man. Listen, little man. You need that leader, the great one, the man who will lead you. That was, you know, a motif of Mussolini. Trump is right there and that has some sort of psychological appeal and then a sense of masculinity and what it means to be a man, and the younger adult males, and apparently you know we don't want to generalize this is just borne out, though, in the polling and the voting apparently. So there are a lot of these different aspects of feeling. I'm threatened, and it should be said.
Speaker 2:I think that the left has an attachment sometimes to rhetoric. That's really not helpful and the buzz phrases don't pay off. I mean, we might talk to somebody in our kitchen with our loved one differently than we would at a community meeting, for instance. At a community meeting, for instance. Why can't the left find better ways to talk to people who not only are not on the left but even think that we are dangerous, and find that common ground? I think Bernie Sanders, of course, has been brilliant at doing that, and we've seen the results. I mean, I think of how, in 2016, in a thoroughly red state, bernie carried every county in the primary against Hillary Clinton. He was presenting a platform that people could connect to, so that Democrats quote unquote or democratically aligned activist politicians would no longer seem like a threat. They would seem like allies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but that was partly the substance, partly the program, but it was also partly Bernie's manner and his ability to communicate and to talk and to hear. And you know I agree with you. I also think I mean this is again not understanding. I don't understand how somebody on the left who is talking about winning a better world, who is winning, talking about, say, fundamentally transforming, defining institutions, can then more or less say well, you know, the Trumpers forget it, we can't talk to them, you're not going to create a new world and win fundamentally transformed institutions ever forget about in the next four years if you can't reach half the population and you can't even communicate with them. So we have to deal with the problem that you're raising.
Speaker 2:I think part of the conscious or not is that we just have no brook and no acceptance of racism.
Speaker 2:We will not accept the misogyny, and so it's sort of a barrier to the get-go. So it is a challenge to find the language and the ways to really challenge it without seeming completely arrogant and pedantic. I know last year I did a lot of YouTube interviews when I was promoting the hardcover of War Made Invisible, and I did maybe eight or 10 interviews with very right-wing hosts YouTube show people who loved Trump and since I was talking about war, often they would completely agree with me, and when I would say that Trump also was a warmonger, that was sort of a disconnect. They didn't like that, because Trump is very good at pandering and being a Rorschach. He's very militaristic, but he's also against endless wars, even though he perpetuated them for four years, and so I think that is an opportunity but a very difficult hill to climb to talk to people and be real about our differences and challenge the bigotry when it comes up but also find that common ground. And in terms of what we are up against, we are up against the most astute, skillful propaganda army in our lifetimes. The Trump people are kicking down every door they can. They're pro-war and anti-war, they are militaristic and for peace. They are for family, while they try to destroy families from the safety net onward, and we have this underlying challenge.
Speaker 2:So I just sort of sum up this thought by saying that, from the standpoint of Roots Action, I've been working with colleagues there for 10 or 12 years and we have denounced the Obama wars, we've denounced the Trump wars, we denounced the Biden wars, and I think a single standard of human rights is just. We should never blow with the wind of the party, of who's in power, and we, I think, like so many people on the left, are looking forward to the opportunity to fight a Harris administration from day one on all sorts of anticipated grounds, because we know where she's coming from, we know what she's campaigning for and we know the interests that she basically represents. We don't know exactly what her policies will be, but we want to be able to fight that fight, as so many people on the left have done for the last nearly four years with the Democrat in the White House and not to belabor the point, but we will be up against the wall if it's a Trump administration.
Speaker 1:You know it's funny. So many people who I know say Trump's an idiot, trump's a moron, they're all stupid. And I'm thinking to myself yeah, he's an idiot. He was just president of the United States. He did win. You do know that. So if he's an idiot, what are the opponents that lost to him? And right now he's either the luckiest person ever to set foot on the planet ie he accidentally has successes in the political realm and in the social realm or he knows what he's doing and I can't make believe. I always know exactly what he's doing. But to decide that, because we don't quite get what he's doing, he's being stupid is probably not right, given how effective he is at it. I completely agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And he is unhinged in a lot of ways. He's not quite as strategic as some of his advisors, like Steve Bannon, who they are fascists. They would wish he would tamp down some of his Arnold Palmer kind of craziness, but he's very shrewd. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's all right, I don't know. Is there something else that we haven't covered that you want to bring up that I haven't asked about.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll put in two plugs. One is for the paperback of my book War Made Invisible that's just come out in the last month. That has an afterword about the Gulf or the Gaza War and what the genocide in Gaza entails in terms of US politics and propaganda, and the other is to support Zee Network. I think the last couple of years the revival of Zee online has just been a real huge plus for the long-term organizing. So if people are not yet making a habit of going to the Zee Network website, please do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I no longer work there, I no longer am on the staff, so I can say, without it being, what is it you know, self-serving. I agree with you. Thank you for saying so. All right, I guess that said this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.