Tea Parties, Unions and the Working Class

Since I'm now the queen of thinking about tea partiers, right-wing organizing, and racism, why not another video? This time we had a debate between a union organizer and a tea party activist, and the amount of common ground might surprise you (though of course, some of this probably won't)...

The Consequences of Not Organizing?

So recently I wrote about my annoyance with progressive reactions to the teabaggers.

Well, today at GRITtv we went one step further than the tea party protests and looked at the rise of white nationalist movements with journalist/filmmaker Rick Rowley, who just made a film connecting the dots between the teabaggers, the anti-immigrant groups, and the hard-core white supremacist/neo-nazi groups. We also had Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, who spends entirely too much of his time researching frightening right-wing groups, on to discuss--and we spoke to a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens from Rowley's film, who says he joined it because of the economy.

I was prepared to be properly freaked out by the rise of neo-Nazi groups. Hell, I'm Jewish, lefty, and while I might be annoyed with some of Obama's moves thus far, I certainly don't want to see him assassinated.

Well, I'm still disturbed by the hatred, but the most salient points made in the panel by far were that these people are angry because they have nothing--or they're losing what little they do have. When I'm watching a film about white nationalists and they're saying some of the same things I say about Wall Street and the economy...

So, as a friend and I were just saying, what do we do now? I'm in NYC, in the heart of liberal multiculturalism, as it were. However, the show I work for is broadcast on satellite and is watched all over rural America. That helps some, I suppose, but we need more.

The good old "50 State Strategy" worked for an exceedingly well-funded campaign, but in the downtime, we need to not forget about organizing and we need to spend less time sneering at people and more time figuring out how to get them to stop blaming people of color, immigrants, women, lesbian and gay people for their troubles and look at the real causes.

(In case you think I'm being entirely too optimistic, I'll fall back on my second Saul Williams reference in a week: Some of these people are never going to change. Your old racist uncle isn't going to get any better--he's just going to die. But that's not most people.)

In Response to Drama over Health Care Reform

So the latest kerfuffle is over whether we should kill the bill or pass it and work on improving it. I honestly haven't had the time to do the poring-over of the Senate bill that I'd like, so I'm not going to stake out hard and fast turf on either side. I will say that mandates and no public option were a huge part of the reason I liked Obama's health care plan better than Hillary Clinton's, and it was an opinion that I fine-tuned for months arguing it on the campaign trail against much louder and better-trained voices like, oh, Paul Krugman's. It's what they have in Massachusetts, and it hasn't worked. David Sirota, on Twitter, called it a Giuliani move: making having no health insurance illegal is sort of like making being homeless illegal--and I agree.

ANYWAY. What is good is that the debate is now squarely between us on the left, and you can't tell who's going to say what based on their supposed position on the bar between ZOMG SOCIALISTS and milquetoast slightly-further-left-than-Ben-Nelson centrists.

And just like the primaries, shit has descended into some nasty personal attacks. Thankfully, since my primary exposure to that shit is on Twitter, and I don't follow too many assholes anymore, I haven't seen so much of it. Instead, it filters through on the sidelines.

I think the bill will probably be passed. I think we have to think long and hard about this, because while we have to fight to get everything good out of the House bill we can into the final bill (which is why the staking out of intransigent positions on the left is GOOD STRATEGY, among other things) we do have to take an honest look at the Senate bill and say: if this is the best it ever gets, is this worth passage? Kind of like getting married--you can't marry the person you hope someone turns into, you have to marry the person they are. (OK, enough folksy analogies from me. Palin I ain't.)

Over recent weeks I've been having this argument/discussion with coworkers and other Really Smart People on the left about what's going on with teabaggers and others. I'm firmly of the camp that says that the left is once again getting out-organized. If we had a solid union movement that educated its members and contextualized issues for them along some sort of class basis, I firmly believe that we'd have less angry incoherent teabag signs and much more protests of the people that deserve it: Wall Street.

So. Jane Hamsher is apparently making common cause with teabagger types in her quest to kill the bill. While I shudder at the thought of trying to make ANY common cause with someone like Grover "drown-government-in-the-bathtub" Norquist, I think that acknowledging the populist anger behind the teabaggers is worthwhile.

For instance. Sure, they're astroturfed. They are also real people who are really pissed off.

So this post this morning, from my otherwise-friend Matttbastard (who also has the luxury of Canadian health care and so has far less a horse in this race than I do) kind of ticked me off.

Ok, so: We have an astroturfed right-wing social movement of sorts (almost singlehandedly keeping the polyester lobby and Lee Greenwood from starving) that, following a TOTALLY SPONTANEOUS RANT on CNBC from Rick Santelli, decided to utilize the angry-shouty bits of Saul Alinsky to get their ugly red state mugs on Hardball every fucking night for several months straight. And this is the (bipartisan) model that Hamsher apparently wants to emulate (nearly 8 weeks after the mission accomplished moment that was NY-23) because “the only difference [between wingnuts and progressives] is the messaging”?

This combines SEVERAL things I hate into one paragraph. "Ugly Red State mugs" well gee, you know what? Those are real fucking people too. I'm so tired of the red state/blue state snobbery I could spit. You know what? I lived in red states. I busted my ass on multiple political campaigns in red states and saw one of them turn blue (Colorado). I've talked to pissed-off overworked people who are just looking for someone, ANYONE to give them a narrative of how they got so fucked--and we haven't been doing it.

Also, since when does anyone who calls themselves a lefty get to snarl and sneer at populist street protest? Sure, I laugh at "look at this fucking teabagger" too, but you know what else I do? I wonder why the fuck we're not out there, because at least those people are putting some effort into it. And to some degree they ARE protesting the right people, even if the narrative they have (ZOMG SOCIALIST!) is just factually wrong.

(See latest Global Comment piece for more on activism being actual work)

Alan Grayson got cheers from nearly every corner of the progressive blogosphere for taking what were essentially right-wing tactics (boil down message to one scare-tactic sentence. Repeat. Refuse to apologize.) to the floor of Congress and the major media outlets. Because it WORKED, it was media-savvy and it was a progressive staking out some turf and refusing to cave in.

So while I disagree with partnering with Grover Norquist, who is no kind of populist and every kind of rich plutocratic asshole, I absolutely don't have a problem with acknowledging that the teabaggers A. have some legitimate grievances and B. are using tactics that get attention. I also don't have a problem with someone staking out a hard and fast progressive position and vowing not to swerve from it.

We got the shitty health care bill we have because progressives refused to do that, while assholes like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson weren't afraid to.

More on The Battle in Seattle

To push back a little on Erik's view of the Battle in Seattle, I'm posting the video from GRITtv's discussion yesterday. Don't get me wrong; I think Erik has a lot of valid points (Ann Friedman made some similar ones in this excellent post from the other day at the Prospect).

I think in general that it's often wrong to classify progressivism (and feminism, and many other things) as movements. They're belief systems, often stagnant ones. By comparison, the Obama campaign WAS a movement--a moment where hundreds of thousands of people came together to fight for one objective, even if lots of us did it with clear-eyed knowledge that a year out we'd be disappointed and arguing with the president we gave so much of our time and effort to elect.

We do need movements, though. We need those moments where we can come together and accomplish something, like in Seattle--and we need to extend those beyond moments. How do we turn those moments into sustained pressure? I like what I've seen from the National Equality March, and the fight in Maine (even though it too lost). But I want more. Anyway, I digress.

People asked what the organizers of Seattle would say if they were asked: well, it was only ten years ago. They're still around, and a bunch of them were on GRIT yesterday. You want to know what they think? Here's video.

Work and Certain Progressive Bloggers

For as awesome as the progressive blogosphere is, many of its leading writers have positions that are questionable at best.

Part of the problem is that these youngsters who rose to the top of the blogosphere at the age of 23 came from privileged backgrounds and haven't worked a day in their lives. This can mean that for all their progressivism on some issues, when it comes to class and especially unions, they don't have a clue.

Stephen Suh points us to this Ezra Klein post. Klein approvingly links to this e-mail he received on tenure.

So I read this article about Michelle Rhee and the end of tenure in DC, and I have some serious misgivings...As a grad student studying to be a math teacher, I am all for reform. Who needs tenure? I should only get better at my job as I get older. That's how most jobs work. If I need a guarantee not to be fired...well I just don't.

Never mind that this person doesn't really understand tenure. I question whether Ezra does either. The real issue here is the idea that tenure should not exist. This guy is approving of "merit-based" work arrangements. While that sounds great, in reality it means that management gets to do whatever they want since they are the people who judge the supposed "merit." This is what teacher unions are fighting against. They understand what the working world is like. They know what management prerogative means. They have worked.

I don't know this math graduate student. And I don't know Ezra either. I could certainly be wrong about their backgrounds; in fact, I am loathe to speculate for fear of making someone angry. But I do know that this is one of many examples of the lack of class analysis within the leading lights of the progressive blogosphers. I suspect that these writers (and many others) would be speaking differently if they understood job insecurity, low wages, and working-class lives. It's real easy to talk about progressive economics from a distance. It's a whole lot different if you've lived it.