Coop Scoop Sept 9: Playing It Down

Sep 10, 2020

The Playing It Down Edition

September 9, 2020
Issue #33

The night Donald Trump was elected I was in Armenia working as a media consultant and was interviewed on video just hours after the results were announced by the outlet where I was consulting… Civilnet.TV.

With full confidence I predicted that a Trump regime would not become fascist because a) the conditions did not exist and b) he was much more of an incompetent Berlusconi than a strategic and disciplined Mussolini.

In the months and years that have followed I have maintained and I still do maintain that outlook.

Now, four years later, it should be vividly clear –55 days out from the election-- that President Donald J. Trump is badly wounded, that he has entered his political death rattle and that he is headed for the dumpster and, quite possibly, a series of criminal indictments from the state of New York, the Manhattan D.A. and the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. (Yes, yes, lower down I will address the fear that he will win or just try to remain in office. Patience!).

And, for better or for worse, he can pretty much take all the credit for what appears to be his near certain defeat. I am not about to rehearse here his entire record; I will merely point to its most salient self-defeating features:

He came into office after already alienating millions of women with his pussy-grabbing reveries and then sealed the deal with his full spectrum defense of Brett Kavanaugh.

His serial mendacity and his staggering incompetence have successively eroded his support among the once loyal cohort of educated white voters.

The failure to produce all those coal mining and industrial jobs have hurt him among his most loyal troops, the white working class of the Midwest.

The kids in cages tore up more support across the board and began what is now the collapse of his support among suburbanites.

The president’s absurd remarks about the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were so noxious that it eventually led to some resignations in his cabinet.

Playing footsie with Putin has only damaged him as has his bromance with the monstrous Kim Il Jong of North Korea. As has the indictment or conviction of more than a half dozen of his closest associates… and that’s not counting Postmaster DeJoy and I would assume, eventually, his repulsive Minister of the Interior Bill Barr who both seem equally anxious for a meeting with Madame La Guillotine shortly after they leave office.

His deployment of his private federal militia to places like Portland and his McCarthyite strategy of smearing all demonstrators and even moderate and conservative Democrats as radical left socialists, anarchists and communists has only further bashed his own credibility.

His now overt racist appeal to “suburban housewives” that only he can protect their neighborhoods from being invaded by them there colored people has gone over like Hitler’s Bar Mitzvah.

His upfront incitement of right-wing militias to take to the streets threatening protestors with their AR’s have alarmed any and everybody who understands the rule of law…as has his despicable takeover of the Department of Justice that now has volunteered to use our tax money to defend him in court in a personal defamation suit brought by a woman who claims she was sexually assaulted by Trump.

The trashing of the FBI leadership, his open disdain for the intelligence community, his belittlement of any dissident Republican voice and his now well-known mumbling about the suckers and losers who lost their lives in combat, has thrown the door wide open for the top-notch strategists in The Lincoln Project to steal away what will be a crucial 5% or so of his once “softer” supporters.

His nightmare mismanagement of the COVID crisis, his sidelining of highly respected scientists like Tony Fauci, his tip-toeing around the diseased corpses of 200,000 Americans (a number soon to double), has made 2/3 of Americans nauseous and has convinced just as many that he cannot be trusted on anything – even a possible last-minute vaccine that he is threatening to unleash just days before the election.

The cratering of the economy, the fact that a full 50-70% of Americans in big urban centers say they are suffering economically, the permanent shuttering of about a 1/3 of American small businesses, the sea of unemployed, the unwillingness of Trump and the Senate to extend meaningful extra support and his fixation, it seems, only with the Dow Jones, hardly provide for a pro-MAGA promotional video.

And now that he’s down, the kicks and punches from Mary Trump, Michael Cohen and now Bob Woodward have been brutal and crippling.

Whether Democrats admit it or fully absorb it, the polls are stabilizing and they all point to Trump’s defeat, including in the electoral college. Trump’s in a much bigger hole than he was at a comparable point in 2016 with the added red flag that he’s the incumbent. A full 80% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track and nobody who owns those numbers can be re-elected.

I am reminded of that great scene in the 1969 Pontecorvo film “Burn” where Marlon Brando, playing the role of a 19th Century British agent, is trying to foment a revolution in a fictional Haiti-like island colony ruled by Portugal. As he tries to turn someone into a leader from among the indigenous island Blacks, he takes him on a robbery where he shoots a lighter-skinned Portuguese soldier. With a magnificent and nonchalant British accent, Brando says, “You see, Jose, the Portuguese can also die.” The object lesson from Brando was simple. You only think your rulers are invincible. They are not.

And, my friends, Donald Trump has no magical powers and he and too will be defeated.

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Sorry to say, but the so-called Resistance can claim almost no credit for taking down Trump. Again, dating back from the first few weeks of the Trump administration, I have consistently criticized and sometimes mocked this “Resistance.”

I suppose they had to learn the hard way that wearing pink watch caps and posting daily laments over the immorality of Trump just didn’t cut it. They missed no opportunity to miss every opportunity to build a robust and nationwide social movement, independent of Democratic Party tutelage to directly confront the authoritarian president.

It actually makes me physically sick to list those lost moments…so I won’t. You know very well what they were and are. Instead, most of the “Resistance” curled up in a ball of PTSD and hoped that others would do their work for them. Whether it was Bob Mueller or the cowardly Nancy Pelosi in whom they invested all their hopes.

Even after the Democrats won the House, Pelosi had prepared no advance strategy on how to handle the Mueller report giving Bill Barr his chance to play Goebbels.

They built NO public movement to support impeachment, and they refused to immediately squeeze the president on his ten documented cases of obstruction of justice and only acted months and months later on the rather indecipherable charge of fucking around with a place few Americans could find on a map let alone care about… Ukraine.

Equal responsibility for the failure of the Resistance can be placed at the feet of many progressive and activist groups to the left of Pelosi.

(I, first, do want to give credit to many, many local groups who did take direct action over the last four years, risking jail and repression to make a difference but they were never congealed into a national strategy).

Not understanding history, they warned of coming fascism but they did little to make sure it did not come. They organized NO significant network of local groups and committees that could be mobilized or activated. Many of them were too busy deplatforming this or that speaker (even among their own ranks) who were stamped with whatever charge.

I was an avid Bernie supporter but I found the slogan Bernie or Bust to be juvenile, detached from political realities and sort of beside the point. As 2020 dawned, our slogan should have been ‘Defeat Trump Or Bust.’ That hardly means muting criticism of other Democrats, but it does mean prioritizing your enemies.

I have little in common with any Democrats, let alone the reviled “centrist” and “neo-liberal” among them. But, sorry again, in this political moment they need to be your allies. You cannot win without them. And I would further pose, though it’s mostly moot right now, you cannot dream of governing America without some sort of coalition or agreement with them. And, probably, as their junior partners. If you think otherwise, I would love to see the argument. The job of these “progressives” was to at least try to build a very broad coalition they could lead or strongly influence. The Lincoln Project understands this. The DSA does not.

However you define their role, the task of progressives was not to be a Purity Checkpoint that excluded potential allies instead of recruiting or at least including them.

Much of this weak Resistance didn’t even get up off the couch until the BLM protests broke out this past May, just a little late into the Trump administration. I give the BLM credit for sparking these mobilizations though I am very critical of their race-first politics.

Worse, the extreme edge of the Resistance, mostly all white, has taken the opportunity to act out their fantasies for more than the last three months, nightly, by provoking fights with the cops and providing Donald Trump with free video footage. I have always understood property destruction and even arson as acts of predictable uncontrolled rage in the midst of heated social conflict. But that’s not what’s been happening in Portland for the last several weeks after the Feds pulled out. This is just destructive and politically counter-productive performance art with no social benefit, to put it lightly.

All of which bring us to today. And the next 100 days, meaning the election and its uncertain aftermath. The incompetence of the Resistance has now come back to bite it in its ass.

The persistent gloom and doom outlook of the Resistance has weakened it and left it probably useless just when it might be most needed i.e. if Trump tries to negate or contest the election.

“[D]emocracy depends on the peaceful transition of power. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not leave office because the Democrats are going to cheat.

"So we should definitely worry."

"But should we despair? Absolutely not,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson in her highly recommended Letter from an American newsletter (link at bottom of this edition).

“Convincing people the game is over is one of the key ways dictators take power. Scholars warn never to consent in advance to what you anticipate an autocrat will demand. If democracy were already gone, there would be no need for Trump and his people to lie and cheat and try to steal this election.
And I would certainly not be writing this letter.”

Indeed, the big question is not whether Trump will win or lose but rather will he accept the loss and, most importantly, what are YOU going to do about it if he doesn’t.

Georgetown Law Professor Rosa Brooks (daughter of the fabulous Barbara Ehrenreich) wrote of her experience on the Transition Integrity Project where a wide bi-partisan array of analysts, political operatives, former career and elected officials gamed out the worst scenarios that we could see if Trump loses. Or wins. It’s a totally necessary and rather chilling read (find the link at the bottom of this edition along with other relevant links).

Read the piece in its entirety as I will only briefly summarize it here. In the four major scenarios gamed out by “opposing teams” only the “big Biden win” option worked cleanly while the three others “reached the brink of catastrophe.”
These Trump loses scenarios were authentic nightmares. Everything from massive disinformation campaigns linked with the DOJ seizing vote-by-mail ballots, the Republicans sending an alternative list of electors to congress, Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and federalizing deployed National Guard Units, to using legal loopholes to justify the sending in of the 82nd Airborne to “quell disorders.”

What’s most alarming, at least to me, is that the Trump side did not hesitate to call out armed militias into the streets, while the Democrats repeatedly appealed for calm and peaceful demonstrations. I see no mention from the Democratic side or organized, non-violent but massive civil disobedience and disruption. Perish the thought!

Brooks warns her readers that these war games are, however, NOT predictive.

“This kind of exercise doesn’t predict the future. In fact, war-gaming seeks to forecast all the things that could go wrong — precisely to prevent them from happening in real life. And if the Transition Integrity Project’s exercises highlighted various bleak possibilities, they also suggested some ways we might, as a nation, avoid democratic collapse,” writes Brooks.

She notes probable and forceful pushback from state and local officials, local courts and ultimately the military. Having survived a couple of Latin American coups, and reported on numerous dictatorships, I can affirm there can be no coup, no extra-constitutional takeover of the government without military backing. Call me naïve, but I strongly believe that the U.S. Armed Forces have nothing to gain by shitting on the constitution and saving Donald Trump’s putrid bacon.

And if there were a smattering of rogue officers who would like to try such a ploy, they might just wind up with a divided or rebellious rank-and-file as Trump has only minority support among the troops. Thankfully.

Brooks does leave for the last graph what I think is the most important point, so that we do not even get to this do or die breaking point. She writes: “Finally, ordinary citizens can help, too — perhaps most of all. As the jurist Learned Hand said in 1944, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it . . . while it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.” This is as true now as it was then: When people unite to demand democracy and the rule of law, even repressive regimes can be stopped in their tracks. Mass mobilization is no guarantee that our democracy will survive — but if things go as badly as our exercises suggest they might, a sustained, nonviolent protest movement may be America’s best and final hope.”

Cox Richardson comes to a similar conclusion in her newsletter, writing: “Americans are coming together from all different political positions to fight this attack on our democracy, and we have been in similar positions before. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln spoke under similar circumstances, and noted that Americans who disagreed on almost everything else could still agree to defend their country, just as we are now. Ordinary Americans “rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach---a scythe---a pitchfork-- a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver,” he said. And “when the storm shall be past,” the world “shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

I agree fully with the asterisk that words are one thing. Action is quite another.

A couple of days ago the Daily Beast splashed on its front page a long piece about progressive groups holding a supposedly private Zoom summit as part of what is called the Fight Back Table to discuss this same issue of what to do if Trump balks.

Reporter Sam Stein writes: “ Sources familiar with the discussions described them as serious with a modestly panicked undertone. A smaller FBT session last fall had talked about post-election planning, but those discussions were tabled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the first time they were bringing the matter to the 50-plus organizations that make up the coalition. To formalize the effort, they gave it a name: the Democracy Defense Nerve Center.”

I bet there was a panicked undertone, as Stein put it. To date, this Fight Back Table, whose prime movers are groups like Moveon, the Working Families Party and Indivisible and some of the more progressive labor unions, has shown little results even though it was founded in 2016.

Even some of its participants agree they are getting on this issue a little late, that they are behind the curve etc etc. The understatements of the year!

As stein noted, a few months ago a similar Fight Back Table was convened and then tabled (!) because of the COVID pandemic. Well, that disease certainly has not stopped the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois and other armed right wing groups from planning AND acting. Only these well-meaning liberals who had been moaning for for four years about Fascism gave themselves the luxury of watching Netflix instead of organizing and expanding their constituencies.

My own sources close to these Fight Back groups say that this new incarnation is too little way too late. They have forfeited their independence to a great degree by becoming uncritical satellites of the Democrats rather than an independent force. And while groups like Moveon claim to be driven by the desires of the membership, the truth is that these groups are mostly headed by a small circle of leaders who have massive mailing lists and their process is top down rather than the other way around. What we know for sure is that they have not successfully organized for some disastrous election outcome even though they have been mouthing off about it for years already.

When pressed by Stein about exactly what they would concretely do, what is their operational plan, they say, simply they don’t know. No problem. Hey, they have a whole fifty some-odd days to figure it out, organize, recruit and train. What could do wrong?

Do I have an answer? Only an abstract one. First, let’s make sure Trump is defeated in the election. Everything else as I see as a distraction. I said it last week and I will say it again now and probably next week. I don’t care about Joe Biden. Or who is in his cabinet. Or the makeup of the DNC. Or if AOC is given an administration appointment. We can deal with all that only if and after Trump is defeated and defeated soundly.

As to a nasty aftermath, I would not be counting on direction from Moveon or anybody else of that ilk. What we need is what we do not have. An organized and ready network of real resistance and defense of democracy. Ideally, the evening that Biden is elected we should be millions strong in the street with one simple slogan: Resign Now! And we should be prepared to bring business as usual to a screeching halt if Trump should continue to mangle our democracy. I can only hope we can do it. +++

The Coop Scoop by Marc Cooper

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