Denouncing Republican Evils Can't Do Much for the Biden Presidency Without Demanding Progressive Policies

By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News

12 January 21

he Republican plunge into Trumpism has made the party especially unhinged and dangerous, but its basic ideology has long been a shameless assault on minimal standards of human decency. Now – while Democratic leaders and most corporate media outlets are suitably condemning the fascist tendencies of Trump and his followers – deeper analysis and stepped-up progressive organizing are urgently needed.

Economic injustice – disproportionately harming people of color – constantly propels U.S. society in a downward spiral. Poverty, economic insecurity and political disempowerment go together. Systemic racism continues to thrive, enmeshed with the predatory routines of corporate power.

After becoming a member of Congress last week, Cori Bush wrote in The Washington Post: “Many have said that what transpired on Wednesday was not America. They are wrong. This is the America that Black people know. To declare that this is not America is to deny the reality that Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate incited this coup by treasonously working to overturn the results of the presidential election.”

And, Bush added, “what my Republican colleagues call ‘fraud’ actually refers to the valid votes of Black, brown and Indigenous voters across this country who, in the midst of a pandemic that disproportionately kills us, overcame voter suppression in all of its forms to deliver an election victory for Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris.”

Yet that election victory – which was a huge blow to right-wing forces and a triumph for the progressive forces that made it possible – assures us of little. The same establishment-oriented corporate and militaristic mindsets that reigned supreme in the executive branch during the Obama administration are being reconfigured for the Biden administration. Similar mentalities at the top of the Democratic Party a decade ago are replicated today.

But, at the grassroots, progressive outlooks are much more prevalent than a decade ago – and left-leaning forces are much better positioned. There’s far less naiveté about Joe Biden on the verge of his presidency than there was a dozen years ago on the verge of Barack Obama’s. And much stronger communication and organizing capacities are in place for progressive individuals and groups in 2021 than was true in 2009.

In short, as Biden prepares to move into the White House, progressives are in much better shape to put up a fight – not only against the right wing but also against corporate Democratic elites, who are uninterested in delivering the kind of broad-based economic uplift that could undermine the pseudo-populist propaganda coming from the Republican Party.

A day after the orchestrated mob assault at the Capitol, Bernie Sanders appeared on CNN and provided a cogent summary of what must be done to effectively push back against the Republicans. In contrast to standard-issue Democratic Party talking points, what he had to say went to the core of key economic and political realities.

While countless Democratic politicians and pundits were taking the easy route of only condemning Trump and his acolytes, Sanders went far deeper.

“We must not lose sight of the unprecedented pain and desperation felt by working people across the country as the pandemic surges and the economy declines,” Sanders wrote to supporters on Sunday. “We must, immediately, address those needs.”

Sanders pointed out that “right now, hunger is at the highest levels in decades in this country and the family that couldn’t afford to put food on the table last week still cannot afford to put food on the table this week, and they need our help.” Among the ongoing realities he cited were these:

“The 500,000 Americans who were homeless and the 30 million more facing eviction last week are still worried about keeping a roof over their heads this week, and they need our help.”

“During the midst of a murderous pandemic which is getting worse and worse every day, the 90 million Americans who were uninsured or underinsured last week still are worried about being able to afford to go to a doctor this week, and they need our help.”

“The millions of Americans working two or three jobs to pay the bills because we have a national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour this week will still be getting paid a starvation wage next week, and they need our help.”

Such help will not come from merely denouncing the villainy of Trump and other Republicans. And it won’t come from reflexively deferring to the Biden administration. On the contrary, it can come from insisting that there must be no honeymoon for the incoming administration if we want to meet the crying needs of working-class people.

Some progressives believe that we should give Biden a break as his presidency gets underway. But in early 1993, we were told to give President Clinton a break. Wall Streeters went into the Cabinet, NAFTA soon followed – and, in 1994, Republicans roared back and took Congress. Later came cruel "welfare reform," deregulation of the banking industry, and much more.

In early 2009, we were told to give a break to President Obama. Wall Streeters went into the Cabinet, big banks were bailed out while people with their houses under water lost their homes – and, in 2010, Republicans roared back and took Congress. Later came economic policies that undermined support and turnout from the Democratic Party base, helping Trump win four years ago.

As Bernie Sanders says, “The old way of thinking is what brought us Donald Trump.”

The Sanders prescriptions for antidotes to right-wing poisons are absolutely correct. Along with ending Trump’s toxic political career, Sanders wrote four days after the Capitol events, “we must also start passing an aggressive agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class in this country: income and wealth inequality, health care, climate change, education, racial justice, immigration and so many other vitally important issues. We must lift people out of poverty, revitalize American democracy, end the collapse of the middle class, and make certain our children and grandchildren are able to enjoy a quality of life that brings them health, prosperity, security and joy.”

Sound impossible? It isn’t. But to make such a future possible will require not only crushing the Republican Party but also dislodging the current Democratic Party leadership to make way for truly progressive elected Democrats – like Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ro Khanna and others – who understand that they must be part of transformative social movements that are our only hope.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Vanilla ISIL: Social Media Is Forced to Treat Trump and Trumpists Like Terrorists

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

12 January 21

ot everyone who mobbed the Capitol on 1/6 was a terrorist, but there were many terrorists among them. Some people came armed, or with ties for taking congressional representatives and senators hostage. Some were desperately looking for Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi in order to assassinate them for, in their fevered minds, stealing the election and giving Trump’s victory treacherously to Joe Biden. Although the Capitol police had a major failure when they did not stop the breach of the building by the mob, they were remarkably successful at spiriting the politicians down to the basement and its tunnels that led to nearby offices. Otherwise the sinister events of that day, in which one policeman was deliberately crushed to death by a massed crowd in a doorway, would have claimed many more lives.

The goal of the Trump-inspired insurrection was to stop Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden as president. Trump moved on several levels to accomplish that goal. He conspired with senators to have them object to the Arizona and Pennsylvania vote counts. In fact, he was trying to convince senators to join this effort by telephone even after the Capitol had been breached and senators were being escorted to the basement, according to Mike Lee. He also tried to disrupt the proceedings by encouraging the breach of the Capitol by a flashmob and by cadres. He may have stopped security forces from being deployed, as part of his coup, to ensure that the insurrection was not stopped prematurely. When the governor of Maryland sought authorization to send that state’s National Guard, he was stonewalled for a crucial 90 minutes, during which Pence, Pelosi and others could have been killed. If they had been, it is not clear Biden’s election could have been certified in a timely manner. Trump spent December moving his ideologues into key positions at the Pentagon, likely hoping to use them to make sure the military could not be deployed at the capitol. That is, the insurrection was in part a coup.

Terrorism was defined in the 1990s US Federal code as non-state actors deploying force against civilians to achieve a political goal. The law has been tinkered with in light of Bush’s “war on terror,” but I think the Clinton-era definition has virtues for analysis since it is very clear. Only the state has a legitimate monopoly on the use of force in modern society, according to Max Weber. Terrorists are vigilantes.

Internet terrorist networks like the Trumpist have posed a challenge to law enforcement for decades, and students of terrorism have learned a great deal about them and how to combat them. The internet is a communications medium, and terrorism is all about communication. ISIL was among the best at working social media, and initially ran rings around the governments it targeted.

The use of social media by designated terrorist groups has been a horrifying success. But the use of “de-platforming,” kicking large numbers of members off platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, has been among the more effective tools in reducing the influence and operational effectiveness of groups such as ISIL.

As of Friday, the large social media platforms are treating Trump and the more virulent forms of Trumpism the way they did ISIL, de-platforming them. Trump has been banned from Twitter and Facebook. The far right wing Parler app has been kicked off Google Play and will likely be expelled from Apple Apps. The indicted fraudster Steve Bannon has lost his YouTube perch.

The Trump insurgency used the internet at several levels, just as ISIL had done. (Here, I am talking about techniques of terrorist organizations, not comparing them for brutality. Obviously, ISIL is far more murderous by orders of magnitude).

1. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (Alex Jones, Steve Bannon), the Breitbart blog and other platforms were used by Trump and his allies to build an audience for their white nationalist ideology. One of their first messages was that the Obama presidency was illegitimate because only white men can legitimately be president. This message was expressed through a conspiracy theory denying that Obama was born in the United States.

2. This messaging was expensive. Moreover, white supremacy of the old KKK sort was also disreputable. In order to succeed, a lot of money had to be thrown at the project, and white supremacy had to be put in a business suit, given Ivy League degrees, and made respectable. Hence, the term “Alt-Right,” a fancy word for Neo-Nazi. The project was not centralized. It is not clear that Robert Mercer, a computer engineer and artificial intelligence expert who came to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even knew Trump. His backing for Breitbart, however, turned a cranky little far right wing blog into a major publication with millions of hits a day. Breitbart in turn heavily backed Trump in 2015. So too did other far right cult-news sites such as Newsmax. And, of course, the media behemoth backing the New White Supremacy was Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, with an ideology I suspect is rooted in the old twentieth-century White Australia policy.

3. This vast social- and traditional-media operation helped create a mass viewership for Trumpism, a constituency from which activists could be recruited. It also helped him make inroads into the Republican Party. Trumpism, however ugly, is not synonymous with terrorism or insurrection, in fact very few Trumpists fit the definition given above. Likewise, I have pointed out that very few Muslim fundamentalists were ever terrorists, and many were quietists, avoiding politics. Still, Muslim terrorists emerged from fundamentalist backgrounds. Terrorism is a set of techniques for the attainment of a political goal, not an ideology. The father of Muhammad Amir Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11, was an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood member, an attorney in Giza. The father had apocalyptic dreams of social transformation but never harmed a soul. The son helped murder nearly 3,000 innocents. It is from the perfervid true believers that the operatives are recruited.

4. The internet could thus be used to recruit small numbers of terrorists from the vast fascist network that Trump and others created and to organize 1/6. White grievance was stoked, with hatred of minorities and immigrants. The network had mostly been used as a vote bank and for the purposes of propaganda, such as convincing people that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. It was, however, always available for more specialized recruitment and missions.

5. One phenomenon associated with social media organizing is the flashmob. A person could say, “Everybody meet at the mall at 3 pm on Saturday the 11th.” Sometimes it happens that such a suggestion is unexpectedly responded to by 5,000 teenagers and creates a security danger. 1/6 was in part a flashmob. Seasoned observers of white supremacist terrorist networks on the internet saw it building.

6. Those willing to engage in terrorism in the Capitol could also use social media to communicate with one another, using code words to fly under the radar of law enforcement. In the zeroes, al-Qaeda used the code word technique. An operative might refer to an operation as a “banquet” and to a bombing as a “very big meal.”

7. Aside from movement-building, terrorist-recruitment, and logistics such as the creation of a flashmob, the internet can also be used for stochastic or random terrorism. Word can be put out to unconnected, random individuals that Something Must be Done. Since these individuals are not part of organizations, they are typically not under surveillance by law enforcement and can act as lone wolves, taking the establishment by surprise. The flashmob at the Capitol on 1/6 was a mixture of social networks (people who knew each other face to face), internet networks (Facebook circles e.g.), and stochastic lone wolf terrorists. This mixture made the aims and techniques of the flashmob opaque.

ISIL had engaged in all these activities and used all these techniques ultimately to create a state and to attempt to terrorize potential Western adversaries such as France into standing down. (France was the former colonial power in Syria and Lebanon and takes a postcolonial interest in what happens there). ISIL activists were wizards at the production of slick video and the use of Twitter and Facebook for recruitment and operations.

Once it became clear how successful ISIL was in using Twitter, for example, the company launched a campaign to de-platform the terrorist organization by cancelling 125,000 accounts in 2016 alone. De-platforming on a large scale is devastating, since when an account is closed, all of its tweets are deleted and all of the connections established to other accounts are lost. Some of the success law enforcement has had against ISIL has derived from de-platforming, though of course the military victories in Syrian and Iraq against the organization were also important in demoting it from a phony “caliphate” to a small transnational terrorist organization.

For every successful counter-terrorism technique and advance, however, terrorists have found ways to evade them. That is, counter-terrorism is not the sort of endeavor where you can have a success and just keep doing things the same way. It is a contest in which the adversary constantly evolves. Even which groups are terrorist in character change over time, with previously nonviolent groups becoming violent, and vice versa.

Significant blows have been dealt to the Trump terrorist network in the past two days, but the vast well of support it has built up among less violent supporters, and among media enablers like Fox, Breitbart and Newsmax, will make it very difficult to root out.