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Standing Rock and the Return of the Nonviolent Campaign Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43480"><span class="small">George Lakey, YES! Magazine</span></a>   
Sunday, 08 January 2017 09:19

Lakey writes: "Nonviolent campaigns are often dramatic and catch the attention of millions - think of Standing Rock water protectors resolute in the face of a brutal police force. All the more puzzling that the concept of a 'nonviolent campaign' is little known and often ignored when people talk about how to mobilize power."

The encampments at Standing Rock worked to keep prayer and nonviolence at the center of their actions. (photo: Joe Zummo)
The encampments at Standing Rock worked to keep prayer and nonviolence at the center of their actions. (photo: Joe Zummo)

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Standing Rock and the Return of the Nonviolent Campaign

By George Lakey, YES! Magazine

08 January 17

 

There’s something even better than electoral politics and one-off protests when mobilizing citizen power.

onviolent campaigns are often dramatic and catch the attention of millions—think of Standing Rock water protectors resolute in the face of a brutal police force. All the more puzzling that the concept of a “nonviolent campaign” is little known and often ignored when people talk about how to mobilize power, for example, to prevent Donald Trump from erasing gains made in addressing climate change.

For many, the choices are limited to lobbying, petitions, and looking for promising progressive candidates to run a different kind of campaign—the electoral campaign. Thinking outside that box usually means a one-off march or rally, or possibly a protest. The trouble is, a nonviolent march or rally or protest is not nearly as effective as a nonviolent campaign. One or two of those actions could not have the impact of the enduring Standing Rock campaign.

What marks a nonviolent campaign?

Swarthmore College researchers have been digging into that question, analyzing over 1,000 nonviolent campaigns waged in almost 200 countries. Swarthmore’s publicly available database goes back historically to 12th century Egypt, when laborers building a tomb for the Pharaoh successfully campaigned for wages that were being unfairly withheld. The researchers found protests are usually one-off events that express grief, outrage, or plain opposition to an action or policy, and if the protest gets attention, it may be repeated. Campaigners, by contrast, carry out a strategy over time. They plan a series of nonviolent actions that continues until the goal is reached. That may be a matter of weeks, or months, or years.

When Earth Quaker Action Team reached year three of its campaign to induce PNC Bank, the nation’s seventh largest, to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, the members of EQAT began to tire. They researched the Swarthmore database and discovered that the British campaign to force Barclays bank to divest from apartheid in South Africa took 20 years to succeed. The Barclays campaign gave EQAT fresh perspective on endurance. Two years later, the group won its “Bank Like Appalachia Matters” campaign.

True, many campaigns are resolved in a much shorter time. America’s earliest recorded nonviolent campaign was in colonial Jamestown, Virginia, when Polish artisans—the first non-English settlers—campaigned for the right to vote equally with the English. The Poles won their demand in three months.

The Allegany County Nonviolent Action Group in New York won its 1990 campaign to prevent a nuclear waste dump from being built there in less than a year. Citizens in Bodega Bay, California, with the help of Berkeley students and folksinger Malvina Reynolds, needed two years to cancel a plan to build the nation’s first commercially viable nuclear power plant. In 1964, campaigners in Los Angeles won cancellation of a planned Malibu plant as well.

Campaigns have specific demands and targets

Nonviolent campaigners know what they want: clean water in North Dakota for indigenous people; the Dream Act for students brought to this country as children by undocumented immigrants; a cleanup of chemicals at Love Canal in upstate New York; university goods and clothing made by workers who are treated fairly with safe working conditions.

Campaigners also know who can make the decision they need. Alice Paul led the National Woman’s Party campaign for suffrage and targeted President Woodrow Wilson. As the film Iron Jawed Angels reveals, the women demonstrating during World War I compared the president to the German emperor, calling him “Kaiser Wilson!” In her later years, when I interviewed Alice Paul, she said she was confident that Wilson could make the difference in persuading a balky Congress to pass the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. She was right. Her 1917 escalation of the campaign brought voting to women just three years later. 

Escalation is an art

The 1960s civil rights movement showed expertise in locating and sequencing direct actions to escalate pressure on their target.

When President John F. Kennedy refused Martin Luther King Jr.’s request to provide leadership for a civil rights bill, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference made an unusual strategic decision. Instead of taking the obvious next step of focusing action in the nation’s capital in order to gain victory there, the SCLC decided to escalate in Birmingham, Alabama, at that time a major industrial city. It was where the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a member of SCLC, had for years led an ongoing antisegregation campaign.

In spring 1963, SCLC brought additional organizers and trainers to Birmingham to join the local struggle. Campaigners escalated their tactics, confronting the segregationists’ police dogs and fire hoses with nonviolent discipline. When mass jail-ins left a scarcity of adults available for civil disobedience, children stepped in to fill the streets. The sheer volume of disruption dislocating Birmingham and the national charisma of Dr. King effectively pressured the White House. Kennedy reportedly got on the phone with U.S. Steel President Roger Blough and others of the power elite, gaining agreement that the time had come for a national civil rights bill that would guarantee equal accommodations.

Campaigns can build movements

The civil rights struggle also illustrates the way campaigns build mass social movements. On Feb. 1, 1960, just four college students initiated a sit-in campaign at a segregated lunch counter near their campus in North Carolina. Inspired, students at other campuses followed suit. Within a month there were student sit-ins throughout the South and a solidarity campaign at Woolworth stores in northern cities as well. Multiple, replicated local campaigns turned a few students’ efforts into the widespread and iconic “freedom movement.”

When Gandhi faced the largest empire the world had ever known, he knew that India would need a massive movement to sustain protracted struggle and gain independence. Initially, he believed that his people were too disunited and disheartened to forge such a movement. So he led a series of campaigns, using them to win smaller demands, build leadership and organizing skills, and develop the necessary self-confidence. The campaigns eventually built a large-enough national movement to wage the famous Salt March of 1930–31, which in turn increased the size of the growing movement by supporting more, smaller campaigns involving still more people. A little more than a decade later, critical mass forced the British to give up the prize jewel of their empire.

Overshadowed by politics

The obsession of the U.S. mainstream media is electoral campaigning. In Denmark, a national political campaign is limited to six weeks and paid advertising is not allowed on TV. Danish voter participation is much higher than in the U.S. Mass media have a small window in which to present and clarify the issue differences among the parties and candidates. They do that efficiently.

In the United States, media bombard citizens for at least a year with the horse-race dimension of elections. People may not learn much about the issues, but they do gain a sense of how a political campaign works, including strategy.

By contrast, no one hears how nonviolent campaigns won or what their strategic choices were. Context is absent: What mainstream media source gives us that kind of context about Standing Rock, comparing it with other campaigns waged by indigenous groups for their tribal and environmental rights? When do we hear academic experts on nonviolent struggle explain the dynamics behind breaking news in a nonviolent campaign?

The result is a public ill-informed about its options when facing an authoritarian president or a wave of policy changes that diminish human rights and planetary sustainability.

The good news is the reemerging art of the nonviolent campaign. Our choices are not limited to petitioning politicians or staging a protest. Instead, we can start something big.


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Intel Chiefs Say Trump's Twitter Account Was Hacked by Four-Year-Old Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>   
Saturday, 07 January 2017 14:37

Borowitz writes: "An alarming report issued by heads of the U.S. intelligence agencies on Friday asserts that the Twitter account of President-elect Donald Trump was successfully hacked by a four-year-old child."

Donald Trump. (photo: Jeffrey Phelps/AP)
Donald Trump. (photo: Jeffrey Phelps/AP)

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Intel Chiefs Say Trump's Twitter Account Was Hacked by Four-Year-Old

By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

07 January 17

 

The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."

n alarming report issued by heads of the U.S. intelligence agencies on Friday asserts that the Twitter account of President-elect Donald Trump was successfully hacked by a four-year-old child.

Profilers and cryptologists who studied Trump’s Twitter feed believe that the account was first hacked during the 2016 campaign, when the child was three.

“The hacker would often wake up in the middle of the night, in an addled and cranky state, and start tweeting,” an intelligence source said. “This disrupted sleep pattern is consistent with a suspect in the three-to-four-year-old age range.”

N.S.A. analysts who studied the vocabulary, syntax, and spelling of the tweets “determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are the work of a preschooler,” the source said.

While the intelligence agencies have yet to determine the identity of the hacker, the source stressed that a four-year-old capable of hacking the President-elect’s Twitter account poses “a serious national-security threat.”

“Based on these tweets, this particular four-year-old has a loose grasp on reality, lacks all impulse control, and is potentially very dangerous.”

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FOCUS: Resisting the Congressional Watchdog Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=15316"><span class="small">Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Consortium News</span></a>   
Saturday, 07 January 2017 12:50

Excerpt: "Mark Twain noted that man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to. He also believed that 'public office is private graft.' Those two observations from our greatest and most sagacious humorist intersected with a bang on Capitol Hill Monday night, when the bright lights of the Republican House Conference met in secret behind closed doors at the end of the New Year's holiday."

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan delivers remarks on the floor of the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan delivers remarks on the floor of the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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Resisting the Congressional Watchdog

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Consortium News

07 January 17

 

Not that political corruption doesn’t happen with divided government, but with Republicans controlling all three branches, the prospects for more Abramoff-type scandals rise, warn Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.

ark Twain noted that man is the only animal that blushes — or needs to. He also believed that “public office is private graft.” Those two observations from our greatest and most sagacious humorist intersected with a bang on Capitol Hill Monday night, when the bright lights of the Republican House Conference met in secret behind closed doors at the end of the New Year’s holiday.

They tried to vote themselves an especially tasty treat: eviscerating the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). That’s the office created in 2008 in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal and the placement of three congressmen behind bars. The conference voted to absorb it into the House Ethics Committee. In other words, they wanted to weaken OCE and put it under the control of some of the very folks the office is charged with investigating for possible influence peddling and other assorted mischief.

If the conference had its way, OCE would wind up having all the clout of the token student representative on your local board of education, giving unscrupulous legislators freedom to rob the public blind without fear of exposure.

But a funny thing happened on the way to congressional visions of new secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. The public can become like sheep when the shepherd is a demagogue, but when the public is outraged over outright unfairness and chicanery, it can roar like a lion. Once word of the vote leaked out, phone calls, emails and social media recriminations from all points of the political spectrum began flooding the sacred halls of the House of Representatives, which was once called The People’s House before it became the predator’s lair.

Talk about embarrassment. Imagine this new Congress, pledged to “drain the swamp,” taking as its first action a rule that in effect would have helped make the swamp part of the National Park Service.

The nonpartisan Project in Government Oversight (POGO), declared that OCE needed “to be strengthened and expanded — not taken out back and shot in the middle of the night.” So the GOP conference fled into another closed-door session and changed its mind. We were only kidding, they said. The Office of Congressional Ethics is alive and well — until the next time we try to kill it.

Just before the meeting, our august President-elect bestowed the Congress with two of his imperial tweets. “With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it,” read the first, followed by, “… may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance! ?#DTS.”

DTS stands for Drain the Swamp, of course, although we’re sure many of our progressive brethren would prefer bawdier acronyms involving the President-elect himself. Nonetheless, many are claiming it was these very dispatches from fearless leader that turned the vote around. But read his words carefully: He’s more concerned about bad timing; he has no great love for the OCE.

In fact, shortly before the tweets, his amanuensis Kellyanne Conway was telling George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America that “gutting it doesn’t mean there won’t be a mechanism” – just that there had been “overzealousness in some of the processes over the years.”

Most members of the House agree it was the public outcry that swiveled those usually obdurate minds on Capitol Hill; Trump merely once again displayed his ability to jump on the prevailing public sentiment or someone else’s success and ride it to vainglory, like the story of the French revolutionary John F. Kennedy liked to tell: There go my people, the revolutionary said. I must find out their destination so I can lead them.

Beware the Congress

In the end, what this New Year’s imbroglio tells us is three things. First, it’s a reminder once again of the mediocre caliber of too many of the men and women running for the House and Senate these days.

All too often, people of public spirit who would make ideal candidates are discouraged from running by the horrors of perpetual fundraising — the vise of money in politics — not to mention the spotlight shone on every small detail of their personal and professional lives. Many of the people who wind up taking the bit and running are soulless empty suits, in it for the power and the payoffs during and after tenure. Or they’re already rich in the first place.

Which leads us to the second thing: venality, so often hand-in-hand with mediocrity. All indications are that our incoming president regards the White House as a pirate galleon built to increase his family’s trove of plunder many fold, and the notion seems to be rubbing off on Congress. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni asked, “Is it any wonder that House Republicans felt OK about trying to slip free of some of their own ethical shackles, no matter how ugly the optics? …

“It’s the tone that Trump has set and the culture that he’s creating. He operates with an in-your-face defiance, so these House Republicans did, too. He puts his own desires and comfort first, so they reserved the right to do the same. With more than a few of his Cabinet picks, he demonstrated little sense of fidelity to what he promised voters and even less concern about appearances. House Republicans decided to treat themselves to a taste of that freedom.”

Third, we have to keep ever vigilant. Other anti-democratic measures inserted in the same rules package slipped past the public. The first imposes a fine on House members taking photos or video in the chamber — a petty, vindictive, retroactive slap to those lawmakers who last June sat-in to protest Congress’ refusal to take action on gun control. You’ll recall that after Republicans quickly adjourned and cut off the C-SPAN cameras, the protesting members, led by Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights legend, used their cell phones to send out video and keep the story alive.

Even worse, the new rules allow not just members of Congress to subpoena and question officials and citizens; it extends that fearsome power to staff members, opening the door to witch hunts and persecutions that could make Benghazi and Clinton’s emails seem like a stroll in the park. Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-New York, ranking member of the House Rules Committee, said, “Freely handing out the power to compel any American to appear, sit in a room, and answer staff’s invasive questions on the record — without members even being required to be present — is truly unprecedented, unwarranted and offensive.”

Every battle won’t be won. Nonetheless, the public DID manage to keep the House GOP from surreptitiously murdering the Office of Congressional Ethics, and that’s proof we can make a difference if we keep the pressure on and hammer home our resistance and opposition when democracy and liberty are threatened.

The problem, neatly summarized as usual by Mark Twain, is that, “To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals.” This week, we got a vigorous, healthy and inspiring reminder that protest matters. Keep that in mind as the perfidies unfold this year under the one-party monopoly that will soon control our federal government.


Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, and a former senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship. Bill Moyers is the managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com. [This article originally appeared at http://billmoyers.com/story/protest-stopped-predators-will-back/]

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FOCUS: Trump Nominee Jay Clayton Will Be the Most Conflicted SEC Chair Ever Print
Saturday, 07 January 2017 12:07

Taibbi writes: "When Donald Trump picked hotshot Wall Street defense lawyer Jay Clayton to head the SEC Wednesday, there was a predictable outcry from certain quarters. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who sits on the banking committee, had one of the most circulated quotes."

Jay Clayton. (photo: USA TODAY)
Jay Clayton. (photo: USA TODAY)

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Trump Nominee Jay Clayton Will Be the Most Conflicted SEC Chair Ever

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

07 January 17

 

hen Donald Trump picked hotshot Wall Street defense lawyer Jay Clayton to head the SEC Wednesday, there was a predictable outcry from certain quarters. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who sits on the banking committee, had one of the most circulated quotes:

"It's hard to see," Brown said, "how an attorney who's spent his career helping Wall Street beat the rap will keep President-elect Trump's promise to stop big banks and hedge funds from 'getting away with murder.'"

Most of the consternation over Clayton's appointment has to do with his own background as a longtime defender of big banks. He's been involved in some infamously shadowy episodes in the post-crisis era, with two in particular standing out.

He represented Goldman Sachs when the firm received a $5 billion capital infusion from Warren Buffet during the September 2008 meltdown. He also represented Barclays during its malodorous acquisition of the assets of Lehman Brothers, an episode one lawyer described to me years ago as "the greatest bank robbery you never heard of." (There is a chapter about this story in my last book, The Divide.)

That Clayton has been a devoted legal slave to the usual Wall Street monsters over the years is obviously concerning, though not terribly unusual.

What makes this situation somewhat unique is the fact that this incoming SEC chief is also married to a broker at Goldman Sachs – his wife Gretchen is a wealth management advisor. This means that a significant portion of Clayton's family income while in office will presumably be coming from a company he is charged with policing.

This is both far less common and a much bigger problem than you'd think. As one former congressional aide put it to me today, "Clayton will be the most financially conflicted SEC chairman in history."

Remember, at the Republican convention last year, Trump supporters heckled Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi, for being a Goldman Sachs employee.

Where are all those furious Trump supporters now that their idol has put the husband of a Goldman broker in charge of the SEC? Pretty quiet. You can hear the crickets chirping all across America today.

How much of an ethical problem Clayton's marriage is can be seen in a bizarre contradiction in the rules. As SEC chairman, Clayton going forward will have to recuse himself from any enforcement decision involving Goldman. This is no small thing, since Goldman has not exactly been a stranger to SEC enforcement decisions over the years.

Yet even as he has to sit out Goldman's inevitable enforcement problems because of his wife, Clayton will not have to recuse himself from rulemaking decisions that could affect Goldman far more than isolated corruption cases.

Ethics rules say officials like Clayton do not have to recuse themselves from matters of "general application," meaning in this case that Clayton may rule on matters concerning Goldman, provided they also impact other banks.

But these decisions about things like the Volcker rule or fixed-income transparency or swaps could have a profound impact on Goldman's bottom line, with hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars at stake.

Who knows how much this will or even could affect his wife's personal compensation. Industry lawyers I spoke with today seemed split on how big a deal it is. But all agreed that it's not a good look for Clayton.

"I get the feeling that this Trump crew doesn't particularly care how bad things look, though," said one.

Obviously there have been many previous instances of familial conflicts involving government officials. Even the outgoing SEC chief, Mary Jo White, was criticized for conflicts involving her husband, John White, a partner at the white-shoe firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

Trump's pick for Transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, is the daughter of the owner of a major shipping company, which poses obvious problems. Former Sen. Tom Daschle's marriage to a lobbyist was a source of consternation for ethics watchdogs for years. There are other examples. The Beltway typically yawns at these situations.

"In general, Washington has kind of a professional courtesy among the corrupted to not take romantic partner conflicts seriously," says Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project. "It's a major issue."

Goldman Sachs isn't just a frequent flyer when it comes to SEC enforcement fiascoes. The bank is also a regular applicant – and recipient – of SEC waivers exempting it from the automatic penalties and sanctions that would otherwise be triggered by their offenses.

Even if Clayton sits out these decisions, the situation is ridiculous. Who needs an SEC chief who has to stay on the sidelines for some of the most important cases the agency considers? It's like having a police commissioner who has to cover his ears every time someone mentions the Crips or the Latin Kings.

A year ago at this time, Donald Trump was ridiculing Ted Cruz for being a "puppet" of Goldman. Now Clayton joins senior advisor Steve Bannon, Treasury appointee Steve Mnuchin, NEC director Gary Cohn and White House advisor Anthony Scaramucci as high-ranking Trump appointees who are either from Goldman or married to someone at the firm. What a joke.

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Democrats Shouldn't Squander Their One Advantage Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38663"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The Boston Globe</span></a>   
Saturday, 07 January 2017 09:56

McKibben writes: "The Democrats were given one great gift last year. Even as they lost state legislatures and control of the Senate, even as they surrendered governors' mansions and somehow turned over the White House to a moral midget, one thing broke their way. And if they squander it now, as their establishment leadership seems inclined to do, then shame on them."

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Keith Ellison speak during a news conference. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Keith Ellison speak during a news conference. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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Democrats Shouldn't Squander Their One Advantage

By Bill McKibben, The Boston Globe

07 January 17

 

he Democrats were given one great gift last year. Even as they lost state legislatures and control of the Senate, even as they surrendered governors’ mansions and somehow turned over the White House to a moral midget, one thing broke their way. And if they squander it now, as their establishment leadership seems inclined to do, then shame on them.

That one great gift was the cascade of young voters that poured out in support of Bernie Sanders. Early in the primary campaign, I introduced the Vermont senator to a crowd of nearly 30,000 people in a big-city convention hall. They were almost all millennials, and they were roaring — any fear I had about the supposed apathy of youth vanished that night. That scene repeated itself across America. By the time primary season was over, Sanders hadn’t just swamped Clinton among young voters — he’d gotten 35 percent more young voters than Clinton and Trump combined. Nothing like that has happened in my political lifetime.

It demonstrates that an honest, bold message, paired with a leader who passes the authenticity test, can move young people into political action. And that should thrill Democrats. Broken as the party is at the moment, demographics means that, indeed, young people are the future. And cynical as they are about politics, they are not lost to the party.

Which is why it was exciting to watch Keith Ellison’s candidacy for party leader take off this fall. Not only did he work closely with Sanders (who remains America’s most popular politician) but he’s cut of the same cloth. Not literally — he’s short, black, and Muslim, instead of tall, white (and white-haired), and Jewish. But he speaks the same language and with the same urgency — he understands the depth of the problems faced by young and working people.

I got to watch him up close during the marathon hearings and negotiations over the Democratic platform last spring. Some of the participants in that process were, to put it politely, veterans of Democratic politics, repeating bromides that had perhaps worked once but no longer do. (Having watched that process, I was not surprised by the lackluster presidential campaign.) Ellison — a sitting member of Congress — was polite, respectful, and attentive. But he was also firm and urgent. He wasn’t going through the motions.

Which is, I think, why the most ingrained parts of the party establishment are now trying to break his momentum. They’ve put forward Thomas Perez, a perfectly good man but from the ruling wing, not the organizing wing, of the party (he’s never been elected to anything above a county council). And, sadly, they’re playing dirty, or at least cynical, digging up “controversies” like ancient parking tickets from Ellison’s past, or a newspaper column he wrote in college defending the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakahn. Voters in his congressional district have thoroughly rejected such nonsense, and so should the DNC members, but the same party machinery that clearly disliked the Sanders challenge (remember those e-mails showing senior officials debating whether it would be more effective to smear him as a Jew or an atheist?) is now trying to derail Ellison.

These insiders view the Democratic party as a club or an institution, not as an organizing platform. And we’re not in an age when institutions are particularly useful — we’re in an era when institutions, without an infusion of new blood and ideas, simply fade away. I know this in part because I’m a Methodist, once perhaps America’s most vital Christian denomination. But over time its energy bled away — despite plenty of vibrant local congregations, and despite sporadic attempts at top-down rejuvenation, it has steadily ebbed. The average age of a Methodist is now 57.

One way to imagine the Sanders campaign, then, is as a series of revival meetings, conducted in every corner of the country. There was nothing shallow about them — Sanders’ unique form of charisma stemmed from his slightly grumpy seriousness. And so the support he received demonstrated a fervent desire to participate, especially among young Americans. They were serious about change.

That energy won’t disappear — it’s already powering the new civil rights movement and the fight for climate justice. But it will disappear from the Democratic Party if the party doesn’t seize the opportunity that Ellison offers. It won’t be the fault of the Russians or the FBI. And it may not come again.

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