It is possible that Trump has reactivated something President Obama couldn’t maintain, and Hillary Clinton couldn’t fully tap into: A unified, mission-driven left that puts bodies into the streets. The women’s marches sent a clear signal: Your comfort will not be built on our constriction. We are America. We are loud, “nasty” and fed up. We are motivated dissidents and we are legion.This is pure fantasy. Much as I would like to imagine that a mass, mission-driven left is being born, it is not. This was a women's march, a nice one-off, but one that was not without serious troubles of its own; for instance, it began as a "Million Woman March," which set off criticism from black women for being tone deaf cultural appropriation.
If the much larger anti-war marches of 2002 and 2003 ended nowhere, and the cultural awakening of Obama 2008 during the Lehman market meltdown ended up ushering in huge Republic gains in the House two years later, then there is little hope for the Pink Revolution.
What the Pink Revolution does have going for it is a lot of top-down direction and elite support. Read "After Success of Women’s March, a Question Remains: What’s Next?" by Susan Chira and Jonathan Martin and you come away thinking that this is a movement that is going to have a lot of access to resources.
The problem is that liberalism and the Democratic Party don't mean anything to working people anymore. The Democratic Party stands for an identity politics minus any robust commitment to social welfare, and that is what is being rejected by working-class voters. All you have to do is read Alissa Rubin's excellent "With French Socialists in Crisis, Manuel Valls and Benoît Hamon Head to Runoff." Rank'n'file Socialists are abandoning their party for Marine Le Pen's National Front.
Trump might look a little wobbly fuming over unimpressive turnout for his inaugural, but he is about to be buoyed by votes in Holland and France.
The issue is that the mainstream neoliberal consensus established in the late 1970s is collapsing. It is done. Faith has been lost.
The Pink Revolution will be maintained as an essential cat's-paw for the Deep State, a simulacrum of a mass movement as a counterweight to Trumpism.
David Talbot shares my suspicions that the worldwide demonstrations this weekend were at some level aided by the CIA. Gloria Steinem's appearance is always a tell for me.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. Did you notice that Working Families Party, MoveOn.org and others have begun spreading #ResistTrumpTuesdays, promising to resist Trump every Tuesday at local Senator's and Representative's offices? So the CoRev will indeed incorporate the Moral Mondays template. It is going to be fascinating to see if a top-down effort will succeed where Occupy, ANSWER in the run-up to the Iraq War, etc., failed.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that can't be denied. Turnout was excellent for the Saturday marches. I didn't attend one. But several coworkers did and they said the numbers of marchers were massive. Still, even will deep-pocketed funders and central plannings, it is going to be hard to maintain momentum. Trump is going to have to show some smarts.
This a.m. Trump announced that the DAPL is going through. Should make for interesting news clips. Let's see if Donald can push his ratings down below 30%. Maybe Donald's purpose in life is to teach liberals that the CIA is really swell, and that coups by intelligence agencies are really the cat's meow.
DeleteAnthony DiMaggio has an ecstatic account of the women's march in D.C.
Deletehttp://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/24/reflections-on-dc-promises-and-pitfalls-in-the-anti-trump-uprising/
I think Trump is poking the hornet's nest by reviving Keystone XL and green-lighting DAPL. 350.org has proven that it can effectively mobilize non-violent direct action civil disobedience. And Obama did what he did on DAPL because the Standing Rock Sioux had out-organized the administration and basically handed Obama a fait accompli: either you implement a large military campaign or you cave. Obama caved. It looks like Trump wants to have his Kent State moment.