Red Pill or Blue Pill? + What Chuck Schumer Needs to Learn from Samuel L. Jackson + A “woke” CIA? + Upcoming event on Immigration Matters
Upcoming Event: The National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA) is hosting an exciting event, “Our Vision of a Just Immigration System,” featuring Nicole Melaku, Angelica Salas, Marielena Hincapie, and Deepak on Thursday, 5/20 at 1 pm EST. You can and should register here!
The Red Pill and Democracy
In Deepak’s second favorite movie of all time, The Matrix, Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) famously asks the vacant hero, Neo (Keanu Reeves), whether he is willing to take the “red pill” and learn a disturbing, life-changing truth . . . or if he’d prefer to take the blue pill and remain in a stupefied, contented ignorance. (Morpheus is the real hero of that movie, but we digress.)
For conscious folk living in America, this is a red pill/blue pill moment.
If you take the blue pill, you can take your mask off if you’re vaxxed and enjoy the spring sunshine; appreciate a Democratic administration that is sane and far more progressive than expected; and contribute your wonkery and mobilizing to make progress on legions of long-delayed policy priorities including the massive American Jobs Act and the American Families Plan. Exciting, right? Sort of back to normal?
Stacey Abrams took the red pill:
Gayle King, CBS news anchor: "Tell us about your dating situation."
Stacey Abrams, Nobel Peace Prize nominee: "I haven't been focused on that this month. I've been focused on saving democracy."
You don’t have to be 1/1000th as brilliant as Abrams to see that the biggest issue facing the country is whether a multi-racial democracy will fall to forces of authoritarianism and white power.
These forces were not cowed into submission after Trump’s defeat and the failed insurrection on January 6th. They are on the march and could win the House and Senate in 2022. And what if they do win? Well, the red pill reality is dark. In her column this week, Michelle Goldberg described “How Republicans Could Steal the Election”:
Erica Newland serves as counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 to fight democratic breakdown in America. Before Joe Biden’s victory was officially confirmed in January, she researched some of the ways that Donald Trump’s allies in Congress might sabotage the process. She came to a harrowing conclusion.
“It occurred to me,” she told her colleagues then, “as I dug into the rules and watched what happened, that if the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, there’s no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect.”
The Republican Party has continued its march to unification under the banners of Trump, the big lie that he won the election, authoritarianism, and white power. Just a fraction of recent evidence: the eviction of Liz Cheney from the House Republican leadership for not embracing Trump’s lies; the passage of yet more state-level voting restrictions designed to undermine democracy by preventing Black, brown, poor, young, and other voters from voting; the tragicomic Arizona “audit” of Maricopa county’s ballots looking for “bamboo” that might prove Chinese vote-tampering; and outright denial by Republican House members that any insurrection at all even happened on January 6th (just “a normal tourist visit” in the reality-denying words of Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde). Too much of the mainstream media is normalizing this by reporting it as just more “partisanship.” In fact, it’s an effort that may well end democracy. And, as you might expect, what we’re seeing is the result of a grotesque plan. Ari Berman and Nick Surgey at Mother Jones just released a chilling exposé “Leaked Video: Dark Money Group Brags About Writing GOP Voter Suppression Bills Across the Country”:
In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.
All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February. With Heritage’s help, Anderson said, Georgia became “the example for the rest of the country.
Do you doubt how consequential voter suppression is? Check out this piece by Dave Weigel in the Washington Post, “How post-Trump voting laws would have changed the last election”
Last year, to ease pressure on polling places and on voters who couldn't easily or safely reach them, Atlanta's Fulton County launched two “mobile voting units,” buses that functioned as fully staffed voting booths. For a cost of around $750,000, the county collected 11,200 votes across both buses, which stopped in different Atlanta locations at times announced by the county in advance. Joe Biden would go on to carry the county with 73 percent of the vote.
The new law grounded those buses, mandating that mobile voting stations “shall only be used in emergencies declared by the Governor.” It also altered the state's provisional ballot rules, requiring voters who show up to the wrong polling place before 5 p.m. to relocate and find their real polling place before 7 p.m. Voters arriving at the wrong precincts tend to cast most provisional ballots, which must be validated after the election; 11,120 valid provisional ballots were cast in the state last year, breaking about 2-to-1 for Biden over Trump. Combined, the ballots cast by both methods are nearly double the margin by which Biden won Georgia.
A study released in late April deserves wider attention: “Democracy Crisis in the Making: How State Legislatures are Politicizing, Criminalizing, and Interfering with Elections.” The executive summary begins
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, a wave of legislative proposals to remake election law has swept across the country, state by state. One organization, the Voting Rights Lab, has identified more than 2,000 bills that deal in one way or another with the way elections are administered.1 Among this group, one set of consequential proposals has flown under the radar. They involve efforts to alter basic principles about how elections should be administered and aspire to put highly partisan elected officeholders in charge of basic decisions about our elections. In 2021, state legislatures across the country—through at least 148 bills filed in 36 states—are moving to muscle their way into election administration, as they attempt to dislodge or unsettle the executive branch and/or local election officials who, traditionally, have run our voting systems.
And the culture of right-wing violence and intimidation continues. Why has Marjorie Taylor Greene not been expelled from Congress? Her recent effort to accost Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was vile, but check out this earlier unhinged performance from 2019:
(One of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s cameramen later showed up at the January 6th insurrection).
She’s only the tip of the iceberg. In his Monthly Review article “America’s Next Insurgency,” Daniel Block asks the “serious question”
Could the United States experience prolonged, acute civil violence?
According to dozens of interviews with former and current government officials, counterterrorism researchers, and political scientists who study both the U.S. and other countries, the answer is yes. “I think that the conditions are pretty clearly headed in that direction,” says Katrina Mulligan, the managing director for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress and the former director for preparedness and response in the national security division at the Department of Justice (DOJ). The insurrection on “January 6 was a canary in the coal mine in a way, precisely because it wasn’t a surprise to those of us who have been following this.
In February, The Forge hosted a very useful interview with University of Chicago historian Kathleen Belew, “After the Insurrection: How to Combat White Power.” She contends
One critical thing for activists to understand, as well as for general readers to understand, is that we're now in a moment where we're talking about generations of organizing by white power activists that has mostly gone unchecked. What I document is the move towards what I classify as the white power movement, which is distinct from earlier moments of Klan and neo-Nazis activity. First of all, because activists are coming together under one banner and second, because their intent is revolutionary change.
But the bigger legacy is that it's been very difficult to understand it as a movement because what we get are a whole bunch of stories of “lone wolf actors” and a “few bad apples,” rather than an organized system of people who are all working together for a common cause. What we're talking about now is a movement that has been operating almost unstopped since 1979 and has been organizing and growing across decades, if not across generations.
One thing that the lone wolf narrative does is divide communities when they find themselves in the crosshairs of this violence. If we tell a lone wolf story, we see El Paso over here as an act of anti-immigrant violence. The Tree of Life synagogue is over here as an act of antisemitic violence. And Dylan Roof's shooting is over here as an act of anti-black violence. All of those are white power violence. And that means that all of those communities have a common interest in opposing it. I would love to see it reported that way more often.
Belew’s superb 2018 book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, is a red pill of its own.
It’s also important to understand that beyond the white power hard core, there’s a vast swath of middle- and upper-class white America powering Trumpism. Political scientist Robert Pape’s work is important in this regard. From “Fears of White People Losing Out Permeate Capitol Rioters’ Towns” in The New York Times:
Most of the people who took part in the assault [on January 6th] came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”
One fact stood out in Mr. Pape’s study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population arethe most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.
Bill Fletcher, Max Elbaum, and Bob Wing wrote a series of incisive articles for Organizing Upgrade that consider the current crisis through the lens of history. In his piece “Key to Strategy #1: Know Your Enemy,” Elbaum argues that
. . . even in a system rigged in their favor, the MAGA core falls short of what it takes to ensure dominance through electoral means. With only 35-40% of the electorate, they need to win additional constituencies to vote their way. The GOP leadership has all but given up on gaining a popular majority nationwide. But they do aim to win enough support from wavering sectors that – combined with suppressing the votes of others – can assure them control of every branch of the federal government.
Key GOP operatives use sophisticated means and messaging to accomplish this goal….
For every MAGA move to expand their base, though, there is a corresponding vulnerability.
There is a tension between supplying enough racist red meat to keep the diehard MAGA core happy and keeping needed sectors of peoples of color in the GOP tent.
It is risky to rely on demonizing the Biden administration to win votes when a significant proportion of the GOP base supports its legislative initiatives. (About 40% of Republicans supported the American Rescue Plan.)
A party that places its biggest electoral bet on a shrinking demographic sector (older white people) while giving less attention to growing sectors of the population and to youth tends to be on unstable footing for the medium and long run.
David Brooks, of all people, has also taken the red pill, which should make you take notice. In a recent column “The GOP Is Getting Even Worse” in The New York Times, he wrote
Those of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly disabused. There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.
It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.
What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swaths of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.
The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.
Waleed Shaheed captured the basic conundrum well in a Twitter thread:
While Biden's diverse center-left coalition is a source of hope in this regard compared to much of the rest of the world, permanent Republican minority rule continues to be a ticking time bomb and no one really knows what Democrats plan to do about it.
In Deepak’s all-time favorite movie, Snakes on a Plane, Samuel L. Jackson poses a profound question: “Who put these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane?” The plot is glorious in its utter preposterousness (it involves, well, killer assassin snakes let loose on a passenger plane). This Wikipedia summary of the ending (spoiler alert!) suggests the right course of action for progressives and Democrats if they don’t want the plane to crash.
Harris contacts Flynn [Samuel L Jackson], telling him that antivenom will be ready for the passengers when they land. However, Flynn discovers that the cockpit is filled with snakes and Rick [the pilot] is dead. After a brief discussion, Troy, Three Gs' bodyguard, agrees to land the plane based on experience playing a flight simulator. After everyone gets prepared, Flynn shoots out two windows with his pistol, causing the plane to depressurize. The snakes are blown out of the cockpit and the lower floor of the plane. Despite his lack of real-world experience, Troy makes an emergency landing and the plane makes it to the terminal. The passengers leave the plane and antivenom is given to those who need it. Just as Flynn and Sean are about to disembark the plane, a remaining snake jumps out and bites Sean in the chest. Flynn draws his gun and shoots the snake, and paramedics rush to Sean, who is unharmed due to a ballistic vest he wore throughout the ordeal after his rescue from Kim's henchmen. As a token of gratitude, Sean later takes Flynn to Bali and teaches him how to surf.
The ending doesn’t make much more sense after watching the whole movie. But there’s a crazy wisdom in Flynn’s approach. What Democrats are doing now: playing conventional politics, being good policy wonks, passing good bills, mostly pretending everything is kind of normal, being upstanding public servants: NONE OF THAT WILL WORK. Democrats will need (metaphorically) to shoot the windows out of the cockpit and evict the snakes from the plane.
Translated into Beltway speak, that means: 1. passing The For the People Act (H.R. 1/S. 1) through whatever parliamentary device is needed to overcome the Senate filibuster rules; 2. Expelling neo-Confederate traitors from the Congress (Greene first among them) 3. Purging all military and security forces of white power supporters that Trump loyalists smuggled into them and cracking down on violent white power extremist civil society groups; and 4. Initiating a public reckoning process, not just about January 6th, but the long history of racism and nativism that led to it — a reckoning that creates a new baseline of public understanding about what threatens and who must be part of multi-racial democracy. (See a piece by Megan Ming Francis and Deepak here on what reckoning might look like.) We need to be shaken out of our stupor – not allowed to slide back into complacency while the snakes slither in plain sight. There are many long-term projects that need to be undertaken in order to weaken the foundations on which the authoritarian project rests, but in the here and now, landing the plane of multi-racial democracy in one piece is job one.
Is our proposed ending to this movie too extreme? Historically, American democracy has buckled every time that moderates have refused to use the full extent of their power to confront Confederates and allowed them back at the table, most famously with the end of Reconstruction. Some group of leaders inside and outside government is going to have to make the call that saving multi-racial democracy is not just another issue – that it is now the issue. Marc Elias argues forcefully in “The Big Lie is a Pillar of the State” that there is an asymmetry in the focus of left and right on this issue:
Fighting against the enshrinement of the Big Lie in state policy is the most important issue in our public lives and we need to treat it as such. I do not agree with Cheney on much, but she is right that fealty to the Big Lie and codifying it in state laws will lead to our destruction. And however the story ends, it will undoubtedly be the defining issue for the Republican Party in 2022 and 2024.
Yet, while Democrats divide their attention between healthcare, the economy, and racial justice, Republicans are singularly focused on making voting more difficult and spreading disinformation about our elections. Every day the proponents of the Big Lie are speaking louder with more voices and influence on this topic than we are.
If Democrats do not make preventing the Big Lie from becoming a pillar of the state a top priority, we will lose not only elections but our democracy.
As Bill Fletcher, Jr. puts it in another piece:
The Republican Party, in pushing through voter suppression legislation, is saying to the public that if Republicans do not win, then that means that an election has been tainted. If Republicans win, then an election is legitimate. The name for this is “dictatorship”, and everyone must be clear about this.
The evolution of the Republican Party from being a hard, right-wing party to becoming a party-for-dictatorship changes everything. It means that they need to be electorally crushed in the midterm elections, given their approach towards elections and democracy. It also must mean that bipartisanship in Congress and in our state legislatures must be based upon the expansion of democracy rather than its contraction.
Trump opened the floodgates for authoritarianism. And now the toxic waste is flowing through our states. Only through the organized actions of those who favor democracy; only through a mass voting rights movement, can this situation be stopped.
We have some reasons to be optimistic. The country is changing, not just demographically but also in its views. Jennifer Rubin’s “This is Why MAGA nativists are in a panic” makes the case that the ferocity of the backlash derives from the intensity of the threat
Today’s Republican Party is the province that welcomes nativists who reject both the sanctity of elections and the core creed of America (“all men are created equal”). Far too many in the party seek to define the United States as a White, Christian nation and accept the right-wing media fantasyland that perpetuates white grievance and replacement theory. That should be a great source of concern to pro-democracy Americans who understand that our Constitution rejects the premise that race or ethnicity or religion defines our country. The good news is that the MAGA crowd is failing spectacularly to indoctrinate fellow Americans.
Analysis from the Pew Research Center finds: “Compared with 2016 — when a wave of immigration to Europe and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the U.S. made immigration and diversity a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic — fewer now believe that to truly be American, French, German or British, a person must be born in the country, must be a Christian, has to embrace national customs, or has to speak the dominant language.” In the United States, only 35 percent of Americans say criteria such as birthplace or religion are important to a person’s nationality, compared to 55 percent in 2016.
A striking 60 percent of Americans think the country “will be better off in the future if it is open to changes regarding traditional ways of life,” as opposed to 38 percent who do not. (However, only 32 percent on the right are pro-change.) And by a lopsided margin of 61 percent to 36 percent, Americans believe that unseen discrimination is a bigger problem than people seeing discrimination where it does not exist.
Delights and Provocations
If The Platypus’s affection for Snakes on a Plane hasn’t totally undermined your confidence in our critical abilities, we also highly recommend The Sound of Metal, about a heavy-metal drummer (Riz Ahmed) who suddenly loses his hearing and has to radically reorient his life while struggling not to fall back into addiction.
You can watch a recording here of a recent, fantastic discussion, “100 Days of the Biden Administration: What’s Next for Immigration, Health Policy, and Economic Justice,” held at Harvard’s Ash Center. Speakers included Megan Ming Francis, Jamila Michener, Connie Razza, and Deepak.
If you haven’t seen the infamous “woke CIA recruitment” video, using words like “intersectionality” and “impostor syndrome,” you really need to stop whatever you are doing and check it out. It’s mind-blowing.
Savvy Corner
Stephanie Luce and Deepak will be offering a class designed for mid- and senior-level organizers and campaigners this fall on “Power and Strategy” at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. From the course description:
How do groups in society achieve the changes they seek? This course will explore how elites, labor unions, community organizations, political parties, and social movements organize, develop strategies and deploy resources to advance their interests and win major changes in society. To provide a shared framework, we’ll begin with an overview of classical and contemporary theories of power and cause and effect. We’ll look at elite strategies to wield power developed in the military, Silicon Valley, business, and politics. We’ll also consider five “strategies from below,” including building mass organization, disruptive movements, efforts to capture governing power, and “inside-outside” strategies.
In the eternal battle between David and Goliath, how and why does David sometimes win? We’ll examine a variety of case studies from the right and left, including the orchestrated rise of neoliberalism, and cutting-edge campaigns from contemporary racial justice and labor and other movements. The class will focus heavily on introducing applied tools for strategy development from a variety of traditions. We’ll review tools commonly used in campaigns like power analysis and strategy charts, but also introduce frameworks like “lean startup,” reverse engineering, OODA loops, emergent strategy, scenario planning, policy feedback loops, time shifting, and methods to harness and work with strong emotions. The class is appropriate for intermediate to advanced social change organizers and campaigners, as well as for graduate students. The class will feature guest faculty and practitioners with extensive experience building winning campaigns. You can apply here.