Robert Reich Is Getting Feisty, Calls for Joe Manchin to be kicked out of the Democratic Party.-- His Guardian article proposal is both "spot on" and a long-term loser.---

Robert Reich Is Getting Feisty, Calls for Joe Manchin to be kicked out of the Democratic Party.-- His Guardian article proposal is both "spot on" and a long-term loser.---

Five days ago, after Senator Joe Manchin torpedoed what remained of Joe Biden's agenda (and I was totally "en fuego" about it at the time) I wrote an article for Facebook to propose exactly the same things as proposed today by former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary, Robert Reich. Kick. Him. Out!

When I saw this piece tonight, I actually had a good laugh. I cited the same reasons in my article that he presents in his "Guardian" op-ed.  He even addressed as did I the fears of many that the GOP would control the Senate if Manchin were expelled. In effect he asks, "what difference would it make, with Manchin and Sinema aiding the GOP obstructionists, they control it anyway?" And Reich even makes exactly the same final point, which is that the benefit would come in the form of the message delivered to the Democratic base from the leadership, namely that the party is returning to it's roots in defending the average middle income American from the Wall Street asset strippers, corporate looters and rapacious financial speculators, three categories of greedy pigs to which Manchin belongs.

Yet, I wrote and then deleted the article before posting.  Why, you ask? Because I thought about it, and decided that it wouldn't be a productive intervention on my part, and not just because I was too pissed off when I wrote it. The reality is that Joe Manchin is a public spokesman for something endemic and rotten in the Democratic leadership, and yes, unfortunately among the DNC and President Biden's White House advisory team. Which is, corporate centrism. 

Corporate America has their hooks deeply into the Democratic Party at the top, and expelling Joe Manchin will not solve that problem. Painful as that is to consider, I don't think I'll get much of an argument on this. Maybe someone will write up a laundry list of policy differences between the parties which are certainly real enough. But reality is that politics in the US have been defined for decades by competing constellations of power which have their separate allegiances to rival factions of an otherwise unified US establishment. There, I said it. As the meme goes, "prove me wrong."

There are a dozen Joe Manchins in the Senate, and many more in the House who have stiff-armed President Biden on an array of issues, including viable "Green Energy," raising corporate taxes, forgiving student debt, raising minimum wage substantially, a wealth tax, closing tax loopholes for corporations, increasing regulation over financial speculation,  including the new forms of fake exotic fiat money, such as Crypto, NFTs, and other such holographic gambling chips. "Big money" also runs the Democratic Party, and if you doubt that, just have a conversation with some of the fundraisers and "bundlers" who are deployed to get the money for their campaigns. I used to be one, for folks who don't know.  Or, you can have a talk with President Biden's former leading rivals for the Democratic nomination Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and ascertain their current residential addresses in the great forgotten state of political "Limbo."

Clearly the demographic of the Democratic voting base is different. There is no question that President Biden came to office committed to an FDR style "go big" economic recovery policy. Unfortunately, he was misled by some of his corporate influenced centrist advisors (Anita Dunn, that means you) to orient toward bipartisanship and compromise with a GOP which literally spit on cooperation with President Biden a mere three minutes after Bernie Sanders took his Inaugural mittens off. 

There was never a prayer for collaboration with this "thing" which the GOP devolved into. And it is the Democratic centrists who have been wasting our time and feeding McConnell's rabid dogs in the Senate the raw meat of bipartisan negotiations for the last year and a half which watered everything down to nothing, producing virtually squat. Our only accomplishment of substance to show for bipartisanship was raising the debt ceiling last year to avoid a default. Everything else was illusory. An infrastructure bill with the guts cut out, and a stimulus bill achieved through reconciliation, without one GOP vote. Don't blame Joe Manchin for all of that. The White House played footsie with him and backed his ridiculous efforts to find "ten good Republicans" for more than 17 months. (Who must have just wandered out of the Senate just like my dark socks disappeared from our dryer) Now President Biden is reduced to trying to govern through executive orders, while still extolling the virtues of democracy. 

Throwing Joe Manchin out of the Democratic Party would be a well deserved act of retaliation, and would make a lot of people feel good, elated even, for a moment. And unfortunately, doing things which feel good in the moment is the major reason that the United States is in this unhappy place, truth be told. It solves nothing. The solution to the "Joe Manchin problem" is not to throw him out. It is to recruit, to grow like crazy and surround him and his allies. 

The future of the United States, and the key to its revival as a democracy is our youth. So long as the Democratic Party hedges on or ignores youth engagement, (except on handfuls of single issues like school shootings) waffles on issues of importance to them, continues to avoid conflict with the twisted priorities of an affluent "Boomer" suburbia which is addicted to consumerism, youth in general will continue to NGAF. They will remain surgically attached to their phones, immersed in social media and dystopian fiction, and the Democratic Party will be the party of "no future."

Bob Reich's heart is in the right place, and he is a fighter. But even he at the moment is floundering out of desperation and bumping into walls due to myopia. The solution to our crisis of democracy is not in trying to maintain an obsolete and dysfunctional arrangement in which our political parties suck from either a left or right set of corporate Titties, with the Koch Tit on the right and the Bloomberg/Meyers Tit on the left. This is not representative politics. And due to the relatively fictional nature of what is laughingly referred to today as money, the pair of corporate breasts which both parties are nursing from are themselves the financial equivalent of silicone implants. What passes for party politics today is not real, and this is a leading factor in shaping the discontent and anger which made so many vulnerable to Trumpism. Not the greatest factors, which are racism and greed, but enough of one to lose for the Democrats in 2016, and possibly the cause of an even greater catastrophe in 2022. 

Now our situation is dire, and we need to orient toward a non-violent resistance for a long war with fascism and theocracy, with MAGA in all of it's manifestations being our adversary. At least in admitting that, Americans are living more in the real world, not the world of the Tooth Fairy.  And that long war will be fought for young people, and led by young people. It will not be limited to one or two issues. Young people are concerned with their lifetimes, which never boil down to "one issue." 

To engage young people successfully, you cannot be transactional, rather you need to speak to their hopes for the future, if they still have any. Our concerns and efforts on behalf of the next generation as expressed through politics should be unconditional, our gift to them. They will not trust in anything else which smacks of dealmaking or pragmatism. Attempting that will only feed the dynamic of generational conflict, which is there omnipresent, seething under the surface. We, the older generation, have an important role to play in helping them to the extent possible. And they in turn have a responsibility to safeguard our future as well, that is, what remains of it. But they need to develop as leaders, and we need to follow their lead.

If there is an example in our recent history which should inform us, it is the fact that the front-line leadership of the Civil Rights Movement and later the anti-war movement largely consisted of young people. Many of us were them. Martin Luther King was a 28 year old minister when he was elected chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the actual head of America's Black Ministers.  The people who marched into the "Lion's Den" of Jim Crow were led by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. At every point in our history when the time came to fight a just war, it was young people who put themselves on the line. Alexander Hamilton, arguably the most important framer of the US Constitution was 20 years old when he was appointed George Washington's Chief-of-Staff for the entire Continental Army. History tells us that those who ignore the youth are those who will be lacking in the will to fight for a just and durable future, because at heart they are cynical. 

The lack of an organized and visible Democratic Party youth movement as a construct or thought object tells you right there the story of why we are in this bind. We are preoccupied with stopping Trump, MAGA, and SCOTUS, and rightly so. But have we lost sight of why, and for who? Ask the Democratic leadership, "what are you doing with young people" and then tell us if the response you get is adequate. 

The reason I raise these questions here is not because I believe I have all of the answers, or even know all of the questions. There will be disagreement with much of what I wrote, which is expected. But can anyone seriously argue that there exists anything like the kind of "quick fix" proposed for the Democratic Party by Bob Reich, or any leading pundit for that matter which amounts to anything? If there is, I'm all ears.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/20/joe-manchin-democratic-party-kick-out