Opinion
This is democracy in a red state's blue dot
On an April afternoon in a small Midwest town, I stood on the side of a busy street with around 500 of my neighbors and community members to protest the current administration and to defend democracy.
I’m not going to lie. I was afraid. Even knowing we would be peacefully protesting in a public space where we are allowed by law to congregate and express our opinions, it felt dangerous. The reality of today is that people are being snatched off the streets and judges are being arrested. Plus, I live in a small blue dot in the middle of a large swath of red.
I deleted screenshots of funny memes and current facts from my phone. I wrote a phone number in sharpie on my upper arm in case I needed to contact someone with my one phone call. I researched Articles 90 and 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and printed out small messages to explain to any police or military presence that they will only be charged with disobeying any lawful orders and providing the GI Rights Hotline number in case of need. I disabled the location on my phone and logged out of all my social media. I made sure facial recognition and thumbprint were both turned off and couldn’t be used to open my phone against my will. I removed my dangly earrings and necklace. I took a deep breath and I walked out the door.
When I got to the city park, I found our allowed protest area neatly marked off with ribbon and volunteers writing signs on posterboard for those of us who forgot to bring a sign. I chose a sign that said “Freedom From Fear” and found a spot between the curb and sidewalk with my neighbors.
For the next two hours we held our signs high and waved at passing cars as they honked and cheered. It felt so empowering to be out in the world and with community members who feel the need to protect our democracy just like I do. I saw a professor I recognized from the nearby university. I saw knitting and crafting friends. I met new people. We were university students and working families and retirees and young parents with babies and toddlers.
Someone handed me an American flag to wave along with my “Freedom From Fear” sign. A veteran in a chair nearby along the line had a sign that read, “Hands off our democracy!” Several versions of “No Kings” or “America does not have a king!” showed up in the signs. So did “Resist Fascism,” “Hands off my books,” and, “No one voted for Elon Musk.” I chanted “Flush the orange turd!” along with the grade-school young ladies every time they walked up and down the line on the sidewalk with a parent and a homemade sign.
Every time someone chanted, “Show me what democracy looks like!” I shouted back, “This is what democracy looks like!” as loud as I could along with hundreds of neighbors and community members. Standing along that line I realized I am not alone. A whole lot of other people fear for our democracy and do not like the actions taken in our names. We are afraid and we are also willing to stand up for our democracy despite that fear. And I started to believe that most of us feel that way. None of us are in this alone.
Hundreds of cars drove by to cheer us on and honk. One drove by flipping us off. Another drove by shouting but no one could tell if they were shouting with us or against us. One large truck gunned the engine and spewed a black cloud along the street. But the rest? Hundreds and hundreds of people agreed with us. And the smiles of relief as they drove by were worth the fear. I was relieved too.
I recently heard U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride, (D-DE) say that no one needs to be a hero as long as we all have a little courage, that seeing someone be courageous helps others have courage too. That day we had enough courage to walk out the door. I have faith that next time it will be easier. And next time? Next time I hope you’ll join us.
Tamara Moots lives and works in Manhattan. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
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Democrats embrace ‘Great Un-Awokening’ as inequality and rage explode
Apologies for the length of today’s letter, but this is vitally important.
Some leading Democrats are now engaged in what’s being called the “Great Un-awokening.”
Former Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel calls Democrats “weak and woke.”
Democratic Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who is Black, vetoes a bill passed by his Democratic-dominated state legislature that took steps toward reparations.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls it “unfair” to allow transgender athletes to participate in female college and youth sports.
Michigan’s Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin says the party needs more “alpha energy.”
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg removes his pronouns from his social media bio.
Hello?
None of this gives the Democrats a message for the future. None responds to the central issues Americans care about.
The largest force in American politics is antiestablishment fury at a rigged system. There is no longer a big-government left or a small-government right or a moderate “center” in between.
There’s only right-wing cultural populism — taking aim at immigrants, transgender people, the “deep state,” “DEI,” “woke-ism”, “socialism,” critical race theory, and other Trump Republican bogeymen.
Or economic populism — aiming at the real causes of the nation’s soaring inequality and the legalized bribery of politicians: large corporations that insist on regulatory rollbacks, their fat-cat CEOs (now earning 350 times their typical employees) who want bigger tax loopholes, and other hugely wealthy Americans who are demanding larger tax cuts.
Democrats cannot win by giving in to Republican cultural populism. They must hammer economic populism.
We are at a time in the nation’s history when inequality has soared to record highs, when big money from large corporations and the rich has engulfed our politics, when CEOs are raking in record compensation compared to average workers, when a president has surrounded himself with billionaires and pledged a huge tax cut that will mainly benefit the rich at the expense of programs on which the poor and working class depend, and when American democracy is in imminent danger of succumbing to a dictatorship.
Democrats must move the national conversation to the terrain they occupied the last time inequality and corruption exploded in America.
1. The era of the Democrats’ economic populism
In the early 20th century, Americans reclaimed the economy and democracy from the robber barons of the first Gilded Age.
The Progressive Era, as it was called, emerged because millions of Americans saw that wealth and power concentrated at the top was undermining democracy and stacking the economic deck.
Wisconsin’s “Fighting Bob” La Follette instituted the nation’s first minimum-wage law. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan attacked the big railroads, giant banks, and insurance companies. Ohio’s Senator John Sherman led the way to America’s first antitrust legislation.
President Theodore Roosevelt used that legislation to bust up the giant trusts. Suffragists like Susan B. Anthony helped secure women the right to vote. Reformers like Jane Addams successfully pushed for laws protecting children and the public’s health. Organizers like Mary Harris “Mother” Jones spearheaded labor unions.
In 1910, Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy American democracy. Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was enacted in 1916 and the capital gains tax in 1922.
Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, saw in the 1929 crash an opportunity to renegotiate the relationship between capitalism and democracy. He attacked corporate and financial power by giving workers the right to unionize, the 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and Social Security.
FDR also instituted a high marginal income tax on the wealthy — those making more than $5 million a year were taxed up to 75 percent — and regulated finance.
Accepting nomination for reelection as president in 1936, FDR spoke of the need to redeem American democracy from the despotism of concentrated economic power. He reviewed what had led to the Great Crash:
Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, [an] industrial dictatorship [now] reached out for control over Government itself . . .[T]he political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor — other people’s lives. . . . Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it.
Roosevelt warned the nation against the “economic royalists” who had pressed the whole of society into service. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor . . . these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship,” he thundered. What was at stake, he said, was nothing less that the “survival of democracy.”
On the eve of his 1936 reelection, FDR told the American people that big business and finance were determined to unseat him. He said that during his first term of office:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.
2. Why the Democratic Party gave up economic populism
By the 1950s, the Democratic Party had given up economic populism. Gone from their presidential campaigns were tales of greedy businessmen and unscrupulous financiers.
Postwar prosperity had created the largest middle class in the history of the world and reduced the gap between rich and poor. By the mid-1950s, a third of all private-sector employees were unionized, and blue-collar workers regularly received generous wage and benefit increases.
Keynesianism had become a widely accepted antidote to economic downturns — substituting the management of aggregate demand for class antagonism. Even Richard Nixon purportedly claimed “we’re all Keynesians now.” Who needed economic populism when fiscal and monetary policy could even out the business cycle, and when the rewards of growth were so widely shared?
Postwar fears of Soviet communism also put a damper on the older Democratic class politics.
Then the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements spawned an antiestablishment, anti-authoritarian New Left that distrusted government as much as it distrusted Wall Street and big business, if not more. The split eventually gave rise to a struggle within the Democratic Party between Bernie Sanders’s populists and Hillary Clinton’s mainstream Democrats.
As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded after the 2016 election, “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class’ problem. They have a ‘working-class problem’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate.”
Before Trump’s election in 2016, Democrats had occupied the White House for 16 out of 24 years. During the first two years of the Clinton and Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.
They scored some important victories for working families, including the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act.
I’m proud of having been part of a Democratic administration during that time.
But I was also terribly frustrated during those years by the New Democrat political operatives who focused on suburban swing voters and ignored the old Democratic working class, and the corporate Democrats in Congress who refused to do more for average workers and who failed to see that if the middle class continued to shrink, authoritarianism would only grow.
Bill Clinton used his political capital to pass free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs the means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. His North American Free Trade Agreement and acquiescence to China’s joining the World Trade Organization undermined the wages and economic security of manufacturing workers across the nation, hollowing out the Rust Belt.
Both Clinton and Obama stood by as corporations busted trade unions, the backbone of the working class. Neither Clinton nor Obama spent any political capital to reform labor laws by allowing workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that fired workers for trying to form unions.
During the 2008 campaign, Obama was instructed to not even use the words “labor union,” since most workers were not members and unions were thought to be unpopular.
Labor unions don’t just give workers more bargaining leverage to get higher wages and benefits. They also used to be a political counterweight to the power of large corporations and Wall Street.
Yet under Clinton and Obama, corporate power continued to rise and union membership to fall as a portion of the workforce. Antitrust enforcement continued to ossify.
Both Clinton and Obama depended on big money from corporations and the wealthy. Both turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, yet he never followed up on his reelection promise to pursue a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United v. FEC decision.
3. The Republican Party’s embrace of cultural populism
The Democrats’ failure to embrace economic populism as they did under FDR enabled Republican cultural populism to fill the void, offering Americans who have been losing ground an explanation for what’s gone wrong and a set of villains to blame for what’s happened to them.
Richard Nixon and his protégé Pat Buchanan saw in cultural populism a means of destroying the New Deal coalition and attracting the white working class to the Republican Party.
Reagan deployed cultural populism in claiming that Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats had stifled the economy and hobbled individual achievement. The rot at the top of America was a cultural elite out of touch with average working Americans, and who coddled the poor — including “welfare queens,” Reagan’s racist dog-whistle.
In the 2004 presidential election, Republicans described Democrats as an effete group of “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times–reading, body-piercing [and] Hollywood-loving” jerks out of touch with the real America.
Meanwhile, big money poured into the American political system. By the 2016 election, the richest 100th of 1 percent of Americans — 24,949 extraordinarily wealthy people — accounted for a record-breaking 40 percent of all campaign contributions flowing to both parties. That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, Senate, and House elections with $3.4 billion in donations.
Labor unions no longer provided any countervailing power, contributing only $213 million.
By the 2020s, Republicans saw the culture wars as the central struggle of American public life.
Enter Trump.
4. The consequence
In the decades immediately after World War II, college graduates voted Republican. Republican legislators were significantly more likely than Democratic legislators to hail from Ivy League universities.
It’s the reverse today. Between the 1980s and 2020s, the Democratic Party went from being the party of American workers to the party of college-educated professionals. Today, they vote Democratic.
Trump is the consequence rather than the source of these trends.
Yet Republican cultural populism is entirely bogus. The biggest change over the previous four decades — the change lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of the working class — has had nothing to do with identity politics, “woke”ism, critical race theory, transgender kids, immigration, “cat ladies,” or any other Republican cultural bogeymen.
It has been a giant upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth; in the power that has accompanied that shift; and in the injuries to the pride, status, and self-esteem of those who have been left behind.
The so-called “Great Un-Awokening” in the Democratic Party is a dangerous diversion from where the party should be — a deflection from what has really happened to a very large number of Americans.
If Democrats have learned anything from what has occurred in America, it should be that they must reverse the giant upward distribution of income and wealth. Counter the upward shift in power. Strive to heal the injuries borne by those who have been left behind.
In short, they must embrace economic populism. Otherwise, why have a Democratic Party?
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com
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We need 1,000 Melissa Hortmans right now
I once naively believed that the worst kind of loss in politics was at the ballot box.
I learned the hard way about real loss in October 2002, when Sen. Paul Wellstone’s plane went down while he was traveling the state doing his job as U.S. senator and running for reelection.
That loss shook the state and devastated his supporters. Many people said to me, “Paul spoke for me. Who will speak for me now?”
But after some of the grief and mourning settled, something amazing happened. People turned the loss into a call for action. “Stand Up, Keep Fighting” was the motto, and a whole new generation stepped into politics declaring that they were ready to pick up where Paul Wellstone left off.
As I try to process the horror of the assassination of Speaker Melissa Hortman and Mark Hortman, the incredibly moving message from their kids Sophie and Colin Hortman brought me back to those days after 2002. They wrote a list of activities we can do to honor Mark and Melissa, and here was the final item: “Stand up for what you believe in, especially if that thing is justice and peace.”
To that I say yes! That is exactly what we must do.
Sometimes a leader comes along who turns out to be the right person in the right place and time. Paul Wellstone was that person. Melissa Hortman was that person. Melissa’s impact on Minnesota and its people is huge. She was authentic, principled and strategic, not to mention funny, smart and relatable. These are ingredients for the best leaders. She built governing power by finding and encouraging a generation of community leaders around Minnesota to run for legislative office. The majorities she led governed justly, boldly and with compassion, through significant change and turmoil, finding the common good. Her hard work has put Minnesota in a good place and ready to take on the future.
She was stolen from us just as she was really getting going. That is just heartbreaking.
But, in her leadership time here, she set a beautiful example, and always did right by Minnesota.
So, just as with Wellstone two decades ago, we now need a thousand Melissa Hortmans. We need people to step up where she left off. People who get to climb on Melissa’s shoulders, get in there, fight for people and make a difference.
People who will volunteer to serve their neighbors, knock on doors, join a local board, march in a rally, and, yes, run for office. And, once in office, to lead with integrity and courage.
Will that be you?
Sophie and Colin say it better: “Hope and resilience are the enemy of fear. The best way to honor our parents’ memory is to do something.”
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100 years after the Scopes monkey trial, education is in the dock again
Today I’m remembering what Lela Scopes told me about her famous brother for my Paducah Sun story going on 46 years ago.
She said before John Thomas Scopes left to teach science and coach football at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tenn., in 1924, he explained: “I’m going there because it’s a small town with a small school where I won’t get in any deep water.”
The skinny, bespectacled, freckle-faced 24-year-old from Paducah ended up the defendant in one of history’s most sensationalized courtroom battles.
A century ago this month, Scopes was convicted of violating the Butler Act, a Volunteer State law that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. His punishment was a $100 fine.
But the “Monkey Trial” grabbed newspaper headlines worldwide. Dozens of reporters converged on Dayton. So did tent revivalists and swarms of hucksters hawking popcorn and pink lemonade and hustling Bibles and souvenirs, including stuffed monkeys.
The State of Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes was also the first trial broadcast live on radio.
I interviewed Lela Scopes in August 1979, when I was a Sun feature writer. She also said John had worried about what their mother might think of the trial: “He was afraid it would get in the Louisville paper, Mother would read about it and think he was a hothead.”
Anyway, as Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” and now is one of those rhyming times.
“Public education is once again under siege from a sustained effort by Christian Nationalists to blur the line between church and state,” warns A.J. Schumann, a youth organizing fellow with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Like today, the 1920s were times of “rapid social, economic and cultural change,” said David Krueger, professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah.
Scopes admitted he covered evolution when he substitute-taught for the absent biology teacher. (In their zeal to ban evolution, Tennessee lawmakers failed to remove the state-approved biology textbook, which included evolution.)
Scopes believed in evolution and agreed to stand trial on principle.
The trial, which began on July 10, 1925, and concluded on July 21, was essentially a clash of competing values: urban science and modernism versus rural, old-time Protestant fundamentalist Christianity.
“The cause defended at Dayton is a continuing one that has existed throughout man’s brief history and will continue as long as man is here,” Scopes wrote in Center of the Storm, his 1967 memoir. “It is the cause of freedom, for which man must do what he can.”
The attorneys embodied the collision of values. Tennessee summoned William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska as special prosecutor. A fundamentalist champion, he had been a Democratic congressman, secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate.
The American Civil Liberties Union hired Clarence Darrow to lead Scopes’ defense team. Darrow was widely considered the country’s top defense lawyer. He was from Chicago, believed in evolution and was an agnostic.
Bryan and Darrow dueled like gladiators in the sweltering midsummer East Tennessee heat. The courtroom became so hot that the trial was moved outdoors to the tree-shaded courthouse lawn where the crowd of spectators grew even larger.
Bryan got a conviction as expected. But progressives, including liberal Christians, believed science and reason had vanquished “EVIL-lution” in the court of public opinion. They pointed to July 20, when Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert.
“There was no pity for the helplessness of the believer come so suddenly and so unexpectedly upon a moment when he could not reconcile statements of the Bible with generally accepted facts,” The New York Times reported. “There was no pity for his admissions of ignorance of things boys and girls learn in high school, his floundering confessions that he knew practically nothing of geology, biology, philology, little of comparative religion, and little even of ancient history.”
In Only Yesterday, his 1931 chronicle of the 1920s, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote: “Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost. Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws, and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”
Allen and the progressives of his day missed the mark. Donald Trump and his Republican Party owe a big part of their electoral success to white Christian evangelicals of the “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” persuasion.
Schumann warned that “today’s Christian Nationalist rhetoric echoes the anti-modernist anxieties of the 1920s — fear that secularism is destroying ‘traditional values’ and that public institutions should reflect a ‘Christian America.’”
He wrote that the First Amendment safeguards all Americans “from having any single belief system imposed on them by the state,” a fact that seems to be lost on much of the GOP these days.
Schumann concluded that the Scopes “trial reminds us that the separation of church and state is not something we can take for granted. It is a principle that must be actively defended, especially in moments of cultural anxiety and political division, when calls to return to some mythic past grow loudest.”
Scopes died in 1970 at age 70. He is buried in the family plot in Paducah’s Oak Grove Cemetery next to his wife, Mildred, and close to Lela, who died in 1989 at 92. “A Man of Courage” is his epitaph. A state historical marker at the cemetery’s main entrance tells about him.
Scopes said not a word during the trial. He got his chance at the end.
After the jury delivered the expected guilty verdict and the judge fined Scopes $100, one of his lawyers pointed out that the defendant had been denied the right to speak before sentencing.
“Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute,” Scopes said. “I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideals of academic freedom, that is to teach the truth as guaranteed in our Constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.”
After Scopes finished, the judge repeated the fine. The verdict was later overturned on a technicality, Schumann wrote, but the Butler Act wasn’t repealed until 1967.
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