[ If we dont get it together, people, things are about to get
ugly. Very ugly.]
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A PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT TO DEFEAT FASCISM  
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Thom Hartmann
December 16, 2023
Common Dreams
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_ If we don't get it together, people, things are about to get ugly.
Very ugly. _

Former U.S. President Donald Trump is seen during the UFC 295 event
at Madison Square Garden on November 11, 2023 in New York City, Chris
Unger/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

 

Most people, particularly Democrats, would never speak of Donald Trump
and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
[[link removed]]. in the same
breath or context. But the very strategy that King used to help end
legal discrimination in America is what Trump is today using to try to
win back the White House in 2024: movement politics.

And if Democrats don’t figure out a way to match the passion and
fervor (and organization) of Trump’s MAGA movement — yes, it’s
as real a movement as was the Civil Rights movement — with their own
passionate, broad-based, slogan- and action-driven movement, things
could get very ugly for next year’s elections.

As of this moment, the biggest mistake the Democratic Party and most
Democratic politicians are making is not realizing that political
movements and political parties are very different things.

Barack Obama understood movement politics: he created a movement and
it carried him into the White House. For the Democratic Party today,
though, not so much…

Political parties deal with policy and practicality:

“How do we get healthcare for the most people in the most efficient
way possible?
“What kind of legislation will best deal with poverty and make our
streets safer?”
“How do we raise money to spread our message and get people out to
the polls?”

Movements, on the other hand, deal with identity and passion. They
spawn activists and evangelists:

“I’m in the street because I’m mad as hell that those idiots in
the state capitol outlawed my right to healthcare.”
“Hey, buddy in the next booth over here in the diner, I just heard
you mention Trump and I want you to know he’s a liar, con man, and
rapist!”
“Officer, I believe that a new and better America is possible with
the ideas of our movement, and I’m willing to let you arrest me for
it.”

The Democratic Party of today is no longer involved in movement
building.

It was building a movement during the Roosevelt administration in the
1930s, when millions showed up for FDR’s rallies or listened to his
fireside chats on the radio, volunteered or joined the three-letter
agencies to rebuild America, and helped the war effort to save the
world from fascism.

It was engaged in movement-building during the Johnson administration,
when the Party embraced MLK’s Civil Rights movement and passed a
whole series of Great Society legislation, beginning with the Civil
and Voting Rights Acts and then leading to Medicare, Medicaid, Food
Stamps and others that lifted millions out of poverty and laid the
foundation for our first serious step in generations toward a
genuinely inclusive, pluralistic society.

As mentioned, Barack Obama created a movement and without it never
could’ve gotten elected or passed Obamacare.

Part of the Democratic Party was definitely recruiting people into a
movement during the Bernie Sanders
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when tens of thousands of people showed up for rallies and Bernie
himself repeatedly said
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“This campaign is not just about me. It is about building a movement
of human solidarity...”

But since the Bernie movement was crushed by the Clinton machine and
the remnants of Clinton’s and Obama’s neoliberal “New
Democrats” in the 2016 primary, the Democratic Party has devolved
into a safe and predictable fundraising and electoral-strategy
institution. It’s left the movement building to us.

While many people, particularly women, supported Hillary, she didn’t
run her campaign like a movement, probably because both she and her
husband had been politicians their entire lives, rather than
activists. The closest she came to it was the millions of women
wearing
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“pussy” hats nationwide right after Trump’s inauguration, but by
then it was far too late and that wasn’t even led by her.

My friend and SiriusXM radio colleague Joe Madison
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“The difference between a moment and a movement is sacrifice.”

Politics, and political parties, deal with moments. They raise money,
push legislation, get people elected, popularize issues, and react to
the challenges of the day and to other parties’ rhetoric.

People, not institutions, generally create and populate movements.
And, as Joe Madison says, doing so requires effort, persistence,
passion, evangelism, and, yes, sacrifice.

While Democrats decry “the cult of Trump” and the media often
ridicules Trump’s “personality cult,” the reality is that
there’s never been a successful movement in history that didn’t
have a charismatic leader. The movement may have preceded the leader,
but the leader and his or her charisma is what makes it so potent.

Trump is a rapist, grifter, criminal, and all-around-horrible human
being. But, like many high functioning psychopaths, he has
extraordinary charisma and can be very charming. He knows how to lead
a movement, and that movement will be his main weapon next November.

I remember Bernie telling me in an off-line conversation years ago
that most politicians — and some of the best and most effective
politicians — are followers, not leaders. They look for a
“parade” (the start of a movement, in this example) and, when the
parade is big enough, they’ll run out to the front of it, lift its
flag, and proclaim, “This is _my_ movement!”

It sounds cynical, but it’s almost always true. And because the
self-organization of the movement preceded the political leadership,
it’s actually a rather organic process.

Certainly, that’s what FDR and LBJ did, as did Teddy Roosevelt back
in the day. Each responded to movements that were already growing on
the ground, ultimately leading those movements in ways that literally
changed America for the better.

Obama, a uniquely brilliant politician who came up as an activist and
community organizer, created his own movement from scratch and it
carried him into the White House.

And movement building and leading are what Donald Trump has been doing
— although not to better America — ever since he came down his
escalator in 2015.

His pitch was about emotion, not detail; about tribe, not facts; about
identity and values, not politics. It was the language of movement,
not momentary politics.

Even today, Trump is engaging in movement-building — this time a new
and more forceful movement than in 2016, that is well-armed and
enthusiastic about using violence — as he repeatedly proclaims his
intention to use it to become a dictator if re-elected.

It cuts both ways. In their early days, most successful modern
dictators were first leaders of movements.

Mussolini had his _Fasci Italiani di Combattimento
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the violent street mobs that became the enforcers of his Fascist
movement when it made the transition to becoming a political party.
Hitler brought people
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into the beer halls and the streets from the very beginning. Franco
called
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his Spanish fascist Falange party “The Movement” to his dying day.

Most Democrats are passionate about defeating Trump and defending
democracy, and some issues like abortion, pot, and voting rights will
get people into polling places, but where is today’s progressive
movement?

Outside of the protests against the murder of George Floyd
[[link removed]] in 2020 (which were
then demonized by the right, as they have every leftist movement in
history), most on the left have been content to consign all that
“sacrifice” to the Democratic Party.

Instead of talking about values — the “right” of people to vote,
healthcare, quality free education, a stable environment, or abortion,
for example — the Democratic Party’s most powerful and visible
leaders, President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Senator Schumer,
talk about legislation and Republican obstructionism.

That’s all well and good, and people need to know those things, but
details and information rarely motivate people the way a movement and
its implicit invitation to membership, participation, and evangelism
does.

When my old friend the late Tom Hayden helped organize Students for a
Democratic Society, he and its founders envisioned it as a movement,
not a party. I started showing up for the MSU chapter of SDS in 1967,
hanging out repeatedly at the Student Union, for meetings off-campus,
and in the streets, and ended up in jail for a week, shaved bald and
beaten, for my efforts. Politicians don’t go to jail: movement
participants (some of them politicians) do.

This comes out of something deep within our basic human nature.

As any psychologist or competent novelist can tell you, we human
beings are story machines: we carry deep within us stories about our
nation, about our lives, about ourselves and our place in family and
society.

Those stories drive our behavior more than any amount of data or
information. They transcend party. And they drive movements.

Deeply embedded into each of those stories are layers of emotion,
identity, and a sense of self. It’s the _stories_ that motivate us,
which is why it’s always _stories_ that drive movements.

Nobody ever got up off their couch and ran into the streets,
particularly into a line of police or jeering militia thugs, because
they were excited by a policy proposal offered in a boring floor
speech read in a droning voice by the Senate Majority Leader.

Movement leaders know how to tell these stories to rouse people’s
emotions and motivate them to action. It’s one of the keys to
creating and sustaining movements.

From JFK calling a “new generation” to action, to MLK proclaiming
a “promised land,” to Donald Trump saying “I am your
vengeance,” movement leaders reach deep into the stories that
underpin our sense of who we are and our understanding of how we got
into the messes we confront.

They are usually driven by a deep longing for change, and often
animated by wounds, unfairness, and grievance as much as idealism,
hope, and a desire to embrace others. Witness the Act Up movement
demanding action about AIDS during the Reagan administration when that
homophobic monster refused to say the word “AIDS” out loud for
eight long years, much less do anything about it as so many people
(including three very close friends of mine) died an agonizing death.

Read the history of the labor rights movement, from the slaughters of
the late 19th century to the Flint Sit-Down Strike to Shawn Fain’s
brilliant leadership of the UAW today. It has waxed and waned for
almost two centuries; it’s reviving itself as a movement again right
now (and Fain has the talent to become a major force).

Movements can come out of pain, but they can also come out of hope.
The belief that a pluralistic, multiracial society free of poverty was
possible in America was, for example, the initial motivation and
mission of SDS: that was the essence of Hayden’s Port Huron
Statement
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Its anti-war activity came later.

This movement requirement for narrative, for deep story that
transcends mere details and summarizes entire complex issues into a
single crystalized legend, is why movements so often have not just
leaders but also martyrs. They are the yin to the yang of leadership
and heroes, and for a movement to be successful both are often useful
or even necessary.

Sometimes the leader and the martyr are the same; the persecution of
Malcolm X, for example, or the repeated jailing of Martin Luther King.
Hitler played that role when he went to prison in the 1920s for trying
to overthrow the government of Bavaria; Trump plays it today with his
candidacy for president overlaid by his victim routine about his 91
indictments and the daily drama of his legal travails.

The Civil Rights movement had Emmett Till and Rosa Parks, with other
famous names in its deeper history. The women’s movement had Susan
B. Anthony, who was arrested for voting-while-female in 1872 and thus
became both the movement’s martyr and leader.

Hitler’s movement held up Horst Wessel
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his violent street-gang _Sturmabteilung_ volunteer militia that was
often, initially, met with violence by police and anti-Nazi mobs.

FDR had a generation of martyrs destroyed by the Republican Great
Depression and brought to popular consciousness by John Steinbeck and
Woody Guthrie.

LBJ used the memory of the death of JFK to push through the Civil and
Voting Rights Acts, and then he and RFK pointed to martyrs in the
poverty-wracked South and a retiring WWII generation who couldn’t
get health insurance in old age to build a movement for his Great
Society programs of Medicare and Medicaid.

Tim McVeigh, who aspired to kick off a “new [white nationalist]
America” movement blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building on the
anniversary
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of the death of white supremacist David Koresh and in the memory of
white nationalist Randy Weaver, leading Trump, today having seized the
mantle of leadership of Koresh’s and McVeigh’s movement, to give
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his first speech as a 2024 presidential candidate in Waco.

Trump regularly honors Ashli Babbit
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(and trots out her mother), killed by a Black Capitol Police officer
during January 6th, along with the imprisoned January 6th
insurrectionists (and their chorus) the way Hitler did with Wessel and
his early Munich brawlers who’d been arrested or killed. He mentions
Babbit and sings along with a recording of the imprisoned traitors at
nearly every rally.

Trump’s movement also has multiple spin-off but aligned astroturf
movements, many funded to the tune of millions by oil, tobacco,
pharma, banking, tech, and other industry billionaires.

For example, the Tea Party — funded by those billionaires — was
successful in driving a nationwide movement to stop a national
healthcare program and guarantee that Obamacare ran exclusively
through the highly profitable insurance industry.

Moms for Liberty has chapters all across America and delights in
harassing teachers and school boards while promoting the banning of
books (except about threesomes?).

Charlie Kirk’s _Turning Point USA_ has over 300 chapters on campuses
across America and sponsors conferences around the country; their
stated purpose includes “to identify, educate, train, and organize
students to promote the principles of freedom…” Not a word in
there about policy or even politics, although they’re having a huge
impact on both.

There’s an entire infrastructure — capitalized to the tune of
billions of dollars a year — that supports the white nationalist,
low-tax, small-government, anti-union, anti-woman, pro-fossil-fuel,
anti-public-school movements and all their branches and offshoots that
Trump successfully captured and now leads.

It has over 1500 radio stations blaring hate and fear 24/7; three
national television networks daily promoting propaganda friendly to
their billionaire owners; newspapers, websites, and appears to even be
embraced by the billionaire owners of America’s largest social media
companies who refuse to make public their algorithms that drive public
opinion and, often, public outrage.

It pays for the political campaigns of politicians who support it,
funds outsiders like Manchin and Sinema who will betray and disrupt
its enemies, and ensures total loyalty to the movement and its leader
Trump with the promise of funding primary challengers against anybody
who deviates even the slightest from its orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has none of this.

Its three most visible movement leaders of my lifetime, JFK, RFK, and
MLK, were all murdered in the 1960s. SDS died in the 1970s when its
violent offshoot, the Weather Underground, was finally brought down.
The Civil Rights movement endures but never recaptured its vitality
after the brutal murder of King.

When Bernie took up the progressive movement’s mantle in 2012 and
2016, he was opposed by the institutional Democratic Party in ways
that leave his supporters bitter to this day and led former DNC Chair
Donna Brazile to pen an apology
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to him in her autobiography and on multiple TV appearances.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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“Squad” had their moment in the sun, but haven’t caught on as
national movement leaders; similarly, the short-lived Black Lives
Matter [[link removed]] movement
caught fire after the murder of George Floyd but has now devolved into
internecine warfare.

Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi did yeoman’s work overhauling the
American economy and getting America back on track after the
disastrous Trump years, but neither has the charisma (or youth or
drivenness) to lead a new progressive movement.

Gavin Newsom is a fresh new face for much of America, and certainly
mopped the floor with Ron DeSantis
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“News” debate, but he’s yet to take the steps — and the
chances/sacrifices — that could catapult him from politician to
movement leader.

And it’s that risk-taking that almost always characterizes the
difference between mere politicians and leaders of movements.

Politicians play within the system; movement leaders aren’t afraid
to offend or even injure the system if it will advance the movement.
Politicians follow the rules; movement leaders often intentionally
break them, if for no other reason than to demonstrate the need for
their reform.

Movement leaders — like true movements themselves — are
disruptive. They lay down in the street, stand before lines of police,
let themselves get beaten and arrested for a greater cause. They
_sacrifice_.

The successful ones are almost always talented in the arts of mass
communication, in public speaking, in organizing political and
guerrilla theater.

For better or worse, from Gandhi to Trump, John Lewis to David Duke
and Alex Jones, Gloria Steinem to Nick Fuentes, movement leaders defy
the _status quo_ and gain an almost mythic stature and power from the
audaciousness of their insurgencies.

Heading into the 2024 election, Democrats are facing a massive,
multi-faceted movement driving Trump’s faction, held together by
white supremacy, authoritarianism, hate, and fear of the “other.”
In response, Democrats are holding up their considerable
accomplishments, but have yet to activate or find their own
grass-roots movement in response.

The craving for movement and movement leadership on the left is
palpable: look at how the country rallied around the Tennessee Three,
for example. But their local activism hasn’t succeeded in going
national and has only occasionally — and then with minimal national
press — been replicated in state houses across the nation.

Similarly, the Occupy Movement had a powerful moment, until it was
co-opted by a New York Maoist cult leader and collapsed.

There’s still a dramatic imbalance between the massive, organized,
and well-funded “anti-woke” movement driving the politics of the
right, and the scattershot state-by-state efforts at reform and to
salvage democracy on the left.

The closest to movement politics we have at the moment are the
millions of American women (and their male allies) who want control of
their bodies and are outraged at GOP attempts to return them to the
status of men’s servants and playthings, from the boardroom to the
bedroom.

That movement is beginning to find its voice and even has a current
martyr in Texas’ Kate Cox, the woman who the men running Texas
threatened to force a doomed pregnancy to term at the risk of her own
life.

Will it become organized and national? Will a charismatic leader
emerge or step forward to carry the women’s rights banner?

The other issue that President Biden keeps trying to evoke movement
politics around — so far with only lip service from the press — is
the attempt to rescue American freedom and democracy from both the
corruption of six billionaire-owned Republicans on the Supreme Court
and a fascist demagogue who promises to become a dictator from “day
one.”

A movement for _democracy_.

(Anand Giridharadas, one of America’s most thoughtful commentators,
recently had a discussion
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about this very topic with Joe Scarborough that’s well worth
viewing.)

The power of the freedom meme is so great that fossil fuel
billionaires have hijacked it for decades, smearing the words
“freedom” and “liberty” all over everything they do. It
resonates deeply in the American psyche.

Will a progressive democracy movement leader emerge to take on the
growing forces of fascism represented by the Trump and Qanon cults —
and the handful of third-party wannabee movement leaders — in
America?

Are there people with talent and charisma willing to risk the fate of
JFK and MLK to take head-on the armed militias and algorithm-fueled
haters who’ve sworn their lives and allegiance to Trump and his
ideal of a Christian-only white supremacist nation?

And, if one or more does, will the institutional Democratic Party
treat them as a threat, the way they did Bernie and Howard Dean before
him? Or will they recognize that the only way to defeat a movement
like Trump now commands is with another movement of equal passion and
fervor — and to get behind it, collaborate, and use its force and
energy to change policy and politics, the way LBJ did when he saw that
MLK would never give up?

As Jen Psaki said on Morning Joe this morning about the great recent
economic news:

“Data doesn’t move people, emotions do.”

She noted that its “never about the data” and the Democratic Party
needs _storytellers_ to convert Biden’s great economic data into
narratives about “how this impacts you and your family.”

Similarly, should a movement and movement leadership emerge in the
next few months that could inspire Bernie-like enthusiasm to drive
millions to the polls, will the handful of billionaires associated
with the Democratic Party, and the consultants who make their living
on fees from conventional advertising, dismiss it the way they did
Bernie, BLM, the Sunrise Movement
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Movement?

Or have they finally learned their lesson and will thus embrace
movement politics the way their rightwing peers did with the Tea
Party, Trump in 2016, and continue to do today with all the spinoff
“anti-woke” movements they fund?

The answer to that question may well determine the future of democracy
in both our republic and around the world.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden
History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream"
(2020);

* Trump
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* Fascism
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* Democratic Party
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