Time for the national Dems to go the way of the once-national Whig Party. Only national politicians can make this start to happen.

I have reached the conclusion that national progressive Dems in Congress need to strongly consider, and then do, what then-progressive Whigs did in the early 1850s, which is to form a new national political party. Just as the then-new Republican Party rose quickly out of the morass of the hopelessly divided Whig Party, this new party will find so much support across the nation, starting in places where the Dems are already toxic. The primary platform should revolve around economic policies of a social democratic form to directly challenge corporate power and the Empire. It will also acknowledge cultural issues, but strongly support "live the way you want to live" on LGBTQ and abortion issues, and promote gun safety regulation more than outright confiscation.

I realize the main difference in the 1850s was the Republican Party was able to unite people outside the enslavement institutional South through one issue, the Scourge of Slavery. However, we face an existential threat of corporate domination and a climate crisis that needs to ensure people can be employed in a New Deal of people-helping jobs and green-oriented infrastructure redevelopment, and not continue to be tied to fossil fuel production.

Structurally, the national Democratic Party resembles nothing more than an equivalent to Communist-front organizations where, once the New Deal liberals left in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler deal of 1939, they became hollow shells. Sadly, the national Democratic Party remains controlled by major corporate donors and major consultant companies which have largely destroyed the Democratic Party's ties to working people and New Deal values.

However, all the activists across labor, environmental, and antiwar movements continue to be unable to create a new political party. What it is going to take is leadership from already known politicians, as with William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Charles Sumner, and even a Lincoln, who was very well known in Illinois, contrary to the usual way we think of Lincoln coming out of nowhere for the 1860 presidential nomination.

I am also confident that states with decent Democratic Party leadership, such as New Mexico, will quickly find their way to a new party, and eventually gain more political power in areas now dominated by right-wing Republicans.

 
It is time. Past time. So, Congressional politicians who supported Bernie Sanders' values and/or Bernie, #DitchtheDems.

Echoes of the fall of Paris and France

Chuck Schumer has become the domestic US version of Neville Chamberlain. His argument was that things will get worse if he and other Dems did not capitulate to the Republicans, and that capitulating to Trump now would be more effective later on. This argument collapses on its own intended idea of logic. Trump has now clearly won. This is why Trump humiliated Schumer further in Trump's "tweet" "thanking" Schumer. The other eight Democratic Party senators and independent Angus King of Maine deserve equal blame.

As this has unfolded, I have been reading the Soviet-Russian novelist Ilya Ehrenburg's 1942 novel, "The Fall of Paris." I am just past the halfway point. The parallel of his description of French life from 1935 forward is compelling. Each step Hitler took, from supporting Franco in Spain against the Spanish Republic, to taking the Sudtenland in Czechoslovakia and then the latter itself, was greeted with alarm across the French political spectrum. However, the same political elites (except the Communists, who the political elites from the far right to the Socialists reviled) ultimately decided peace was more important than standing up to Hitler. In this set of decisions from the French elites, it was believed by all the so-called smart people that giving in would sate Hitler and standing up for Spain and Czechoslovakia meant war.

Reading this insightful and literarily well-crafted narrative has provided me with a powerful understanding of how this unfolded day-to-day. It is uncanny to me how I see echoes of this in the discourse I have read and sometimes seen at my folks house on MSNBC and CNN. Except, in our time, our nation's Fascist threat is a call from inside the house.

What is surprising to me in reading this novel is Erhenburg was a dedicated Stalinist during the period of the 1930s through Stalin's death. Yet, this novel is deeply sympathetic with respect to business people, conservative and right wing people, and the politically indifferent people who simply wish people would stop with obsessive political arguments, and leave each other in peace. Ehrenburg has been careful to not show how wrongheaded these people were, as he almost tenderly describes their best motives and arguments. Ehrenburg knew he could write the novel in this fashion, as, of course, he wrote his novel after the fall of France. Readers would therefore themselves be able to judge the thinking of these people.

The reason I am still inclined to be negative in my judgment regarding Ehrenburg the person is based upon my reading Victor Serge's most important work, "Memoirs of a Revolutionary," which Serge wrote in his last years before his early death in Mexico in 1947 for what he called the "dresser drawer," and which was not published until after his death. In Serge's magisterial work, he took great care to be as objective as he could about his enemies and opponents. It is what makes the work so powerful, as Serge, a revolutionary, is, in this way, most liberal in that old 19th-Century sense. But he is not willing to be that way with Ehrenburg. In the memoirs, Serge harshly described Ehrenburg as a "hack agitator-novelist" (Serge, 318).

I get Serge's anger. In 1935, Ehrenberg, originally born in Kyvv (!), was then living in France. At an international left writers' conference held in Paris he attended, there was a proposal on behalf of various oppressed writers around the world. One of the speakers mentioned Serge, who was suffering his second internal exile due to Serge being a Left Oppositionist to Stalin and affiliated with Trotsky. Ehrenburg and other pro-Soviet writers denounced Serge as a counterrevolutionary and justified Stalin's treatment of him.

 
Not long after the conference, Andre Gide and Romain Rolland respectively implored the Soviet ambassador to France and Stalin to let Serge leave, and Stalin relented (Serge, 318-319). This proved to be miraculous as Serge eventually left the Soviet Union not long before the "Great Purges" of mostly Bolsheviks began. As Serge remains my Soviet dissident hero, I hesitated to read Ehrenburg's book as I expected it to be hack work. I was stunned from the start with Ehrenburg's brilliant writing, and, as I have reached the halfway point, have found it remarkably prescient in its insights. The only nod to Stalinism I see is his missing the manner in which the Communists in Spain were behaving and a very brief, indirect, unnamed but positive, nod to the Lysenko agricultural methods. The latter led me to laugh and that nod has thankfully not been repeated. The novel won the Stalin Prize for best novel, which also makes me deeply wince, but damn it, it is really great despite that hackish award.

Again, I find it sadly strange to be reading this novel of France in the late 1930s and seeing how it echoes into today's political environment. Heck, I didn't even need to re-read Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (1935). Lewis' novel is not focused so much on the day-to-day that led to the election of Buzz Windrip. Its focus is on the aftereffects. Ehrenburg's novel takes readers step by step into the abyss in a story with a variety of characters from various parts of life, whose lives overlap with, break apart, or carry on romantic affairs with each other. It is a remarkably insightful and compelling work.

Trump's humiliation of Zelenskyy was an American insult to America's injuring Ukraine all these years

I POSTED THIS TO FB ON SATTURDAY MARCH 1, 2025. I THOUGHT I'D SAVE IT HERE. I DID SOME GRAMMAR EDITS, BUT IT IS ESSENTIALLY THE SAME AS THE FB POST. I MAY AS WELL SEE HOW THIS STANDS UP WHEN HISTORIANS IN 2060 LOOK AT BLOGGER POSTS IF THEY CAN. LOL. ANYWAY... 

What Trump and Vance did to Zelenskyy yesterday was petty, cruel, nasty, and dumb. What these two terrible leaders did also revealed to me that, for all the arguments from the anti-anti-Trump left that "Russiagate" was a "hoax," this is one more example of Trump being potentially compromised by Putin's Russia--with now Vance going along.

 

I feel so badly for the Ukrainians. The evidence is clear to me that the US, for decades, led enough Ukrainians near or in power that NATO membership was likely at some point and that promise was somehow worth fighting for. The US' goals have not primarily been about helping Ukrainian people as much as using Ukraine as a proxy to bloody up post-Communist, kleptocracy Russia, which, incidentally, our nation initially and ironically helped create in the 1990s. Our actions in the mid to late 1990s and, in the early 2000s, to expand NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, remember?) shocked the now deceased major Cold War advisers Chalmers Johnson and George Kennan, who had spent their adult lives studying Russia and its nationalist impulses. They knew expanding NATO betrayed what was implied and sometimes said to Russian leaders. The actions exposed the fallacy in their own assumptions about US good faith and revealed to them that Soviet/Russian fears of "capitalist encirclement" were not cynical delusions. These two men at least had the integrity to go public with their mea culpas and warnings, which warnings continue to be prescient.

Worse, Ukrainian diplomats have already gone on record that a reasonable settlement with Putin was at hand in the spring of 2022, within weeks of Putin's February 2022 invasion. They have publicly stated how, during those negotiations, they were shocked that Putin kept saying "No NATO membership," which for these diplomats proved Putin's nationalistic concerns in that regard were real, not feigned. The US's and UK's deliberate--and threatening--scuttling of that potential deal has only led to far more devastation, and what could be a million deaths on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides. The big counteroffensive the Biden administration pushed has failed, and, while there is an uneasy stalemate, the Russians may be said to be in better shape militarily than they were a year or so ago. I shudder when I look at Ukraine's current position, the Ukrainian public's loss of confidence in Zelenskyy, and the continued hostilities between Russian-Ukrainians and those Ukrainians whose heritages go back a millennium.

This brings me to this reminder amidst the noise: We must never forget that, before February 2022, 22% of Ukrainians identified as Russian, speak Russian, and are favorably disposed to Russia. Ukraine's history and Russia's history have been intertwined since at least the thirteenth century, with initially for centuries, Ukrainian leaders ruling over a then-fledgling Russia.

I am so appalled at the way Trump has behaved against Zelenskyy and Trump's cruel and disrespectful denigration of Ukraine's sovereignty. This is truly a moment where I now desperately hope China and Germany may enter negotiations as relative neutrals, sorta how Teddy Roosevelt acted to help end the Japan-Russian War of the dawn of the 20th Century.

The US behavior at this point is an insult to the initial injuries against Ukraine from Clinton's, Bush II's, Obama's provocations, and Biden's warmongering. I should note, though, that during Trump's first administration, Trump issued sanctions against Russia, in part because of brewing issues with Ukraine. For the anti-anti-Trump left, that fact proves Russiagate was a hoax. For me, it was simply Trump not having the power or confidence at the time to overcome the military-industrial complex. Remember, nearly every major foreign policy person from his first administration, and his first VP, nearly all Cold Warriors, opposed Trump in 2024's election cycle. That is not a coincidence.

In any event, at this point, the military-industrial complex's guardrails appear to be severely weakened--which would have been largely true even if there was a President Harris as she would have been feckless, and facing a mutiny among her own party, let alone plenty of cruelly cynical Republicans. For those of us opposed to the existence of the US Empire, that development may seem good. However, that weakening of guardrails is occurring in a context that threatens stability within our own society. The weakening of the military-industrial complex is not happening in the way a President Bernie Sanders would have wanted to see, with the US becoming an honest, kindlier peacemaker and only competing with China on "belts and roads" initiatives, while promoting a global response to climate change challenges. I know, it sounds so naive. But, dammit, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, those who are often called idealistic are most often the most effective realists when provided the opportunity.

After yesterday, I remain hoping against facts that someone calms down Trump and Vance, and gets them back to some reasonable recognition that the US and UK put Ukraine into this position and that blaming them is a disgusting insult to the injuries committed against Ukrainians and their present government. It is a humiliation Ukrainians will not soon forget, with consequences that may cause anti-Russian Ukrainians to act in ways that nationalists behave--you know, like Serbian nationalists circa 1910-1914.

Right now, I don't hold much hope for anyone currently in the Trump administration getting hold of Trump's demented mind to create trust to get to a decent peace between Russia and Ukraine. But I admit I am not reading these twists and turns on this issue as deeply as I used to do. I just find the whole thing detestable, and my own views so far outside the discourse on top of having no power. I feel like Isaac Deutscher surveying Cold War America, though without his credentials. :) Anyway, I found yesterday morning I was doing more analysis-reading of the Lakers' victory over the Clippers on Friday night, where Luka appears to have gotten hot in his shooting in the second half after I had gone to bed. LOL.