This week, I returned at New York to an old obsession of mine: the long-long Democratic tradition of advocating significant government reform:

One of the problems progressive Democrats have had for a long while is the inveterate American suspicion of and sometimes hostility toward government, and particularly the federal government. It’s not a phenomenon isolated in any one demographic group, region, or cultural persuasion. As the party of activist government, Democrats have often vacillated between opportunistic appropriation of selected conservative anti-government themes, emphasis on government functions that happen to be popular, and, well, changing the subject to go after institutions (e.g., Big Pharma or banks) that are at least as unpopular as Washington.

When Bill Clinton and Al Gore made “reinventing government” a major theme of their administration in the 1990s, it was a point of departure for Democrats that soon more or less evaporated, in part because they oversold the initiative and in part because it focused too narrowly on cost saving rather than improvement of public services. When the more virulent forms of anti-government activism like the tea party movement arose in the 21st century, progressives tended to defend government rather than trying to fix it. As social scientist Paul Light noted in 2015, the constituency for reinventing government faded thanks to this pincer movement, and along with it, any immediate incentive for progressives to embrace public-sector innovation. And as Yoni Appelbaum observed a few years earlier, Democrats were losing ground in the eternal fight over the shape and size of government:

“The current progressive movement has … tended to promise better policies and improved implementation, while rallying to the defense of government from its critics. It insists that government should do better, but not that we need a better government. Whatever its intellectual merits, this approach has a fatal political flaw: most Americans number themselves among government’s critics. They don’t think government works terribly well, and they are disinclined to support politicians who do.”

One of the side benefits of Democrats losing control of the federal government in 2016 was that it liberated them from the reflexive habit of defending Washington. Indeed, one of the hottest topics in progressive political discourse these days is the once-radical belief that our current institutional arrangements all but guarantee a conservative oligarchical control of the country for decades to come. Add in a huge Democratic presidential field and voters hungry for new ideas, and you have a prescription for a revival of interest in government reform.

“It has not always been thus. During the Progressive period of the early 20th century, liberals rallied around a series of major systemic reforms. They pushed to break up trusts. They expanded the vote, and demanded recall elections and popular referenda. They passed the Seventeenth Amendment, mandating the direct election of senators by voters, rather than by state legislatures.

“Democrats took up this mantle, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Republicans could still win presidential elections, but as with Dwight Eisenhower, they were often offering just a scaled-back version of Democratic big-government ideas. The GOP was supine.”

Part of the new interest in government reform on the left comes from the very old fear that the public sector has been “captured” by wealthy interests, and needs refocusing as much as it needs expansion. That’s at the heart of the wonkiest of Elizabeth Warren’s wonky policy ideas, a proposal to reorganize federal trade policy functions. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in this area since at least the Carter administration:

“[A] new Department  —  the Department of Economic Development  —  will replace the Commerce Department, subsume other agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office, and include research and development programs, worker training programs, and export and trade authorities like the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The new Department will have a single goal: creating and defending good American jobs.”

In this case, reform serves as the handmaiden of the populist goal of ridding the federal government of a pro-corporate structural bias that has been built right into our fragmented system. But it reflects a more general resurgence of interest in government reform among presidential aspirants, as Graham notes:

“Many of them are proposing things that would require constitutional amendments, all the more notable since there hasn’t been a substantive amendment since 1971. To name just a few: O’Rourke wants term limits. As I wrote earlier this week, radical reforms to the Supreme Court, including court packing, have become central to party thinking, even for cautious candidates such as O’Rourke and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Obama achieved universal insurance coverage through the private-insurance system; several Democrats want to bulldoze it entirely with Medicare for All schemes. Senator Elizabeth Warren has been perhaps the most aggressive of the bunch, pushing everything from abolishing the filibuster to busting trusts to enshrining a right to vote.”

Medicare for All is not only the largest and most revolutionary government reform idea kicking around left-of-center circles this year; it’s also one that cleanly illustrates the conflicting impulses progressives continue to have between reforming and simply expanding government. On the one hand, single-payer health care is a classic reform aimed at sweeping away the hodgepodge of public and private health-insurance services that has so ill-served Americans over the years, and creating a much simpler and fairer model that has been tested in many other countries. On the other hand, its proponents have chosen to brand it (somewhat misleadingly) as simply an expansion of an existing government program, albeit one that is relatively quite popular. Unsurprisingly, public support for this reform tends to shrink when conservatives and their health-industry allies pound it as a government takeover of health care that will reduce consumer choice and carry an enormous price tag: the standard anti-big-government theme that always strikes a chord with so many Americans.

In this as in so many other areas, Democrats would be wise to remember that a majority of voters don’t inherently trust government any more than they do big corporations. The political power of “populism” — in both its left- and right-wing expressions — derives from a perpetual national craving for leaders who will bend government to the popular will and force it to address genuine needs. This by no means requires hostility to public employees or any reluctance to expand government where it’s needed. But it does mean boldly taking issue with government as it exists.

In his New York Times column, “When It Comes to the Senate, the Democrats Have Their Work Cut Out for Them: Regaining control of the upper chamber may lie just outside the party’s grasp, but it is not out of reach,” Thomas B. Edsall provides a source-rich exploration of Democratic prospects for winning a Senate majority in 2020. Edsall checks in with several of the most perceptive political analysts, and concludes,

Leah Gose and Theda Skocpol, sociologists at Harvard, have been tracking on-the-ground mobilization efforts by over 100 resistance groups in Pennsylvania and they are more optimistic about Democratic prospects in 2020.

In “Resist, Persist, and Transform: The Emergence and Impact of Grassroots Resistance Groups in the Early Trump presidency” Gose and Skocpol argue that anti-Trump efforts “have remade American civic life and politics since 2016.”

The two observe that the anti-Trump mobilization has not been “restricted to liberal states or to ‘blue enclave’ areas where voters mostly support Democrats” but extends into “places where Democrats or liberals are a beleaguered minority.”

Skocpol sees little or no letup on the part of local resistance groups. In an email, she wrote:

“Almost all groups plan to be very active going into 2020. The national media obsesses with the presidential horse race and the impeachment argument, but local groups are keeping at the fundamentals in many places.”

Democrats who have been frustrated by Republican control of the Senate — from 1995 to the present Congress, Republicans will have been in the majority for 19 years to the Democrats’ nine — had better hope that Gose and Skocpol are right.

If not, Democrats can bank on more years of staring at what Will Bunch, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, described as “Mitch McConnell’s democracy-crushing smirk” while McConnell presides over a Republican majority that has become the fervent ally of a president determined to embrace and embolden a white America hostile to immigrants, committed to an immoral racial hierarchy and eager to eviscerate the social progress of the past 60 years.

We encourage TDS readers to take the time to read the entire Gos/Skocpol paper, including their appendices, references and other notes. Their research not only provides a hopeful guide to successful progressive organizing projects in current context; they also shed light on how new groups can form and add to this all important coalition. In the paper’s abstract, the authors explain:

The November 2016 election sparked the creation of thousands of local groups committed to resisting the new Trump administration and Republican Congress. Our paper uses online surveys and interviews as well as evidence from fieldwork and web searches to analyze the development, demographics, and activities of such groups operating since late 2016 in eight non-metropolitan counties in four states as well as in dozens of cities, towns, and suburbs spread across the state of Pennsylvania. Local groups were founded through friendships and social media contacts and most of their members and leaders are middle-class white women. Often networked across states and regions, grassroots resistance groups have reached out to surrounding communities and generated and supported new candidates for local, state, and national offices. During the 2018 midterms and beyond, they are challenging and often remaking the Democratic Party at the local level.

Skocpol and Gos note that “Describing and analyzing the characteristics and activities of these widespread grassroots resistance efforts has been a challenge for scholars, because they are not part of any one big national organization, their participants are not flagged in national surveys, and their leaders and activities are only sporadically featured in the national media.”

Focusing on key swing states, the authors used “innovative forms of data collection – via fieldwork in multiple states, interviews, online surveys, and tracking of the Facebook pages of local groups – to offer the first comprehensive description and analysis of grassroots resistance organizations formed from late 2016 in four states and dozens of communities across North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, and (most extensively) Pennsylvania. Specifically, we ask: how did anti-Trump resistance groups form, grow, and sustain themselves at the local level from November 2016 to early 2019? Who formed and joined these groups and what have they done?” Among their insightful observations:

…Research concentrated on street demonstrations and other mass public protests cannot not get at the heart of what makes recent electorally sparked popular upsurges in the United States so consequential…Grassroots resistance groups were built by citizens who found other like-minded people nearby. For those who set up and went to resistance meetings, attendance was about more than political engagement because it provided emotional support and community-based opportunities to connect, organize, and act at what they felt was a shocking moment for America.

in a section entitled, “The Social Characteristics of Grassroots Resisters,” Gose and Skocpol note,

According to responses to our online individual questionnaires (see Appendix D) – and what we see with our own eyes when attending local meetings around the country – most participants in resistance groups are middle-aged or older white college-educated women. Our largest set of individual responses comes from participants in the pro-Trump counties who fit a consistent profile. Nine of every ten are women, and our field observations suggest that male members of local groups are often husbands or partners of the female members. Furthermore, the leadership teams for groups found in the eight counties are either all-female or (in two instances) include a woman teamed up with one or two men.

Nine of ten respondents report their race as white (compared to 8% who identified as nonwhite and two percent who do not indicate a category); and the respondents are even whiter than the surrounding populations in these overwhelmingly white non-big city areas. As for age, these resisters are mostly older adults ranging upward from their 30s into their retirement years (plus one 19-year old). The overall median age is 55 years. And they are highly educated people, with 37% reporting college degrees and another 46% holding advanced post-graduate degrees. Some of these participants are retired. Among both retirees and those still at work, the most frequent occupations cited are school teacher or university professor; health care positions; work in retail or human services jobs; and business management positions.

In addition to the demographic portrait, a sense of interpersonal conection and community is clearly a leading factor in activist participation:

Many resisters also placed high value on camaraderie and joint action with other local people who share their views and want to join forces to create “strength in numbers.” Social ties formed in local resistance groups and projects are crucial, as we have learned. Leaders and participants who did not previously know one another told us they have become close friends while working together in these groups. This dynamic can have a downside, of course; if one friend pulls back, that can reduce the other’s motivation. Yet at the same time, as the months have passed, people often tell us that they are remaining involved despite feelings of burnout, precisely because they value the fellowship. As one female co-leader in North Carolina put it in an email to the authors explaining why she is sticking with her group while another exhausted leader pulled back, “Working with our community makes me happy. I grow appreciative of the interconnectedness we share. I learn about myself and my world. Indivisible members have been a great blessing to me.” Attachments to fellow participants were apparent in many questionnaire responses. As we suggested earlier, the grassroots resistance has created and reinforced interpersonal social ties in the course of drawing volunteer citizens into new levels of activism.

In one of the most hopeful observations, Skocpol and Gose write, “we wondered at the onset of this research whether local resistance groups would tend to cluster in the most liberal states and in the more liberal cities and college towns of conservative “red” states. But that is not what we find. Similar grassroots groups have emerged all over the United States, in and across every state…Indeed, we find many indications in our field visits, interviews, and questionnaire responses that centrist and liberal residents of conservative counties may have felt an even stronger need to come together than their counterparts in liberal-leaning areas.”

As for issues of particular concern to the activists,

Virtually all were horrified at threats they perceived from the Trump administration and the GOP Congress; and most wanted to fight to try to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal once Trump and the Congressional leadership made this a top 2017 priority. But beyond that, various subgroups of resisters cared most about the environment, or were especially determined to push for gerrymandering reforms, or were worried about education spending cutbacks at the local and state as well as national levels.

Almost every one of the several dozen groups we have followed devoted a lot of participant energy to the early year-long fight to save the Affordable Care Act. That fight was ideal for a combination of local organizing and national purpose, because it involved repeated critical junctures as each house of Congress took steps toward repealing or eviscerating the landmark 2010 law that extended health insurance coverage to millions of Americans. Resistance efforts on this front were especially intense and relentless during the spring and summer of 2017 – when local groups used tactics like letter writing and “post card parties,” calls or visits to elected officials and their staffs at district offices, writing opinion pieces, and holding public demonstrations and “die-ins” (for accounts, see Griffin 2017, Weigel 2017, Zremski 2017). Defending health reform was a common challenge around which disparate local resisters could organize, build ties, and hone skills. Members of grassroots resistance groups were engaged at all levels and quite intensely; and even as efforts across many places were nationally attuned, local networks of resisters could take steps to inform their neighbors and local news outlets about what the Affordable Care Act does and what would be lost if it were repealed. Because this “all hands on deck” struggle went on for quite some time, it taught local members and regional networks ways to engage the media and press their representatives on other issues.

Finally, the fight to block health reform repeal boosted the widespread resistance because it ended up “winning” in two important ways. Congressional votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act ultimately fell just short in the Senate, and grassroots efforts at least contributed to this outcome. Those efforts prodded the GOP Congress to keep trying different variants of repeal over many months. And they pushed Maine Senator Susan Collins to become one of three Republican senators who blocked repeal (Cassidy 2017; Levin, Greenberg, and Padilla 2017b). What is more, in a larger sense, during 2017 U.S. public support for the Affordable Care Act shifted from net negative to net positive (Kaiser Family Foundation 2018). Whether or not widespread local resistance agitation directly caused either the Congressional repeal failure or the shift toward more favorable public views of health reform, these coincidences were encouraging to resistance members. Vital lessons were learned about how to act locally to affect national outcomes.

Gose and Skocpol also provide some cogent insights about burnout, attrition and ‘group persistence’ and note the important role of social media, particularly Facebook, in sustaining the activist projects. They also explore the sometimes problematic relationships between the groups and the local Democratic party and Democratic campaigns. They conclude,

Whatever unfolds, our research so far suggests that movement sparked by the Trump election will not push U.S. liberal politics toward the uncompromising far left. The kinds of grassroots resistance groups we have discovered and studied do not espouse the sorts of purist ideological stances sometimes taken by professionally run progressive advocacy groups. Grassroots groups have strong local connections, and their participants are closely engaged with candidates and officeholders with varied backgrounds and views. If these female-led voluntary groups persist as an important part of center-left politics in the United States, they are unlikely to further uncompromising ideological polarization. As before throughout American history, women’s civic activism may revitalize democratic engagement and promote a new birth of responsive government in communities across the land.

The research of Skocpol and Gose provides hope that the new ‘resistance’ activist groups can indeed help steer America in a more progressive direction. How effectively Democrats support and interact with these groups may also help the party win the presidency, secure working majorities in Washington and in state legislatures across the nation.

From Dylan Scott’s “Trump is really unpopular in the most important 2020 battleground states: Trump is deep underwater in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other key 2020 states” at Vox: “Here are the raw numbers for Trump in the states that are expected to be competitive in the 2020 election:

• New Hampshire: 39 percent approval, 58 percent disapproval
• Wisconsin: 42 percent approval, 55 percent disapproval
• Michigan: 42 percent approval, 54 percent disapproval
• Iowa: 42 percent approval, 54 percent disapproval
• Arizona: 45 percent approval, 51 percent disapproval
• Pennsylvania 45 percent approval, 52 percent disapproval
• Ohio: 46 percent approval, 50 percent disapproval
• North Carolina: 46 percent approval, 50 percent disapproval
• Florida: 48 percent approval, 48 percent disapproval
• Indiana: 49 percent approval, 46 percent disapproval”

Amid all of the buzz about Wisconsin becomming a critical swing state in the 2020 presidential election, there are encouraging signs that the state Democratic party is preparing an unprecedented voter mobilization effort. As Emily Hamer reports at The Wisconsin State Journal, “Former MoveOn.org leader Ben Wikler has been chosen as the new leader of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, the party announced Sunday. Wikler will lead Democrats into the 2020 campaign in which Wisconsin is widely viewed as potentially decisive in the race for the White House.” At MoveOn, “Wikler helped lead the successful organizing push in 2017 to halt the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.”

Also at Vox, Ella Nilsen writes, “Five candidates, including Biden, Inslee, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and former Reps. Beto O’Rourke and John Delaney have all released massive plans to combat climate change, ranging from $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion in federal investment over a decade. Candidates are factoring in the spur of private investments as well, hence the jump to $5 trillion in Biden’s plan…“It’s a recognition of where the electorate is,” Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray told Vox. “This popped out from the very beginning. Climate change and the environment in general was the No. 2 issue after health care for Democratic voters.”…“I think it’s just becoming a zeitgeist for Democrats,” Murray added.”

Nilsen and Tara Golshan have another Vox post, “Democrats’ extremely uphill battle to retake the Senate majority in 2020, explained,” which notes a “very tough map” for Dems. As they observe, “Just three Republican seats seem truly competitive, as far as the Cook Political Report is concerned: Colorado, Arizona, and Maine. The rest is a sea of red, including the seat Democrats have to defend in ultraconservative Alabama…To retake a bare majority in the Senate, Democrats need to pick up four seats on net. Because this cohort of senators was last up for election in 2014 — a very strong year for Republicans — Democrats are on offense this year…To retake the majority, Democrats would likely have to:

1) Keep Sen. Doug Jones’s seat in deep-red Alabama. (Trump has a +27 approval rating there.)

2) Win Arizona and Colorado — and they could, since there are already strong candidates declared or interested in running.

3) Turn out an extremely enthusiastic Democratic base and put tough states — Maine, Georgia, Texas, Montana, and Iowa — within reach. Democrats, by the way, still need to recruit “top tier” candidates in all of these states.

4) Take advantage of divisive Republican primaries in Kansas and North Carolina, where Trump has anemic approval ratings. But again, they need solid candidates to compete.”

Ed Kilgore, Gabriel Debenedetti and Benjamin Hart discuss “How Much Does Age Matter for Presidential Candidates in 2019?” at New York Magazine. Some of their observations: Hart notes that “So far, talk of being too old to serve as president does not seem to have had a major effect on any of these people’s standing. Is age now just a number in the presidential sweepstakes?” Debenedetti adds that “voter age doesn’t actually line up with candidate age in any obvious way. Bernie gets younger voters, Biden gets older ones, etc. But to use Buttigieg as an example again, he actually often talks about how older voters have flocked to him in the past in recent elections, specifically because of his youth.” Kilgore argues, “I think there are three ways it could matter in 2020: (1) if a candidate is perceived as too old (that’s sort of what Gabe was just talking about), (2) if a candidate exhibits age-related debility or illness, and (3) a candidate’s age could take away a potential advantage against Trump.”

Elaine Godfrey explains why “Why Pro-impeachment Democrats Are Still Siding With Pelosi” at The Atlantic: “Some of the lawmakers who have recently called for impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump say that, despite their own personal feelings, they still support leadership’s slow-and-steady strategy of pursuing congressional investigations first. Although in lengthy Twitter threads and interviews on MSNBC these lawmakers have explained that impeachment proceedings are the best way to protect democracy, they don’t plan to publicly challenge the speaker, according to interviews with several House Democrats and congressional aides…“Right now, the vast majority of the caucus believes she’s doing the right things,” Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, told me in an interview…A lot of us feel that even though we’re convinced he should be impeached, we should let these investigations play out for a little while.”

“America Is Missing Its Chance to Fix Our Election System Before We Vote in 2020,” warns Steven Rosenfeld at Common Dreams: “The emergence of powerful forms of online political propaganda, the absence of progress in 2019 state legislatures on improving audits and recounts, and new revelations about the extent of Russian hacking in 2016—accessing more election administration details than previously reported—all point to the same bottom line: what evidence can be presented to a polarized electorate to legitimize the results?…To be fair, some policy experts who network with senior election officials—who have authority to order more thorough vote-verification steps without new legislation—say there is still time to act. But as 2020 gets closer, there are fewer opportunities to do so…There’s a lack of vote count evidence trails and transparent audits to serve as a counterweight to the newest forms of propaganda. And Congress is not poised to handle the power struggle if the presidential result is contested. The clock has not run out with taking proactive steps before 2020, but it is ticking, and opportunities to act are ebbing away while new worries are emerging.”

In his post, “Social media shapes our politics. But does it actually elect presidents?” Sam Fulwood III writes at ThinkProgress that “More In Common, an international research group examining global civic engagement, found that Americans’ use of social media is an imperfect tool to assess the relative support of one candidate over another because highly motivated activists play an outsized role in shaping online conversations…The group’s report — “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape” — surveyed 8,000 Americans and conducted focus group and in-person interviews to discover that Americans are “defined by their core beliefs, rather than their political opinions, race, class or gender.”.Among the report’s more significant findings was that people at the extremes were a distinct minority of the U.S. population, but were among the most active on social media…Americans identified as Progressive Activists, for example, make up 8% of the population and 70% of them said they had shared political content on social media. Those identified as Devoted Conservatives are 6% of the population and 56% of them shared political content on social media…By contrast, the study noted that people categorized as Politically Disengaged, the largest single category at 26% of the population, “are practically invisible in local politics and community life,” and only 5% of them said they shared political content on social media.”

Being from Georgia myself, I don’t generally throw too many stones at Deep South states for being Deep South states. But a realization about Alabama made me pick up the nearest rock at hurl it towards Montgomery via New York.

Alabama’s recent (and overwhelming) enactment of the nation’s most reactionary abortion law — a law that embarrassed many Republicansnationally and even occasioned a dissent from its terms by Donald Trump — probably made some Americans who don’t regard the state as their sweet home wonder if the self-described Heart of Dixie might profess some values a bit out of the mainstream.

Wonder no more. AL.com confirms:

“Jefferson Davis — the president of the Confederate states from 1861-1865 — was born on June 3, 1808. Alabama marks that occasion every year with an official state holiday …

“The Davis holiday is one of three in Alabama that honors Confederate leaders: Robert E. Lee’s birthday, which is marked in January on the same day as Martin Luther King Day; Confederate Memorial Day in April; and Davis’ birthday in June …

“Alabama is the last state to have a legal holiday set aside solely to commemorate the birth of Davis. Mississippi marks Davis’ birthday but includes it in the Memorial Day celebration. In Texas, Davis’ birthday is part of “Confederate Heroes Day” while other Southern states, including Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee, have a holiday for Davis on the books but do not give employees a day off.”

That’s right: Even Davis’s home state of Mississippi, which he represented in Congress and where he died in 1889, no longer shuts down state government to honor the arch-traitor. But Alabama does….

Unlike his traitor-in-arms Robert E. Lee, Davis can’t be defended with the sort of weak rationalizations available to protect the legacy of the Lost Cause. Davis was by no means a military genius or a symbol of postwar reconciliation or some sort of icon of southern chivalry. He was a bigot who was convinced that civilization itself depended on the enslavement of African-Americans, as illustrated by this very typical quote unearthed by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Confederate president Davis made white supremacy the unmistakeable cornerstone of his criminal enterprise, as James W. Loewen observes:

“White supremacy was Confederate national policy from the top down. In November, 1862, for example, Confederates seized four African Americans in U.S. uniforms on a South Carolina island and asked Richmond what to do with them. President Davis and his secretary of war approved their “summary execution,” which was and is a war crime. When President Lincoln released the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Jefferson Davis called it ‘the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.’ He proposed to his Congress that white officers of black troops be delivered to state authorities to be ‘dealt with in accordance with the laws … providing for the punishment of criminals engaged in exciting servile insurrection’ — again, execution. The Confederate Congress responded that the C.S.A. should use its own military courts to have such persons ‘put to death or be otherwise punished.’

“The Confederacy put these policies into practice. Time after time, at Fort Pillow, Tennessee; Poison Spring, Arkansas; Brice’s Cross Roads, Mississippi; Olustee, Florida, etc., Confederate troops killed black POWs and their officers. On the home front, in February, 1863, Davis decreed the enslavement of ‘all free Negroes in the Southern Confederacy.’”

After the war, Davis was imprisoned but escaped trial for treason thanks to a tragicomedy of errors committed by Andrew Johnson’s administration. Unsurprisingly, he was a bitter opponent of the Reconstruction of his region, and defended the Confederacy even when mild repentance might have won his clemency:

“An amnesty bill that restored citizenship to Confederate leaders in 1876 specifically excluded Davis, and the former Confederate president did not fight the decision. ‘It has been said that I should apply to the United States for a pardon. But repentance must precede the right of pardon, and I have not repented,’ Davis told the Mississippi Legislature in 1884, before adding, ‘If it were all to do over again, I would again do just as I did in 1861.’”

Jimmy Carter, the first post–Civil War president from the Deep South, signed a pardon in 1978 posthumously restoring citizenship rights to Davis in what was likely an effort to secure political cover for his controversial amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders. Even if his desire for letting bygones be bygones was understandable, honoring Davis as a hero, as Alabama still does, is just wrong.

But the idea that celebrating racism is an innocent recognition of “heritage” lives on, as reflected by the attitude of Alabama’s governor, who also recently signed that abortion bill:

“In 2017 … Alabama enacted the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which prohibits local governments from removing, altering or renaming monuments more than 40 years old.

“The state’s attorney general in August 2017 used that law to sue the majority-black city of Birmingham for covering a Confederate monument with plywood and a tarp. Gov. Kay Ivey has called efforts to remove Confederate symbols ‘politically correct nonsense.'”

So, too, presumably, is respect for the African-American citizens Jefferson Davis considered suitable only for slavery.

From “Rumblings from Trump’s base could shape Democrats’ choice for 2020” by Ronald Browstein at CNN Politics:

Detailed new research by the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist found that the party’s big gains in the 2018 congressional election were fueled not only by unusually high turnout among voters sympathetic to the party, but also by larger-than-expected defections from the GOP among voters who had backed Trump two years earlier.

Those findings offer potentially critical evidence as Democrats are debating the best approach to beating Trump in 2020. On one side are progressive activists who say the party should prioritize mobilizing nonvoters, particularly young people and minorities, with an unabashedly liberal agenda. On the other are centrists who say Democrats can’t tilt so far left on issues such as single-payer health care and the Green New Deal that they alienate swing voters who backed Trump in 2016 but may be open to reconsidering now.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Were We Just a Bit Early?

I mean about the emerging Democratic majority. David Brooks seems to think that could be the case. In his latest column, he writes about something I’ve written about quite a few times recently (you always see it here first!): generational turnover in the American electorate and the potentially dire implications of this for the GOP.

“In 2002, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which predicted electoral doom for the G.O.P. based on demographic data. That prediction turned out to be wrong, or at least wildly premature….

At CNN Politics, Harry Enten explains why “Why Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment strategy is politically smart,” and notes, “After Mueller’s statement, Pelosi again decided to strike a center chord. She didn’t call for impeachment proceedings to begin, but indicated such action may be necessary in the future depending on what House committees investigating potential obstruction of justice issues find…Polling shows that’s likely the right move for now. Voters seem most open to a path in which obstruction of justice is investigated, but not via an impeachment inquiry. A clear majority of voters (57%) agreed with the statement that Congress should “investigate whether Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice during the course of the Mueller investigation” in a CNN poll taken after the Mueller report was released. This includes 94% of Democrats, 52% of independents and even 18% of Republicans…In the CNN poll, 61% of voters were against impeaching and removing Trump from office…An ABC News/Washington Post poll similarly showed that only 37% of Americans want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings, while 56% were opposed…Put it all together: Voters are very much open to the idea that Trump did something wrong, but they don’t want to go the road of impeachment just yet.”

Writing about the CNN poll, Daniel Politi notes at slate.com “Among Americans as a whole, support for impeachment increased only slightly to 41 percent, up from 37 percent last month. On the opposite end, 54 percent are opposed to impeachment. And despite the slight uptick, it is hardly the highest it has ever been compared to the 47 percent who supported impeachment in September 2018…Democrats are increasingly in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump, with 76 percent saying they support the move to oust the president from office, according to a new CNN poll. That marks a seven-percentage-point increase from April when support for impeachment stood at 69 percent among Democrats, according to the poll conducted by SSRS.”

From “Democracy Fights Back: Republican attempts at voter suppression have inspired a movement to restore and expand access to the polls” by Adam Eichen at The New Republic: “Florida is just the tip of the iceberg. Activists are winning pro-democracy battles across the country. Just on election night 2018, voters approved over 20 pro-democracy ballot initiatives. Now, 15 states and Washington, D.C. have automatic voter registration. Nineteen states and D.C. have same day registration. Fourteen states and D.C. will have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (with three more likely to join by the end of the year). Public financing of elections is spreading via municipalities. Five states last year attempted to limit gerrymandering(with varying degrees of success). And on a federal level, the House of representatives passed the For the People Act (H.R.1), an omnibus package that includes, among many other things, public financing of Congressional elections, nationwide automaticand same-day voter registration, and independent redistricting commissions.”

“Twitter is not exactly known as a platform for centrist, middle of the road, political discourse,” Hana Trudo writes in her article, “Dem Centrist Group Launches Twitter Campaign to Get People to Ignore Twitter” at The Daily Beast. “But Third Way, the prominent think tank for moderate Democrats, is hoping to change that. The group is targeting roughly 10,000 “influencers” on the platform by promoting paid content that aims to change the progressive conversation to centrist chatter ahead of 2020. And they’re doing so, in large part, by encouraging the individuals they’re targeting on Twitter to not pay too much attention to Twitter…with Democratic lawmakers continuing their leftward drift, the group is rethinking what type of incentive structures matter. The Twitter campaign is a recognition that social media conversations—and the powerful public opinion shapers who participate in them—can be as influential in shaping how lawmakers act as, say, polling data…Ultimately, Third Way’s goal is not simply to influence the influencers, but to shape the direction that the Democratic Party takes heading into the 2020 primaries.”

At the lefty Counterpunch, John Rynn, author of author of Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The Power to Rebuild the American Middle Class,” has some salient thoughts on the importance of a permanent infrastructure strategy for Democrats. An excerpt: “Increased infrastructure spending is proposed by the Democrats, Our Revolution, the Green Party, the the CPC, and BLM up to about $200 billion per year, to fix what is clearly crumbling…What we actually need right now is a massive increase in spending to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure and create new green infrastructure to prevent the worst of global warming and other environmental catastrophes. This spending could provide a decent job to anyone who wants one and at the same time rebuild the critical manufacturing sector (I have proposed an approximately $1.5 trillion per year plan for this purpose).” Rynn urges creation of a “permanent sector of the economy”  dedicated to “permanently spend all of their time maintaining, updating, and expanding national infrastructure…Infrastructure thus enables modern wealth creation and growth, supports manufacturing, creates millions or even tens of millions of jobs, and ideally can be used to prevent ecological collapse…There is plenty of infrastructure building in American and world history to be proud of in the past hundred years or so that can provide lessons for current agendas. Promoting economic democracy is a new function of government that could help evolve left-of-center parties from declining, boring remnants of the past into inspiring and attractive political movements of the future.”

Gabriela Resto-Montero’s “Democratic presidential candidates call for change at California’s Democratic Party Convention” at Vox  rounds up choice comments of the 14 Democratic presidential candidates, including: ““Here’s the thing, when a candidate tells you about all the things that aren’t possible, about how political calculations came first, about how you should settle for little bits and pieces instead of real change, they’re telling you something very important — they are telling you that they will not fight for you,” she [Elizabeth Warren] said…“Beating Donald Trump is a must, but that is a floor, not a ceiling,” [Sen. Cory] Booker said. “We are bigger than that, we have greater ambitions than that.” And, “In these times, Democrats can no more promise to take us back to the 2000s or 1990s than conservatives can take us back to the 1950s,” [Mayor Pete] Buttigieg said. “If we want to defeat this president and lead the country in a new direction, we must be ready to transform our economy and our democracy into something different, something better.”

Emily Yoffe explains why “Democrats Need to Learn From Their Al Franken Mistake: The country lost an opportunity to model how fair procedures can work in a #MeToo case” at The Atlantic: “The lessons of this debacle remain unlearned, and the consequences of Franken’s case continue to play out, in the presidential race and beyond. The Democratic reaction to the Franken allegations and the precedents it set will present a danger to the Democratic Party until it reconsiders the episode, and thinks about ways to stop such unfair and swift destruction from happening…The Senate is the rare workplace in which an established set of proceduresaddresses such violations. The inquiries are conducted by staff (or sometimes outside attorneys) with subpoena power. They are intended to provide an unbiased examination, and recommend proportional punishment—if appropriate. One of the greatest misfortunes of the Franken case is that this process was abruptly terminated in favor of political posturing…The Senate could have modeled how fair procedures can work in a #MeToo case outside the criminal-justice system, illustrating the necessity of restraint and patience when volatile issues are being adjudicated…When people are accused and punished unjustly, a backlash inevitably ensues. When that happens, the crucial and urgent cause of addressing sexual misconduct is undermined.”

Progressive activists are keeping watch over who is sponsoring the Republican Convention. David C. Morris notes at Fortune that “CREDO Action, which is associated with the wireless provider CREDO Mobile, has gathered more than 65,000 signatures for a petition urging Google (GOOGL, -1.34%) and Microsoft (MSFT, -1.70%) to pull out of supporting the RNC, saying “It is irresponsible and dangerous for corporations like Google and Microsoft to promote Trump’s hate by sponsoring the Republican convention.”…Microsoft has already said that it will provide only technology and support, not cash, to the convention. Coca-Cola (KO, -0.24%) has also dramatically scaled back its support of the event… Facebook has confirmed to Recode that it will remain a sponsor of the GOP’s July convention in Cleveland. That’s despite an activist group urging tech companies to pull their support for the event, which they characterize as “sponsoring” Trump’s contentious platform.” Facebook and Google would be difficult to boycott, but activists can certainly make them conclude that supporting the GOP convention is not worth the headaches and bad image they get from sponsoring the most extremist GOP in history.

At FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-Deveaux addresses a question that may be of interest to the various presidential campaigns, “Who Do Non-Religious Democrats Prefer?” Thomson-Deveaux observes, “People who identify as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” accounted for 35 percent of Democratic primary voters in 2016, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study,¹ and as we mentioned in our article, are a growing constituency within the Democratic Party. And according to crosstabs from Morning Consult’s weekly tracking poll for May 20-26, support for Sen. Bernie Sanders is higher among religiously unaffiliated voters than among religiously affiliated voters. Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has an edge among religious Democrats…religiously unaffiliated Democrats — in particular, atheists and agnostics, who together accounted for 17 percent of primary voters in the 2016 CCES study — are substantially more liberal than Democrats who are still part of organized religion…Marshaling Democrats by invoking their secular identity, though, would be risky for Democratic politicians…”

There are obviously many things Donald Trump does every day that bug me. But there’s one in particular that is simply enraging, and I wrote about it this week at New York:

On the 2016 campaign trail, Donald Trump famously predicted that if elected he’d do such wonderful things for African-Americans that he’d win 95 percent of their votes in 2020. Since he won a booming 8 percent of the black vote against Hillary Clinton, there was nowhere to go but up, and indeed, Republicans won 9 percent of the African-American vote in 2018, according to exit polls. But the signs for Trump were really bad:

“An election-eve poll of African-American voters, moreover, showed that 83 percent said Trump made them feel ‘disrespected,’ and 79 percent ‘angry.’ In the same poll, 48 percent of African-Americans labeled Trump a racist who is deliberately trying to hurt minorities.”

If that surprises you in any way, be aware that a Google search for “racist Trump” pulls up 163 million hits. Aside from his exalted status among white nationalists and his deeply reactionary domestic agenda that would devastate poor and minority communities, the man’s reflexive defense of neo-Confederate symbolism and his solidarity with racist politicians make the troubles Republicans have had with African-Americans for decades look benign.

Nonetheless, Trump’s reelection effort will include an effort, well, not so much to win over African-Americans as to encourage them to stay home on November 3. A notable falloff in black turnout in 2016 was one of several key factors leading to Clinton’s fatal underperformance in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which, in the end, were the ball game.

This was not entirely an accident or just a product of Barack Obama’s not being on the ballot, as Philip Bump explains:

“’They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary,’ Trump said. ‘They didn’t come out. And that was a big — so thank you to the African-American community.'”

According to reporting from Bloomberg shortly before the 2016 election, the campaign was working hard to ensure that they didn’t. A senior campaign official told reporters Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg that they had “three major voter-suppression operations underway,” including one aimed at dampening turnout among black voters. In part, the Bloomberg report suggested, that included running under-the-radar ads on Facebook tying Clinton to the 1994 crime bill.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Trump is already pulling the same stunt with possible 2020 opponent Joe Biden, calling the 1994 crime bill “a dark period in American History” that the former vice president should apologize for, and contrasting that with Trump’s involvement in criminal justice reforms that “helped fix the bad 1994 Bill.”

The mendacity of this line of argument is stunning. Aside from Trump’s personal history of backing the nastiest kind of law-and-order politics, he’s acting as though the sentencing provisions of the 1994 crime bill, which many observers now blame for contributing to mass incarceration, was some sort of “Democrat” scheme. Yes, a majority of House Republicans opposed the final version, but that was due to its assault-weapons ban and its crime-prevention programs; the GOP wanted purely punitive legislation, as the New York Times reported:

“The bill that passed trimmed the original package from $33.5 billion, with nearly two-thirds of the cuts from prevention programs that Republicans had branded as useless welfare spending …

“A measure proposed by Representatives Bill Brewster, Democrat of Oklahoma, and Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, to scrap the bipartisan compromise and approve a plan with no money for so-called prevention programs — and no ban on assault weapons — failed, 232 to 197. ”

All but 30 House Republicans voted for that lock-’em-up-and-let-us-keep-our-guns version of the bill. No, Trump wasn’t in Congress then, but, if anything, he has represented a return to the brutal anti-crime and war-on-drugs policies and messaging that helped make Republicans toxic to minority voters before he came on the scene.

But Trump’s slurs about (and/or ignorance of ) the 1994 crime bill are nothing compared with his chutzpah in bragging about the criminal-justice-reform legislation that “helped fix the bad 1994 bill.” His 2016 law-and-order campaign derailed a bipartisan drive for a more comprehensive reform bill after Mitch McConnell decided to yank it out of fear of contradicting Trump (and his chief Senate agent, Jeff Sessions, a bitter opponent of reform). With Sessions installed as attorney general, it looked as if criminal-justice reform might be dead, but then presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner got behind a modest prison-reform bill in the House, eventually merging it with a few sentencing-reform provisions in the Senate, and spent months trying to convince Trump to get onboard the bipartisan train. Finally, and reluctantly, the president agreed to a watered-down mini-version of the bill he indirectly killed in 2016. And now he’s acting as though it was all his idea.

So Trump’s insulting audacity in addressing African-American voters isn’t abating at all. And he’s hoping he’ll demoralize them into failing the exercise the franchise. What a scandal for a president from the Party of Lincoln.

The good news from South Carolina is that we have a solid Democratic challenger running for Lindsey Graham’s U.S. Senate seat. As Li Zhou reports at Vox: “Jaime Harrison, a former chair of South Carolina’s Democratic Party, is officially challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2020 — and he thinks he can win by swaying some Republicans in the process…As Harrison told the New York Times’s Astead Herndon, he thinks he could build a coalition of Democratic voters and crossover Republicans in order to ultimately secure a victory…“When your health care is threatened or you’re crushed under the weight of student loans, politics doesn’t matter — and character counts,” Harrison said as part of his launch, which included hefty criticism of the incumbent. In a campaign video, he lambasted Graham for sharply changing his stance on Trump. Clips show Graham calling the president a “race-baiting, xenophobic and religious bigot” in 2016, and then turning around and saying the exact opposite after Trump won the election.” Harrison hopes to win support from state voters who are angry about  Graham’s complete lack of leadership regarding the closing of rural hospitals, water pollution and student loans.

Despite his incumbency and GOP strength in SC, Graham is burdened by an embarrasing surfeit of video clips revealing his creepy flip-flops on key issues and statements about Trump. Here’s an opening salvo from the Harrison campaign:

Contribute to Harrison’s ActBlue page right here.

Perry Bacon, Jr. presents a case that “The House Probably Has A Pro-Impeachment Majority Right Now” at FiveThirtyEight: “Only a few dozen of the 235 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have publicly called for the impeachment of President Trump, or even for Congress to launch a formal impeachment investigation. And that number hasn’t meaningfully changed — so far, at least — even after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller gave a closing public statement Wednesday in which he all but said his investigation concluded that Trump obstructed justice regarding the probe of potential Russian interference in the 2016 election…But the relatively small number of Democrats calling for impeachment doesn’t mean the vast majority of House Democrats oppose impeachment — or, more precisely, that they would vote “no” on impeachment. In fact, it’s likely the overwhelming majority of House Democrats would vote to both the launch of an impeachment inquiry and for impeachment itself if either or both came up for a vote.” Bacon’s estimate is based on a core group of 150 House members in “safe Democratic districts — districts that are blue enough to withstand an impeachment backlash even if it did occur,” plue several other groups, which would likely respond to pro-impeachment momentum.”

Can a presidentail candidacy based more on issues than charisma, comfort zones or identity win the Democratic nomination? That’s a pivotal question being addressed by Elizabeth Warren’s run for the white house, explain Gregory Krieg and Jeff Zeleny in “Elizabeth Warren breaks through crowded 2020 field — with a plan” at CNN Politics. “For five months now, Elizabeth Warren has bounced around the country pitching ambitious ideas — typically anchored by well-timed policy rollouts — to achieve the “big, structural change” at the core of her pitch to Democratic primary voters…Now, with the first round of debates in sight, the energetic campaigner is beginning to see a different kind of movement — in the polls. The latest round of surveys have shown Warren creeping up behind her ideological ally and friend Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator whose campaign is increasingly adapting similar smallball tactics as a way of more directly addressing voters’ questions and concerns. Former Vice President Joe Biden remains the frontrunner by a comfortable margin, but in the race to represent the party’s more liberal wing, Warren is quietly on the rise.” The authors cite Warren’s “knack for serving up a complicated policy in a digestible bite” and her “I have a plan for that” mantra, which is getting considerable media play.

“Voter Registration Is Surging—So Republicans Want to Criminalize It,” writes Eliza Newlin Carney at The American Prospect. Carney explains that “In the wake of a midterm that saw surging turnout by non-white, young, and urban voters—all blocs that tend to favor Democrats—a backlash in GOP state legislatures was perhaps inevitable. What troubles voting rights advocates is that Republicans have now set out to penalize not just voters but the groups trying to register them, in some cases with astronomical fines and jail time that effectively criminalize civic engagement…The most extreme example is a law newly enacted in Tennessee that imposes civil and criminal penalties, including fines of up to $10,000 or more and close to a year in jail, on organizers who submit incomplete registration forms, fail to participate in state-mandated trainings, or fail to submit forms within a ten-day window. The law violates both the First and the 14th Amendments, say civil rights advocates who have filed suit, and also runs afoul of the National Voter Registration Act.” Carney notes other efforts to suppress voter registraiton campaigns in Arizona, Georgia and Texas.

So, in the wake of Mueller’s warning about the urgency of the continuing threat of Russian interference in our elections, what is being done to protect the integrity of our elections? Very little at the federal level, it turns out, according to Peter Stone’s “Trump not doing enough to thwart Russian 2020 meddling, experts say: Despite fears of cyber attacks, adequate funding and White House focus to counter any new election interference are lagging” at The Guardian’s U.S. edition. Stone, writing a couple of days before Mueller’s statement, noted that “Election security concerns that critics say require more resources and attention include: a paper ballot system to replace or back up electronic voting machines vulnerable to hacking; more resources and attention for cybersecurity programs at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS); a requirement that campaigns report to the FBI any contacts with foreign nationals; and a strong public commitment from the president to an interference-free election…Russia would be remiss not to try again, given how successful they were in 2016,” said Steven Hall, a retired chief of the CIA’s Russian operations…Russian intelligence operatives, Hall added, are likely to be adept at analysing what worked and what didn’t in 2016, stressing that the Kremlin “will try to be more sophisticated in covering their tracks” in 2020, which could make detecting threats harder and require better security measures.” “We tend to fight the last war,” said John Cipher former CIA Russia expert. “Russia is going to look for new ways and vulnerabilities to damage the US.” Given Russia’s capabilities, Democrats have good reason to worry that election security measures in key states could be equally ineffectual.

At Esquire, Charles Pierce has a few choice words in response to Mueller’s warning about continued Russian attacks on our elections: “More significant, at least from this seat, was Mueller’s discussion of the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 election and the ongoing attempts to ratfck the 2020 election. This section of his report is the basis for the “No collusion” half of the “No collusion. No obstruction” litany that everybody down at Camp Runamuck says with their morning prayers, and that Mueller pretty much left as a pointed open question on Wednesday. There was no hoax. There was no coup. There was an attack, and there soon will be others, so saddle up, you idiots…You may recall some stories at the time that alleged the Russians were engaged in some nihilistic, non-partisan ratfcking in order merely to create chaos in the American political system. No, Mueller said on Wednesday. The Russian ratfcking had one definite purpose: the election of Donald Trump. The Russian ratfckers, and the Volga Bagmen behind them, wanted this incompetent, vulgar talking yam to be president.”

Pierce continues, “To believe still that Mueller’s investigation definitively concluded, “No collusion,” you have to believe that all this effort and expense to influence an election in favor of a guy whose businesses already depended on Russian money, and who at the time was trying to close a major real estate deal in Moscow, was all a happy accident, a blessing from above on the Trump campaign. All of this, of course, was in the report. But watching Mueller say it out loud was a compelling bit of theater…And that brings us to the most disappointing thing about Mueller’s brief appearance on Wednesday: his stated reluctance to appear before Congress. He has no excuse left. He is a private citizen now. And if he only repeats what’s in the report, on television, in front of the country, it will contribute mightily to the political momentum behind the demands that Congress do its damn job or shirk its duty entirely. He still needs to testify. He still needs to take questions. He’s only a citizen like the rest of us now, and he has a duty to do the right thing. We all do.”

Despite evidence of growing support for ‘socialist’ ideas, particularly with young voters, polls indicate that GOP red-baiting could cause problems for progressive Democratic candidates with other constituencies. Peter Dreier’s “How Democrats Should Respond to the GOP’s Red-Baiting: Remind them that many of the most popular US programs were once called ‘socialist’” at The Nation provides an antidote. As Dreier observes, “The phrases “social democracy,” “democratic capitalism,” “shareholder capitalism,” or “progressive capitalism” (economist Joseph Stiglitz’s favorite) more accurately describe the evolving consensus among progressive Democrats…Of course, this won’t stop Trump and other Republicans from pinning the socialist label on every Democratic candidate and every Democratic idea…It makes little sense for Pelosi and other party leaders to get defensive when Trump pins a socialist tail on the Democratic donkeys. It would be better to simply explain their vision and practical solutions for America, point out that popular ideas like land-grant colleges, Social Security, public libraries, child-labor laws, the Voting Rights Act, the minimum wage, the Clean Air Act, and Medicare were once called “socialist,” and remind voters that Trump inherited a real-estate empire built on government-backed middle-class housing, squandered his fortune through bankruptcies and mismanagement, used the White House to advance his family business, and cheated on his taxes and his wives.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

David Jarman at DK Elections has a good write-up of the recently-released Catalist data on the 2018 election and their strategic implications. He doesn’t say anything terribly different than what I said about these same data in a recent post, but he does go into a lot more detail than I did. Plus, he has a lot of nice simple tables and graphics to get across his points so it’s well worth looking at.

Jarman’s analysis underscores an important point: the Catalist data are so good and so clear that what they tell us should become the new conventional wisdom about 2018 and the implications for 2020 strategy. Of course, the mobilize-the-base-and-never-talk-to-Trump-voters crowd will still resist. But hopefully these data will convince all but the diehards which way we need to go. As Jarman says: