So, rough night...
Welcome to a special Wednesday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
I will send a longer dive into key state and local election results to premium members tonight, but I want to share some thoughts with everyone about last night’s political car crash and what it means for Democrats, progressives, and a country that seems to be coming apart at the seams.
Before we delve into the autopsy, though, let’s start with a bit of exciting news: Residents in St. Paul, MN saw through a multi-million dollar misinformation campaign sponsored by the state’s powerful corporate landlord PAC and voted to approve a ballot initiative that will now cap annual rent increases at 3% across the city. It is a tremendous victory for St. Paul’s grassroots nonprofits and activists, who have spent years fighting for affordable housing in a city that is rapidly gentrifying and growing more expensive by the month.
Progressives Everywhere covered this story in depth several weeks back and raised money for the organizers fighting to pass the initiative. You can read more about it here:
OK, now, some critical updates and thoughts.
This is a story less about politics than it is about power, media, and why the work we are doing together is so important.
It began even before the polls closed in Virginia. By mid-afternoon, with internal polling and turnout numbers clearly portending disaster, conservative Democratic Sen. Mark Warner was on TV trying to preemptively blame progressives for Terry McAuliffe impending loss in the state’s gubernatorial election. More specifically, he bemoaned the ongoing negotiations over President Biden’s economic agenda and House Democrats’ refusal to vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill until they came to an agreement on the broader Build Back Better reconciliation bill.
“I’ve got to tell you, in Virginia, where we’ve got a gubernatorial race tomorrow, that would have really helped Terry McAuliffe a lot if we had been able to notch that win,” Warner told MSNBC.
Left unsaid was the fact that Warner negotiated the deal with Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the two reviled Democrats most responsible for hacking, slashing, and killing the most popular parts of the Biden’s election-winning economic and social plan. Less than 24 hours before polls opened, Manchin went on TV and threatened to trash the whole thing, furthering months of “Democrats in disarray” narratives and doing no favors for Biden’s cratering approval rating.
Instead, Warner blamed progressives for the failure of a candidate that could hardly be described as a member of the Squad or even be mistaken in passing for a mainline progressive. Like Warner, McAuliffe is a died-in-the-wool centrist, a phenomenally wealthy former governor addicted to incrementalism. He is a relic, a former hatchet man for Bill Clinton who got rich in real estate and private equity. On the campaign trail, he refused to back popular policies like ending the state’s draconian, anti-worker “right to work” law and promised to continue the legacy of a governorship he won in 2013 by just 2.5 points in an election in which his GOP opponent was ensnared in a corruption scandal that nearly put him in jail.
That Warner’s comments were made on MSNBC, the putative “liberal” cable network, is indicative of a truly existential problem.
McAuliffe didn’t present much of a contrast from Republican Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin, the smarmy former co-CEO of a major private equity firm. But like many Republicans, Youngkin gets points for that with some of his voters, and he otherwise elided his past by running an explicitly racist campaign. Part of that was embracing “parents rights” in education, which serves as a trigger for voters conditioned to believe that critical race theory — now being used as a stand-in for any kind of historically accurate, socially aware education — is poisoning their children.
I’m reluctant to say that the CRT lie is what won Youngkin (and other Republicans in Virginia) the election, because anti-CRT candidates in actual school board recall elections largely flopped last night (including this remorseless bigot). But it was undoubtedly a factor, especially in turning out voters in the more rural areas where the GOP trounced Democrats even more than last year. Republicans also swept in bellwether suburban counties like Philadelphia-adjacent Bucks County, PA, which had finally gone Democratic in 2018, so there was clearly a larger message snaking through the GOP electorate.
Trash like CRT paranoia doesn’t happen organically — it’s amplified by a gigantic right-wing echo chamber. The lie was seeded by wealthy conservatives, pumped through Facebook-assisted right-wing publications and social media networks, and then made a permanent topic on the three reactionary TV networks, raising the temperature even further in a hermetically sealed, 360-degree outrage machine.
Republicans and conservative media clowns use that funnel to mold crusaders for their false causes. They spent an entire year screaming that the 2020 election was stolen and warning that Dems want to poison their kids with vaccines and reverse racism. They made this election the first major front in their perceived war for civilizational survival.
It may have been bullshit, but it was and continues to be inescapable bullshit. In a fractured media environment in which social media algorithms serve us up what our worst cousins are reading and prioritize engagement to goose ad revenue, chaos and anger will always win.
We watch horror movies for the thrills, knowing that the monsters and killers can’t jump off the screen and follow us into the outside world. But just imagine having a relentless feed of horror movies beamed onto your TV as people on Facebook tell you that what you’re watching is actually real and that you must become doomsday preppers and join their army to protect their families.
Democrats’ message this year was just about it often gets drowned out by cable news, Facebook, and talk radio. So there is really only one solution, with two parts.
First, run to the picket lines and pass the bills that actually help people.
We are at a multi-generational peak of populist animosity against big business, bosses, and bullshit at work. More than four million people outright quit their jobs in August. There are tens of thousands of workers on strike right now. The only way to fight anger in politics is by redirecting that anger.
Last night, as Democrats got walloped, 10,000 striking UAW members voted to reject John Deere’s latest offer and will continue their strike in Iowa, Illinois, Georgia, Kansas, and Colorado. Over 1000 BCTGM workers at Kellogg’s are still striking in Michigan and Pennsylvania. I’ve been reporting on the strike wave across America at More Perfect Union, and based on everyone I’ve spoken to, it’s clear that there are a lot of Trump supporters amongst these striking workers.
Workers are often used as pawns and campaign props in politics, something that Democrats have become very guilty of doing these past few decades. That needs to change. They need to show up. Every single Democrat should be booking it to those picket lines, bringing food and donations and marching for days.
As I outlined in the above deep dive into the red tide washing over struggling manufacturing towns, Democrats desperately need to enact policies that help rebuild these places and very publicly own them.
Create a national progressive media ecosystem
Democrats can’t just do good things — they need to make sure people know about them, give Democrats credit for them, and understand that the right-wing is serving up trash. They need to tackle the cultural wars head on while also offering and executing on a better vision. Neither of these things are possible with the media infrastructure we have now.
This won’t be easy. The media’s conservative default has been shaped by many factors: Corporate media ownership, liberal self-loathing, a deep fascination with “real Americans” (ie white conservatives in truck stop diners), and an “objectivity” that borders on Weimar Republic-levels of complicity and inaction.
“White racists are mad about an invented problem” should not be a straight news story, but the media’s fascination with and overcorrection on behalf of the “real Americans” has legitimized right-wing paranoias like immigrant caravans and Critical Race Theory time and time again.
Democrats deserve full blame for their laughable failures to pass policy, but they’re also hurt by the binary of a two-party system and a media obsessed with elections and conflict. If Democrats fall short on passing laws, Republicans are positioned as the logical alternative.
Here’s the message we so often read: “One party isn’t giving people all the help they rightly deserve, which is good news for what we are presenting as the equally legitimate opposition, the Throw Yourself Into a Den of Hungry Lions Party.”
This won’t be easy to change because there is no pressure coming from the left. The far right-wing began building its own ecosystem decades ago, which is why they have three cable channels and a network of websites, podcasts, and YouTube pages that pump people’s minds full of lies and bad ideology.
We need to catch up, and fast. I’ve spent the last four years working to turn this newsletter into a vehicle for spotlighting the progressive candidates, causes, policies, and organizations that just get zero major media attention otherwise. We’re part of a growing network of independent progressive media outlets, but we certainly don’t have the big billionaire backing or the help of horrible corporations like AT&T, which provided the funding for the TV cesspool OAN.
We’ll keep on battling forward, but until deep-pocketed Democratic donors (or a gigantic surge in grassroots donors!) recognize this discrepancy, and actually want to fund real progressive media that can change a conversation instead of simply cater to savvy DC types and the cocktail hour crowd, it’s going to be tough to have any shot at equal footing in a nation under siege from right-wing terrorists.
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