Steve Bannon illustrates the rot in California's Republican Party

For almost nine years now, the Republican Party has ceased to be a good-faith party to our country’s small-d democratic governance, and has instead become a vehicle for targeted destruction, waging a campaign of sabotage based on a series of lies about our country’s politics, history, and society.  Prominent among those lies, and central to its decision to launch this search and destroy mission into the heart of our democracy, has been the idea that “government doesn’t work.”

The modern Republican Party’s platform involves returning power to unchecked free markets and those who thrive in such dangerous environments.  It involves giving large industries free rein to treat workers as they choose, and rolling back the power of agencies in the hands of a democratic state charged with protecting people not just as consumers, but as living beings who need clean air, healthy water, and safe food.  It involves pushing people into a sick libertarian celebration of the grinding struggles, hardships, cruelties, and uncertainties that come from the refusal to treat healthcare, childcare, higher education, workplace rights, and a host of other spheres of life as involving fundamental social and economic rights.

This re-regulation of power to benefit the already-wealthy and -powerful is deceitfully sold as de-regulation from “government,” which is simultaneously supposed to be grossly incompetent and disturbingly penetrating in its reach.  And this misleading packaging and salesmanship is only possible because the Republican Party has worked day and night since January of 2009 to reduce faith in public life and institutions, thereby bringing by their own hand their lie to life.

Since then, the Republican Party has engineered government shutdowns, held up the work of personnel crucial to the functioning of government departments and our court system, and embraced the work of a national security state that has eroded trust in the federal government, confirming the suspicions they have stoked that the state has an adversarial relationship with individual citizens.  The Republican Party has hamstrung the ability of state officials to deal with climate crises (or even to refer to climate change) and used supermajority rules to starve even progressively-dominated states of the revenue streams necessary to care for citizens.  The Republican Party publicly dedicated itself to the failure of one presidential administration, and threw its weight behind a candidate known to be serially incompetent and openly dedicated to the destruction of our constitutional framework.  

Last week, California Republicans signalled their re-commitment to their guerrilla warfare against our government’s abilities to help people to realize civil and political as well as social and economic rights.  The state’s marginalized party invited Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s fascist advisor, to speak at their party conference.

Compared to much that we’ve heard from Bannon, Trump, and others in recent months, the speech was dull.  Bannon adopted Trump’s speaking style and was throughout generally, perhaps deliberately, incoherent.  The rambling, wreck of a speech was full of incomplete sentences and uncompleted thoughts, but these are perfect for the innuendo-strewn politics practiced by the far right.  Comically, and disturbingly, Bannon discussed Black, Latino, and Asian Californians with a certainty that none were in the room, and offered a tortured historical narrative to underpin his views.  

But if the speech itself was unremarkable, Bannon’s presence and prominence there was, given all that he and this administration symbolize.  Bannon, an unconstructive bomb throwing troll granted power by his dear leader, is responsible for formally combining economic and ethnic nationalism in Trump and the Republicans’ programs.  These are the two ingredients which when combined yield fascism: a rhetorical commitment to addressing economic grievances and a very real effort to redefine citizenship and the national community along ethno-religious lines.  

Bannon’s call for “open revolt” is a reiteration of his desire to dismantle what he has characterized as the “administrative state,” but which is actually the small-d democratic state: the one which when empowered by idealistic and humane politics can generate prosperity and security and power for middle and working classes.  In the chaos that Bannon’s attack on our government would generate, only the wealthy and powerful could thrive.

Bannon’s presence was a symptom of the intellectual and moral failure of California’s Republican Party, and the extent to which that failure has turned them into a party perpetually circling the toilet drain.  The party’s failures are of the compounding variety.  The unpopularity of their racism, their trickle-down economics, and celebration of inequality has prevented them not just from occupying, but increasingly from seriously contesting, statewide offices.  In the summer primary, which in California pits all candidates from all parties against each other and sends the top-two to a run-off in November, the top Republican vote getter won only 7.8% of the total votes cast.  Between them, the top two Democrats won 58%, with other candidates of the center-left winning between five and seven percent, and other Republicans ranging from .8 to 4.7%.  

In other elections in 2014, Republicans made it onto the November ballot, but a place there for a statewide office is increasingly looking like a career-ender for Republican politicians, so toxic is the combination of ideology and practice they have embraced, both locally and nationally.

Most Republican leaders therefore retreat to their districts, and spend two to four years whipping up hate and spreading a noxious sense of grievance while refusing to participate in constructive governance in Sacramento or Washington, hoping  to advance through the ranks of a party basically reduced to social and economic gangsterism and thuggery, rather than occupy positions of leadership in their state.  

Because these people therefore never expose themselves to California’s full voting public, and therefore never have to think about how to construct a political economy and a moral economy built for all forty million of the state’s citizens (as opposed to the 710,000 who populate an average Californian congressional district, 465,000 in each assembly district, or 930,000 in each senate district).  Aside from San Diego’s mayor, there is no Republican officeholder in California in serious conversation with more than a million voters.  There is no Republican officeholder in California who is in conversation with a population that resembles the state’s broad demographics.  

The California Republican Party is not a good-faith participant in public discourse or in government.  Rather it comprises a group of embittered saboteurs, abusing the hospitality of the rural districts amongst which it shelters, and wrecking the public sphere in those districts to reiterate its self-evidently false claims about democratic governance.

Bannon’s appearance suggested that we will see no changes from California Republicans.  They will content to brood angrily in opposition, trolling the state’s public research universities and spreading intellectual rot in the districts they serve so poorly.  They will continue to use the state’s supermajority rules to frustrate Democrats’ efforts at serious healthcare reform, and stall efforts to reduce tuition at the University of California (even though older Californians attended that institution tuition-free).  They will continue to keep open the wounds inflicted by Prop 13 in 1978, which ensures that California’s budget remains misshapen and its politics remain incapable of more than tinkering.

And California Republicans will continue to provide votes in lock-step for a national party that Trump and Bannon are using to strip Americans of their rights, generate an economics of-by-and-for the 1%, and use chaos as a method for the disruption of efforts by Americans to claim social and economic rights.

California's Voters should Retire Feinstein and Look to a Better Future

This week, California’s long-time senator, Dianne Feinstein, announced her bid for re-election in 2018.  Coverage revolved around how Feinstein polls with Californians, and focused in particular on two issues: whether or not Feinstein’s age will prove to be a liability; and whether she will be challenged from the left of the Democratic Party.

Most of the talk surrounding a challenge from the left dealt with Feinstein’s understated and perhaps dangerously naive approach to dealing with the Trump administration.  As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Feinstein only last month declared her hope that Trump “has the ability to learn and change.  And if he does, he can be a good president.  And that’s my hope.”  

Feinstein is undoubtedly trying to strike a different tone from Republicans in 2009 who entered a new Congress rooting for the failure of President Barack Obama.  However, Obama had not campaigned on a platform containing the essential policy and stylistic components of classic fascism, and he did not spend the opening months of his presidency delivering a devastating salvo against Americans’ fundamental civil and political rights while demonstrating horrific disregard for the social and economic welfare of Americans, and engaging in systematic corruption.  In light of these very different circumstances, Feinstein’s hopes sound outright delusional, and unlikely to form a sound basis for a defense of either Californians’ rights or those of the broader American public.

What has been neglected in the ageist focus on Feinstein’s seniority, is the kind of senator she has been.  One of the spaces where Feinstein has carved out significant expertise and sought to establish considerable authority, is in the realm of national security.  There, however, Feinstein has demonstrated systematically and spectacularly bad judgment.  I would argue that this, more than anything, should call into question her fitness to serve Californians.

In 2001, Feinstein offered her support to the dangerously rushed and ill-considered Patriot Act, provisions of which we live with today in part thanks to her 2005 support for the extension of the Act.  Feinstein supported the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, without requiring that the Bush administration set out clear political goals and commitments, with the result that the U.S. has remained mired in a poorly-defined war for sixteen years.

In 2003, Feinstein supported the illegal war of aggression against Iraq, declining to use her considerable powers in the senate to question the Bush administration’s transparently disingenuous abuse of intelligence, the broader logic of a preventive war, or the refusal to plan for the aftermath of the catastrophic consequence.  If this vote had been an aberration, that would be one thing, but like other neo-conservative Democrats, the vote for Iraq fits a pattern.

This vote was particularly catastrophic because not only did the war in Iraq lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans and at a minimum hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  It also--as British intelligence warned in 2002 and 2003--led to the proliferation of international terrorism, Iraq’s descent into a civil war with regional ramifications, and ultimately to the emergence of ISIS as a deadly and destabilizing force.

As whistleblower Edward Snowden shed light on the abuses and civil liberties infringements of the U.S. security state in 2013, abuses and infringements enabled in part by Feinstein, the senator defended the head of U.S. national intelligence, even as he was found to have lied repeatedly to her colleagues in the senate about his slow erosion of Americans’ rights and aggrandizement of unchecked power for the security state.  She denied in the face of evidence to the contrary, that the NSA’s activities constituted “spying.”  

Thereafter, Feinstein worked carefully to derail efforts at serious reform of the security state, demonstrating once again that between her constituents and the post-9/11 rogue national security state that emerged under President Bush and continued to flourish under President Obama, her loyalties are with the latter.  Feinstein also made or supported a series of deeply disingenuous claims about the “successes” of the U.S. security state designed to pressure the public and her colleagues into backing away from serious reform.

Feinstein’s support of the security state is particularly significant because of the role of this episode and the subsequent attacks on whistleblowers played in eroding the trust of the public in the state.  In successive elections, disingenuously given their own history, Republicans were successfully able to conflate the mystery of the security state and its well documented abuses, with the broader efforts of the federal government to work for citizens.  Through her support from a position of power in the senate of the Bush administration’s wars, and the Bush-Obama expansion of the security state, Feinstein played a not-insignificant role in facilitating the mistrust in the state that led to the rise of Donald Trump.

Later in 2013 when President Obama contemplated an undefined, unresourced, and uncommitted attack on the Syrian regime, driven by the impulse to “do something, anything!” no matter whether intervention stood any success of helping Syrians, Dianne Feinstein was among those senators trying to influence the president to intervene.  Feinstein sought to bludgeon her colleagues into supporting an attack on Syria by circulating distressing images of gassed citizens, while refusing to ask hard questions of the administration--or answer any herself--about precisely how a muddled series of airstrikes would have halted the depredations of the Syrian regime.

She dismissed the serious reservations of her constituents, remarking condescendingly that “they have not seen what I have seen or heard.”  Nor were they likely to, thanks to her refusal to offer evidence of her claims or a basis for thinking that intervention would work in either the short or long term.  But what constituents could see was the emergence of a pattern wherein their senator could not be trusted to accurately represent intelligence, the activities of the national security state, or to exercise good judgement about those things.  

Nor has Feinstein offered more than the barest indulgence of democracy in her home state, systematically declining to debate primary or general election opponents and long disdaining the town hall and other mechanisms that allow voters to directly interrogate their representatives.  Instead, she and her husband, a former chair of the Regents of the University of California who worked to privatize that institution by stealth, wall their deeply political activities off from public scrutiny.  

Now, the Democratic establishment is stepping to Feinstein’s aid as she faces a challenge from the leader of California’s senate, Kevin de Leon.  Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti recently told a fundraising crowd, with reference to the prospect of a Democratic primary opponent, that “this cannibalistic approach, that somehow we should be at each other’s throats right now...is wrong for Democrats and what California should be doing right now.”  

The political primary, an important layer of democracy in our country that allows voters to influence parties and their ideas, is apparently regarded as a destructive nuisance by leading Democrats as they defend a senator with a track record of putting a rogue security state’s power ahead of the rights and interests of her constituents.  In equating a debate about ideas and direction and policy to “cannibalism,” Garcetti and those who share his mentality are demonstrating deep contempt for Californians and a troubling streak of “we know best” elitism that will rebound in one fashion or another to their deep disadvantage and that of their constituents.  Fear of debate by incumbents in power should always be read as underlining its profound necessity.

Another influential figure from Feinstein’s wing of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, wrote in a recent memoir, that the “progressive” approach to welfare, involving piecemeal, targeted reforms, has been proven to be inadequate, both in terms of creating robust and sustainable policy, and in terms of providing the basis for a civic national identity in contrast to the racist one fomented by Trump and his party (Clinton, What Happened, 238).  Clinton acknowledged that as a matter of both opportunity and urgency, the moment has arisen to embrace social democracy in the U.S.  In order for this to occur, California will need to send a senator with a different sensibility and a different ideological commitment to the senate.  

California state senate leader Kevin de Leon needs to think hard about his own approach should he wish to represent California in the senate.  He recently threw his fellow legislative leader in the Assembly under the bus by backing a regularly recycled universal healthcare bill from the ‘90s in California.  Under de Leon’s stewardship, the commendable desire in the senate to develop universal healthcare legislation was not matched by commensurate effort to develop legislation with a firm funding source.  The disinclination to work with the Assembly also indicated a laziness about the hard work of building consensus and harnessing expertise, suggesting that this effort in California was more about show than substance.

De Leon and others should realize the disservice they would have done their cause if they had passed such deeply flawed legislation, the failure of which would then have delivered a national setback to the push for universal healthcare.  The decision of California Democrats to tackle something as massive as healthcare without first dealing with the state’s mangled tax system--a legacy of 1978’s Prop 13 and decades’ of failure to come to grips with its consequences--that would be charged with sustaining the new legislation, is symbolic of the deep cowardice of the state’s elected officials.  

From Governor Jerry Brown (who presided over the failure to head off Prop 13 in 1978) on down, California’s Democrats have refused to understand that they are reduced to ineffectual tinkering unless they tackle the state’s constitution--broken as it has become by Republicans and their financial backers--and the straitjackets it imposes on legislators and their ability to muster serious revenue.  

When Californians vote for a new senator in 2018, I hope that they will ignore the anti-democratic blandishments of the most entrenched Democratic powerbrokers, and leave Senator Feinstein to a retirement more dignified and less violent than her tenure in office.  That tenure has been tragically marked by destructive interventions in the realm of national security that have led to global violence and instability, played a part in the rise of Donald Trump, and have diminished Americans’ civil liberties.  Californians should then ask hard questions of the alternatives.  But they should look hopefully for candidates from the left who understand that social and economic rights should take their place alongside the civil and political rights valued by Americans.  And they should look for candidates who promise to do their best to chart a new direction in U.S. foreign policy that is informed by the same values underpinning the desire to create a more fair and just country.