Who Will Stop Trump’s War on Iran?

All,

The sheer fucking INSANITY of this mindless attack on the supreme commander of the Iranian military and its utter disregard for the very severe and clearly murderous consequences that are absolutely sure to follow for not only the United States but many other places in the world is the direct result of choosing and allowing a maniacal nihilist to "lead" the country. The most disturbing aspect of this typically authoritarian action is that it was always completely predictable given the undeniably psychopathic political reality of a raging walking ID and certifiable MADMAN in the white house. No remotely stable political or military leader would have done this under any circumstances whatsoever for either so-called strategic or tactical reasons. This is nothing but a gigantic CATASTROPHE from any perspective and is putting us all on the fasttrack toward World War 3 which as any sane person knows can only lead to complete global destruction. Stay tuned because the worst as always is yet to come...

Kofi

https://www.thenation.com/article/suleimani-iran-war-trump/

US Wars and Military Action
Iran
Donald Trump

Who Will Stop Trump’s War on Iran?

The assassination of a top Iranian military commander could cause the conflict to spiral out of control.

by Jeet Heer
January 3, 2020
The Nation

PHOTO: Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani. (Photo by Pool / Press Office of Iranian Supreme Leader/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

On Friday morning in Baghdad, American military forces, under the order of Donald Trump, launched an air strike assassinating Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, a commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps who has long been a thorn in the side of American forces in the Middle East. The killing of Suleimani, a popular figure in Iran, has been described as a major escalation in hostilities between the United States and the Islamic Republic. But that’s an understatement. As Andrew Exum, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy, wrote in The Atlantic, “This doesn’t mean war, it will not lead to war, and it doesn’t risk war. None of that. It is war.” It’s unclear how Iran will retaliate, but an intensification of hostilities is almost a certainty.

If Exum is right and the United States is already in a de facto war with Iran, this is a strange conflict. This is a war fought not over natural resources or ideology but rather motivated by petty grievances, with Trump goaded into action by a wounded ego.

The timing of the assassination, coming so soon on the heels of the impeachment, has raised suspicions that Trump is trying to stir up conflict in order distract attention from his political troubles. It’s plausible enough that impeachment played a factor in triggering Trump’s actions, but his conflict with Iran goes back further. The pivotal date is 2017 and the decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Since that move, the Trump administration has pursued a punitive policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran that has lead inexorably to a cascading cycle of tit-for-tat retaliations. As the United States has ramped up pressure on Iran with sanctions and bombings, the Islamic Republic has responded with attacks on American allies and personnel.

Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart usefully noted that Trump has displayed contradictory attitudes towards Iran, with bombastic chest-beating tempered by a desire to avoid another full-scale Middle Eastern war. While Trump does have hawks around him who seem eager for armed conflict with Iran, Trump himself has hesitated to pull the trigger. As Beinart points out, “with each escalation, Trump’s predicament worsens. His confidants insist that he can’t afford a war—which would likely boost oil prices and damage the economy—especially in an election year. Yet he also can’t pursue real diplomacy, at least not without provoking a confrontation with the GOP’s hawkish foreign-policy elite. He’s caught between his desire to avoid being like George W. Bush and his desire to avoid being like Barack Obama.”

Unable to resolve the contradiction between his instincts to avoid a war and his need to present himself as a tough guy to his Republican followers, Trump has settled for turning Iran policy into a personal vendetta. This was on full display in the Twitter argument Trump had with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Responding to an earlier Trump tweet threatening Iran, Khamenei tweeted on Wednesday, “If the Islamic Republic decides to challenge & fight, it will do so unequivocally. We’re not after wars, but we strongly defend the Iranian nation’s interests, dignity, & glory. If anyone threatens that, we will unhesitatingly confront & strike them.”

Trump seems to have no plan—to just react to events in an ad hoc way. Wendy Sherman, a former ambassador who negotiated with Iran on nuclear weapons, said on MSNBC on Thursday night, “I pray with all of my heart that the Trump administration has a plan and a strategy, but all I have seen to date…is one-off actions and this one-off action can have unbelievably horrific consequences.” This lack of planning is a natural outgrowth of the Trump White House’s inability to hire and retain experts. As Ben Denison of Tuft University’s Center for Strategic Studies notes, “Sadly, the purging of Iranian expertise in the State Dept, DoD, and the NSC makes it even more likely that we do not have the understanding of Iranian dynamics to understand what will come next.”

Beyond the incompetence and staffing disorder of the Trump administration, the larger problem is that there has been no effective move by Congress to rein in Trump’s careening foreign policy. A president shouldn’t be able to launch an attack that is an act of war without congressional authorization. Apart from a brief discussion with Lindsey Graham at Mar-a-Lago, it seems Trump didn’t notify anyone else in Congress ahead of time.

Responding to news reports, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy tweeted, “The question is this—as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”

Trump’s petty motives and incoherent policy have been enabled by a Congress that has long been derelict in its duty to provide oversight over foreign policy. This abdication of responsibility is all too typical of American politics since the 9/11 terrorist attacks—under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

There is concern about the turn to war even among Republicans, at least privately. According to Washington Post reporter Robert Costa, “Some of my best Hill sources tonight tell me there is very little to no appetite inside GOP for attacking Iran in Iran, but support for taking steps to protect embassy in Baghdad as long as intel is solid. Emphasis on securing compound, stability. Uneasiness tho about POTUS.” But these Republicans are speaking to Costa only off the record.

The question is whether Congress can find the will to put the brakes on Trump’s Iran policy, which has created a de facto state of war that can easily spiral into a large-scale disaster. Perhaps one possible blessing of Trump’s presidency is that he’s so reckless he might force even a feckless Congress to do its duty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent at The Nation and the author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014).

PHOTO: Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani. (Photo by Pool / Press Office of Iranian Supreme Leader/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

IMPORTANT NEW BOOK:

Nigger: An Autobiography
by Dick Gregory
Plume (reprint edition), 2019

[Publication date: June 11, 2019]

Comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory’s million-copy-plus bestselling 1964 memoir—now in trade paperback for the first time.

“Powerful and ugly and beautiful...a moving story of a man who deeply wants a world without malice and hate and is doing something about it.”—The New York Times

Fifty-five years ago, in 1964, an incredibly honest and revealing memoir by one of the America's best-loved comedians and activists, Dick Gregory, was published. With a shocking title and breathtaking writing, Dick Gregory defined a genre and changed the way race was discussed in America.

Telling stories that range from his hardscrabble childhood in St. Louis to his pioneering early days as a comedian to his indefatigable activism alongside Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gregory's memoir riveted readers in the sixties. In the years and decades to come, the stories and lessons became more relevant than ever, and the book attained the status of a classic. The book has sold over a million copies and become core text about race relations and civil rights, continuing to inspire readers everywhere with Dick Gregory's incredible story about triumphing over racism and poverty to become an American legend.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dick Gregory (1932-2017) a friend of luminaries including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers, and the forebear of today's popular black comics, including Larry Wilmore, W. Kamau Bell, Dave Chappelle, and Trevor Noah, was a provocative and incisive cultural force for more than 50 years. As an entertainer, he always kept it indisputably real about race issues in America, fearlessly lacing humor with hard truths. As a leading activist against injustice, he marched at Selma during the civil rights movement, organized student rallies to protest the Vietnam War; sat in at rallies for Native American and feminist rights; fought apartheid in South Africa; and participated in hunger strikes in support of Black Lives Matter. He died at age 84 in 2017. 

IMPORTANT NEW BOOK:

We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989
by Joshua M. Myers
NYU Press, 2019

[Publication date: December 24, 2019]

 

The Howard University protests from the perspective and worldview of its participants

We Are Worth Fighting For is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university’s Administration Building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university. The protest, inspired in part by the emergence of “conscious” hip hop, helped to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent black nationalist ethos.

At the center of this story is a student organization known as Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. Co-founded by Ras Baraka, the group was at the forefront of organizing the student mobilization at Howard during the spring of 1989 and thereafter. We Are Worth Fighting For explores how black student activists—young men and women— helped shape and resist the rightward shift and neoliberal foundations of American politics. This history adds to the literature on Black campus activism, Black Power studies, and the emerging histories of African American life in the 1980s. 

REVIEWS:

"We Are Worth Fighting For reminds us of the insurgency of Black college students in the late 1980s and early 1990s that inspired a generation. Thoroughly researched and well constructed, this book illuminates how Howard students inspired the political and cultural rebellion of the time and shines light on this period of the Black freedom struggle." --Akinyele Umoja, author of We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement

"Like the students whose stories populate its pages, We Are Worth Fighting For provides a challenge. It challenges conventional narratives about Howard. It challenges understandings of Black student protest in the ’80s. And it challenges the reader to wrestle with the uses and meaning of history. Cover to cover, this book reflects the state of Black Studies―a discipline that has come of age." --Jonathan Fenderson, author of Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s

"This riveting, exceptionally well-written book is a major contribution to Black Power historiography and the history of Black student activism. Featuring appearances by future mayors of Newark and Atlanta and pioneers of hip hop, this study holds important lessons for today." --Gerald Horne, author of Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s

"We Are Worth Fighting For is a book about the problematics of, and is a writing against, the terms of American order that elaborates their relation to Black radicalism. The 1989 student occupation at Howard is part of the genealogy, the tradition, of Black radical struggle. It is necessary and urgent for understanding that which American order responds to, the ongoing nature of Black radical struggle. It is a radicalism worth cultivating, tending to, and fighting for." --Ashon Crawley, author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Joshua M. Myers teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He serves on the editorial board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal. 

His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, musics, and foodways as well as critical university studies, and disciplinarity. His work has been published in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, The Journal of African American Studies,The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Human Rights and Globalization Law Review, Liberator Magazine, and Global African Worker, Pambazuka, Burning House Press, among other literary spaces. A current book project, Cedric Robinson: Black Radicalism beyond the Order of Time is under contract with Polity Press.

In addition to serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he is the senior content producer at the Africa World Now Project, a and served as the co-coordinator of the SNCC Legacy Project’s Black Power Chronicles Oral History Project and as an organizer with Washington DC’s Positive Black Folks in Action.

A central thread that guides all of this work is an approach to knowledge that takes seriously that peoples of African descent possess a deep sense of reality, a thought tradition that more than merely interprets what is around us, but can transform and renew these spaces we inhabit—a world we would like to fundamentally change.

  

Trump Orders Killing of Top Iranian General Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad

All,

The sheer fucking INSANITY of this mindless attack on the supreme commander of the Iranian military and its utter disregard for the very severe and clearly murderous consequences that are absolutely sure to follow for not only the United States but many other places in the world is the direct result of choosing and allowing a maniacal nihilist to "lead" the country. The most disturbing aspect of this typically authoritarian action is that it was always completely predictable given the undeniably psychopathic political reality of a raging walking ID and certifiable MADMAN in the white house. No remotely stable political or military leader would have done this under any circumstances whatsoever for either so-called strategic or tactical reasons. This is nothing but a gigantic CATASTROPHE from any perspective and is putting us all on the fasttrack toward World War 3 which as any sane person knows can only lead to complete global destruction. Stay tuned because the worst as always is yet to come...

Kofi

https://www.nytimes.com/…/qassem-soleimani-iraq-iran-attack…

Trump Orders Killing of Top Iranian General Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad

Suleimani was planning attacks on American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region, the Pentagon statement said.

by Falih Hassan, Alissa J. Rubin, Michael Crowley and Eric Schmitt
January 2, 2020
New York Times


BAGHDAD — President Trump ordered the killing of the powerful commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, in a drone strike on the Baghdad International Airport early Friday, American officials said.

General Suleimani’s death was confirmed by official Iranian media.

“General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “General Suleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.”

“This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans,” the statement added. “The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.”

The killing of General Suleimani was a major blow for Iran and a major escalation of President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, which began with economic sanctions but has steadily moved into the military arena.

The strikes followed a warning on Thursday afternoon from Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, who said the United States military would pre-emptively strike Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria if there were signs the paramilitary groups were planning more attacks against American bases and personnel in the region.

“If we get word of attacks, we will take pre-emptive action as well to protect American forces, protect American lives,” Mr. Esper said. “The game has changed.”

In Iran, state television interrupted its programing to announce General Suleimani’s death.

The news anchor recited the Islamic prayer for the dead — “From God we came and to God we return” — beside a picture of General Suleimani.

American officials consider General Suleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers during the Iraq War and hostile Iranian activities throughout the Middle East.

“This is devastating for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime and Khamenei’s regional ambitions,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank that supports a hard line against Iran, referring to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“For 23 years, he has been the equivalent of the J.S.O.C. commander, the C.I.A. director and Iran’s real foreign minister,” Mr. Dubowitz said, using an acronym for the United States Joint Special Operations Command. “He is irreplaceable and indispensable” to Iran’s military establishment.

The American drone strike hit two cars carrying Mr. Suleimani and several officials with Iranian-backed militias as they were leaving the airport.

American officials said that multiple missiles hit the convoy in a strike carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command.

The strike killed five people, including the pro-Iranian chief of an umbrella group for Iraqi militias, Iraqi television reported and militia officials confirmed. The militia chief, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was a strongly pro-Iranian figure.

The public relations chief for the umbrella group, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, Mohammed Ridha Jabri, was killed as well.

Two other people were killed in the strike, according to a general at the Baghdad joint command, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

PHOTO: Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani Credit...Ebrahim Noroozi/Associated Press

According to the Iraqi general, General Suleimani and Mr. Ridha, the militia public relations official, arrived by plane at Baghdad International Airport from Syria.

Two cars stopped at the bottom of the airplane steps and picked them up. Mr. al-Muhandis was in one of the cars.

As the two cars left the airport, they were bombed, the general said.

The strike was the second attack at the airport within hours.

Iraq

The New York Times

An earlier attack, late Thursday, involved three rockets that did not appear to have caused any injuries.

The strikes come days after American forces bombed three outposts of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-supported militia in Iraq and Syria, in retaliation for the death of an American contractor in a rocket attack last week near the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

The United States said that Kataib Hezbollah fired 31 rockets into a base in Kirkuk Province, last week, killing an American contractor and wounding several American and Iraqi servicemen.

The Americans responded by bombing three sites of the Khataib Hezbollah militia near Qaim in western Iraq and two sites in Syria. Khataib Hezbollah denied involvement in the attack in Kirkuk.

Pro-Iranian militia members then marched on the American Embassy on Tuesday, effectively imprisoning its diplomats inside for more than 24 hours while thousands of militia members thronged outside. They burned the embassy’s reception area, planted militia flags on its roof and scrawled graffiti on its walls.

No injuries or deaths were reported, and the militia members did not enter the embassy building.

They withdrew late Wednesday afternoon.

The Pentagon statement Thursday night said that General Suleimani “had orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months,” including the one that killed an American contractor last Friday.

General Suleimani also “approved the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad,” the statement said.

President Trump said on Tuesday that Iran would “be held fully responsible” for the attack on the embassy, in which protesters set fire to a reception building on the embassy compound, which covers more than 100 acres. He also blamed Tehran for directing the unrest.

Washington and Tehran appear intent on ratcheting up both their messaging and their forces, raising concerns of a larger conflict. In the past several months, Iranian-supported militias have increased rocket attacks on bases housing American troops. The Pentagon has dispatched more than 14,000 troops to the region since May.

Caught in the middle is the Iraqi government, which is too weak to establish any military authority over some of the more established Iranian-supported Shiite militias.

On Thursday, Mr. Esper said the Iraqi government was not doing enough to contain them. The Iraqis need to “stop these attacks from happening and get the Iranian influence out of the government,” Mr. Esper said.

General Suleimani was long a figure of intense interest to people in and out of Iran.
He was not only in charge of Iranian intelligence gathering and covert military operations, he was regarded as one of Iran’s most cunning and autonomous military figures. He was also believed to be very close to the country’s supreme leader, Mr. Khamenei, and seen as a potential future leader of Iran.

His presence in Iraq would not have been surprising.

General Suleimani led the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, a special forces unit responsible for Iranian operations outside Iran’s borders. He once described himself to a senior Iraqi intelligence official as the “sole authority for Iranian actions in Iraq,” the official later told American officials in Baghdad.

In his speech denouncing Mr. Trump, he was even less discreet — and openly mocking.
“We are near you, where you can’t even imagine,” he said. “We are ready. We are the man of this arena.”

Falih Hassan reported from Baghdad; Alissa J. Rubin from Paris; Michael Crowley from West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.

Protesters Attack U.S. Embassy in Iraq, Chanting ‘Death to America’
Dec. 31, 2019

Pro-Iranian Protesters End Siege of U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

Jan. 1, 2020

Alissa Johannsen Rubin is the Baghdad Bureau chief for The New York Times. @Alissanyt

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Michael Crowley is a White House correspondent, covering President Trump’s foreign policy. He joined The Times in 2019 from Politico, where he was the White House and national security editor, and a foreign affairs correspondent. @michaelcrowley

Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 3, 2020, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Strike in Iraq Kills Commander Of Iranian Force. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper 

PHOTO: The remains of a vehicle hit by missiles outside the Baghdad airport.Credit...Iraq Security Media Cell, via Twitter

AOC And The Ongoing Movement for Progressive and Principled Politics In the Democratic Party

https://www.thenation.com/article/2020-aoc-democrats/

Election 2020
Democrats
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

AOC Tells Democrats How to Get it Right in 2020

“For anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests,” she says, “it’s called having values. It’s called, giving a damn.”

by John Nichols
January 1, 2020
The Nation

PHOTO: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to reporters in Statuary Hall at the US Capitol on December 18, 2019. (Getty Images / Drew Angerer)

As 2019 closed, the centrist pundits and politicians who make it their mission to police the Democratic Party were busy reanimating one of the oldest lies in the book. They were aiming at 2020, the year in which the party will nominate a candidate to take on the biggest liar in American politics: Donald Trump. To beat Trump, the centrists argued, Democrats must reject “purity tests.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, luckily, has recognized this threat contained in the coded language about “purity tests” and countered it with a masterful defense of the politics of principle that will be essential to upend Trump and Trumpism. She finished the year arguing, correctly, that Democrats must stand strong for their ideals in 2020, or they will run the risk of letting Trump frame the debate.

“For anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests, it’s called having values. It’s called, giving a damn,” the Democratic representative from New York told a cheering crowd of 14,000 at a December 21 rally for Bernie Sanders in Venice, California.

While at least one Sanders rival, Pete Buttigieg, has been busy decrying purity tests regarding issues and strategies, AOC has pushed back against a politics where the parties are defined by the demands of big donors—and the cautious policies they favor. “It’s called having standards for your conduct to not be funded by billionaires but to be funded by the people,” she said.

The wrestling over standards between progressives and centrists is real, and it can be healthy for a democracy. Unfortunately, the centrists who refuse to surrender their rigid grip on the Democratic Party—especially when it comes to naming presidential contenders—want Democrats to believe that the only way to tackle Trump, the man who has shredded every standard for electioneering and governing, is with a return to politics as usual. They imagine that it is possible to make politics great again. Their back-to-the-future approach, which is as dangerous as it is naive, suggests that the 2016 election was an aberration.

Centrism is an unyielding ideological construct. It demands that candidates and parties abandon ideals in order to satisfy the whims of professional pessimists like David Brooks of The New York Times, who earlier this year reduced the Democratic contest to a David Brooks primary. In a Times column headlined, “Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away,” Brooks warned, “The party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable. And it’s doing it without too much dissent.”

Never mind that poll after poll shows that the “positions” Brooks perceives to be electorally poisonous—support for real health care reform and a sufficient response to the climate crisis—are, in fact, quite popular. Never mind that Brooks, a man unscathed by even the slightest measure of irony, bemoaned the lack of dissent in a column prominently featured in the nation’s most influential newspaper. Brooks was not happy because no one seemed to accept his premise that “the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.”

The defenders of the empty politics of the past spent 2019 in a fret fest over the success of a democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, and a progressive anti-monopolist, Elizabeth Warren, in framing out a bold vision for the party and the 2020 campaign. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell warned against “lazy sloganeering — lately exemplified by Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal” and counseled that Medicare-for-All was “in danger of becoming a purity test for 2020 candidates.”

Actually, Medicare-for-All should be a purity test for candidates; as AOC said, “it’s called having values.” If the Democratic nominee in 2020 cannot communicate a vision for treating health care as a right, then the party will sacrifice one of its strongest tools for mobilizing young and disenfranchised voters.

Democrats should recognize the value of keeping pure on major issues—even if major donors might ask them to compromise. Clarity on the big issues helps a party to increase turnout among potential voters who agree and to shape the discourse in ways that appeal to independent voters who are frustrated by the concessions that both major parties make to America’s oligarchs.

It is reasonable to suggest, as does former President Obama, that the Democrats must avoid being so pure that they only attract “people who already agree with us completely on everything.” Even Warren, who made her name taking on the big banks, admits, “Nobody is perfect, and nobody is pure.” But Warren also says that Democrats have to avoid compromising at the start of the process, with “vague calls for unity.” And Sanders continues to advocate for a renewal of former President Franklin Roosevelt’s “I-welcome-their-hatred” approach to the billionaire class.

In the last Democratic debate of the year, Buttigieg decried efforts to apply “purity tests” when it comes to campaign fund-raising and claimed that “in order to build the Democratic Party and build a campaign ready for the fight of our lives, these purity tests shrink the stakes of the most important election.”

Warren and Sanders stood their ground, making the case for funding campaigns with lots of small donations as opposed to bundles of big checks. Buttigieg stood his ground, as well, rejecting charges that he is running as “Wall Street Pete,” defending “traditional fundraising” and telling The Washington Post, “The thing about these purity tests is the people issuing them can’t even meet them.”

Perhaps. But Democrats should at least try to meet some of them. That was AOC’s point when she warned against buying into the fantasy that “there is no difference between being funded by a handful of wealthy people and being funded by small grassroots donations.”

“Let me tell you something,” the former waitress explained, “I go into work all the time and I hear people say ‘what will my donors think?’ I hear that phrase. I hear and I see that billionaires get members of Congress on speed dial and waitresses don’t.”

If Democrats want to mobilize the masses in 2020, they’ll need the waitresses—and the rest of the working class—not the defenders of billionaire money and elite centrism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

John Nichols is The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent and host of Next Left, The Nation’s podcast where politics gets personal with rising progressive politicians. He is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.

PHOTO: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to reporters in Statuary Hall at the US Capitol on December 18, 2019. (Getty Images / Drew Angerer)

THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS ANNUALLY FROM 2010-2019

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS ANNUALLY FROM 2010-2019:

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