BY ED FELIEN
Juan Gonzalez chaired the first discussion group on Friday night. He co-anchors “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman. He talked about how when he was in SDS (I always thought it was the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican SDS equivalent), and they were demonstrating at the 1968 Democratic Convention for McCarthy and the peace movement and against Humphrey, they yelled, “Vote with your feet. Vote in the street.” Which doomed Humphrey. It was the right analysis but the wrong tactic, he said—with obvious implications for the tenor and intent of the demonstrations that will happen in Philadelphia this summer.
This was a big deal. Juan Gonzalez is the most recognizable American Latin leftist. He was saying, “Don’t screw this up!”
The next day Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York and co-founder of the first Muslim online organizing platform, MPOWER Change, said, “We can’t afford to have this screwed up.”
So, it seems, the message is: “Don’t screw this up.”
I guess that means we’ll have to vote for Hillary.
Bernie appointed good people to the Platform Committee. There were some small victories and some big defeats. And the struggle goes on. There will be struggles inside the Convention and there will be demonstrations in the street. But there will be an understanding among all of us that Trump is quite different from Hillary.
Trump is the face of fascism—Nationalism! Racism! Anti-intellectual! Anti-woman! A huckster selling snake oil to suckers. All brag and bully and bad attitude.
Hillary is the face of neo-liberalism—a continuation of the imperialism and regime change of Obama. Good on domestic issues. Anti-racist. But a friend of Wall Street and hedge fund managers.
Bernie sees a profound difference between the two. He sees the Democratic Party as open to the possibility of progressive change, and he sees the Republican Party as a door closed to the hopes and dreams of women, minorities and immigrants. And the left could screw this up by fighting with itself: “Hillary’s not pure enough, so we’ll let Trump win and then we’ll get our chance next time.” That’s what the Communists thought about the Social Democrats in Germany in 1933, and we ended up with Hitler. And that’s what SDS thought in Chicago in 1968 and we ended up with Nixon.
No. For women, minorities and immigrants, the stakes are too high. We can’t afford to screw this up.
Bernie has won a seat for us at the table. We get to talk about our issues at the Platform Committee hearings, and we’ll get to vote on them at Philadelphia, and Hillary should commit to having Bernie people in her administration.
We are a force to be reckoned with inside the Democratic Party. Hillary knows she can’t get elected without us. She knows she can’t govern without our cooperation and support. We will not support trade deals that make the rich richer and impoverish the rest of us. We will not support regime change for each new unpopular flavor of dictator of the month. We want health care and higher education. We are willing to work patiently for these objectives. But we must see cooperation and support from her, if she wants cooperation and support from us.
