The Unreported Resistance and The Moral Case For Democrats

“Ford was President, Nixon was in the White House, and FDR was runnin this country into the ground” – Stumpy, ‘Out Cold’

One more explicitly political blog. And then we’re going back to music. Album(s) are coming out soon.

Or general writing about writing, idk. Mixing takes a long time.

But first, let’s look at a Howard Zinn chapter, “The Unreported Resistance,” from A People’s History, that I can’t stop thinking about. Here’s what I wrote when I first read it. Let’s see what lessons it has for anyone to the left of *checks notes* Dick Cheney post-2024.

Sorry, did that headline imply “the moral case for voting Democrat?”

No.

I mean the moral case Democrats need to make.

Not to TL;DR before the column starts, but I’m not going to advocate for dems abandoning trans people. I’m not going to say they need to get tougher on immigration (they need to get softer). I’m not going to blame Trump’s win on defunding the police—a thing that didn’t happen and still needs to—or on anyone else except the people who voted for him.

That, and depressed turnout. You know some people thought Trump was anti-war?

While I do agree that sexism and racism played a major role—it is undeniable, the United States is a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, after all, word to bell hooks—I don’t believe those two factors tell the whole story. I also don’t believe Democrats throwing their hands up and saying “whaddya do with all these cracker-ass yahoos” is good electoral strategy or good politics.

I Am Not A Democrat But I Do Vote Democrat

This is the same calculus Ilhan Omar (who won re-election with 75.2% of the vote), Rashida Tlaib (who won re-election with 69.7% of the vote), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who won re-election with 68.9% of the vote), Bernie Sanders (who won re-election with 62.3% of the vote), and others make. Millions of USian voters feel this way, and I would bet there are many, many more now that the DNC has become the party that advertises their Dick “Architect of the War On Terror and Halliburton Grifter” Cheney bonafides. Or now that the DNC is considering Rahm “I Simply Do Not Care That A Police Officer Shot Laquan McDonald 16 Times I Will Cover It Up To Win An Election” Emanuel for party chair.

Or, as Howard Zinn put it:

“Despite the political consensus of [1970s-80s] Democrats and Republicans in Washington which set limits on American reform, making sure that capitalism was in place, that national military strength was maintained, that wealth and power remained in the hands of a few, there were millions of Americans, probably tens of millions, who refused, either actively or silently, to go along. Their activities were largely unreported by the media…The Democratic Party was more responsive to these Americans, on whose votes it depended. But its responsiveness was limited by its own captivity to corporate interests, and its domestic reforms were severely limited by the system’s dependency on militarism and war.” (Zinn, 589)

Zinn goes on to outline how LBJ’s Great Society was swallowed up by Vietnam, while Jimmy Carter’s reforms kept running out of money because the US kept expanding its nuclear arsenal. We already had enough nukes to kill the world multiple times over, and instead of saying, “maybe that’s enough,” or “maybe we shouldn’t have nukes at all,” we let the 1970s happen.

The point is, just because a guy (and apparently it has to be a guy) wins the presidency does not mean people want him to be president. Or, to quote Zinn:

“The repeated elections of Republican candidates [from 1980-88]…were treated by the press with words like ‘landslide’ and ‘overwhelming victory.’ They were ignoring four facts: that roughly half the population, though eligible to vote, did not; that those who did vote were limited severely in their choices to the two parties that monopolized the money and the media; that as a result many of their votes were cast without enthusiasm; and that there was little relationship between voting for a candidate and voting for specific policies.” (Zinn, 598, emphasis mine)

In a system where the government doesn’t work for the people but for itself, incumbents are going to have a hard time. Voters are going to check out—just ask all those swing state voters googling “did Joe Biden drop out” on the day of the election.

Why Would Voters Check Out?

Zinn makes the case that there’s been an awareness of the government not working for the people, but for money, growing since Vietnam. If I had the space, I’d detail the antiwar and anti-nukes activism of the 1970s and 1980s. I’d talk about Vietnam being the moment when people realized a talking point Andrew Tate, of all people, would later parrot:1 you’re not serving your country, or gaining honor, or proving anything by joining the military. You’re fighting for other people’s money.

The case Zinn makes is that the US is a class-based society that doesn’t like to talk about class. As I’ve said before, the time is now to fully embrace class war. The billionaires foisted it on us. It’s here whether you like it or not. Now see if any of these quotes feel applicable to today:

“…both parties, through the eighties and early nineties, kept strict limits on social programs for the poor, on the ground that this would require more taxes, and ‘the people’ did not want higher taxes. This was certainly true as a general proposition…But when they were asked if they would be willing to pay higher taxes for specific purposes like health and education, they said yes, they would.” (Zinn, 599)

I will forever hate MattYYGeligous or however you spell his asshole name for being like “why would Chicago want parks?”2 THANK YOU, high taxes, for the amount of parks and playgrounds I can walk my kid to, and THANK YOU, high taxes, for there being a great neighborhood school that meets his needs. Anyway:

“…when higher taxes were presented in class terms, rather than as a general proposal, people were quite clear. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in December 1990 showed that 84 percent of the respondents favored a surtax on millionaires (this provision was dropped around that time from a Democratic-Republican budget compromise). Even though 51 percent of the respondents were in favor of raising the capital gains tax, neither major party favored that.” (Zinn, 599)

Please remember that in 1990 we had way fewer billionaires than we do now, and “millionaire” was an epithet on Columbo.

“A Harris/Harvard School of Public Health poll of 1989 showed that most Americans (61 percent) favored a Canadian-type health system, in which the government was the single payer to doctors and hospitals, bypassing the insurance companies, and offering universal medical coverage to everyone. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party adopted that as its program, although both insisted they wanted to ‘reform’ the health system.” (Zinn, 599, emphasis mine)

Notice how often and for how long both parties have been selling you on the desire for a better healthcare system, and have not delivered. The ACA was an important first step, and Obama gets kudos for making that a central conversation. Joe Lieberman will get pineapples shoved up his ass in Hell. Meanwhile, how many people have gone bankrupt because they got hit by a car since 1990?

“A survey by the Gordon Black Corporation for the National Press Club in 1992 found that 59 percent of all voters wanted a 50 percent cut in defense spending in five years. Neither of the major parties was willing to make major cuts in the military budget” (Zinn, 599)

Here’s something Brendan said to me once: “show me an antiwar presidential candidate and I’ll vote for them.” Shit man. When was the last time we had that? I’ll even overcome my social anxiety enough to phonebank and knock doors for an actual antiwar presidential candidate. Uno mas:

“How the public felt about government aid to the poor seemed to depend on how the question was put. Both parties, and the media, talked incessantly about the ‘welfare’ system, that it was not working, and the word ‘welfare’ became a signal for opposition. When people were asked (a New York Times/CBS News poll of 1992) if more money should be allocated to ‘welfare’ only 23% agreed. But when the same people were asked, should the government give ‘more assistance to the poor,’ 64 percent answered yes.” (Zinn, 599-600)

Hey, Jesus said “the poor will always be among you.” He also spent his whole life helping them out. Good enough for a Palestinian carpenter wrongfully executed by the Roman police state? Good enough for the USian government, people say. Hang, uno mas for real this time, for any DNC consultants that might be reading.

“This was a recurring theme. When, at the height of the Reagan presidency, in 1987, people were asked if the government should guarantee food and shelter to needy people, 62 percent answered yes.” (Zinn, 600)

No matter how stupid you think the average USian voter is—and it’s pretty clear that 33% of USian voters is one or more of 1) rock-stupid 2) evil 3) aware that their individual vote doesn’t count for much—people can see that their government doesn’t work for them. The only Democrat to convincingly win the Presidency in the last 30 years did so on a message of “hope and change.” He then proceeded to immediately bail Wall Street and banks out of the financial crisis. He also proved a Black person can win the Presidency, and while I’m not gonna do some “we’re post-racial now” bullshit, I think that does indicate that the electorate isn’t purely racist and sexist.

So again: Democrats cannot abandon marginalized people, and they cannot out-war or out-cruel the Republicans. Any concessions or compromise will never be enough for these bloodthirsty Christofascist freaks. When you say “genocide in Gaza is fine but we feel bad about it” or “we welcome everyone to our great nation, but yeah, DO NOT COME,” all you’re getting is the approval of The Lincoln Project. Literally no one else.

Imagine who they could get if they made taking care of people their whole thing.

Hey, anybody remember 2004, when Dems blamed their loss on focusing too much on abortion? I didn’t, but Rebecca Traister did.

What Can Be Done?

To fight the coming mass deportations and whatever else results from a bunch of Curtis Yarvin–pilled losers getting a megalomaniac sundowner to crash the economy? I’m not sure. I’m not going to pretend to know how to live in a state more failed.

“As the United States entered the nineties, the political system, whether Democrats or Republicans were in power, remained in the control of those who had great wealth. The main instruments of information were also dominated by corporate wealth. The country was divided, though no mainstream political leader would speak of it into classes of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, separated by an insecure and jeopardized middle class.” (Zinn, 617)

Brutal, huh? Not too hard to see how things got from 1992 to now, is it? But Zinn continues, and this is where I want to hang my argument.

“Yet, there was, unquestionably, though largely unreported, what a worried mainstream journalist had called ‘permanent adversarial cutlure’ which refused to surrender the possibility of a more equal, more humane society. If there was hope for the future of America, it lay in that refusal.” (Zinn, 617)

A better world is still possible. We outnumber them, even if they have all the money to launch weird anti-trans ads during the World Series and bankroll YouTubers who will buy out skate parks.

Fuck their money.

Fuck them.

Power to the people.

Sorry you got an email,

Chris