This Briahna Joy Gray interview of David Sirota discusses the fundamental problem of money in USA. Politics. Near the beginning, they discuss the likely danger that Harris will lay out positions that are progressive, but eventually abandon them and capitulate to the donor class, as she did on Medicare for All in 2019.
Beginning around 39:23, Sirota summarizes The Lever’s new work on Lewis Powell and the Powell Memo, and how Powell enabled corporations to corrupt the political system. There is some important information that was not publicly known before The Lever staff combed through nearly forgotten archives the past two years, including Powell’s friendship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and the group of secret task forces established by the Chamber of Commerce to implement the Powel Memo.
They discuss what the Democratic Party might do when Trump is no longer on the scene. The Party just can’t be held together if it’s only progressives and big money donors in the Big Tent. Sirota talks about what he saw at the Demcoratic National Convention: the tensions under the surface between clean energy groups and corporate sponsors involved in fossil fuels. “You had anti-billionaire Senator Bernie Sanders… sharing the same stage with Illinois ultra-rich Democratic governor JB Pritzker.”
The last 20 minutes I found very tedious and a bit maddening. Gray asked whether or not Biden was a break from the right-ward drift of the Democratic Party since the 1970s. When Sirota said he thought that was the case, Gray refused to accept the answer and kept pressing for example of how Biden was “better.” Sirota would explain some policy change or program achievement, and Gray would just ignore it.
What a waste of the last 20 minutes! Why can’t Gray and other people on “the left” accept that, as Sirota said, “something changed” that made Biden much better on economics than Clinton and Obama? It would be so much more useful to try to identify what changed, what caused that change, and figure out if that cause and effect can be replicated again to continue driving the Democratic Party toward better economic policies.
And, glaring by its absence, was any discussion of how two of the most progressive member of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman, were defeated in primaries earlier this year. They were buried by an avalanche of money from the Israeli front group, AIPAC. There was no mention of this at all.
Finally, also missing was any discussion of what people can do, either inside or outside the Democratic Party. Gray now believes that the two Sanders presidential campaigns, and the freezing out of AOC, Katie Porter, and The Squad, all show that the Democratic Party is useless as an instrument for achieving progress.
Ok, that’s understandable, but what are the alternatives? Remember, Gray and Sirota have both been “on the inside.” From 1999 to 2001, Sirota worked as press aide and spokesperson for then U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, then served as a speechwriter and senior adviser for the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. And Gray was National Press Secretary for the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.
I should also note that in 2008, Sirota published The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, giving ample warning of the populist surges we have seen under Sanders and Trump. So, an important topic for discussion should be: Why did reactionaries manage to take control of the (anti)Republican Party, but the progressives fails to take control of the Democratic Party?