They are victims too

Comment at DownWithTyranny post about prospect of confronting Nazis with violence:

Even if violence could resolve right wing extremism, it would be violence against our fellow citizens, friends, family and colleagues. The wounds of the American Civil War have not fully healed and now we are actually considering another civil war. Scary times. 

Not to be overly Pollyannish but here's something else to consider: White supremacists are right in the sense that they are victims, just not victims of the people they hold responsible. Like the majority of us, they are victims of an economic system that preys on workers; unlike most, they are also victims of movement recruiters who feed their aggrievement a nasty diet of race blaming. A parallel would be deceitful military recruiters. The leaders of these movements are the real evildoers. 

NPR interviewed A Reformed White Nationalist Speaks Out On Charlottesville.

Sign of fear

The New York Times published an op-ed by Mark Penn and Andrew Stein arguing that Democrats need to shift to the center if they want to win elections. At TRNN, Nina Turner says Democrats lost because they've lost touch with their voters. My thoughts (comment at TRNN link):

As I see it, the Penn & Stein op-ed in the NYT was a pre-emptive attempt to frame the debate. In other words, the only news worthy of print ("All the News That's Fit to Print") is defined by the tiny ideological differences between Republicans and establishment Democrats. All other ideas and positions are 'extremist' views and unworthy of print. An excellent example of this bias was the way the NYT covered Bernie's campaign - by not covering it, they deemed his positions and policies 'not fit to print'. The galvanized resistance to the GOP healthcare plan and growing calls for single payer probably has the establishment quaking in their boots.

Unifying Resistance

A comment I posted at Truthout. It pulls together several themes I've written about here:

"Trump is upping his game, and we, as resisters, aren't ready." 

Yes. It's also time to be proactive as opposed to reactive. But we need to understand the reflex to react and how to step back and see the forest to respond proactively. It's important to understand how politics divides people in both obvious and subtle ways. DJT is a practitioner of confrontational divisiveness; he outright declares his rejection of immigrants, Mexicans, unattractive women, prisoners of war, disabled people, etc. Divide and conquer can also be achieved by more subtle tactics, such as when Republicans and Democrats specifically void the needs of the poor by leaving them out of the debate (or DJT spotlighting the educated with his 'I love the poorly educated').  

The modus operandi of the body politic is to act on the interests of the elite at the expense of the larger population by dividing the larger group. Successful opposition would require some degree of unified resistance which is not the case with single issue movements. I would suggest single issue movements make their case under the umbrella of a larger 'meta' theme for the benefit of the larger overall. For instance, demanding that all policy be based on objective evidence would mean the numbers of gun injuries and deaths factors into gun policy and definitions of corporate personhood would correct for the differential influence such policy would confer on owners. Another useful theme would be to define economies as 'production, consumption and exchange of capital for the sustained wellbeing of humanity'. 'Sustained' would entail policy makers incorporate a long view of policy outcomes - think climate change; 'wellbeing' would require some degree of universal healthcare; and the 'economics' of warfare would be completely invalidated. A final theme would be maximize information transparency. The only way a small group (elites) can concentrate power to any extent is through the control of information. They use propaganda (selective/deceptive use of information) to create divides in the larger population and amplify infighting. Information transparency inoculates against propaganda.  

The resistance movement needs to recognize that although Trump is personally repugnant and vulgar, he is only a figurehead. The real adversaries in the long fight are the power elites.

Protests

I've been thinking about how I (as audience member) would/could respond to a disruptive protest like what happened to Bernie Sanders in Seattle. I think if the protesters annoyed me, I would turn my back to them and ostentatiously cover my ears with my hands. The point being to devoid protesters of my unwilling participation.

By the way, this isn't a denunciation of the Black Lives Matter movement. I haven't quite worked out my position... they still have far to go to do what Glen Ford said so well:

"...In terms of the Black Lives Matter shutting down these candidates, I’m totally with that. I wish they would shut all of them down. But I get a little bit confused. If our only demand is that these Democratic, and I guess Republican, candidates for president declare and recognize that black lives matter, so what if they do? What after that? What is the real demand? Are you then going to vote for these same criminals just because they said the magic words, yes, black lives matter? Movements are defined by their demands. And a year after Michael Brown’s death, a year after the emergence of this incipient movement, this movement needs to be about getting its demands together, and that would be something to strategize about and to move forward..."