Republican Tyranny, Orange Menace

Democracy is trumped in the United States by multiple, overlapping, interrelated and mutually reinforcing forms of despotism. The Trump administration and the Trumpified Republican Party, backed by a cult-like base, embody a creepy, neofascistic variant of the disease.

The Republican White House and Senate are currently conducting a tasteless tutorial in tyranny, making a Monty Pythonesque mockery of the U.S. Constitution and “the rule of law.” The Great God Trump was caught red-handed setting the U.S. Founders’ wigs on fire by trying to trade military assistance and a White House visit to Ukraine’s newly elected president Volodomyr Zelensky in return for a Kiev press conference announcing an investigation based on a right-wing conspiracy theory meant to discredit Trump’s perceived U.S.-presidential rival, the conservative Democratic blowhard “Pool Chain” Joe Biden.

Confronted with this presidential misconduct by a “deep state” (likely CIA) whistleblower, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was compelled to overcome her reluctance to impeach the pestilential fiend who contaminates America and the world with his every vile emission.

The evidence of Trump’s criminal abuse of power is overwhelming. Equally convincing is the expert legal testimony contending that his offense is worthy of impeachment and removal.

UkraineGate is just one of the tangerine tyrant’s many mind-boggling misdeeds. It is far from his worst wrongdoing. Numerous other atrocities stand higher on the list of Trump’s most terrible transgressions: family separations at the border; kids in cages; the abrogation of asylum law; the pardoning of sociopathic war criminals and a fascist sheriff; the encouragement and sparking of lethal political violence; slashing Food Stamps and Medicaid for needy people deemed disposable; the proclamation of a fake national emergency; the failure to prepare for and respond adequately to deadly hurricanes; the continuation (over Congressional opposition) of U.S. participation in the crucifixion of Yemen; the diversion of taxpayer dollars to the construction of a hated nativist Wall; the message that Border Patrol agents should shoot asylum seekers and otherwise feel free to break the law; the sick campaign to remove tens of millions of people from health insurance; the cover provided for neo-Nazis and other white supremacists and for Saudi Arabia’s murderous vivisection of a dissident journalist; the reckless and monumentally criminal assassination of Iran’s top military commander; the malevolent acceleration of the carbon-capitalist war on livable ecology (for example); and…the list goes on.

Still, the Trump-Giuliani-Parnas Ukraine gambit is very much like what the United States Founders had most in mind when they included the impeachment clause in their republican, anti-monarchical Constitution. The framers understandably fretted that a U.S. president might try to unfairly perpetuate his rule by enlisting foreign actors (governments included) in service to his domestic political interests.

The Trump-Republican-FOX News response to Congressional efforts to honor James Madison and meet basic constitutional responsibilities in response to Trump’s Ukraine shenanigans has been shameless obstruction, denial, and dismissal with on a scale that would make Mussolini blush:

+ A blanket White House refusal to comply with Congressional subpoenas.

+ Flat disavowal of the quid pro quo despite clear evidence of the quid pro quo.

+ Absurd insistence that Trump’s “perfect [July 25th, 2019] call” to Zelensky was really about a sincere desire to investigate corruption in Ukraine and to enlist more European support for the Kiev government.

+ Diversion from the transgression with reams of conspiratorial nonsense about the ridiculous Bidens.

+ Repeated Trump and Republican references to constitutional-republican investigation and prosecution of his presidency as an attempted “coup.”

+ The bogus argument that Trump cannot be legally removed without having been shown to have violated any specific criminal statutes.

+The false claim that Trump broke no laws.

+ The absurd portrayal of impeachment as an attempt by “the radical Left Democrats” to “cancel the voice of the voters.” (The Democratic Party is run by center-right corporatist imperialists. Trump lost the 2016 popular vote to the highly unpopular Hillary Clinton by 3 million tallies).

+ Likely successful (I am writing on the morning of Thursday, January 30^th) efforts to turn the Senate removal trial into an open farce by blocking the testimony of witnesses and the presentation of new evidence – this even as (a) key UkraineGate participant Lev Parnas has been telling the media that Trump knew him quite well and commanded the arms-for-dirt deal; (b) the New York Times has recently released passages providing direct first-person confirmation of the quid pro quo from a forthcoming book by Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who is usefully a frothing right-wing warmonger. The Trump administration is now moving to prohibit the publication of Bolton’s book.

Nothing says “the rule of law,” “constitutional checks and balance,” and free speech like a Senate anti-impeachment mistrial without witnesses and new evidence and the banning of books.

“The Argument of a Monarch”

Now we have the final soul-numbing absurdity, The president’s Orwellian celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz actually went on the floor of the U.S. Senate Wednesday to say this: “if a president does something that he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

Say what? “The Trump team’s argument,” as the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah observes,
“is now that ANYTHING Trump does to get himself re-elected is fine because his re-election in his mind is good for the country – and then it’s not impeachable. Anything.”

Yes, anything. The contention is that there’s nothing impeachable Trump could have done to advance his re-election since he believed that his re-election is good for the country. Hey, forget about just shooting people on Fifth Avenue. He could barbecue small children out of the belief that doing so would help him get re-elected and therefore be good for the country and that would be okay. In Dershowtiz world, it would be just fine – constitutionally speaking – for Trump to order the rounding up and extermination of all Lutherans if Trump thought doing so would be good for his re-election and thus for the country.

Talk about a slippery slope!

As the Canadian academic and activist Gabriel Alan tells me, Dershowitz’s argument “has a tautological antilogic reminiscent of Nixon’s assertion that if the president does something then it cannot be illegal. It is essentially the argument of a monarch.”

L’etat, c’est Trump!

This monarchist argument has been accepted by numerous Republican Senators as adequate grounds for dismissal.

Another reminder, perhaps, that the United States never really had a good bourgeois revolution!

The Despotism of American Constitutional Electoral Geography

Trump and his party are determined to stay in presidential power even in defiance of an election that doesn’t go its way next November. Trump has been seeding the narrative that he cannot be fairly or legally voted out of office from day one of his presidency. And much of the Trumpenvolk base is prepared to take up arms if “necessary” to block “the radical Left Democrats” (permanent proletarian revolution and workers’ control advocates like the legendary left anarchist Joe Biden) from taking back the White House.

But Trump and his minions may not have to resort to extra-constitutional measures come the next quadrennial holy day. Even as they brazenly defy constitutional rules and principles, the ever-more neofascistic Republicans are hazardously over-empowered by the same Constitution they flout with impunity. Under the extensive reign of the slave-owning Founding Fathers’ 1787 charter, “America’s political system counts states and districts rather than people.” This, Vox founder Ezra Klein notes, gives the nation’s rightmost party a perverse “geographical advantage that offsets its popular disadvantage.”

Trump’s removal has always been highly unlikely thanks to the Constitution’s steep Senate threshold (a two-thirds vote) for defenestration and to the Trumpified Republican Party’s absurd majority position in the upper body of Congress. And the widely hated Republicans run the Senate thanks in no small part to the fact that the Constitution drastically overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary, white and rural regions. It does this by giving every U.S. state two U.S. Senators regardless of their total population.

This grotesque violation of the elementary democratic principle of one-person, one-vote is quite extreme. “By 2040,” Klein writes, “70 percent of Americans will live in the 15 largest states [and be]…represented by only 30 senators while the other [disproportionately white, rural, evangelical, right-wing and FOX Newsified] 30 percent of America will be represented by 70 senators.”

(As few know, the Constitution’s framers placed the by now super-absurd apportionment of the U.S. Senate [California’s 40 million citizens are no more represented by U.S Senators than are Wyoming’s less-than 600,000 citizens] beyond the reach of change through constitutional amendment.)

The House of Representatives, too, is badly and all-too constitutionally weighted towards the most reactionary of the two dominant capitalist parties. Partisan gerrymandering, fully legal under (though not at all mandated by) the Constitution, now means that the Democrats have to win nearly 60 percent of the popular House vote nationwide to command the gavel in the lower Congressional body. That, too, is totally absurd from a one-person, one-vote perspective.

Then there’s the ludicrous Electoral College, always fun to try to explain to European friends. The citizens of the “world’s greatest democracy” don’t elect “their” president by popular vote. The purposely democracy-negating/-flunking Electoral College limits serious inter-party presidential-electoral contestation to a relatively small handful of “battleground” states and renders millions of votes superfluous to the presidential election’s outcome (it makes no “winner take all” Electoral College difference if the Democratic contender beats his or her Republican opponent for 700 or by 7 million votes in California or New York). It also grants the rightmost party a geographical advantage so great that “Republicans can count on winning two-thirds of the elections in which they narrowly lose the popular vote” (Klein).

(There’s never been a bigger popular vote loser in the White House than Donald Trump. He managed to lose the technically irrelevant popular count by three million tallies to the broadly disdained Hillary Clinton in 2016.)

To top it all off, the undemocratically elected U.S. president appoints the powerful, for-life U.S. Supreme Court, subject to two-thirds confirmation by the undemocratically apportioned Senate. The high court is controlled by the white-nationalist Republican Party, casting a dark reactionary pall across the nation.

Forget “democracy,” the republic is in dire straits. The framers’ vaunted “checks and balances” lose much of their meaning when one vicious right-wing party controls all or nearly all three branches of the federal government (not to mention most of the 50 state governments). As Klein warns:

“It is not difficult to imagine an America where Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they typically control both the House and Senate despite rarely winning more [Congressional] votes than the Democrats, where their dominance of the Supreme Court is unquestioned and where all this power is used to buttress a system of partisan gerrymandering, pro-corporate campaign finance laws, strict voter-identification requirements and anti-union legislation that further weakens Democrats’ electoral performance.” (E. Klein, “Polarization and the Parties,” New York Times, Sunday Review, January 26, 2020, p.2).

Despotic Dems

What about the other major party – the other one of the “two wings of the same bird of prey,” as the young socialist Upton Sinclair accurately described the Democrats and the Republicans in 1904? It too is an authoritarian entity. Beyond the advantages conferred to it by the Electoral College and by racist-partisan vote suppression in key Republican-controlled states, the Trumpenstein owes its presence in the White House primarily to the Democrats’ long and cringing captivity to elite corporate and financial interests. The Clinton-Obama-Pelosi-Robert Rubin-Citigroup-Council on Foreign Relations-Center for American Progress-CNN-MSNBC-Washington Post Democrats’ not-so “progressive neoliberal” commitment to corporate globalization, capitalist austerity, and imperial interventionism has worked insidiously to demobilize and demoralize the nation’s all-too silent progressive majority in ways that have helped open the door to “history’s most dangerous party” (Noam Chomsky’s interesting description of the Ecocidal G.O.P.) again and again.

The horrific Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 is a classic case in point. It was a depressing, dollar-drenched follow-up to the miserably elitist, insufferably arrogant, and nauseatingly neoliberal Barack “Dollar O’bomber” presidency. By defaming and cheating the authentically progressive Bernie Sanders and running a deeply conservative and openly conceited, heartland-insulting establishment campaign in an obviously anti-establishment election, the dismal Clinton-Obama Dems and their allied media handed the keys of the imperial presidency to a vicious monster whose person, party, and base pose existential threats to what’s left of democracy at home and abroad – and indeed to life itself.

The corporate-imperial Dems and their many media allies then spent the next three years absurdly blaming the election’s outcome on supposedly super-powerful Russia, advancing a conspiracy theory designed to obscure their own responsibility for the election’s disastrous outcome. Their RussiaGate obsession diverted public attention away from the demented fascist oligarch’s worst crimes, including his disastrous acceleration of carbon capitalism’s exterminist and already Stage Four assault on livable ecology, which is just the biggest issue of our or any time. Along the way, Congressional Democrats have absurdly granted massive military and surveillance budgets to a president they (accurately) describe as a childish dolt, a malignant narcissist, an authoritarian madman, and the like (though almost never as a fascist, curiously enough). How’s that for inauthentic opposition and fake resistance?

Don’t Hold Your Breath

If the Democrats were truly serious about breaking the Republican Senate logjam on Trump removal, they would call for millions of ordinary U.S. citizens to take to the streets to demand the immediate takedown of the Trump-Pence regime. Mass civil disobedience in line with the growing global uprising against tyranny and corruption would be best call for an authentic people’s opposition party and movement. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, and Tom Perez or even Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to invoke the ghosts of the Boston Tea Party, Tom Paine, the Whiskey Rebels, the Molly McGuires, Haymarket Martyrs, Flint sit-down strikers, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, Occupy, and Howard Zinn. The Democratic establishment has no interest in true grassroots movements, which have a nasty habit of raising questions the neoliberal business and professional class “elite” would rather keep suppressed: class inequality, capitalist Ecocide, plutocracy, racism and sexism (deeply understood), militarism, the insanely gigantic Pentagon System, the police state, mass incarceration and more.

For the Democrats, it’s all about electoral politics on the savagely time-staggered election cycle. Their notion of “politics,” the only “politics” that matters is wedded to the disastrous notion that the most important thing a citizen can ever do for democracy and social justice is walk into a caucus room and/or a voting booth to line up with or make a mark next to the name of a political candidate who has already been vetted in advance by upper- and middle-class funders and coordinators.

The Stop Sanders Democrats

Even in the electoral realm, the neoliberal Democrats don’t seem to really want to defeat the venal fascist syndicate atop the federal government. Trump may well not have to challenge the 2020 election count thanks also in part to the centrist neoliberalism fueling the Democratic Party and most of the corporate media. The Party of Fake Resistance’s (PFR’s) leading funders, operatives and media would rather lose to the evermore fascist, right-wing GOP than to the leftish Bernie Sanders wing of their own party. So what if only Sanders can mobilize the voters required to defeat Trump, the wannabe president for life?

Meanwhile, the media more closely aligned with Democrats does everything it can to ignore and demean the Sanders candidacy, failing to cover his rallies and dismissing his platform and “electability.” The Democratic establishment and loyal media outlets refuse to respectfully transmit and take seriously his strong critique of American class inequality and plutocracy. Nor does it highlight his urgent calls for action to confront capitalogenic climate change before the planet is cooked beyond repair. The elite Democrats and their many media allies also smear Sanders’ popular call for single-payer health insurance, declaring it “too radical,” “too expensive” and—to use the contemptuous language of Amy Klobuchar—a “pipe dream” hopelessly untethered from the real world here on earth.

In the distorting hall of mirrors that is the corporate-managed, Democratic, center-left media and politics culture, single-payer isn’t a great social-democratic victory that would embed health care as a human right while dramatically reducing health care costs, improving ordinary Americans’ health and instilling new democratic space in the United States. No, “Medicare for All” is absurdly portrayed by mainstream Democratic politics and media as an overly expensive assault on the population’s existing health insurance plans. Never mind the ridiculously inflated cost and woefully poor performance of the U.S. health care system under the rule of private, for-profit corporations, with their giant and parasitic administrative and marketing costs.

So what if Sanders is the Democrats’ best chance to energize disaffected and disadvantaged sectors of the electorate that need to be rallied to defeat Trump? The Democratic Party isn’t primarily about winning elections, much less social justice, democracy and environmental sanity. It’s mainly about serving corporate sponsors who don’t want even a mildly progressive populist like Sanders in the White House. Even Elizabeth “capitalist in my bones” Warren (who stood up and clapped when Trump ordered Congress to pledge that the U.S. would “never be a socialist country” during his last State of the Union address) is absurdly considered too left for many, if not most, Wall Street Democrats.

No less of a corporate-neoliberal Democratic icon than Barack Obama has made it clear that the Democrats’ most electable candidate must be stopped. As Politico’s Ryan Lizza reported in November, the officially neutral Obama indicated that he would speak up to block Sanders. “Back when Sanders seemed like more of a threat than he does now,” Lizza wrote, “Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him.” A “close Obama friend” told Lizza that “Bernie’s not a Democrat.”

On “Getting Things Done”

Speaking to NBC News last weekend, the center-right purple pragmatist Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar denounced Sanders as “too liberal,” adding that “I don’t think he should be leading the ticket. I think I should be leading the ticket, because my ideas are much more in synch with bold ways of getting things done.” By “bold,” Sen. Klobuchar means milquetoast and mild, consistent with the requirements of corporate bankrollers.

“Getting things done” is a constant “pragmatic” refrain of centrist (neoliberal, ruling-class) Democrats: “we know how to get things done”….like ripping-up AFDC, bombing Serbia, passing the three-strikes prison bill, deregulating finance capital further, bailing out the Great Recession’s financial sector perpetrators while letting the working-class drown, crushing the Occupy Movement, blowing up Libya, deporting millions, exonerating torture, drone-striking with impunity, expanding domestic fracking and oil-drilling – and then cashing in on one’s service to the wealthy Few. Hitler got things done.

Bernie Scares Pete and Michelle

Last Saturday, the slimy former McKinsey staffer and current Wall Street plaything Pete Buttigieg sent out a fundraising email titled, “Bernie Sanders could be the nominee.” The missive went on to warn that “Bernie Sanders is raising tons of money, he’s surging in the polls, and he[‘s] …attacking his competitors. If things stay steady until the Iowa Caucuses in nine days, Bernie Sanders could be the nominee of our party.”

Oh my God and Holy shit: a competitor who almost won the competition last time is competing right now and he might win the competition! Somebody do something!! Stop this competitor before he wins the competition!!!

The underlying and widely understood premise behind such dire warnings is of course that no self-described “democratic socialist” could ever defeat the unmentionably fascistic Trump.

An especially sinister intervention recently came from the keyboard of the pseudo-progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. After subtly sort of smearing Sanders as a loud and bullying, left-wing version of Trump, Goldberg wrote that “the Sanders juggernaut scares me.” Goldberg worries that Trump will crush Sanders with “attack ads about Sanders’ radical past.” She even points neo-McCarthyist candidate-assassins to some of the best red-baiting “gotchya” videos the Trump campaign could use against Sanders.

Would Michelle Goldberg like to tell her Times readers and MSDNC (I mean MSNBC) viewers that her husband is a well-paid adviser to Elizabeth “Capitalist in My Bones” Warren, who stood up and applauded when Herr Donald told the Congress to pledge that “America will never be a socialist country” one year ago? Would she like to use her perch at the nation’s leading newspaper to fight back against neofascist red-baiting neo-McCarthyism of the right-wing? Would she like to read a self-help book on how to feel and move through one’s fear? It might prove useful to her if Bernie wins the nomination.

Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment—which opened the stable door to the tangerine hate “genius” and gets ironically whitewashed by his relentless awfulness— has certainly enjoyed seeing the left-most presidential candidates, Sanders and Warren (polling No. 1 and 2 in Iowa, respectively) tied down in the Senate impeachment farce while the top two Wall Street darlings, r Biden and Buttigieg, have been free to run around Iowa and New Hampshire in the final weeks leading up to the nation’s first presidential caucus (Iowa) and primary (New Hampshire).

Despotic Capital’s “Sanders Scare”

Behind the despotism of both the Constitution-assaulting white-nationalist Republicans and the more constitutionalist neoliberal Democrats lay the despotism of capital. If Sanders somehow gets past establishment obstacles to secure the nomination, many big, traditionally Democratic funders and operatives could sit out the general election and possibly even actively back Trump. Behold this chilling report from the corporate business network CNBC last September:

“Wall Street Democratic donors warn the party: We’ll sit out, or back Trump, if you nominate Elizabeth Warren. In recent interviews of several big-money Democratic donors and fundraisers in the business community, CNBC has found that this opinion is becoming widely shared as Warren surges against Joe Biden. Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle — or even back President Donald Trump — if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party’s nomination…in recent weeks, CNBC spoke to several high-dollar Democratic donors and fundraisers in the business community and found that this opinion was becoming widely shared as Warren, an outspoken critic of big banks and corporations, gains momentum against Joe Biden in the 2020 race. ‘You’re in a box because you’re a Democrat and you’re thinking, ‘I want to help the party, but she’s going to hurt me, so I’m going to help President Trump,’ said a senior private equity executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity in fear of retribution by party leaders. The executive said this Wednesday, a day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would begin a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump” (emphasis added).”

Read that report again. “Several” top Democratic Party election bankrollers were ready to back the revolting orange neofascist Trump over and against not just the progressive populist and self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders but even over and against the self-declared “capitalist” and center-left Democrat Elizabeth Warren.

That was nearly four months ago, when Warren seemed like the top “progressive threat.” Now, with Warren down and Sanders surging in the polls, Bernie is seen as the leading menace by the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money. Behold this from CBNC four days ago – a suggestion that big capital, with parasitic (anti-) health care capital in the vanguard, already starting to on strike against the “radical Left” Sanders:

“Once panned by Wall Street as a socialist with ‘crazy’ ideas, Sen. Bernie Sanders is finally commanding attention from investors. And they don’t like what they see. Shares of the nation’s leading health insurance companies sank Monday after a handful of new polling data showed the Vermont Independent had eclipsed longtime front-runner Joe Biden among Iowans one week before the state’s key Democratic caucuses. Stocks including  Anthem, UnitedHealth and Cigna all fell at least 2% in early trading. Molina Healthcare, an $8 billion health insurance company based in Long Beach, California, dropped 3.1%…”

“An Iowa [Sanders] victory could trigger what Wall Street ‘Bond King’ Jeffrey Gundlach labeled a Sanders ‘scare,’ warning investors earlier this month that the biggest risk to the markets in 2020 is the Vermont senator becoming “more believed in as a real force” that investors would have to take more seriously.”

“ ‘Bernie is stronger than people think,’ the DoubleLine CEO said on Jan. 7. ‘I think it will be taken more seriously as the field winnows. The financial markets broadly will have to deal with the fact that there could be a scare that Bernie Sanders is starting to become a plausible candidate for the nomination.’”

“some of Wall Street’s biggest investors have already raised the alarm that stocks could see a big sell-off if markets start to believe that Sanders could prove a meaningful political threat to President Donald Trump…Bond investor Gundlach said that the biggest risk to the market in 2020 was the possibility of Sanders becoming president. Longtime hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller said something similar last summer, warning that stocks could plummet if Sanders is elected president. ‘If Bernie Sanders became president, I think stock prices should be 30% to 40% lower than they are now,’ he said in June.”

I suspect that Stanley Druckenmiller was/is on to something. He knows his highly class-conscious class very well. A Sanders nomination and presidency would create a very instructive moment regarding how the capitalist class rules.

“It Will Be Up to the People”

So are all we actual Left progressives just supposed to just suck it up and cower under the umbrella of establishment capitalist Democrats, who will either give Trump a second term or gain the White House only to hatch an even worse white-nationalist and neofascist presidency in 2025? Hell No! We should be hitting the streets en masse to demand the collapse of the openly despotic Trump-Pence regime and to challenge all the different forms of despotism. At the same time, there is great democratic opportunity and radical potential in the possible election of Bernie Sanders so long as we understood a Sanders presidency as a partial and opening step in a big and prolonged, many-sided working-class and people’s struggle to reclaim the social, political, and environmental commons. The left historian and journalist Terry Thomas recently put the recent CNBC report in useful historical context for me:

“A Sanders victory could be the start of the real class struggle, because the powers-that-be, especially finance capital, will absolutely sabotage the economy, massive capital flight and emptying of money markets. Moreover, even if he is successful, many of his proposals will cause temporary dislocations in the economy. Think of moving massive investment from military and fossil fuels to a Green New Deal. These are absolutely necessary, but Sanders will likely not have sufficient institutional support to offset the concentrated and economic ‘catastrophe’ that will be implemented to delegitimize his administration and prove ‘socialism’ doesn’t work. It will be up to the people, the masses who benefit from what Bernie is proposing, to stand up and force the issue. I think it can be done, but I’m not confident it will happen. Because, honestly, if he is elected he will inherit a system run by capital, and they will be pissed, and when people see things crumbling they will be scared. If he can pull it off, he will by definition become the greatest president since Lincoln. And also if he/we can pull it off, people will be empowered because not only did they defy the powers-that-be to enact meaningful change, they will have endured the sacrifices and demonstrated the strength to force its implementation.”

In the streets, in the factories, the offices, the mills, the union halls, the churches, the public assemblies, the town halls, the fields, the ballot boxes, the schools, the unions, the media, in the art world, “it will be up to the people.”