Trump and Miller Go to War
Sending the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles to quell a non-existent "insurrection," they're proving to be as dangerous as we feared. But the Defiance has the next move, on No Kings Day.
Saturday night, Donald Trump declared war on us. The presidential memorandum he issued, titled, “Department of Defense Security for the Protection of Department of Homeland Security Functions,” is an open-ended declaration that he will use the National Guard to subdue protests against his government. The memo claims that the protests against ICE now underway in southern California and elsewhere “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” and authorizes the Secretary of Defense to mobilize not just National Guard members but also “any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.” Its language is extremely dangerous.
But before you freak out over the words, remember this: Trump also chickens out when he’s faced with countervailing power. And this isn’t just true of his backdowns on tariffs. More than once, he’s quietly given in on immigration fights. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is now back in the US from El Salvador, getting the due process he was initially denied. Ming Li “Carol” Hui, the Chinese immigrant from Kennett, Missouri whose detention drew local protests and then national attention from the New York Times, has also been freed from jail.
Events have been moving quickly in Los Angeles, but I agree with my friend Marc Cooper (who lived there many years) that so far, the protests there are nothing like a “violent insurrection” (the fevered claim of Trump-whisperer Stephen Miller) or even close to 1965 Watts uprising or the 1992 Rodney King riots. As Marc writes, “Those two eruptions involved thousands, and thousands were arrested, dozens were killed, entire stretches of main boulevards were set ablaze. An epidemic of looting spread through the city.” In that context, Trump and Miller’s lustful leap to a national militarized response is a massive projection, a provocation in search of a justification.
As I wrote last week, the Defiance is at an inflection point. Miller is screaming at ICE to invade Home Depots and other places where immigrants work (or seek work), a big leap past the “we’re only going after hardcore criminals” lie. Quite rightly, this is generating a growing backlash. So to a degree that no one could have anticipated, the June 14 “No Kings” rallies that were originally planned as counter-programming to the Orange Cheeto’s Birthday Party to Himself’s Military Parade in DC are suddenly much more urgent. It’s one thing to protest a symbolic display of military might. It’s quite something else when American troops are firing rubber bullets at American protestors.
As of today, there were close to 2000 local protest events registered on the NoKings.org site. That’s already almost 50% more than the number of Hands Off rallies held across America on April 5, when an estimated three million people turned out. This Saturday’s protest wave is going to be much bigger and broader, and that’s the best thing any of us can do to keep Trump and Miller from escalating further.
--P.S. If you are wringing your hands worrying about the violent scenes coming out of LA, read Marc Cooper’s latest: “On Protestor Violence in L.A” and Rebecca Solnit’s “Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence.”
Changing the Playbook (Cont’d Some More)
—Russell Berman got the scoop yesterday in The Atlantic (gift link) on new research from Vote Forward, which last year orchestrated a grassroots letter-writing campaign aimed at five million occasional voters hoping to nudge them into voting. It found that the push “had no effect on turnout.” That’s a big comedown from 2020, when the group bragged that their 2020 “Big Send” program found that partially handwritten letters sent by volunteers significantly boosted turnout. Apparently, such letter-writing no longer stands out in the ever-noisy campaign environment, except perhaps with newly registered voters, which Vote Forward found could be nudged to vote by a modest +.16%. So the group estimates it drove an extra 9,000 voters to the polls overall, after getting 78,000 volunteers to write 9.75 million letters. Vote Forward notes that its effort was still cost effective, because it only cost the group about $175,000 to subsidize printing and stamps, but as my friend and sometime co-author Lara Putnam points out on X, that’s not counting the millions that volunteers spent out of their own pockets on wasted postage.
In the wake of this news, there were a fair number of discouraged volunteers on a Zoom briefing that Vote Forward did last night. People were openly wondering if they had wasted their time and money handwriting hundreds of letters. In the Q&A box, Ingrid Chang, a Vote Forward staffer, argued, “We are still making a difference! While a few tenths of a percentage point may not seem like a lot, it can be a big deal when elections are won and lost on tight margins. And when multiplied across thousands or millions of voters, that small effect size can translate into a meaningful number of people showing up to make their voices heard. It turns out that getting nonvoters to vote is pretty difficult! We also see evidence from other organizations working in voter turnout that small effect sizes are common. Small effect sizes still have big impacts.” (It’s not your small effect size, it’s how you use it?)
Emily Wasserman, Vote Forward’s research director, admitted on the Zoom that Vote Forward’s larger impact in 2020 was probably due, at least in part, to the fact that everyone was home because of Covid and more isolated, making a personal letter more impactful. Going forward, she said that the group still planned to use letter-writing where it believes it can be most effective: “low turnout, low-information elections where voter contact is scarce.” That makes sense. But looking ahead, the group is planning to explore a range of tactics that may push its volunteers away from their kitchen tables and into tactics like relational organizing via text messaging, “person-to-person digital organizing,” and distributed canvassing strategies, “training and supporting volunteers to lead localized, issue-driven canvasses, including methods like deep canvassing and issue persuasion.” Which is to say: After several years teaching people that they could make a real impact on politics without leaving the safety of their kitchen tables, Vote Forward is admitting it oversold its strategy and is putting the best face possible on the need to get out there and build authentic relationships!
—Charlotte Swasey has fleshed out her critique of power-building/long-term community organizing with a long post detailing all the differences between field, canvassing, paid canvassing, organizing, mobilizing, power-building, getting-out-the-vote, persuasion and relational organizing, and taking on some of the responses she got to her first post. That includes my suggestion that it’s not fair to say that we’re actually “throwing money” at long-term community organizing. But the chart she shows for the Movement Voter PAC’s month-by-month fundraising in 2023-24 makes my point for me—that this arena is perennially underfunded. All that said, she’s not wrong to point out that there aren’t many organizations that have 1) survived for longer than a single electoral cycle, 2) remained focused on their initial stated purpose, 3) engaged people who are not otherwise engaged by Democratic programs, and 4) produced new votes for Democrats at a cost comparable to other methods. I can think of a few, starting with labor unions, and including Working America (an offshoot of the AFL-CIO). Is it a coincidence that a big piece of opposition to ICE in Los Angeles is coming from unions like the SEIU? I think not.
—Matt Browner Hamlin has updated his writing on progressive tech infrastructure and practices with a fresh post on how organizing tools have evolved over the last few decades. IMHO, he covers a lot of the key points, tools and moments—from MyBO and Change.org and ControlShift’s distributed petition platform to more recent tools like peer-to-peer SMS and Slack. I think he’s right that the culture of an organization (in terms of whether it values volunteers and organizing or just wants to mobilize people or farm them for resources) matters more than the tools available, and I hadn't quite thought of how that would make the development of volunteer-empowering tools a lower priority for investment by campaigns. The hard truth: it’s exceedingly rare for someone to build a tool meant specifically to enhance popular self-organizing and then see that tool take off. Most of the time, people use the tools they’re already familiar with and make them work to meet their needs.
Tenth Avenue Shakeout
While I don’t have a vote in this month’s New York City primary elections, I am watching them unfold with grim interest. Three observations:
One: NYC is the largest jurisdiction in America using ranked-choice voting, and I don’t know a single voter there who is happy about trying to figure out how to rank the candidates running for mayor—let alone in the far less visible city council races that are being contested by multiple candidates. The problem, alas, is when you have a lot of candidates all running on the same party label, voters have a hard time figuring out who to support—something a new academic study of multicandidate primaries bears out. Proponents of RCV claim that the system is needed to prevent non-plurality winners, but NYC used to solve that problem with runoff elections—a more expensive but arguably far less confusing approach. The other big claim for RCV is that it rewards moderates because they’re presumably better at appealing to a larger swath of the electorate, but as the mayoral race comes into focus, it appears that either a well-financed candidate with high name recognition is going to win (disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo), or a well-organized candidate with a highly motivated base is going to win (socialist state assemblymember Zohran Mamdani). If by some chance Mamdani beats Cuomo, I’m looking forward to how RCV advocates will explain this to their funders, who mostly come from the hedge-fund class. If on the other hand, Cuomo wins, then it will be time to start calling RCV “Rich Celebrity Voting.”
Two: Mamdani’s rise as the choice of most left-leaning New Yorkers has eclipsed NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, an old-school progressive who was the leading candidate of the liberal-left in the city and who still retains the backing of many name-brand groups and individuals. Ross Barkan argues that Lander’s decline is proof of his theory that the “professional left” is on its way out, though I think there’s a clearer explanation, one that has less to do with professionalization and more to do with generational shifts. The ground that a whole generation of liberal-leftists in NY stood on started to break in the years 2017-2021, as intergenerational warfare broke out inside organizations over everything from #MeToo to the racial reckoning over “white supremacy culture” and workplaces often became paralyzed by internal rancor. As The Intercept’s Ryan Grim described in his essential 2022 report on “The Elephant in the Zoom”, in many places older white leaders, male and female, were pushed out of organizations or decided to get out of nightmare jobs or make graceful exits. But it was all quite debilitating. Plus trying to run organizations over Zoom during Covid's early days didn't help at all.
If you recall, in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary the left in NYC was split between civil rights leader Maya Wiley, city comptroller Scott Stringer and social worker Dianne Morales—who positioned herself as the most radical of the three. The younger side of the generational divide fell hard for Morales at first—pushing many organizations to cozy up to her—and then the young people inside her campaign blew her up over allegations of harassment and other forms of bad management. The disarray opened a path for former cop Eric Adams and the rest was history.
Today, in understanding the eclipse of Lander, I'd put a LOT of weight on how October 7 and the Gaza conflict has broken the old liberal-progressive camp (something Barkan barely mentions). Lander, a liberal Jewish supporter of Israel who wants it to end the Gaza war and the West Bank occupation and bring about a two-state solution of the conflict, has tried to keep his footing exactly where the chasm keeps widening. Cuomo is running unabashedly for the votes of traumatized liberal city Jews along with pandering to its Orthodox and Hasidic enclaves, and unfortunately the rise of visible anti-semitism in the city only helps him. Meanwhile, Mamdani has the luxury of talking about being “consistent” in his support for Palestinian human rights, which puts him much more in tune with younger voters than Lander.
Third: In Lander’s old city council district, the polarized post-October 7 politics are playing out in a fight between the city’s first Muslim woman councilmember, Shahana Hanif (a former Lander staffer) and Maya Kornberg, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. This very progressive district, which centers on Park Slope, is one of the places that Maury Litwack’s Jewish Voters Unite, a “nonpartisan organization working to ensure that the Jewish community comes out in full force” is investing heavily, hoping to knock Hanif out by highlighting claims that she is antisemitic. Other big money interests, like Uber PAC NY, James Dolan (the owner of Madison Square Garden) and some real estate moguls, are also spending heavily on behalf of Kornberg. My friend Robin Epstein, who lives in the district, has written a long and impassioned post rebutting the antisemitism claim in detail, which I recommend you read. I don’t believe Hanif is antisemitic myself. The problem, however, is obviously that Hanif – like Mamdani – isn’t interested in walking the tightrope that her ex-boss Lander is still dancing on. As this report on a meeting she held with 16 local Jewish community members last year suggests, she apparently believes that Palestinian pain is deserving of more attention than Jewish pain. Asked to condemn local graffiti criticizing Israel that these community members found offensive, she reportedly replied, “I’ve called out the vandalism that flattened Gaza,” Hanif said. “So what’s the vandalism that you’d like me to call out, because if it’s ‘Free Palestine,’ that’s making a statement about a self-determination.” This is one side you can take. Still, why do we have to choose whose pain is greater? And since when did progressives decide it was ok to say that you can ignore a community’s pain if that community is Jewish?
If You Read One Thing About Musk’s Third-Party Threat
Make it Lee Drutman on why it won’t work.
End Times
Los Angeles Football Club fans do not mince words.
"but as my friend and sometime co-author Lara Putnam points out on X, that’s not counting the millions that volunteers spent out of their own pockets on wasted postage." Honestly, that's the least of it -- think of the tens of thousands of hours of wasted time, volunteer time that could have done something useful! Stop letter-writing to people you don't know. Stop texting people you don't know. Organizers, stop pretending these equivalents of unsolicited junk mail to people we don't know has an impact. If you want to have an impact, canvass, especially with actual dialogue with voters. Given the stakes, your time is precious so use it wisely.
Micah- Maybe another framing of this is to say the writing campaigns onboarded amazing volunteer armies who are now educated, good at what they do have created amazing communities and can mobilize quickly. What a great accomplishment and an asset to the party, should they avail themselves of this free battle tested labor. It may be that writing campaigns are productive for certain types of races ( as you acknowledge) and we should maximize its usefulness. Markers For Democracy has found great success in school board races. We should now take advantage of the activist army that now exists ( however it emerged) and let's harness all that energy in strategic ways. Personally, I don't buy into relational organizing, at least the way the Dems have so far implemented it. We need good programs for activist groups. That will necessitate a willingness on the part of the powers that be to interact in a meaningful way with the partner volunteer community. You know those of us who onboarded through the postcarding and letter writing campaigns.