The Democratic Party has lost to Donald Trump and MAGA twice, and is continuing to lose working-class voters by clinging to corporate power, militarism, and a leadership class increasingly disconnected from its base. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Norman Solomon about his new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell, and the reality that the right can only be stopped by both confronting Democratic failures and rebuilding a grassroots politics rooted in class, peace, and social movements.
Guests:
Credits:
- Producer: Rosette Sewali
- Studio Production: David Hebden
- Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank
Transcript
he following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us again. My guest today is Norman Solomon. He joins us once again. His latest work, The Blue Road to Trump Hill. This is a critically important book that wrestles with how the Democrats pave the way with its right terror that now controls the US government. Jonas Solomon is the National Director of Roots Action, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. And along with this book, Ruch Action Democratic Autopsy looks at why the Democrats lost. Here’s a quote from one of the reports they did. Because their service to corporate power are still laid to the progressive wing of the party, out of control militarism, disconnection from the base of the working class, and how all that contributed to decline of support and the party’s platforming candidates, not to mention the Gaza War and our unwavering uncritical support of Israel.
And Norman, welcome. Good to have you with this.
Norman Solomon :
Hey, thanks a lot, Marc.
Marc Steiner:
Well, let me just begin with an overview and with your perspective of how and why the Democrats got to a place where they lost their base, whether it’s among the working class or progressives or in communities of color around the country, they’ve just sunk. So let’s start with how that began and why it happened.
Norman Solomon :
Well, I think Bernie Sanders summed it up very well just hours after the calamitous results came in of the reelection of Donald Trump ushering in his second term. Bernie said that it’s not surprising that the working class abandoned the Democratic Party after the Democratic Party abandoned the working class. And that pretty much sums it up. The Democratic Party was never some kind of strong left wing advocacy group for working people, but it did fight for basic, basic improvements in the working conditions and lives of most people in the United States going back to the New Deal of the 1930s. And what has happened gradually, especially over the last three or four decades, is that affinity with support from and for the rich corporations and the merger of more and more corporations into being bigger and bigger and more powerful, that has taken over the Democratic Party.
And the base has been abandoned. And when you abandon people, sooner or later, they figure it out. So the attraction of bogus, pseudo-populist, right-wing demagoguery, which is not a bad description of the current Republican Party, that’s just been appealing to all too many working people, want to be working people, those who feel that their lives are really lives of difficult uphill struggle, just basically in economic terms. That’s where we are now. And people who are listening might wonder, Mark, well, why are you talking about the Democratic Party and criticizing it when we are facing this fascistic politics coming out of the White House, coming out of the dominance of Congress? And I think the answer is really that the only electoral vehicle to turn around this horrible rightward extreme trend in the federal government is through the Democratic Party. And people may not like that.
I wish that were not so, but that’s the real world. And if AOC hadn’t run as a Democrat, if Rashida Talib or Ilhan Omar or Zoran Mandami, now the mayor of New York, if they hadn’t run as Democrats, they wouldn’t be in office. So that is a reality. And quickly, the other reaction might be, “Well, the Democrats are hopeless. Why are you trying to resuscitate this zombie party?” And in a way, the answer is similar. State power really matters. Who’s in the White House? I mean, duh, as the saying goes. Come on. We’ve seen the results of having people in power who are vicious, who are cruel, who are unabashedly pushing the power of the oligarchy.
Marc Steiner:
So this was not necessarily inside your book, but I wanted to ask you this. As I was reading your book, I started thinking about all the work and research I’ve done on 1930s Germany, not comparing this to a Hitlerian moment necessarily, but it came at a time when the left and progressives, liberals of Germany could not come together to defeat, in that case, a minority of the Nazis taking of the entire country. And there’s something about the inability, it seems to me, of different elements in this country, from liberal to progressive to left, to come together at some way to stop this right wing onslaught from taking over the country. To me, it’s almost akin to what happened in the South with the Ku Klux Klan. And some people might say this too a bit extreme, but I see sometimes the right wing taking over as the descendants of the clan taking over this country.
I think
Norman Solomon :
That’s well put. I mean, there’s a kind of a state terrorism which some of the sheriffs in the South were part of the clan and we have ICE behaving in many ways simply like terrorist thugs. It might seem like an exaggeration to some people, but for other people, it has become reality.
Marc Steiner:
So let me come back, not to digress away from your book, but I just wanted to throw that out there because as I was reading the book, this really hit me hard. And I-
Norman Solomon :
Well, I think it’s a key point, Mark, and it’s a dilemma. And as the saying goes, the required response has a dialectical element, which is these truths exist simultaneously, that the Democratic Party has been odious in so many ways, foreign policy supporting one war after another, so many other things that we could mention. At the same time, it is the electoral vehicle, the only way in which we’re going to throw these right-wing Republican thugs out of controlling the Congress and the White House. And I think we could frame our challenge right now as seemingly contradictory, but very real. We need a united front in this midterm election campaign, and then for 2028 for the presidential campaign, a united front with those who include militarists and corporatists who we find odious. At the same time, we need to fight against militarism and corporatism, and we can do that all at the same time.
It just requires some real clarity and determination
Marc Steiner:
To me what you said, it’s what they lost, they never had completely, but what they lost were their union and civil rights roots that really pushed progressive agenda inside the Democratic Party, killed segregation, built unions, fought for working people, and they’ve lost all that.
Norman Solomon :
Yeah. The focus is on identity politics. Class is out the window. Rhetorically, we hear about how the leaders of the Democratic Party are for the working class, but in fighting for the working class, I mean, basically nobody’s been home.
Marc Steiner:
Exactly. So make go through some of your major points. Let’s start with my youngest daughter and her generation and why they are losing the 20 somethings and the 30 somethings to either not voting or voting for a third party or some voting Republican, why they’re losing that group of people who are mostly fairly liberal or progressive.
Norman Solomon :
Yeah. Well, the so- called leadership of the Democratic Party intentionally had their fingers in their ears, and that really resulted in the Trump election back into the White House. When we looked at, and this is in my book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell, there were polls from the New York Times and elsewhere leading into 2022, 2023, early 2024, one poll showing that upwards of 90% of young voters did not want Joe Biden to run for reelection, and yet the so- called leadership and rank and file Democrats in Congress were like, “Oh, yes, sir,” as though he was the political commander-in-chief and just went along with it. And I think one stat I talk about in the book is that when you look at not just young people, but overall Democrats in the United States who were polled in 2022 and 2023 and asked, “Do you want Joe Biden to run for reelection?” The numbers were about 65 to 70% no.
And yet when you look at the numbers of Democrats in Congress at the same time who were saying that, it was about 1%. So what can we say about a party that has its base two-thirds saying, “Joe Biden, don’t run free election,” because they realized it would be a disaster if he did, and he wasn’t capable of serving as president for a second term, it was becoming evident. So two-thirds of the base saying, “No, no, no.” And 1% of their elected supposed representatives on Capitol Hill saying, “1% saying no.” So this is, I think, a snapshot and a politically and historically profound instance of how we’ve got a leadership of the Democratic Party that is absolutely and intentionally estranged from the base. Now, they’re tapped in with Wall Street very well
Marc Steiner:
And
Norman Solomon :
With Silicon Valley gazillionaires, I cite in the book an example where Governor Gavin Newsome, who were now told as the front runner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, sent burner phones, pre-dialed with his digits put into those burner phones to a hundred CEOs of major corporations based in California with a note saying, “I’m here for you. Call me anytime.” And there’s no record of him sending one burner phone to advocates for the poor, for low-income people, for working people. So that’s another snapshot of what we’re up against.
Marc Steiner:
So let me stop there for a minute, because I think that what you just said, the Gavin Newsom is clearly a major front runner for the next nomination in South Democratic Party. And since what you describe is true, what does that portend? I mean, he has physically and oratorically the figure to do to be presidential in a kind of very superficial way.
Norman Solomon :
Hollywood.
Marc Steiner:
Hollywood, exactly. So A, what does that mean? And B, where do you see the organizing taking place to confront that and change the script?
Norman Solomon :
Well, the superficiality is screaming out at us. There’s that saying money doesn’t talk, it screams. And it’s partly confluence of his backing early on from the Getty family and so forth. And also, as you say, it’s just the surface, the tinsel and the imagery that we’ve been inculcated with about what a leadership is. He’s white, he’s slick and so forth, a guy. And at the same time, we have the potential from the base. I mean, Zurn Mandani was elected mayor because 50, 70, 80,000 volunteers went out into the streets of the five boroughs. And you can’t buy
60 or 80,000 volunteers. You can buy them to go out, but there’s not the spirit. There’s not that energy. There’s not that convincing capacity in reaching and talking with people one-on-one and so forth. So I think that’s the antidote to the poison of this kind of superficiality that we’ve seen is so toxic because when you look at these supposed leaders like Newsome and you see what they’re saying, he has moved right. He has vetoed farm worker bills in Congress for the rights of farm workers, for breaks in a hundred plus degree weather in the fields, strikers. He’s vetoed a bill to give them unemployment compensation, environmental regulations, he’s vetoed when they’ve come through. So this is part of the record. And then when he’s asked about Israel and Gaza,
Again, it’s just talking points reflexive. It’s time warned stuff about, “I love Israel. We got to support it. ” Well, Israel’s a genocidal state. And when you look again at the polls, this is another example of the gap because most Democrats say to pollsters about three quarters, Israel has committed genocide. Three quarters of Democrats, according to polls in this country, believe that arms should be cut off. There should be a weapons embargo on Israel, and yet it’s really hard to find these contenders, aside from Congressman Rokhana, we are told contending for the next presidential nomination, we’re willing to say that. So we’ve got to close that gap and the closure of that gap is not going to come from above. It’s going to come because we get organized. And I think this is the last part of the answer to your very good question, which is that’s how change has always happened.
Everything that we can be proud of in this country, Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and so much more, environmental protection all came from the grassroots. And that’s where we are now. That’s what we need.
Marc Steiner:
And I agree. I mean, that’s where all the change came from, enforced legislation to change America in all those cases. And your governor in California is somebody that people want to like, but-
Norman Solomon :
Well, there’s a desperation. People
Marc Steiner:
Want
Norman Solomon :
Somebody who can go toe-to-toe with Trump and so forth. And he’s got tremendous press because he has done tweets and capital letters being equally stupid and abusive. Well, okay, at least it’s combative, which is perhaps an improvement over most who have been at the top of the Democratic Party, but it doesn’t do it. And we’ve learned that. And I think, again, Bernie Sanders has made this point very well. It’s not enough just to say how bad Trump is. You also have to have an alternative that gives people not only a vision, but specifics of what you want to do, like Medicare for All and so forth is something concrete for people that they can wrap their heads around, they can understand that would really change their lives. And I think we’ve seen the failure of, “Oh, Trump is so terrible. He’s going to fall under his own weight.
He’s going to destroy his own political future.” That’s what Hillary Clinton was banking on in 2016, and that’s pretty much what Kamala Harris was banking on in 2024. And the absurdity of that campaign, which I talk about in the book, Joy, the keynote theme of that campaign in August, September, October of 2024 from the Kamala Harris campaign was joy. While genocide was going on in Gaza, when people were worried about paying their bills, I mean, talk about being in the stratosphere of isolation. This continues to dog and cause tremendous problems for and from what we call the leadership of the Democratic Party.
Marc Steiner:
Remember when I read that in your book, I was thinking about how there’s nothing wrong in a campaign being joyful, but with no analysis and no fight behind it saying we want everything. Exactly. It doesn’t work. I mean, let’s talk for a moment about what you’ve written about and the role that Israel and Gaza play in this. And I think it’s a really tough one because we live in a world where many of the people in Jewish communities support the Democratic Party and there’s a growing split inside the Jewish world around Israel, Gaza at this moment. And the kind of line people are trying to thread around opposing Israel’s war and the decimation of Gaza and how that plays into the Democratic Party and how you think that plays into the future of American politics. The
Norman Solomon :
Future of American politics, if the grassroots has something to say about it, is to oppose genocide, to oppose arming any government that is committing atrocities and abusing human rights, the future should be to enforce the law. The Lehi law says you don’t arm human rights abusers around the world, and yet the Biden and Trump administrations have done just that. We’re now in a place where we cannot abide the sustaining of this kind of a policy. And as James Baldwin has written, as George Lakoff, the linguist has written as well, politics ultimately in people’s minds has to do with being moral. We would argue sometimes a very distorted view of that, but it is a moral engine that moves forward political and social movements. And not just, but especially young people in this country are revolted by and are revolting against the kind of support for genocide that the US government has continued to provide to Israel, as well as now this war of aggression, not a war of choice, a war of aggression against Iran which has the Middle East in flames as we speak.
So this is about moral politics. Martin Luther King talked about how love without power is anemic and power without love is ruthless. We need love and power energized through politics. So
Marc Steiner:
One of the things I started thinking about was, what is the alternative and how do you begin to organize and generate a movement and campaigns to change it? I mean, I watched the 20s and 30 somethings in my family. They’re all disenchanted with the Democratic Party. They’re disenchanted with the way politics is going in America. But they’re also out there in Gaza demonstrations and they’re doing other things to stand up or organizing a union in their workplace worth what they’re doing. The question is, what is the strategy to get back to union and civil rights roots for the 21st century to organize and to build something? How do you see that happening?
Norman Solomon :
Well, there’s a saying when people lead, leaders will follow, at least some of them. And the conception of so many people running for office and those in office, which is unfortunately internalized so often by so many of us, is that social movements are a subset of political campaigns, and that’s best atwards.
What we really need and what we benefit from when it happens is that political campaigns, electoral campaigns are subsets of social movements. And so when the social movements gain power, that can have a tremendous impact, not only on people’s understanding, but also on the results of the election. There’s no way that we could say, I believe, that Bernie Sanders would’ve had a ghost of a real chance to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 without the Occupy Movement a few years earlier that was not only mobilizing people, but educating and agitating for millions of other people. And I think that is the future. It’s not by any means simple. I mean, it’s so much easier said than done. And I’ve written books, I’ve written a thousand articles, but the hardest thing I’m engaged with, with my colleagues at rootsaction.org is organizing because it’s messy, it’s difficult.
There’s all kinds of contradictions, but that’s how these changes get done. And if you look at the electoral arena, you see someone like I think one of the greatest members of Congress in my lifetime, Rashida Talib out of Michigan. She is immersed in social movements. She is an expression of them. She’s not simply using them for votes. And
Marc Steiner:
The time we have left, and I really having this conversation with you makes me want to have a number of them and we explore some things in depth here. But let’s talk for a moment about your organization Roots Action and what you just talked about a moment ago because the question to me, it goes back to grassroots organizing. So the question is, how do you organize that? How does that take root to seize today? Because I think that we are really on a precipice here. We’re a very dangerous precipice with this neophasistic right wing government that’s in power and Democrats in disagree not knowing what the hell to do.
Norman Solomon :
Well, we’re an extremely dangerous precipice, that’s for sure. And to mobilize means to requires that we mobilize in communities around the country. At rootsaction.org, Jeff Cohen, my longtime colleague and I founded Roots Action almost 15 years ago. And we did it in part because the online world on the left and progressive areas were dominated by outfits like MoveOn that were anti-war when Bush was in office, but then when Obama came in also tripling the number of troops in Afghanistan, for instance, they were not willing to be nearly so anti-war. We need a single standard of human rights and politics. And that’s what rootsaction.org has been about. Everybody, if you’re not already signed up in 30 seconds, you go to rootsaction.org, you can sign up to get our email action alert.
Marc Steiner:
And let me just digress and say it’s well worth to do that.
Norman Solomon :
Yeah, I’d like to say so. And then because it’s one component of organizing online. And just a couple examples. We launched the Don’t Run Joe campaign right after the midterms in 2022, and we were told, “Oh, it’s inevitable. Biden’s going to run for reelection.” We couldn’t find one other national progressive organization of any size to co-sponsor. We asked them, we invited them. So it was, so to speak, Roots Action carrying the torch throughout 2023 into 2024 saying, “For God’s sake, let’s stop Biden from being the nominee. It will be a disaster politically and in terms of his evident capacity or incapacity to run an effective campaign, let alone be in a second term.” A very recent example is that we’ve joined with the organization Peace Action to urge to call for and have constituents and thousands of them have done that in the last couple of days to contact their Democrats in House and Senate and say, “Time is up.
Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, their leadership…” We don’t say it this way. Their leadership sucks. They are inspiring hardly anybody. They’re winking and nodding for this aggression against Iran with these really wishy-washy tactical discussions about process. And we need some explanations from the explanations from the White House. I mean, Jeffries was on Meet the Press a week after this horrible war was launched by the US and Israel against Iran. And he was saying, “Well, we need better answers from the Trump White House. This is the kind of demagoguery of its own sort that simply greenlights more war.” And so to sort of sum up, roots action is about, “Hey, we stick to principles, whoever’s in the White House, whatever party’s in control of Congress.” And I think that is part of the future we need to create.
Marc Steiner:
I think you’re right. And as you were saying that, before we close here, one of the things I thought about as you were responding, when it comes to Israel and Palestinians, it always seems to me, and I’ve been in that struggle for 50 plus years, from trying to join the Israeli army in 67 to then joining the anti-occupation forces in 68. And it’s not so difficult to create policies that people can relate to, like saying, “We have to create a world in the holy land, in Israel, Palestine for Jews and Palestinians live together, create the negotiation for it to take place so people live side by side in the same place and really push the idea of peace.” And the problem is I think Democrats have really lost their, A, their organizing roots, which I said earlier, which is where they came from, and B, their creative roots that they used to have in spades in the ’60s and ’70s.
And I think that, and not saying they’re the Democrats of the panacea, but I’m saying they’ve lost who they are.
Norman Solomon :
Yeah, creative roots is a good way to put it. And real clarity, one of the, I think, powerful forces behind the Mondami campaign, now Mayor Mandami, was to really focus on very clear examples and instances and tangible realities that needed to be created, affordability, free buses, childcare, education that would be access for everybody. And I think of something that Woody Guthrie once said, “Any damn fool can be complicated.” And I thought of it when, Mark, when you were talking about peace, I mean, peace is something very real. It’s very real for people, especially who are at risk of the opposite. I remember being in a souk in Tehran about 15 years ago. And I was talking with a guy there who spoke English and he said, “People all over the world, they want peace, but their governments won’t let them have it. ” And that’s where we really are now.
And I think it applies to what you’re saying about Israel, which is intentionally year after year, literally blowing up one country after another in the Middle East. I do want to say, I mean, I’ve listened to many of your programs on this subject of Israel and the Middle East. People should, I would recommend, go back to the Real News website and listen to some of those because in the last few years, you’ve done a really great job with various guests and in conversations talking about that peace is the core social justice is the core.
Marc Steiner:
Absolutely. And Norman Tomlin, I do really appreciate your time and the work you’ve been doing. We’re going to link to the book and link to Roots Action as well and continue our conversations together and come up with more ways to get this message out and to get this conversation out to everyone. And thank you so much for your work and your time, and I really appreciate you being here.
Norman Solomon :
Well, thanks a lot, Mark. And I do want to mention to people that in a world with so many paywalls that we shouldn’t have, I’ve been really pleased that when my book, The Blue Wrote to Trump Hell was published very recently, it went out immediately free online. So anybody who doesn’t want to
Marc Steiner:
Buy
Norman Solomon :
The book, great. Just go to this website, blueroad.info, and there are many formats you can read it online as a free ebook.
Marc Steiner:
And let me just say that it’s well worth the read because you’re really probing deeply into how the Democrats can change and what they’re failing at and how we can save our future. So I really appreciate the work you do. And we’re going to link to all that stuff right here on this conversation.
Norman Solomon :
Thanks so much, Mark.
Marc Steiner:
Thank you very much, Norm. Once again, I want to thank Norman Solomon for joining us today and remind everyone to check out his new book, The Blue Road Trumpelle, and check out his website, rootsaction.org. You can see the rest of his work there. It’s well worth the journey. Thanks to David Hebdon for running the program today, and our audio editor received Frank and producer Rosette Sewali for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here through news for making this show possible. So please, let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Norman Solomon for joining us today and his tireless work. So for the crew here at the Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
Ron Paul is a former Republican congressman from Texas. He was the 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president.
