NS: At the rootsaction.org site we've had a petition which challenges the Washington Post's McCarthyite front page story, a couple of weeks back [which], without any sort of real journalism, endorses a 200 website named list from a shadowy group, whose identity we don't even know, saying that they are flunkies and "useful idiots for the Kremlin." Now, what does this sound like? If you know the history of the McCarthy era, you know this is how it functioned and was a way to suppress dissent.
And yet, we have here one of the purportedly liberal papers, which actually has somewhat of a neo-con foreign policy position on the front page and the editorial page, stoking this kind of McCarthyism. And I think what a lot of groups have not recognized, including for instance MoveOn, is they have stoked this.
DB: They've jumped right on...
NS: ...Right on, "blame Putin." ["] They think they're kind of picking low hanging political fruit. It's a way to bash Trump, and get more strength for the Democrats against them, and delegitimize his election, and so forth. But when you ride that tiger of McCarthyism and militarism, and souping up a new cold war, that is a tiger that not only is going to come back and bite you, but actually quite likely is going to devour you.
If you believe in diplomacy instead of warfare, if you believe in civil liberties instead of suppression, and witch hunting against dissenters, it's time to really, I think...and part of this was propelled by these illusory hopes about the electoral college on the 19th of December...but now it's time to recognize that progressives, rather than joining in the chorus to demonize the Kremlin and Putin, and so forth, we should be organizing against that. And atrootsaction.org we are organizing against it. Some groups definitely are.
What's at stake? What's at stake is whether we're going to have continuous momentum towards military confrontation with a power that has thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the U.S. and vice versa. What's at stake is the entire political climate in the U.S. vis-a-vis foreign policy, militarism, war and dissent.
What I started to sort of allude to is that Trump has sounded a note of "Let's find common ground with Russia." And when it comes to ending the horrible slaughter in Syria, for instance, other diplomatic solutions, and avoiding confrontation that could turn military and [be] horrific in Europe, for instance, this is an opportunity to say, "Let's have detente."
And by hitching itself to the star of congressional leadership of the Democratic Party, all too many progressives have assumed that, "Oh, we're going to make Trump look bad, so therefore, we'll cheer-lead on when Nancy Pelosi and others say 'Oh, it's the Russians who are causing it all.'" And that's a very dangerous bargain to make.
Another way to put it, Dennis, is that yes, we need a broad, deep, united popular front against Trump, at the same time we need to not have our dependency on the line of the top of the Democratic Party because they're militarists. I mean that's why Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and the top of the Democratic Party leaders are so, in part, upset with Trump foreign policy, because they had, as Hillary Clinton did, their hearts set on a confrontation with Russia.
Hillary Clinton, very much more than Obama, was into that mode. She was a de facto neocon in that kind of foreign policy. And a lot of people, like myself, and I was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the National Convention this year, a lot of people who were Bernie supporters haven't realized that by jumping on the band wagon, that is being led by these main line, establishment Democratic Party leaders, we are strengthening the Clinton wing of the party.
Because they would like nothing more than to change the subject about what happened in the last election and just say "It's Russia's fault." It wasn't the Wall Street alliance between Hillary Clinton in the election, and for years before. It wasn't the speeches she gave for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It wasn't the fact that she lacked credibility when she pretended to be some sort of populist. It wasn't the way in which the Democratic National Committee unfairly put its thumb on the scales even while claiming to be neutral, in the primary battle between Bernie and Hillary Clinton. All those other factors, the structural...
DB: The way she supported the coup in Honduras, it wasn't her Libya policy. It had nothing to do with the dangers of a no fly zone [in Syria]...
NS: Absolutely. Her record of talking about super-predators in the 1990s, the institutional racism, the mass incarceration, the record of the Clinton wing of the party -- oh, no it's none of that. It's not the structural racism and classism that kept so many people out of the polls and [not] having their votes registered on election day this year.
No, it wasn't that and it wasn't the inability of the Democratic Party, under Clinton, as the nominee, to speak meaningfully to poor people around the country because she was so obviously a phony entwined with Wall Street, [and was] the author, with her husband, of welfare so-called reform, that was a savage attack on poor women and families of all races. It wasn't that. It was Vladimir Putin.
Well, what does that do? That kind of lying, absolutely gives more power, going forward, to the very corporate forces at the top of the Democratic Party that the Bernie campaign has been fighting.
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