Anger, Complacency and American Politics, an Interview with Abbey Arletto
Domination University’s Francesca J Rose: Abbey, I discovered you online and was attracted to your insights on politics, dark sense of humor and witty writing style. You’ve gathered many followers online as a role model for snark. All hail the queen of snark! Please tell us about yourself, where you studied political science and how it fits into your life as an American?
Abbey Arletto:
I was fortunate enough to study Political Science at Yale. But my first brush with serious political activism was as a student-intern organizing youth-centered volunteer and recruitment activities for the Obama Campaign. I guess I decided to study political science out of anger and frustration over the eight years of shitfuckery we lived through under George W. Bush. The rampant criminality of his administration and the pervasive moral corruption of Congress (on both sides of the aisle) during his presidency is something this country hadn’t seen since the time of Richard Nixon and, I believe, really helped fire up my generation politically in ways not seen since the 1960s – which in turn helped Obama win the 2008 election, largely due to strong youth support.
Dom U: How do you stay sane with the level of fuckery coming out of Washington every day?
Abbey:
Anger! Anger keeps me sane. Never, ever lose your sense of outrage as Bernie Sanders says. We have seen what happens when a society stays complacent in the face of injustice and abuse. Americans are, sadly, embarassingly complacent, despite the myths of freedom-loving rugged individualism we tell ourselves. Righteous anger and indignation lies behind all progressive change in history. From revolting against aristocratic tyrants to organizing unions, winning voting rights for women and minorities and so on, we can’t move history without the motivation and focus we get from anger and outrage. Anger makes us demand change. Anger makes us organize. Anger gets us to the polls.
Dom U: Do you vote and what are your feelings on the matter, those who do and don’t?
Abbey:
I always vote in elections. Not voting is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Voting is our most sacred duty as citizens. The people who came before us fought wars, spilled blood and died to ensure our rights to cast a ballot. All that said, I do understand some of the reasons behind voter apathy. It seems like nothing changes regardless of how many times we vote. But one of the reasons for political stagnation is voter apathy itself. Not voting because you are fed up with a broken system merely leaves it broken. It fixes nothing. Sort of like when people on the Right claim that government is bad because it doesn’t work and thus it shouldn’t be funded so it works even less. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whatever message you believe not voting sends to the political establishment isn’t going to change anything, because the establishment will just fine tune its message to appeal to those demographics who DO vote.
Not voting fixes nothing. It merely leaves you more impotent than you already are. It’s effectively self-disenfranchisement. Moreover, it spits in the face of efforts to enfranchise voters who are being systematically suppressed by Republicans in states all over the country. Democracy is not a law of nature. For most of human history we didn’t have it. It needs to be maintained and nurtured, otherwise we lose it. Voting is the bare minimum we can do to preserve what little democracy we have left.
I agree with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the “squad” when they say that Democrats should focus more on reaching out to non-voters than they currently are. Because she also knows what I said above: The party establishement will pivot to where the voters are. And currently they are in the Center, where they have been since the 1990s. Or at least, that was the perceived wisdom up until the 2016 election. The elevation of Joe Biden to Democratic presidential candidate suggests the party leadership still believes the Center is where it’s at. And why shouldn’t they? They know the Left has no where else to go. Unless, of course, the non-voting masses suddenly rose up and organized.
Dom U: In 2016 we saw the DNC make a lot of mistakes culminating to a loss to the most unqualified individual in the history of politics. What mistakes have you seen repeated in 2020 and are there no other consequences?
Abbey:
After the 2016 shitshow, the DNC made a bunch of middle-of-the-road concessions to the Bernie camp which in turn made a bunch of compromises to get those concessions. But we saw early on in this election cycle that DNC Chair, Tom Perez, began building firewalls against a possible Bernie Sanders surge when he stacked the 2020 Democratic National Convention committees with known centrist candidates from deep within the Democratic Party establishment, including corporate lobbyists and anti-progressives who have a history of publically railing against Bernie Sanders. It doesn’t seem to me like the DNC learned much from 2016 at all, except maybe in pushing states to transition from caucuses to primaries. I’m not on the DNC RIGGED IT bandwagon in 2020, though it’s clear they did it in 2016. I agree there’s lots of questions we need answered in regards to exit poll discrepancies, but I’m less than confident we ever will. However, at the time of writing this there’s no hard evidence of DNC rigging as far as I know, so I’d rather not help to promote that theory.
All that said, the most egregious “mistakes” (though they really aren’t, because it’s deliberate) I’ve seen repeated this time around are, first of all, the way the mainstream media and Democratic Party elites walked hand in hand when it came to bashing Bernie Sanders and by extension, progressives in general – just like they did in 2016. They were playing the short game of getting their main opponent (Bernie) crushed, but are risking the long game getting progressive voters enthusiastic enough to show up at the polls in November. Secondly, the way the establishment rallied behind Biden at a time when he was really suffering in the polls and hadn’t been campaigning in several Super Tuesday states, tells me they learned nothing from 2016. They want a Centrist and any Centrist will do. They’re pushing Biden the same way they pushed Hillary, regardless of whether or not there’s any grassroots enthusiasm for him. Come Hell or high water, it’s their way or the highway. This type of arrogance has lost them elections before (Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry and Hillary) but those lessons don’t seem to stick. According to the infinite wisdom of the Democratic Party leadership, the Centrist candidate is always always the electable candidate. Even though Bill Clinton is the only Centrist they ever got elected. That Obama turned out to be a Centrist too is something we didn’t really know in 2008. Neither did the party establishment, who pushed hard for Hillary to begin with.
Dom U: Bernie has admitted his young followers are not the best at showing up for primaries. Is there a particular sentiment you think can be addressed there? I’m talking Rock the Vote movement in the 90s type of promotion or similar, or do you think there are other factors that ultimately caused him to lose momentum and eventually withdraw his nomination?
Abbey:
The missing youth vote has been the biggest personal disappointment for me this election cycle. And I don’t think there’s one simple answer to it. We know there were issues within the Bernie campaign itself with campaign managers pulling in opposite directions on strategy and rhetoric. Bernie’s message hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades, but in 2016 he was largely unknown on the national stage and he mainly had to deal with just one primary opponent, which served to amplify his message as the sole contrast to Hillary’s. The 2016 primaries were largely binary as the third candidate, Martin O'Malley, withdrew in February already. So the choice in 2016 was starker.
2020 had a massive field of candidates. Bernie’s message hadn’t changed so there wasn’t anything new to report on his agenda and his profile was not as pronounced due to the many other voices until quite late in the game. Elizabeth Warren took a fair amount of Bernie’s supporters, which meant that Bernie wasn’t having a good showing for a long time while Biden’s frontrunner status was elevated for months before the first primary election happened.
How to get young people more engaged in politics is really the million dollar question. It’s a bit of a media trope that Millennials and Gen Z are way more progressive than older generations. I’m not so sure that’s entirely true. Barack Obama was the only Democratic candidate to win young white voters in 15 years. And according to a Reuters poll from the 2018 midterms, white voters between 18 and 24 were even more conservative than white voters in their late 20s and 30s.
If we go by Obama’s election in 2008, my theory is that young people respond to personality every bit as much as older generations do. Both Bill Clinton and Obama (the two most succesful Democratic candidates among young people since Kennedy probably) were extremely adept at using “attribute priming” - making certain considerations about their backgrounds and candidacies highly salient to young voters and then reaching these voters through emerging forms of new media. For Bill Clinton in the 90s, it meant making appearances in entertainment and late-night shows geared towards young viewers. For Obama, his online strategy revolutionized the way everyone campaign today. Bernie tried with “Our Revolution” and old school rallies, but it didn’t translate to the kind of “idol” status we saw with Bill Clinton and Obama.
Now it’s true that for hardcore progressives, what matters most is policy. And to them, Bernie could have been anyone as long as the agenda aligns. That’s probably less true for younger voters who, though generally progressive in attitudes, may not be as well grounded in policy - but would react stronger to someone whose personality they find appealing. I’m not sure Bernie Sanders ever managed to cross that hurdle. At least not with Generation Z. I’d love to see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a national campaign, not only because I personally like her, but because it would be interesting to see how she’d do with youth voters.
Dom U: Historically speaking, when did our country get hijacked by a bunch of power hungry sociopaths?
Abbey:
The short answer, September 17, 1787. The Framers were wealthy white land owners and they didn’t put anything in the Constitution that could threaten their wealth and power. To this day we’re largely still ruled by the same class of wealthy and privileged elites. The vast majority of US presidents in history have been millionaires. Each of the last five presidents had a net worth of at least $20 million. Their cabinets are mostly millionaires. Most members of Congress are millionaires. Most SCOTUS justices are millionaires. Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public, but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country, but they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the founding. The main reason for this is that politics in America are basically privatized. It’s not easy for working class people to run for office, because it costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time (and who can afford the time off?) and requires a lot of networking with political elites. Like George Carlin says: It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
Dom U: What changes have you seen in both parties from inception to their current state? Especially the Republican party, I try and tell my Republican family, they are not the same Republican party our ancestors supported. They are not the post Whiskey Rebellion Republicans. How have we lost our ways?
Abbey:
Obviously today’s Republican Party isn’t the party of Lincoln. Goldwater’s Southern Strategy put several nails in that coffin. But the Republican Party isn’t even the party of Goldwater and Nixon anymore. Nor is it the party of Reagan or even George W. Bush. They at least had some sort of coherent ideology and policy agenda. Today’s incarnation of the Republican Party began in 2008 with the Tea Party when John McCain’s VP candidate, Sarah Palin, stoked white resentment and became more popular with the Republican base than McCain was. In the 2010 midterm massacre, when Democrats were wiped out across the country, you had a major influx of inexperienced and radical Congressional freshmen who later formed The Freedom Caucus and largely managed to change the party from within – not unlike Bernie Sanders attempted with Our Revolution. They were incredibly succesful and ousted several high profile party leaders, like John Boehner and Eric Cantor. The election of Donald Trump was part of the same surge of radicalism within the ranks of the Republican Party, funded in large part by private billionaires like the Koch Brothers and the Waltons.
But the process didn’t happen over night and it didn’t start with the Tea Party. The push away from the Center and towards the far right probably began to some extent when Ronald Reagan’s allied himself with Jerry Fallwell’s Moral Majority and opened the party to conservative Evangelicals. But it really picked up speed with Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution of 1994. Gingrich changed the entire way the Republican Party dealt with the Democrats. Gone were any attempts at bipartisanship and compromise (both scorned and mocked by Gingrich). Gone were any pretenses of civic duty or statecraft. Gingrich attacked the moderates of his own party and began slinging shit across the aisle, accusing Democrats of being communists, anti-American, tyrannical and so on. He coined the phrase “loony left” (since adopted by centrist Democrats). Gingrich, more than anyone else, broke politics in America and radically changed the Republican Party. It wasn’t Mitch McConnell who invented the refusal to work across the aisle on anything whatsoever. That was Gingrich. He wanted to win back Congressional majorities not through politics, but through sabotage. And in 1994 he did exactly that. The lessons Republicans learned back then still define the party to this day.
Dom U: What brain washing mechanisms do you see utilized by both parties? Why do people so easily attach and identify with a politician that they would rather fight each other than try to understand each other?
Abbey:
Hmm… I think the way many people engage with politics is similar to the way they engage with sports. It’s about teams. The reptilian part of the brain is activated and we form tribes and start throwing rocks at each other. It becomes personal, maybe because politics in America is extremely focused on individuals more than parties. We are a two-party system, so naturally there will be a lot of very different political viewpoints and factions within each party. This is more the case for Democrats than Republicans because the Democratic Party is much more diverse than the GOP. In most European countries, the political fights mostly happen between political parties based on their competing platforms, while our political fights mainly happen between individuals. I think this fact generates a different psychological dynamic in the American electorate. We are extremely focused on the personality of our politicians - who we’d want to have a beer with, or if they are authentic or not and whether or not they are salt of the Earth working class regular Joes or whatever. I haven’t seen the same kind of stuff when observing European elections. And it’s my theory that this personality-centric approach is one of the reasons why Americans become so fanatic and polarized during elections. After all it’s much easier to build a personality cult around an individual, than to do it around a mass-based political organization.
Dom U: What are your thoughts on a 3rd party and what would a viable future look like if one could properly compete with the Dems and GOP?
Abbey:
I’d love to see the political system in America splinter and fracture into 20 different political parties. I think it’s the only true solution to gridlock and stagnation in Washington. The Center has not held in the last 30 odd years, but if many parties had to cooperate to reach a certain number of mandates to legislate, then bipartisanship would be essential and necessary to governing. As our system is now, only total majority rule gets much of anything done and even then, it can all be cancelled out by the next president – just like Trump has basically nullified Obama’s presidency. Ours is an incredibly ineffective system. Sadly a third party in the political realities of modern America is not viable. Not only because it would always serve as a spoiler to one of the two major parties (most likely the Democrats), but because there are major systemic obstacles put in place by both Democrats and Republicans to keep third parties from posing a threat. One of the few times in our history when a third party became large enough to threaten the duopoly, it wasn’t built from scratch but broke off from the Republicans. I’m referring here to The Progressive Party, or The Bull Moose Party, founded by Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 as a protest against the renomination of Howard Taft. I don’t have much confidence that a third party could go it alone. I have more faith in labor-left organizations like The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who seeks to get more progressive elected to office.
Dom U: We don’t privatize Emergency Services like fire fighters and police. What will it take, other than a global pandemic, for people to realize the importance of universal health care?
Abbey:
One thing Bernie Sanders absolutely achieved was taking universal healthcare to the very forefront of the political debate in America. I think that alone has woken a lot of people to the concept. It’s not that many years ago when you couldn’t even talk about something like Medicare for All etc. without being called a Communist by Democrats and Republicans alike. So I think the Overton Window has moved quite a bit on this issue. It’s now up to whoever comes after Bernie to keep the debate going and maintain the narrative and push Democrats in the right direction. However long it takes. In my opinion, the main priority for the “Progressive Movement” at large should be to re-educate Americans on issues like general welfare and tax justice. Conservatives were allowed to dominate this narrative for decades, so much so that for years Liberals were even afraid to call themselves Liberals, because Ronald Reagan successfully turned the word into a slur. It’s beyond high time Liberals and the Left reclaim the narrative so debates don’t always happen on Republican turf. This is something Democrats have sucked at for a long long time, but thankfully we see much stronger people getting elected now, like AOC et.al. They are not afraid to attack Republicans where it hurts. That’s what we need. Unabashed, proud and angry progressivism!
Dom U: Bernie created one of the most exciting political movements with his progressive ideas. Why do you think they seem so radical in America?
Abbey:
They weren’t always radical. That’s the thing. It’s like a big cloud of amnesia descended on America with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. And after we “won” the Cold War, his brand of Neoliberalism became canonical. After all, it crushed Communism, right? It’s been taboo to question American style hyper-capitalism for the past 40 years. Bernie Sanders is really the first mainstream political candidate to do so openly on a national stage and gain a major following for it. There’s truth to what he says when he talks about winning the battle of ideas. You have a bunch of blabber-heads in rags like Politico claiming he didn’t. But we’re now having mainstream political discussions on issues he brought to the table. Pandora’s Box has been opened and there’s nothing the centrist mouthpieces can do to close it again. We need to keep normalizing the progressive agenda and push that Overton Window ever further left. It worked for the Republicans, it can work for us. Bernie was only the beginning.
Dom U: The average interest rate on a federally funded student loan is about the same as a used car loan. Student Loan interest rates are set by Congress. What do you think about the American Education system?
Abbey:
I think the American education system is idiotic. One of George Washington’s fondest dreams was the creation of a national university. The Founders, being creatures of the Enlightenment, knew education was key to the preservation of the Republic. Hence it was an essential service that should be run by Government instead of for-profit private entities. At the time, private universities like Harvard and Yale primarily trained congregational clergy and religious denominations in America were against the establishment a secular national university. And the states were sceptical of a federal university system, so Washington’s dream never came to pass.
What we have instead is a class system in which, if you happen to come from wealth, you can obtain an excellent education from a prestigious university, make yourself an excellent career (not only because of the excellent name of your school, but because of all the excellent connections you make there) and earn a ton of excellent dollars to add to the wealth you already have. So much for meritocracy! The educational system in America is instrumental in depressing socioeconomical mobility and locking social classes in place. If you’re not wealthy or lucky enough to win a scholarship like I did, but hope to get a good education and move up the social ladder, it will bog you down in so much debt that you’ll end up even poorer than you were before. While society tells young people that graduating with a bachelor’s degree is the best way to secure their place in the middle class, the cost of tuition keeps rising. Despite enrolling only 11 percent of the higher education population, for-profit colleges and universities receive 25 percent of all federal student aid that the Education Department disperses. Some of the largest for-profit colleges receive as much as 90 percent of their total funding from federal aid, incentivizing schools to target low-income students. Higher education in America has turned into a grift, sucking young people and families dry simply because they want to live decent lives. It’s absolutely and utterly disgraceful! The entire system needs to be completely reformed from the bottom up. Education should be either cheap or free and of the highest possible quality. As the Framers knew, without proper education of the citizenry the Republic will not survive.
But of course, that may very well be the point.
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