Insurgents or Insiders? (w/Norman Solomon)

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J. Eskow, produced by the WEAC Radio Network and broadcasting from the banks of the Anacostia directly into the halls of power. And now your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. Hello, everybody, welcome back to the program. As I record these words, it is Friday in Washington, D.C., and I am speaking through a smoky haze of climate change induced air poisoning, whatever you want to call it, degraded. air quality, the alert level for the air right now where I'm speaking is purple, which I think is bad. I think it's worse than red and red is bad. So it basically means nobody should go outside if they can possibly afford it. And it's another sign of the bizarre times that we live in that the ruling political party in this country doesn't even think climate change is a thing, even though forest fires like the ones that cause this one are way up, even though extreme heat and heat inversions have increased. undoubtedly as a result of climate change. Now, can you point to any one particular hot day and say climate change did this? I'll leave that to the scientists. But the trends are clear and the scientists have spoken. Climate change is real. That's why our world is getting hotter. That's why we're coughing and choking. And we have a political system where somehow the reality of all that is open for debate. We'll be right back.

Hello, this is Yo-Yo Ma, and you're listening to The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow. And we are back on the zero hour. I as always am your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. Joining me once again is Norman Solomon. Norman is a prolific writer. He's the co-founder of Roots Action, which can be found at rootsaction.org. He is also executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, which is a great group. Hey, it's an author of a number of books, the latest of which is The Blue Road to Trump Hell, how corporate Democrats paved the way for autocracy. And he's written several good, excellent pieces in the last month or so I figured I'd have him back and talk about it. So, first of all, Norman, welcome back to the Zero Hour. Thanks, very glad to be here. Well, we're glad to have you. And I want to start with this one because I thought this neatly encapsulated the situation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I get asked about a lot. I think anybody who's identified is on the left, probably gets asked about her a lot. The headline it was given, I believe this piece was an op-ed in The Hill. But the headline they gave it was today's cautious Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would not have endorsed the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of 2018. And as I say, that encapsulated a certain shift people are concerned about with her. But tell me what inspired you to write that. Well, it really occurred to me that when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into Congress, it was as a result of challenging somebody who seemed almost unchallible, Joseph Crowley, the fourth from the highest powerful Democrat in the entire House. It seemed impossible. She had no prior, quote-unquote, experience in office. She attended Barr, and she was a terrific activist. And so she won, stunned people. And now in 2026, as somebody who has a lot of well-justified clout in the left, on the left, and nationally in terms of political discourse, she's declined to endorse any of the candidates who are trying to ascend in the same way that she did. mostly by the way, people of color who have won as Democratic Socialists in the last few weeks in Deep Blue districts. They're on their way to Congress. And frankly, no thanks to her. Now, I know that it's complicated. You're in office. You have to choose your endorsements carefully. But it's really stunning to me that she's made as a policy that she won't endorse any challenger.

to an incumbent Democrat when that's the way she got into Congress in the first place. It is striking, and she deserves credit, I think, for helping So Zohran Mamdani early on in his race, but that wasn't a House race, right? So I always worry about, in one of my recent interviews with a left-wing Democratic politician, one, fortunately, is. had to you know has been discredited had to drop out of the race but the way i put it to him was i always worry about progressives getting elected and then joining the the democratic board collective of the the power is elite there and to their to many of their credits they have not done that didn't reject it that for a long time, was always strategic when he became influential after his first presidential run and when and how he worked with the the insider groups. And I didn't always agree with him, but he was definitely cautious, careful about it. And we could go down the list, but the initial one of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first moves coming to Washington was to join a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi's office, which got her in a lot of trouble. Now she's taken the position, as you say, she seems to have taken the position that challenging and incumbent is...

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented clearly unequivocally to Israeli human rights groups, physicians for human rights, Israel, and Bethlehem, all four of them saying, this is genocide, and yet you have this guy in the middle of the summer of 2026 using his leverage to say, we want to keep arming genocide. So in that context, it looks especially bad that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went out of our way to say, this is our leader for next year. And this gets back to a conversation you and I, and I think many of us in various configurations have had before, which is the fact that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and candidly Bernie as well endorsed Joe Biden for re-election a year. before the campaign started, maybe two years. My memory's a little hazy now, despite the fact that he was at the point, at that point, supporting this ongoing genocide in Palestine. And he absolutely continued. There was no leverage used for humanitarian relief there or anywhere else. And it begins to raise the question. At what point do you think as a politician, supposedly a change agent, you're changing the party. And at what point is the party changing you and in that little race who's winning? Because it seems to me in both cases, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we're talking about now, traded away leverage not only on a political issue that would be favorable to her if she stood for it more strongly. But according to the polls, but a moral issue. So it really makes me wonder, am I missing something here or is it just, I don't know. I admit to being baffled. gratuitously early is a way to describe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries for Democratic Party leader in the House coming up. Well, the vote won't happen until at the earliest November where the Democratic caucus decides, who's our leader for next year. And we should keep in mind that leader, whether Speaker or not, has tremendous power and leverage over the way that the Democrats in Congress behave the caucus. positions and most of all perhaps the committee assignments and this and that so It's akin to, unfortunately, and we don't see this very much, a labor leader going into negotiations with management and already giving up so much before there has been any negotiations even taking place. So really, as you allude to, Richard, I think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for whatever reasons, decided, hey, I'm going to endorse before we even negotiate. She did.

give an explanation for why. She said in her announcement that she had met with Jeffreys and she was very pleased that he was going to support public housing in New York, which is important to her. And I found that explanation just at best, baffling, at worst, just ridiculous and literally incredible. There are only really two possibilities that one could draw from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's explanation. One is that Hakeem Jeffries is so unreliable and so un... principled as a humanitarian leader that you've got to cut a deal with him before he's going to support public housing for people who need it in New York City. Or, on the other hand, he's somehow somebody who you can depend on, and in which case, then why would you have to cut a deal in the first place? So either way, doesn't, as a saying goes, past the smell test. I think one doesn't want to impute just really selfish motives per se, but people are politicians. Clearly, she is ambitious for higher office. And I think that's probably the most specific explanation. And then there's the generic one. that if you want to get along with your colleagues in Congress, you don't, so to speak, spit in the soup. You don't tell them you're going to help people remove them from office. You know, I've studied, as you have, Norman, politics for a long time. And perception matters a lot. It's hard to quantify. It's hard to predict. But the strength that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brought to her initial campaign, brought to the House of Representatives, brought to her what quickly became political celebrity, was a combination of... you're refreshing energy, sort of, I don't want to say rebellious, but unsolum in a positive way, you know, sort of. attitude towards be playful at times even in a good way as when I thought it was a great moment when she told a hostile witness I was a bartender for years I know to handle men how to handle men like you I mean you know she has she has definite gifts as a communicator but she's also those every gift is double edged I've come to conclude in politics and the gift of being a facile communicator

can quickly turn on you if people don't feel it's backed up with substance and character and commitment. And her youth and her youthful energy equally could turn against her if people feel there's something superficial about her. And I'm not saying this because I can predict the future or read people's minds or how they're likely to react. But I don't, I think she, I guess what I'm saying is I think if she's ambitious for herself and her career, and she clearly is, to me, she's playing a dangerous game. On that note, trust can seem ineffable, almost an abstraction, but I think it really matters in the longer term. And let's face it, if she does run for president or even for Senate in New York, the right-wing guns are going to be really trained on her metaphorically. And they really hate her. If you look at right-wing media, that's the case. She's going to need the base to turn out. She's going to need, as Zohran Mamdani had. tens and tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who are willing and able to be volunteers, go-to-door, and all the rest of it to counteract the corporate militarist assaults on her in terms of media and politics that are sure to come and have been in existence for many years. I've gotten some pushback from progressives who said, why are you picking on her? She's in Congress. She knows things you don't know. She understands some of the tactical complexities that you don't know. And I think that that is a very hazardous attitude because we've seen that before when almost every Democrat in Congress refused to say a negative word about Biden running for re-election. We're told, well, they're the pros. They're the experts. Who are we to try to micromanage them? Well, it's called democracy. We all... take our best assessments that we can, and we push because that's what activism, organizing, participatory democracy ought to be all about. Right. It's not about the... the visible figures, the celebrity figures, it's about the movements that make them, you know, succeed or not succeed in that guide them, pressure them, encourage them. I've found it in a kind of sad irony at times when some of the people who came to power because Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton are using the same rhetoric to defend their choices that Hillary Clinton's... supporters did to attack the Bernie contingent that these people came out of, which was exactly what you just said. Well, you know, they're the insiders, they're the experts, they're the ones with, they know what you know. Well, you know it in a democracy. If you know something, I don't tell me, because that's how democracy works. You're really reminding me of, you know, it's formative for me, as many people in my generation, during the Vietnam War, we constantly heard that Lyndon Johnson

knew things that we didn't know. So why should we think that we knew better than him about the Vietnam War? And year after year, and I was a teenager at the time, 1965, 66, we were told, The Democrats in Congress, they understood about the Vietnam or we didn't know. So basically the message was butt out in trust. And we can't afford to trust when the circles of power can easily surround people who are in a negative sense of the word seduced by it. We'll be right back after this with more of my conversation with Norman Solomon. I'm Richard R.J. Eskow and you're listening to The Zero Hour. You are listening to the We Act Radio Network produced in Washington, D.C. Visit us online at weactradio.com or at YouTube.com slash weactradio, DC.

And we are back on The Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Escal, we now continue our conversation with Norman Solomon. People remember from those days the book, at least the title of the book by David Halber, Sam, the best and the brightest about the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. people who went on to the Johnson administration, Robert McMillard and so on. What they don't tend to remember is that the title is ironic. that the best and the brightest made a mess of things. And that gets me to one of the other pieces you've written recently, Norman, which was on the headline I saw was, and again, we don't always write our own headlines, but why the Biden debate disaster still matters for the future. And I'm sure there are. People who would read that, I think this came out through 25th as well enough about the Biden debate disaster, but we're still talking about it and not just you and me, but a lot of people, and this ties into exactly what we were talking about in the context of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, doesn't it? But first of all, tell me if you agree with that. Yeah. Elaborate or not. Well, very much. And as it happens, unfortunately, two of my political electoral heroes, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, went down to the last minute supporting Biden saying he should not drop out of the race until he announced. He would. Patterns really matter. Political cultures matter, even though we have our trouble putting our fingers on it or describing it sometime. And this conformity that is so attractive, it's so magnetic, especially as people want to ascend or be taken, quote, seriously. And so we saw that dynamic. And it's not to both, but just to be factual. At Roots Action, we launched the Don't Run Joe campaign. right after the midterms in 2022. And we couldn't find any other sizable national group to go with us. And we heard from some saying privately, oh, yeah, Biden shouldn't run, but they were afraid of losing access. And the same was the case for Democrats in Congress. There were one or two who were willing during that time, 2023, to publicly say Biden shouldn't run. Well, this has consequences. And we're living the consequences right now. Some people listening and watching them might think, why are they concentrating on Democrats right now? Right. The fascistic Republican regime. And we certainly do. The underlying question is, how do we defeat them? Can we defeat them the way that Kamala Harris did, which is trying to keep splitting the difference? To put it mildly disrespecting the base that was horrified by the genocide that the U.S. was supporting. I mean, clearly the question answers itself. We need a departure from this willingness to...

reinforce the establishment and disregard the polling. And I think there's one other aspect going back, not only to the 2024 campaign, but what we're talking about in terms of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the polling has been very clear in the last 12, 18 months. A large majority of Democrats, now it's about 75%. Don't want to be arming Israel. They think Israel's engaged with genocide. And still in all, we have one of the best progressives in Congress. endorsing for a leader, somebody who just came out for, again, arming Israel. So it's maybe a cliche, but it's true. When people lead from the grassroots, leaders will follow. If we don't lead, they're going to follow each other, and that's right over the cliff. Well, and I want to address the first thing you said, because I get that a lot too, Norma, which is, why are you always beating up on, I mean, I don't think I am. I think it's constructive. criticism, but why are it characterized? Why are you always negative about Democrats when we have this authoritarian Trump who's so terrible? My answer is always that's why. That's certainly one of the reasons why, because he wouldn't be there today, in my view, if Democrats were listening to the activist movements and the and the popular will. And, you know, I get it. On one level, I have been close enough to... the seats of power, whatever you want to call them, that I get that it's a major job to shift this massive and corporate enterprise, corporate in the classic sense, called the Democratic Party, institutional Democratic Party, from something that's large donor-based to something that's popular and small donor-based. I get that that's intimidating. I get that that's a radical career change for a lot of people. I get that a lot of... well-paid consultants might have to find other ways to make, I mean, I get all of it, the institutional momentum behind the party as it doesn't work right now. But the fact is that this is the, I think, it's not only good policy and good for the country, it's... The only way to win, polls keep showing it, where they don't show it. Oftentimes, you find it's the phrasing of the poll. That's the problem. The class example for me is Medicare for All, which polls extremely well. Unless you say, would you be willing to support government, run health care, even if it meant a big hike in your taxes, right? Which it doesn't necessarily have to mean A, and B, That would be way more than offset by what you're not paying in premiums and co-pays. So we have...

an agenda that works that would make the world a better place, safer place, healthier place. And the fact that there is this institutional resistance to it should be, to me, it should be a dividing line. It should be the politicians I support know that and they want to work with grassroots to resist it. And to me, so when you bring up the Biden, debate performance again. There are a million reasons I think we haven't talked that through, but one of them is to quote the psychologist or sociologist Stanley Milgram, obedience to authority, that we should not. certainly as a movement, and Democrats as a party should not be so obedient to authority, especially authority that is misled them so often. But I'm sorry, I'm ranting a little bit. Let me turn it back. Very key. And the huge gap between the polling of Democrats, and in many cases, polling of the whole country, on the one hand, and positions being taken by the leadership of the Democratic Party, is just political malpractice. So we're in a situation where... As I mentioned, the vast majority of Democrats don't want to be arming Israel, for instance. And yet we have this model that is institutionalized that says those folks don't really matter compared to other factors upon tautocracy. People can write six or seven figure checks and so forth. The reality is that if we're going to have successful campaigns writ large, They have to be inspiring. That's how the current mayor of New York became the mayor of New York. A friend of mine gave a keynote speech to a state Democratic Party recently. And he said, how many of you would like to be campaigning next to Chuck Schumer if you were running for office? Please raise your hand. And hardly anybody raised their hand. And I think there's something similar there with the house leader, Jeffreys. What does that tell us that we have these ostensible leaders in the party at the very top who are found to be uninspiring, which translates into not inspiring turnout, which is supposed to be essential to elections, that every time October comes around, this is a turnout election. And yet the so-called leadership is deadening rather than inspiring. I think another element, which you referred to, Richard, is... the model of funding for campaigns in the party. And

Without inspiration, you can't do what Bernie Sanders did, averaging $27 donations. I think the people running the Democratic National Committee and at the top of the Democrat caucuses in the House and Senate, they don't really see the small donations as the key. And if you don't have the hammer, you don't have the nail, they don't inspire people anyway. And no wonder the DNC is in dire financial straits right now. And to me, as i say i get the challenge that it poses to them and their mindset and everything else uh to even think about a small donation popularly uh you know funded popularly motivated uh party uh it's alien but uh i think they're approaching a sort of uh freeze freeze up point where uh I'm trying to think the best way to articulate it, where the only way they can raise money is by clinging to policies that people don't vote for. So they can raise money and not win elections, which means some people make a good living as consultants and so on, or not significantly win elections. Or they can decide they want to win elections or get in a group of people who do, but that at some point it's just going to be frozen in place like that kind of stasis. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, I think that brings us back to what we were starting to talk about very early on this discussion, which is, de facto, it tends to be a bubble. Capitol Hill, it is insular, that whole environment, the milieu is you're dealing with these colleagues, you're dealing with these pressures. And I think a key question for people at the grassroots, us, progressives, others who want progressive humanistic social changes, are we going to be counter pressures or not? Are we going to leave it to the corporates and the militarists and so forth? And those who dominate the milieu. on Capitol Hill, are they the only pressures that someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be encountering? Are we going to provide counter pressure? And I think, of course, it's the latter that's really essential. Absolutely. And before you go, Norman, I do want to say a word about or have a brief conversation at least about a piece you wrote my conversation with Karl Marx about Donald Trump. Because I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what you were trying to do here in channeling the late Karl Marx for this chat. was struggle, was explore the issue of the class struggle as an engine of history versus this historic transformative personality as the engine of history in the case of Donald Trump. And Trump does pose a challenge in that way to me to the left because I do believe that there are, I mean, I think it can be overly simplified, but I do think that.

Class struggle, economic struggle is a major driver of history and that there are tectonic forces. But individuals can also shift at certain times. And I think this is a challenge for the left because... So many centrists and corporate politicians have used the personhood of Donald Trump as an excuse not to offer better policies for the working class, which has created a counter reaction. But to me, it's a delicate balance. But first of all, am I right that that's what you were looking to do with this conversation with Marx? Yeah, that was a lot of what I was after. And it is a delicate balance. I know I'm one of many people I've talked to who in the last years, and especially again the last year and a half or so, just trying to reconcile what I think is a fairly solid analysis that it's social forces that determine what happens historically and in the present and future. And we want to be strengthening the social forces for good, so to speak, rather than... corporate militaristic evil. And at the same time, then along comes Trump, and he is a not only cult of personality, leading a cult, but also the force of that cult of personality in him as an individual has, in some ways, been really transformative. So trying to use a word sometimes just sounds too academic or jargony, but dialectically, that's really... These are truths in conflict that coexist. And I was able to find a quote from Karl Marx just saying, hey, Engels and I never said that everything that happens is because of economics. He said, people who say that, they're just not being accurate. He's saying, yes, the basis of it is economics. And as he says, class struggle, there are other factors involved. And that's the real world. Right. It's, you know, it's the gasoline and it's the match. The gasoline won't catch fire or explode if there's no match. So on the one hand, there's clearly, there are clearly global. social forces at work with the rise of the right and demagogic leaders, Viktor Orban and Hungary, and Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in Great Britain, and we could go about Jair Bolsonaro and some of them are in, some of them are out. But clearly, there is something global going on and an alienation against the elite in the absence, in my view of a valid left to challenge it. So I think, yes, that's the structural side. But on the other hand, would we be in the situation we're in today without...

Donald Trump, I would say no. You know, I mean, I could be really radical and say, okay, he's intensified the contradictions. If you remember that rhetoric from the 60s, he's heightened the contradictions. Now we're going to have, but we don't know how it's going to turn out, but we know that that we have to stop Trump and Trumpism if we want to create a space for real. transformative change. At least that's my view. I'm not sure that Marx or anybody else would disagree with that. Yeah, definitely. We need to roll back the Republican power. It is a fascistic power. And when I hear some on the left, and I actually don't think it's a particularly left position at all, say, oh, it doesn't matter what individuals are in power. I just think that's at this point a hallucination. It clearly does matter who's in office. And when we have these right wingers running the executive and legislative and... to large extent, the judicial branch, then we're completely on the defensive. There's no capacity to really get good policies to implement it. We're doing damage control. That's not the case when we get the right wingers out of office, which is really the imperative for this midterm election coming up, and for that matter, 2028. And the other reason to get these characters out of office is as dissatisfied as I am with the Democratic Party, I think there's some total of human suffering in this country would be somewhat less if the far right was out of office and some basic humane, you know, things I don't think a government, a party deserves. a laurel wreath for, but just human decency might come back. And I'm not that cosmic that I think I know how much human suffering should be permitted in the short term because I think something magical is going to happen in the long term. I think that we relieve human suffering. I think we give people a space to breathe and survive and then show them what a better world can look like. But before we go, and then I'll give you the last word, a great quote from Marx that I had. heard before, apropos of Trump. Obviously, he wasn't writing about Trump in 1869, where, in your words, a cult existed around a tyrant. The class struggle, and this is, I take it as Marcus's words, quote, created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part. That sounds very much to me like the current president of the United States.

But I will give you the last word. Yeah, really, that was an amazing description by Marx about, I think, Napoleon III or something. And as you say, great description of the dangerous, vicious clown that is now president of the United States. I do want to invite people. I'm so glad that the latest book I wrote is free and it's online and you can download it in various formats. And that's simply... online at blue road.info if you want to read The Blue Road to Trump Hill. All right. I encourage people to do that. You and I've been... on the program to talk about it. And with that, Norman Solomon, co-founder of Roots Action and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, thanks for these recent pieces that I got so much out of. And thanks once again for coming on the program. And thanks a lot, Richard. And we'll be right back after this. I'm Richard, RJ Eskow, and this is The Zero Hour.

Hello, this is Yo-Yo Ma, and you're listening to The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow. We're back on the Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Escal. Well, we spoke in the last segment with Norman Solomon about the risk of what he and a lot of people are calling fascism. And I will say, you know, I keep reading the political science on this. There are a lot of fascist-like characteristics about this administration. There have been a few. in past administrations as well, it's more of a sliding scale than anything else. I, you know, I have mixed feelings by using the word fascist because some people think it's just an epithet or a swear word, but there's certainly totalitarianism going on. The good news, I think, is that the President of the United States took his best shot at convincing people to be terrified of a broken set of election. electoral scams that don't actually exist. The problem with our electoral system is that it's financed by big money. That's the main problem. He tried to put in these scare tactics so that he could do anything he could to try to win the upcoming elections, including possibly militarizing our polling places. But it didn't land. The problem with doing this crazy rhetoric over and over again is that sometimes Even your most devoted fans stop listening. Yeah, they believe it, but did he change anybody's mind with his demagoguery on Thursday night? Personally, I don't think so. We'll be right back.