JC: FAIR.org.
RS: Yeah. And you were a journalism professor at Ithaca College, and I think I met you that way, because you gave me an award at one point, the I.F. Stone award --
JC: The Izzy Award.
RS: Izzy Award. And for people listening who don't remember who Izzy was--go to journalism schools, as I say, we're here at Annenberg, we do have students who know about Izzy; up at Berkeley they do, at Columbia Journalism they do. And he was a legendary journalist, and he was a maverick; he was independent. And he felt, not only did all governments lie--a statement famously attributed to him -- but also he felt all politicians lie, and his job was to cut through all of that. Now, I met you while you were doing that; you were also a lot on MSNBC, you were a lot with the sort of liberal euphoria, doing a lot of -- I kept watching you on the screen. And you're a very bright, optimistic fellow; right now, even, you got a --
JC: I'm a talker.
RS: No, but you also have a good smile on your face. So I'm going to confess to you, as my priest. I had a very odd reaction this morning after, you know, the midterm election. Because I watched Donald Trump, and whatever you say about Donald Trump, he brought some energy and feeling to the situation. Now, you know, he'd gotten good news, bad news -- you know, somehow there was, again as you suggest, a program. He was going to move ahead. And then I just now look at the screens, and he's fired [laughs] the attorney general, and he's going to move aggressively. And then they had Nancy Pelosi come on, and the question -- you know, Trump actually endorsed her in his remarks. And I expected Nancy Pelosi to really stick it to this guy, you know? And -- no! We've been empowered to come back here and really do something for ordinary people! And it was tepid at best, tepid. And it was like, oh, we're going to save a notion of affordable health care. And she seemed as tone-deaf as Hillary was in the election. My feeling is, what Bernie Sanders brought was the same sort of energy -- only it was a left populism -- the same sort of energy that Donald Trump has. A progressive populism, as opposed to a reactionary, scapegoating of minorities, vulnerable people, and so forth. And I wonder, you know, you've spent the last months in midterm elections and everything; do you, is the Democratic Party really capable of feeling that pain?
JC: No. Not in -- not the current leadership. I mean, you're right; the problem is Pelosi, the problem is Clinton, the problem is Schumer. After the disaster of 2016 -- and you're right about my history, I go back decades in this. You know, we set up FAIR because progressive points of view were excluded from mainstream media. Typically in mainstream media -- with some exceptions; you were one at the L.A. Times -- typically, the spectrum went from the center to the right. So I spent decades trying to get the progressive view there. And I would tell executives, I'd have meetings with media executives, and I'd say: you know, if you had an unabashed progressive in some of these discussions, not only would it be good for democracy, but your ratings would go up.
And so what was interesting with the Bernie campaign -- and I've known Bernie since his first term in Congress -- is for the first time, mainstream media was forced, because he had these huge rallies, to have the progressive agenda on the nightly news, every night, especially on cable news. And lo and behold, that progressive message connected with many voters, whether they know the term progressive or not. And again, talking to later Trump voters who voted for Bernie -- I've met these people. So my whole life has been about trying to get progressive, the progressive message heard by the masses of people. And can the Democratic Party, as it's currently led, win and defeat Trump, and then after you win an election, govern in a way that you can maintain power? Not with the current leadership.
There's two problems facing our country: one, you'll hear about on MSNBC every night. It's the extremism, the racism, the anti-science, the scapegoating of the Republicans. There's an equal, second problem, and that's the corporatism and the vacillation and the backpedaling of the Democratic Party. And if all you ever do is talk about that first problem, which is all they talk about hour after hour on MSNBC, you're giving your viewers half of the story. Because the two things go together. So after the disaster of 2016, when the leadership of the party -- this was one of the big calamities in U.S. history, when Trump won -- they would not do an autopsy on what they had done wrong. They refused to do it, so we did it. And we put out this report called DemocraticAutopsy.org. What the Democratic leadership and MSNBC was content to do, was look at external factors. So they tried to blame it on Russia, is why they lost in November [2016]; or the Comey intervention, 11 days before the election.
These were small factors. But the major factor was within the control of the Democratic Party leadership, and that's who they chose as their candidate; how they ran that campaign, how they spent their money -- and remember, the Clintonites spent more money than the Trumpites in November, in the November 2016 election. So what, our critique of the Democratic Party leadership, and why they need to be replaced -- and there will soon be campaigns to replace Schumer and Pelosi and Tom Perez, the leader of the Democratic National Committee -- the reason they need to be replaced is they keep making two errors. One is agenda; they don't have a progressive agenda, it's mush, it's tepid, as you said. And two, they don't spend their money the right way. What you need to do is have a progressive agenda that creates a lot of enthusiasm among young people, people of color, even white working-class people. And then you have to spend your money to get your base out to the polls -- that's black people, Latinos, poor people, young people. Instead, they spend all this money on ads.
RS: But we're slipping into a language here of the Democrats as somehow being virtuous, if stumbling. And I just want to raise a question for you. Aren't they really more perfectly, on economic matters, the party of Wall Street? And the result is, even in the '16 election, they got more support from Wall Street, and they got it in the midterm now; I haven't done a clinical analysis of the stats. I want to ask you about this Democratic Party -- maybe it is basically a con job, OK, that in fact, you're deluding people. Most of my friends, most of the people I know, they're part of the blue wave; I mean, in my own family everywhere, I have -- I've got this all the time: we're going to win, we're going to resist. And the question is, isn't there a message of false consciousness here? If we're talking about a base that has working people, black people, brown people -- those, that's the group. College-educated black and brown people were the people hardest hit in the Great Recession, engineered by Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Bill Clinton. You know, they lost 60, 70 percent of their wealth because of these liar loans, swindles and everything. That's the base that you're now going to tell they should give the Democrats another chance?
JC: Well, you're right in -- you and I identify the base, but the leadership of the party is, as you say, allied with Wall Street. The Clintonites, the Obama -- Obama got more money from Wall Street when he ran for president in 2008 before, in that campaign, before he was the front-runner. And there were two New York candidates running for president, Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, and Obama was out-fundraising them before he was a front-runner. So he was well connected, too. So the base of the party -- we don't have a parliamentary system, we don't have proportional representation. We, at national and statewide levels, we're reduced to two parties. And progressives need to take over the leadership of the Democratic Party. If it's left in the hands of the Pelosis and the Schumers and the Tom Perezes, it's hopeless.
RS: OK, but you know, I like to dig a little deeper in these interviews. And you know, last night -- oh, I got in trouble, not just last night, teaching a couple of times. And everyone from my wife to my former dean here, and other people -- I said, look, if there are any kids in the room, any students who don't feel they want to vote, you don't have to. Now -- debatable proposition.
JC: Very debatable.
RS: Very debatable, but after all, we're at a university, we're supposed to do critical thinking, we're supposed to challenge. And I was making a point to develop discussion and argument, you know. And I myself last night had my "I Voted" sticker on; you know, I dutifully went to my polling thing. But I thought, you know, wait a minute; wait a minute. Is this really a game that should absorb so much of our attention? Now, I'm putting the question to you because when I was at the Democratic Convention, you were an important figure to me as a journalist. I wanted to be where you were, the meetings and so forth, because they were the most interesting delegates, the Bernie delegates. They came from all over the country, they were idealistic, they were in touch with their own communities. And, lo and behold, they were betrayed.
JC: Right, but if -- you, I'm so glad you brought them up. If all they did was be Bernie delegates and work in the Bernie campaign, then yeah, I'd be disappointed. But the people you're referring to that I got to know so well in Philadelphia, from every race, every age group, every gender -- they're movement-builders. These are people that work in organizations. They're union-organizers, they're tenant-organizers. So I don't believe you register anything by not voting. But if all you do is work in elections, or you only get active two months before an election, you're really not an activist. What you have to be doing is building independent organizations, and then also take those organizations and work electorally. But if all you do is electoral work, it's cyclical; that's not how you're going to build a movement that could take over the Democratic Party and take over the country. The important thing is, where do we go? Is there a way of putting forward a progressive agenda and raising money for a presidential campaign or a big campaign? And I think Bernie Sanders proved, you don't need Wall Street money. You don't need corporate money. You can get $27 donations. Beto O'Rourke proved it.
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