Is it even possible to astroturf an already artificial, corporate political movement?

It appears that we are about to find out.



"The Resistance" has significant support from the non-profit industrial complex and the Wall Street-stuffed coffers of the Democratic Party. Such support is evident in the organizations MoveOn.org, the Town Hall Project, and Indivisible. The Democratic think-tank Center for American Progress (CAP) assists each of these so-called anti-Trump focused organizations. On CAP's Board of Directors sits Democratic Party elites Madeline Albright and John Podesta.

Indivisible is not a group I had heard of before. So I did a search and found this.



With more than 6000 chapters by early February, the classic Astroturf organization “Indivisible,” set up by two Democratic Congressional staffers, has worked to channel popular anger into manageable mainstream channels that offer no challenge to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, class, empire, race, gender, and ecocide. Indivisible talks about the need to get past “ideology” and unite Americans across partisan lines to “get big things done” through government – standard “pragmatic” neoliberal language. An activist and attorney from California’s Monterey County recently wrote me on how Indivisible is a “mechanism for co-opting the anti-Trump resistance and channeling opposition to Trump into support for the Democratic Party.” By the activist’s account, Indivisible “has had a devastating impact on local organizing. A broad-based and diverse coalition was developing here in the first few months after the election; it collapsed as soon as Indivisible appeared.”

...I’ve received similar reports from other correspondents. One of my favorite ones comes from South Florida, where an Indivisible chapter invited as a speaker its notorious right-wing corporate-Democratic Congressperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz – an arch-neoliberal Democrat who led the rigging of the primaries against Sanders as Democratic National Committee chair and who has openly pledged allegiance to big money campaign donors over single-payer health insurance. As Florida progressive Taylor Raines reported last May 2nd, “not only did this group invite one of the most divisive women in liberal politics to speak at their meeting, but they openly prepared to silence dissent by banning signs, and promptly removed protestors who spoke up against her.” Any angry Floridian who had the accurate audacity to note that Wasserman-Schultz wing of the Democratic Party essentially elected Trump (Sanders would likely have defeated the orange-tinted beast) was evicted from the gathering – in the name of “one nation, under God, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Wow! The Dems moved fast to co-opt legitimate, grassroots anger and fear, and completely gut it.

I should point out that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was one of the 25 House Democrats that have been working for the last few months on a bill that would remove Trump from office. So DWS is also part of the McResistance.

Now some of you might think that I'm being unfair by calling this prepackaged, heavily processed, over-marketed, unhealthy political movement The McResistance.

The reality is the name is extremely appropriate.

Yes, really. This is an actual McDonald's web site.

Even the Tea Party wasn't this phony.



The apparel carries several slogans such as “vive la résistance” imposed over fast food or the image of Ronald McDonald’s fist raised in solidarity—notable that it is the mascot’s fist raised in solidarity and not that of, say, a fictionalized employee. The imagery is the explicit merger of the language of resistance with that of global capitalism. Political action is reduced to another commodity on the market.

...Here resistance becomes another product paradoxically upholding the status quo rather than challenging it. Wall Street’s problem isn’t that the financial industry explicitly profits off others poverty, they just need more women as board members. McDonald’s hasn’t fought paying employees a living wage—it’s part of the resistance. That liberalism is largely uninterested in challenging the status quo makes this emphasis on the symbolic necessary.



Give the Republicans some credit.

At least the GOP could maintain some thin, superficial appearance of a grassroots movement.

The Democrats are completely unable to do the same.

It is only natural, then, for Democrats and progressives to look back at the Tea Party for some guidance in 2017, which is exactly what the authors of the widely read Indivisible document did last December, offering “a step-by-step guide for individuals, groups, and organizations looking to replicate the Tea Party’s success in getting Congress to listen to a small, vocal, dedicated group of constituents.”

...Of course, the “resistance” has been far from perfect, and at times liberals seem to be imitating the Tea Party in all the wrong ways. For example, many liberals have also come to ignore reality and create their own facts, while falling for conspiracy theories that bolster their increasingly paranoid worldview (particularly when it comes to Russia). Just as Tea Partiers once accused Obama of being a Kenyan-born Muslim, many liberals are today convinced that Trump is a Russian spy who is guilty of treason.

If the resistance has been all too ready to embrace the Tea Party’s paranoid style of politics, it has simultaneously been too reluctant to adopt the anti-establishment politics that made the Tea Party such a dominant force in American politics.

One thing you have to give credit to the Tea Party was that it challenged the GOP establishment. The Dems, on the other hand, seem obsessed with making sure that doesn't happen to them.

While Hillary has shamelessly hitched herself to what is supposed to be a "grassroots" movement, Obama has kept it more quiet.



But the private activity suggests that the former president, who left the White House with a 60 percent approval rating, is quietly doing more to shape the party than is often visible.

...The conversations between Obama and the lawmakers and party leaders are said to vary.

With Perez, the men discussed the outlines of the party's future. With others, he has discussed policy.

What might be his advice? Protect Obamacare and pass TPP? Oh, and find out why we lost the Rust Belt when you get a chance.

Obama is singularly unqualified to guide the Democratic Party back to something that represents its grassroots.



In a January 2017 interview with Vox, former President Barack Obama said, “In the ‘dissatisfied’ column are a whole bunch of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a single-payer plan. The problem is not that they think Obamacare is a failure. The problem is that they don’t think it went far enough and that it left too many people still uncovered.”

Indeed, Sanders supporters don’t think Obamacare went far enough because it left 28 million people uncovered in addition to millions more with virtually no coverage given the high premiums and deductibles they face. Criticisms of the AHCA—that it would take away health coverage for millions and cause countless deaths—are true for Obamacare as well. The debate taking place within the Democratic Party between establishment Democrats and Sanders progressives is about how many people it is acceptable for a government health care system to abandon: none or millions.

As I pointed out the other day, the entire health care system is failing, while Obamacare does nothing but subsidize health insurance for some people.

To be fair, there is a progressive insurgency inside the Democratic Party that is outside of the McResistance. The GOP has their grassroots problem as well.

No matter how much astroturfing the parties do, this popular rebellion will not go away. Not as long as the nation remains an oligarchy.