By Norman Solomon

When Democrats take control of the House in early January, they’ll have two kinds of leadership — one from the top of the party’s power pyramid, the other from its base. With formal control, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer can brandish huge carrots and sticks to keep Democratic lawmakers in line. With grassroots support, a growing number of those lawmakers can — and should — strategically step out of line to fight for progressive agendas.

Pelosi and Hoyer have been running the Democratic machinery in the House of Representatives since 2003, and they’re experts at combining liberal rhetoric with corporate flackery. Pelosi is frequently an obstacle to advancing progressive proposals. Hoyer is significantly worse as he avidly serves such “constituents” as giant banks, Pentagon contractors and other Wall Street titans. The duo has often functioned as top-drawer power tools in the hands of powerful corporate-military interests.

Pelosi is a longtime wizard at generating and funneling hundreds of millions of election-cycle dollars, and as speaker she’ll wield enormous power over committee assignments. But she must keep Democratic House members minimally satisfied — and along the way that should mean yielding more power to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Buoyed by wins in the midterm elections, the caucus includes two-fifths of all Democrats in the House.

That’s where the other kind of leadership comes in — if a hefty number of self-identified progressives in Congress go to the mat to vigorously represent progressive constituencies. For that to happen, a dubious aspect of the Progressive Caucus past must not repeat itself.

“When historic votes come to the House floor, party functionaries are able to whip the Progressive Caucus into compliance,” I wrote six years ago. A grim pattern set in during the Obama presidency, “with many Progressive Caucus members making fine statements of vigorous resolve — only to succumb on the House floor under intense pressure from the Obama administration.”

Backing down had tragic consequences for the nation’s healthcare system. In September 2009, Progressive Caucus leaders sent a letter to President Obama pledging not to vote for any healthcare bill “without a robust public option.” They wrote: “Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Medicare rates — not negotiated rates — is unacceptable.” Six months later, every member of the Progressive Caucus abandoned the demand and voted for a healthcare bill with no public option at all.

In recent years, the leadership of the Progressive Caucus has become more impressive. The current mix of leaders and new members — which includes veteran lawmaker Raul Grijalva, more recent House arrivals like Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna, and notable incoming progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley — seems to augur well.

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[This article was originally published by Truthdig.]

By Norman Solomon

Nancy Pelosi will probably be the next House speaker, a prospect that fills most alert progressives with disquiet, if not dread. But instead of fixating on her as a villain, progressives should recognize the long-standing House Democratic leader as a symptom of a calcified party hierarchy that has worn out its grassroots welcome and is beginning to lose its grip.

Increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party’s mobilized base, that grip has held on with gobs of money from centralized, deep-pocket sources—endlessly reinforcing continual deference to corporate power and an ongoing embrace of massively profitable militarism.

Pelosi has earned a reputation as an excellent manager, and she has certainly managed to keep herself in power atop Democrats in the House. She’s a deft expert on how Congress works, but she seems out of touch—intentionally or not—with the millions of grassroots progressives who are fed up with her kind of leadership.

Those progressives should not reconcile with Pelosi, any more than they should demonize her. The best course will involve strategic confrontations—nonviolent, emphatic, civilly disobedient—mobilizing the power of protest as well as electoral activism within Democratic primaries.

Such well-planned actions as Tuesday’s “Green New Deal” sit-in at Pelosi’s Capitol office serve many valuable purposes. (Along the way, they help undermine the absurd right-wing Fox News trope that portrays her as some kind of leftist.) Insistently advocating for strong progressive programs and calling Pelosi out on her actual positions despite nice-sounding rhetoric can effectively widen the range of public debate. Over time, the process creates more space and momentum for a resurgent left.

There is much to counter at the top of the party. Pelosi still refuses to support single-payer enhanced “Medicare for all.” As on many other issues, she—and others, such as the more corporate-friendly House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer—are clinging to timeworn, Wall Street-friendly positions against powerful political winds generated by years of grassroots activism.

Increasingly, such leadership is isolated from the party it claims to lead. Yet the progressive base is having more and more impact. As a Vox headline proclaimed, more than a year ago, “The stunning Democratic shift on single-payer: In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might.” The Medicare for All Caucus now lists 76 House members.

Any progressive should emphatically reject Pelosi’s current embrace of a “pay-go” rule that would straitjacket spending for new social programs by requiring offset tax hikes or budget cuts. Her position is even more outrageous in view of her fervent support for astronomical military spending. Like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (who was just re-elected to his post), Pelosi went out of her way last winter to proclaim avid support for President Trump’s major increase in the already-bloated Pentagon budget, boasting: “In our negotiations, congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense.”

[Continue reading this article here.]

[This article was originally published by Truthout.]

By Norman Solomon

Election results were still pouring in Tuesday night when pundits on cable news channels began to revive a media refrain that conventional wisdom has been aiming at Democratic Party leaders for decades: Stay away from the left and move toward the center.

We should expect plenty of such advice during the months ahead as Democrats take control of the House for the first time in eight years. It may sound prudent to urge “affordable health care” instead of Medicare for All, or “subsidies for community colleges” instead of tuition-free public college. But such positions easily come across as wonky mush that offers no clear alternative to a status quo that played a role in driving populist anger into the arms of the right wing in the first place.

Last week, in the closing days of the midterm campaign, Barack Obama campaigned saying that he wanted to appeal to “compassionate conservatives,” a phrase propagated by George W. Bush two decades ago. Few Republicans actually turn out to be persuadable at election time. Efforts to pander to them show contempt for progressive principles. Such pandering can lessen the kind of grassroots enthusiasm that helped to defeat GOP candidates in the latest midterms.

Though Andrew Gillum’s gubernatorial quest in Florida fell just short of victory and Stacey Abrams may not reach a runoff election for governor of Georgia, their campaigns boosted turnout that surely helped some Democratic contenders to flip congressional districts. People of color and youthful voters proved to be pivotal — energized not by “moderate” candidates but by strong progressive populism.

The same held true for the Senate campaign of Beto O’Rourke, whose inspiring race in Texas came within less than 3 percent of toppling the extreme right-wing incumbent Ted Cruz. Texas journalist Mimi Swartz commented in a New York Times piece that “O’Rourke gave Texans who have long felt disenfranchised a glimpse of what could be, and I hope they don’t take his defeat as a sign that victory is beyond their grasp.” She added that “the enthusiasm for Mr. O’Rourke most likely helped less glamorous and less moneyed candidates win down the ballot.” And seeds were planted for years to come: The president of Voto Latino “said that her organizations saw a 500 percent increase in registration among young Latino voters in Texas, the state that previously had the lowest voter participation of all.”

When political campaigns are deeply authentic from the grassroots, they serve as compost to prepare the ground for future victories. In sharp contrast, there’s little left to build on after Election Day in the wake of top-down campaigns that promote moderate notions in response to extremely dire problems. While commonly applauded by mass media, centrism smothers the fires of grassroots excitement.

This week, media coverage has often focused on “suburban” voters as key to the defeat of GOP candidates — while rarely noting the demographic changes in many suburbs that have made them more racially diverse. People of color and young voters are often drawn to progressive populism that directly challenges widening income inequality, institutional racism and environmental degradation.

Incantations about the need for so-called moderate policies do little to stimulate a big turnout from the Democratic base — and other voters — oriented to voting against Republican candidates if their opponents draw sharp contrasts between advocacy for economic justice and flackery for de facto oligarchy.

Surveys show that voters are hungry for genuinely progressive policies that have drawn little interest from mainstream media outlets. For instance, polling of the US public shows:

• 76 percent support higher taxes on the wealthy.
• 70 percent support Medicare for All.
• 59 percent support a $15 minimum wage.
• 60 percent support expanded tuition-free college.
• 69 percent oppose overturning Roe v. Wade.
• 65 percent support progressive criminal justice reform.
• 59 percent support stricter environmental regulation.

Yet such popular positions are routinely ignored or denigrated by elite political pros who warn that such programs are too far left for electoral success. The same kind of claims assumed that Bernie Sanders would never get beyond single digits in his 2016 presidential campaign.

[Continue reading this article here.]

[This article was originally published by The Nation.]

By Norman Solomon, Jeff Cohen, Pia Gallegos, Sam McCann and Donna Smith

In October 2017, a team of progressive researchers published “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis,” which probed the causes of the disastrous 2016 election defeat. The report came in the wake of the party leadership’s failure to do its own autopsy. In a cover story for The Nation, William Greider wrote that the “Autopsy” is “an unemotional dissection of why the Democrats failed so miserably, and it warns that the party must change profoundly or else remain a loser.”

Now, “Democratic Autopsy: One Year Later” evaluates how well the Democratic Party has done in charting a new course since the autumn of 2017. This report rates developments in each of the seven categories that the original report assessed.

The upsurge of progressive activism and electoral victories during the last year has created momentum that could lead to historic breakthroughs in the midterm elections and far beyond. Realizing such potential will require transforming and energizing the Democratic Party. 

Corporate Power and the Party:

Somewhat worse

The Democratic Party has implemented modest reforms, but corporate power continues to dominate the party. In 2017 and early summer 2018, the Democratic National Committee voted to refuse donations from a handful of toxic industries that contradict the party’s platform—though the ban on fossil-fuel money was effectively repealed in August 2018. Meanwhile, the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee continue to freely take big corporate donations.

A test for Democrats on Capitol Hill came this year when the GOP successfully worked with powerful bank lobbyists to weaken the Dodd-Frank Act (under the guise of helping small community banks). More than one-third of Senate Democrats joined the effort; many were recipients of significant banking donations. In the House, 33 Democrats joined most Republicans to pass the measure; journalist David Dayen reported that nearly all of the 33 identify as corporate “New Democrats.”

In September, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi preemptively boxed in any potential left-populist agenda on Capitol Hill by backing reinstatement of a “pay-go” rule to offset all new spending with tax increases or budget cuts. A former legislative director for three Democrats in Congress, Justin Talbot-Zorn, responded with an article for The Nation pointing out that “bold progressivism and ‘pay-go’ fiscal conservatism are mutually exclusive.” He added: “The existential challenge of climate change demands that we fully overhaul our energy and transportation infrastructure in a short period of time. The issues of America’s rising inequality and frayed social contract—including stagnant wages, unaffordable college, and exorbitant health care can only be fixed with major new investments.”

After writing a recent analysis for The Guardian that looked at how Democratic leaders act on economic issues in states (from California to Connecticut) that they politically control, David Sirota put his conclusions in a tweet: Democrats in blue states “have used their power to block single payer & a public option, enrich Wall St, subsidize corporations, slash pensions, lay off teachers, promote fracking & engage in pay to play corruption.”

For the Democratic Party, a crucial disconnect remains between rhetoric about corporate influence and subservience to it.

[Continue reading this article here.]

[This article was originally published by The Nation.]

By Norman Solomon

The most widely acclaimed TV series ever about the Nazi occupation of France is a relentless epic with little use for the familiar images of craven collaborators and selfless resisters. Un village français focuses on a fictional rural community that endures a tightening vise of German control for more than four years. The villagers live far away from black-and-white tropes. Even a ruthless Nazi official eludes the usual monochrome. The humans are all too human. 

Un village averaged about 3.4 million French viewers during 72 episodes between 2009 and 2017. The dramatic series has also aired in upward of 40 countries, according to producers. Now gaining an audience in the United States via online platforms (under its English title A French Village), Un village is far afield from routine US media assumptions about bright lines between good and evil. 

From the start of the series, when German troops suddenly arrive in mid-June 1940, the choices for locals are bad and keep getting worse. Un village is riddled with dilemmas that often go from painful to insoluble. The drama’s creators aimed “to bring some shades of grey to the public memory of World War 2 in France,” historian Marjolaine Boutet wrote; they had “the ambition to evoke an empathetic response from the audience towards every character”—while bypassing the timeworn formula of “collaborators as villains and Resistance fighters as heroes.” Based on solid historical research, the poignant and often heartbreaking script comes alive with a superb ensemble cast in more than 20 major roles. The result is a dramatic tour de force that undermines Manichean views of the world. 

After watching the 63 hours of Un village français, I was eager to interview its head scriptwriter, Frédéric Krivine. We met on a rainy Paris morning at a café not far from Place de la République. My first question: “How and why did you want to make a Nazi human?” 

Krivine, who is Jewish, responded with a fleeting quip—“It’s a good Jewish story”—and quickly turned serious. “A good show, especially a show to last for a while, needs to have characters who are really representative of the complexity of human nature,” he said. “Otherwise, you mustn’t use them.” Nazis, he went on, “were human beings, with desires and problems,” at the same time that “in another point of view, they were kind of monsters.” 

The main Nazi character in Un village is a powerful intelligence officer whose romantic charm and steely wit coexist with willingness to torture and execute if necessary to get the job done. I asked Krivine whether there was a message in the mixture. 

“People who do horrible things are human beings,” he said. “We have to find a way to talk about them without hiding what they do and without treating them as nonhuman people, nonhuman beings. They are human beings; like us they belong to, we are in, the same species, human species…. It’s humans who kill now everywhere in the world where people are killed. It’s because they are human beings that we have problems—because if they were just extraterrestrial or monsters we could just erase them.” 

Un village is an intricate counterpoint to Marcel Ophüls’s landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, which left many viewers with the broad-brush impression that occupied France was virtually a nation of collaborators, except for a few heroes. Krivine balks at such sweeping categories. In his script, some of the resisters are unable to resist their own egotism, opportunism, dogmatism, or lethally displaced rage. The purpose of the plot points is to engender not cynicism but realism. 

Overall, Krivine commented, most people are apt to remain bystanders. In the case of wartime France, an overwhelming majority of the population were neither resisters nor collaborators and didn’t do anything, “bad or good.” (Meanwhile, many more French citizens cooperated with the occupiers than resisted them.) When I asked about human tendencies to go along with evils, Krivine replied that “it’s a very complex matter,” and then swiftly reframed my question this way: “Of what is made indifference, and what are the consequences of indifference?” 

Krivine brought up two current examples. He pointed out that several million people have died of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade—yet life-saving medicines exist and could be delivered for use in a far-reaching program. “But we don’t do it.” Krivine then spoke of how snipers in the Israeli military had recently been killing Palestinians along the Gaza border. Yet scant opposition came from the Israeli public. 

When I remarked that such cases are forms of collaboration by the majority, Krivine demurred. “I don’t feel it as collaboration,” he said. “But it’s not nothing.” When I suggested the word “complicity,” he differed again, and said: “People don’t react when they don’t have the horror in their eyes.” 

During the first year of the occupation, the tightening repression of Jews caused little critical response from the French public, he said. It was only when police began to separate Jewish parents and their children in 1942 that a widespread negative reaction from the population set in. German authorities took note and started to implement similar policies more discreetly; the public concern dissipated. 

Near the close of Un village français, two scenes notably bring the past into the present. 

After barely eluding the dragnets of Vichy and German forces, Rita and Ezechiel escape to Palestine. But, contrary to boilerplate story lines, the Jewish couple doesn’t get a happy ending in the Promised Land. On a desert road one day in 1948, they come under attack from Palestinians; when Rita expresses bafflement at the ambush, Ezechiel tells her that Jewish settlers have recently massacred Palestinian families in a village called Deir Yassin. More than one layer of tragedy hangs in the air. 

The postwar trajectory of the central Nazi character—Heinrich Müller, the top SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service) intelligence official in the town—also goes against the familiar grain. As German forces retreat from advancing Allies in the late summer of 1944, Müller deserts with his French lover in an unsuccessful effort to reach Switzerland. Soon the American military captures Müller and discovers his identity. Later, when he resurfaces in the series, the year is 1960, the country is Paraguay, and—as a CIA operative—Müller is overseeing a torture session. The goal is to extract information from a woman who is part of a guerrilla insurgency against a fascistic regime being propped up by the US government. 

With both narrative twists, so different than what we’re apt to see in US mass entertainment, I asked Krivine: What’s the big idea? 

“The idea was,” he said, “we need to show the long-distance consequences of an event like occupation. And it was interesting to show one guy in Paraguay in the sixties. And the Jews who escaped—it was so for Rita and Ezechiel a narrow escape, they were survivors, and then they’re in another place, in another story. The idea was to say: there is no ending to that kind of story.”

[Continue reading this article here.]

By Norman Solomon

When members of the Democratic National Committee voted to take power away from themselves and other “superdelegates” — removing their leverage over the presidential nominating process — they took a big step toward heeding a sign that activists held outside their decisive meeting: “Democratic Party: Live Up to Your Name.”

Outside that meeting at a Chicago hotel, we were holding the sign to put a spotlight on existing hypocrisy and to call for seizing an opportunity.

Officials rarely decide to reduce their own power. And the Democratic Party has not made such a historic reform to its presidential nominating process in decades. So, how did it happen?

After participating in the 2016 national convention as a Bernie Sanders delegate and then working as part of coalitions to get superdelegates out of the nominating equation, I’ve been pondering what we can learn from the historic win that occurred on Saturday. Here are some takeaways:

1:  Leadership to make historic change must come from the grassroots.

The mass media did not do anything to help jettison the power of superdelegates. Neither did even the most progressive Democrats in Congress. The impetus came from, and was sustained by, a progressive base that saw what was wrong with the nominating process in 2016 and was fed up.

2:  Education and agitation must happen in communities nationwide.

Sometimes we hear how it’s not enough to “preach to the choir.” But, while ultimately insufficient, it’s necessary: to build on and expand a solid base. Only with thorough and ongoing outreach — to inform and galvanize progressives — can momentum for long-term pressure be sustained.

3:  In many respects, even the best Democrats in Congress are not providing much cutting-edge leadership. Grassroots activism should be providing leadership to them rather than the other way around.

If it had been left up to the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the superdelegate reform would not have happened. Overall, the reform proposal got scant support — and some notable vehement opposition — from Democrats in Congress, including some who are often praised as “progressive.”

4:  When grassroots activists lead — and are willing to fight like hell, astutely and reasonably and unrelentingly — the Democratic leaders can sometimes be compelled to follow.

It’s virtually impossible to name a profoundly positive social change that was first initiated from Capitol Hill or from the DNC leadership.

5:  We need to methodically organize — inside and outside of the Democratic Party — in order to effectively harness the progressive energies that require public education, activism, and expressions of outrage.

Grassroots organizing — local, regional and national — is crucial. That’s what happened on the superdelegate issue. Overall progressive strength and organizational muscle led top national Democratic Party powerbrokers to conclude that the party must earn a lot more trust from progressives in order to win more elections. Those powerbrokers came to understand that failure to ditch the power of superdelegates would only worsen the falloff of grassroots support and enthusiasm for the party’s candidates.

6:  Election campaigns should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around.

Winning elections — to defeat Republicans while electing more and more progressive Democrats — is absolutely vital. GOP control over the federal executive and legislative branches, and therefore increasingly over the courts as well, must be rolled back: beginning with the midterm elections this fall. In the absence of hallucinatory political analysis, defeating Republicans will require supporting Democrats on the general-election ballot.

At the same time, progressives should not defer to leadership from Democratic Party officials or congressional Democrats, who are routinely constrained and compromised by their roles. And in a time of perpetual war and runaway militarism, in sync with rampant corporate power, the party is currently in need of a basic course correction that can only come from the grassroots. The ultimate key to vital social change is social movements.

Leadership must come from the grassroots. That’s how superdelegates met their long-overdue demise.

     Norman Solomon is the national coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

[This article was originally published by HuffPost.]

By Norman Solomon

The schedulers for this coming week’s Democratic National Committee meeting either have a sly sense of irony or a touch of historical amnesia. Why else would they set the DNC’s most important vote in many years for Chicago on the day before the 50th anniversary of the start of the party’s disastrous convention in that city?

The 1968 Democratic National Convention remains notorious mainly because of bloody clashes in the streets of downtown Chicago, where thousands of antiwar protesters encountered what a federal commission later called a “police riot.” Passions were also fraught inside the convention hall. From the podium, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut denounced “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”

But it’s less well known today that much of the mayhem in the streets and the angry dissent inside the amphitheater a half-century ago stemmed from the well-grounded belief that the Democratic establishment had rigged the nominating process for its candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Many of the delegates for the two antiwar contenders at the convention, Sens. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, were incensed at the party’s disregard for the will of the voters.

About 70 percent of the votes in the presidential primaries had gone to antiwar candidates, including Sen. Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated the night of his election victory in the California primary in early June. Yet the party conferred its nomination on Humphrey, a supporter of the still-escalating Vietnam War who had stayed out of the primaries ― but still ended up with more than two-thirds of the delegates at the national convention. The undemocratic process deepened the divisions inside the party and weakened public support for its ticket, aiding Richard Nixon’s narrow victory in the November 1968 election.

Since then, the Democratic Party's rules for selecting a presidential nominee have greatly improved. In 2016, voters in Democratic primaries and caucuses were able to choose 85 percent of the delegates to the national convention. But the other 15 percent were “superdelegates” ― party officials and Democrats in Congress and state offices ― who enabled Hillary Clinton to become the far-ahead front-runner in the delegate count well before a single voter had cast a ballot in the nomination contest.

By mid-November 2015, 11 weeks before any state primary or caucus, Clinton had already gained a public commitment of support from half of all the superdelegates ― 359 out of 712. That boost from party insiders gave her a major lift with fundraising and burnished the media narrative of pre-primary inevitability. It was an advantage that angered many Bernie Sanders supporters (including me) who saw it as unfair.

Widely unpopular at the grassroots, the superdelegate system remains a burr in the donkey’s saddle, threatening to further undermine party unity in the quest to regain the White House. Top DNC leaders seem to have recognized the problem, and the full DNC might be on the verge of fixing it.

At the Chicago meeting this week, the 447 members of the Democratic National Committee are scheduled to decide on the rules for selecting the 2020 presidential nominee. On the agenda, with strong support from DNC Chairman Tom Perez, is a proposal that would effectively eliminate the voting power of superdelegates on the first ballot for the nomination. (The party’s national convention has not gone to a second ballot since 1952.)

The proposal has received almost unanimous support from the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which is overwhelmingly dominated by party officials who backed Clinton in 2016. Sanders supporters are enthusiastic about the change. But significant pushback is underway from sectors of the party establishment. Some Democrats in Congress and a number of officials in state parties are now vocally making clear that they do not want to lose their superdelegate voting privileges.

A historic showdown is again looming in Chicago. And for the long term, the stakes could turn out to be just as momentous as they were in August 1968. Fifty years later, the national Democratic Party can take a big step toward becoming worthy of its name.

     Norman Solomon, the national coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org, was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. He is a co-author of the report “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis,” released last fall. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."

By Norman Solomon

Progressives should figure it out. Amplifying the anti-Russia din helps to drown out the left’s core messages for economic fairness, equal rights, environmental protection, diplomacy and so much more. Echoing the racket of blaming Russia for the USA’s severe shortages of democracy plays into the hands of Republicans and corporate Democrats eager to block progressive momentum.

When riding on the “Russiagate” bandwagon, progressives unwittingly aid political forces that are eager to sideline progressive messages. And with the midterm elections now scarcely 100 days away, the torrents of hyperbolic and hypocritical claims about Russia keep diverting attention from why it’s so important to defeat Republicans.

As a practical matter, devoting massive amounts of time and resources to focusing on Russia has reduced capacities to effectively challenge the domestic forces that are assaulting democratic possibilities at home — with such tactics as state voter ID laws, purging of voter rolls, and numerous barriers to suppress turnout by people of color.

Instead of keeping eyes on the prize, some of the Democratic base has been watching and trusting media outlets like MSNBC. An extreme Russia obsession at the network has left precious little airtime to expose and challenge the vast quantity of terrible domestic-policy measures being advanced by the Trump administration every day.

Likewise with the U.S. government’s militarism. While some Democrats and Republicans in Congress have put forward legislation to end the active U.S. role in Saudi Arabia’s mass-murderous war on Yemen, those efforts face a steeper uphill climb because of MSNBC.

This week, under the headline “It’s Been Over a Year Since MSNBC Has Mentioned U.S. War in Yemen,” journalist Adam Johnson reported for the media watchdog group FAIR about the collapse of journalistic decency at MSNBC, under the weight of the network’s Russia Russia Russia obsession. Johnson’s article asks a big-type question: “Why is the No. 1 outlet of alleged anti-Trump #resistance completely ignoring his most devastating war?”

The FAIR report says: “What seems most likely is MSNBC has found that attacking Russia from the right on matters of foreign policy is the most elegant way to preserve its ‘progressive’ image while still serving traditional centers of power — namely, the Democratic Party establishment, corporate sponsors, and their own revolving door of ex-spook and military contractor-funded talking heads.”

Corporate media have been exerting enormous pressure on Democratic officeholders and candidates to follow a thin blue party line on Russia. Yet polling shows that few Americans see Russia as a threat to their well-being; they’re far more concerned about such matters as healthcare, education, housing and overall economic security.

The gap between most Americans and media elites is clear in a nationwide poll taken after the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, which was fiercely condemned by the punditocracy. As The Hill newspaper reported this week under the headline “Most Americans Back Trump’s Call for Follow-Up Summit With Putin,” 54 percent of respondents favored plans for a second summit. “The survey also found that 61 percent of Americans say better relations with Russia are in the best interest of the United States.”

Yet most Democratic Party leaders have very different priorities. After investing so much political capital in portraying Putin’s government as an implacable enemy of the United States, top Democrats on Capitol Hill are hardly inclined to help thaw relations between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

It would be easy for news watchers to see that the Democratic Party is much more committed to a hard line against Russia than a hard line against the corporate forces imposing extreme economic inequality here at home.

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