Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor

Last weeks' story -- reported in Huffpo and elsewhere -- about a group of James O'Keefe's confederates who attempted to vote in the New Hampshire primary using falsified ID's "in order to prove voter fraud is possible" has not gotten the attention it deserves.

In principle, the perpetrators' actions are no different than walking into a church and robbing the minister at gunpoint (while covertly filming the crime) in order to "prove" the need for metal detectors in church doorways.

As it happens, the perpetrators in O'Keefe's criminal conspiracy didn't even get away with it. A poll watcher recognized one of them as using a false ID and alerted the authorities. The debate is now whether O'Keefe's criminal "perps" should be prosecuted for committing a serious crime that carries a jail sentence.

But the deeper issue that has not gotten any attention yet is the profound moral red line that the O'Keefe gang has now crossed. To understand it, one just has to look back at the past.

The history of political extremism in the 20th century offers a vast number of examples of actions by groups traditionally called "provocateurs" - extremists who pretended to be members of some opposite group and then committed crimes in their name in order to discredit them. In American history the most extensive use of this tactic was by anti-union forces in the 1930's who infiltrated union demonstrations and then attacked police or bystanders in order to provoke a violent clash and police crackdown on the demonstrators. Another example were covert payments by segregationists to Black teenagers to throw rocks and bottles during some civil rights demonstrations.

The inescapable fact is that the moment that any group decides it has the moral right to commit covert illegal acts in order to "prove they are possible," it then becomes morally reasonable and even obligatory to take the next step and commit illegal acts while pretending to be members of some other group because "our opponents are going to do it anyway; we're just exposing the real truth about what they are going to do."

Just consider how small a step it would have been for the O'Keefe gang to have used African-American or Latino fraudsters and then release the video as proof that actual voter fraud had occurred, rather than as proof that fraud is technically possible. Even if the video at some point identified the fraudsters as actually working for a conservative group, once the video began to circulate on the internet, the distinction between "staged" voter fraud and "actual" voter fraud would be completely lost.

In fact, this is already happening with the video filmed by the O'Keefe gang. On many conservative sites the video is being presented as documentation of actual voter fraud not "staged" voter fraud. Before long, tens of thousands of people will be passionately citing this video as "smoking-gun proof" that actual voter fraud is occuring.

(O'Keefe has deliberatied encouraged this kind of confusion about his videos and has also directly falsified them in the past. Images of the famous "pimp suit" he claimed to have worn during covert taped interviews with members of ACORN were actually edited into his videos after the fact, dramatically altering the viewers impression of what the people being interviewed were seeing. Any moral line between adding phony pimp suits to a video after the fact and hiring African-Americans or Latinos to act as fraudsters is quite literally impossible for normally honest people to distinguish).

Right-wing "provocateur" actions of even greater malevolence are already being committed in the Wisconsin recall campaign. Opponents of the campaign to recall Governor Scott Walker are openly boasting on conservative websites of misrepresenting themselves as petition gatherers for the recall and throwing out the signatures they collect or of providing misleading information to people who wish to sign. Other opponents brag that they have deliberately signed petitions with false names in order to invalidate the petitions and the recall process in general.

There is no reason to mince words: these are nothing less than right-wing extremist attacks on American democracy itself. The perpetrators can be called with perfect justice both "subversives" and "un-American." Democrats should not only demand that they be punished to the maximum extent of the law but that conservatives and Republicans should publically denounce these acts and join in the demand for forceful prosecution. Anything less on their part will represent a shameful wink of tacit approval and repugnant evidence of moral complicity.

Watching video clips of Romney's flip-flopping on just about every major issue is a tiring experience. But his lurid history of pandering to exploit the latest trends in political idiocy should not distract voters from the raw truth of what he stands for today, which is an all-out capitulation to the agenda of the vulture capitalists.

The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuval explains it well in her WaPo op-ed, "Extremist in Pinstripes." Vanden Heuval reviews Romney's extremist positions on social issues, immigration, increasing the military budget and notes his call to push the Supreme Court even further to the right with his appointments.

She provides a disturbing account of Romney's blase certitude in support of draconian cuts in Pell grants, Medicaid and food stamps, children's health programs and aid to people with disabilities to "give multinationals a tax holiday" and give millionaires a nearly $300K tax cut, and adds:

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Romney, as Mike Huckabee once famously noted, "looks like the guy who laid you off." At Bain, he was the guy who fired you. In a review of 77 major deals that Bain capital did when Romney headed the firm, the Wall Street Journal found that "22% [of the businesses that Bain invested in] either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses." Of course, Bain produced remarkable returns for its investors, including Romney.

Romney's flip-flopping proclivities are the easy target for commentators and pundits. But no one should be deluded by speculation that Romney will flip back toward moderate conservatism, if elected. As vanden Heuval argues,

...This isn't the plan of a moderate. The conservative garb isn't something Romney has donned for the primaries. These policies...are consistent with Romney's background as a corporate raider. And as his fundraising shows, they play well in the plush offices of big finance where Romney made his fortune. He is a champion for the 1 percent, peddling a program that will ensure that working Americans bear the cost for the mess left by Wall Street's extremes while the buccaneer bankers, corporate raiders and private equity gamblers are free to go back to preying on America.

Vanden Heuval's article should provoke a sobering reassessment among those who have entertained the fantasy that Romney would govern as a moderate. As E. J. Dionne points out, chameleon Romney has proven highly adept as deluding his fellow Republicans across the party's ideological spectrum that he reflects their views. Dems should not be so gullible, for there is every reason to believe his election would unleash the worst elements of vulture capitalism.

In his The Plum Line column, Greg Sargent reports on "The GOP's game plan to end Obama's presidency," based on "the book," a 500-page memo the GOP has compiled, featuring the President's quotes and videos the Republican plan to use against him. Sagent explains:

National Republicans who are putting together the battle plan to defeat Obama face a dilemma. How do they attack Obama's presidency as a failure, given that voters understand just how catastrophic a situation he inherited, continue to like Obama personally, and see him as a historical figure they want to succeed?...The answer is simple: Republicans will make the argument that Obama fell short of expectations as he himself defined them.

...The game plan is to remind Americans of the sense they had of Obama as a transformative figure in order to claim that he fell short of the promise his election seemed to embody:

One reason for the strategy, notes Sargent, is President Obama's likability. The GOP apparently is concerned that personalized attacks against the President could backfire, because polls indicate that many who disapprove of his record like him nonetheless.

The "Obama vs. Obama" strategy is rooted in a double-barreled assault: "Republicans will now attack him for failing to transcend partisanship and achieve transformative change." Sargent elaborates on the strategy's built-in weakness :

...Obama had barely been sworn into office before the national Republican leadership mounted a concerted and determined effort to prevent any of Obama's solutions to our severe national problems from passing, even as they openly declared they were doing so only to destroy him politically. Republicans have admitted on the record that deliberately denying Obama any bipartisan support for, well, anything at all was absolutely crucial to prevent voters from concluding that Obama had successfully forged ideological common ground over the way out of the myriad disasters Obama inherited from them.

Further, polls indicate that the public is not likely to be hustled by the GOP faulting Obama for inadequate bipartisanship, especially since the president has taken so much heat from inside his party about excessive bipartisanship. Most voters now know that Republicans have no intention of extending anything resembling a bipartisan spirit toward the President. Blaming the President for the failure of bipartisanship is a very tough sell.

The second prong of the GOP strategy, blaming the President for the failure to achieve transformative change, is also made problematic by the public's awareness of Republicans' refusal to negotiate in good faith on anything. Also, whether you like the Affordable Care Act or not, Dems can make a compelling case that the legislation is, in fact, transformative. Dems, however, have failed thus far to vigorously defend the legislation and 'sell' the extraordinary benefits of the act for millions of citizens. It's about turning the ACA into a political asset, instead of a source of concern.

In terms of the economy, Sargent notes another major flaw in the GOP strategy:

While it's true that disapproval of Obama on the economy is running high over government's failure to fix the economy, the independents and moderates who will decide the presidential election agree with Obama's overall fiscal vision -- his jobs creation proposals and insistence on taxing the wealthy to pay for them. They also recognize that Republicans are more to blame than Dems for government's failure to implement those proposals...

If the Republicans stick with the flawed strategy of 'the Book,' Democrats shouldn't have much trouble crafting a persuasive response. In a way, GOP complaints about the failure of bipartisanship and the inability to create transformative change call attention to their responsibility for both failures. Instead of 'Obama vs. Obama,' their strategy could end up looking like 'Republicans vs. the GOP.'

One of the conclusions you get from Jedediah Purdy's Democracy post "The Roberts Court v. America" is that the Democrats were too hasty in confirming the current CJ and the other conservative justices.

Subtitled "How the Roberts Supreme Court is using the First Amendment to craft a radical, free-market jurisprudence," Purdy paints a disturbing portrait of a court majority dedicated to gratifying wealthy elites at the expense of working people. Most Dems were generally aware of this, but Purdy's report should heighten concern about the future of economic progress in America under a High Court dedicated to de-regulation. As Purdy summarizes the philosophy of the current High Court:

In the last few years, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have shown a new hostility toward laws that regulate the economy and try to limit the effects of economic power. They have declared a series of laws unconstitutional, most famously limits on corporate campaign spending (the Supreme Court) and a key part of Congress's 2010 health-care reform act (among others the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta; the Supreme Court will decide the issue in the coming year)... and struck down other state laws that try to constrain the effect of wealth on elections. These decisions don't just trim around the edges of regulation: They go to the heart of whether government can act to balance out private economic power in an era of growing economic inequality and insecurity. These decisions chime with some of the more troubling themes of the time. They fit well with the economics-minded idea that most of life is best seen as a marketplace, and with the right-wing mistrust of government that has metastasized into Tea Party contempt and anger.

Liberals have denounced many of these decisions, but they have not yet spelled out the larger pattern. What's missing from the criticism is a picture of what these cases add up to: an identity for the Roberts Court as the judicial voice of the idea that nearly everything works best on market logic, that economic models of behavior capture most of what matters, and political, civic, and moral distinctions mostly amount to obscurantism and special pleading.

The author believes the current court is headed in the direction of the "Lochner era," named for an emblematic case which in which the Supreme Court of 1905 launched an era of some 200 decisions bashing worker rights and undermining economic fairness to benefit the already-wealthy, laying the foundation for unfettered corporate abuse. "The new cases have different doctrinal logic, and the economy has changed vastly, but the bottom lines are eerily alike: giving constitutional protection to unequal economic power in the name of personal liberty."

Purdy sketches the ideological underpinnings of the Roberts Court:

The Supreme Court's several-pronged attack on the regulation of spending, selling, and buying reinforces one of the most persistent and pernicious intellectual mistakes of the time...the idea that markets are natural phenomena, arising from their own organic principles and free human action, while politics and lawmaking are artificial interferences with this natural activity. In fact, as sophisticated economists, lawyers, and others have always understood, markets are the products of law, which defines and enforces the ownership and exchanges that set the market in motion. A laissez-faire market arises from one kind of law, a more social-democratic market from another. There are things to say for and against both kinds of markets, and any real-life economy has complex blends of both elements--for instance, minimum-wage laws, bans on racial discrimination and prostitution, speed and weight limits for long-haul truckers, and so forth are all straightforward limits on laissez-faire market freedom. It is obscurantist to suggest that some version of the laissez-faire market is a natural baseline, and anything that departs from it needs special justification...

Of recent decisions by the Roberts majority, Purdy adds,

That is the spirit of the new cases. Taken to their limit, they would set aside the intellectual and political gains of decades of struggle in the twentieth century: the New Deal recognition that the country must take responsibility for shaping its own economy, and the decision to remove the old American romance with economic libertarianism from constitutional judging...The new jurisprudence shares some special features with the old--in particular, a meshing of constitutional principle with economic libertarianism that calls into question the authority of democratic government to shape markets and, above all, check economic power.

Regarding the upcoming deliberations on HCR, Purdy writes, "The most extreme scenario would begin with invalidating the 2010 Affordable Care Act, but, win or lose, the mere fact that there is a viable constitutional argument against the law is a sign of how far the new economic libertarianism has gone." Regarding elections and spending, he writes "It is in this market-fixated climate that courts can declare that spending is speech, advertisement is argument, and the transfer of marketing data is a core concern of the First Amendment."

President Obama was able to get Justices Sotomayor and Kagan confirmed. But now the Senate Republicans are about blocking all Obama court appointments. If the Republicans win, Dems should put Republican court nominees, and particularly their economic philosophy, through more intense scrutiny. One more free market ideologue on the court, and reforms like the minimum wage, health and safety regulation and all remaining elements of the social and economic safety net will all be endangered, if not shredded.

Of course, the term "Robert's Court" somewhat disses the four liberal/moderate court justices, who may be in the majority on occasion. There is also an argument that one more reactionary Supreme Court Justice won't make such a big difference. But a 6-3 High Court would prolong the rule of the 'free' market purists, potentially for decades longer than the current 5-4 conservative majority.

Progressives have been fairly vigilant in monitoring the records of Court nominees with respect to their views on abortion, gun control, Gay marriage, prayer in school and all of the social issues. But it's clear that Dems have been too lax in giving conservative court nominees a free ride on their economic philosophies, which are proving hugely consequential to America's future.

There's lots more in Purdy's article that Dems should read to better understand what's at stake in the November elections. But if political moderates needed just one good reason to vote Democratic in 2012, Purdy's got it.

It's impossible to open a magazine or newspaper these days without running across a fawning, completely credulous article that breathlessly describes a new breed of non-Democratic "moderates" and "centrists" who are said to be sprouting like mushrooms across the country.

These new moderates and centrists are profoundly different from the moderate and centrist political strategists of the Clinton era who sought to prod the Democratic Party toward the "center" in order to win the votes of political independents. Progressives strongly disagreed with these "New Democrats" on many issues but the vast majority of the Clinton era moderates and centrists (with the utterly dishonorable exception of the reptilian Dick Morris and a handful of other political chameleons) were at the time and have subsequently remained firmly and unequivocally committed to working within the Democratic Party.

The new breed of moderates and centrists, in very dramatic contrast, are described as being completely disillusioned with the Democratic Party as well as the GOP and currently wandering about in the political wilderness in search of a new third party or some innovative new technological platform that will allow them to create a political formation far beyond the snares of both Republican and Democratic orthodoxy.

In principle, it is possible to imagine a set of voters who might be attracted to such an alternative. There certainly are many moderate Republicans who feel deeply estranged from the current Republican Party and who yearn for "old fashioned" Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller, George Herbert Walker Bush or Bob Dole but who, at the same time, simply cannot imagine actually voting for a Democrat. On the Democratic side, even though Obama is in many ways the most centrist Dem in recent memory, he is still sufficiently liberal to make some of the more conservative Democratic voters vainly wish for an alternative that is less liberal and more "traditional values" oriented than the modern Democratic Party.

But there's a massive, unavoidable problem with the idea that the current self-appointed leaders of this potential voting bloc genuinely reflect the views of most "middle of the road/neither Democrat nor Republican" voters. A central pillar of any honest moderate or centrist perspective today must necessarily be the recognition that -- while a moderate voter may feel deeply estranged from both political parties - it is also simply impossible for him or her to ignore the fact that the Republicans are vastly more intransigent, rigid and uncompromising in their positions than are the Democrats.

A genuine moderate or centrist is, by the very definition of the two terms, someone who wants to see sincere efforts at compromise coming from both sides of the partisan divide rather than the total capitulation of one side or the other. Yet only a person who is completely - and I mean completely -- immersed in the conservative and Republican world-view can seriously believe and assert that the Republicans have actually been just as flexible and willing to compromise as have the Dems.

E.J. Dionne says it well:

Some of my middle-of-the-road columnist friends keep ascribing our difficulties to structural problems in our politics. A few call for a centrist third party. But the problem we face isn't about structures or the party system. It's about ideology -- specifically a right-wing ideology that has temporarily taken over the Republican Party and needs to be defeated before we can have a reasonable debate between moderate conservatives and moderate progressives about our country's future.

He continues:

If moderates really want to move the conversation to the center, they should devote their energies to confronting those who are blocking the way. And at this moment, the obstruction is coming from a radicalized right.

In fact, opinion polls show that there are indeed many sincere moderates and centrists who do accept this basic reality. Progressive Democrats may disagree with this group on many subjects, but can nonetheless still grant that they are essentially honest and sincere.

On the other hand, however, a good number of the self-proclaimed leaders and theoreticians of this new centrist "movement" belong to three quite different and substantially less admirable groups. A quick rundown includes three distinct subcategories:

• "Tokyo Rose" Dems who gleefully bash all things Democratic on Fox News

• Faux-sanctimonious "both sides are equally to blame" hypocrites

• Double-talking "have it both ways" verbal gymnasts

Let's look at them in turn.

A substantially more important group, on the other hand, are the advocates of the notion that "both sides are equally to blame."

The acknowledged Poster Boy for this group is, of course, David Brooks. Brooks actually lost his way for a moment back in July and uncharacteristically scolded the Republicans for extremism in one New York Times column without remembering to immediately add that the Dems were at least as bad or actually even worse. Within a few days, however, he made a complete recovery from this temporary infection of objectivity and reverted to form as the advocate of a strict "plague on both your houses" Olympian condescension.

Here's a typical Brooksian expression of the "both sides are equally to blame" notion.

[Both the Democratic and Republican parties] main fear is that they will lose their identity and cohesion if their members compromise with the larger world. They erect clear and rigid boundaries separating themselves from their enemies. In a hostile world, they erect rules and pledges and become hypervigilant about deviationism. They are more interested in protecting their special interests than converting outsiders. They slowly encase themselves in an epistemic cocoon. The Democrat and Republican parties used to contain serious internal debates -- between moderate and conservative Republicans, between New Democrats and liberals. Neither party does now.

Characteristically, the passage above positively reeks with pompous pretensions of high-minded impartiality but at the same time basically functions to accuse Dems of being every bit as extreme as the GOP. An honest moderate or centrist cannot evade acknowledging that there is a substantial difference between the two parties on precisely the issues Brooks notes above but this is exactly the point that the self-anointed prophet of the Moderate Center systematically avoids conceding.

Greg Sargent has accurately described the "both sides are equally to blame" notion as the "false equivalency" fallacy and he and other progressive commentators have created an ongoing "false equivalency watch" in their commentaries because so many new examples continue to appear every day.

Among mainstream media writers and commentators the "both sides are equally to blame" notion is, of course, enormously popular for essentially grubby professional reasons - to keep good relations with sources and stay on the invitation lists to briefings and parties. Brooks, on the other hand, has made the "both sides are equally to blame" notion his unique brand, trademark and raison d'être. Ed Kilgore has wryly described Brooks' method as that of someone "who soars above the partisan fray like an eagle, but always manages to find his way back to the tactical positions of the GOP like a homing pigeon."

Kilgore elaborates:

There's a well-established rhetorical practice available very often in the op-ed pages of The New York Times that ought to be called the Brooks Maneuver. It involves framing a complicated public policy issue in terms of abstract and conflicting principles that the columnist sympathizes with but deems tragically incompatible. The conclusion drawn is that any resolution will require a brave new kind of politics that just doesn't exist. Thus, sadly, no action is advisable until that great day when wise solons take charge, a course of action that happens to coincide, amazingly, with the short-term strategy of the Republican Party.

The Brooks Maneuver is an ideological scam of long standing, but the most popular recent variation of the "both sides are equally to blame" notion is the product of a group that can reasonably be called the "talking out of both sides of their mouth" brigade. They simultaneously accept and reject the notion that both sides are equally to blame - often in the same article and even on the same page.

The New York Times recently offered one particularly clear example of this ideological-literary sub-genre in an op-ed that was focused on precisely the need for a renewed national commitment to "compromise." In one particular paragraph the authors contrasted Ronald Reagan's relative willingness to compromise when he was president with John Boehner's recent statement that "I reject the word [compromise]" and did not immediately pose any equal but opposite example of modern Democratic intransigence. This subtle stylistic choice tended to suggest that they might privately recognize that a difference between the two parties does really exist.

But at every other point in their commentary they were rigidly and relentlessly "even-handed." They defined the contemporary opponents of compromise as "Politicians" (3 times), "members of congress" or "members" (4 times)", "Washington", "the capital", "my party," "our political leaders", "legislators" and "representatives." Within this veritable avalanche of scrupulously non-partisan labels there was not a single hint that there might be even the slightest, most miniscule difference between Democrats and Republicans in regard to their willingness to compromise.

The leading spokesman of the "talking out of both sides of their mouth brigade" however, is unquestionably the Washington Post's Matt Miller who has called for a third party because of the utter inadequacy he perceives in the existing two. In one isolated paragraph of a recent commentary he does concede that a difference between the two parties does exist. As he says:

This doesn't mean both parties are equally to blame for Washington's dysfunction. But they're unacceptable and disappointing in their own ways. I'm a former Clinton aide who believes President Obama has done many good things, and that his agenda is much better than the current Republican creed. But with America on the road to slow decline, the stakes are too high for "inadequate" and "retrograde" to be our only choices.

But in this other, much more typical paragraph he doesn't see any real difference at all:

Neither of our two major parties has a strategy for solving our biggest problems; they have strategies for winning elections, which isn't the same thing. Democrats and Republicans will tell you, as I do, that they want to make America competitive again, keep faith with our deepest values of fairness and opportunity, and fix our broken political system. But the Democrats' timid half-measures and the Republicans' mindless anti-government creed can't begin to get us there. Both parties are prisoner to interest groups and ideological litmus tests that prevent them from blending the best of liberal and conservative thinking. And neither party trusts you enough to lay out the facts and explain the steps we need to take to truly fix things

In short, for the new "have it both ways" gang, determining their position basically depends on which one of their paragraphs you happen to be reading at any particular time. Every once in a while the Dems are admitted to be, well, um maybe/kinda/sorta/slightly/a little/somewhat/ better than the Republicans. But then, at every other point in the same article, the authors turn around and find twenty different ways to flatly affirm that there's not one lousy stinking dimes' worth of difference between the two.

Now these verbal gymnastics are entirely understandable -- and indeed quite useful -- if you're a journalist who wants to be admitted to invitation-only receptions at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday but also be able to deny being a gullible moron or utterly craven careerist at the National Press Club on Friday. But, as far as intellectual honesty is concerned, the truth is that, no matter how agile these rhetorical gymnasts may be, they simply can't have it both ways. If you don't firmly -- and consistently -- recognize that a major difference does indeed exist between the Democrats and Republicans, you are, as Paul Krugman says, part of the problem and not the solution.

Here's how Krugman lays out the situation:

So what's with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it's coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it's not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out -- a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you're not willing to say that, you're helping make that problem worse.

There is a profound resistance to facing this unavoidable truth. Many commentators simply cannot bring themselves to accept the idea that one of the two American political parties is actually evolving in a direction that is recognizably similar to the evolution of extremist European political parties like the French National Front in the previous decades when it was led by Jean Marie LePen. They would rather continue to promulgate the comforting political bed-time story that both American political parties still ultimately seek to achieve reasoned compromise despite the utterly irrefutable evidence that the Republican Party has completely abandoned this goal.

But Democrats cannot and must not allow this evasion to stand unchallenged. These new self-proclaimed moderates and centrists have to be aggressively confronted and challenged with a simple question:

"Do you believe that the Democratic and Republican parties are equally guilty of intransigence and extremism or is the Republican Party significantly more to blame?"

It is predictable that the leaders of the "have it both ways brigade" will unleash a barrage of rhetorical evasions to avoid giving a direct and categorical answer to this question but, unfortunately for them, life doesn't always provide an escape hatch from facing reality. There simply isn't any "sensible", "moderate", "middle of the road" option that can allow them to escape the hard choice between these two stark alternatives. As a result, it's time for Democrats to get rude and directly "in their face" and to force them to admit where they really stand.

Genuinely sincere moderates and centrists cannot help but recognize and acknowledge that a profound difference does indeed exist between the two parties in regard to political intransigence and extremism. In contrast, self-proclaimed "moderates" who refuse to admit that any major difference exists really aren't moderates or centrists in any meaningful sense at all.

In the coming days the Occupy Wall Street movement faces an extremely complex and difficult series of decisions about its strategy and tactics. It cannot simply repeat the initial tactic of occupying public spaces that it has employed up to now but it has not yet developed any clear alternative strategy for the future.

In debating their next steps the protesters - and the massive numbers of Americans who support them - will turn again and again to the history and example of the civil rights movement for guidance. Martin Luther King's closest advisors including Jessie Jackson and Andrew Young have noted the clear historical parallels that exist between the two protest movements and both activists and observers will urgently seek to find lessons in the struggles of the past.

The discussion, however, will be hindered by the profoundly oversimplified vision that many people today have of how the victories of the civil rights movement were actually achieved. Most Americans have little more than a series of impressionistic images of the civil rights movement - police dogs and fire hoses unleashed against the demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, dramatic marches attacked by police in Selma, Alabama in 1965 and, across the south, sit-ins and freedom rides that rocked the region in the early years of the decade. In this vision, dramatic confrontations with the authorities appear to have been, in effect, the movement's entire "strategy."

But, in fact, behind every major campaign of the civil rights movement there was actually a very organized and coherent three-pronged strategy. To seriously seek guidance for the present in the struggles of the past, it is absolutely indispensible to understand the basic socio-political strategy that the movement employed.

The civil rights movement's three-pronged strategy combined:

(1) Civil disobedience

(2) Grass-roots organizing and voter registration

(3) Boycotts and economic withdrawal

In every single major campaign of the civil rights movement - Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma -- these three elements of the overall strategy were employed in a coherent, mutually supporting and reinforcing way. In contrast, no part of this coordinated approach was ever successful in isolation.

Seen in this light, there are indeed reasonable comparisons between the civil rights movement and the initial phase of Occupy Wall Street. OWS represents a modern application of civil disobedience, the first component of the civil rights movement's three-pronged strategy. The essence of civil disobedience (also called "nonviolent direct action") is the use of dramatic protests that disrupt normal activities and usually violate the law. They are designed to call attention to the existence of injustice and win public sympathy through the demonstrators willingness to risk danger and injury and to go to jail for their cause.

But civil disobedience was only tip of the iceberg of the civil rights movements' struggle against segregation. Behind the dramatic actions that captured the headlines was a massive grass-roots organizing effort across the South that involved thousands of passionate young organizers. For every one sit-in demonstrator there were a hundred grass-roots civil rights activists who spent months and years travelling around the South to conduct "freedom schools" in church basements, restaurants, barber shops and meeting halls, gatherings that were held in even the smallest towns and rural areas. These freedom schools patiently built support for voter registration efforts and laid the foundations for later political campaigns by African-American candidates. King and his lieutenants were always absolutely clear in saying that the only long-range solution to segregation lay in Black Americans winning effective political representation.

Today it is the "We Are Ohio" movement and the Wisconsin recall campaigns, rather than Occupy Wall Street, that represent the modern equivalents of the civil rights movement's grass-roots organizing campaigns. During these recent campaigns against laws designed to eliminate the right to union representation hundreds of thousands of petitions were signed and thousands of volunteers engaged in door to door canvassing, literature distribution, the manning of tables in shopping centers and the operation of phone banks - the hard, grueling, unsung work that is indispensible for successful grass-roots campaigns. The one-on-one, face-to-face organizing techniques of the Ohio and Wisconsin movements actually displayed substantial similarities with the techniques of traditional trade union organizing as well as with the civil rights movement.

In short, comparisons between the movements of today and the civil rights movement cannot be limited to Occupy Wall Street. The "We Are Ohio" and Wisconsin recall campaigns have an equally valid claim to kinship with the earlier struggles of the civil rights era.

The third prong of the civil rights movement's strategy was boycott and economic withdrawal. In the Montgomery campaign the bus system was boycotted, in Birmingham, it was all downtown merchants. In the view of King and his associates it was economic withdrawal that was actually the most powerful single weapon in the nonviolent arsenal. It was the bus boycott that won King's first victory in Montgomery and the boycott of downtown stores that ultimately forced the business and political establishment of Birmingham to negotiate.

King himself referred to boycotts as "campaigns of economic withdrawal" and described them as "nonviolence at peak of its power". Here is how he expressed it in 1967:

In the past six months simply by refusing to purchase products from companies which do not hire Negroes in meaningful numbers and in all job categories, the Ministers of Chicago under SCLC's Operation Breadbasket have increased the income of the Negro community by more than two million dollars annually. In Atlanta the Negroes' earning power has been increased by more than twenty million dollars annually over the past three years...This is nonviolence at its peak of power.

The modern application of this strategy can now be seen in the "Move Your Money" and related campaigns that call on people to withdraw funds from the major banks and reinvest them in credit unions and other more socially conscious institutions. There are a variety of estimates from credit unions and independent sources that suggest the campaign has already had a significant and measurable effect, but it is also clear that this is still the very earliest trial run for future economic withdrawal campaigns with potentially powerful consequences.

Beyond the current campaign aimed at the largest banks, the tactic of economic withdrawal can be applied to a wide variety of firms and issues. Such campaigns will all be united by a simple underlying concept: working people should not spend or invest their money with firms and institutions that use those same funds to bankroll conservative candidates, laws and policies that undermine those same workers' economic security, standard of living and hopes for the future.

Consumer product companies are particularly vulnerable to campaigns of economic withdrawal because the damage to their reputation and image can in many cases be more devastating than the direct economic damage itself. The quite effective campaign by People of Color to pressure the advertisers of Glen Beck's TV show in 2009 demonstrated the significant leverage consumer boycott campaigns can bring to bear in the internet age.

There are already a variety of informal linkages developing between the three social movements above -- the "Occupy Wall Street", "We are Ohio/Wisconsin recall" and "Move Your Money" campaigns. Organizations including MoveOn.org, Van Jones' American Dream Movement and the AFL-CIO/Working America federations have played a significant "behind the scenes" role in supporting the OWS, "We are Ohio" and Move Your Money" actions and also in popularizing and promoting the broader "We are the 99%" political movement and perspective around the country.

But the critical historical lesson that can be drawn from the civil rights movement is the vital need for the three prongs of the movements' strategy - civil disobedience, grass-roots organizing/political mobilization and boycott/economic withdrawal - to be employed in a coordinated way as part of a single integrated approach. The movement's key victories in Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma all depended on this coordination.

There is currently no single leader with the immense stature of a Martin Luther King or grass-roots organizations like SCLC and SNCC to provide such coordination for a national "We Are the 99%" social movement. In the modern internet-connected world, however, more diversified and decentralized forms of organization are more likely to develop and are more likely to be effective as well.

But for a "We Are the 99%" movement to achieve substantial victories, coordination must be achieved. Neither Occupy Wall Street nor the Ohio and Wisconsin campaigns nor campaigns of economic withdrawal like "Move Your Money" can, in isolation, produce transformational victories of the scope and significance of the victories of the civil rights movement.

In coordination, on the other hand, these three tactics are immensely powerful. It was the combination of these three approaches, employed in a coherent overall strategy, that broke the back of the system of Southern segregation within a single decade and that same three-pronged strategy can profoundly transform America once again today.

Note: the analysis presented here was first formulated at a 1971 conference of The Institute for Nonviolent Social Change that included many of the leaders of the major campaigns of the civil rights movement.

In his National Journal post, "A Model for Obama?," Ronald Brownstein sorts out the political leanings of white workers in Ohio, in light of a Hart Research/AFL-CIO survey of voters conducted 11/6-8 and the vote on issue 2, which repealed the ban on collective bargaining for Ohio public workers. Brownstein explains:

As impressive as the depth of the win was its breadth...the survey, released Wednesday afternoon, offers the best picture available of the coalition that overturned Kasich's prized legislation:

--The repeal campaign won broad support. Fully 86 percent of union members voted to repeal, but so did 52 percent of non-union voters. A solid majority of every age group voted to repeal. Not only did 92 percent of liberals vote to repeal but so did a preponderant 70 percent of moderates. (Conservatives supported maintaining the law by almost two-to-one). Nearly three-fifths of independents voted for repeal, along with over nine-in-ten Democrats. Almost three-fifths of whites, as well as a big majority of minorities, voted to repeal.

--The repeal vote reached well into the groups that powered the Republican surge in 2010. A 54 percent majority of whites older than 60 voted to repeal, according to figures from the survey provided by Hart Research's Guy Molyneux. So did a 61 percent majority of whites without a college education. Even a 55 percent majority of non-college whites who do not belong to a union voted to repeal. All of those are groups that have not voted much in recent years for anything favored by Democrats. Even 30 percent of self-identified Republicans and one-fourth of voters who backed Kasich in 2010 voted to repeal.

The success of the repeal vote among the overlapping groups of senior and blue-collar whites - each of which, nationally, gave 63 percent of their votes to Republican House candidates in 2010, according to exit polls - might be the most striking result in the poll. For Democrats who want a class conscious message from Obama in 2012, it's evidence that these prodigal Democratic voters can still be reached with an edgy on-your-side appeal.

The white house should learn the important lesson from the vote and the poll, argues Molyneux:

The idea that you can get Democratic voters, not just young and African-American voters, but working class voters energized and excited about fighting for their economic interests is a lesson I hope the White House will take on this...What killed Kasich was the sense that he was looking out either for the rich and powerful or his own party's political interests. Either way he was not focused on helping average working families in Ohio. And I think that's what Obama needs to set up about his opponent - motives and concern and in whose interest they are going to govern.

In his New York Times op-ed "How Obama Can Win Ohio," John Russo, co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, offers this encouraging assessment:

According to CNN exit polls from the last few elections, union household voters remain a strong presence in Ohio, even after more than three decades of de-industrialization. Twenty-eight percent of Ohio voters come from union households, compared with 23 percent nationally. In 2008, they underperformed for Obama, who won 56 percent of their votes in Ohio versus 59 percent from union households across the country. No similar data exists for the 2010 midterm election, but many labor leaders admit that Kasich beat the Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, in part because voters from community groups and union households either voted Republican or stayed home (essentially giving half a vote to Kasich).

If union households in Ohio lost their enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in recent years, Kasich's actions, together with the national Republicans' just-say-no politics and kill-Medicare initiatives (like the Paul Ryan budget), have made the Democrats look a lot better than they did in 2010.

It all comes down to math. In 2008, 2,933,388 Ohioans voted (or 51.5%) for Obama, 258,897 more than McCain won. If union households maintain their proportion of the electorate, and if just 1 percent more of them vote for Democrats, they can add 15,700 votes to the Democratic vote and subtract the same number from the Republicans - a swing of more than 31,000 votes. If Ohio's union household voters increase their support for Democrats by 3 percent - that is, if they match the national average for union household voters - they would generate 47,100 additional votes for Obama, a swing of 94,200 votes. That alone could give the president Ohio's electoral votes.

But because of Senate Bill 5, we might reasonably expect an even larger shift. A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that the anger generated by the anti-union bill and the organizing fostered by the effort to overturn it has 70 percent of union household voters planning to support Obama and the Democrats in 2012. That translates into an increase of 219,829 votes for Obama, a swing of almost 440,000 votes. Put differently, a mobilized Ohio labor movement with 742,000 members, including many teachers, police officers, and firefighters who have often voted Republican, will be more likely to vote for Democrats in 2012.

Russo believes that Obama must press the case for "a positive economic vision and a program for economic change" and the President's jobs legislation and Obama's recent initiatives on mortgages and student loans should help.

Writing in The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky adds in his post, "Ohio Vote Shows Obama Winning Back the Rust Belt":

...The larger context in which this vote took place is important, too. And that context is Operation Wall Street, income inequality, Republicans in Congress killing the jobs bill piece by piece, Obama finally getting some blood flowing through those veins again instead of water. People have started to care about class issues, and it's pretty clear what they think: The Republican Party isn't representing them (unless they happen to live in a household with an income of at least $368,000 a year). In the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 76 percent agreed that "the current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country."

What this means for next year is twofold. First, it suggests that Davids Plouffe and Axelrod should work the Rust Belt. Plouffe in particular has been signaling a strategy that would put more emphasis on Virginia and Colorado and North Carolina (where the convention is being held) at the expense of states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. But the way Democrats and majorities of independents are acting in those Rust Belt states now, they're looking more like states Obama can hold. You may have seen the Ohio poll in which, despite his low approval rating, Obama beats all the Republicans handily--Mitt Romney by nine points, 50 to 41, and the others by double digits.

Tomasky believes the Ohio vote debunks the conventional wisdom that Dems can win either the base or the center, but not both. As Tomasky says, "...What the Ohio result shows is a way to unite liberals and moderates, Democrats and independents, behind one message that both want to hear. That hasn't happened much in recent American history. The White House had best be alert to it."

In the wake of the Ohio vote it's now clear that the GOP made a huge blunder in declaring class war on unionized workers, providing Dems with a powerful weapon. As Molyneux puts it, "...If the class-conscious Ohio repeal campaign genuinely offers Obama a roadmap to remaining competitive with more older and blue-collar whites, he can keep graying Rust Belt states like Ohio and Wisconsin in play - and reduce his need to repeat his 2008 breakthroughs in the diverse and fast growing new swing states across the Sun Belt."

With little more than a year until the presidential election, two new reports--a survey from CBS/NYT and a CBO brief on household income--illuminate the treacherous terrain on which the campaign will be waged. The candidates will be fighting for the sympathies of an electorate that is utterly dispirited and in no mood for promises of uplift from either party. They say they want change, but they have lost confidence in the public sector as the agent of change.

That would seem to give the edge to the Republicans, but unfortunately for them, most people think they're out to serve the interests of the rich, who already have too much. That would seem to move the edge back to Obama and the Democrats. But unfortunately for them, the people can't figure out whose interests Obama and the Democrats want to serve--or whether they have a plan that could translate good economic intentions into tangible results.

Let's begin with the latest CBS/NYT survey, which finds that only 10 percent of the electorate trusts the federal government to do what is right most of the time--by far the lowest level of confidence ever recorded. Only 9 percent approve of the way Congress is doing its job, which--as Senator John McCain is fond of stating--pretty much narrows its base of support to staff and family members.

Trust in the political system is low because the country is widely perceived as heading in the wrong direction and politicians aren't seen as providing answers. From Barack Obama's inauguration through the end of 2009, on average, 39 percent of the electorate thought that the country was generally heading in the right direction--not great, but much better than the 2008 average of 13 percent. But things have gone downhill ever since: The "right direction" choice averaged 33 percent in 2010 and 28 percent thus far in 2011. As of this week, it stands at 21 percent.

When it comes to the public's faith in government providing effective answers, in mid-September, 43 percent of the people thought that Obama had a clear plan for creating jobs. Five weeks later, after a non-stop presidential jobs tour, that figure has fallen to 38 percent--unimpressive, but far better than the Republicans in Congress, who have persuaded only 20 percent of the electorate that they have a jobs plan. But the people aren't grading the president on a curve: Only 35 percent approve of the way he is handling job creation, and only 38 percent approve of his handling of the economy as a whole. (By contrast, public approval of his handling of foreign policy and Iraq stands at 50 and 60 percent, respectively. But these aren't likely to be voting issues next year.)

Such high levels of pessimism and mistrust should be political gold for Republicans. But the electorate has its own distinct worries about the GOP, and they center on the issue of income inequality. The CBS/NYT survey asked the people a blunt question: "Do you feel that the distribution of money and wealth in this country is fair, or do you feel that the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly divided among more people?" 26 percent of the respondents thought that the current pattern is fair, versus 66 percent who thought the distribution should be more even.

This brings me to the second new report--from the Congressional Budget Office, on trends in household income. Its core finding can be stated simply: In the three decades from 1979 to 2007, the distribution of household income became substantially more unequal, even taking transfer payments and taxes into account. The bottom four quintiles saw their share of income drop, while the share going to the top quintile rose from 43 percent to 53 percent. And in that top quintile, near all of the gain went to the top 1 percent, whose share rose 9 percent points, from about 8 percent to 17 percent. Among that rarified group, average real household income after taxes rose by 275 percent, versus 35 percent for households at the median. When the "Occupy" movement talks about the 99 percent, they're on to something. And so are the people as a whole.

CBO identifies the widening dispersion of income derived from the market--wages and salaries, capital and business income, and capital gains--as the major reason for the increasing inequality of household income. It turns out that all these sources of income have become less equal. In 1979, the bottom 80 percent of households received 60 percent of total labor income, 33 percent of business and capital income, and 8 percent of capital gains. By 2007, those figures had fallen to 50, 20, and 5 percent, respectively.

Simply put, people are justifiably worried that income inequality is too high, and they see Republicans as working to exacerbate it. For example, when asked whom they think the policies of Congressional Republicans most favor, 69 percent say the rich. Only 9 percent say the middle class, and only 2 percent say the poor. Only 15 percent believe that Republican policies treat all groups equally. Here are the comparable figures for the Obama administration: 28 percent say its policies favor the rich, 23 percent say the middle class, 17 percent say the poor, and 21 percent say Obama's policies treat everyone equally. The American people know what Republicans stand for, and they don't much like it. By contrast, they can't figure out what Obama stands for--and they don't much like that either.

In sum, while Americans sense that generating jobs and economic growth is an urgent task right now, they're also concerned about the long-cycle trend toward increasing inequality and whether it's compatible with either economic or civic health. But they still have no idea to whom they should turn to address those concerns. Unless the way the free market works changes dramatically, they know they can't expect the "invisible hand" to reduce inequality. If the people want more equality, which they say they do, they can only get it through public policy. The catch is they don't think they can trust the government to get the job done. They feel, in other words, that they're stuck with a status quo they dislike.

It will be the job of the presidential candidates, of course, to capture and appeal to this dispirited mood. In that way, one thing is already clear: It won't be a campaign full of "hope and change."

In recent days the mainstream media has been rapidly converging on a new common wisdom -- a set of clichés that they will use to frame the rest of the campaign for the Republican nomination and the election of 2012. This new common wisdom portrays the intra-Republican struggle as one between more moderate and extreme wings of the party, with "pragmatic" Republican elites seeking a candidate who can beat Obama in opposition to the more "extremist" fringe elements and candidates of the grass-roots Tea Party.

It is inevitable that the mainstream media will find this image utterly irresistible. It not only serves their personal and professional needs but also reinforces their ideological preconceptions.

The image of "Republican elites as pragmatic, the tea party fringe as extreme" suits commentators' personal and professional needs because it allows them to be publically disdainful of "extremism" without ever having to actually use the term to describe any powerful and significant figure in the Republican coalition who might be in a position to retaliate. A suggestion of "extremism" directed against anyone in this latter group is a social - and possibly career-damaging - faux pas that mainstream journalists will take every imaginable step to avoid.

At the same time, the "Elites as pragmatic, grass roots as extreme" image also validates mainstream commentators' essentially condescending view of political life, in which "extremists" are always scruffy, largely disreputable individuals on the lower rungs of society - the kind of people who live in trailer parks and rant incoherently about the second amendment. Wealthy, powerful and influential "movers and shakers" within the Republican world, on the other hand, regardless of their actual views, are still invariably accorded respect as essentially serious and sensible individuals.

There is nothing new about this pattern of behavior among the mainstream media. It follows the same pattern as the "both sides are equally to blame" clichés about partisan gridlock and "dysfunctional government." Writers and commentators who, in private, will cheerfully concede that, of course, the crisis is fundamentally the fault of Republican intransigence will then fall back on "both sides are equally to blame" clichés in their public writing -- not only to avoid charges of liberal bias but also to portray themselves as impartial and intellectually superior observers of all career politicians.

There is, unfortunately, one major problem with this "elites as pragmatic, fringe as extreme" view: it is deeply, profoundly and fundamentally wrong. The most dangerous group of political extremists today is not the grass roots supporters of the Tea Party. It is the major sector of the Republican financial and ideological elite who have embraced the philosophy of "politics as warfare."

To see why this is so, it is necessary to very clearly distinguish between two entirely distinct meanings of the term "extremism." On the one hand, it is possible for a person or political party to hold a wide variety of very "extreme" opinions on issues. These views may be crackpot (e.g. "abolish paper money) or repugnant ("deny non-insured children medical care"). But as long as the individual or political party that holds these views conducts itself within the norms and rules of a democratic society, this, in itself, does not lead such groups or individuals to be described as "political extremists" by the media or society in general.

Libertarians and the Libertarian Party offer the best illustration. Vast numbers of Americans consider many libertarian views "extreme." But, because the libertarians conduct themselves within the norms and rules of a democratic society, they are virtually never described by the media as "political extremists."

The alternative definition of the term "political extremists" refers to political parties or individuals who do not accept the norms, rules and constraints of democratic society. They embrace a view of "politics as warfare" and of political opponents as literal "enemies" who must be crushed. Extremist political parties based on the politics as warfare philosophy emerged on both the political left and right at various times in the 20th century in many different countries and circumstances.

Despite their ideological diversity, extremist political parties share a large number of common characteristics, one critical trait being a radically different conception of the role and purpose of the political party itself in a democratic society.

In the politics as warfare perspective a political party's objective is defined as the conquest and seizure of power and not sincere collaboration in democratic governance. The party is viewed as a combat organization whose goal is to defeat an enemy, not a governing organization whose job is to faithfully represent the people who voted for it. Political debate and legislative maneuvering are seen not as the means to achieve ultimate compromise, but as forms of combat whose objective is total victory.

This basic conception of the role of political parties leads to the justification and use of two profoundly anti-democratic strategies.

Historically, the Republican Party never embraced this strategy at any time during the Democratic administrations of Truman, Kennedy or Carter. The strategy first made its appearance when Newt Gingrich engineered the shutdown of the government in 1994. After Obama's election in 2008 the use of this "paralyze the government" tactic accelerated dramatically with the conversion of the filibuster into a minority veto of virtually all majority-sponsored legislation and a Republican bar to the huge numbers of judicial and administrative appointments.

Previous generations of Republicans would have been scandalized by the notion of crippling the administration of justice by leaving courts grotesquely understaffed in order to prevent the appointment of individuals who did not strictly adhere to conservative orthodoxy.

The most dramatic escalation of this approach, however, occurred after the elections of 2010 and was reflected in the rejection of the very substantial reduction in federal spending that Obama offered the Republican house majority. Observers concurred that the deal was far more favorable to conservatives in terms of policy than the deal Ronald Reagan accepted in 1986 on tax reform or that Newt Gingrich accepted on welfare reform in 1995. But public statements by Republican leaders indicated that the deal was rejected in substantial part on the explicitly political grounds that any legislative agreement that produced a "victory" for Obama was unacceptable. In effect, the political objective of weakening the president had actually become a higher priority than the achievement of the most fundamental long-sought conservative policy goals.

It is almost impossible for anyone who does not remember previous eras of American politics to realize how extraordinary this transformation actually is. It would have been literally inconceivable to the Republican senators and congressmen of the 1950s and 1960s.

The second, even more directly and profoundly anti-democratic strategy that directly flows from the politics as warfare philosophy is the calculated attempt to disenfranchise likely pro-Democratic voters.

There were no systematic Republican initiatives to disenfranchise voters during the Nixon, Reagan or Gingrich eras. But after the 2008 elections Fox News began promulgating the notion that massive voter fraud had occurred. Fox News featured a video of two members of the New Black Panthers at a single polling site more than 100 times on its national programs, asserting that they had intimidated voters in order to insure Obama's election. Even after it was conclusively demonstrated that sworn eyewitness testimony had been intentionally falsified in order to fabricate this charge, Fox continued to air the accusations and to assert that they were the tip of the iceberg of similar incidents. In parallel, accusations were also made that massive numbers of fraudulent votes had been cast in the election.

The result of these charges was a widespread grass-roots effort by local tea party groups to police polling places and record incidents of intimidation and fraudulent voting during the 2010 elections -- an effort that produced not a single documented case anywhere in the country. Nonetheless, there is now a major, nationally coordinated and massively funded effort to prevent pro-Democratic constituencies from casting their ballots.

TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore accurately summarized the situation as follows:

In the wake of the 2010 elections, Republican governors and legislatures are engaging in a wave of restrictive voting legislation unlike anything this country has seen since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which signaled the defeat of the South's long effort to prevent universal suffrage. This wave of activism is too universal to be a coincidence, and too broad to reflect anything other than a general determination to restrict the franchise.

Millions of voters are affected....As Ari Berman explained in an excellent recent summary of these developments for Rolling Stone, restrictive legislation, which has been introduced in 38 states and enacted (so far) in at least 12, can be divided into four main categories: restrictions on voter registration drives by nonpartisan, nonprofit civic and advocacy groups; cutbacks in early voting opportunities; new, burdensome identification requirements for voting; and reinstitution of bans on voting by ex-felons.

While new voter ID laws have clearly been coordinated by the powerful conservative state legislative lobbying network ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), other initiatives have spread almost virally. Virtually all of these restrictions demonstrably target segments of the electorate -- the very poor, African-Americans and Hispanics, college students, and organizations trying to register all of the above -- that tend to vote for Democrats.

In previous decades large sectors of the Republican elite would have been extremely uncomfortable with such measures and a significant group would have been vocally critical. Today, however, there is literally not a single significant figure in the Republican universe who is publicly objecting. The overwhelming influence of Fox News and talk radio have converted the notions that Obama represents a threat as massive as the rise of Hitler did in Germany, and that massive voter fraud is occurring all across the country, into passionately held urban legends that Republican elites no longer dare - or indeed even wish -- to challenge.

There are two profoundly disturbing conclusions that must be faced:

First, the paralysis of government and the disenfranchisement of citizens are not "business as usual" for American conservatism. They are not attempts to prevent or reverse the enactment of particular policies and bills to which conservatives object but are rather strategies that strike at the most basic institutions and operations of representative democracy itself. To put it bluntly, they are not the policies of conservatives - they are strategies of political extremism.

Second, these strategies are not the products of a disreputable fringe of grass roots conservative activists, but have been designed, executed, endorsed and financed by a major sector of the Republican and conservative financial and ideological elite. The extraordinary fact that there is no major group or individual within the Republican coalition vocally objecting to these measures, as would have occurred in the past, offers the most profoundly disturbing evidence imaginable of the widespread tacit approval by the Republican elite.

The problem will only become more severe and dangerous as the 2012 election approaches. If Obama appears to be winning as Election Day nears, the logic of the extremist view will drive its adherents to embrace a "by any means necessary" philosophy to prevent what they will consider to be nothing less than a cataclysmic social and political catastrophe. If reasonable people across the political spectrum do not speak up now the measures that have been introduced so far could easily become only the opening salvo in even more dangerous attacks on the institutions and operations of American democracy.

Rob Stein, Founder of the Democracy Alliance, has a sobering, must-read for Democrats in his HuffPo article "The Grand New Alliance." Stein skillfully dissects the component elements of the right wing coalition of his post's title ('GNA' in shorthand), provides a thoughtful assessment of their cumulative power and makes a compelling argument that it promises serious trouble for Democrats and Progressives in 2012 -- and beyond.

A profoundly significant new political alignment within the right flank of the Republican Party is becoming entrenched in American politics.

For the modern, somewhat more mainstream economic and neo-conservative Reagan-Bush-Bush-Cheney Republican Establishment, it is a threat far more dangerous to its control of the Conservative-Right than, in their time, were the rambunctious John Birch Society, the youthful Goldwater Rebellion, or the Lee Atwater upstarts who orchestrated the Reagan Revolution.

For Independents, moderate Republicans and Democrats this new alignment should be a wake-up call that the foundations of Democracy are always fragile and the promises of America must never be taken for granted...An harmonic convergence -- a "grand new alliance" -- is occurring among Libertarians, the Christian Right and the disparate legions of Tea Party activists that is transforming politics as we have known it.

Stein acknowledges significant "tensions and fissures" in this multi-tentacled right-wing coalition, "around the environment, the legitimacy of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, and gay marriage." He adds, however, that,

Today, the Libertarian-Religious-Tea Party Alliance is a consciously strategic federation of separate, but inter-connected, wings of a potent right-wing political machine that is energized by the frightening uncertainties of the economic downturn, mobilized in rigid opposition to a President they cannot abide, emboldened by confrontation with some of their historic allies within the broader Republican conservative movement, and fueled by a new avalanche of post-Citizen's United-inspired financial resources.

Its political power has risen rapidly and dramatically. In just the past twelve months, the GNAs' successes have affected virtually every nook and cranny of American politics - sweeping victories in the 2010 Congressional and state elections, grid-locked legislative stand-off with Congressional Democrats and President Obama, scorched earth political wars in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey and other states with overwhelming Republican elected majorities, and a dramatic hijacking of the current Republican Presidential Primary process through the candidacies of Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

Stein goes on to describe the three key elements of the GNA -- libertarians, the religious right, and the tea party -- their numerical strength, what they believe, how they get funded, work together and resolve their differences. He notes that the dominant element, the tea party, successfully projects a "powerfully resonant right-wing populist economic (anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government, anti-Obama) message that is drowning out reasoned debate, causing legislative gridlock, and strengthening reactionary forces."

...Their narrative is delivered daily (through GNA's various local, state and national institutions and media outlets) to an estimated 40 or 50 million activists who are deeply committed to electing Republicans in 2012 at every level in every state in the country.

Stein points out the weaknesses of the three groups as individual entities, but adds:

But acting in concert, the Libertarians, the Christian Right and the Tea Party have become a grand new alliance that has seized control of the Republican message, become the dominant political voice in the Republican Party, is driving the Republican Congressional agenda, is creating political havoc in selected states, and is orchestrating the theatrical drama of the Republican presidential primary process.

Clearly, the whole of this alliance is far more powerful than the mere sum of its parts. The grand new alliance is not just challenging the leadership prerogatives and institutional dominance of the grand old party, it is methodically positioning itself for a wholesale dismantling of 20th Century Republicanism.

Looking forward to 2012, Stein considers various who-gets-nominated scenarios facing Republicans, all of which include a powerful role for the GNA, particularly in terms of economic resources, citing,

...the sophistication and potency of the non-party, non-candidate, independent political machinery that the GNA has at its disposal and the vast financial resources it will raise next year. It will almost certainly out-raise and out-spend the Republican Party in 2012 - my estimate is that the GNA could raise $400-500 million or more for its independent 2012 electoral activities.

This money will be used to both demonize and denigrate President Obama and Democratic candidates at every level, as well as to mobilize tens of millions of Libertarian, Christian Right and Tea Party voters.

The Supreme Court's decision in the Citizen's United case in 2009 opened the floodgates for individuals, corporations and unions to make unlimited and often unreported contributions to non-party, non-candidate, non-profit organizations like the ones built over the past several decades by the GNA. To maximize this financial opportunity, the GNA has built a prodigious fundraising machine that has identified and convinced a new generation of wealthy GNA donors -- including, but not limited to, Texas energy barons, New York hedge fund managers, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs - to donate millions to the GNA political machinery.

An aligned, well-financed and strategically deployed GNA political machine will wreak havoc against Democrats is 2012...This same army of GNA mobilized voters could devastate Democrats in local, state and Congressional elections in many states in 2012.

If this sounds like a load of worst-case scenario, chicken little doom-saying for the next election, Stein is equally gloomy about Dem prospects beyond 2012:

But whether or not the Libertarian-Religious-Tea Party Alliance is successful in winning the presidency in 2012, or indeed, whether or not it is able to defeat Democrats at all levels within the states, there is little doubt that its power and influence will grow throughout 2012 and beyond.

With added strength, it will continue to bedevil the Republican establishment, continue to do all in its power to undermine the effectiveness of President Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders, continue to exercise control in state legislative chambers, and continue to frustrate the advancement of enlightened policies that are desperately needed to restore American confidence, economic prosperity and fairness.

Stein goes on in similar manner, describing a very disturbing picture of the future, if Dems don't get their act together. He sees some hope in the growing OWS demonstrations and defines the choice facing progressives:

Either, we can align ourselves into our own new powerful coalition to promote our core values, counter the views and positions of the GNA, and leave the door open for responsible members of the GNA to join with us whenever possible.

Or, we can continue to focus on our differences with one another, squander our opportunities for cooperation, reject our own leadership responsibility to build a strong, secure and just America, and stand by while the GNA doggedly refuses to secure America's economic competitiveness and methodically dismantles the pillars of our democracy.

The hope is that Stein has understated the divisive forces within the GNA, as well as Democrats' capacity for confronting it. The prudent course, however, is to recognize that he is right that Dems face a choice between building unity and marinating in petty internicine squabbles. While there is not much in Stein's piece to provoke optimism among Democrats, it should be a good motivator for Dems to face the stark reality of the GNA juggernaut, get organized and mobilize an unprecedented Democratic voter turnout in 2012.

Ah, some new data rendering the myth of the 'liberal media' into a pile of rubble. As Politico's Keach Hagey reports on a new Pew Research study of "11,500 news outlets -- including news websites and transcripts of radio and television broadcasts, at both the local and national levels -- as well as hundreds of thousands of blogs":

Sarah Palin put an end to her possible presidential candidacy this month with a familiar parting critique: President Barack Obama has an unfair advantage as a candidate because he's got "about 90 percent of the media still there in his back pocket."

...But a study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, in the past five months, the reverse has actually been true: Obama has received the most unremittingly negative press of any of the presidential candidates by a wide margin, with negative assessments outweighing positive ones by four to one.

Pew found that just 9 percent of the president's coverage was positive, while 34 percent was negative -- a stark contrast to the 32 percent positive coverage and 20 percent negative that it found Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the most covered Republican, received.

"His coverage has been substantially more negative in every one of the last 23 weeks of the last five months -- even the week that Bin Laden was killed," Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said of the president's treatment in the media compared with that of the GOP field.

The wingnuttiest Republicans got plenty of positive coverage, as Pew reports:

The top four most favorably covered candidates, the study found, were all tea party favorites: Perry was followed by Palin, with 31 percent positive coverage and 22 percent negative; Michele Bachmann, with 31 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative; and Herman Cain, with 28 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative...Mitt Romney's positive and negative coverage were almost in a dead heat at 26 percent and 27 percent, respectively.

Of course there is always a cautionary note with this kind of data. Some publications carry a lot more weight than others, as do some stories. Associated Press stories, for example, tend to appear in hundreds of newspapers. Hagey quotes one AP story that put a negative spin even on the killing of bin Laden:

A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the street to wildly cheer President Barack Obama's announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decadelong manhunt. The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his reelection campaign.

Hagey goes on to show that, despite negative stories in the "liberal" media, Perry and Palin have gotten pretty positive coverage, according to the Pew data (Gingrich not so good). Ron Paul has done well on the blogosphere, but not as well in the MSM, while Herman Cain's coverage has perked up considerably. Hagen quotes Newsweek analyst Jonathan Alter:

...Over the last 2½ years, Obama never got a honeymoon, if you actually look back into the early days of his presidency. He got very positive press on the first day, and he's been in the scrum ever since...The truth about the American media is that we have gone, over the last 15 years, from something that could accurately be called a dominant liberal media -- through the period of American liberalism, from the end of World War II to the founding of Fox News in 1996 -- to a dominant conservative media in this country.

Moreover, President Obama is taking plenty of heat from the left flank inside his party, so the cumulative criticism is cited by both the left and right as proof of his growing unpopularity. Yet he still does much better in opinion polls than the Republican Party and surprisingly well in head-to-head horse race polls, considering the current economic situation.

Hagen closes with an inconclusive discussion about whether it is good strategy to attack the media for bias. But what remains clear is that conservative whining about 'liberal media bias' won't find any verification in the best data out there.

After fierce but inconclusive battles in Wisconsin, the great labor struggle of 2011 is now centered in that ultimate swing state of Ohio. A richly funded national right-wing effort to break the economic and political power of the labor movement in its Midwestern heartland is now facing a ballot test in a Nov. 8 referendum to affirm or overturn a union-busting law, known as Senate Bill 5.

As in Wisconsin and other states, conservatives in Ohio have focused their fire on public-sector unions, which are easy to identify with unpopular levels of government spending and taxation. But just as there is little doubt the assault on public-sector unions this year is part of a broader effort to weaken collective bargaining rights and undermine labor's political strength, efforts to repeal Senate Bill 5 will depend on the solidarity of private-sector union members who are not directly affected by the legislation, but can see the handwriting on the wall.

The heart of Senate Bill 5, as enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by GOP Gov. John Kasich, is a set of provisions limiting collective bargaining by public employees to wage and hour issues. Strikes by public employees (who constitute nearly half the state's unionized workforce) would be banned, as they already are for police and fire department employees. Pensions and benefits, and a variety of ancillary issues affecting conditions of employment, such as class sizes for teachers, would be permanently off the table.

Of equal importance is a provision banning "fair-share" assessments from non-union members who benefit from union collective bargaining efforts, a step that would seriously damage incentives to join public-sector unions. This is perhaps the most obvious feature of Senate Bill 5 that might set a precedent for future attacks on private sector unions in Ohio and on unions in other states. Nationally, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing state right-to-work laws banning "union shops." Some, including, so far, at least two Republican presidential candidates, are even promoting a national right-to-work law.

Proponents of SB 5 are trying mightily to claim the legislation is mainly about "runaway" pensions and benefits, and often tout a provision requiring public employees to pay at least 10 percent of the cost of pensions and 15 percent of the cost of healthcare premiums. Unfortunately for this argument, many if not most public employees already contribute to pensions and benefits at this level or more. Just as important, public employee unions in Ohio and elsewhere have traditionally sacrificed wage increases to pension and benefit needs. Indeed, in 2008 alone, Ohio public-sector unions made $250 million in wage and benefit concessions to state and local governments.

The conservative talk about disparities between public and private-sector employees is a transparent ploy to drive a wedge between the two wings of the labor movement, while distracting attention from the more egregiously anti-union provisions of the SB 5. Polling has shown the benefit and pension issues are the only provisions of SB 5 that are reasonably popular.

These efforts certainly have not worked at the level of union or political-party leadership. The drive to repeal SB 5, spearheaded by a union-funded umbrella group called We Are Ohio, has conspicuously featured private-sector union leaders. This weekend, a Columbus-area phone-bank and door-to-door canvassing effort was personally led by Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen, with strong participation from other private-sector unions ranging from the Steelworkers to the Plumbers & Pipefitters to the Food and Commercial Workers.

Mike Gillis of the Ohio AFL-CIO told me that building trades unions, who fear an effort to kill Project Labor Agreements ensuring union jobs for major public works projects, are also very active in the repeal campaign. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed Kasich's approval ratings among voters in union households to be deeply "underwater" with 27 percent positive and 68 percent negative. And beyond the union ranks, the Ohio Democratic Party has been an unambiguous opponent of SB 5 from the beginning.

The apparent strategy of conservative anti-union activists to target public-sector employees as a less-popular "weak link" in the union ranks is based on questionable assumptions. Though there is little in the way of public polling on this subject, a February 2011 Pew survey showed public- and private-sector unions having almost identical favorable/unfavorable ratings from the public at large. The poll found 48 percent have favorable view of private-sector unions with 37 percent negative. For public section unions, the figures were 48 percent favorable, 40 percent unfavorable.

After a period of extensive partisan polarization on SB 5 and publicity over similar battles in other Midwestern states, along with the first big series of pro-SB 5 ads, the margin of support for repeal had dropped to 51-38. Since this is an off-year election in Ohio, turnout patterns could be as important as public opinion in determining the result. The ultimate outcome, then, may still depend on stretch-drive campaigns by both sides. The repeal-SB-5 forces are relying heavily on the kind of grass-roots effort that collected an impressive 1.3 million signatures -- a new record for Ohio -- on petitions to put the measure on the ballot. We Are Ohio is testing out its ground game in early voting, which began on Oct. 4.

The pro-SB-5 forces, organized under the leadership of a group calling itself Building a Better Ohio, have little in the way of a ground game, other than local Republican organizations and Tea Party groups. The Koch brothers' favorite project, Americans for Prosperity, has been training Tea Partyers in mobilization efforts for the referendum. But supporters of SB-5 do have money, most of it from the same shadowy national conservative groups who have exploited the loose campaign finance rules introduced by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to spend vast sums on the 2010 midterm elections and the battles in Wisconsin and other states since then. And while the pro-repeal We Are Ohio campaign has fully disclosed its funding sources and expenditures, the finances of the anti-repeal campaign remain largely a matter of conjecture.

Clearly both sides have devoted significant resources to the airwaves. Just last week, a consortium of Ohio newspapers released a partial analysis of TV ad spending that suggested We Are Ohio has outspent Building a Better Ohio by a 5-2 margin. According to the same news story, We Are Ohio's own figures indicate a closer money battle, with the pro-repeal group registering $5.4 million in ad buys compared to $2.8 million for Building a Better Ohio, supplemented by another $1.2 million in ads bought by Make Ohio Great, a group set up by the Republican Governors' Association and featuring more general "reform" appeals by Kasich.

But pro-repeal forces legitimately fear a last-minute infusion of out-of-state money supporting a "yes" vote, with Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS -- which played a major role in the 2010 elections -- being a particular suspect, especially given the strong incentive it has under federal tax laws governing nonprofits to spend as much as possible on non-candidate elections like ballot initiatives.

Indeed, for all their efforts to frame the Ohio referendum as a struggle between budget-conscious Buckeye officials against union bosses, it's clear that the Nov. 8 balloting, no matter which way it goes, will be a major landmark in a national anti-union effort that began in Wisconsin and will reach its apex in November of 2012. A political spokesperson for the national AFL-CIO, Jeff Hauser, put it this way in an interview:

It is critical that working people respond vigorously to this significant attack on their rights orchestrated by the shadowy ALEC and backed by Karl Rove's secret sources of corporate cash. Fortunately, Kasich, like Scott Walker before him, has galvanized working people into action, union and non-union, private sector and public sector alike.

That's how opponents of SB 5 hope the issue will be understood by 50 percent-plus-one of Ohioans voting on Nov. 8.

Campbell Robertson's New York Times article "For Politics in South, Race Divide Is Defining" scratches the surface of a trend Democrats should try to understand better.

Robertson focuses on Mississippi, the state where African Americans comprise the largest percentage of residents:

At a glance, Democrats may seem to be in better shape here than they are in neighboring states. Republicans won a supermajority in the Alabama Legislature in the 2010 elections and took over the Louisiana Legislature a month later as a result of several party switches, while Mississippi Democrats still control the State House of Representatives. Unlike in Louisiana, Democrats in Mississippi have actually managed to field candidates for a few statewide offices in this year's elections, and hold the office of attorney general.

But the tale told by demographics is a stark one. Mississippi has, proportionally, the largest black population of any state, at 37 percent. Given the dependably Democratic voting record of African-Americans here, strategists in each party concede that Democrats start out any statewide race with nearly 40 percent of the vote.

...Merle Black, an expert on politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said that point is arguably already here. In 2008 exit polls, he pointed out, 96 percent of self-identified Republicans in Mississippi were white. Nearly 75 percent of self-identified Democrats were black. ...Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Democratic support among whites could get any lower when, according to 2008 exit polls, only 6 percent of white males in Mississippi described themselves as Democrats.

The title of Robertson's article is a little misleading. Robertson is not saying, as the title implies, that white southerners in the polling booth think, "Gee, I better vote Republican because I'm a white person." Nor are African and Latino Americans voting Democratic at the polls solely because of their skin color. In reality, southerners vote more along the lines of their perceived economic interests.

People of color vote their real economic interests for the most part. The distortion in the south is more about the white working/middle class voters casting ballots against their own economic interests. This happens across the country to some extent, but it is more of a problem for Democrats in the south, where unions are weak and so-called "right-to-work" laws keep them that way.

Robertson notes that there are little pockets of Democratic strength in predominantly white communities throughout the south, with northeast Mississippi being a prime example. However, white progressives in the south are more concentrated in the big cities, closer-in suburbs and college towns.

Outside of the cities, most of the mainstream media targeting the working and middle class are conservative in policy outlook. Too many white voters in rural areas rarely hear or read a well-argued liberal opinion. Hopefully, MSNBC and the growth of the progressive blogospshere are beginning to change that. As income inequality continues to grow unabated, it's not hard to imagine a tipping point at which southern whites will begin to question the wisdom of ever-increasing tax cuts for the rich and the party that pushes such policies as a panacea for all economic ills.

Robertson quotes Brad Morris, a Democratic strategist, on Democratic prospects, saying "We've hit rock bottom," in the south, and I tend to agree. There's just not much more room for growth of Republican political influence in the region, given current demographic parameters. And most of the demographic trends going forward favor Democrats.

The Republican echo chamber has been very successful in the south in terms of making demagogic attacks against Democratic candidates and policies stick. State Democratic Party organizations tend to be weaker and underfunded in the south and their messaging suffers as a result, while anti-union corporations in the south make sure Republicans have all the money they need. This is the heart of the GOP's southern hustle.

President Obama's victories in North Carolina, Virginia and Florida certainly suggest the Democrats should not write-off any southern states, as some have urged. With stronger candidates, Democrats can win more elections.

Looking to the future, Democrats are going to do better as a result of explosive growth of Latino and African Americans in the southern states. But there must also be more of a conscious effort on the part of state and local Democratic parties to recruit and train stronger candidates. Dems need more candidates of color to turn out these rapidly-growing demographic groups. But they also need more candidates, women in particular, who have white working-class roots and/or know how to reach white working families. With that commitment, a substantially more Democratic south in the not-too-distant future is a good bet.

Viewing videos and reading articles about the 'Occupy Wall Street' campaign (e.g. here and here), I was encouraged, even though it was only a few hundred protesters, mostly idealistic young people, who will likely evaporate before too long. "Hell, at least somebody is in the street," I mumbled to no one in particular.

Although the stated goals of the Wall St. protesters seem broad, who knows, this could be the beginning of an 'American Spring,' Al Gore and others have called for. One of the common denominators with the Egyptian uprising is that we, too, have a large number of bright, well-educated young people looking at lousy job prospects, though not yet at the crisis levels Egypt is suffering.

The difference between the Wall St. protests and the London riots may just be a matter of time. The progressive hope is that the Occupy Wall St. protest will take on more of the scope, substance and goal-oriented militance of the Wisconsin uprising.

Whether it's Wall St. occupiers, Madison unionists, London rioters or Cairo demonstrators, working people everywhere want stable, secure employment. Regardless of what the Ayn Rand ideologues and the financial barons say, a decent job ought to be considered a fundamental human right in any nation that calls itself a democracy, and most certainly in the world's most prosperous democracy. And when the private sector fails to deliver, government should step in and put people to work on needed public works projects.

The American Jobs Act which President Obama has proposed is a start. Reasonable progressives can disagree about how good of a beginning it is and what more needs to be done. But we have to begin somewhere, and right now this is the best single jobs bill we have. Let's pass it and then fight for more. We might not be able to pass it before the election. It might even take a few years. But let it not be said that it failed to pass because of weak support from the Democratic rank and file.

The American Jobs Act may be a grandiose title for what the legislation actually delivers. But the thing is to view it as a small but important part, a first step goal of something bigger, call it the American Jobs Movement. Such a movement must be a broad-based, well-organized coalition that puts feet in the street and in the halls of congress as citizen lobbyists, not just here and there but continuously, until we exhaust the opposition. Numerous polls indicate that we already have the numbers to make it happen. We just need the organization.

In addition to legislative reforms, an American Jobs Movement could also leverage consumer economic power, in the form of 'selective patronage' campaigns, stockholder activism and even targeted boycotts if necessary, to persuade American companies to provide and keep more jobs in the U.S. This part of the American Jobs Movement would not depend on or be limited by any politician. We can only blame our political leaders so much, if we don't organize our economic power to compel investment in American jobs. After that, it's on us.

We've had a lot of dialogue in the MSM and blogosphere about the need for jobs and what should be done. And some great ideas and insights have been shared. But the missing ingredient has been a mass movement focused on securing the reforms that can produce jobs for Americans. It's time to add it in and stir it up.