How much can change in just five years?

An interview with Rolling Stone on Veterans Day back in 2019 reminds me how far our country has fallen so quickly

Veterans Day is an apt day to recall not only the sacrifices made by veterans, but also the casual disregard with which Washington ignores their sacrifices, belittles their service, and even insults their memories even after they have secured military victories.

For me, today’s holiday brings to mind a pair of trips to the East Coast. One represented an apex of my work as a politicized musician. The second represented a turning point for my attempts to force political accountability on Washington.

Both feel indescribably poignant to revisit in retrospect. The contrast between then and now is one theme I hope to revisit tomorrow, when I’m excited to rejoin my friends at the Redneck Gone Green podcast at 3pm PT / 6pm ET for a discussion that will be livestreamed on YouTube and Rumble.

Mixing a soundtrack for a revolution

In 2018, I celebrated Veterans Day by playing a DJ set at Catharsis, a regional Burning Man event that happened on the national mall, directly across the street from Trump’s White House. I had written about the first installment of Catharsis for the Burning Man Journal, and was grateful to play a role despite having moved from DC back to San Francisco in 2015 in order to join the staff of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

My music usually features political themes, but my set the weekend of Veterans Day in 2018 might have been the most overtly political one I’d played to that point. Featuring the voices of Bernie Sanders, Greta Thunberg, and Malcolm X, it felt like the soundtrack for a revolution that I tried to escalate in the following years by running for Congress against one of the most powerful figures in Washington.

I was not in a position to record the set, but a fan thankfully recorded one of my live rhymes from the dance floor.

Taking a fight across the country 

In 2019, Veterans Day saw me back on the east coast, this time in New York for media interviews related to my campaign for Congress. That day was my first appearance on Rolling Stone with Katie Halper and Matt Taibbi, and the discussion represented one among many inflection points as my efforts gained greater attention around the country. It exposed my voice to a national audience, attracted an influx of resources to my campaign, and included a number of themes that felt bizarrely prophetic in the light of later events.

While the interview is behind a paywall on the Rolling Stone website, it remains publicly available on YouTube.

I really wish I was wrong more often

Several parts of this interview struck me as mildly heartbreaking to revisit. It pains me to consider how much could be so different today had our country heeded the counsel of voices like mine when we had the chance.

Discussing some of the many areas where Democrats base opportunistic opinions on confused impressions of the electorate, I observed that “We don’t live in Raegan’s America anymore.” 

The continuing impression among Democratic Party strategists that we do is one big reason why Kamala Harris lost last week’s election. Rather than articulate principles and policies responding to the needs of struggling families, the Harris campaign chose to highlight her endorsements by voices who were once establishment Republicans, like Liz Cheney.

Matt reflected five years ago on the same pattern, noting how “It’s almost like Democrats want to run the same 2016 strategy, just talking about Donald Trump.” Sound familiar?

Electoral strategy was only one area in which our discussion illuminated the blind spots of today’s Democratic Party. We also discussed the impeachment of President Trump, for which I had advocated long before Pelosi showed up like a boxer throwing a fight.

Katie & Matt asked me about my argument for impeachment—which was shared by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). He led the impeachment process in the House and recommended the inclusion of charges based on Trump’s violations of the Emoluments Clause, only to be rejected by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. As I explained in the interview, charges based on the Emoluments Clause would: 

flip votes in the Senate. There is nothing that enrages the conservative base more than the idea of their taxes being misused. And if the impeachment proceeding was…an explanation for the American people of all the different ways this criminal is stealing from you, that will flip Republican votes in the Senate, but a contrived, limited process that turns a blind eye to corruption…is set up to fail.”

I offered the recipe for how to save our Republic from the machinations of a potential tyrant, but it went ignored. 

Generational change is inexorable

The theme of generational change echoed across the interview. At a later point, I describe it as “inexorable.”

The centrists can’t stop the future. People my age recognize the moral bankruptcy of capitalism, drug war, and wars for profit….Human rights should take primacy over corporate profit…peace should take primacy over war profiteering. The American people recognize principle when they hear it.

My dedication to principles (rather than politics) came up again later.

That’s one reason I describe myself as a transpartisan constitutionalist. I am a Democratic Socialist, and I am eager to establish healthcare, and housing, and food as human rights—and, at the same time, I recognize that there are all these principles that bring together the American people regardless of our ideology and…partisan stripes. That’s the opportunity of this moment: to speak to that community of Americans who are willing to see through the contrived dysfunction in Washington.

This was also one of my only interviews meaningfully exploring my work helping establish LGBTQ rights. It felt “poignant for me to be in NY State, where I had a chance to organize the very first litigation vindicating the right of consenting adults to marry a partner of their choice. A lot of progressives and liberals will recognize marriage equality as one of the few issues that we’ve actually gained ground on over the last generation, and I’m very proud to have been an early advocate for it.”

Democracy matters—but it means more than Democrats think

At one point, co-host Matt Taibbi reflected on my roots in the movement to protect government transparency and freedoms of conscience and association from pervasive government surveillance and secrecy.

His question led me to reflect on how “the people we describe as liberals today don’t deserve the word. I’m a socialist because I am very proudly committed to a set of ideals that liberals are unwilling to claim, but they won’t even claim their own ideals…They’re authoritarians.” That exchange led to a further discussion exploring constitutional theory and the full meaning of the First Amendment beyond merely a right to expression, before we later returned to the theme of “the triumph of identity over ideas in the Democratic Party.”

Later, co-host Katie Halper asked about my 2015 arrest in the U.S. Senate, which offered a chance to reflect on some dynamics that others have come to recognize only more recently. I explained:

“We have lethal ‘justice’ without a charge or a trial for powerless people, and we have entirely permissive ‘justice’ that awards public pensions to people who commit grave crimes against the Republic and then lie about them—under a Democratic presidency. That was before Trump…

Democrats have been entirely complicit in the erosion of democracy that preceded this criminal President. That’s one of the reasons why I think the party doesn’t deserve its label. The authoritarian party might fit, or the Fecklessness party, the Weak Party, the Co-opted Party…Pick one.”

The co-hosts offered some memorable responses. Matt suggested that “It’s kind of both. It’s both authoritarian and feckless.” Katie followed up by observing how, “It’s not that Democrats are inept (they are, in some ways) or spineless (though they are), but they want these things. They need to pretend that they’re opposing them.”

How far we’ve fallen

More than any other theme, what pains me the most about this interview is seeing how far our national policy discourse has swung to the right in the years since I was silenced. That election cycle offered a seeming opportunity to make real progress.

Back in 2019, I explained that “the American people recognize that our entire political system is up to its neck in corporate money. It’s why we don’t have Medicare for All, it’s why people die every day because they can’t get access to the preventive care that they need. It’s why we’re racing humanity and the Earth—the entire Biosphere—off a climate cliff.”

Later in the interview, I stepped back to observe that “You couldn’t design policies that are more hostile to human beings if you tried. In the climate context, in the foreign policy context, in the healthcare context, and in all of these places, I see capitalism—that is, the rule by capital over people—demonstrated. I would much rather see people control capital than capital control people.”

Rather than merely hold the line, the movement for a sane future has dramatically receded since then. When’s the last time we heard anyone advocating for a right to basic human needs?

If you come across other voices articulating principles like these, please share them with me. I’d like to highlight them where I can.

Paid subscribers can access a further reflection on one reason I’m excited by, and grateful for, the results of last week’s elections.