It's the democracy, stupid

Joe and I continue our conversation about how to fight for our democracy and take the fight to the MAGA crowd. This week?

* Texas’ mid-decade gerrymandering scheme

* A war criminal visits Alaska

* Republicans are vulnerable on…..everything

* Democrats and Mamdani

* 2026 is everything- Democrats have to take back the House

* Seeking straight-talking Dems

Joe and I are having a lot of fun… I hope you’ll give this episode a listen.

You can follow Joe here:

https://substack.com/@socialcontractwithjoewalsh

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Joe Walsh and I are are two guys untouched by political consultant speak. We say what we think. We also laugh a lot.

Today we talked about the Texas Dems walkout, JD Vance raising a lake for a canoeing trip and other political news. We also dug into what we might learn from the Tea Party movement. I hope you’ll give it a listen.

You can subscribe to Joe’s Substack here:

Here’s the link for mine:

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Taxpayers give Trump $1 billion. Meanwhile, he's raising our taxes with each tariff deal. And, of course, it turns out he's one of those rich predators implicated in the Epstein crimes and breaking his promise to come clean with the files and the videos.

I hope you’ll listen to this week’s chat with Susan Demas.

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I love talking to Ezra. He’s focused, strategic, and determined to build the largest mass pro-democracy movement in American history. It turns out, we Americans aren’t ready to sit on our hands and let Donald Trump and his band of oligarchs entrench their power over us. 150,000 people showed up for Indivisible’s first ever training session in strategic non-violent non-cooperation. That’s a mouthful, but it boils down to this: working together we can protect America’s free press, America’s universities, America’s law firms, the rule of law itself, and our free and fair elections.

Edwin Eisendrath is joined by Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible.

Levin detailed the success of the June 14 "No King's Day" protest, which he called "one of the largest protests in American history," adding: "We were in 2,169 communities, actually, not just in America; we were across 27 countries . . . . And we had 5 to 6 million people, showing up saying, we don't do kings in America. An incredible day, an incredible demonstration of the power of nonviolent, peaceful protest in America.

He also spoke about the launch last week of One Million Rising. "We had 150,000 people register for this training on nonviolent, strategic noncooperation," Levin told Eisendrath. "The experts said this was the largest training in history on nonviolent, strategic noncooperation. So we are breaking records. Lots of people weren't engaged before lifting their heads up and asking themselves the basic question, What can I do? And we're trying to point them in the right direction."

You can sign up for the next round of training with Indivisible here:

Catch “The Big Picture with Edwin Eisendrath” Saturdays from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. Central on WCPT (heartlandsignal.com/programs/the-big-picture).

And find “The Big Picture (Full Episodes)” podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, YouTube, Amazon and TuneIn.

Thanks for reading It's the democracy, stupid! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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A lot of Democrats are positioning themselves against the party's brand. This is a huge mistake. (I wrote about that problem here.)

In this conversation, Susan Demas gave me the opportunity to say what Dems ought to be doing instead. I didn't hold back.

Trump and the billionaires declared class war on working Americans- stripping away healthcare, raising prices, adding regulatory paperwork, all to further enrich a handful of billionaires. Instead of shying away from that war, and appeasing the oligarchs, Democrats should accept it and fight back. Raise marginal tax rates. Enact a meaningful inheritance tax. Use the money to make sure hard working Americans have opportunities to get ahead, and the quality of life they've earned.

Trump won't do any of this. He's too busy ordering government employees to find his name in the Epstein files. The GOP controlled Congress won't do it, they are too busy protecting their boss. The Supreme won't help, they are in the tank for the billionaires. But we can get it done. Susan and I talk about all this, and how we win too!

Join Susan and me every Tuesday at 10am CT right here on Substack LIVE for a lively chat about the week in politics!

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I'm grateful for the conversation with Andrea Pitzer. She explained how we've been thinking about concentration camps in the wrong way & how other countries that have been through this have gotten rid of them. We have a lot of work to do and everyone has a role to play. I hope you will give it a listen.

Edwin Eisendrath is joined by Andrea Pitzer, journalist and author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

Pitzer defined the concentration camp as mass civilian detention "without any real trial. So if there was a trial," she explained, "it was just a show trial, or a big group, 100 people getting sentenced at once, something like that, done on the basis of race or ethnicity or religion or political party, rather than an actual crime that was committed. And it's almost always done to separate a targeted group from society, to remove them from society, and it's almost always also done to consolidate and build political power."

She highlighted the evolution of concentration camps from the 19th century to the Nazi era and warned of their resurgence in the United States under the Trump administration. Pitzer emphasized the importance of independent courts, legal aid, community activism and protests in combating this development.

Catch “The Big Picture with Edwin Eisendrath” Saturdays from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. CT on WCPT 820AM or stream on Heartland Signal.

And find “The Big Picture (Full Episodes)” podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, YouTube, Amazon and TuneIn.

Thanks for reading It's the democracy, stupid! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s my latest chat with Lincoln Square’s Susan Demas. Here we talk about Dismantling the Department of Education, the corrupt and captured Supreme Court and how there's still room for optimism in America. It's all here in my discussion with I hope you'll give it a watch:

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I had some technical difficulties with the lighting, but the conversation was fun. Let’s just say, we are not happy with MAGA.

Thank you Nick P, Patrick Schelling, Colette Holt, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lincoln Square!

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Lincoln Square Media and Susan Demas are countering the false narratives that too often find their way into our news ecosystem. We recently talked about the implementation of the BBB- basically enacting Project 2025 into law. We managed to talk about a lot more too!

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Ezra Levin co-founded Indivisible after the 2016 election and ignited an outpouring of political engagement across America. Indivisible’s first guide helped tens of thousands to organize and support each other in their effort to make build a stronger democracy. Now as Donald Trump returns to White House determined to remake America along the lines of post-democratic Hungary, Indivisible has published a new guide that will help us protect our democratic institutions and resist Trump’s powerful autocratic movement.

I spoke with Levin this week about “Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink.” I urge you to listen to our entire conversation but here are some key takeaways:

(Note: The quotes are verbatim, but the questions are not. As you will hear, this was a conversation, not Q and A session.)

Why this guide now?

EL: People organized can indeed apply pressure in many circumstances, either to stop bad stuff that’s coming or to slow it down, which is meaningful because if you slow things down, less bad stuff happens, or to blunt the impact.

And as a final resort, if you can't stop it, if you can't blunt the impact, if you can't slow it down, you can at least make sure that the folks who push forward unpopular policies take political damage and get defeated, the next opportunity you can defeat them.

People think organizing is just about winning elections. It really isn’t, is it?

EL: That's exactly right. I think a common misconception is that the purpose of political organizing is to elect leaders and then they fix everything for you.

And as you said, that's never been the case. Wilson was an opponent of the suffragettes. They had to actually organize to push him. FDR did not immediately push for the New Deal program. He had to be pushed. LBJ had to be pushed by MLK and a powerful civil rights movement. Obama almost dropped the Affordable Care Act and had to be pushed.

Each time we've had an opportunity to make progress because we've won majorities in Congress or the presidency, we've also had to push.

And each time we've lost we've also had to organize to prevent damage.

That's how it goes.

Democrats have, for a long time outsourced their work to professionals. We let the organizing muscle atrophy.

EL: I think that's a really important insight. I was part of the nonprofit industrial complex. I worked for a national nonprofit that did any poverty work. I thought it was good work, and it was good work. We made some good progress, but I was a paid think tanker advocate trying to create policies and convince members of Congress to listen to their better angels and throw a few more bucks towards their earned income tax credit or support for folks to put away a little bit of savings.

That was my job.

And when I was a staffer on Capitol Hill, I met with a ton of interest groups. Some of them were good. Some of them were bad. They were all professionalized. The act of being engaged in democracy and pushing for good climate policy or pushing for good anti-poverty policy, or pushing for better democracy policy? That came down to professionalized advocates and researchers based inside Washington, D.C.

And I came to the conclusion after several years of doing that, that our problem in D.C. was not that we didn't have one new good white paper, or we didn't have one new good coalition of nonprofits talking about what needed to be done.

Our problem was we didn't have political power. We didn't have political power to actually get it done.

A member of Congress didn't need another white paper. They needed a lot of their constituents saying, hey, you got to listen to us. Otherwise, we're going to throw you out of office

We spent a lot of time and energy on progressive policies during President Biden’s term. In retrospect, I wish he had worked harder to strengthen the guardrails that are now about to get tested. This new guide is not confused about the goal.

EL: The new Indivisible Guide is not a guide to how we remake the Democratic Party or how we build a coalition that can permanently win in 2028 and beyond. It is much more narrow than that.

I think those are important conversations to have. I think we need to figure out how we do a better job of building that coalition so it's not susceptible to the entreaties of an autocrat like Trump. And also, we've got to get to 2028 first.

I'm worried about actually having free and fair elections headed into 2026.

This guide is a guide to how we live to fight another day, which means across ideologies, there are non-MAGA Republicans and independents and progressives. We can all unify in this moment and say we know we voted – the country, 49.9% voted- for Donald Trump because they were upset about egg prices.

What they did not vote for Donald Trump to do is to install Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. They didn't vote for Donald Trump to ban abortions. They didn't vote for Donald Trump for Project 2025.

We can all join together and say no to that.

This new guide talks about how much better we did in the swing states where we were well organized and focused, than in parts of the country where we were not. We lost those states anyway. So why talk about it?

EL: It’s a mistake to believe that the enemy is the Republicans or MAGA or Donald Trump. They’re not the enemy. They're the folks that we're trying to defeat.

The enemy is cynicism, fatalism, defeatism. The sense that nothing I do matters, so I'm just going to focus on something else…

In the first chapter of the guide, we try to create some shared understanding of what actually happened in this election. Because if we don't understand what happened in this election, we're not going to agree on what should happen next. And there are a couple of main takeaways.

One is, if you look nationwide, there was a seven-point swing in non-battleground states against us, seven points against us. That's really, really hard to overcome.

But then if you look just at the battlegrounds, and Wisconsin is a great example because we did the best there, there was only a 1.5% swing in Wisconsin, which means where we were running a campaign, where we were doing Get Out the Vote, where we were knocking on doors and writing postcards and sending texts and making calls, we were able to close that gap by five and a half points.

Now, that's cold comfort, right?  We wanted to win. We didn't want to make gains…

But it's a mistake to say that didn't matter…. what we do can indeed make a difference.

It's just the wave this year was really, really hard to overcome.

We covered so much more in our conversation. I hope you’ll listen to entire our chat (the podcast link is above) and read the updated Indivisible Guide here. Ezra is smart and thoughtful about where we are as a country right now. Please listen and let me know what you think.

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