Jeffrey Feldman

As historian Jay Feldman describes in his brilliantly researched and artfully written new book, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America, there have indeed been a great many things wrong with this country specifically with respect to government attacks on civil liberties. Feldman pulls together a jaw-dropping historical catalogue of 20th Century examples where the United States government not only trampled the Bill of Rights, but did so while whipping up class warfare, xenophobic hysteria, and political mob violence, all on the pretext that war or the threat of war necessitated the abrogation of liberty.

In his memoir about life in the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos recounted the mini press corps revolt that erupted when he decided to shut the door leading from the press room to the press secretary’s staff quarters-thereby barring what had been routine access by reporters to the communications staff. “Helen Thomas led the charge…I may have been working for the new president, but she was part of the institutional presidency. “

Midway through his new book on effective communication for progressives, Framing the Future, Bernie Horne steps back from his discussion of ‘persuadable’ voters to make a basic, but indispensable observation:

A political campaign is not the place to educate voters–it’s a place to persuade them.

(Framing the Future, p. 52)

How it is that Democrats grew so unaware of this truism at the onset of the 21st Century will be the stuff of graduate school dissertations for generations. For now, framing savvy activists wonder why so many Democrats have heard some version of Horne’s maxim, but still have not assimilated it into their political habits.