 Aloha, welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers, the Politics in Hawaii series. Today, our guest is Mr. Bart Dane, member of a number of organizations. Today he's representing the Progressive Democrats of Hawaii. We're going to have a conversation today about party unity, and hopefully there will be enough time as well to talk about party platform and how it can, maybe should, inform policy. So, welcome to the show, Mr. Bart Dane. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity to have a good conversation about really anything having to do with local politics here in Hawaii. And because of, partially, partially, because of what happened on November 8th, but not because of that as much as what happened in our presidential primary race, we have issues. And yes, I think it was amplified, and this is my take on it. The divisions within any party always exist. There are always factions. Some people that lean more left, some people that lean more right, some people that are hot-headed, some people who are not. So, inevitably, you're going to have factions of people within organizations. That being the case, highlighted by this 2016 presidential cycle was the Bernie, as far as the Democratic Party is concerned, the Bernie Sanders group and the Hillary Clinton group, and how there seemed to be building and building animosity there. And so, what I wanted to talk about is, with all of that in mind, an important piece moving forward for all of us in the state of Hawaii and nationally. But it is how we come back together, how we maintain and heal so that we can have the party unity necessary to really advance and move forward. So, that's the background of the conversation, but that's what I would like us to talk about. So, give me some initial thoughts on what I just said. Tell me if you think I'm off-base, please. Well, I guess I would approach it a little bit different. I think the tensions which express themselves in division of Clinton versus Bernie are tensions that arise from divisions in society as a whole. That there are problems that exist and that impact different people in different ways. And I think we saw that nationally. We saw that with the eventual election of Donald Trump because I think Donald Trump spoke to the frustrations that people have with the mainstream political parties, both Democrat and Republican, the establishments of both parties. And Bernie spoke to the frustrations that people have, traditionally people who would mostly vote Democratic, although some who might vote Green, with the Democratic Party's leadership. And Hillary Clinton seemed determined to run her professional campaign based upon traditional model of cobbling together various interest groups and leadership of core Democratic constituencies in order to cobble together what she thought would be a winning majority. And her message was not one that inspired the kind of passion and the kind of confidence that Bernie's did, so that Bernie... That point seemed clear. And I think that as we looked at the conversations, and here's this thought, as we were all watching this, the reality TV show that it is these days, as we were all watching this, we saw the scores of people who had a passion who were behind the Bernie Sanders movement in a way that was invigorating. It had a message of hope and opportunity and possibility that I think is necessary coming certainly from a politician or anybody who wants to be a leader. There needs to be this idea of that, in my opinion. What I thought interesting is Bernie and Donald Trump had the same message in many cases, the same message of change, the same message of anti-establishment, the same message of a movement in order to, well, drain the swamp is what some people say, but in either cases it's making sure that the majority of the country is being listened to. And that's both of them. Yeah, I would disagree with that a little bit. There are similarities. It's like, you know, when you were a kid and you went to school, they say compare and contrast, right? So there are things they have in common and there are things that are different. And I think the differences are very important. I think they both spoke to the frustration that a lot of people have in this country. There's a lot been a lot of focus on what happened to white working class and middle class people, how many of them voted for Donald Trump, both men and women, for that matter. And I think that's because the Democratic Party has long ago really abandoned its commitment to not just organize labor but to working people generally and has become a party of the professional class and even of the financial elite, certain sectors of the financial elite. Yeah, I think there's truth in that and I think that showed itself in this election. But I think that in a sense many of us who grew up maybe in an earlier period have always been fearful of the rise of fascism in the United States. So we see parallels between what happened in Italy and in Germany in the 20s and the 30s. And I think that can be overblown but I think there are parallels there. I think that both were speaking to these frustrations, a sense of powerlessness among middle class and working class people and the political elites were ignoring their needs. But Bernie said, okay, the way we deal with this is we come together, we work together in order to create programs to serve the interests of the vast majority of people, make college affordable for young kids, have child care for the parents so the kids can go to school, have health care for everybody as a right as it is in most Western European countries, etc. Trump looked at the same frustrations and said, yeah, the problem is the immigrants, the problem is the blacks, the problem is... He was pointing his finger. The liberals. He was looking for scapegoats. Which goes back to the fascist comment, which goes back to the Mussolini-Hitler era and okay, yeah, scapegoating. It's those people's fault, so we need to do something to address those people. So I think what's important when we try to characterize the message, we see the difference. They had different messages to the same sort of problem that people were feeling. One said, yes, I feel your pain, let's organize, let's come together, appealing to humanistic, the better angels, right, of the American character. Calling upon the better angels. As opposed to... The other one went straight to the bad angels. Yes, the id, the atavistic drives. And depending on who you talk to is what is... And that's the fascinating part is the near 50% of this country that still thinks that he was the better choice. And that's something that we have to deal with. Now, getting back to this idea of party unity, that segues because how do we deal with that? As a party, as a democratic party, we have to now deal with that. We have to figure out, yes, we have divisions. We have people who are strongly positioned that became the Bernie people, the Bernie bots, whatever names people came up with versus the Hillary people. Well, there's still division there. And there's still frustration there. And with that, Bernie was able to bring some independence and some Green Party people in to call themselves Democrats, even to register as Democrats that they weren't before. Yeah, we brought in 30,000 new members, almost all Bernie people, you know, in order to vote in our caucuses. At the convention, I gave a speech at the convention, and I said that we need to have unity, but it has to be unity based upon a principled relationship. We have to be able to disagree. We have to be able to agree to disagree, but we have to be able to have a forum that allows for free debate over these ideas. And there's a lot of conceptions of unity in the party. We saw them expressed at the convention with our people who were trying to suppress debate over certain kinds of issues through procedural methods. And so we were threatening to walk out of that convention if we were not allowed to have a free debate. I think that our conception of unity has to continue to be based on that. We have to have a structure that allows us to agree to disagree, but to have those disagreements. Because I think of disagreements as being sort of pistons that are exploding and driving things forward. I came into the Democratic Party when I was 17 as part of an effort by anti-war activists to turn the young Democrats in Hawaii into an expression of the anti-war sentiment because the official party was still supporting LBJ's war in Vietnam. And then I worked on Jesse Jackson's campaign and I worked on Dennis Krasinich's campaign. So I'm always used to being involved in a network that is articulating a certain kind of strong progressive voice, not just in opposition to Republicans, but also in opposition to business as usual Democrats. More mainstream, what has become more mainstream in some areas. Well, mainstream but also corporatist. That's an important thing. But that's where Obama was able to overcome that. Obama was able to reach out into more and was able to actually connect to people at all of these levels for talking about the working class of any race. He was able to connect to them in a way that Hillary wasn't. And I believe Bernie was able to connect to them because he was speaking to the issues and having some suggestions, some policy suggestions to address those issues. And I think, so the challenge that I see that we have is we have an old school group. We have a new school group. And we have a lot of challenge that exists because not everybody wants to recognize everybody else. Not everybody wants to work together. Some people think that, you know what, I don't believe you guys and erroneously call some of the old school people Republicans. Okay, I think that misframes it from my experience. Yeah, and that's what I wanted to say. I don't think it's a matter of old school versus new school. The old timers have who've been the party for a long time. I'm actually the most senior person on the State Center Committee on the Democratic Party, not because I'm the oldest, but because I've been there for 24 years, longer than anybody else. People who've been there for a long time see a tide come in that challenges and it recedes. New people come in with their energy, some of them get integrated into the party, some get frustrated and walk out. The old timers have this perspective. It is the more middle-aged, mid-level party functionaries who see new energy as being a threat to their party position who have been vicious and who have bent the rules and leaned over backwards to slam the door in the face of burning people. That's interesting. It is not the old timers. Because I would classify myself in that mid-range. And I see that new energy as positive. And I see that new energy as an opportunity. Yes. I'm not saying all mid-level people that way. But it's interesting. And I think that unfortunately, I think you hit it, exactly. It comes down to whatever perceived power center some people think that they have or are losing. Henry Kissinger made a statement that said that the reason why faculty politics is so vicious is because they're so little at stake. You can apply that to the party. You know, who are a district chair or region chair or something, and they think it's a powerful position and gives their life meaning. And really it's a pretty thankless job. They do nothing. Or they do a lot and a lot of it is destructive. And so they don't want to lose that part of their identity and they can be nasty. So what's the problem there? The problem is, from my perspective, looking at it just from a personal people management perspective, if there's no clear direction, if there's no clear leadership or guidance whereas here are what our core principles are, here is what our common bonds are, here is what makes us all want to call ourselves Democrat or lean, progressive, lean liberal. These are the core concepts and principles that we all unite behind. That doesn't really happen. It seems like, you know what, I'm behind these principles and I'm going to run this and I've got these 25 people that agree with me and well I've got these principles and I think that this is important. I've got these 25 people and, okay well, if we do that, my problem as far as the Democratic Party is concerned from today, my problem is if we continue that, we will solve no problem and we will be in trouble in 2018 and in 2020. What we must do is figure out how to get all of these different, and it's not just two, there's multiple factions, multiple groups that are trying to run off in different directions for multiple reasons. If we cannot find a way to say yes, yes, structural changes need to happen. Let's sit down and make them happen. Let's talk it through and we're not going to agree on everything, but we need to find a way to agree. We need to find a way to move forward together. If we don't do that, what's the point? Yeah, let's say, I don't think the party controls much in Hawaii. I think that we should look at the party less as a command structure and more like a common carrier, that there's an infrastructure in place that allows ideas to be expressed, allows people to rally people to their projects, where we don't have to impose some sort of agreed upon unity. And I think, in a sense, that's making a, what is it, a virtue out of a necessity, because it is largely impossible when we talk about hurting Democrats, right? Leading Democrats is hurting cats. Well, I'll tell you, from the Bernie side, it's hurting feral cats, right? And it's always a difficult thing to impose this kind of order. It can emerge organically, I think, if people gravitate towards certain kinds of ideas, certain projects. Some of us put out a project and people are attracted towards it, as long as it's not inimical to the interests of the Democratic Party, I think we should be encouraging that. And I hear what you're saying, and I agree with that in large part. I think that we all have a project to work on, and that begins with the name Trump. And that we should all be able to recognize that perspective. And I totally respect and honor people that have different opinions, that come from different parties. I get that. From the Democratic Party perspective, we have that goal. We have a singular goal that we should be able to rally around. So, with that, we have to take a quick break. We're already at our break. So, thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's movers, shakers and reformers, politicians of Hawaii series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Today we have our guest, Mr. Bart Dane. Thank you again for joining us. We'll see you in one minute. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii, where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law, where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. This is Steve Katz. I'm a marriage and family therapist, and I do shrink wrap, which is now going to every other week, all during the summer and maybe forever after. Take care of your mental health this summer. Have a good time. Do what's fun and take good care of yourself. Bye-bye. Aloha, Kako. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to navigate the journey with us. We are here every Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. and we really want you to be with us where we look at the options and choices of end of life care. Aloha. Aloha. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers, Politics in Hawaii series. Welcome once again our guest, Mr. Bart Dane. Glad to be here. Okay, so party unity is where we were just talking. I believe whether it is... it ends up being, as you said, an idea, a concept, an issue, somebody's cause, somebody's project, or it's a personality that coalesces and brings people together and gets them relatively in line. I think one of the reasons, and this is my opinion, please tell me where I'm wrong, I think one of the reasons we are not as effective as a party here in Hawaii is because we work in projects, we don't work in unity. We don't have a singular guidance. We allow whatever you want, or don't. Okay, well, I'm not sure when the party was effective in this notion that we are less effective than perhaps we were in the past, because I tell you, when I came in as a very young Democrat, the Old Boy Network was definitely running everything. It was not a very democratic party. The party accomplished a lot of things because it was controlled by a particular group and it was ruled with iron discipline. One of the consequences of us becoming more democratic is that we are a little more anarchic, a little more people allowed to be their individualistic selves and don't want to operate in concert as much. Perhaps one reason why it was more disciplined at that time is there was much more unity around what the program should be in the Democratic Party. Particularly coming out of the union experience was a disciplined organization. We've lost the influence of the organizing principle of the union particularly the ILWU is no longer a very meaningful force except perhaps on Maui and little communities in some of the neighbor islands. They have not been replaced. HGA is present. HGA doesn't have a forceful agenda. The building trades are present. Their agenda, frankly, is not always that progressive. They're looking for jobs for their members, which is reasonable, but that's obviously in conflict. And you understand that. I understand that exactly, but it's a rather one-sided view and so it has to be counterbalanced by those who are involved with urban planning considerations, sustainable environment considerations. Exactly. Which we should be able to theoretically. It sounds like we agree on that in some sense, and I love disagreement, but it sounds like we basically agree. Maybe we can tweak some of the edges, but I would personally like to see something in the middle. Having people have the ability to go off on their own particular individual thing is great until we have to come together, until we need to come together, until there's a reason to focus those energies. And I agree that having an iron fist, though is more efficient in some ways, is counter to what the Democratic Party principles are, the liberal principles are. So something in the middle, I think is, I don't know, perhaps what a goal could be, what that looks like is malleable. Okay, but now one of the problems as to why the party doesn't have more power is because elected officials, candidates get elected on their own. They have their own networks of high school buddies and business associates and whatever community organizations they're in that back them up, and they get monies from their campaign contributors with the pro-labor they get from certain unions, if they're pro-building industry, they get from them, trial lawyers, et cetera. So they don't need the party. So there are individual entrepreneurs who have their own agendas, and the more important agenda for them in terms of unity is whatever faction they belong to in the legislature. So if you're with the speaker, you get money through the speaker's faction. If you're with the other group, you get money through them, et cetera. So that's another thing that's a structural sort of change that has led to the party's function changing. That means change is hard to come by. You mean there's a certain stability that's created by the special interests? As a result of that. Each of our electives has their support base, and their support base is going to keep them in there because they're going to keep doing what they want. And as a result of that, the idea of trying to change that, trying to bring enough people in to tip the balances, it seems that it will satisfy itself, that it will feed its own needs. See, there are other things that are political activities that are happening outside the party, right? So we saw on Maui and Kauai, for example, these two massive mobilizations of voters around issues of agriculture. In the case of Kauai, it was mostly the focus on pesticides. On Maui, it was mostly GMO. Regardless of how you feel on those particular issues, that was something that neither party had control over. And certainly the Democratic establishment did not have control over that. But it was the biggest mobilization of voters in years, in both cases. And that and TMT? TMT is a more, I think has a more narrow base. It is a strong appeal among native Hawaiians and some other allies. But it hasn't been tested in terms of mass mobilization at the voting box. Okay, okay, ballot box. Well, because people avoid it. Because it is a potential drop. But so what I'm saying is out of those kind of mobilizations, for example, that's where Hapa arose. The Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action. And this weekend, Hapa is sponsoring this People's Congress, trying to pull together community activists and organizations to come up with their agenda, which is not the Democratic Party's agenda, Republican, Libertarian, Green agenda. And it's not the agenda of the corporations and the lobbyists. And to take it to the legislature and say, here are these items that we are demanding that you be accountable to. So organizing outside the party, given the limitations and the difficulties of getting the party to either unify around a common program or to be able to enforce that on its candidates and elected officials, probably organizing outside, but having some sort of symbiotic relationship with the party is probably the best way for us to move forward. So, okay. So that is, what that is suggesting is, number one, the Democratic Party, though we are the dominant party in Hawaii, on paper, really has no teeth and it's really about the various different factions that exist about whatever agenda or project that they're motivated by. And that, therefore, we are a disparate band of people who like to call ourselves Democrats or New Yorkers. The fact that we have all 25 Senate seats is showing that the divisions in our society are not expressing themselves clearly through two competing political parties. No, they're not. But exist inside one party now. So the divisions are still there. Exactly. And that's actually a very important point. When we say, when it looks, it appears as though we have a solid Democratic Senate. The reality is, no, we don't. So how do you parse that out? How do you say, you know what, these are the progressive Democrats. You can figure that out with some conversation and some bills and some positions that some people will take versus the moderate versus the, well, right-leaning ones. And you can sort of piece that out and put that together. Well, I agree. But they're all going to carry that Democratic banner because everybody believes you can't get elected unless you're a Democrat. Yeah. And so in some ways, the failure of the two-party system to express the divisions in our society. See, I mean, I believe in both unity and diversity. I believe in unity and conflict and struggle, because that's the dynamism that forces compromise. Yin-yang. Right. Yin-yang, dialectics, that kind of stuff. So the failure of the Democratic Party to be able to express that because we are incorporating, we're the party of governance and have been the party of governance for what, 50, 60 years now. We are not allowing, we're stifling that kind of interaction, that kind of dynamism, that kind of conflict, which I think we should be somehow nurturing. And if the party cannot do that internally, then it has to sort of do it within the gravitational pull of other more dynamic sort of formations. Yeah. I hear that. I hear that. I just think that... I just can't wait. I may be able to put this away. I can't wait to see what that becomes as a result of that. Yeah. Because where we exist, and maybe I'm one of the few people who will call himself a Democrat that also thinks that we need to have a strong message of opposition. Otherwise, we're not really finding a way to reach everybody. You're talking about opposition to... Meaning, meaning, if we're... We can't be all Democrat. We need to have more Republican and we need to have more Republican strength so that we can have a real debate. So we can have a real argument on the issues so that we can find a solution that reaches and touches all people, not just some people. I think these arguments are looking for ways to express themselves structurally, organizationally, and normally the default thing is through the two main parties. That's breaking down. We saw the Republicans. I mean, Trump's ascendancy, right? Well, it is breaking down. And we could definitely see that in the Democrat... In the Democratic Party, we can definitely see it in the Republican Party. The Tea Party faction versus the more mainstream... Well, I don't know what's mainstream these days, but there's the more centrist versus the more right-leaning. Well, we have the more centrist versus the more left-leaning. Well, okay. What is that going to mean? And is it possible that... As a person on the left, let me say we've tried not to express ourselves as a faction, okay? During the presidential thing, you're forced into this structure or that structure, right? Yes. But I've tried not to operate in a way that we go in, we have these votes lined up, and we twist arms in order to get things done. Yeah. I'm personally in favor of unity to accomplish a goal, recognizing common goals and bringing people together to achieve those common goals. Well, I've always liked, because I was the head of the Bernie campaign in Hawaii, I explicitly told people when I'd heard them use language that we're going to take over the party. I said, no, we're not going to take over the party. That's not our goal. We shouldn't be talking about that publicly. We shouldn't be talking about that internally. What we're trying to do is we're trying to bring progressive energy into the party. We're trying to strengthen the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. We are not trying to take over the organization. If our ideas succeed in winning more people, then it will have the effect of increasing our influence. It's not a matter of grabbing more. I agree with that concept. Somewhere between you having that concept and you trying to espouse that and what happened with the never-Hillary people and all that stuff that eventually became never-Trump people on their side, how that happened on the ground versus the theory, the concept, and the intended direction. That will even be said from Bernie. Oh, yeah. The direction was this and we got way off of that. Well, we weren't able to cover everything I wanted to cover. I wanted to get into and we were about to touch on it, but I would love to have you come back and we can talk about the party platform and how it can or should inform what policy can be or how we can try to do that. I'd love to have you back to talk about that. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Alliance, Movers, Shakers, and Reformers. We're politics and hoys. I'm your host, Carl Kempong. Thanks again to Mr. Bart Dane. Thank you to the staff and crew of Think Tech Hawaii. We will see you in the next video.