 Welcome to the Ruderman Roundtable. I'm State Senator Russell Ruderman. I'm from the Big Island. I represent District of Puna and Ka'u. And we talk about politics, good government, and environmental issues here on our Think Tech program every other Tuesday afternoon. My guests today are Tim Zhu and Bart Dame. Thank you for joining me, guys. Good to be here. Timothy Zhu is a graduate student in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management at UH Minoa with a research focus on wildlife ecology. He's involved locally as an organizer in the graduate student organization of UH Minoa, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Young Progressives Demanding Action. Bart Dame is a national commitment of the Hawaii Democratic Party and a respected longtime political observer who has written for several local and national publications. Thank you for joining me, Bart and Tim. It's very nice to have you. Thank you very much. And we were hoping that we had to talk about politics per se. You folks are both involved in the progressive political scene here in Hawaii, and that's a great interest of mine. So we want to talk about the current political situation from your perspective. Tell me, what defines someone as a progressive? Who wants to start? I'll take a shot. OK, thanks. I think progressive is, by necessity, sort of an ambiguous term. But I mean, a lot of people and organizations claim that mantle progressive. I mean, I've seen an advertisement of McDonald's where they claim to be a progressive and modern burger company, for instance. I would disagree with the idea that McDonald's is progressive in any sense. And you know, politicians will claim the mantle of progressivism when necessary. I think to be progressive means to be left of center. I think it means, while it doesn't necessarily mean you're anti-capitalist, but I feel like you have to have some kind of criticisms of the current systemic economic order, I think that you have to stand for social, racial, economic justice to some degree. And I think that it means being progressive to me in this modern day and age means that you're for policies such as single-payer health care, a living wage, paid family leave, paid child care, that sort of thing. OK, anything you want to add to that, Bart? Yeah, I think it's interesting. Tim comes from a different generation than I do. I probably started calling him. Which one's older? I think he's a few months older than I am. But I started getting involved in political activism when I was a high school kid. And I started hanging out with the SDS and the draft resistance people and picking the marine base near my Kailua house where I grew up against the war in Vietnam. And so probably by the 70s, I was using progressive to describe my politics. And so I have a slightly different conception. I think Tim is right that it is of necessity. It is an ambiguous thing. It is an evolving concept. I think there are some things that are constant. I think that I may be showing both my educational bias and my historical roots that I think the progressive movement comes out of the enlightenment spirit. What it is, we believe that we apply human intelligence to the world around us, society around us, and humane values. And try to say, how do we build a society that is rational, that is just, that is sustainable? And so concerns, I use the word sustainable now, was before much of the focus was on class justice and economic justice. And now there's much more interest, in addition to those things, with environmental justice and sustainability. And what is common to there is that one can argue as to whether McDonald's or capitalism is progressive. In a certain sense it is. It is moving forward as transforming the world. But there are costs and there are benefits. And I think the progressive vision is that the cost should be borne equitably and the benefit should be shared equitably. And that the more rapacious aspects of capitalism, where their short-sighted pursuit for profits cannot be allowed to destroy the interests of the planet, of the ecosystem of people as a whole. Okay. Yeah, and I would just like to add, I have no disagreements there at all with Bart's characterization of what progressivism is. And I just would like to add, as another thought, that progressives are, I think, concerned deeply with the expansion of democracy and different spheres of our life. Okay, okay. Is there a difference between progressive and liberal? I use it again, this is my historical roots. You're a much younger man than I am, of course, Russell. But I remember there were Cold War liberals. That was a term, Cold War liberals, when I was young. And Hubert Humphrey was running for president in 68 when I was 15 and I was adamantly against the war in Vietnam. He was the classic liberal. So the word liberal to me has not always had a positive association. To me, it's sort of been a weaker, more compromised version of what I think a progressive should be. And so I embrace the word progressive and it gets confusing because the Clinton people try to run away from the word liberal and they try to use the word progressive as an alternative as a more centrist articulation. But I see it as more to the left from liberals. Okay, good. Thank you. So we see this year, we see a tremendous surge in political energy and involvement of particularly amongst young folks today, particularly amongst young progressives. What's behind the surge of young folks being involved in politics and how can we help cultivate it even more? You're younger. I would love to answer this question. Okay, I would. So just to put in perspective, I'm 29 years old. I remember significantly my first coming of age, I guess, in terms of political enlightenment was, I think I would have been a sophomore in high school and that's when we were marching off to start a war in Iraq. It was like 2003. And even then, I thought there was something completely wrong about what we were doing. Youth, people my age and younger and older millennials, we've been like our entire adult life, we have been at war in multiple countries, Afghanistan, Iraq. We're currently bombing something like eight or nine different countries. We've been in Afghanistan for 16 years now with no end in sight. We've seen the failures of our foreign policy. When I came out of college, it was right in the middle of the recession and wages have been stagnant for 40 years. We've just come of age in this time where people my age were the most well-educated generation and yet we're also graduating with the highest burden of student loan debt. So I think just all these material pressures have just driven us by necessity to a radicalization in terms of political ideas, which was reflected last year in the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders who proposed policies that directly addressed these concerns. Nobody talked about the recession and the role that the banks had the way that Bernie did when he talked about breaking up the big banks and establishing a financial transaction tax on Wall Street. Nobody properly addressed the disastrous healthcare systems that we have in this country that are controlled by corporations the way that Bernie Sanders did when he proposed his Medicare for All system. All these factors are more, I think, contribute to the more radical politics I believe you see in the youth today. Do you have any additional input to that? Well, again, it's from a different generation and a different perspective but probably confirming the same thing. A few years ago I was testifying on behalf of raising the minimum wage and I went after Lowell Colapa who's now deceased but who was a leading lobbyist for business interests under the guise of being a tax expert and we talked about minimum wage and Lowell said, well, I worked minimum wage when I first started as a teenager and it was good for me and it helped discipline me and there were a couple things that were wrong with that. It's like I entered the job market just a couple years behind Lowell and at the time I entered the job market the minimum wage was $1.60, this is 1968-69, okay? That same minimum wage at the time we were testifying was more like, just for inflation it would be more like $9 an hour and so what Lowell was saying and the minimum wage by law was $7.25 what Lowell was saying is it was good for us under those circumstances it allowed us to get training to enter a growing expanding economy and get careers and learn workplace discipline but he was ignoring the fact that minimum wage was now 30% or less more that young people who were entering the market now are not entering an expanding economy and it's not the beginning of the careers and a lot of people learning minimum wage are actually older people who've lost their high paying union jobs or secure jobs and are now working for minimum wage jobs so it's a very different thing but the reality of starting your working career with pessimism about your opportunities under this system as opposed to the growth that existed during the 60s and 70s it's like a very different attitude and yet a lot of young people have embraced progressivism as a pragmatic as well as principled solutions the kinds of problems they face whereas a lot of us were doing it for idealistic reasons. Yeah, absolutely, I mean I think it's utterly pragmatic the policies that we're embracing here there's this kind of characterization of a lot of Bernie Sanders' policies for instance in the last year as being idealistic pie in the sky but there's nothing idealistic about wanting to have healthcare for everyone in my opinion and yeah, pessimism I think is real that what Bart refers to I mean, my impression is that in the 70s a person could graduate out of high school into a decent union job and be able to afford a house a two-car garage house with being able to have a family just on those wages alone and nowadays that's almost seen as like a sign of being like upper class which is utterly absurd to me. Or I could work during the summer a summer job and pay for my tuition for going to college which is now not possible. Exactly and I read actually a very fascinating study just yesterday where something like a majority of I guess baby boomers, you know like older Americans a majority of Americans polled thought that their children were going to have a lower standard of living and lower wages than they did. That's the first time ever. Yeah, for the first time ever and you know, you couple that with just everything else happening in the background you know, the ice caps are melting permafrost is melting, polar bears are dying and we're kind of growing into this age where it just seems like the system is not working and we want to change. So what I think I hear both of you saying are long range trends that have been growing for really decades but what made it seemingly explode last year? Why is there suddenly this year and last year so many more people involved? What do you think? Hmm, that's an interesting question. I mean, you saw, you know last year you saw like the explosion of two distinct phenomena not distinct, I mean, I think they're connected in some way but both the radical right wing populist of Donald Trump on one side, you know the xenophobic and nationalistic but somewhat, you know giving shout outs to economic populism in certain ways, you know whether it was against NAFTA or, you know, the off-shoring of American jobs and then on the other side, obviously you had this sort of more left wing populism of Bernie Sanders. I'm not sure why it... I just wonder was Bernie Sanders the symptom? I mean, was he the thing that crowded it? Or was he the result of this way that's been building? I think Bernie Sanders recognized an energy there that was, you know he was turning around the country prior to starting his presidential campaign and he was trying to gauge whether the energy was there for this left wing outsider like himself. So I do think that he is more, you know a symptom rather than, you know he wrote this way that has been building whether it was Occupy, Wall Street in 2011 or other similar protests that have been racking the country in the years prior. Yeah, I think basically what Bernie did is let me preface this also but I was introduced as national committee man I'm speaking as an individual here I am the national committee man for the party but the party's not responsible for what I'm saying here I'm barely responsible for what I'm saying here but I worked on Bernie's campaign I had worked on Jesse Jackson's campaign 87 and 88 I had worked on Dennis Kucinich's campaign in 2004 in each of those things we had a certain limited amount of success that kind of shook up the establishment a little bit but nothing like what happened this time and I think that Bernie was not a charismatic guy except that his lack of charisma was part of his charm he was a straight shooting grandpa who was telling it like it is and he was sometimes being impatient and sometimes being incredibly patient and he was trying to educate a lot of people who are sort of alienated from and hostile to elective politics and saying, listen, this is how it is suspend your disbelief, learn for yourself but if enough of us turn out, we can win this thing and he would organize us to do that so a lot of people sort of did suspend their skepticism particularly younger people who were not voting they said, okay, we can vote for this guy and the hope was that we would build a movement that whether Bernie won or lost we'd educate a whole new crop of people in how to use the organs of electoral democracy to strengthen real democracy over the workplace over the environment, over policies, over government and take care of a real human needs. I wanna come back to one of the points you just made about whether these young people are voting or not but we have to take a brief break I'm here with Bart Daim and Tim Zoo on the Ruderman Roundtable on Think Tech Kauai I'll be back in just a moment and welcome back on State Senator Russell Ruderman we're here at the Ruderman Roundtable with Tim Zoo and Bart Daim and we're talking about politics in Hawaii and progressive politics in particular. So we're talking about this tremendous involvement of young folks and progressives last year. How close are we to really seeing a true political revolution especially given the fact that we're still seeing less than 50% of young folks voting less than it was in previous generations. So are we on the verge of a true political revolution or is there something missing here before we can really see some change? My own perspective is that we're in it for the long haul here I think just any kind of historical analysis I think about the election of Franklin L. O. Roosevelt who's considered one of the new deal Democrat one of the most progressive politicians in our time and I think what gets lost behind his election in the 30s was just I think decades of work and organizing in the right situations in the right economic and historic context. So going to the modern day right now I think we are seeing steps, formation of new groups strengthening of currently existing groups that are all working towards looking at building a change at the national and local level in 2018 and 2020 whether or not that succeeds I think we'll just depend on the strength of our organizing. Bart do you have an opinion on this? I use the phrase about FDR in the historic context I think that many of us are looking at what's happening now there's a breakdown there's a lack of optimism for the future for a lot of regular working folks it seems like parents are seeing the standard living of their kids declining people getting out of college in debt rather than having an optimistic view about how their careers gonna go. So I think the old order has a hard time being seen as legitimate by very many people part of that's really rooted in the extreme inequality so the benefits of increases in technology and efficiency and even globalization the benefits go to a very small group of people and the costs are being borne by the least powerful people in society and so it's hard to get a buy-in from the vast numbers of people who see their standard living going down and have little reason for optimism. Because there's not a clear model going forward the last election in some ways was a struggle between the regressive populism of Donald Trump who tried to appeal to the negative aspects of people's fears versus the better angels approach of Bernie Sanders who was putting forth this democratic socialist vision that we can take care of all of our people we don't have to rail against the Hispanics against the immigrants against the Muslims against the gays against the uppity women and all the things that Trump tried to say but instead we can all come together for our common interest and I think that is the battle and it's not clear which side is going to win it's not clear that either side is going to win around a clear kind of model rather than a muddle sort of model but I think that's what people are looking for they're looking for some sort of clarity and so some of the same people who might give in to their internal racism or their misogynistic views and go with Donald Trump some of those same people I think can be won over by a more class perspective which is what Bernie's been doing when even after the election he's gone to these red belt areas and talked to working class coal miners about the new economy and they actually resonate with him he is the most popular politician in the United States today by far and he's popular among Democrats among independents but also among a lot of these people who ended up voting Republican but still yet know that Donald Trump is kind of a reality show kind of comic figure rather than someone's ruling and lead them into the promised land Yeah and I would also just like to add I mean this is my optimistic side coming through but rather than seeing Donald Trump as being some frightening new out of the ordinary symptom I view it more as the last decaying gasp of the dying order The last hurrah Yeah that's personally my hope I mean I think I vote for your view too I hope you're right to do that for sure So we're talking and we're looking at the midterm elections next year what are the current stumbling blocks looking forward to next year's elections what do we have to watch out for what can we hope for next year Well the national level and this is sort of inside internal the Democratic Party but it's among Democratic voters and I'll include most progressives in there and most Democrats in there I went to the Atlanta meeting of the DNC where we elected new chair of the Democratic Party this is shortly after a few months after the disastrous election in November and so there were two candidates running Tom Perez and Keith Ellison and I went there as a strong Keith Ellison supporter both of them were broadly speaking progressive I think Keith was the more consistent progressive but when Tom Perez won by a narrow margin and this is in the highest reaches of Democratic Party to get into the DNC you've got to pay some dues you got to pass through a lot of filters but even in that the higher reaches the party was split almost 50-50 as to which way to go and with some opting for a much more progressive approach Tom Perez immediately upon winning the election said I moved to suspend the rules and allow me to appoint Keith Ellison as my deputy chair and everybody in the room said okay now we have a chance to work together now since that time the DNC has been sending Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison as well as Tom around the country barnstorming for Democratic candidates and special election and trying to rally the base they've been running into opposition from some Bernie or Busters who were saying Bernie what the hell are you doing supporting the DNC they're all corporate sellouts and from hardline unrepentant Clinton supporters not all but some of the more opposite ones saying DNC why are you empowering Bernie Sanders for the immediate time medium term it is important there be a strategic alliance between progressives and mainstream Democrats so that we can take control of one or both chambers in the midterm elections in 2018 or if we don't quite do that at least improve our numbers because we have to push back against Trump we have to build a strong United front against Trump but we also have to offer a progressive alternative to Trumpism which is what the progressive message is that Tom Perez is embracing but Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison are obviously stronger advocates for it. Okay what can the progressive movement do to gain the attention of mainstream Democrats or to better gain this is just what you were just talking about we're sort of split right now what can progressives do to help unify the party or to get the more centrist Democrats to not fear this progressive movement? Well I think in order to win I think it's again sort of like I said there was the pragmatism underlying allies youthful people being attracted towards progressive thought I think that the progressive message I think is one that can rally the vast majority of working in middle class people in this country behind the Democrats but when candidates who seem like they're co-opted by Goldman Sachs and Wall Street and are more sympathetic with that sort of view than with working people then people are not gonna vote for Democrats they're gonna vote according to the escape goat theories that are thrown their ways against the various evil boogeymen and stuff that the Republicans particularly Trump have been very good at advocating. Let me ask a little bit and we're talking nationally here but what about on the local level in the state of Hawaii Democratic Party I've had people observe that the party people who come to conventions who are active in precincts is much more progressive than the elected officials that we have in our state. Why is that and can we change it and there seems to be a gap to me between who makes up the Democratic Party and who holds elective office that the elected officials are quite a bit more conservative than the party today. Well okay the party has to be party's not really clear what its function is but in my conception the party has a different function than the elected officials and part of our job is to not just exhort the politicians to support the Democratic platform but again to go back to FDR where FDR says okay you've convinced me about these progressive policies now go out there and make me do it. Organize public opinion make it so that if I don't promote progressive policies that take care of the needs of most people my chances of winning are not that good make it so that if I do support those things you will be there to protect me to defend me and to get me reelected. That's the role I think of the Democratic Party. Some people view the Democratic Party as though we should be ideological policemen trying to enforce the platform. I strongly disagree with that point of view although I used to hold it very adamantly I believe what we have to do is use our connections and experience we acquire through the Democratic Party to run more progressive people for office as Democrats and defeat the more conservative corporatist ones as individual Democrats using the skills we acquire and do it through small D Democratic ways rather than through sort of a law enforcement model which is to say oh you're not honoring our platform so we're gonna kick you out of the party that's the wrong approach today. I also want to touch on that I think Bar kind of alluded to it I think that just focusing on just figureheads not figureheads but you know representative Senators you know elected officials is also in a way putting the cart before the horse I think. What you don't see behind something like FDR is that FDR had to be pushed significantly to enact the policies they did and what was he pushed by? He was pushed by you know radically strong unions back then in the 30s and the 40s he was pushed by mass movements out there in the streets you know I mean what you didn't see you know was outside the White House which is you know hundreds of thousands of people out there you know protesting and pushing for movements. I want to switch subjects for just a minute Tim because I have you here and recently the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate students at private universities are employees and essentially paving the way to collective bargaining as if they were a union. Should those at public schools be allowed the same option? I know you're involved in a graduate student organization which is like crazy. Yeah absolutely so I'm a graduate student at UH Minoa and I work as a teaching assistant. This last semester I taught two sections of calculus had over 100 students and I absolutely do think that graduate assistants should be given the right to unionize and that's the case at all private universities as you said since this historic ruling last year we've had unions petition at Harvard, Yale, New Chicago, Columbia, New York University, et cetera and it's the case at public universities in every public university in California, Washington, Oregon and other states across the country, New York and there's no reason why Hawaii's public university should not join this movement. Graduate assistants are taking on more and more of the day-to-day administrative and teaching and research work at the universities. We contribute to the local economy. We educate our local people and we're workers and unless we wanna just be taught to accept lower and lower standards of pay and working conditions I think you'll find that the decline of union densities nationally has been, is strongly correlated with the increase in wealth inequality. I think we deserve a union. Thank you, very well answered, thank you. So I'm here with Bart Daim and Tim Zoo, they're both progressive Democrats very active in the political organizations in our state and I wanna give each of you just a couple of seconds to let people know how they can reach you and your organizations if you're interested. Bart, would you like to, or anything you would like to share? How people can reach them? Well, okay, I work with a number of groups depending on and I'm not sure who I should embarrass by saying I'm on the board of a nonpartisan group, the Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action. Probably our most ambitious project right now is the Kuliana Academy, which is to find, identify and train young people and not even that young people who wanna run for office so we teach them the mechanics of how to run for office. Regardless of what party. Find that organization online if they wanted to or Facebook. I would search, do a Google search for Hapa. Hapa and Hawaii. Okay, in Hawaii and then you can also search for Kuliana Academy. I also work with Progressive Democrats of Hawaii and I also do work with the Democratic Party as well. Okay, how about you Tim? Hi, yeah, so I work with several different organizations in the local community, including YPDA, Young Progressive Demanding Action. The group that I'm currently working the most with is Democratic Socialists of America, which is the largest and fastest growing socialist organization in the country. And I think with Bernie's election, he's the most pop, we're not his elections, but his, you know, primary victories at multiple states. You know, I think it's a historic opportunity. He's the most popular politician in the country and he's an open democratic socialist. And we're a national organization then, right? This is, and we're not a party, we're an organization. We work on multiple issues on multiple fronts and we're dedicated towards building a working class mass socialist movement. Okay, wonderful. I wanna thank you both so much. Bart Daim and Tim Zoo for joining me here on the Ruderman Roundtable. And thank you to Think Tech Kauai for hosting us. We'll be back again in two weeks with another Ruderman Roundtable. Mahalo for joining us.