Insurgents or Insiders (w/Norman Solomon)

Where is the Democratic blue road going?

When I think about the left-wing reformers who are winning office as Democrats, I recognize that they need to govern alongside people who differ with them. That means compromise. It also means that politicians can’t lead the struggle for transformative change, at least not on their own. Movements lead, and sometimes they give rise to people who can also be effective in elected office.

I also worry that the party will absorb each new generation of reformers into its culture before they’re able to change it.

When I caught up with Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, we started off by discussing his recent column arguing that today’s AOC wouldn’t have endorsed the insurgent AOC of 2018. She’s holding back on endorsements for challengers who are doing exactly what she did to get elected, and she recently endorsed Hakeem Jeffries for House Democratic leader—even as he sent colleagues a letter pledging to keep arming Israel.

From there we went to a couple of Norman’s other recent columns. Topics included the failure of institutional conformity in the Democratic Party, its moral and strategic failure on Gaza and Palestine, the myth of “insider expertise,"and the interplay between class, social forces, and personality in the shaping of history.

I enjoyed the conversation very much. I hope you do, too. There’s a (lightly edited) transcript below.

Here are the columns we discussed:

Today’s cautious AOC would not have endorsed the AOC of 2018
My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump
Why the Biden Debate Disaster Still Matters for the Future

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Selected quotes

“When people lead, leaders will follow. If we don’t lead, they’re going to follow each other.”
— Norman Solomon

“At what point are you changing the party, and at what point is the party changing you?”
— Richard Eskow

“It’s stunning that [AOC] has made it a policy not to endorse any challenger to an incumbent Democrat when that’s how she got into Congress in the first place.”
— Norman Solomon

“It’s not about the celebrity figures. It’s about the movements that make them.”
— Richard Eskow

“It’s called democracy. We all take our best assessments and we push.”
— Norman Solomon

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Transcript

Richard Eskow: Welcome back to The Zero Hour.

Norman Solomon: Thanks. Very glad to be here.

Richard Eskow: I want to start with this piece, because I thought it neatly encapsulated the situation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I get asked about a lot. I think anybody identified as being on the left probably gets asked about her a lot. The headline, and I believe this piece itself was not from The Hill, though the headline was, read: “Today’s Cautious AOC Would Not Have Endorsed the AOC of 2018.” I thought that captured a shift people are concerned about with her. What inspired you to write it?

Norman Solomon: It occurred to me that when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into Congress, it was by challenging someone who seemed almost unchallengeable, Joseph Crowley, the fourth-highest-ranking Democrat in the House. It seemed impossible. She had no prior, quote-unquote, experience in office. She’d tended bar, and she was a terrific activist. She won, and it stunned people.

Now, in 2026, as someone with a lot of well-justified clout on the left and in national political discourse, she’s declined to endorse any of the candidates trying to ascend the way she did, mostly, by the way, people of color who’ve won as Democratic Socialists in deep-blue districts in the last few weeks. They’re on their way to Congress, and frankly, no thanks to her. Now, I know it’s complicated, when you’re in office, you have to choose your endorsements carefully. But it’s stunning to me that she’s made it a policy not to endorse any challenger to an incumbent Democrat, when that’s exactly how she got into Congress in the first place.

Richard Eskow: It is striking. She deserves credit for helping Zohran Mamdani early on in his race, though that wasn’t a House race. I always worry about progressives getting elected and then joining what I’ve called the Democratic Borg collective of the power elite. To their credit, many of them haven’t done that. Bernie resisted it for a long time, he was always strategic about when and how he worked with insider groups. I didn’t always agree with him, but he was careful about it, and we could go down the list.

One of AOC’s first moves in Washington was joining a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office, which got her in a lot of trouble. Now she seems to have taken the position that challenging an incumbent is outside the rulebook. But that’s not only how she got into office, it’s supposed to be how democracy works. So what do you think is at the root of her discomfort?

Norman Solomon: She’d be uncomfortable dealing with some of her colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus if she supported challenges to incumbent Democrats. It’s notable that some of the best members of Congress, not just her, got there that way: Ro Khanna, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, who hopefully is coming back after being ousted. They got there by challenging people considered entrenched.

There’s a saying that we do political analysis, not psychoanalysis, so we never really know what’s going on inside someone’s head. But it’s pretty clear she’s aspiring to higher office. She may run for the Senate seat in 2028, whether or not Chuck Schumer runs for reelection. There’s also been increasing buzz in the media about her running for president in 2028. In either case, the traditional pathway is not to alienate the powers that be in the Democratic Party, and she seems to be taking the opposite path.

Just as I finished writing this piece for The Hill, news came that AOC had endorsed Hakeem Jeffries, the current House Democratic leader, to continue in that role next year, whether or not he becomes speaker. To me, that reinforces the concern, and maybe the reasonable guess, that she’s trying to curry favor with people in power. And nobody on the Democratic side of the House is more powerful than Hakeem Jeffries. Nobody is more pro-Israel, either, arguably, or certainly, no one is more powerfully pro-Israel.

Just days before we’re speaking, Jeffries sent an extraordinary “Dear Colleague” letter to every House Democrat, saying he’ll oppose any cutoff of weapons and military aid to Israel. He didn’t have to say that, even if he was personally going to vote against an arms cutoff, but he went out of his way to pledge his allegiance to the IDF, using his leverage to stop more Democrats from breaking away from the “Israel, right or wrong” line and voting against arming a government that is clearly engaged in genocide, as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights groups Physicians for Human Rights Israel and B’Tselem have all documented.

And yet here’s this guy, in the middle of summer 2026, using his leverage to keep arming a genocide. In that context, it looks especially bad that AOC went out of her way to say, “This is our leader for next year.”

Richard Eskow: This gets back to a conversation you and I, and I think many of us, in various configurations, have had before: the fact that AOC, and candidly Bernie too, endorsed Joe Biden for reelection a year, maybe two years, before the campaign started. My memory’s a little hazy on the exact timing. But this was despite the fact that he was, at that point, supporting the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and he continued to do so, with no leverage used for humanitarian relief there or anywhere else.

It raises the question: at what point, as a politician who’s supposedly a change agent, are you changing the party, and at what point is the party changing you? In that race, who’s winning? Because it seems to me that in both cases, AOC traded away leverage, not just on a political issue that, according to the polls, would favor her, but on a moral one. So it makes me wonder: am I missing something here? I admit I’m baffled.

Norman Solomon: “Gratuitously early” is one way to describe AOC’s endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries as Democratic leader. The vote won’t happen until at least November, when the Democratic caucus decides on its leader for next year. That leader, speaker or not, has tremendous power and leverage over how the Democrats in Congress behave, over caucus positions, and especially over committee assignments.

It’s a bit like a labor leader going into negotiations with management and already giving up so much before any negotiating has even taken place. As you allude to, Richard, I think AOC, for whatever reason, decided to endorse before there was even a negotiation. She did offer an explanation: she said in her announcement that she’d met with Jeffries and was pleased he would support public housing in New York, which matters to her. I found that explanation baffling at best, and at worst, just not credible.

There are really only two possibilities you could draw from AOC’s explanation. One is that Jeffries is so unreliable and unprincipled on humanitarian issues that you have to cut a deal with him just to get his support for public housing that New Yorkers need. Or, on the other hand, he’s someone you can depend on, in which case, why would you need to cut a deal in the first place? Either way, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I don’t want to impute purely selfish motives, but these are politicians, she’s clearly ambitious for higher office, and I think that’s probably the most specific explanation. And then there’s the more generic one: if you want to get along with your colleagues in Congress, you don’t tell them you’re going to help remove them from office.

Richard Eskow: I’ve studied politics for a long time, as you have, Norman, and perception matters a lot. It’s hard to quantify, hard to predict. But the strength AOC brought to her initial campaign, to the House, to what quickly became political celebrity, was a combination of refreshing energy and an unsolemn, I don’t want to say rebellious, but a playful, in a good way, attitude. I thought it was a great moment when she told a hostile witness, “I was a bartender for years, I know how to handle men like you.” She has real gifts as a communicator.

But every gift is double-edged in politics, I’ve come to believe. The gift of being a facile communicator can quickly turn on you if people feel it’s not backed up by substance, character, and commitment. Her youth and youthful energy could equally turn against her if people start to feel there’s something superficial about her. I’m not saying this because I can predict the future or read people’s minds, but if she’s ambitious for herself and her career, and she clearly is, I think she’s playing a dangerous game.

Norman Solomon: On that note, trust can seem ineffable, almost abstract, but I think it matters enormously in the longer term. Let’s face it: if she runs for president, or even for Senate in New York, the right-wing guns will be trained on her, metaphorically. They really hate her, just look at right-wing media. She’s going to need her base to turn out. She’s going to need, as Mamdani had, tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers willing to go door to door to counteract the corporate and militarist assaults, in media and in politics, that are sure to come, and that have already existed for years.

I’ve gotten pushback from progressives who say, “Why are you picking on her? She’s in Congress. She knows things you don’t. She understands tactical complexities you don’t.” I think that’s a very hazardous attitude. We saw it before, when almost every Democrat in Congress refused to say a negative word about Biden running for reelection. We were told, “They’re the pros, they’re the experts, who are we to micromanage them?” Well, it’s called democracy. We all make our best assessments and push, because that’s what activism, organizing, and participatory democracy are supposed to be about.

Richard Eskow: It’s not about the visible figures, the celebrities. It’s about the movements that make them succeed or fail, and that guide and pressure and encourage them. There’s a sad irony in seeing some of the people who came to power because Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton now using the same rhetoric to defend their choices that Hillary’s supporters once used against the Bernie contingent, “They’re the insiders, they’re the experts, they know what you don’t.” Well, you know what? In a democracy, if you know something I don’t, tell me, because that’s how democracy works.

Norman Solomon: That reminds me of something formative for me, and for many people of my generation, during the Vietnam War: we constantly heard that Lyndon Johnson knew things we didn’t, so why should we think we knew better than him? Year after year, I was a teenager at the time, 1965, ‘66, we were told the Democrats in Congress understood the war in ways we didn’t. The message was: butt out, and trust. But we can’t afford to trust, when circles of power so easily seduce the people inside them.

Richard Eskow: People remember, from those days, at least the title of David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest, about the Kennedy people who went on to serve in the Johnson administration, Robert McNamara and others. What people forget is that the title is ironic, the “best and the brightest” made a mess of things.

That gets me to another piece you’ve written recently, Norman, the one headlined “Why the Biden Debate Disaster Still Matters for the Future.” I’m sure some people think, “Enough about the Biden debate disaster”, but we’re still talking about it, and not just you and me. This ties directly into what we were just discussing about AOC, doesn’t it?

Norman Solomon: Very much so. As it happens, two of my political heroes, Bernie Sanders and AOC, supported Biden right up until the last minute, until he announced he’d drop out. Patterns really matter. Political cultures matter, even when we have trouble putting our finger on them. There’s a conformity that’s magnetic, especially for people who want to ascend, or be taken seriously.

We saw that dynamic play out. Not to boast, but just to be factual: at RootsAction, we launched the “Don’t Run, Joe” campaign right after the 2022 midterms, and we couldn’t find any other sizable national group willing to join us. We heard privately from some who said, “Yeah, Biden shouldn’t run”, but they were afraid of losing access. The same was true for Democrats in Congress. Only one or two were willing, in 2023, to say publicly that Biden shouldn’t run. This has consequences, and we’re living them right now.

Some people watching might ask, “Why focus on Democrats, when we have this fascistic Republican regime?” And we certainly do focus on that. But the underlying question is: how do we defeat them? Can we do it the way Kamala Harris tried, splitting the difference and, to put it mildly, disrespecting the base that was horrified by the genocide the U.S. was supporting? The question answers itself. We need a departure from this willingness to reinforce the establishment and disregard the polling.

There’s one more piece here, going back to both the 2024 campaign and what we’re talking about with AOC: polling over the last twelve to eighteen months has been very clear, about 75% of Democrats don’t want to keep arming Israel. They believe Israel is engaged in genocide. And still, one of the best progressives in Congress just endorsed for leader someone who came out in favor of continuing to arm Israel. It may be a cliché, but it’s true: when people lead from the grassroots, leaders follow. If we don’t lead, they’ll follow each other, right over the cliff.

Richard Eskow: I get that question a lot too, Norm, “Why are you always so hard on the Democrats when we have this authoritarian Trump who’s so terrible?” My answer is always: that’s exactly why. Trump wouldn’t be there today, in my view, if Democrats were listening to activist movements and the popular will.

I get it, on one level, I’ve been close enough to the seats of power to understand that shifting this massive institution, the Democratic Party, from a large-donor model to a small-donor, popularly-funded one, is a major job. I get that it’s intimidating, that it’s a radical career change for a lot of people, that a lot of well-paid consultants would have to find other ways to make a living. I get all of it, the institutional momentum behind the party as it currently works.

But I think it’s not only good policy and good for the country, it’s the only way to win. Polls keep showing that. Where they don’t, it’s often the phrasing of the poll that’s the problem. The classic example for me is Medicare for All, which polls extremely well, unless you ask, “Would you support government-run health care even if it meant a big hike in your taxes?” Which it doesn’t necessarily have to mean, and which would be more than offset by what people no longer pay in premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.

So we have an agenda that would make the country safer and healthier, and yet there’s institutional resistance to it. To me, that should be a dividing line: do the politicians I support understand that, and want to work with the grassroots to overcome it? When you bring up the Biden debate performance, there are a million reasons behind it we haven’t even gotten into. But one of them is what the psychologist Stanley Milgram called obedience to authority, and we, as a movement, and the Democrats as a party, should not be so obedient to authority, especially authority that’s misled us so often. Sorry, I’m ranting a little. Let me turn it back to you.

Norman Solomon: No, that’s key. The huge gap between how Democrats, and often the country as a whole, poll, and the positions taken by Democratic Party leadership, is political malpractice. The vast majority of Democrats don’t want to keep arming Israel, for instance, and yet we have an institutionalized model that says those views don’t really matter compared to other factors, namely, that autocrats and the wealthy can write six- or seven-figure checks.

The reality is that successful campaigns have to be inspiring, that’s how the current mayor of New York got elected. A friend of mine gave a keynote to a state Democratic Party recently and asked, “How many of you would like to be campaigning alongside Chuck Schumer if you were running for office?” Hardly anyone raised their hand. I think it’s similar with Jeffries. What does that tell us? That the party’s ostensible leaders at the very top are found uninspiring, which translates into failing to drive turnout, which is essential to winning elections. Every cycle, come October, it’s a turnout election, and yet this so-called leadership is deadening rather than inspiring.

Another element you touched on, Richard, is the campaign funding model within the party. Without inspiration, you can’t do what Bernie Sanders did, averaging $27 donations. I don’t think the people running the DNC, or leading the House and Senate Democratic caucuses, really see small donations as the key. It’s the old line, if you don’t have the hammer, everything doesn’t look like a nail. They don’t inspire people, and no wonder the DNC is in such dire financial straits right now.

Richard Eskow: I get the challenge this poses to their mindset, even conceiving of a small-donation, popularly-funded party is alien to them. But I think they’re approaching a kind of freeze-up point. The only way they can raise money is by clinging to policies people don’t actually support, just to keep the fundraising going, which lets some people make a good living as consultants without significantly winning elections. Or, they decide they actually want to win, and build a coalition of people who do. Otherwise, they risk freezing in place, in a kind of stasis. What do you think?

Norman Solomon: That brings us back to where we started, the fact that Capitol Hill is, de facto, an insular bubble. You’re dealing with certain callings, certain pressures. I think a key question for those of us at the grassroots, progressives and others who want humane, progressive change, is whether we’re going to be a counter-pressure or not. Are we going to leave the field to the corporate interests and militarists who dominate that milieu on Capitol Hill? Or are we going to provide counter-pressure? Of course, it has to be the latter. That’s essential.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Before you go, Norman, I want to talk briefly about a piece you wrote called “My Conversation with Karl Marx About Donald Trump.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what you were exploring, in channeling the late Karl Marx, was the tension between class struggle as the engine of history versus the historic, transformative personality, in this case, Donald Trump, as the engine of history.

Trump poses a real challenge to the left in that sense. I believe class and economic struggle are major drivers of history, and that there are tectonic forces at work, but individuals can also shift the course of events at certain moments. This is a challenge for the left, because so many centrists and corporate politicians have used Trump’s personality as an excuse not to offer better policies for the working class, which has created a counter-reaction. It’s a delicate balance. Is that a fair read of what you were trying to do with the Marx piece?

Norman Solomon: Yes, that’s largely what I was after. It is a delicate balance. I’m one of many people who, especially over the last year and a half, have been trying to reconcile a fairly solid analysis, that social forces determine what happens historically, in the present and future, and that we want to strengthen the social forces for good rather than for corporate militaristic evil, with the fact that along comes Trump, not just leading a cult of personality, but embodying a force, as an individual, that’s been genuinely transformative.

It’s a word that can sound academic or jargon-y, but dialectically, these are truths in conflict that coexist. I found a quote from Marx, writing to Engels, essentially saying: I never claimed that everything that happens is purely because of economics, people who say that aren’t being accurate. The basis of it is economics, and class struggle, but other factors are involved too. That’s the real world.

Richard Eskow: Right, it’s the gasoline and the match. The gasoline won’t catch fire or explode without a match. On one hand, there are clearly global social forces at work in the rise of the right and demagogic leaders, Orbán in Hungary, Le Pen in France, Farage in Great Britain, some in power, some out. There’s clearly something global going on: alienation against the elite, in the absence, in my view, of a valid left to challenge it. So that’s the structural side.

But on the other hand, would we be in this situation without Donald Trump specifically? I’d say no. I could go further and say he’s intensified the contradictions, to borrow that phrase from the ‘60s, “heightened the contradictions.” We don’t know how it will turn out, but we know we have to stop Trump and Trumpism if we want to create space for real transformative change. At least, that’s my view. I’m not sure Marx, or anyone else, would disagree.

Norman Solomon: Definitely, we need to roll back Republican power, it is fascistic power. When I hear some on the left say it doesn’t matter who’s individually in office, I think that’s, at this point, a kind of hallucination. It clearly matters who holds power. With the right wing running the executive and legislative branches, and much of the judicial branch, we’re entirely on the defensive, there’s no capacity to implement good policy, only damage control. That’s why getting them out of office is the imperative for this midterm election, and for 2028 as well.

Richard Eskow: The other reason to get these people out of office, as dissatisfied as I am with the Democratic Party, is that I think the sum total of human suffering in this country would be somewhat less if the far right were out of power. I don’t think a party deserves a laurel wreath for basic decency, but at least some measure of human decency might return. I’m not so cosmic that I think I know how much suffering should be tolerated in the short term because something magical might happen in the long term. I think we owe it to people to relieve suffering, to give them space to breathe and survive, and then show them what a better world can look like.

Before we go, I’ll give you the last word, there’s a great Marx quote I’d heard before, apropos of Trump. He wasn’t writing about Trump, obviously, in 1869, but he described a cult existing around a tyrant, and how the class struggle “created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” That sounds very much like the current president of the United States. But I’ll give you the last word.

Norman Solomon: That’s an amazing description by Marx, I believe of Napoleon III, and as you say, it fits the dangerous, vicious clown now serving as president. I do want to invite people to check out my latest book, which is free and available online in various formats, at blueroad.info. It’s called The Blue Road to Trump Hell.

Richard Eskow: I encourage people to do that. You and I have talked about it on the program before. Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, thanks for these recent pieces, which I got a lot out of, and thanks once again for coming on the program.

Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Richard.

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