Alexander Burns penned a piece yesterday about Lula’s trip to DC and his proposed global battle against fascism, delivering a “dire message” to progressive lawmakers and labor leaders. “Though poisonous demagogues had fallen in both Brazil and the United States, Lula warned that a global web of right-wing forces continued to threaten political freedom. Voters crushed by economic inequality and confused by a torrent of social-media disinformation remained vulnerable to figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the brutish strongman whom Lula barely defeated last fall.”
He issued “a call to battle: The left needed to build its own transnational network, Lula said, to fight for its political values and take on crises like economic deprivation and climate change. Far-right leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro in the Americas had sought each other out and found fellow travelers in European hardliners like France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. No comparable club has existed on the left. In Lula’s view it was time for that to change.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Lula wanted to mobilize left-leaning forces against “an international network of right-wing people and movements” that is seeking to “take over democratic countries.”
“He really was appealing to us, asking the Progressive Caucus to build something that can counter that,” Jayapal recalled.
An initial step may come later this year, with a possible trip to Brazil by congressional progressives. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a leading House liberal who also met with Lula, said the Brazilian president urged lawmakers three times to visit.
Khanna said he had asked his staff to explore other international forums where U.S. progressives should make their presence felt.
Lula’s exhortation represents an overdue challenge for the U.S. left. For all the influence they have exercised on domestic policy, left-wing Democrats have not yet managed to articulate a distinctive transnational agenda.
That has been a missed opportunity.
It is not that progressives do not care about the rest of the world. They just tend to engage it as a scattered array of flashpoints and pet causes, without telling a more universal story about the struggles of the 21st Century.
In Washington, many progressives have embraced President Joe Biden’s chosen narrative about a grand contest between democracy and autocracy, while lamenting the gulf between Biden’s rhetoric and his tolerance of strategically useful tyrannies like Saudi Arabia. Yet they have made only fitful attempts to lay out an overarching left-wing agenda that starts with change in the United States and extends across the larger world.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has made the most developed effort, calling in 2018 for an “international progressive front” against oligarchs, despots, and multinational corporations. But his chief role these days is chairing the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee— a powerful post focused on the U.S. economy.
…[P]anic about Bannon-style meddling had receded in Europe: Věra Jourová, the vice president of the European Commission, recalled a sense of fear after 2016 that a character like Bannon might help ignite a continental movement. “It didn’t happen,” Jourová said.
Still, there has been political value for extreme conservatives in thinking of themselves in global terms. It has helped them identify trends and cultural attitudes that have driven elections across national boundaries— anger about the Syrian refugee crisis, fear of China, resentment toward big tech— and sharpen a common vocabulary for discussing them.
On an intangible level, it has given a once-marginalized group of ideologues a certain esprit de corps that can translate into what Americans call swagger.
Lula, who previously served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, may be uniquely positioned among foreign leaders to summon the U.S. left to the barricades.
Even before his return to power, Lula occupied a special place in the imagination of U.S. progressives: a populist crusader in one of the world’s largest democracies, a defender of the Amazon, an outspoken American leftist through the era of George W. Bush. His imprisonment in 2018, the result of a questionable corruption prosecution, made him a political martyr.
There is an aesthetic component to his appeal to progressives that helps obscure other inconvenient realities, like his equivocal view of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.
Consider the images from Lula’s last candidacy, showing a roaring leftist fighter campaigning through destitute neighborhoods and greeting ecstatic crowds from an open-top car. These are scenes unknown to U.S. voters in our time. To many progressives, they look like the best version of politics.
Lula’s imprisonment strengthened his long-distance relationship with left-leaning lawmakers in Washington, who took up his cause. Sanders led the effort, repeatedly calling for Lula’s release during his own presidential campaign. Upon his release, the Brazilian politician singled out Sanders for thanks.
“I hope American workers will make you US president,” Lula wrote to Sanders on Twitter.
He continued expressing gratitude in Washington this year, meeting with Sanders and thanking him and other progressives for their support. When Lula sat down with union leaders, he was effusive. “He wanted to thank the labor movement for standing with him,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
With labor officials, too, Lula urged a transnational mobilization. He pressed them to lead a “fight about working people and about lifting up their economic aspirations, their living wages,” as well as protecting the Amazon, Weingarten said.
In his meeting with congressional progressives, Khanna said Lula described a certain form of progressive politics— focused on economic advancement for the working class and fighting climate change— as the antidote to a mood of despair that feeds authoritarian politics.
“One of the interesting insights he had was that there was a movement, not just in Brazil but around the world, of anti-politics,” Khanna said, “and that people have so lost faith in organizing and political activity, they have bought into the narrative that everything is corrupt, everything is broken and politics doesn’t matter.”
The solution, according to Lula, was a “hopeful, aspirational politics” that gives voters confidence “that you can improve people’s economic conditions,” Khanna said.
While he was in DC, Lula didn’t meet with my congressman, Adam Schiff, likely to be the next senator from California— and likely to quckly eclipse the 2 current nonentities, Alex Padilla and Dianne Feinstein, who may or may not still be among the living. He should have. Schiff is no Bernie or Ro or Pramila, but he has gradually moved in a decidedly progressive direction since being elected to Congress in 2000, and if Lula wants to get his project moving, he’s going to need adherents like Adam Schiff, who has the skill to pass bipartisan progressive legislation— and has done so. Who stopped the NSA from spying on Americans? The Congressional Progressive Caucus certainly helped but it was an amendment Schiff wrote and passed in 2005 that prohibited the government from using the Patriot Act’s section 215 to access library and bookstore records and a year later it was Schiff who wrote and nearly passed an amendment with bipartisan support to block defense spending going to NSA without warrants. One year on, it was Schiff’s (and Republican Jeff Flake’s) amendment that passed the House to prevent the use of wireless wiretapping of U.S. citizens.
Also in 2007 Schiff wrote the Bipartisan NSA Oversight Act, to modernize FISA and invigorate Court supervision over domestic surveillance. He didn’t stop there. In 2013 he pushed proposals to require FISA judges to be confirmed by the Senate, while adding a team of lawyers to the Court to represent privacy interests. And also that year he introduced a transparency bill to force declassify the the FISA Court’s opinions about the government obtain business records.
On the House Intelligence Committee Schiff was the only member to vote for an amendment to curtail NSA bulk data collection of US phone calls, while repeatedly speaking out against the government’s data collection programs aimed at American citizens. He was willing to fight not just Republican administrations but Obama’s as well to protect Americans’ data privacy, saying before Trump was elected that “all the surveillance programs ought to meet at least three fundamental standards— they need to be constitutional, they need to be effective and they need to be structured in a way that minimizes any unnecessary intrusion on our privacy.” As a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, he kept calling on Obama to end surveillance programs on everyday Americans and on gathering bulk phone metadata on the American people.