Can Van Jones Create a “left-wing Tea Party?”

You remember Obama’s departed Green czar, the once self-proclaimed revolutionary Communist, Van Jones? Well, the man is back. According to Michelle Goldberg writing  in The Daily Beast, last July 23^rd Jones threw a Washington, DC party to announce the creation of what he predicts will be the left-wing’s Tea Party, which he calls “The American Dream Movement.” Goldberg writes:

Launched at a July 23 event in New York City that was part rally, party dance party, the American Dream Movement aims to restore the fight for economic justice to the center of progressive politics. On Aug. 9, the movement put out its crowd-sourced “Contract for the American Dream,” a 10-point economic manifesto that called for new investments in education and infrastructure; higher taxes for corporations, Wall Street and the wealthy; and curbs on lobbyists. The next day, it was published as a full-page ad in The New York Times. Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois will soon introduce the Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act, legislation based on the document.

Since I read the Times on-line, I did not see the full–page ad—one of the benefits of not reading the print edition. Actually, Jones’ movement was first announced last February at the Huffington Post—but somehow, the earlier announcement produced no traction. Nothing like a re-release to try again.

While Jones introduces it as a left version of the Tea Party, a more accurate rendition is a 21^st  Century version of the Communist Party’s 1930’s Popular Front. After all, just as the CPUSA hid its Red politics and Communist aims under the guise of “20^th Century Americanism,” Jones too hides his real aims in a similar fashion. Remember the old slogan of the CP’s wartime chief Earl Browder, who proclaimed the slogan “Communism is 20^th Century Americanism,” under photos of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx. The slogan lasted until old Joe Stalin took offense at the audacity of undermining loyalty to the Soviet Union, and ordered that the slogan be ditched overnight.

Jones, as we may recall, in a now famous 2005 newspaper interview said that “I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.” No longer announcing that he is a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist, Jones is proceeding to try and build social movements along the classic lines of the old 1930’s and 40’s communist movement that he once sought to openly emulate.

With his new movement, Jones hopes not to have to depend for cadre on a small group of East Bay radicals in San Francisco, but to create a movement from above that appears to be like the actual Tea Party, a movement that started from below. It’s a classic CP strategy. As the Old Left sees the New Deal era, F.D.R. was pushed to the Left by a powerful social movement composed of the working class that was organizing the CIO- the industry-wide new trade union movement. That pressure from below supposedly forced Roosevelt to turn to more left-wing programs, hence the slew of legislation that became the hallmark of the Second New Deal after 1935.

Hence Jones’ belief is that with his American Dream movement, a groundswell of protest will emerge that will both keep Barack Obama in the White House, and at the same time, force him to do what the Left so far has not been able to accomplish—openly force him to espouse and to gather momentum for new widespread Government spending, a new huge stimulus bill, all based on increasing the U.S. deficit through Keynesian spending mechanisms.

Of course, in the 1930’s- there was an actual social movement that was based in reality, and that enabled labor to eventually reject radicalism and move into the middle class.

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