[Peace-discuss] Parties to the right of the people
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at uiuc.edu
Mon Aug 18 19:27:32 CDT 2008
"With a large part of the citizenry supporting serious progressive change in the
wake of the hard-right Cheney-Bush nightmare, Obama's corporate-imperial
centrism could end up costing him the White House. This is standard operating
procedure for the Democrats, who have long been unable and/or unwilling to run
in accord with the progressive and anti-imperial sentiments of the American
majority...
If Obama Loses
August 18, 2008
By Paul Street
"It Would Not Be Because of Race"
While seeking to distance himself from his former pastor Jeremiah Wright last
spring, Barack Obama told reporters that if he lost in his quest for the
presidency, "it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I
made along the campaign trail"[1].
I have no idea what's going to happen in November. This presidential election is
even more difficult to call than the last two, thanks in part to race.
Still, I can safely say that, like many of Obama's formulations, his comment was
partly true and largely false. Racial bloc voting and the well-documented
reluctance of many whites to vote for a black presidential candidate - widely
evident during the Democratic primaries - are obviously going to be a relevant
factor in the November elections [2]. If Obama loses to the reactionary
war-mongering nut-job John McCain despite a political context that would
normally strongly favor a Democrat this time around, the refusal of a
significant number of white voters to support a black candidate will be a
significant part of the explanation.
The Swift-(Wright-) Boating is Underway
But other factors besides "race" (racism), Obama mistakes included, will
contribute to an Obama defeat if he loses. The powerful Republican right-wing
attack machine is already effectively "Swift-boating" him. The "war hero"
(former bomber of Vietnamese civilians) and leading Iraq "war" (imperial
invasion) enthusiast John McCain and the FOX News crowd are bludgeoning Obama
with the charge of being "soft" (insufficiently militaristic and imperial) on
Iraq and now on Russia. With dominant U.S. media consistently following the lead
of the far right by framing electability around "toughness" when it comes to
"national security," situations like the current conflict between Russia and
Georgia work to leading Russia critic McCain's distinct advantage.
Obama has done everything he can to reassure the nation's ruling bipartisan
political class that he is fully on board with the American Empire Project, but
it doesn't matter: "conservatives" continue to score points with the
"patriotism" and military cards, absurdly tarring him as a "far left" opponent
of American interests and security. That preposterous allegation is the central
theme in the far-right crackpot Jerome Corsi's current best-selling book "The
Obama Nation" - a monument to neo-McCarthyist smear tactics in the post 9/11 era.
Corsi was the co-author of the ridiculous but important and widely read 2004
volume "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry."
His latest bestselling hatchet-job is loaded with lurid innuendos and
guilt-by-association narratives claiming to link the deeply conservative Obama
to African radicalism, "black rage," drugs, Reverend Wright (of course), the
Communist Party, the Weathermen, Islamic "anti-Americanism" and the plot to open
up Israel and the United States to nuclear attack.
Race is a critical sub-text throughout the narrative of "Swift Boat 2.0," of course.
Corsi is making the dominant media rounds and is a featured guest on right wing
talk radio around the country.
This is not really Obama's fault, of course. The Fatherland (FOX) "News" crowd
would be doing the same thing in different ways if Hillary Clinton or John
Edwards (who we now know would have been dead in the water thanks to his sordid
dance with Rielle Hunter) had gotten the nomination. At this stage in the
corporate-totalitarian and imperial degradation of U.S. political culture, any
Democratic presidential candidate (now matter how centrist and compromising) is
going to be subjected to relentless charges of "leftist" weakness and
questionable "Americanism" - vicious accusations that will be dutifully bounced
across the dominant media's echo-chambers and hall of mirrors.
Still, just as Edwards went into the primaries with the Rielle Hunter affair
waiting to explode, Obama (no dummy) certainly made his bid with full knowledge
that the "controversial" (sadly) Afro-Centric Reverend Wright (his pastor of
20-plus years) would likely emerge as a potent symbol for the Republicans'
racist, right-wing noise machine.
Overreach and Fatigue
Hubris and overreach could play a role in a hypothetical Obama defeat, with
voters getting turned off by the quasi-millennial aspects of the Obama
ascendancy, replete with an oration before 200,000 Germans and an acceptance
speech to be delivered to 70,000 chanting Democrats in a Denver football stadium
that will have to do since Mount Sinai is unavailable. You don't have to be a
Republican to think it's more than a little over the top.
Obama fatigue could factor into a possible Obama defeat as millions of Americans
get tired of seeing Obama's face and hearing his measured baritone "eloquence"
over and over and over again. We are now technically into the fifth year of the
Obama phenomenon, launched during the Democratic National Convention in late
July of 2004. Obama is over-exposed at this point, even as most Americans
(including many of his supporters) know amazingly little about his actual public
record and world view. A recent Pew poll finds that nearly half (48 percent)
U.S. voters say that they "have been hearing too much about Obama lately." Just
barely more than a quarter (26 percent) of Pew's respondents said they had heard
too much about McCain.
Alienating Media
Team Obama has recently demonstrated some remarkably controlling and prickly
behavior towards the press. This could be a big mistake. If it isn't more
careful about ruffling dominant media egos, the Obama camp could do significant
damage to the "Obama Love" proffered by a corporate media that retains a soft
spot for the supposed "maverick" McCain. As Gabriel Sherman noted in The New
Republic in late July, "Reporters are grumbling more and more that the campaign
is acting like the Prom Queen. They gripe that it is ‘arrogant' and
‘control[ling],' and the campaign's own belief that Obama is poised to make
history isn't endearing, either. The press certainly helped Obama get so far so
fast; the question is, how far can he get if his campaign alienates them?" (G.
Sherman, "End of the Affair: Barack Obama and the Press Break Up," TNR, July 24,
2008. read at
www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=6e9f4a42-9540-4d99-aba2-25adc276c25d)
Why Obama Deserves to Lose Iraq
The offensive notion that "the Surge" is "working" in Iraq has hurt Obama and
helped McCain. But while it s true that "the Surge's" triumphs are grossly
exaggerated and that claims of U.S. "success" in Iraq ignore the fact that the
Iraq War should (as Obama says) "never been launched in the first place," Obama
deserves to lose Iraq as an issue working in his favor. He has repeatedly voted
funds for the criminal occupation and distanced himself from antiwar activists
and from more courage politicians (e.g. Jack Murtha and Russ Feingold) on Iraq.
He backed pro-war antiwar Democrats in the 2006 Congressional primaries. He has
embraced the preposterous Orwellian claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq out of its
excessive "good intentions" to export democracy. He has advanced the odious
Orwellian notion that the U.S. is involved in a selfless effort to "put Iraq
back together." Absurdly applauding America for its great "sacrifice" in the
cause of "freedom" within and beyond Iraq and enthusiastically embracing George
W. Bush's equally illegal invasion of Afghanistan, "antiwar" Obama has never
come close to acknowledging the extent of the monumental damage the U.S. has
done to Iraq (including more than a million Iraqi dead) during (and before) the
occupation. His plans for "withdrawal" have long been nauseatingly ambiguous
and maddeningly deceptive, hiding the strong likelihood that a President Obama
would maintain the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period.
Obama has never exhibited the elementary courage or decency to oppose the
occupation of Iraq on moral and legal grounds - as a monumental imperial crime.
He has only opposed it as a "strategic blunder" and "mistake:" as a "dumb war"
that isn't "working." This has made him vulnerable to losing the Iraq War as an
issue working on his behalf once the Bush administration and dominant U.S. war
media succeeded in selling the notion that the criminal invasion was finally
being properly executed - the vile idea that the unmentionably criminal invasion
is "working."
Kicking Progressives in the Face
The ugly conceit with which Obama has been willing to risk alienating
progressive, left-leaning voters could come back to haunt him in November. The
militantly centrist corporate-sponsored Obama has irritated many of his leftmost
supporters with the lurches he has made further to the right after securing the
Democratic presidential nomination. Even I (a consistent left critic of Obama
since his highly conservative 2004 Keynote Address) have been surprised at the
speed and strength with which he has kicked his more progressive supporters in
the face (and other bodily regions) by:
* embracing the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a Washington D.C ban on
personal handguns and claimed that the Second Constitutional Amendment pertains
to private citizens, not just organized state "militias."
* declaring his belief in the state's right to kill certain criminals, including
child rapists.
* becoming the first major party presidential candidate to bypass the public
presidential financing system and to reject accompanying spending limits
(violating his earlier pledge to work through the public system and accept those
limits).
* supporting a refurbished spy bill that grants retroactive immunity to
telephone corporations who collaborated with the White House in electronic
surveillance of American citizens (violating Obama's earlier pledge to
filibuster any surveillance legislation containing such immunity).
* appointing the corporate-friendly Wal-Mart apologist and Hamilton Project [3]
economist Jason Furman as his economic policy director - something that stood in
curious relation to his criticism ("I won't shop there") of Wal-Mart's low-wage
anti-union practices when speaking to labor audiences.
* increasing his declared support of "free trade," contradicting his
campaign-trail criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
* "tweaking" his claim that he would meet with Iran's president (he added new
and more restrictive conditions).
* embracing (in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public
Affairs Committee - AIPAC) Bush-McCain rhetoric on the supposed Iranian nuclear
threat and promising to do "anything" to protect the nuclear occupation and
apartheid state of Israel from Iran (a nation previously attacked by Israel).
* calling (in his AIPAC speech) for an "undivided" Israel-run Jerusalem despite
the fact that no government on the planet (and not even the Bush administration)
supports Israeli's right to annex that UN-designated international city.
* making bolder Iraq "withdrawal" statements indicating that an Obama
administration would not leave Iraq.
* vocally supporting a major part of the Republican agenda: the granting of
public money to private religious organizations to provide social services.
* endorsing the conservative white male Blue Dog Democratic Congressman John
Barrow (D-GA) over the progressive black female challenger Regina Thomas in a
July 15 primary [4].
* flip-flopping on energy policy by calling for increased domestic and offshore
oil drilling after it became clear that McCain was getting traction with voters
by calling for such environmentally insensitive drilling.
"Dropping the Class Language"
With a large part of the citizenry supporting serious progressive change in the
wake of the hard-right Cheney-Bush nightmare, Obama's corporate-imperial
centrism could end up costing him the White House. This is standard operating
procedure for the Democrats, who have long been unable and/or unwilling to run
in accord with the progressive and anti-imperial sentiments of the American
majority [5].
Last time out, John "I am Not a Redistribution Democrat" Kerry made the usual
surrender. Given the closeness of the 2004 race and the unpopularity of the
arch-plutocratic George W. Bush, Kerry could have won if he'd run further to the
populist left. With help from the "liberal" New York Times (which agreed not to
publish its findings on the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping until well
after the election), the super-opulent windsurfing aristocrat Kerry ran to the
corporate center and thereby gave us four more years of the Worst President Ever.
This great failure followed in perfect accord with Thomas Frank's widely
mentioned but commonly misunderstood book on why so many white working class
Americans vote for regressive Republicans instead of following their supposed
natural "pocketbook" interests by backing Democrats. Released just before Bush
defeated Kerry with no small help from working class whites, Frank's "What's the
Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" (New York: 2004)
has generally been taken to have argued that the GOP distracts stupid
"heartland" (white working-class) voters away from their real economic interests
with diversionary issues like abortion, guns, and gay rights. Insofar as
Democrats bear responsibility for the loss their former working class
constituency, Frank is often said to have argued that this was due to their
excessive liberalism on these and other "cultural issues"
But Frank's argument was more complex or perhaps more simple. At the end of his
book, in a passage that very few leading commentators seem to have read (a
shining exception is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman), Frank clearly and
(in my opinion) correctly blamed the long corporatist shift of the Democratic
Party to the business-friendly right and away from honest discussion of - and
opposition to - economic and class inequality for much of whatever success the
GOP achieved in winning over working-class whites. As Frank noted in his final
chapter:
"The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such
figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McCauliffe, has long
been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on
recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social
issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are
corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far out-weighing
anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and --- more
important --- the money of these coveted constituencies, 'New Democrats' think,
is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless
concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law,
privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule
out what they deride as 'class warfare' and take great pains to emphasize their
friendliness with business. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues
off the table. As for working-class voters who were until recently the party's
very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will
always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what
politician in this success-worshipping country really wants to be the voice of
poor people?"
"...The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or
anti-school prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that once
distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable
to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory
appeal would ordinarily be overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an
environment where Republicans talks constantly about class - in a coded way, to
be sure - but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up" (Frank, What's the
Matter With Kansas?, pp. 242-245).
The corporate-sponsored, capitalism-praising Obama is repeating the same old
classist Democratic mistake. For all Obama's talk about activating the popular
base to bring about "change from the bottom up," Obama is making his own ironic
contribution to the de-mobilization of the progressive electorate with a
militantly centrist, neoliberal, and boring policy agenda that is noticeably
bereft of populist inspiration. It's more Goldman Sachs and Hamilton Project
than lunch pail and picket line, consistent with his (actually) elitist comments
to an affluent gathering of fundraisers in San Francisco prior to the April 22nd
Pennsylvania primary (won decisively by Hillary Clinton with large support
from white working-class voters).
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania," Obama condescendingly said,
"and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25
years and there's nothing's to replace them...And it's not surprising then they
get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't
like them." Later, in clarifying his comments, Obama said that poor white small
town Americans simply "don't vote on economic issues," turning instead to things
like guns, gay marriage, abortion and religion [6]. Sounding like he accepted
the standard false version (the self-serving upper-middle-class adaptation) of
"the Tom Frank Kansas thesis," he failed to note that working class whites
actually vote more on the basis of economic concerns than do affluent whites [7]
and that Democrats lose white proletarian voters by taking the workers' material
concerns "off the table" and running (unlike John Edwards' ill-fated
semi-progressive 2007-08 campaign) away from the populist language and
commitments that once made the Democratic Party a relevant defender of working
peoples' material interests. (He had nothing to say about the source of the
"bitterness" that leads him to cling so strongly to the guns of American Empire
and to his own self-serving notions of God.)
I recently sat through a tiresome Obama "Town Hall" on "Economic Security"
before hundreds of relatively unenthused supporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Beyond some brief chest-pounding about Exxon-Mobil's latest record profits and
"big oil's" campaign contributions to McCain, the content and tone of Obama's
policy presentation was positively Dukakisian. It was very University of
Chicago, loaded with arcane neoliberal policy wonkery that may have countered
McCain's picture of him as an empty-headed celebrity (ala Paris Hilton) but also
left much of the audience cold. It seemed almost calculated not to mobilize
people for an epic confrontation with the vicious arch-plutocratic and
messianic-militarist bastards behind the McCain campaign. A former John Edwards
staffer who cringed through the event with me asked "where's the red meat?" I
imagined millions of formerly engaged Obama supporters forsaking politics
altogether - their hopes for reform and "change" shattered and their desire to
avoid politics reinstated - when and if Obama's tepid, business- and
Empire-friendly campaign goes the way of Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry.
Snotty Know-it-All Middle-Class Obamaists Not Transcending Race
Which brings me to another factor that could help cost Obama the election - the
elitism, ignorance, and occasional race-baiting of many of his ostensibly
progressive white middle and upper-middle class supporters. So far this
campaign season, I have been lectured by three white Iowa City
liberal-"progressive" Obamaists on how Tom Frank's book shows the "idiocy" of
the white lower and working classes - those misguided proletarian dunderheads
who foolishly "vote against their own pocketbook interests" (against those
supposedly wonderful and progressive Democrats) because of childish
vulnerability to "cultural issues" like "guns, God, gays, and abortion."
"What's the matter with these clowns" one university-affiliated forty-something
white male Obamaist asked me the other day, citing Frank's book. "Don't they get
that the Democrats are the party of the workers and the poor?"
The Obama fan who asked me this insulting question became noticeably perturbed
when I noted (A) the white working-class actually "votes its pocketbook" more
than the white middle and upper class and (B) that Frank's book actually ends
with the argument I quoted above, observing that the corporate-captive and
excessively bourgeois Democratic Party opens the door for working class
defection and apathy precisely by abandoning its commitment to working-class
people's moral-economic issues and needs. The Democrats have long been the other
business wing - the "inauthentic opposition" in - the corporate-managed American
"one-and-a-half party system" (Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin's
term) and Obama is not fundamentally challenging that terrible reality.
Affluent white Obamaist liberals display a related and disturbing tendency to
argue that any criticism of their hero's aristocratic bearing and commitments
actually betray the critic's underlying "racism."
"You know what people really mean when they say Obama is bourgeois and elitist,
don't you?" a patronizing white male university-connected know-it-all Obamaist
asked me a few weeks ago. Before I could say anything, he answered his own
question: "they mean they think he's ‘an uppity nigger.'"
Oh, okay. I'm sure there are plenty of white folks, including a large number of
Republicans, who are using the charge of elitism and "haughtiness" as cover for
racism. But I (the author of two books and numerous project studies and
hundreds of articles against white supremacy and institutional racism) am not
one of those racists. When many whites and (by the way) blacks I know say that
Obama is bourgeois and elitist, they simply mean that (whatever his skin color)
he's, well, bourgeois and elitist, which (by the way) he is.
He's also very weak, from a progressive perspective, on race, interestingly
enough, part of why he has long been viewed as elitist by a significant portion
of the black community in Chicago and Illinois. Having run to the right of
Kucinich and even Hillary and Edwards on racial justice issues, "race-neutral"
Obama has exhibited a disturbing tendency (strongly approved by
arch-conservative white Republican commentators like William Bennett, Charles
Krauthammer, and George Will) to eagerly join the white post-Civil Rights
majority in blaming blacks for their disproportionate presence at the bottom of
American hierarchies.
It is interesting to hear university town white Obamaists claim that that their
candidate "transcends race" while hurling reckless charges of racism at those
who make the elementary observation that Obama is an elite, Harvard-educated,
and Wall Street-sponsored (and excessively white-friendly) candidate running an
openly (for those willing do some elementary research) corporate-imperial
campaign. As the black and Left political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. noted last
April, the Obama campaign repeatedly contradicted its own claim to "transcend
race" during the primary season. "Obama supporters have been disposed to cry
foul and charge racism at nearly any criticism of him," Reed observed, "in
steadily more extravagant rhetoric." They claimed, for example, that Hillary
Clinton was expressing racial bias when she dared to criticize Obama as
"inexperienced." The attempt to portray one's opponent as short on experience is
"standard fare in political campaigns" (Reed) and goes back to the beginning of
electoral politics.
Along the way, the Obama campaign has called for voters to support its candidate
because of the opportunity to "make history" simply by putting someone who
happens to be half-black in the White House. That is hardly going "beyond race"
[8].
Obama recently made the false charge that the McCain campaign has been telling
voters to oppose the Democratic presidential candidate because he "doesn't look
like those other presidents on the dollar bills." The McCain camp's
opportunistic response was (naturally) over the top but, sadly, McCain was right
to note that Obama had played the race card in an unfortunate way.
Obamaists should be careful with the racism charge if they want to avoid
over-alienating potential supporters, who don't generally deserve to hear snotty
know-it-all pseudo-progressives screeching "Your Whiteness is Showing" (the
title of an ill-advised letter from the progressive anti-racist Obama supporter
Tim Wise to certain already pissed-off white female Hillary Clinton fans last
June) because they happen to find the openly imperialist capitalism and Afghan
Invasion enthusiast and Israeli apartheid supporter Obama hard to swallow. The
Obama campaign is making a mistake by not doing more to actively discourage some
of its more irritating staff and supporters - an especially good example is
current "Progressive for Obama" Web site chief Carl Davidson (who has absurdly
leveled the accusation at me on at least two occasions) - from recklessly
charging racism.
Maybe It Isn't About Running for President
Speaking of race, it is common to hear white middle-class Obama supporters
excuse and explain their candidate's conservative centrism as a result of the
fact that's he's black and therefore "has to be especially careful not to
offend" white voters by seeming too strident or "angry." "John Edwards can get
away with talking class struggle," one academic Obamaist told me last fall,
"because he's white. Barack can't because he's black and that's scary enough in
and of itself for white voters."
There's a kernel of truth in this argument. Toxic white racial fears and
stereotypes of the "angry black man" (e.g. Jesse Jackson Sr. and big bad
Reverend Wright) are alive and well in U.S. political culture. Sadly enough,
white dread of (legitimate) black anger may well help make it especially hard
for a black male politician to fight for the poor and working-class Many against
the rich and powerful Few. I have long suspected that Obama has felt the need to
go an extra mile or three to prove his fealty (in ways that are often quite
unpleasant to behold) to dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and
doctrines partly because he senses that his racial identity raises red flags for
the nation's predominantly white political class and electoral gatekeepers and
the white majority electorate.
Still, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, the Clintons, and Gore did not need to be black
in order to walk the same basic tiresome centrist line trod by "the new black
Clinton" (or perhaps "the new black Carter" - see below) Barack Obama. Obama
appears to be a natural and longtime neoliberal centrist, consistent with his
elite private prep school and Harvard background, his "deeply conservative"
temperament, his well-known personal narcissism, and his impressive corporate
sponsorship.
It should be understood that the main white folks who can't deal with "populist"
rhetoric are the rich and powerful Few. Angry "class language" (Frank) works
pretty well with much of the white working class majority - a main reason that
any potentially viable candidate who speaks it to any significant degree (e.g.
John Edwards in 2007) must be marginalized and discredited by corporate media.
"Re-establishing Confidence in the Legitimacy of the Current Political Order"
And insofar as it is true that Obama "can't be all that progressive because he's
black" (something that may NOT be true) wouldn't that seem to indicate that
it's, well... a mistake for progressives to advance a black candidate for president?
This might seem like a terrible thing to say (I can just see my nemesis Carl
Davidson ready to pounce!), but there's a deeper point here. Maybe the struggle
against racism and other political and societal evils isn't about running people
(of any color) for the presidency - the top position in the executive committee
of the American ruling class - or any other high elective office. Maybe it isn't
about U.S. electoral politics.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turned down efforts to get him to run for the White
House and died for his determination to authentically resist American
capitalist, racist, and imperial power structures - what he called "the triple
evils that are interrelated." By the end of his life, King had concluded -
correctly in my views - that only revolutionary change could save the U.S. from
an ever-deepening descent into repressive authoritarianism. As King noted in the
spring of 1967, liberals have for too long "labored with the idea of reforming
the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change
there." What is really required, King knew, was "a reconstruction of the entire
society...a radical redistribution of political and economic power."
That is exactly what Obama is NOT about. "Perhaps the greatest misconception
about Barack Obama," Ryan Lizza recently observed, "is that he is some sort of
anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career
has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions
rather than tear them down or replace them." Later in the same essay Lizza notes
that Obama is "an incrementalist."
As Greg Guma recently noted in a thoughtful reflection on Obama as "The New
Jimmy Carter": "the truth is that, in Obama, a worried establishment has found
the vessel through which they hope to restore international and domestic
stability." As Guma darkly but rightly observes, "Obama, like Carter, can be
useful [to the U.S. power elite] in calming things down and re-establishing
confidence in the legitimacy of the current political order. In short, he can
reinforce the argument that ‘the system' still works"[9].
Beyond Electoralism
Revolution (desperately required) aside, even the attainment of basic reforms is
about building and expanding grassroots social movements beneath and beyond the
false promises of political campaigns and mass media, who market domesticated
corporate candidates like they sell cars and candy. It's about the real
politics of popular organization and resistance beneath and beyond the
quadrennial narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted candidate-centered election
extravaganzas, whoever wins and whoever loses. As Dr. Reed noted last November,
"Elected officials are only as good or as bad as the forces they feel they must
respond to. It's a mistake to expect any more of them than to be vectors of the
political pressures they feel working on them" [10].
Given the harsh realities that make even avowedly "progressive" politicians,
policymakers, and candidates veer center and right, Reed argued, correctly in my
estimation, progressives should focus less on election dramas and more on
building movements for democratic change from the bottom up and across and
between elections:
"We need to think about politics in a different way, one that doesn't assume
that the task is to lobby the Democrats or give them good ideas, and correct
their misconceptions."
"It's a mistake to focus so much on the election cycle; we didn't vote ourselves
into this mess, and we're not going to vote ourselves out of it. Electoral
politics is an arena for consolidating majorities that have been created on the
plane of social movement organizing. It's not an alternative or a shortcut to
building those movements, and building them takes time and concerted effort. Not
only can that process not be compressed to fit the election cycle; it also
doesn't happen through mass actions. It happens through cultivating one-on-one
relationships with people who have standing and influence in their
neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, families, and organizations. It happens
through struggling with people over time for things they're concerned about and
linking those concerns to a broader political vision and program. This is how
the populist movement grew in the late nineteenth century, the CIO in the 1930s
and 1940s, and the civil rights movement after World War II. It is how we've won
all our victories. And it is also how the right came to power" [11].
Reed's point on the need to concentrate first and foremost on the building of
movement capacities - NOT corporate-crafted elections that answer mainly to
elite interests - is echoed in Noam Chomsky's instructive reflections on the
2004 presidential contest. By Chomsky's analysis on the eve of the last election:
"The U.S. presidential race, impassioned almost to the point of hysteria, hardly
represents healthy democratic impulses."
"Americans are encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in
the political arena. Essentially the election is yet another method of
marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get
people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think,
‘That's politics.' But it isn't. It's only a small part of politics."
"The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in progressive direction -
often in close conformity to majority opinion - is to grow and become strong
enough so that that they can't be ignored by centers of power. Forces for
change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its
foundations include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace
movement, the women's movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work
at all levels, everyday, not just once every four years..."
"So in the election, sensible choices have to be made. But they are secondary
to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive
democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral
extravaganzas, whatever their outcome" [12].
How individual progressives define their version of the "sensible choice" is of
little interest to me at this point. People write me to ask "should I vote for
McKinney?" "What about Nader?" "Should I vote tactically for Obama to block Mad
Bomber McCain since I live in a contested state?" "I think I'm just going to sit
the election out - what do you think?"
I don't know what people should do on Election Day. I'm not sure I care (it
changes from day to day, to be honest). What I'd really like to know is when
true progressive folks are interested in "struggling with people over time for
things they're concerned about and linking those concerns to a broader political
vision and program."
And I am frankly haunted by the likelihood that Greg Guma is right: while McCain
is obviously terrible and dangerous, Obama is attractive to a large section of
the U.S. power elite because he promises to "calm things down and re-establish
confidence in the legitimacy of the current political order" by "reinforce[ing]
the argument that ‘the system' still works." Wouldn't that seem to suggest that
the loathsome and dangerous McCain is the lesser evil in the long run?
Our current corporate-totalitarian system and political culture doesn't work.
It is a grave threat to human survival and peace and justice at home and abroad.
Dr. King was right forty years ago about the pressing need for "radical
reconstruction" and the "radical distribution of political and economic power."
The path of that reconstruction is long and leads well past my own time on this
planet, but it is at least clear to me that millions of people in the world's
most powerful nation are being dangerously hypnotized and repressively
de-sublimated yet again by the false hopes and colored lights of the
narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted election extravaganza.
If Obama loses, and he may, it will be important for progressively inclined
citizens and activists to understand that it was corporate-imperial centrism,
not the left and not the People, that got defeated. If he wins, those citizens
and activists need to understand the severe limits of what triumphed and be
prepared to fight and organize on a daily basis beneath and beyond presidential
elections.
Paul Street (paulstreet99 at yahoo.com) is a veteran radical historian and
independent author, activist, researcher, and journalist in Iowa City, IA. He
is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11
(Paradigm 2005); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil
Rights Era (Routledge 2005): and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis
(Rowman&Littlefied 2007). Street's new book Barack Obama and the Future of
American Politics can be ordered at
http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)
NOTES
My annotation for this piece could easily run to 100 notes - something that
would be impractical for reader and writer alike. Readers who want sources for
assertions without notes can feel free to write me at paulstreet99 at yahoo.com.
1. Obama is quoted in Glen Ford's brilliant article, "Obama Stumbles on His Own
Contradictions," CounterPunch (April 30, 3008), read at
http://www.counterpunch.org/ford04302008.html
2. Among many possible sources, see especially John Judis, "The Big Race," The
New Republic (May 28, 2008).
3. The Hamilton Group is a leading "conservative" (business-friendly) economic
think tank. Furman, 37, is linked closely to Robert Rubin, the top Wall Street
financial mogul and former Clinton economics advisor and Treasury secretary.
Rubin's regressive views on behalf of "free trade" (including the North American
Free Trade Agreement, investor's rights, wages, welfare and "deficit reduction"
gave the Clinton administration "credibility" in the halls of corporate and
financial power.
4. See Leutisha Stills, "Obama Charges Rightward," Black Agenda Report (June 25,
2008), read at
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=674&Itemid=1
5. For an (I hope) useful summary of that progressive majority opinion and some
key sources, see Paul Street, "Americans' Progressive Opinion vs. ‘the Shadow
Cast on Society by Business," ZNet Sustainer Commentary (May 15, 2008), read at
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3491
6. Paul Krugman, "Clinging to a Stereotype," New York Times, 18 April, 2008, p. A23.
7. See Larry Bartels, "Inequalities," New York Times Magazine (April 27, 2008),
p. 22. As Bartels points out, Frank exaggerated white working-class voters'
susceptibility to cultural diversion: "In recent presidential elections," he
notes, "affluent voters, who tend to be liberal on cultural matters, are about
twice as likely as middle-class and poor voters to make their decisions on the
basis of their cultural concerns." In other words, working class white voters
don't especially privilege "cultural issues" (God, guns, gays, gender, and
abortion) over pocketbook concerns and actually do that less than wealthier voters.
8. Adolph Reed Jr., "Obama No," The Progressive (May 2008). For what its worth,
I am told by a reliable source that Michelle Obama dismissed concerns with
experience as racism during a coffee with female Democratic voters in eastern
Iowa last fall.
9. Ryan Lizza, "Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama," The New Yorker, (July 21,
2008); Greg Guma, "Barack Obama: The New Jimmy Carter," ZNet (July 28, 2008),
read at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18288 See also Larrisa
MacFarquhar's useful reflctions on Obama's "deeply conservative" world view and
commitments: see Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama
Coming From?," The New Yorker (May 7, 2007). Near the end of his article, Lizza
proclaims that "He [Obama] is ideologically a man of the left" - a ridiculous
indication of how shockingly narrow the political and ideological spectrum is in
the U.S. today.
10. Adolph J. Reed Jr., "Sitting This One Out," The Progressive (November 2007)
11. Reed, "Sitting This One Out."
12. Noam Chomsky, "The Disconnect in American Democracy" (October 27, 2004) in
Chomsky, Interventions (San Francisco: City Lights, 2007) pp. 99-100. See also
Howard Zinn's excellent reflections in "Election Madness," The Progressive
(March 2008).
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18472
###
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