Sitting This One Out

By Adolph L. Reed Jr.
November 2007 Issue of The Progressive

OK, HERE WE ARE AGAIN, a year out from a Presidential election, and we're all
supposed to be figuring out which of the Democrats has the best chance to
win--determined mainly by the standard of raising the most money--and
subordinating all our substantive political concerns to the objective of
getting him or her elected. This time, I'm not going to acquiesce in the
fiction that the Presidential charade has any credibility whatsoever. I'm not
paying any attention to the horse race coverage--that mass-mediated positioning
in the battle for superficial product differentiation.

The Democratic candidates who are anointed "serious" are like a car with a
faulty front-end alignment: Their default setting pulls to the right. They are
unshakably locked into a strategy that impels them to give priority to
placating those who aren't inclined to vote for them and then palliate those
who are with bromides and doublespeak. When we complain, they smugly say,
"Well, you have no choice but to vote for me because the other guy's
worse." The party has essentially been nominating the same ticket with the
same approach since Dukakis.

The last straw for me was the spectacle of all the "serious candidates"
falling over one another to link Castro and Chávez with Ahmadinejad, bin
Laden, and Kim, thus endorsing the Bush Administration's view that any
government that does anything that ours doesn't like, including giving its
own people's needs higher priority than those of our corporations'qualifies
it as a supporter of terrorism, a rogue state, part of the Axis of Evil, or
whatever comic book slogan is operative this week. Then came the supposedly
anti-war Obama buttressing his commitment to increase overall American troop
strength with a pledge to invade Pakistan. Then came his and HRC's tiff over
the etiquette of publicly declaring a willingness to use nuclear weapons on a
case-by-case basis, with both parties treating the issue as purely a matter of
foreign policy gamesmanship. And this was during Hiroshima and Nagasaki week,
no less!

Each serious candidate has boosters who will tell us that we should be more
sophisticated than to take what their candidates say at face value, that their
empty, inadequate, or objectionable proposals are the best, most realistic
versions of whatever we think we want--from ending the war, to universal
national health care and access to quality education, to public investment in
rebuilding the Gulf Coast and the rest of the country's physical and social
infrastructure, to worker protection and fighting environmental degradation.

A friend of mine characterizes this as the "we'll come back for you"
politics, the claim that they can't champion anything you want because they
have to conciliate your enemies right now to get elected, but that, once they
win, they'll be able to attend to the progressive agenda they have to reject
now in order to win. This worked out so well with the Clinton Presidency,
didn't it? Remember his argument that he had to sign the hideous 1996 welfare
reform bill to be able to come back and 'fix' it later? Or NAFTA? Or two
repressive and racist crime bills that flooded the prisons? Or the privatizing
of Sallie Mae, which set the stage for the student debt crisis? Or ending the
federal government's commitment to direct provision of housing for the poor?
This time, the nominal frontrunners have Rube Goldberg health care proposals
that protect the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the chief sources of
the health care crisis. They discuss the murderous adventurism in Iraq and
Afghanistan mainly in bloodless, managerial terms, as a "broken policy" or
some other such technician's euphemism. Not only do their references to the
tragic loss of American lives seem pro forma and constructed by focus-group
engineers; they also reinscribe the presumption that only American lives count.

This is part of what undergirds the broader framework of a foreign policy hinged
on cavalier use of military assault and invasion in the first place-what used
to be clearly recognized as imperialism. Edwards, who seems somewhat better
than the others on Iraq, apparently needs to make up for it--lest what seem
like expressions of decency be grounds for accusations of weakness--by being
even more bellicose than they regarding Iran. However, all of them have
indicated a lusty willingness to attack Iran, Syria, or any other country that
can be demonized either for not dancing to our government's tune or even just
because it's convenient to do so as a prop for some other purpose.
At the end of the primary campaign, one of the 'serious candidates' is going
to get the nomination and form a ticket with another version of his or her
triangulating self. (I still wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be
Clinton-Obama, in an all-Oprah ticket, an exercise in massive short-term
self-delusion and empty identity politics that will guarantee the White House
to whichever combo the GOP puts up.) Maybe by Election Day I'll be moved or
guilted or frightened into voting for that ticket, whatever it is. But I'm
just as likely to sit this one out.

And I'm prepared to blow off every liberal who starts whining and hectoring,
in that self-important and breathless way they do, about our obligation to
protect "choice" or to make sure we can get another Stephen Breyer or
Sandra Day O'Connor onto the Supreme Court.

I know that some outraged readers are going to write in, fulminating about how
nihilistically ultraleftist I am to criticize the Democrats in this way and how
irresponsible The Progressive is to publish the criticism, especially now, when
the stakes are so great and it's so crucially important for the future of the
country, the world, the galaxy, the cosmos, that some Democrat--anyone, no
matter how worthless--wins the Presidency. (That they make the same
cataclysmic claim about every election never seems to dull their self-righteous
fervor.) They'll explain that we have to understand that we can't get
everything we want all at once, that the Democrats can't go any further than
they go, and that a half-hearted promise of part of a stale loaf of bread in
some unspecified future is better than no bread at all--especially for those
who don't really need the bread at the moment.

Well, in part, they're right. The Democrats are what they are. We should all
know that by now, after two decades of their failing to stand up to the
rightwing juggernaut, of presenting themselves as more responsible and steady
managers of the country's slide to the right. By the time the national
elections come around, there really are no options other than to vote for their
predictably worthless nominee, make an existential statement (or engage in
wish-fulfillment, if you think it's more than that) by voting for a third
party candidate, or just not bother. This bleak reality reflects the left's
failure to build any durable extra-electoral force between elections that can
bring pressure to bear on the Democratic contenders and debate.

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. This is a lesson that
progressives have forgotten or failed to learn.

As an illustration, consider the recent contretemps between John Conyers and the
pro-impeachment, anti-war activists who attacked him as a sellout for failing to
push impeachment over Nancy Pelosi's and the House Democratic leadership's
opposition. His critics accused him of betraying the spirit of Martin Luther
King. But that charge only exposes their unrealistic expectations. Conyers
isn't a movement leader. He's a Democratic official who wants to get
reelected. He's enmeshed in the same web of personal ties, partisan loyalties
and obligations, and diverse interest-group commitments as other pols. It was
the impeachment activists' naive error, and I suspect one resting on a partly
racial, wrongheaded shorthand, to have expected him to lead an insurgency. If
the pro-impeachment forces had been able to organize a popular movement with
militant local to national expressions on a wide scale, Conyers would have had
the leverage necessary to press the movement's case to Pelosi and Democratic
leadership, or at least he and the others would have felt real pressure to act
more boldly on this issue. Instead, an understandable sense of urgency led them
to take a politically self-indulgent, doomed shortcut. The result is much wasted
effort, unnecessary enmity, and another demoralizing defeat.

Unfortunately, like the Democrats, our side fails to learn from experience.
Despite a mountain range of evidence to the contrary, we'the labor, anti-war,
women's, environmental, and racial justice movements' all continue to craft
political strategy based on the assumption that the problem is that the
Democrats simply don't understand what we want and how important those things
are to us. They know; they just have different priorities.

That's why the endless cycle of unofficial hearings and tribunals and rallies
and demonstrations and Internet petitions never has any effect on anything.
They're all directed to bearing witness before an officialdom that doesn't
care and feels no compulsion to take our demands into account. To that extent,
this form of activism has become little more than a combination of theater--a
pageantry of protest'and therapy for the activists.

Then at the apex of every election cycle, after having marched around in the
same pointless circle, chanting the same slogans in the interim, we look
feverishly to one of the Democrats or some Quixote to do our organizing work
for us, magically, all at once.

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.

The anti-war movement isn't coherent or popularly grounded enough to exert the
pressure necessary to improve the electoral options; only the labor movement has
the capacity to do so, but it doesn't have the will. None of the other
progressive tendencies has the capacity to do anything more than lobby or
exhort. Effective lobbying requires being able to deliver or withhold crucial
resources, and none but labor has that capacity. Exhortation works only with
people who share your larger goals and objectives; other than that it's
useless except as catharsis.

We also need to think more carefully about what our demonstrations and protest
marches can and can't do. Here we could take a lesson from Martin Luther
King. His 1962 Albany, Georgia, campaign failed because the local authorities
figured out that the success of King's mass marches depended on meeting
brutal resistance from local officials. When they didn't forcibly stop the
marches, the movement fizzled.

Our approach to mass mobilization is like the Albany campaign. Our actions
don't raise public consciousness because they're treated dismissively, if
at all, in the mainstream media. They don't even connect with the residents
of the cities where we hold them because we agree to strict march routes and
rally sites that make certain we don't engage with anyone other than
ourselves. And we agree not to disrupt routine daily life more than a
homecoming parade would in exchange for having a designated place to gather and
talk to ourselves. Even the civil disobedience is carefully choreographed and
designed to be minimally disruptive.

Whether or not we admit it, these are features of a politics that is focused
mainly inward, on shoring up the spirits of the participants in the actions
themselves. They don't send a message that those in power can't simply
ignore, and they don't inform, excite, or win over anyone who's not already
on board with the movement's agenda. It's telling in this sense that our
movement culture has evolved elaborately clever techniques for keeping
participants entertained through the stale, all-too-predictable cavalcade of
speeches and chants and puppets on stilts.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that people don't need to engage in rallies and
protests. It is self-defeating, however, to collapse the difference between the
activities that make us feel good and the work that is necessary to build the
movement. There are no shortcuts or magic bullets. And, if we don't confront
that fact and act accordingly, we'll be back in this same position, but most
likely with options a little worse than these, in 2012, and again and again.

Adolph L. Reed Jr. is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania.