|
Books by
Adolph Reed, Jr.
Race, Politics and Culture
(1986) /
Without Justice for All ( 2001) / The
Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (1986) /
W.E.B. DuBois and American Political /
Thought: Fabianism
and the Color Line (1997) /
Class Notes
(2001)
* * * *
*
Where Obamaism Seems to be Going
By Adolph
Reed, Jr.
A friend
called me a few days ago from Massachusetts,
astounded at a WBUR radio program featuring Glen
Greenwald from Salon.com and Katrina vanden
Heuvel of The Nation, in which vanden Heuvel not
only unflaggingly defended Obama's open and bald
embrace of right-wing positions during the last
few weeks against Greenwald's criticism, but
also did it from the right herself, calling him
a "progressive pragmatist." She affirmed Tom
Hayden's insistence on the
Progressives for Obama blog that the
candidate is a progressive, but a new kind of
progressive, or some such twaddle. In response
to Greenwald's sharp rebuke of Obama's FISA
sellout, she acknowledged that he had "missed an
opportunity to lead." Defending his June 30
patriotism speech that included a gratuitous
rehearsal of the right-wing line about
anti-Vietnam War protesters from the
"counterculture" who "blamed America for all
that was wrong in the world" and the canard
about antiwar activists "failing to honor"
returning Vietnam veterans, which Obama asserted
"remains a national shame to this day" despite
the fact that is an utter lie, vanden Heuvel
pointed again to Hayden's endorsement as a sign
that Obama's cheap move must be okay because,
after all, Hayden was a founder of SDS.
And perhaps
most tellingly, despite their disagreements,
Greenwald and vanden Heuvel both supported
Obama's practice of going out of his way to
attack black poor people, most recently in his
scurrilous Father's Day speech and again before
the NAACP. (And, by the way, he grew up without
a father and is running for president, no?) To
Greenwald, this is the "Obama we want to see
more of," the one who takes positions that are
"unorthodox" and "not politically safe." Since
when has it been unorthodox or unsafe
politically to malign black poor people in
public? Who the fuck has been doing anything
else for at least twenty years? Public sacrifice
of black poor people has been pro forma
Democratic presidential strategy since Clinton
ran on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it"
and made a burnt offering of Rickey Ray Rector,
and victim-blaming based on just-so stories
about supposed "behavioral pathology" has been
the only frame for public discussion of poverty
for at least as long.
To vanden
Heuvel, Obama's contretemps with Jesse Jackson,
who, ironically, has his own history of making
such attacks, around this issue reflects a
"generational division" among black people, with
Obama representing a younger generation that
values "personal responsibility." She also, for
good measure, asserted that Obama has been
"nailed unfairly" for his cozying up to the
evangelicals and promising to give them more
federal social service money. In explaining that
he comes out of a "community organizing"
tradition based in churches in Chicago, she
didn't quite say that the coloreds love their
churches. But she didn't really have to say it
out loud, did she?
This is
what passes for a left now in this country. It
is a left that can insist, apparently, that
Obama's FISA vote, going out of his way (after
all, he could simply have followed the model of
Eisenhower on the Brown decision and said that
the Court has ruled; therefore it's the law, and
his job as president would be to enforce the
law) to align himself
—twice, or three
times—with the Scalia/Thomas/Roberts/Alito wing
of the Supreme Court, his declaring that social
problems, unlike foreign policy adventurism, are
"too big for government" and pledging to turn
over more of HHS and HUD's budgets to the Holy
Rollers are both tactically necessary and
consistent with his convictions.
So, if
those are his convictions, or for that matter
what he feels he must do opportunistically to
get elected, why the fuck should we vote for
him?
I'd been
thinking about doing a "See, I told you so"
column about Obama; then, especially given the
torrent of vituperation and self-righteous
contumely I got after arguing that he's not what
far too many nominal leftists were trying to
make him out to be, I was tempted instead to do
a "To hell with you, you deserve what you get"
column. But the smug yuppies to whom I'd address
that message—the fan club we encounter in
foundation offices, faculty meetings, soccer
games and dinner parties and on MSNBC and in the
Nation—are neither the only people who've
listened to Obama's siren song nor the ones
who'll pay the price for their self-indulgent
idiocy. (And Liza Featherstone deserves
acknowledgement for having predicted early that
the modal lament of the disillusioned would
compare him unfavorably to Feingold.)
Among other
things, as I saw ever more clearly while
watching Rachel Maddow talk with another of that
Dem ilk about Obama and his family—how adorable
and "well-raised" or some such his kids are,
etc., etc.—a few nights ago on Keith Olberman's
show, an Obama presidency (maybe even just his
candidacy) will likely sever the last threads of
any connection between notions of racial
disparity and structurally reproduced inequality
rooted in political economy, and, since even
"left" discourse in this country seems capable
of conceptualizing the latter as a politically
significant matter only in terms of the former
(or its gender or similar categorical
equivalent), that could just about complete
purging entirely out of legitimate political
discourse the notion that economic inequality is
rooted fundamentally in capitalism's political
and economic dynamics.
Underclass
ideology—where left and right come together to
embed a common sense around victim-blaming and
punitive moralism, racialized of course but at a
respectable remove from the familiar
phenotypically based racial taxonomy— will most
likely be the vehicle for effecting the purge.
Obama's success will embody how far we have come
in realizing racial democracy, and the
inequality that remains is most immediately a
function of cultural—i.e., attitudinal, and
behavioral—and moral deficits that undercut
acquisition of "human (and/or "social," these
interchangeable mystifications shift according
to rhetorical need) capital," a message his
incessant castigation of black behavior
legitimizes.
In this
context, the "activism" appropriate for
attacking inequality: 1) rationalizes
privatization and demonization of the public
sector through accepting the premise that
government is inefficient and stifles
"creativity;" 2) values individual voluntarism
and "entrepreneurship" over collective action
(e.g., four of the five winners of the Nation's
"Brave Young Activist" award started their own
designer NGOs and/or websites; the fifth carries
a bullhorn around and organizes solidarity
demos); 3) provides enrichment experiences,
useful extracurrics, and/or career paths for
precocious Swarthmore and Brown students and
grads (the Wendy Kopp/Samantha Power model
trajectory), and 4) reduces the scope of direct
action politics to the "all tactics, no
strategy," fundamentally Alinskyite, ACORN-style
politics that Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone
have described as "activistism"
and whose potential for reactionary opportunism
Andy Stern of SEIU has amply demonstrated.
Obama goes
a step further in deviating from Alinskyism to
the right, by rejecting its "confrontationalism,"
which severs its rhetoric of "empowerment" from
political action and contestation entirely and
merges the notion into the pop-psychological,
big box Protestant, Oprah Winfrey, Reaganite
discourse of self-improvement/personal
responsibility.
All of the
above salves the consciences of our
professional-managerial class peers and
coworkers who want to think of themselves as
more tolerant and enlightened than their
Republican relatives and neighbors, even as they
insulate themselves and their families as much
as possible from undesired contact with the
dangerous classes and define the latter in
quotidian practice through precisely the same
racialized and victim-blaming stereotypes as the
conservatives to whom they imagine themselves
superior. This hypocrisy, of course, is
understood within the stratum as unavoidable
accommodation to social realities, and likely to
be acknowledged as an unfortunate and lamentable
necessity. Yet those lamenting at the same time
reject out of hand as impractical any politics
that would challenge the conditions that
reproduce the inequalities underlying those
putative realities.
Obama, in
the many ways that Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley
and others have catalogued here, is an ideal
avatar for this stratum. He has condensed, in
what political dilettantes of all stripes rush
to call a "movement," the reactionary
quintessence that Walter Benn Michaels in The
Trouble With Diversity identifies in a politics
of identity or multiculturalism that substitutes
difference for inequality as the crucial metric
of political criticism. It's apt in this
connection that even elites in the Mississippi
Delta, down to the level of the Cotton Museum in
Lake Providence, LA, and the blues museums that
dot every hamlet on US 61 in Mississippi between
Greenville and Memphis, have come to appreciate
the political and commercial benefits of
multicultural celebration and even civil rights
heritage tourism, without destabilizing the
underlying relations of racialized
subordination.
Indeed,
Obama represents a class politics, one that
promises to cement an alliance anchored in the
professional-managerial class (including,
perhaps especially, the interchangeable elements
of which now increasingly set the policy agendas
for what remains of the women's,
environmentalist, public interest, civil rights
and even labor movements) and the "progressive"
wing of the investor class. (See, for example,
Tom Geoghagen, "All
the Young Bankers," The American Prospect,
June 23, 2008.) From this perspective, it is
ironic in the short term—i.e., considering that
he pushed HRC out of the way— that Obama would
be the one to complete Clintonism's redefinition
of liberalism as conservatism.
So there's
no way I'm going to ratify this bullshit with my
participation, and I'm ready to tell all those
liberals who will hector me about the importance
of voting that it's the weakest, most passive
and least consequential form of political
participation, and I'm no longer going to
pretend it's any more than that, or that the
differences between the Dem and GOP candidates
are greater than they are, just to help them
feel good about not doing anything more
demanding and perhaps more consequential.
To be
clear, I'm not arguing that it's wrong to vote
for Obama, though I do say it's wrong-headed to
vote for him with any lofty expectations. I
would also suggest that it's not an open and
shut case that—all things considered—he's that
much better than McCain.
In some
ways Obama would be better for us in the short
run, just as Clinton was better than the elder
Bush. In some ways his presidency could be much
worse in the longer term, again like Clinton.
For one thing, the recent outpouring of
enthusiastic support from all quarters—including
on black academic and professional list serves
and blogs and on op-ed pages—for his attacks on
black poor people underscores the likelihood
that Obama will be even more successful than
Clinton at selling punitive, regressive and
frankly racist social policies as humane
anti-poverty initiatives. In a way, I suppose,
there could be something useful about having a
large strain of the black petite bourgeoisie
come out as a militant racial class for itself.
Maybe that could be a prelude to a good fight,
but unfortunately there's no counterweight. And
the black professional-managerial strata,
despite their ever more blatant expressions of
contempt for black poor people, continue to
insist on speaking for the race as a whole.
Lesser
evilists assert as indisputable fact that Gore,
or even Kerry, wouldn't have invaded Iraq.
Perhaps Gore wouldn't have, but I can't say
that's a sure thing. (And who was his running
mate, by the way?) Moreover, we don't know what
other military adventurism that he—like
Clinton—would have undertaken to make clear that
he wouldn't be seen as a wimpy Democrat. As to
Kerry, even though like all the other Dem
presidential aspirants who voted for it, except
Edwards, he claimed later that he thought he was
voting for something else, he did vote to invade
Iraq, didn't he? And, moreover, during his
campaign didn't he say that, even if he'd known
then what he knew in 2004, he'd still have voted
for it?
No, I'm not
at all convinced that the right wouldn't have
been able to hound either Gore into invading
Iraq or Kerry into continuing the war
indefinitely. Sure, neither Dem would have done
it as stupidly and venally as Bush, but that's
no comfort to the Iraqis, is it? Nor does it
suggest a break from the military
interventionism—old school imperialism—that's
defined our foreign policy increasingly since
Reagan. Obama is on record as being prepared to
expand the war into Pakistan and maybe Iran, now
apparently even generically anywhere in
"Mesopotamia" (NYT, 7/14/08), after he does the
Randolph Scott move and "talks" to his targets a
couple of times. He's also made pretty clear
that AIPAC has his ear, which does it for the
Middle East, and I wouldn't be shocked if his
administration were to continue, or even step
up, underwriting covert operations against
Venezuela, Cuba (he's already several times
linked each of those two governments with North
Korea and Iran) and maybe Ecuador or Bolivia.
This is
where I don't give two shits for the liberals'
criticism of Bush's foreign policy: they don't
mind imperialism; they just want a more
efficiently and rationally managed one. As Paul
Street argues in BAR, as well as in his
forthcoming book Barack Obama and the Future of
American Politics, an Obama presidency would
further legitimize the imperialist orientation
of US foreign policy by inscribing it as
liberalism or the "new kind" of progressivism.
You know,
the black is white, night is day kind. And, as
he has shown most recently in his June 30 speech
he will similarly sanitize the galloping
militarization of the society that proceeds
under the guise of "supporting the troops." (How
many of you have noticed being called on by
flight attendants to give a round of applause to
the military personnel on board a flight—it may
be only a matter of time before pretending to be
absorbed in reading will no longer work, and
those who don't cheer them on will be
handcuffed—or the scores of other little, and
not so little, everyday gestures that give
soldiers priority over the rest of us, in the
mode of returners from the Eastern Front?
Actually, befitting neoliberalism, these
gestures are for the image of soldiers, what
they get instead of medical care and income
support for the maimed.)
All in all,
I'd rather have an inefficient imperialism, one
that imposes some cost on the US for its
interventions. Clinton, like Bush père and
Reagan, was able to pull it off with "surgical"
(i.e., broadly devastating and terroristic to
the objects, relatively painless for the
subjects) actions and had the good sense both to
select targets that couldn't really fight back
and to avoid the hubris of occupation. To that
extent, no one complained; this was the new Pax
Americana that in principle could have gone on
indefinitely, with successive US governments
creating and lighting up demon regimes abroad as
needed.
This brings
to mind Lila Lipscomb, the woman in Michael
Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," whose son was killed
in Iraq. She had proudly and quite happily sent
two or three of her kids into the military
before this one because it seemed like a
reasonable bet for their being able to make the
bases for better lives for themselves from the
perspective of borderline poverty and general
economic distress in Flint. Sure, the military
no doubt lied in minimizing the likelihood of
seeing combat and about how, if they had to do
it, all their cool gear would keep them out of
harm's way as they fired up bad guys all over
the world who were threatening our or somebody
else's "freedom."
And all the
politicians, Dems and Republicans, supported
every deployment on those terms. And, like the
vast majority of Americans, she probably would
never have been moved to question the propriety
of traipsing all over the world fucking with
people— killing them and destroying their
lives—who hadn't done anything to us. I don't
make light of deaths of American soldiers; nor
do I want to make one of those "maybe this will
make them understand" points (though we
certainly must recognize why people on the
receiving end of this country's bipartisan
foreign policy would feel that way). I do want
to stress that: a) so long as we assign
significance only to the death, injury, and
sovereignty of Americans and not those of the
people on whose countries we make war, we will
be all the more likely to repeat wars like this
one over and over and over and b) the bipartisan
"support the troops" rhetoric that has become a
scaffold for discussing the war is a ruse for
not addressing its foundation in a bellicose,
imperialist foreign policy that makes the United
States a scourge on the Earth.
Obama, like
other Dems, doesn't want such a discussion any
more then the Republicans do because they're all
committed to maintaining that foundation.
"Antiwar" arguments that begin with clauses like
"since the troops are there" or "if they're
going to be there" are no antiwar arguments at
all. To the extent that Obama and his like
christen them as such, they legitimize as
"responsible" an "antiwar" discourse that
reduces to no more than a technocratic focus on
fighting interventionist wars in ways that
minimize American casualties. If that's a
"progressive" foreign policy, then, in the words
of Amos from "Amos ‘n' Andy," include me out.
And, by the way, since Obama is so fond of
invoking Vietnam these days, I should remind the
faithful that every major party presidential
candidate between 1956 and 1972—except one,
Barry Goldwater, who ran partly on his
willingness to blow up the world and was
trounced for it—ran on a pledge to end the
Vietnam War. Every one of them lied, except
maybe Nixon the third time he made the pledge,
but that time he had a lot of help from the
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.
And then
there's the issue of the courts, the big joker
the liberals wave when all other arguments seem
shaky. But hasn't Obama already aligned himself
with the right wing of the current Court, three
times in the current session, and on three
pretty show-stopping issues? I know, the
response would be that he's just posturing and
on balance he'd appoint more "centrist"—as even
his running dogs put it—judges. (This is the "I
know he's always out with her in public and
looks like he's enjoying himself, but he told me
he really loves me and is just sticking around
for the kids" argument.) Frankly, the courts
bugbear is beginning to look played out. Past a
certain point of giving away the store
programmatically and ideologically, it doesn't
much matter who's on the Court. And the more
ideological ground that's given away, the
farther right will be the boundary of acceptable
"centrism."
Could Obama
now nominate someone with a record of favoring
gun control or late-term abortions for mental
health reasons or opposing the death penalty?
And this isn't even to raise all the other,
property and contract related areas where the
Courts' actions are significant with respect to
people's lives. There's no reason to expect
anything from him in this area, especially when
you factor in all the hedge fund and investor
class money he gets and his close University of
Chicago Law School and Economics Department
connections.
I'm
increasingly convinced that the courts issue
looms so large because the liberals have given
away everything else. It feels ever more the
property of Dem hacks who have to strain to find
any basis for plausible product differentiation
during election season. (A friend used to
maintain that there's so little difference
between the two parties in this bipartisan era
that people determine their allegiances in the
same ways they sort themselves into Ford and
Chevy people. Now I think it's more like Buick
v. Pontiac; they have the same structure and
frame, same engine, and same chassis design—just
different flourishes and labels.) It's a
deal-maker only if you accept the premise that
formal preservation of Roe v. Wade is the
paramount issue, the sine qua non, of gender
justice in the United States or that holding on
to the shreds of a mangled, "mended" version of
affirmative action is the same for blacks.
Those two
areas don't stand out so much when you add up
everything the Dems have caved on that has more
directly injurious effects on black people and
women, often with more direct and persisting
impact on reproductive freedom—or "choice" in
the liberals' capitulationist parlance—and
economic security than abortion rights, which
are exercised, at best, episodically, and
affirmative action, the meaningful scope of
which is effectively reduced by retreats in
other policy areas.
For
openers, just think of comparable worth, welfare
reform, publicly supported child care, cuts in
Federal urban aid, education, the War on Drugs,
NAFTA, the ethnic cleansing program of HOPE VI,
corporate health care, privatization, abetting
union-busting, fetishizing deficit reduction, as
only among the most obvious areas where they've
rolled over. For most blacks and women, most of
the time, abortion rights and affirmative action
are at best more symbolic than practically
meaningful, particularly in a context in which
in all those other areas that affect their lives
directly, the Dems have already given away the
store.
Trying to stoke hysteria around abortion
rights and affirmative action looks more and
more like a feeble attempt to deflect attention
from that fact, and to convince people who don't
stand to get much from a Dem victory that they
should commit to them anyway—for the sake of
those who do stand to benefit. I've finally
realized what this move is all about: what makes
the Dems every four years "better" is always
something that the hacks and yuppies are likely
to imagine getting if they win, and their
disgusting moralizing about the imperative to
vote for their "lesser evil"—which means "I may
get what's important for me, but you have to
recognize that what you need is naïve or
impractical"—is all about bullying the rest of
us into believing we have an obligation to vote
for what's good for them.
Bill
Clinton's "successful" presidency underscores
this point. Like baseball managers, presidents
probably get too much credit for economic growth
and too much blame for downturns. Yes, the
growth of inequality may have been tempered in
some ways during his administration. But how was
Clinton able to pull off his triangulation that
combined stimulating the economy while sharply
reducing the deficit? I may be a little out of
my depth here, but it seems to me that part of
the answer is his support for another burst of
deregulation in the financial sector, which
generated the speculative stock market boom and
its inevitable bust that wrecked so many small
investors' lives and gutted their risky,
defined-contribution pensions.
Another
part apparently was his administration's role in
stimulating housing market speculation—which
included encouraging in a couple of different
ways the proliferation of subprime lending. Thus
a longer-term effect in both cases, between
bailouts and the concentration that's part of
capitalism's crisis tendency, an element of its
dynamic of "creative destruction," was upward
redistribution. And, by the way, if you add the
fact that the steepest cuts in the federal meat
inspection program occurred under Clinton
(Tyson's Chicken has its needs, after all), then
the libs' halcyon, nay Edenic, days of the
Clinton presidency lose a lot of their
prelapsarian splendor, as its fingerprints are
all over three of the biggest domestic crises in
this decade.
And there's
no reason, other than the will to believe, to
expect that Obama would be any better, and it's
entirely likely that in some ways—including
those bearing on racial justice—he'll be worse,
again by moving the boundaries of thinkable
liberalism that much farther to the right. There
is nothing in his record, much less his recent
courting of some of the worst tendencies of the
right, to reassure us on this front. The
argument that he has to give away everything in
order to get elected is substantively only an
argument that we have no reason to elect him.
All that
said, I reiterate that, although I've been clear
about my own decision to abstain from this
charade, I'm not arguing that people shouldn't
vote for him. Nor do I see any third-party
candidate as a serious alternative. I was a
Commoner elector in 1980 and voted for Nader in
2000 (I'm proud to declare that, whatever else I
may have done in my life, I've voted against Joe
Lieberman at every opportunity I've had to do
so), but the fact is that third party
candidacies are really the same as not voting,
just more costly and time-consuming. They aren't
an answer to anything. They don't galvanize
movements, and unless they emerge from dynamic,
powerful movements—like the Republicans in the
1850s—they aren't more than vehicles for
collecting and registering protest by isolated
individuals. This can be defensible, so far as
it goes, but it is not an alternative or
shortcut to building a movement capable of
changing the terms of political debate. And that
can't happen during the heat of an election
period.
The point
is that we need to approach this presidential
election stuff, and not just this time around,
with no illusions about the trade-offs involved
and recognize that it's not even as simple a
matter as Obama being better than McCain in the
here-and-now on a select menu of issues. I could
understand the impulse to rally the troops to
produce the outcome that's better on immediate
tactical grounds, if we had some troops to
rally. If we had such a base, it might even make
sense to consider an organized boycott of the
election, which may be the only way to keep from
being treated like a 2 am booty-call for
triangulating Dems. However, we don't have it,
and it can't be built during an election season.
Perhaps the
one luxury of the left's weakness now is that
we're absolved of the need to hew so closely to
such tactical considerations because we can't
influence the outcome of the election anyway.
Pretending that we can is a convenient excuse
for laziness and opportunism, on both
intellectual and political fronts. This, by the
way, is yet another area where we've been failed
by much of the left media that too easily
succumb to simple cheerleading, counting up
outrages, and engaging in wish fulfillment,
indulging the fantasy that there is a coherent
political movement out there somewhere that can
assert its electoral will.
Here are
two sobering thoughts for the "yes, but" left.
First, despite all breathless claims about how
the Obama campaign "energized" young voters who
could remain mobilized to become the cornerstone
of the base that will push him to be more like
the fantasy Obama, when all was said and done,
18-29 year old voters were 14% of those voting
in the primaries. True, that was up a few points
from the last several elections, but it is
exactly the average of the "youth" turnout over
the past thirty years.
Second, the
escrow account established by progressive Obama
supporters to hold him accountable has,
according to the New York Times (July 13, 2008)
raised $101,375 from 675 people in nearly a
month. By contrast, the campaign's chief
fundraiser, Penny Pritzker of the Chicago real
estate magnate and philanthropic family, a week
earlier scheduled "more than a dozen big-ticket
events over the next few weeks at which the
target price for quality time with the candidate
is more than $30,000 per person" (NYT, July 4,
2008). I guess our side had better get cracking
with those bake sales on Democracy Now!
Finally, I
recognize that trade-offs would be involved in
rejecting the premise that we can't afford to
jeopardize the chances for a Democrat's victory,
no matter how little he or she may differ from
the Republican. Two little items in the July 15
NYT illustrate this point. One is about the Bush
administration's effort to push through a
regulation requiring any hospital or medical
facility that takes federal money not to
discriminate in hiring those—nurses or
pharmacists, for example—who oppose abortion or
contraception on religious grounds. The second
is that the GAO has outed the wage and hour
division of the Labor Dept for its laxity and
worse in handling complaints and apparently not
paying attention to low-wage industries at all.
When the right is in power, they can push their
agenda into the administrative and regulatory
interstices insidiously, and a Democratic
administration, at least to this point, would be
less likely to pursue objectives such as those,
which clearly make things substantively worse
than they were and at least temporarily more
difficult to fight.
When and
whether it's appropriate, or not, to accept the
immediate costs of such trade-offs is a decision
that would be properly made systematically, in
the context of a larger strategy for pursuit of
political power, not on the fly, by individuals
in the heat of the moment. It's an issue that
would best be discussed and debated in
institutional forums—labor federations,
constituent advocacy and membership groups—and
through movement-linked media.
But here's
the catch-22: The left version of the lesser
evilist argument stresses that it's unrealistic
and maybe unfair to expect anything of the Dems
in the absence of a movement that could push
them, and no such movement exists. True enough,
but where is such a movement to come from if we
accept the premise that the horizon of our
political expectation has to be whatever the
Dems are willing to do because demanding more
will only put/keep the other guys in power, and
they're worse?
I remember
Paul Wellstone saying already in the early ‘90s
that they'd gotten into a horrible situation in
Congress, where the Republicans would propose a
really, really hideous bill, and the Dems would
respond with a slightly less hideous one and
mobilize feverishly around it. If it passed,
they and all their interest-group allies would
hold press conferences to celebrate the victory,
when what had passed actually made things worse
than they were before. That's also an element of
the logic we've been trapped in for 30 years,
and it's one reason that things have gotten
progressively worse, and that the bar of liberal
expectations has been progressively lowered.
It's also
one of the especially dangerous things about
Obama, that he threatens to go beyond any of his
Dem predecessors in redefining their
all-too-familiar capitulation as the boundary of
the politically thinkable, as the substance of
"progressivism." He can manage this partly
because of the way that he and his image-makers
manipulate the rhetoric and imagery of
energizing "youth," whose righteous fervor is
routinely adduced to demonstrate the power and
Truth of Obamaism, rather than evidence that
they just don't know any better.
The
Obamistas have exploited the opportunism and
bankruptcy of adults whose lack of will and
direction, and maybe their hyper-investment as
parents, lead them to look to precocious young
people as sources of wisdom and purpose. But
"youth," first of all, is an actuarial and
advertising category, not a coherent social
group, and one of its defining features is lack
of experience. Another, lest we forget, is its
transience; youth, by definition, is a status
that disappears with time, and rapidly. (I'm
reminded of joking with comrades more than three
decades ago, after the Student Organization for
Black Unity—SOBU—had become YOBU about what
would be the next step in the progression after
Student and Youth.)
The many
organizational debates over the decades about
where to set the upper age limit of the "youth"
section should have been a signal of how
arbitrary and concocted the category is. And
these precocious young, mainly middle class
enthusiasts, who believe that the world began
when they started paying attention, have not had
the experience of being sold out by Dem after
Dem; they didn't live through their parents'
versions of the exact same overblown and
unfulfilled enthusiasms for Jesse Jackson, who
also supposedly energized youth and was
historic, and/or Bill Clinton. They haven't seen
the Dems run a slightly different version of the
same candidate and campaign as their Magic Negro
every four years since Dukakis, or maybe even
Mondale or Carter, with almost always the same
result.
Many of
them don't understand the difference between a
political movement and a protest march, chat
room or ad campaign. And, most of all, they by
and large don't feel adult anxieties about
health care, working conditions, pensions and
the like.
Therefore,
they are the ideal propagandists for the fantasy
that Obama can transform the political
environment through his person, as well as his
bullshit about "community organizing" and the
real progressivism being that which transcends,
even obviates, conflict, and his arsenal of
student government platitudes like the notion
that "hope" has a self-evident, concrete meaning
or that partisanship is a bad thing or that
"politics of gridlock" is something more than
important sounding filler for use by the male
and female news bunny corps and their stable of
talking head guest commentators.
And, no, I
don't mean to dismiss young people's role in
politics. Because of their point in life and the
social location associated with it, they tend to
have more social energy and to be more inclined
to experiment than older people. These can be
valuable attributes for a political movement.
They are also reciprocals of lack of experience
and immersion in adult concerns. The Obamistas'
opportunistic exploitation of the imagery of
youth activism, though, makes it especially
important to be clear-headed, to avoid
mystifications and facile nostalgia about what
role to expect from young people in building a
movement.
Neither the
civil rights movement nor the Vietnam era
antiwar movement was the product of precocious
youth, least of all the sort who create their
own NGOs, though both at various points depended
heavily on the energy, flexibility and other
talents of young people, however defined. The
direct action explosion of the 1960s civil
rights movement in the South was the product of
years of organizing and institutional political
agitation and action that stretched back to the
1930s. The leadership of the
Montgomery
Improvement Association were adults: E. D. Nixon
was more than 50 years old and a long-time
activist in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters and NAACP; Rosa Parks was over 30 and an
NAACP functionary, and King himself, the novice,
was a married father and pastor. SCLC, CORE and
the NAACP similarly were led by long-time
activist adults who shaped those organizations'
programs and their directions. James Farmer was
40 at the time of the Greensboro sit-in, and
Bayard Rustin was pushing 50. And this isn't
even to consider the many labor and other
organizations that fed into, shaped, and
sustained the movement.
The story
of the student and antiwar movements is similar.
SDS began as an offshoot of the labor-based
League for Industrial Democracy, and the anti-
Vietnam war movement in no way is reducible
simply to its student or youth component. Labor,
civil rights, pacifist and many other types of
activist organizations shaped, pushed, funded
and directed the larger movement. It's telling
that the mass youth antiwar movement collapsed
almost immediately with elimination of the
draft.
I recognize
also that one reason it's so difficult to have
the discussion about the point at which it makes
sense, if not to break with the Dems at least to
stop lying to ourselves about the cataclysmic
significance of voting for them or not, is that
the election year is in a way not the optimal
time to have it. This is precisely because of
the immediateness of the stakes and the kind of
politics—i.e., by definition not
"transformative," if we take the term to imply
potential to alter the terms of political debate
substantially—elections warrant and require. The
problem, though, is that even within the
ineffectual enclaves that pass for a left, as
well as all the more solid left-of-center
interest configurations— labor, enviros, women,
civil rights, etc.—"politics" increasingly has
come to mean only getting someone elected or
defeated or some bill or initiative passed or
defeated.
So
elections are the only context around which it's
possible that even politically attentive people
and those who see themselves as activists are
inclined to discuss political strategy at all.
And then, because the frenzy of electoral
jockeying stokes passions and leads to
extravagant claims, the discussion becomes
overheated, and distinctions between tactics,
strategies and goals blur, with the first likely
to drive the other two rhetorically. The
predictably exaggerated claims that support
electoral mobilization, e.g., "Obama is a
transformative politician," etc, strive to
channel and subordinate all political discussion
to the immediate goal of winning what can be won
right now and not really entertaining questions
about how much, not to say whether, it's
actually worth winning, or even whether the
victory could be pyrrhic.
So we
"don't have time" to have the strategic
political discussion about how to try to change
the terms of debate during the election year,
and "we don't have time" to have it between
election years because (a) there are other,
equally instrumental objectives that consume
everyone's time as immediately more
pressing—some other 8% adjustment to fight for
or against - and (b) the dilettantish left
persists in the belief that some gimmick—some
Special Candidate, some clever slogan ("No,
we're really the ones who ‘support the troops'"
or "We need a policy that helps ‘working
families' and the ‘middle class'")—can magically
knock the shackles from the eyes of the majority
that already exists as our constituency but
doesn't yet know it, if we could only find the
right one.
Then we're
back to the next election year, and some new
candidate becomes the embodiment of all our
hopes and dreams and the one who'll call that
majority together for us. Frankly, I've begun to
suspect that the election year version of the
"now is not the time" argument and its sibling,
the "get him elected first then hold him
accountable" line, as well as their first
cousin, "Well, that's what they all have to do
to get elected," reflect nothing better than
denial of the grim reality that we can't expect
anything from them or make any demands of them.
After all, how can we hold them accountable once
they're in office if we can't do it when they're
running, when we technically have something we
can withhold or deliver?
The fact is
that they know we don't have the power to make
them do or not do anything and treat us
accordingly, and they will until we develop the
capacity to force them to do otherwise. I know
this is a difficult message for those who like
to believe that politics is about good people
and bad people, or that writing really smart
position papers that demonstrate the formal
plausibility of a win/win agenda that satisfies
everyone's concerns should be enough to counter
the influence of those $30,000 per head
corporate and hedge fund contributors, but
that's just not the way the deal goes down.
So the
question is: how are we to break this cycle to
be able to try to build the movement we need to
do anything more than staunch the bleeding?
Consider as well that the staunching looks less
and less meaningful to the growing population
that gets defined as on the wrong side of the
triage line and that each iteration of the
losing game further shrinks the ranks of the
relatively secure economically, drives more and
more people to the margins, and shifts the
thinkable terms of political debate, as well as
the electorate's center of gravity, more and
more to the right. We have seen, for example,
that after nearly thirty years of bipartisan
government-bashing, even in the wake of massive
catastrophes like the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina, the notion of public obligation to
provide for the citizenry's well-being is
steadily being wiped out of public
consciousness.
(And, by
the way, those precocious NGO engineers are
energetically instrumental in doing a lot of the
wiping.)
And it's
crucially important for those who identify with
the left to recognize that there is no
designated moment at which the crisis becomes
intolerable and "the People" either "wake up" or
"rise." That is simply not the way politics
works. Absent concerted, organized intervention,
it could go on indefinitely, with all kinds of
inventive scapegoating available to stigmatize
the previous rounds of losers and provide
desperate reassurances to the next. And that
would be a political situation and social order
likely to grow ever uglier and more dangerous.
Adolph Reed, Jr. is a political
scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. He
is author of
Class Notes,
The
Jesse Jackson Phenomenon,
W.E.B. DuBois and American Political
Thought, and
Stirrings in the Jug, and
can be contacted at
alreed2@earthlink.net
Source:
Black Agenda Report
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro
By
Nathaniel Weyl and William Marina
This book shows that most of America's great
statesmen from the Revolutionary War to the
Kennedy years were not overly fond of Blacks
and did not believe in the intelligence of
Black people or their ability to assimilate
into American society. This is good in that
it provides some interesting statements from
Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, etc. that
are not well known. As the authors point
out, the United States inherited a race
problem. Negro slavery had already been
established by the Southern states before
the nation was even founded. In fact, the
question of whether slaves were people or
property was the most intractable problem at
the constitutional convention in
Philadelphia. . . . As Mr.
Weyl and Mr. Marina point out, in its time,
the American Colonization Society enjoyed
the support of the most powerful and
prestigious men in America. |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music)
posted 18 July 2008
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