-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [BRC-ANN] Quote of the Day: Howie Hawkins Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2000 03:57:56 -0500 From: Art McGee <amcgee at igc.org> Reply-To: hhawkins at igc.org To: brc-announce at lists.tao.ca
Some people in the Greens have been arguing recently that GPUSA puts too much emphasis on "identity politics," meaning feminism, anti-racism, and gay liberation. These people want an anti-corporate populism that avoids the social issues like Perot's Reform Party. Nader's approach in the campaign is held up as the model: attack the common enemy, the corporations, but avoid the "divisive" questions of abortion, immigration, affirmative action, and gay rights. This view advocates a "middle-of-road populism:" attack the corporations but avoid both the reactionary social positions of a conservative populist like Pat Buchanan and the progressive social positions of a liberal populist like Jesse Jackson.
"Middle-of-the-road populism" is strategic suicide, not to mention moral bankruptcy. I think Nader lost a lot of votes by his reticence to address these so-called "wedge issues." If you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit from both sides. You don't get support from either side.
Robert and Pamela Allen's Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States (Washington: Howard University Press, 1976) should be required reading for every activist. It documents the sorry story of how progressive movements in America -- abolitionists, suffragists, populists, socialists, labor -- have repeatedly undermined themselves by compromising with racism in order to build a broader white base. Racism divides whether it is fought openly or subordinated to "higher" priorities -- and will always divide and weaken our movements until we uproot and eradicate it.
Linking issues and constituencies builds bridges, not walls. We need a "rainbow populism" that advances the anti-corporate material interests of the popular classes, the anti-oppression interests of women, people of color, and gays, and the general human survival interests in peace and a sustainable environment -- without privileging or subordinating any of these interests.
--Howie Hawkins
"The Greens After the Nader Campaign"
Synthesis/Regeneration 12
Winter 1997
<http://www.greens.org/s-r/12/12-07.html>
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