The Progressive - February 2001
GET OFF THE DEFEATIST CYCLE by Adolph Reed
Well, the Republicans blatantly stole the White House. Nader didn't get the magic 5 percent, and we on the left are as weak as ever. So where do we go from here? How can we avoid finding ourselves in the same position again in another four years: facing undesirable electoral alternatives, with no solid foundation for opposition, and primed to tilt at windmills with whoever comes riding along?
Only the right wing ever seems to learn anything from electoral outcomes. After Barry Goldwater was swamped by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the right embarked on a strategic, long-term campaign that was largely grassroots-based. They realized that their push had been premature; the Johnson landslide showed them that it was necessary to take a step back and work to create a popular constituency for their political agenda. It's true they have had advantages that progressives can never count on: access to almost unlimited financial resources, the goodwill of the corporate media, institutional strength in the Republican Party at all levels that we could never match with the Democrats, who have always provided an inadequate home for progressive interests. The dominance of the Clintonist neoliberal tendency has made the party only more inhospitable.
The Goldwaterites drew from defeat the lesson that they needed to work from the ground up to alter the political climate, to shift the center of gravity of American politics in their direction. This meant digging in for a protracted effort to change the terms of political debate, to redefine and reframe key issues in ways that would make their interpretations and programs seem reasonable to a potential electoral majority.
The Goldwater conservatives pursued this objective by doing several things we've consistently failed to do since the high period of civil rights and anti-war activism in the 1960s. They mobilized activists at the local level around issue-based campaigns - for school prayer and tax revolt, and against abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, school busing, and affirmative action. They identified and cultivated bases of support around each of these issues and worked to bring them together into a coherent movement.
The right built a cohesive alliance, rooted institutionally in the Republican Party, that joined what often seemed to be disparate, if not incompatible, interest groupings into a singular political force. This is the alliance that Ronald Reagan rode to power. Political scientists and pundits imagined that this alliance was held together only by Reagan's personal magnetism. As Reagan's tenure wound down, there was considerable speculation about his coalition's future; after all, it appeared to be an unstable amalgam of social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, the religious right that wanted increased government regulation of private life, racists, nativists, and homophobes, proponents of lavish military spending, and an economic right that sought to reduce government's functions across the board (except for corporate welfare, of course).
Predictions of the Reaganite coalition's demise obviously turned out to be shortsighted. Solid political movements are built and maintained on a principle of solidarity, and the strength of the rightwing coalition is that its constituent groups proceed from an understanding that what advances the objectives of some components of the alliance advances all of the alliance. Fiscal conservatives, who themselves may not care so much about eliminating abortion rights or enforcing school prayer, will nonetheless back policies and candidates that promote those issues primarily because they recognize a victory for those interests as also a victory for their own.
That's why the Moral Majority's convention before the 1996 election concluded with the proclamation that what God wanted most on Earth that election year was reduction of public spending and cutting capital gains taxes. This looked like transparent hypocrisy, an admission that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were just corporate stooges and ideological opiate dealers. But instead, Falwell and Robertson were conveying to movement supporters their assessment of what best advanced the coalition's interests in that election. Local activists then passed this message on to less active or engaged voters. This signaled that a vote for a candidate advocating capital gains tax cuts would be tantamount to voting for school prayer, against abortion, or in line with whatever conservative social issue was most meaningful to them.
How has the right been able to maintain this kind of disciplined solidarity while we haven't? Despite their tremendous advantages, conservatives face a major obstacle that we don't: Their task has been to sell a big chunk of the American population a bill of goods, to convince them that their interests and concerns are best served by supporting political initiatives and programs that are sharply skewed to benefit corporations and the rich at their own expense.
Yes, the right has had more resources, but this imbalance is one we'll always face, by definition. If that were an insuperable obstacle, then we may as well quit. However, it can't be; if it were, no left movement ever would have been able to win anything.
Some say the right has succeeded because it plays to people's fears, which are supposedly easier to mobilize around than the more abstract, less emotionally charged political programs. But the concrete fears that most people experience most acutely connect much more immediately with the programs of the left: for example, fear of job loss and declining living standards, lack of access to adequate health care, affordable housing, and quality education.
Another explanation, largely a smear by smug neoliberals, is that the left proposes no new ideas and offers only opposition without clear, practical alternatives. But the right galvanizes its ranks largely around opposition to abortion, taxation, civil rights, social spending. And what ideas are more shopworn in American politics than racism, nativism and unrestrained property rights?
A yet more dubious answer is that the right has had galvanizing leadership that the left lacks; some have gone so far as to claim that we need our versions of Reagan or Falwell. This contention, which underlay some of the enthusiasm generated by Lone Ranger escapades like Jesse Jackson's and Nader's hopeless campaigns, fails to see that leaders are holograms created by movements (Reagan more literally than most). At best, it presumes the existence of an active constituency yet to be born; at worst it suggests a suspiciously top-down form of politics, the sort that can be one big disappointment - or career opportunity - away from fascism. And it reflects a wish to circumvent the long, tedious work of movement-building.
Falwell is Falwell, and Reagan certainly was Reagan, only because a mobilized social base assigned them a role and accepted their performance of it.
No, the right has been so much more effective at cultivating and maintaining a disciplined political alliance mainly because it has harnessed that alliance to a larger goal of pursuing national power. This is the foundation of their solidarity; they are united around a vision of governing the society, of becoming its dominant political and ideological force. While we've fallen into a defeatist cycle of mobilizing intensely around only defensive struggles, accepting and exaggerating the inadequate options offered by the Democrats, and indulging a penchant to replace strategic political action with a shortsighted-though no doubt personally gratifying-politics of moral gestures and bearing witness, they've pursued relentlessly the objective of winning what most of us are now even too embarrassed to refer to as state power.
Think of how the left responded to Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 and to Nader this time. Look at what we have to show for all the energies those efforts drained and all the enthusiastic commitment they provoked. We need an entirely different, more tactical and less candidate-centered, approach to electoral action. We need to confront the electoral arena much more as the Goldwaterites did post-1964: that is, not simply as a venue for making immediate statements but as the setting for a triumph yet to come if we do our work well.
In this light, it's useful to take note of some significant, though small, electoral successes that were overshadowed even within the left press by the circus surrounding the Florida Presidential vote. The Labor Party, working in coalition with a range of other organizations, sponsored local ballot initiatives in Massachusetts and in Florida. In Alachua County, Florida, the question read: "Do you favor legislation to create a system of universal health care in Florida that provides all residents with comprehensive health care coverage (including the freedom to choose doctors and other health care professionals) and eliminates the role of insurance companies in health care by creating a publicly administered health insurance trust fund? The trust fund would receive the funds presently going to the numerous health insurance companies throughout the state." As the state was splitting down the middle between Gore and Bush, the Alachua initiative outpolled both of them (and all but one candidate on the ballot for any office) and carried nearly 65 percent of the vote.
In Western Massachusetts and in two districts in the eastern, more urban part of the state, voters were asked whether their legislators should be instructed to initiate and support legislation to create a health care system for all Massachusetts residents. The initiative asked whether voters would support a new system that "provides universal coverage for comprehensive health care services that includes the freedom to choose doctors and other health care professionals, facilities, and services; eliminates the role of insurance companies in health care and creates an insurance trust fund that is publicly administered and fairly funded; and in order to safeguard the availability of quality health care, stops the buying, selling, managing, and closing down of health care facilities by forprofit corporations."
In the large, western senate district, the measure passed with 69 percent of the vote; in the eastern districts, it won 60 percent. At the same time, a statewide binding initiative, Proposition 5, calling for universal health care, failed. Proposition 5 specifically shied away from proposing a single-payer model for financing and was therefore vulnerable to attack from HMOs for being financially irresponsible,
Also in Massachusetts, voters in six legislative districts were asked to respond to the following question: "Shall the representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation that equitably invests state funds in local public schools for quality education; reduces class sizes; excludes use of voucher programs which siphon funds from public education; bars forprofit schools from public funding; suspends the MCAS tests as the criteria for promotion and graduation, and establishes an authentic and fair system of educational progress for our students and their schools?" The voters approved the measure by margins ranging from 61 to 76 percent.
These are admittedly modest victories. The initiatives were local and nonbinding. However, because of their modest, dispersed scope, they didn't provoke intense countermobilization and disinformation campaigns such as victimized Proposition 5. To that extent, they arguably serve as clearer expressions of public concern and sentiment. Along with similar successes-for example, the rejection of school privatization schemes by California voters-they underscore the point made forcefully by Michael Zweig in his important new book, The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret (Cornell, 2000), that there is a potential majority constituency in the country for a concrete political program that honestly addresses most of our real, everyday needs and concerns.
We don't have the resources or the developed political base yet to take on large corporate interests in direct confrontation. This is one of the two crucial lessons we should take from our history of engagement in electoral politics for the last two decades. just as the Goldwaterites did, we should concentrate our efforts on trying to aggregate resources and cultivate our base.
The other lesson is that we can hope to do either only by talking and fighting explicitly for what we want by offering people a clear, practical, alternative vision of how the country should be governed in their interests. Only through generating grassroots-level discussion around such practical alternatives can we create an activist base deep and broad enough to break the rightwing/neoliberal dominance of public debate, withstand the aggressive and dishonest opposition of the powerful interests aligned against us, and mobilize support for the kind of society we all know we need.