------ Forwarded Message From: adolph reed <alreed2 at earthlink.net> Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 10:25:35 -0500 To: danny postel <dpostel at iwj.org> Conversation: [DemocraticLeft] Important Adolph Reed piece Subject: Re: [DemocraticLeft] Important Adolph Reed piece
Hi, Danny. I was in New Orleans until last night and didn’t really have time to engage with responding. Sure, you can post my response to the list.
Adolph
From one angle, the differences between us don’t seem that great. I can’t quite figure out whether Dubofsky didn’t read my essay carefully enough, or there’s a more fundamental disagreement after all. We agree, apparently, that it’s folly to expect to get anything meaningful to a left agenda or vision from the Dems, which for me is the key point. I admit that, as a political scientist, it makes me smile a bit to encounter those earnest mini-lectures on how features of the electoral system and structure of the national government — winner-take-all elections and, in this case, the nature of Senate representation -- tie our hands. I find them precious to some extent but also beside the point. If those conditions are as important as Dubofsky contends, then wouldn’t that be another argument in support of my position, that it’s folly to expect to get anything decent from the Dems, even if they win? (This isn’t even to deal with the fact that they’re locked into an electoral approach that is doomed to fail. I noted in my original draft that the party has been pursuing the same approach at least since Dukakis, and that it has never produced an electoral majority, that, in fact, Gore and Kerry got higher percentages of the vote losing in 2000 and 2004 than Clinton got winning in 1992 and were within less than a single point of his percentage in 1996. Without Perot in those two races, there wouldn’t have been a Democrat in the White House since Carter. And, from our perspective, it’s certainly debatable whether all the fixated anxiety and effort to get them elected has been worth it even when they have managed to win. Recall the laundry list of the Clinton presidency’s infamous “accomplishments;” I’ve just been watching the continuing fallout from one of them in New Orleans, as HUD and the city try to raze 4,500 units of low-income public housing in a city with perhaps the most acute affordable housing crisis in the country and whose homeless population has doubled to 12,000 since the flood.) It would also support my argument that we should therefore not put so many eggs in the basket of the quadrennial national elections, that we should stop pretending that electing neoliberal weasels like Clinton and Obama is of paramount importance for a progressive social vision because “the other guy’s worse” or that we can have any influence over what they stand for and do, and that we should focus primarily on trying to build a popular base for our own political agenda. As I said in the article, “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... [T]hat process cannot be compressed to fit the election cycle.”
I suspect, however, that there is a deeper disagreement that Dubofsky may be understandably reticent about articulating explicitly in a forum like this one. And to that extent the civics lesson may be a beard for his real complaint. I’ve never been especially moved by arguments that we must first struggle to change the electoral system as a precondition for fighting for the political agendas we want, ultimately because I think that argument is too much like a dog chasing its own tail. Only wonkish types who watch C-SPAN and the Lehrer News Hour dutifully or read political blogs like junkies can be energized to care enough about winner-take-all elections to contemplate putting any effort into changing them, or even to imagine that it’s possible to persuade substantially more people than themselves that this a burning issue that requires their attention and action. Absent the ability to build a broad, popular groundswell, the only way to win that reform is to persuade the incumbent officials — i.e., those who most immediately benefit from the current system — that they should vote to change it. And what would make anyone think that could happen? I can understand the general appeal of the technical fix; it’s the political equivalent of yearning for an alchemy, in this case a simple, technical process that can bring change without tedious organizing and conflict. (“It’s simple; if we could just remove the impediment of X rule, then the people’s will could be heard!”) But in this political context it’s also yet another marker of the toll that nearly three decades of defeat have taken on capacities for thinking about politics strategically, for imagining chains of connection between goals, actions and outcomes, that has removed considerations of efficacy in relation to our larger political vision from our discussions of political strategy. As to the point about the Senate, I find that, as well as the discussion of FDR, surprisingly ahistorical. (As to FDR, the political contexts are utterly incomparable, and I’m willing to write off his suggestion that Clinton or Obama could turn out -- “we can’t be sure” -- to be a latter-day incarnation of Roosevelt to rhetorical exuberance and let Dubofsky just take back that little sophistry.) There’s no reason that those small states that have as many votes in the Senate as New York and Pennsylvania should be seen as intrinsically rightist. They haven’t “evolved” into right-wing strongholds. That they are is a function of the right’s success in knitting together a political alliance that gives them the advantage there — for now. Of course there are structural characteristics of several of the western states’ political economies and demographies that have facilitated the right’s efforts, but those victories weren’t inevitable; nor are they necessarily immutable. Besides, the sword of cuts both ways: Rhode Island and Vermont, for instance, have two votes in the Senate as well; ditto the Dakotas and Hawaii. And most of all, if we have to wait until we can amend the Constitution to effect a radical change in how Senate representation is apportioned, then we may as wipe the idea of pursuing a political program that goes beyond what the Dems are inclined to do out of our minds entirely, in the name of realpolitik.
This, when all’s said and done, is the burden of Dubofsky’s critique, that I’m not prepared to accept whatever the Democrats feel comfortable doing, including their skittishness about being too closely identified with progressive interests (he mentions labor, but the same diagnosis applies equally to all social justice movements and agendas), as the absolute boundary of the politically possible. As I note in my article, this is the essence of their bogus “we’ll come back for you” politics, but Dubofsky’s formulation doesn’t even require the disingenuous promise to come back. It’s instructive that he dismisses my argument as a pointless jeremiad when I offer a very concrete argument for the need to develop the capacity to operate within political domains beyond the electoral cycle. He, on the other hand, fails to suggest any explanation for how slavishly accepting a Democratic party committed strategically to refusing to be more than the GOP Lite can help “produce the polity and society that he and we would want.” And, again, just to be clear, I’m not calling for a principled rejection of electoral engagement, even in quadrennial national elections, nor even a strategic rejection. I can say confidently that, unless John Edwards wins the Democratic nomination and continues to present his candidacy as he has so far, I’m most likely not going to vote in November, but, as I think I also made clear in my article, I’m not calling on others to do the same. Not only is that question no better than secondary to the objective of building the kind of movement we need to be able seriously to challenge neoliberal hegemony; frankly, and this is another illusion the left has to get over, it wouldn’t make any difference whether I made such a call or not because we are so weak and thoroughly marginalized in American politics that our debates and proposals, like our actions, have no appreciable impact on the course of things.
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Adolph, I thought you might be curious to see this response to your Progressive piece by the labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky <http:// www.binghamton.edu/history/faculty/dubofsky.htm> , which he posted to a list we’re both on called DemocraticLeft (to which I had posted your piece). He gave his blessing to my relaying it along to you. If you have any desire to reply to his points, I’d be glad to post your reply to the list — or, if you prefer, I could forward it along to Dubofsky individually. Danny
From: DemocraticLeft at yahoogroups.com [mailto:DemocraticLeft at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Melvyn Dubofsky Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 4:35 PM To: DemocraticLeft at yahoogroups.com Subject: RE: [DemocraticLeft] Important Adolph Reed piece
Danny, Like you I believe much of what Reed has to say, but I fear that he leaves two vital factors out of the equation. Given our winner-take- all electoral system there is no way Democratic candidates can play to the audiences and groups that share Reed’s and perhaps our beliefs (and a third-party movement from the left is doomed to failure). And remember in primaries candidates are appealing to a constituency in the D party that tacks more to the left than the general electorate. To play Reed’s politics and ours in a national election is to throw victory to the other side (Is the worse better? I think not). You have to get elected before you can make policy or affect/effect actions. Are any of the current Democratic candidates FDRs, who ran for office from the right of center in 1932 (and he was no radical leftist even in his best days), probably not, but we can’t be sure. Another structural factor that must be taken into consideration is the nature of the Senate, a reality that shifts Washington politics right with the many votes from population-sparse states that over the last 40 years have evolved into hotbeds of right-wing politics and social movements. Reed is right about the role that labor has played, the central element in what can be called modern US liberalism, but even during CIO’s most heroic moment, the year 1937, FDR, for exigent political reasons, had to pull back his support of militant labor. To fast forward, during the Jimmy Carter administration, when labor was far stronger in numbers, and money, and influence than it is today, the Democrats in power, with only a few exceptions, realized two things: to go too far in the AFL-CIO’s direction on policy would cost popular votes and alienate a powerful bloc of Democratic senators who represented an affluent suburban mentality that was all for women’s rights, symbolic equal rights for racial minorities, and environmentalism, but dead set against Labor Power. Today with organized labor far smaller, poorer, and surely less influential politically, how can it influence candidates and why should they cater to its interests and needs. And the situation for labor and other movement groups will only get worse if Republicans remain in power. Unless we can achieve an electoral system that offers space for more than two parties, some kind of PR, and a Senate more representative of the actual population, Reed may be able to offer more jeremiads but bemoaning the sad state of contemporary politics won’t produce the polity and society that he and we would want. Mel D