Glen Ford, Adolph Reed and others insist that there is no "movement" in the way lefties usually mean, only people voting for, and affixing their hopes to a "good man" who promises "change". I'm sure there are people who'd argue that Sen. Clinton's supporters are part of a movement too. But none of us are buying that. Why do we think the word applies to the corona circling the Obama campaign?
^^^^ CB: The continuum might be something like movement...coalition...front...campaign.
( though I don't use this scheme entirely consistently below)
Jesse Jackson coined a Rainbow Coalition in the context of a Presidential campaign. Other campaigns are for example
an Equal Rights Amendment for equality of women. The Communist Party , for example, has over the last few decades called for the formation of an
"All Peoples Front" and an " Anti-monopoly coalition " toward a working class and then socialist movement. It has a Party program
http://www.cpusa.org/article/static/758/ fleshing out goals and aims of this movement, and this theoretical Anti-monopoly coalition and All-Peoples Front is toward the large (largely theoretical in the US) socialist, working
class conscious movement. Historically , there's been a
labor movement, a women's movement, a Civil Rights movement. There was a world wide anti-Apartheid Movement with respect to South Africa. There is now an anti-war movement, as against past wars. There is a more general peace movement, an environmental movement.
Because O's Presidential campaign has masses of whites voting
for a Black person for President, it has the quality of a stage or moment in the larger
historical movement for African-American liberation and equality and against racism. In the past, this movement included an Abolitionist moment, and an anti-lynching movement, et al.. O's campaign is not a movement. It's most significant aspect is that it could help take another step in this larger historical movement for African American
liberation and equality.
What is the movement or movements that Ford and Reed want to bring about ? Do they have an assessment that the O
electoral campaign, and perhaps beginning new coalition has nothing to do with the movement or movements that they are in favor of or are promoting ?
In a larger sense, the current right wing swing in Europe might
be anti-Arab immigrant racist based. So, W.E.B. Dubois' observation that the issue of color is the question
in the twentieth Century, the darker and lighter races' relations,the national and race liberation movements may now be more upfront and at home in Old Europe , joining America to be the question of the 21st Century , no ?
The mocking term "corona" is as inaccurate in the cynical direction as "movement" is in the "mania" direction.
It doesn't make sense to try to compensate for overstatements like "movement" in the positive direction
by making overstatements in a mocking direction like "corona".
Charlie the Moor
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