What's Happening to America:
In This Issue Chalmers Johnson Bill Ayers and Amiri Baraka
“Can Any Administration Reverse the United States’ Downward Spiral?”
In his speech to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama called the forthcoming presidential election a “defining moment” in this country’s history. It is conceivable that he is right, and there are precedents in American history in which an election inaugurated a period of reform and political realignment. However, such a development is extremely rare and surrounded by contingencies that are normally beyond the control of the advocates of reform. So let me speculate whether the 2008 election might set in motion a political renaissance in the United States—restoring a modicum of democracy to the country’s political system and ending the march toward imperialism, perpetual warfare, and bankruptcy that began with the Cold War and approaches its end game at the present time.
The political blunders, serious mistakes, and governmental failures of the last eight years so discredited the administration of George W. Bush that his name was barely mentioned at the 2008 Republican convention. Even John McCain chose to run as a candidate of “change” despite the fact that it was his own party’s misgoverning that elicited those demands for change. Bringing the opposition party to power, however, is not likely to restore the American republic to good working order. It is almost inconceivable that any president could stand up to the overwhelming pressures of the military-industrial complex, the extra-constitutional powers of the sixteen secret intelligence agencies, and the entrenched interests they represent. The subversive influence of the imperial presidency, the vast expansion of official secrecy, and the irrational commitments of American imperialism (761 active military bases in 151 foreign countries as of 2008) will not easily be rolled back by the normal workings of the political system.
In order for that to occur, the election of 2008 would have to be a “realigning election,” of which there have been only two during the past century—in 1932, electing Franklin Roosevelt, and in 1968 bringing Richard Nixon to power. Until 1932, the Republicans had controlled the presidency for 56 of the previous 72 years, beginning with Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860. After 1932, the Democrats occupied the White House for 28 of the next 36 years. The 1968 election saw the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson, the defeat of Hubert Humphrey (not to mention the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King), and created a new alignment that favored the Republicans based on the so-called “southern strategy.” Its essence was to run Republican racists for office in the old Confederate states. Before 1968, the Democrats were clearly the majority party, winning seven of the previous nine presidential elections. Between 1968 and 2004, the Republicans won seven of the next ten.
Of these two realigning elections, the one that elected Roosevelt is more important for our purposes because it ushered in one of the few truly democratic periods in American political history. In his latest book, Sheldon Wolin, a Princeton political theorist and analyst of American democracy, holds that “Democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs.”
However, the founders of the country and virtually all subsequent political leaders have been hostile to democracy in this sense. They favored checks and balances, republicanism, and rule by elites rather than rule by the common man or woman. Wolin writes:
The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. The republic existed for three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred years before black Americans were assured of their voting rights. Only in the twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete: women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered.
It is this history that makes the election of 1932 so exceptional. “The sovereign people,” Wolin contends:
were fully entitled to use governmental power and resources to redress the inequalities created by the economy of capitalism. That conviction supported and was solidified by the New Deal. A wide range of regulatory agencies was created, the Social Security program and a minimum wage law were established, unions were legitimated along with the rights to bargain collectively, and various attempts were made to reduce mass unemployment by means of government programs for public works and conservation. With the outbreak of World War II, the New Deal was superseded by the forced mobilization and governmental control of the entire economy and the conscription of much of the adult male population. For all practical purposes the war marked the end of the first large-scale effort at establishing the tentative beginnings of social democracy in this country.
Socioeconomic conditions in 2008 somewhat resemble those in 1932, making a realigning election conceivable. Unemployment in 1932 was a record 33 percent. In September 2008, the rate was a much lower 6.1 percent, but there were many other severe economic pressures. These included massive mortgage foreclosures, bank failures, rapid inflation in the prices of food and fuel, the failure of the health care system to deliver service to all citizens, a looming catastrophe of global warming due to the overconsumption of fossil fuels, continuing costly military interventions with more on the horizon due to foreign policy failures (in Georgia, Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and elsewhere), and record-setting budgetary and trade deficits. The question is whether the electorate can be mobilized as it was in 1932 and whether this would lead to a realigning election. The answer to neither question is an unambiguous yes.
To even contemplate that happening, the Democratic Party has to win the election, and it faces two formidable obstacles in doing so: race and regionalism. Although large numbers of white Democrats have said to pollsters that the race of a candidate is not a factor in their decision to vote, there is ample evidence that they are not telling the truth. Andrew Hacker, a well-known specialist on this subject at Queens College, calls this phenomenon the “Bradley Effect,” referring to Tom Bradley, a former black mayor of Los Angeles, who lost his 1982 bid to become governor of California even though every poll in the state showed him leading his white opponent by substantial margins. Similar results appeared in 1989 when David Dinkins ran for mayor of New York City and Douglas Wilder sought election as governor of Virginia. Dinkins was ahead by eighteen percentage points but won by only two, and Wilder was leading by nine points but actually won by only a half a percent. Numerous other examples lead Hacker to offer this advice to Obama campaign offices: ALWAYS SUBTRACT SEVEN PERCENT from any favorable poll results. That’s the Bradley effect.
Meanwhile, the Karl Rove-trained Republican Party has been hard at work disenfranchising black voters. Although we are finally beyond property qualifications, written tests, and the poll tax, there are many new gimmicks. These include laws requiring voters to present official identity cards that include a photo, which for all practical purposes means either a driver’s license or a passport. Many states drop men and women from the rolls who have been convicted of a felony but who have fully completed their sentences, or they require an elaborate procedure to be reinstated. There are many other ways to discourage black voters from attempting to vote, not the least of which is that the United States imprisons a greater proportion of its population than any other country on earth, a burden that falls disproportionally on blacks. These obstacles can be overcome but they require heroic organizational efforts.
Regionalism is the other problem standing in the way of attempts to mobilize the electorate on a national basis. In their book Divided America, the political scientists Earl and Merle Black argue that the U.S. electorate is hopelessly split. This division, which is becoming more entrenched with each passing year, is fundamentally ideological but is also rooted in ethnicity and manifests itself in an intense and never-ending partisanship. “In modern American politics,” they write, “a Republican Party dominated by white Protestants faces a Democratic Party in which minorities plus non-Christian whites far outnumber white Protestants.” Another significant and growing difference is gender imbalance. In the 1950s, the Democratic Party, which was then by far the larger party, was evenly balanced between women and men. Fifty years later, a smaller but still very potent Democratic Party contained far more women than men (60 percent to 40 percent). “In contrast,” says Black, “the Republican Party has shifted from an institution with more women than men in the 1950s (55 percent to 45 percent) to one in which men and women were as evenly balanced in 2004 as Democrats were in the 1950s.”
The old American antagonism between the two sides in the civil war (Southern Democrats vs. Northern Republicans) had by the 21st century given way to “a new American regionalism, a pattern of conflict in which Democrats and Republicans each possess two regional strongholds and in which the Midwest, as the swing region, holds the balance of power in presidential elections.”
The five regions, each becoming more partisan and less characteristic of the nation as a whole, are the Northeast, South, Midwest, Mountains/Plains, and Pacific Coast. The Northeast, although declining slightly in population, is becoming more unambiguously liberal Democratic each year. It is composed of New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont), the Middle Atlantic states (Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), and the District of Columbia. It is the primary Democratic stronghold. The South is today a Republican stronghold. It is made up of the eleven former Confederate states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia).
The second Republican stronghold, displaying an intense and growing partisanship, is the Mountains/Plains region. It is composed of the thirteen states of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The second Democratic stronghold is the Pacific Coast, which includes the nation’s most populous state, California, joined by Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. The Midwest, where national elections are won or lost by the party that is able to hold on to and mobilize its strongholds, is composed of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The two most important swing states in the nation are Florida (27 electoral votes) and Ohio (20 electoral votes), which the Democrats narrowly lost in both 2000 and 2004.
These five regions are today entrenched in the nation’s psyche. There is no way to get around them in a national election, which barring a clear and unmistakable performance failure by one of the parties—as happened to the Republicans during the Great Depression—will normally produce very narrow victories by one party or the other.
In the 2008 election, there are two main issues that will determine whether or not it will be a realigning one. Republican Party failures in managing the economy, in involving the country in catastrophic wars of choice, and in ignoring such paramount issues as global warming all dictate a Democratic Party victory. Militating against that outcome is racist hostility toward the Democratic Party’s candidate. It seems probable that the crisis caused by the performance failures of the incumbent party will guarantee a realigning election favoring the Democrats. But it is impossible to know how swayed by race the nation may be. The fate of the nation hangs in the balance.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006).
BILL AYERS
“The Politics of Teaching in an Unjust World”
During the heat of the 2008 battle with Senator Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination for president, Senator Barack Obama was asked who he imagined Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would support if he were alive today. Without hesitation Obama responded that he didn’t think Reverend King would support or endorse either one; King, more characteristically, would be in the streets building a movement for peace and justice, holding everyone’s feet to the fire.
That strikes me as right. Lyndon Johnson, the most effective politician of his generation, was never involved in the Black Freedom Movement, although he did pass the most far-reaching legislation in history in response to a robust and in many ways revolutionary movement in the streets. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was neither a labor leader nor an activist, and yet he presided over critical progressive social legislation in a time of radical labor mobilization in shops and mines and factories across the land. And Abraham Lincoln was not a member of an abolitionist political party, but reality—including in effect a general strike by enslaved human beings—forced emancipation to the forefront of American politics. Each of these three acted at a moment of crisis and expanding possibilities, each responded to radical grassroots movements for social justice on the ground.
Of course the White House “matters,” but where intellectuals, artists, and activists tend to get muddy is in analyzing how and why it matters, what its critical limits are, how this or that election, this or that candidate, a vote for this one or “that one” or neither one fits into a larger strategy for fundamental progressive change. Too often when the wildly noisy carnival of a national election sweeps into town it’s as if a magnetic hole opens up, sucking all energy and light into its gaping maw. Some abandon other important work under the banner, “All for the White House,” others offer “critical support.” But without a serious, collectively generated critical analysis, national elections reinforce a terribly retrograde and entirely unworthy idea: if we get the right leaders, we can sit back while they bring us the change the world needs. If the less bad alternative lands in the White House there’s no need for dancing in the streets; we might feel relieved, but the real work still lies ahead. In this regard it’s worth remembering the insight expressed by Eugene Debs at the turn of the last century when he told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”
I subscribe to Myles Horton’s idea that great moments of social upheaval—Mountain Times he called them—are inevitable in an unjust world, but that Valley Times are critical in order to prepare ourselves for the coming storms. This is the hard and essential work of movement-building. We, of course, cannot will a movement into being, but neither can we sit idly by waiting for a movement to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus, and land in our laps. Preparation, preparation, preparation.
We must agitate for democracy and push hard for human rights, learning to build a new society through our collective self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles. We must commit to the common good even as we take a full and realistic measure of reality. This means making a concrete analysis of real conditions, finding ways to make connections between and across specific movements—war and warming, peace and labor rights, queer freedom and human rights—and positing alternatives. We must seek ways to live sustainably, to stop the addiction to consumption and development and military power, to relentlessly press the egalitarian ideal of fair distribution of rights and wealth, and this means specifically opposing war and surveillance and caging in favor of more education, more health care, and social security for all. In these efforts the competing impulses and ideals that animate our history are on full display: rights and liberty and the pursuit of human freedom on one side, domination and conquest and repression on the other; education, health care, and some degree of economic security throughout life in close contention with war, surveillance, and containment.
We live in a time of empire resurrected and unapologetic, militarism proudly expanding and triumphant, war without justice and without end, growing disparities between the haves and the have-nots as economic dislocation wracks the world, white and male supremacy retrenched, basic rights and protections shredded, fear and superstition and the mobilization of scapegoating social formations based on bigotry and the threats of violence, and on and on. The powerful cannot rule in the old ways, ordinary people are unwilling to pursue solutions in the old ways, and a missing piece of the puzzle—a radical new vision and program—cries out to be discovered through action. We live as well at the eclipse of the American empire—Randy Newman sings that “The end of the empire is messy at best/and this one is ending/like all the rest.” The question of whether we will become a nation among nations and a people among peoples, or rather insist belligerently on our right to be the uber-nation and go out, then, in the proverbial blaze-of-glory is palpable, immediate and real. The trauma of contradictions that is America. All of this pushes us toward becoming authentic actors and active subjects in our own history.
And none of this, of course, is easy or automatic; all of it demands, in Gramsci’s famous dictum, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” We might harvest some hope now in the growth of opposition to war and occupation worldwide. Or we might be inspired by the growing reparations and prison abolition movements, or the rising immigrant rights movement that is re-framing the question of work and rights as well as the stirrings of working people everywhere on earth, or by queer people courageously pressing for full human recognition and rights. But mainly hope resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it’s also entirely unknowable.
History is always in the making, and we are—each and every one of us—works-in-progress. It’s up to us, for nothing is predetermined, and we are acting largely in the dark with our limited consciousness and our contingent capacities. This makes our moment both entirely hopeful if exquisitely treacherous and all the more urgent. And it brings me to the wild and wonderful, controversial and always-contested world of education.
In Brecht’s play Galileo the great astronomer sets forth into a world dominated by a mighty church and an authoritarian power: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declares recklessly. “Superstition and plague. But now the word is: since it is so, it does not remain so. For everything moves my friend.” Intoxicated with his own radical discoveries—he has seen more, become shockingly more aware—Galileo feels the earth shifting and finds himself propelled surprisingly toward revolution. “It was always said that the stars were fastened to a crystal vault so they could not fall,” he says. “Now we have taken heart and let them float in the air, without support … they are embarked on a great voyage—like us who are also without support and embarked on a great voyage.”
Here Galileo is raising the stakes and taking on the establishment in the realm of its own authority—it strikes back fiercely. Forced to renounce his life’s work under the pressure of the Inquisition he denounces what he knows to be true, and is welcomed back into the church and the ranks of the faithful, but exiled from humanity—by his own word. At this point a former student confronts Galileo in the street, saying, “Many on all sides followed you with their ears and their eyes believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching—in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”
The right to think at all, which is in dispute—the right to pursue an inquiry into uncharted spaces, the right to challenge the church and its orthodoxy with argument and evidence in the public square. The right to think—this is the heart of education which, at its best, rests on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation, knowledge and human freedom. We want to know more, to see more, to experience more in order to do more—to be more competent and powerful and capable in our projects and our pursuits, to be more astute and aware, more fully engaged in the world we inherit and that we are simultaneously destined to change.
Education in a democracy must be considered distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, and the distinction matters. After all, school leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia are all agreed that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters. But in a democracy there is something more: the attempt to develop in students and teachers alike the ability to think for themselves, to decide what is black and what is white, what’s false and what’s true. Teaching in a democracy is geared toward participation and engagement, and it’s based on a common faith: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force capable of asking. Who in the world am I? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed?
Education in a democracy is characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing—it’s about opening doors, opening minds, inviting students to become more capable and powerful actors and choice-makers as they forge their own pathways into a wider world. But much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested bits of information. A fundamental choice and challenge for teachers, then, is this: to acquiesce to the machinery of control, or to take a stand with our students in a search for meaning and a journey of transformation. To be a prison guard or an educator. To teach obedience and conformity, or to teach its polar opposite: initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to your full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education as the practice of freedom.
School has always been and will always be contested space—what should be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom?—and at bottom the struggle is over the essential questions. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to construct a meaningful, purposeful, and valuable life in the world, here and now? What demands does freedom make?
The education we are accustomed to is often little more than a caricature—it is not authentically or primarily about full human development. Why, for example, is education thought of as only kindergarten through 12th grade, or kindergarten through university? Why does education occur only early in life? Why is there a point in our lives when we feel we no longer need education? Why is there a hierarchy of teacher over student? Why are there grades and grade levels? Why is there attendance? Why is being on time so valuable? Why is education separate from production?
Schools in a democracy resist the over-specialization of human activity—the separation of the intellectual from the manual, the head from the hand, the heart and the head, the creative and the functional—as a distortion, and build upon the unity of human beings, a unity based both upon recognition of differences as well as consciousness of interdependence. People are different—distinct capacities, unique needs—and we are, at the same time, entirely connected. The knowledge we lack includes an acknowledgment of the reality of our wild diversity—something that just is—and at the same time an acceptance of our deep connectedness. The knowledge we desperately need is a knowledge based upon full human recognition, upon unity and solidarity. The goal of democratic schools, then, is the mobilization of intelligence and creativity and initiative and work of all people in all directions.
Educators, students, citizens, and activists must press in this period for a new kind of education based on the principle that the fullest development of all will be the condition for the full development of each. This new education advocates an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served. All children and youth, regardless of economic circumstance, must have full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers, and assessment must be in the service of student learning and teacher effectiveness. K-16 education is an urgent priority and a fundamental human right.
We might try to create open spaces in our schools and our various communities where we expect fresh and starting winds to blow, unaccustomed winds that are sure to electrify and confound and fascinate us. Winds that tell us we are alive. We begin, then, by throwing open the windows. In this corner of this place—in this open space we are constructing together—people will begin to experience themselves as powerful authors of their own narratives, luminous actors in their own dramas, the essential creators of their own lives. They will find ways to articulate their own desires and demands and questions. In this space everyone will live in search of rather than in accordance with or in accommodation to. This is the key to a democratic future.
Bill Ayers (http://billayers.org) is Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of several books on education and politics, including: To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher (soon in 3rd ed.), Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Actvist (2001, re-released Nov. 2008 by Beacon), Race Course: Against White Supremacy (co-author, out Dec. 2008 from Third World Press), City Kids/City Teachers and City Kids/City Teachers (New Press, 2008), Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice (2004), and Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (2004).
AMIRI BARAKA
“Forward is Where We Have to Go”
What the young people with the signs in St. Petersburg said to Barack Obama—“You’re undermining the (Black) Revolution”—is merely one more example of how confused and misdirected too many who style themselves “revolutionary” have become. For one thing, it is certain that these folk do not even understand what revolution is. I would guess they are more of the tiny throng captivated by anarchism and infantile leftism who think revolution means standing on the sidelines hurling insults at the people who they think are their enemies.
If you want to stand around with signs of some significant show of political clarity, they should at least be aimed at the crypto fascist John McCain. To not even be able to identify who the main enemy is at any given stage of struggle is patently non-revolutionary. To think that Obama is the principle target of our struggle is, at best, infantile and anarchist. At worst, it could be pro-McCain.
If we go back to basics, revolution is the seizure of power. The aim of revolutionaries, at most stages of struggle, is the seizure of power. To picket Obama is to move to seize power for McCain.
What is also not understood is the tortuous path of revolutionary struggle. Obama, along with quite a few other “post ‘60s” developments is still the product and direct result of the turbulent Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements of the ‘60s. Without Dr. King, Montgomery, Malcolm X, Robert Williams, Rosa Parks, CORE, the Freedom Riders, the Black Panthers, SNCC and CAP there could be no Barack Obama. Without those bloody struggles against black national oppression, racism, discrimination and segregation, there could be no Obama candidacy, or certainly not of this magnitude.
Jesse Jackson’s two runs for president were admirable, and yes, they were part of the sledgehammer of black politics from the 50’s through the 80’s. And just as that force created the visible use of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice as negro “buttons” within the rightwing establishment of US bourgeois politics, none of that was possible without the black movement itself, as contradictory as that might seem. The internationally perceived racial conflict in the United States was the most glaring contradiction to US claims to being the almighty white angel of world politics.
The colored secretaries of state provided some of the cool out necessary not only to sublimate that image but to foist on this world of colored people a confusing tactic, so that when either secretary of state hopped out of a plane somewhere in this mostly colored world, friends and righteous enemies would be startled by who was carrying the message.
So now that it’s come all the way to the “top” of US government, there is a need for another, Yeh! black, face to cool out the ugliness the last twenty some years have mashed upon the world. We might not agree with the intention of this playacting, but at the same time we must recognize the forces that make it necessary. Recognize those forces, because we are a large part of them. And with that recognition must come the understanding of what the next step in this protracted struggle to ultimately eliminate imperialism and monopoly capitalism is: which are the base of continuing national oppression, racism, gender oppression, and anti-democratic hegemony anywhere in the world.
The very negative side of the “post-racist” line that Obama runs is that the die is cast for nitwits to say that racism is done and gone and that if you still in the ghetto or still don’t have a job, it’s on you. Obama’s best intention is that there is the making of a post racist coalition that can provide the muscle for his campaign and victory in the election. But reality—the cops, the jails, the unemployment figures—puts all that down every day.
Still, it is a very pimpable figment. A New York Times recent cover story—“Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”—is a stinking example of its pimpablity. One obvious answer to that is “Only if Obama is the End of White Politics.” One could hope that an Obama victory would signal an incremental leap in the direction of more democratic allowances for highly skilled operatives within the system, which is what Obama certainly is. But “post-racist”? Gimme me a break.
Black politics will only disappear when the black majority disappears, and even the wish fulfillment of New York Times “liberals” can never achieve this, nor the creepy self hatred of those incognegroes the Times wants to anoint as “post-black.” Still the question of Obama’s candidacy is a quite different consideration. As I have said in print and in the flesh at many forums, the foundation of Obama’s successful candidacy is his 90 percent support from the Afro-American people, a fact that I’m sure he understands. Obama also understands that it is the rest of the American people he must reach out to, no matter how his attempts to do this are questioned, even by black people. After all, 90 percent of 12 percent is not enough to win the presidency.
The so called militants, black and white, simply fail to understand that the logic and strength of Obama’s candidacy is the 21st century manifestation of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements. Jesse Jackson’s two impressive candidacies were also part of that movement. Not to accept both these phenomena as positive aspects and results of our collective struggle is to lack “true self consciousness.”
The real question now is what the next step should be, what the key link in that chain of progressive struggle is that if grasped will hoist the whole of us incrementally to the next level of unity and struggle? We cannot go backward or even contemplate it. A revolutionary must first find out what it is the people want, what they need. Unfortunately, for some, the definition of revolution is to construct some elitist cultural nationalist, religious or infantile leftist position, the “further out” the better, so they may claim, since few others will get down with that, that they must be the most revolutionary of all. Too often this is just a means of hiding out from the real work of educating and organizing and settling for being the hippest chump in the closet.
What we must be aiming for at the present level of US politics is a people’s or popular democracy, rather than the dictatorship of wealth that exists today. That struggle must include replacing the monopoly capitalist-imperialist domination of US politics at every level with a united front, which should be led by the working class in alliance with farmers, the progressive petty bourgeoisie, oppressed nationalities and progressive national bourgeoisie: in other words, the loose Obama coalition, as it exists now.
For the Afro-American people a national united front, democratic assembly, would be a huge step in the right direction, as what was attempted by the Convention Movement of the 19th century, the National Negro Congress in the 1940’s and the Gary Convention in 1972. It is this kind of organized force that would be powerful enough to maintain the correct orientation of any national coalition of multinational forces to win this election and help steer the ship of state.
The fiercest opponents to such a victorious coalition are the racist right and the juvenile delinquent left some of whom are quite rightist and even some quite racist; e.g., how can Nader put Obama down for “sounding white”? What does “white” sound like, after all? And how come Nader don’t sound like that?
Ultimately this political period will be characterized by what kind of political force blacks and progressive Americans can put together to secure Obama’s election and push him ever to the Left. Hubert Harrison, the black socialist, wrote in the New York Call in 1911: “politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea. The presence of the Negro puts our democracy to the proof and reveals the falsity of it…True democracy and equality implies a revolution …startling even to think of.” So the question of “Black Politics” must be inextricably bound to progressive politics in this country and just as we fought as black people and with progressive allies of many nationalities even to vote, or for that matter, to drink out of public drinking fountains or ride anywhere in a bus, so it is this same “Black Politics” that will help us tackle our current national problems. Black politics in its most progressive meaning is the struggle for a people’s democracy here in the United States. This is what the Obama campaign asserts boldly. We must see that it continues to do so right into the Oval Office and beyond.
Amiri Baraka is an internationally acclaimed poet, playwright, political activist, and the former Poet Laureate of New Jersey. He is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, including Blues People: Negro Music in White America, (1963), The Dutchman (1964), Black Magic, poems (1969), and Somebody Blew Up America (2001).
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