| Let me stress that in my skimming of comments about Obama on the DailyKos post linked to, above, for example, or on Open Left, there are also plenty of people who do "get it," who aren't particularly surprised by something like the FISA vote from Obama (see Bowers' recent post on the myth of 60 senators). But too many are.
Movements are Not Elections
In an earlier diary, I laid out the difference between what Obama has been doing, which is campaign organizing, and what local community organizing groups do. I argued that Obama is generating support for Obama, which is, frankly, his job.
He has not laid the groundwork for the emergence of a social movement to fight for specific social changes. His people are trained to go out and convert people to Obama. That's what campaign volunteers do. As far as I can tell, they really aren't learning very much that would prepare them to do more. In fact, their training seems likely to reinforce their support for Obama and lessen the likelihood that they will oppose him in the future, at least on the margins.
My point was not that people are not getting engaged that haven't been engaged, or that they are not learning to be leaders in some general sense, or that they haven't learned any organizing skills at all (they did learn how to do one-on-ones), or that they have been brainwashed, or that some, perhaps many, aren't likely to use this experience as a jumping-off point for more active engagement in the future. My point was that they are not being taught how to participate in or support the emergence of a real social movement. In some ways they seem actually to be learning the opposite-that electing a person is the same as being part of a movement.
And why should Obama act any differently? A "real" movement would likely to turn around and put pressure on him. And what person wants to create a group of powerful people who can threaten them?
Sure, it's nice to sit down and chat with folks. Listening sessions. Politicians are cool with listening sessions. But real pressure? In fact, at the same time as he talks about people power, he seems to be trying to centralize power under his thumb even more (e.g., bye bye Progressive Media USA ).
And why would Obama think he needs to be pressured? I mean, he's Obama. He already thinks he's on the right track. If he's not sure, well, he can hold some listening sessions. You don't have to imply some messianic complex, here. Would you do anything different if you were in his position?
Elections create the conditions for the possibility of social change. They are rarely the same as social change
Politicians are . . . Politicians
Yes, we could have gotten someone better than Obama. No argument about that. Although we could have gotten someone worse. But with few minor exceptions (Feingold?) the FISA vote simply proves that nearly all of the politicians in the Senate are . . . politicians.
Politicians fight to get elected. They think about how their actions may effect their electability and their future power. They constantly look for compromises and "I'll scratch you're back, you scratch mine" solutions. They live in a pressure cooker filled with people seeking to pressure them in multiple directions. The more power they have, the more pressure they experience, of all different kinds.
When "you" elect someone, you are one of a broad and diverse collection of folks that together got them more than 50% of the votes. You have not elected a platform. You have not elected a machine that can be programmed to do what you want. You have elected someone who has had to appeal to a broad range of voters to get into office. And if they have fought that hard to get into office, they likely want to stay there.
Let me say it again: The election of center-left presidents is almost certainly only the condition of the possibility of such shifts, which can only be produced by a complementary capacity to put significant, meaningful pressure on the politicians we can elect.
Obama is a Politician
He never said any different, as far as I can tell. Certainly his few past actions indicated this was the case (Lieberman, anyone?).
Furthermore, as Paul Rosenberg has pointed out again and again, he's a classic progressive in many ways. "Why can't we all get along?" Listening sessions . . . . Win-win solutions. . . . Deep structural social conflict is unnecessary if we can just sit down and hear each other out . . . .
No, of course he's not stupid. Clearly he's damn smart. I support him, myself. But he's not far enough away from these beliefs, either. They are clearly compelling ideas to him.
In his own classic progressive way, he's a politician. Look, if you are going to listen to everyone, and you are going to try to be elected by as many people as possible, you are going to need to compromise, compromise, compromise. Maybe Bobby Kennedy would have been different. Maybe not.
Bill Clinton and Welfare Reform
Bill Clinton's vote for the welfare reform bill is a perfect example of the difference between elections and movements. That bill eliminated welfare as an entitlement and created a lot of suffering that we will see more and more evidence of as the economy goes into the toilet. Again, I'm writing off the cuff, here, so feel free to correct me.
As I remember, Clinton didn't want to sign the bill. What center-left politician would? But there was too much support for it, too much chance that he wouldn't get elected if he didn't sign it. Everybody knew welfare as it was didn't work, although the Republican solution was like killing the patient to save it. The right wing had built a whole movement (that word again) around beating welfare down. And he believed that it was better to keep a Democrat in the White House than stand on principle.
And besides, if he signed the bill, a whole plank of the right wing movement would be eliminated. No more welfare queens. No more lazy black people in the inner city living off the sweat of good honest hard-working white people. The usual racist crap.
Was he wrong? A Republican president would have signed a worse bill. And it's possible that the loss of the "welfare" issue was the beginning of the end of the right wing juggernaut-I don't know enough to say.
To some extent, the welfare bill was our fault. If we could have generated significant pressure for him not to sign it. If we could have given him evidence that we had the power 1) to kick him out if he did, or 2) to make sure he still got elected if he didn't, then he probably wouldn't have signed the bill. Or we could have built the pressure to get him a better bill-however crappy it might still have been. But we couldn't. We were too weak.
This is what politicians mean, I think, if they say that they wish people could put more pressure on them.
Without a movement that had any significant power, Clinton the centrist politician signed the bill.
Movements
Movements are organized around long-term efforts to achieve particular social ends. They aim at social changes not just personnel changes.
Earlier in this series I talked about the difference between "organizing" and "mobilizing". Organizers try to build long-term power. Mobilizers put a lot of effort into a single change and then go home and take a nap when they are done.
A good example of mobilization was on NPR a couple of weeks ago. In India, many people revere cows. And lots of cows were dying because they were eating plastic bags. Those in defense of cows came up with the idea that if they mandated thicker bags, plastic scavengers would get enough money for picking them up that it would solve the problem. So they fought for a change in the law, celebrated victory, and went home to drink tea. And, of course, once they went home, everybody ignored the law and apparently even more cows are dying today.
Elections are a kind of mobilizing. You work like hell to get someone in office, but don't build any long-term power to hold the person accountable after they are elected. So they don't have to worry about you until the next election. And so the cows continue to die . . . .
Some great things may come of the Obama presidency. A couple significant bills, especially around unions, could lead to real shifts in the power structure of this nation. Hopefully this will happen whether there is any movement-building or not. (Of course, unions are one of the few examples of national structures with social power on the left in the country, however much it may have waned . . . .)
But if we don't help more people internalize this difference between electoral politics and movement politics, if we don't stop trying to find some messianic figure who will reject politics (Nader, anyone?) and make the social changes we want without us having to actually build the non-electoral structures to fight for them ourselves, we are in deep trouble.
We need Obama. Anyone who doesn't understand that has been living under a rock. But Obama, by himself, or Hillary, for that matter, will or would likely not be enough. Either could, in all likelihood, only be the condition of the possibility of deep, progressive social change.
I may be wrong, but I think many of us need to lower our expectations. It seems at least possible that overly high expectations of Obama may end up driving disappointed people out of politics-of both the movement and electoral kind. (Politics sucks, you can't fight city hall, etc.). Instead of getting disgusted, more of us should knowingly nod our heads. Yup, we knew he was a politician. (Sure, get angry too--I am.) But now what are we going to do so that he moves our way on the issues that are most important to us. (And we can't have everything, so what do we want the most?)
Electing Obama is the beginning, not the end.
How do we help people understand this fact on a broad scale?
Of course, this brings the challenge of doing movement building and electoral politics at the same time. One is hard enough by itself. But as long as we place hope in politicians, as long as we keep confusing elections with movements, we won't be struggling enough with the movement building challenge, itself.
[Note 1: I've played fast and loose with the terms "organizing" and "movements" here. They don't describe the same things. Organizing seeks to build organizations that can generate long-lasting power to support multiple issues. Movements are usually built around specific issues or sets of issues and are much vaguer collections of organizations, activists, etc. But these differences weren't so important for this diary. .]
[Note 2: I haven't made an effort to go dig up lots of electoral research. If you've got evidence that I'm totally off base, let me hear it.] |
