and intense but orderly work."
Also,
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.
The apprehension appears to exist among the supporters of the Democratic Party that our political fortunes are on the decline, and that the strident and belligerent opposition to our President's least public utterance or moderate political initiative must translate into defeat at the polls this fall. Rather than exchanging insults on this point, I wish
to draw some lessons from the political past as I have experienced and remember it, and give some unsolicited advice about "What is to be Done."
During the 2008 campaign I, like many of my fellow citizens who came of age in the 1960s, felt that we were, at long last, on the verge of recovering the victories that were placed beyond our grasp in 1968 by the wreckage of political assassinations and the internal Democratic Party dissension which pitted the likes of Mayor Richard Daley & his machine against the enthusiastic young activists who wanted to end the Vietnam War and who had largely cut their teeth in the civil rights movement. We saw quite clearly that the act of electing a Black person, even a Lincoln-esque moderate balancer like Barack Obama, would represent a fundamentally radical step in Amercia's political progress, and would, naturally, stir up a firestorm of racial resentment and outrage the likes of which had not been seen in over a century and a half (roughly speaking). Consequently, we should be neither surprised nor dismayed to find this to be the case today; similar things have been said before:
But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"
The conditions have changed considerably since 1861; there is no gigantic organized violent resistance to the Federal Government, and there will be none successfully begun. The most we have to fear are sporadic acts of intimidation, punctuated by violence - nothing beyond our ability to confront and control. In short, there are no grounds for panic, and our political system remains on its firm foundation, "that there can be no appeal from the ballot to the bullet". Still, our ruling political coalition, which has just succeeded in the radical act of electing a Black President, and now has passed a long-overdue reform of our health care system, is still in a very retrograde movement on several fronts, forcing various groups that are part of the alliance into a defensive posture.
The fight for women's reproductive freedom is far from over; murder of health care providers is matched up with political compromises within our own Party that undermine its commitment to full access to reproductive choice for all women, not just the wealthy or geographically fortunate. Racial bias, while decried on all sides with lip service, remains a powerful recruitment tool and motivator for the politcal opposition. Economic privilege, coupled with access to political power by means of wealth alone, continues to grind the faces of the working class with ever-increasing impoverishment and the daily slaughter of workers in unsafe conditions of employment. And the 600 pound gorilla of the War on Drugs remains firmly on the backs of American society, including, most unjustly, the inner circles of the Democratic Party, which hasn't elected a national candidate to office without the votes and support of marijuana smokers since the election of Jimmy Carter, but where even a self-styled feminist like California Senator Barbara Boxer thinks that she can win re-election while opposing the ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in her State. What a short-sighted stance! Our nation is learning what it would have been like if the Prohibition of Alcohol, instead of being called off after a dozen years, had endured for decade affter decade, in an ever widening spiral of repression, imprisonment, and violent turf wars between criminal gangs and quasi-criminal law enforcement agencies.
When one major faction of the Democratic Party consistently links hands with the most reactionary elements of American society to attack and disempower a major block of the Party's supporters, election after election, why should they be surprised to find themselves out on an island, with the water rising, and no help in sight? How many "feminist" Democratic politicians have climbed the political ladder by "making their bones" as drug prosecutors? I defy anyone to find an opponent of the War on Drugs who doesn't support women's reproductive choice - but the "feminists" who will speak respectfully of marijuana users are few and far between. The attacks on George McGovern's 1972 campaign as the "Party of Acid, Amnesty and Abortion" still work today to divide us from each other, and will render any Democratic political victories brief and illusory, unless we take seriously to heart that "a house divided against itself cannot stand."
I do not advocate defeating any Democrat for not supporting women's reproductive choice, or not supporting an end to the War on Drugs, but I urgently request that the supporters of each of these causes act with due regard for the both of these issues, and respect each other's principal and principled agendas. Let us link hands in a common cause, and cease to kow-tow to the social arsonists of the reactionary right, that seek to end liberties that are common to all of us. No politician today can claim, with any credibility, that the War on Drugs is working. Marijuana prohibition is at long last in its death throes. Do not miss the opportunity to be on the right side of history.
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.