No one for whom a critical, nationwide issue is personally real will demand guaranteed success in advance before even trying to address it: That is not a realistic demand to make under the best of circumstances, and not something people who can't avoid the issue have the luxury of demanding. Only someone not directly affected by the issue feels that's a reasonable expectation, because from their perspective they're being asked to do a favor for some other group they only idly care about rather than stand up for something fundamental to themselves. They will rouse themselves from their comfortable, self-satisfied stupor if and only if you can guarantee victory in advance and prove that there is no practical alternative but to do the right thing. Only by overcoming that self-involvement were we able to create the Civil Rights-oriented Democratic coalition that has held us fast through thick and thin as a Party, and if we prove that no longer compelling to us, we will rationalize ourselves into a state of irrelevance and fecklessness that makes the Bush era seem like our Golden Age.
Take a mental trip back to the 1950s and 1960s, but imagine that you are your current age back then, and that you occupy your current disposition relative to status quo politics: That in your lifetime, you faced bitter disappointment and disillusionment with the Democratic Party because FDR sold out to the industrialists with a bunch of half-measures, that (from your perspective) Harry Truman turned out to be a warmonger who accelerated rather than decommissioned the military-industrial complex after WW2, that Kennedy was a centrist tool for running to the right of Nixon on foreign policy and pushing tax cuts, etc. etc. You've ranted and raved, you've published angry pamphlets and manifestoes, you've attended lectures and read books by the leading left-wing lights of the day, but always politics betrays you. At some point you got used to the idea that you're powerless, and resented the hell out of anyone who suggests otherwise because it carries the implicit accusation of negligence.
All your rallies and organizing appear to have led nowhere but to this complacent, militaristic, bourgeois America run by corporations and cavalierly headed toward nuclear Armageddon. You've been followed by Feds, had meetings busted up by cops and corporate thugs, seen people dragged in front of HUAC witch-hunts by Democrats and forced to defend their opinions as if they were criminals for having them, watched labor unions you supported hijacked by gangsters, and seen a new generation of the Left come on the scene who just seems to think that defying trivial social conventions is the same thing as having ideas. In other words, you're a cynical, curmudgeonly bastard selectively soured by experience who has failed to learn the opposite lesson from the multitude of positive developments around you.
And then you hear about a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama by black people tired of being treated like garbage by the drivers and white passengers. "Eh, that's not going anywhere," you think dismissively. Sure, you support the sentiment involved: What self-respecting white leftist of privileged economic background would not prefer to think of themselves as enlightened on the subject? But come on, when had people of color ever successfully stood up to the white establishment in Dixie? It had never happened, and never would happen - at least until The Revolution that you idly imagine being inevitable. The people waging the boycott were to be commended, but their actions are, you're sure, utterly naive, and the only possible outcome would be they all end up dead or rotting in prison. You grew up in the 1910s, so you still think the South is one giant 24/7 Klan rally: In fact, you're actually sad to hear about the boycott, knowing as you do how it must inevitably end.
Some of the people you know want you to help send money to the boycotters, and you pity their naivete. Poor fools - don't they know the only thing that money would end up being used for is funerals? You remember the white race riots of the 1920s, and just can't imagine anything being fundamentally different today. There are real, credible, serious uses for that money: Like helping the poor Cuban peasant farmers in their righteous struggle against the Batista regime. Cuba, now there was a place some positive change might happen soon, where the common people were finally asserting themselves.
You ask your friends how exactly the boycotters expect to win with an all-white government, all-white police force, all-white bus management, all-white juries and judges, and a thoroughly segregated society with centuries of hatred against blacks. They don't really have an answer other than, "It has to be done. A stand has to be taken. The first step to changing things is refusing to support the status quo." You laugh and wave them off - you like your friends, but sometimes they're such pie-in-the-sky nincompoops. You're certain that you know all there is to know about what America is capable of, and lions and zebras would sit down together for dinner and tea before Montgomery, Alabama would so much as integrate its cemeteries, let alone buses.
The 20-year-old version of you would spit on the pathetic, pusillanimous, no-imagination-having carcass you've become, but what did that idiot know? He actually tried to change things. Unfortunately, you're too far into the shadows to know that your earlier self succeeded, so you can't imagine that anyone else can. You don't see the shining new universities, brand new roads, electrified cities, and educated and well-fed nation your younger self helped build from the podunk shithole of a vestigial 19th century society you inherited. All you see is all the fantasies that didn't come true, the rhetoric that never became accepted religion, and the lingering fact that bad and foolish people will always be around to ignore wisdom and fuck up the best laid plans.
But despite your confident expectation of failure, if not sadomasochistic desire to see your past disappointments reenacted with new actors, the boycott goes on without any sort of Rosewood massacre scenario playing out. In fact, it gains steam, and people from outside the region are supporting it. So your friends come to you again and ask you to contribute money to the cause, and maybe join them in organizing on behalf of it. But you repeat your earlier arguments, now tinged with a slight edge of defensiveness: "It doesn't matter how long the boycott goes on - how is refusing to ride a bus going to change centuries of hate, segregation, and oppression? Ride a bus or don't ride it, the people making the decisions are still segregationists. And even if they succeeded, so what? Then everything but the buses in one town would still be segregated." They say again, "It's a beginning," and once again you dismiss them.
So they ask you what your plan would be to end to segregation in general. "Simple. Elect black leaders to the local and state governments and then change the laws." But...how are they supposed to do that if black people are prevented from voting? "Elect white people who will change the laws to let more black people vote." And you think racist white mobs who won't tolerate black voters would tolerate a white politician trying to let them vote? "Nope." So...what the hell is your solution??? "Armed struggle." By now your friends are starting to think you're full of shit, because in fact you are at this point. They start to realize that the only approaches you'll consider are things that either can't happen - changing segregation within the rules of segregation - or things so radical they simply won't happen, either of which completely lets you off the hook from participating in any meaningful way.
So there's no option between going along with the status quo and bloody revolution? There's no civil disobedience option where people confront and defy segregation without attacking society as a whole? "What would that accomplish," you ask. "The system would just ignore, mock, and violently suppress peaceful disobedience. Get with reality." So instead of participating in the boycott, you spend your time and money fighting to change the curriculum at your local university to offer more material on anarcho-syndicalism, passing out pamphlets about how the Mayor of your city is in cahoots with the major businesses of your city (because that's not obvious), and raising awareness about the plight of the peasant farmers of Whereverthefuck. Absolutely no one gives a shit about what you're doing, and that's how you like it - that's what's comfortable and familiar to you, in your decrepit, end-stage degeneration from progressive activist into ideological taxidermist.
When you hear that the boycott succeeded, you can't hide your true reaction: Not elation, not wonder at the possibilities it signifies - you're irritated. Damn irritated. How dare these people defy centuries of hate and violence by simply not riding a bus and have the unmitigated gall to win? Didn't they know that it was futile? Clearly someone had not gotten the memo about the Facts of Life as written by you. Things are not as you remember them, and now the world is confusing. People are building on the achievements you've forgotten with achievements you refused to even acknowledge as possible, and for a brief moment you're confronted, eyes wide open, with the fact that you've made yourself irrelevant. But because joining the flow of life would be too hard, you just retreat further into that irrelevance.
"All well and good," you say, "but this doesn't really change anything. Segregation is still in force, for all intents and purposes." You're right about the second part, but rather than being a motivational fact as it is for your friends, for you it's a comforting rationalization for why you ignored and refused to participate in the boycott, and now refuse to participate in what follows from it. As a few years pass, you hear that activists are sitting in at lunch counters; that they're marching in the streets; that Northern college students are riding into the Deep South to help black people register to vote. And you tell yourself, with a growing hint of defensive hysteria, that it's all naive nonsense. "How does any of that actually end segregation? You can march and defy all you want, but they'll just keep arresting you." You demand to know the specific plan that would translate from these actions to equality in the South, and still your friends try patiently to explain, "It's a beginning, not an end." Still you just...don't...get it.
In your cynical world, power is a commodity that must be given by someone else or else seized by force. In the world of these Civil Rights activists, power is already inherent in the people, and must simply be asserted to be realized. They try to explain it to you, but it just...does...not...compute. You are a lost cause, and any cause that isn't just as lost is one you can't support. So while they're sitting at lunch counters and asserting their rights, you're ranting about the outrage that is the US Space Program that is "taking food from the mouths of children to put soldiers on the Moon," or whatever nonsensical way you choose to interpret it - to the yawns and askance stares of the people you talk to outside your little world, and even many inside it.
Still your friends come to you hoping to get support for the Civil Rights movement, and say "Look at this amazing community we've created. Look at these relationships we've fostered. Look at the rights we've asserted, the global movements we've inspired, the optimism we've engendered, the values our actions represent. Look at the political coalition we've forged." And still you'll have none of it. "Woop-dee-doo. Conservatives will fight back, and this will all fall apart." So when MLK is assassinated, you are sad, but for you it merely confirms everything you've believed all along, as do the riots and angry rhetoric that follow. And yet the violence passes, while the community and values of Civil Rights remains and grows.
But if there were people like this imaginary, chronologically-backdated you during the Civil Rights era, they're not remembered - people who live in denial of their own power to change things never are, as are people whose vision of "change" is parochial and self-centered to the point of singularity. Those who dismiss the exercise of that power as naive and transient merely expose themselves as already dead long before they're in the ground, and if anyone bothers to include them in footnotes to the histories of the movements they dismiss, no one reads or recalls them. No one remembers the typos in the story of life.
So, seeing the reaction - or more properly, lack of reaction - to the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court case striking down the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, I have to ask: How much of the Democratic Party and the liberal community in general is now like the person described above? On a website that bills itself as representing the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, how worried should we be that the consensus is "Do more of what we're already doing" within the status quo rather than confronting it more actively, in the sense of the Civil Rights movement? It seems painfully obvious that this attitude transplanted backward to that era would have favored working within the framework of segregation to try to end it rather than civil disobedience, while the angrier elements would simply dismiss such disobedience as a pathetic half-measure that would change nothing: Basically the position taken by the example character, but as a prevailing opinion, with a worsening status quo being the obvious result.
You tell me: Should the Civil Rights movement have focused exclusively on helping people pay poll taxes, pass rigged literacy tests, and work within the framework of segregation to change things, or should they have done exactly what they did and confronted the system directly through disobedience? If the answer is the latter, how is the answer to the Shelby case the former now that the Supreme Court has cleared the way for states to reimpose abusive laws on voting simply to limit the minority vote and maximize the likelihood of Republican victory?
The reason the Civil Rights movement had to engage in civil disobedience was because the system was rigged: Black people were prevented from voting, so they couldn't elect people who would change the laws - it was simply not practical, and not rational to pretend as if they could desegregate the South by operating under its status quo, and people who dismissed Civil Rights protests as impractical or irrational were thus engaging in doublethink. Justice could not be achieved under the status quo, and violent revolution would have just created more victims, so really there was no alternative but civil disobedience: It was an absolute and singular necessity.
Demanding that people guarantee victory before they do what's necessary is not sane, and not something anyone who personally experiences the necessity would do. It's the act of a privileged person who only vainly considers themselves progressive, but is basically conservative where the subject is other people's necessities. If the boat is cap-sizing, do you demand that passengers come up with a long-term survival plan before disembarking? If the house is on fire, is your first move to consult your insurance policy for the most economical approach to saving it? If someone wandered out of the woods gaunt and hungry, are you going to make them fill out a diet plan and write an essay about how they intend to avoid obesity before giving them some food? The only people who would are those for whom the urgency involved is purely abstract, so it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Daily Kos is probably a lot whiter and more economically privileged than America in general. Just look at this reaction to the VRA ruling:
I try not to go around picking fights or calling people names but sometimes you just have to call a racist a racist, or a fucking idiot a fucking idiot.
If you think interfering in the right of minorities to vote is not a big fucking deal here in the 'land of the free,' you are a major bonehead. It flies in the face of everything we have stood for as a people for over two-hundred years.
Actually, no one said that, and if someone had, it would probably end up being Hidden as an inflammatory attack - I edited it from something
OPOL said about the NSA that got about 860 Recs. This is the real quote, in a diary full of similar content (including the title):
I try not to go around picking fights or calling people names but sometimes you just have to call a war criminal a war criminal, a repressive regime a repressive regime or a fucking idiot a fucking idiot.
If you think massive, intrusive government surveillance is not a big fucking deal here in the 'land of the free,' you are a major bonehead. It flies in the face of everything we have stood for as a people for over two-hundred years.
You see, communications privacy is a lot more urgent as an issue to the demographics of Daily Kos than voting rights. The fact that no issue you can possibly care about will ever advance if Republicans can simply pick their own electorate doesn't seem to compute. But I'm sure there have been equally popular, equally vehement diaries about voting rights, right?
Right? Well, the
highest-Recced diary about the VRA ruling certainly wasn't ignored - it had 478 Recs - and just because it was more measured in tone shouldn't be used to indicate a less vehement response, I'm sure:
We're not standing for it. Not even a little bit. Not only has the GOP just lost the minority vote - FOREVER - they've really, REALLY Pissed Us Off.
Yes. Yes, they did. To prove it, the
highest-rated VRA diary this month had about a third as many Recs as the above, and mostly concerned judicial power over NSA spying. We're really holding the GOP's and the Supreme Court's feet to the fire over this, if by fire you mean room temperature pillow. And whenever the subject comes up of
impeaching the Supreme Court majority responsible for such nauseating acts of Orwellian judicial tyranny as Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and now Shelby County v. Holder, the spam flies fast and hard - sophomoric, circular logic excuses for hewing to the status quo that only our hypothetical curmudgeon from above would find convincing or even rational.
But you couldn't get impeachment passed! You couldn't get desegregation passed in 1955. Funny how that didn't stop anyone who was serious about confronting it from trying, and stepping outside the status quo to do so. Once again, it's a beginning, not an end. You have to stand up before you can walk forward. People overly concerned with endings rather than seeing things as a process are just exposing themselves as exhausted, and showing the lack of vital creative energy necessary in a progressive movement. It's also inconsistent because very little of our agenda would pass any likely Congress under the status quo, and yet we're "permitted" by social convention to continue advocating that agenda because it's not outside the normal process.
It requires no exertion of will or courage, no trailblazing of new politics to fill out an issue checklist - but impeaching Supreme Court Justices would be dangerous if it got going. It would be skeery. It would open up possibilities, both positive and negative, and suddenly people would not be entirely certain of where they stand. The total certainty of an ongoing downward trajectory guaranteed by a rigged system with a conservative Supreme Court majority at its nexus rewriting the Constitution for the benefit of the GOP would be replaced by a more dynamic and unstable situation. Suddenly The People would be playing a heretofore unprecedented role in their own government, and the comforting absoluteness of guaranteed decline into oligarchy and despotism would be supplanted by the tumult and anxiety of a more perfect Union - a state closer to the democratic society we all claim to want, but so few of us seem willing to work towards. I was kind of in awe of how succinctly the following comment by Moravan sums up what I've been seeing:
This is trolling: Propose a daring solution that seeks to address an irrefutable plank of the modern left - protection of voting rights - and then watch people squirm. It reminds me of a certain proposal to enlist piss and vinegar neocons.
And that's basically the long and short of it: We're dealing with chickenhawkery here. Folks are screaming totalitarianism, police statism, Nazi Nazi Nazi! on a subject as far removed from everyday existence as the mirroring of internet traffic by intelligence agencies...but when the subject is a lawless and abusive Supreme Court majority waging war on voting rights, and you suggest taking steps outside the status quo that are nonetheless fully legal and provided for under the Constitution, and suddenly the tone changes 180 degrees: It's as if you're talking to a Byzantine Empire court functionary so wrapped up in mechanistic procedure and authoritarian circular logic that their brain goes TILT when you suggest a move that's perpendicular to banal politics.
They'll say it's just your opinion that someone is stomping on your face, so you have no justification to stand up against it. They'll say it's too radical to work and too dangerous to try because it might work. They'll say judges are above the law because they interpret the law, so trying to hold them to the law would itself be lawless. Basically, they'll say anything to reach the conclusion that rationalizes passive acceptance of the dismal fate they've become comfortable with believing in, because saying "Yes" to the question "Will you stand up?" is too frightening and carries too many confusing possibilities. Better the illogic of nonsensical excuses than the insecurity of a future you define by your decisions.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!
-Jabberwocky
The fact is we are once again in a rigged system because of this Court majority: One where any legislation we pass, any election we pursue, and any right we would exercise as individual citizens is subject to constant, capricious, and arbitrary judicial attack founded not in law but in partisan Republican calculation, and the attacks will only become more brazen while these same people dominate the Court. When a necessity presents itself like that of confronting the present Supreme Court majority, your options are very simple: Acknowledge it and
step outside the status quo, or choose irrelevancy.
I assume there must have been Southern white people at some point prior to the Civil Rights era who were moral enough to help black people register to vote, help them pay the poll taxes, speak on their behalf to the officials - at least a few of them, right? But no one remembers them if they ever existed, because they never stood up to the real problem - they accepted things as they were and acted as if the fundamental dignity of their fellow human beings were a matter of their voluntary charity. Foolish people who ignore the reality of a rigged system in order to make themselves feel better don't deserve a place in history, and so they rarely get one unless as cautionary tales.
So if you want, you can be that guy whose most profound response to Shelby v. Holder will be going to Jim Crow 2.0 areas in 2014, 2016, and every election year afterward trying to help minority voters jump the ever-increasing number of hurdles put in their way or enabled by this Court. Then you can be that guy who whines when it's not enough to stop Republicans from stealing the result, bemoans cruel fate and the sorry state of America while totally dismissing any attempt to do anything about it, then shrugs and says "Well, better luck next time!" You can be the guy who gives funny looks to people who suggest going farther than that, and becomes snide and contemptuous when they take your hint that real activism is socially unacceptable. You can be everything that's loathsome and useless about the centrist, collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party, or you can be one of the people whose actions renew and enliven this country on a daily basis.
Shit or get off the pot, is what I'm saying. This is not "my" issue that I'm asking you to support as a favor to me; it's not a black issue for the white people who overwhelmingly comprise Daily Kos to give lip service so we can call ourselves fair and then promptly ignore it; and it's not an issue to be put off until we're a few months away from an election as if it were just some technical matter of logistics that can or should be overcome merely by putting more effort into playing the rigged game. This is either your issue or you have none, because this Supreme Court majority is a big problem that only gets harder to deal with the deeper their phalanx of false case law becomes in order to impose Republican majorities on the American.
In case you've missed the last 13 years of history, this majority is seeking to guarantee its own perpetuation by maximizing Republican electoral prospects, so it will not just go away: Every interference in the electoral process on behalf of the GOP increases the number of their offices on both the state and federal levels, the amount of time they spend in those offices, and the amount of power they wield while in office. Because of this Court, we are saddled with an unelected Republican House majority hell-bent on treasonous destruction of the American economy so long as a Democrat is in the White House.
The American people did not choose for John Boehner or any Republican to rule the House of Representatives in 2012 - more of us voted against them than for. But because of judicial tyranny selectively upholding naked and frequently racist GOP gerrymandering, that's the situation we face. Not to mention the utter corruption imposed by Citizens United, telling us that not only may we not elect Democrats, but if we do, it will be politically impossible for them to pursue economically progressive positions because the full weight and force of the corporate economy would come crashing down on them if their constituency is not rock-solid. And guess what? They're not done. They'll go as far as they have to. Oh, and BTW, you might be interested to know the key reason why Democrats didn't go after single-payer healthcare in 2009 even as a bargaining tactic: This Court would have been guaranteed to strike it down, so Republicans would never consider it a realistic threat to bargain down from. But I suppose it's more convenient to just think the Party is corrupt than admit you've been ignoring the crux of the problem.
We had made inroads against corruption in this country with McCain-Feingold, and they struck it down. We have made great strides toward diversity and plurality in our electorate, so they've attacked the federal system that guarantees it. Every time we've made salients into Republican power, they're rewritten the law to compensate. The truth is if we had had Al Gore in the White House, and an intact system of campaign finance regulations, and if they upheld American democracy by striking down naked racial gerrymandering, we would indeed have the permanent Democratic majority we thought had been achieved in 2008 - because in fact we did achieve it, but the Supreme Court rewrote the law again, and again, and again with every step forward we've made to take us two steps back. Our core issues are overwhelmingly supported by the American people, but the process through which leaders are chosen has been so engineered by these criminals that Washington in no way resembles the nation politically.
Now when the fuck are you going to admit that there is no sustainable way forward without bringing this Court to heel? Which future decade of dystopian Republican domination will finally convince you, since the Bush era that three of the current majority gave us wasn't enough, nor the last two years of unelected Republican obstruction? How far down the rabbit-hole of Undemocracy must this Court throw us before you decide that it's worth your precious time to do something that isn't on your little civic jobsworth checklist? If you haven't signed the SCOTUS impeachment petition, please do so. If you have, please spread the word and think of ways that you can pursue the same objectives through your own initiative.
Otherwise, just stamp "5-4" on your forehead, because that's the ratio by which your agenda will always end and its polar opposites be affirmed - if not greater. Why would minorities even continue to vote for Democrats if we won't even deviate from the script long enough to stand up for their basic rights against five petty oligarchs? Sooner or later it's not worth the effort to defend a Party that won't even defend itself, let alone your rights, and believe it or not we are the Democratic Party - not the handful of people who hold elected office under our banner. So it's we who decide whether this Party will finally, after more than a decade of this shit, stand up to it and put this Court majority on notice that we no longer consider their continued presence on the Court amenable to the rule of law. Shit or get off the pot.