“Transformative Politics” - A Lost Manuscript Shows the Fire Barack Obama Couldn’t Reveal on the Campaign Trail
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/opinion/obama-lost-book-manuscript.html
My synopsis — selected quotes from the above essay:
abolishing formal segregation was just the first stage of the battle for civil rights. Securing true equality now [demands] a campaign to overhaul the American economy and lift up workers of all races. Change at this scale required overwhelming public backing …
“We cannot talk about the democratic road to freedom,” [Bayard Rustin] said, “unless we are talking about building a majority movement.” Republicans and Democrats had been divided along economic lines since the New Deal, when working-class voters stampeded into the Democratic column. [But] backlash to the cultural upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s blew [the Roosevelt] coalition to smithereens.
Around the world, left-wing parties lost ground with the working class. The exodus had a distinctly racial cast in the United States, where blue-collar whites fled the Democratic Party in droves. Even as African American politicians started winning elections in substantial numbers for the first time since Reconstruction, Republican victories at the national level placed strict limits on what local officials could achieve ... despite the “important symbolic effect” of Black electoral victories, real change had remained out of reach. No single politician could reverse the global economic trends.
{What was needed was] a platform that appealed to both the values and the material interests of working people. That meant shifting away from race-based initiatives toward universal economic policies. … “Precisely because America is a racist society … we cannot realistically expect white America to make special concessions towards blacks over the long haul.” … Economics were a safer bet. Blue-collar workers of all races, Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher wrote, “understood in concrete ways the fact that America’s individualist mythology covers up a game that is fixed against them.” … Moderates scrambling for the middle ground were just as misguided, [they] argued, as antiracists implicitly pinning their hopes on a collective racial epiphany. Neither understood that bringing the conversation back to economics was the best way to beat the right ... drain[ing] the venom out of the culture wars, allowing Democrats to win back working-class voters who had been polarized into the G.O.P.
What does all this mean for Democrats? Although politicians and journalists like to say we’re confronting unprecedented threats to democracy, the party is facing the same basic problem that has bedeviled Democrats since the breakdown of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s. An electorate divided by culture isn’t going to deliver the votes that Democrats need to build a lasting majority.
The crisis of democracy, then, is really a problem of the Democratic coalition … Mr. Rustin’s vision — the same vision that once upon a time drew a young Barack Obama into politics — remains the best starting point for coming up with a truly democratic solution to the crisis of democracy.
Rebuilding the [1963] March on Washington coalition requires an all-out war against polarization. That larger project begins with a simple message: Democrats exist because the country belongs to all of us, not just the 1 percent. With this guiding principle in mind, everything else becomes easier — picking fights that focus the media spotlight on a game that’s rigged in favor of the rich; calling the bluff of right-wing populists who can’t stomach a capital-gains-tax hike; corralling activists in support of the needs of working people; and, ultimately, putting power back in the hands of ordinary Americans.
Historian Timothy Shenk’s NYTimes essay is far richer than these brief quotes I have selected here. I encourage you to read it completely. It is truly worth thinking about.
On a personal note, I was the oldest of four children. The culture wars of the mid-1960’s to early ‘70s (long hair, “Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll”, Woodstock, the anti-war movement) cleaved right between us. The sudden and profound cultural shift made me, a 1966 Viet Nam enlistee, incomprehensible to them, and they to me. While the anti-war movement was initially largely led by “entitled” college youth like them, like me many in America’s working class “did their patriotic duty” and went off to fight, resenting those privileged ones who, like Jane Fonda, distained (and accosted) them.
(Only later did I, like McNamara, come to recognize how misguided our Viet Nam policy was - but that is another story).
The cultural splits of the 1960’s have become even more pervasive over the decades since. It is unsurprising the Republican Party seized on them as a way to finally break apart the New Deal coalition, and has played the “culture wars” card ever since. What does surprise me is how strongly the culture wars red-button “identity” issues (Gun control, prayer in schools, abortion, LGBTQ - and now, anything that can be labeled “Critical Race Theory”) and America’s individualist mythology push working Americans to support those Republicans whose actual policies are strongly tilted to the elite, and against the economic interests of the bulk of Republican voters.
To twist James Carville’s famous formulation, “It’s the workers’ economic interests, stupid”. (With this guiding principle in mind, it’s up to us to help them see it). This is the antidote.
Until and unless we find a way to do an end-run around the “culture wars” that divide us, American democracy will continue to suffer grievously, and possibly collapse into authoritarianism as the illusory antidote to anarchy.
Rustin, Fisher and Obama point to the end-run we need, the path toward restoring our American democracy’s health and vibrancy.
For a well-documented discussion of how the GOP’s self-serving policies were deliberate, take a look at thomhartmann’s just-posted “How Long Will the GOP Continue to Shrink the Middle Class Rather than Grow It?”