"I am a progressive who gets things done," Hillary Clinton said in Thursday night’s debate. "The root of that word, ‘progressive,’ is progress."
Which begs the questions: What things must you “get done” to achieve progress? And when must you do them? What is the route of progress?
For centuries, in Europe and then in America and elsewhere, political progress has meant the slow, painful march towards universal rights, toward a civilization in which every adult — regardless of birth, wealth, or power — has the right to a vote that counts, the right to an equal say in the choices government makes.
But here in the United States that progress was halted, made irrelevant, perhaps reversed, by the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision in 2010. When those with the most money were allowed to buy candidates and to buy public opinion, 800 years of progress began to evaporate.
In Britain, the march toward political progress goes back at least to the Magna Carta in 1215, when barons won rights and protections from the king. Some men won more progress in the fifteenth century, when certain landholders were given the right to vote. But it was not until 1832 that even 20 percent of British men were granted the franchise, and it was not until after World War I that all British men could vote. Women over 30 were granted the vote at the same time. Women over 21 could vote by 1928 in Britain. Thus, it took Britons 700 years from the signing of Magna Carta to get universal suffrage.
In the early days of the United States, male property owners could vote, as could women in New Jersey and freed male slaves in four states. By the beginning of the Civil War, all white males could vote, regardless of wealth. Black men got the right in 1870. Black and white women could vote as of 1920. However, the rights of blacks were quickly curtailed by various laws in the South, and they didn’t truly get the full franchise until the Voting Rights act of 1965, almost 200 years after the Declaration of Independence. Today, conservatives are still attempting to roll back those voting rights, and succeeding in some states.
At each step of the way on the road to progress, the people who pushed for it were considered radicals, while conservatives of the era opposed it. Centrists tended to think that it was unwise for people to ask for quite so much just now. But, with pressure, progress was eventually made, and in some cases conservatives even switched sides and led the way. This conservative-centrist-radical dynamic took place in every one of the extensions of the franchise in Britain and the United States since the 19th century. (I can’t vouch for the middle ages.)
It was also at work in the battle to abolish slavery in America. Back then, the conservatives on the issue were the Democrats, but the dynamic was the same. Radicals wanted to abolish slavery now. Centrists temporized. Conservatives objected strongly. These lines were not immovable. Even the great Frederick Douglas, an escaped slave and an early champion of women’s rights, argued that black men should get the franchise first.
II
Belief itself is never enough to get what you want; you must have tactics. And sometimes the best tactic is to survive to fight another day. But, it is easier to sit tight and hold your horses when you are fighting for someone else’s freedom rather than your own. And it is easier to keep hope alive when you can see that you are making progress.
It’s not like anyone’s going to hand it to you. It took a Civil War for black men to gain even a partial right to vote in America. It took World War I for the ruling classes to finally realize that poor Britons, many of whom had been gassed in the trenches or sent home in pieces, were perhaps suitable enough citizens to be allowed to vote. It took Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of peaceful black and white Americans putting their lives on the line to finally win universal suffrage for blacks.
Today in America, we’re not making that kind of progress anymore. The world has changed, and the power of wealth has spread beyond national borders. We can’t just send a posse of knights out to arrest the king. Multinational corporations trump our power, steal our resources, avoid our taxes, and send our jobs to wherever workers make the least money and work the longest hours with the fewest protections. These corporations are codifying their new power into binding trade agreements like the TransPacific Partnership (
TPP), a reverse Magna Carta.
At the same time, the corporate wealth of the energy industry has purchased something never seen before in history: a movement that denies the existence of an immediate threat to human survival; a movement so powerful that it stalemates any solution. The civilized world has never faced such a threat as climate change before. And if it had, no one could have bought off so many politicians, media hacks, TV weathermen and gullible conservatives. But Exxon Mobil and the rest of the energy industry got it done.
On top of this sits Citizens United, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections. As Mitt Romney famously said, “Corporations are people, my friend.”
No, they’re not. Nor are they magical: there is no divine wisdom of the “free market” that leads it to rational action. Corporations are run by people, so they are fallible. They don’t always act in their own self-interest or in the interest of their own survival. Today, the largest public corporations generally act in the perceived short-term interest of whichever nearsighted CEO holds the reins.
We non-corporate people have hearts, minds, families, and values that extend beyond mollifying shareholders and enriching top management. But we find ourselves in an existential crisis — not the kind of crisis that Jean Paul Sartre has when he can’t find his cigarettes, a crisis that threatens the existence of the human race. As we see the corporate world spin out of control, we have no choice but to fight back. Now.
The only question is how.
III
We’ll get no help from the conservative side. The Republican faithful, and the disaffected Democrats who would sooner vote for Donald Trump than for a libtard, face the same climate disaster that the rest of us do. And most of them face the same dismal fate of increasing corporate abuse and personal impoverishment that the rest of us do. All the problems of bad schools, declining income, substandard healthcare, skyrocketing prescription costs, endless debt and disappearing horizons affect them as much as they do us.
Their counter-intuitive reaction to this is not new in this world. It was common among working class Britons even before the industrial revolution: They identify with those who oppress them and they hope for safety in their shadow; they blame all their troubles on people weaker and less successful, or on people of different races, cultures and religions. The conservative base is easily aroused to resentment and war against such aliens, but you can’t move it to take on the power structure.
Conservative political and business leaders and their most affluent followers don’t experience the same problems as their base, though they are surely vulnerable to climate change and the ensuing worldwide chaos. Some think that God will save them, some convince themselves it’s all a hoax. Others really don’t care what happens to anyone else. Many believe, as did the kings and barons 800 years ago and the lords and ladies of the Victorian era, that they were born to privilege, or have earned it, or both.
This leaves Democrats, and those independents who understand the way the wind is blowing, to work things out unilaterally, pretty much in the way that things have been “worked out” for the last decade of unified Republican obstructionism. This is not good. The inability to reach compromise makes incremental change, let alone big change, harder to achieve and harder to hold on to — witness the scores of votes to repeal Obamacare.
So both Clinton and Sanders are faced with the possibility that the best they can achieve in office is a caretaker government, an administration that relies on appointments to courts and regulatory posts, and on executive orders, to prevent the massive damage the Republicans would do if they could. President Obama has run just such a government since the Democrats lost Congress two years into his second term.
Hillary Clinton makes the case that she is more experienced, more savvy, tougher, and better able to find common ground than Bernie Sanders, not to mention more electable. And some of that may be true. But the question for many progressives is this: What is the point of electing a reformer, a person who starts out looking for a half a loaf, a person who, when it comes to reforming the banks, cracking down on Wall Street, creating trade deals and solving the climate change crisis, invariably plays the role of the traditional liberal centrist who just isn’t comfortable asking for quite so much right now?
Where Bernie wants to break up the biggest banks now, Hillary wants to break them up should it become necessary. Where she reserved judgement on Keystone Pipeline and TPP, Bernie — and most progressives — could see the clear evidence that these were bad, bad deals.
Caution is not a bad thing, but there is a time for action and a time for revolution. When international corporate power is turning back our hard-won freedoms, repealing almost a millennium of progress on the road to freedom, there is no time for tinkering.
I’m not talking about storming the ramparts or bringing out the guillotines. I’m talking about uniting America to take back our power and our wealth from those who have stolen it over the last 30 years, to make sure the power of one vote means something. And that’s what Bernie Sanders is talking about too. To really do it will require regaining control of Congress. Which candidate inspires the most enthusiasm for that task?
With the Republican faithful racing like angry lemmings over the cliff, for Democrats to take a centrist, tinkering, calculating, temporizing approach to corporate power, the depredations of the 0.1 percent, and climate change is the equivalent of handing out bailing buckets on the Titanic, or backing your Chevy over the cliff while staring at the beautiful sunrise through the windshield and mouthing platitudes about children, minorities, equal pay for women and LGBT. After you back over the cliff, who’s going to take care of them?
There are certain things we must fix right now to preserve our ability to fix anything in the future. I don’t think Hillary’s partisans fully realize that. It’s not all about who can beat Trump, Cruz or Rubio. It’s not all about whether America will accept a socialist. It’s about what we need to do right now to stop any further erosion of our rights and our wealth and to start putting the brakes on climate change.
It is incumbent on Hillary’s supporters — those who think she is more electable than Bernie, those who think she is more accomplished and more savvy, those who think her time has come — to demand that she address these issues with the urgency they deserve. We don’t have 800 more years to solve them. If we don’t take strong, decisive action right now, there will probably not be another chance.
That said, if Hillary Clinton never meets our expectations in this matter, and if she is nominated anyway, it is equally incumbent on Bernie Sanders’ supporters to vote for her in the final election. Anything else is suicide, and suicide should be a private choice, not one you foist on the world.
