Another Way

The 2022 Midterm elections find the Democrats surviving what was expected to be a stunning defeat.

There is already an announced candidate for President in the 2024 election and an immediate lineup of expected primary opponents.

And there is a pretty good idea about the public mindset regarding both political parties. Media pundits remind us that national elections are all about ”bases” – voters that can be counted on to vote for a candidate they believe represents them.

Today we can confidently predict that any on the list of Republican hopefuls will woo and want Donald Trump’s base of 40 million voters because they have become the Republican Party.

On the other hand, the Democratic candidate will be looking to the cities and immediate surrounding suburbs for college educated ‘elite’ voters because that is where the Democratic Party has drifted in this century.

Conventional wisdom at work.

At yet consider this:

Until he was derailed by his attempts to cover up the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic and his increasingly outlandish autocratic anti-government behavior, Trump had done something extraordinary. He had essentially ended 40 years of the Reagan legacy of corporate predominance and had begun to build a multiracial working class party.

Fifteen years as a network television personality in prime time, had shown him his audience. He knew what they wanted to hear and he could speak their language.

He was building it on non-college educated white men and including blacks, Hispanics and others of color all from the world of blue collar working Americans. And he was doing it despite his often crude racist and anti-Semitic signals.

As Republicans pressed the idea that Democrats no longer cared about the working class, the Democrats seemed to accept the idea and simply assumed the identity of the party of elites.

And so despite the Republican Party’s failure to blow the Democrats away in this midterm election this is where it stands today. The Republican base seems to think Trump tweets are about government policies. And the so-called Democratic left…the progressives…seem to think that AOC’s Instagrams about a Green New Deal, Defund the Police, Break up ICE are policy ideas that can work instead of merely slogans that go on bumper stickers.

Are our political parties that weak, that meaningless? Do you have to ask?

But there can be another way.

TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS

Bayard Rustin was not the most famous of the Black intellectuals, academics, writers, clergy and other activists who came to public attention in the 1960’s.

Certainly Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Andrew Young, Richard Wright, Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, Akiri Bakara (Leroi Jones) had far more media attention.

But Rustin, an openly gay black man who had once joined the Communist Party, had a specific idea that would establish what did not exist. He imagined a real role for blacks in the society that they’d never had before.

At the time, there was talk about ‘reparations’ for blacks who had been born to families brought to America as slaves.

Rustin recognized America’s racial past and continued existence which he thought would prevent America’s white middle class from ever accepting and supporting the idea of financial reparations.

But after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, Rustin believed America could take a giant step forward towards a level of equality and desegregation that had never existed.

He believed that trying to abolish segregation through civil rights legislation would not succeed unless the American economy was overhauled so that workers of all races were equally lifted into a powerful force.

Republicans and Democrats had been divided along economic lines since the New Deal when masses of working class voters found a home in the Democratic Party. By focusing on the blue collar working class Rustin believed the Democratic Party in alliance with Blacks, liberals and blue collar whites could be turned into a vehicle for racial and economic justice. Relating to an important event happening in Washington at the time, Rustin called it the March on Washington coalition.

This fundamental idea appealed so strongly to Martin Luther King that he increased and broadened his personal efforts to include working class Americans — seeing them as living in the same ‘segregated’ reality within the American economy.

LBJ’s decision to pass the Civil Rights Voting Act giving blacks a chance and a right to vote killed the Democratic Party’s Southern support. Southern states left the Democratic Party en masse.

The cultural explosion in the 1960s and 70’s driven by our role in the Vietnam War finished the job. Whatever chance the Rustin plan for a March on Washington coalition working was crushed and disappeared…and yet in a strange way, it didn’t.

A NEW VOICE

Why are we talking about something that happened 60 years ago and failed?

Because while he was probably still in diapers when Rustin was working most feverishly, that concept of a change in America’s racial outlook by bringing a blue collar work force into a genuine place in the American economy by including black Americans as equals, would eventually reach a student in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.

In his youth, Obama showed a decidedly Marxist tilt in his view about what government had the power to do to equalize opportunity and justice in this country despite four centuries of racism.

He was writing almost directly from the Rustin playbook while in college and saw in Chicago all of the opportunities and problems he needed to see to support his views.

But it was while he was at Harvard Law School, that he and a friend decided to write a book about bringing the Rustin idea of that working class coalition to life. Tentatively calling it “Transformative Politics”, the 250 page document carefully outlined the reality of racism in America and flatly stated that it would never change unless black Americans became an equal part of a working class force in the American economy.

He clearly stated that rebuilding the idea of a March on Washington coalition required an all-out war against polarization; the class system which favored the rich, well educated corporate power base able to buy what they wanted; the one percent of people who seemed to own America on one side and the populists who wanted an America to recognize their needs and concerns and found themselves ignored on the other.

It was a startling book-to-be…but it never was published. Both men graduated into a busy World and never finished their work.

But it was that Obama who eventually ran for President with those ideas clearly in focus.

It was that Obama who would march alone on stages arms outspread, that fantastic smile, talking about hope and change while campaigning and after winning election and reelection do absolutely nothing about the very principles he seemed to so fervently believe in.

That was only a few years ago so we cannot forget the problems and open opposition he faced…perhaps the most obvious and ferocious in our history. Perhaps the very difference in what he believed and how he behaved caused him to fail to ever really sell what he did to help save the country from financial disaster in his very first year in 2008.

It no longer matters, but In a bit of karma, he and Michelle’s media production company will introduce a documentary on Bayard Rustin next year.

PERFORMANCE POLITICS

Today, tomorrow while the Republican Party will have another leadership line-up against party boss Trump, the Democratic Party will have the same base of elites and very little in the way of leadership.

Despite Joe Biden’s efforts to develop genuine infrastructure changes, student loan relief, making funds available during a pandemic which put millions out of work, support of Ukranians that has permitted a free people to actually fight back against a massive force under autocratic rule, a growing economy, historically low unemployment, a constant effort to fight pandemically driven inflation topped by obvious corporate greed everywhere, a decent if somewhat misguided willingness to listen to the progressive forces still looking to Bernie Sanders for policy leadership, and a forthright support for a woman’s right to choose all of which help fight off a Republican midterm election disaster…his poll numbers show that a majority of Democrats would rather see a new face as a Presidential candidate just two years away.

In the midst of all those political tweets and instagrams, polls show that while only 27% of registered voters identify as liberals,(its 55% in NY State), 62% of Americans want to raise taxes on millionaires, 71% approve of labor unions, and 83% support raising the federal minimum wage.

These are clearly voters who should belong to a Democratic Party focusing on their needs. Yet despite the fact that Democrats win the popular vote in Presidential elections, they face the same problems they have faced since the end of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s that led to more than 40 years of Republican legislative rule.

Yet the overwhelming number of Democrats could still find the way to an inclusive working class especially in these odd post-pandemic years.

The bodies and votes are there.

Where is the leadership?