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Sunday, December 14, 2003
Power from the People 
| | Howard Dean's December 7 speech is the most important statement on race in American politics by a mainstream white politician in nearly 40 years. Nothing remotely comparable has been said by anyone who might become or who has been President of the United States since Lyndon Johnson's June 4, 1965 affirmative action address to the graduating class at Howard University. |
| | For four decades, the primary political project of the Republican Party has been to transform itself into the White Man¹s Party. Not only in the Deep South, but also nationally, the GOP seeks to secure a majority popular base for corporate governance through coded appeals to white racism. The success of this GOP project has been the central fact of American politics for two generations — reaching its fullest expression in the Bush presidency. Yet a corporate covenant with both political parties has prohibited the mere mention of America¹s core contemporary political reality: the constant, routine mobilization of white voters through the imagery and language of race. |
| | In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful way -- by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people. |
| | They called it the "Southern Strategy," and the Republicans have been using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it, using phrases like "racial quotas" and "welfare queens" to convince white Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America's problems. |
| | The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few. |
| | To distract people from their real agenda, they run elections based on race, dividing us, instead of uniting us. |
| | But these politics do worse than that -- they fracture the very soul of who we are as a country. |
| | It was a different Republican president, who 150 years ago warned, "A house divided cannot stand," and it is now a different Republican party that has won elections for the past 30 years by turning us into a divided nation. |
| | In America, there is nothing black or white about having to live from one paycheck to the next. |
| | Hunger does not care what color we are. |
| | In America, a conversation between parents about taking on more debt might be in English or it might be in Spanish, worrying about making ends meet knows no racial identity. |
| | Black children and white children all get the flu and need the doctor. In both the inner city and in small rural towns, our schools need good teachers. |
| | I think both the Black Commentator piece and the Dean speech overstate their cases a bit. But understandably. |
| | What neither do is give credit. Of course, you don't get much of that in political campaigns, or in political seasons. But often it's the missing stuff that matters most. Especially to those who might agree with you, but currently don't. |
| | Dean's right that Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was a racial one, to some degree. But there was more to the conservative rhetoric of the time than racial code talk. Still is, too. Much more. |
| | Always seemed to me that the Republicans had the party of income production, while Democrats had the party of income redistribution. |
| | Also that those two values were not opposed so much as prioritized differently. |
| | Most Americans, of every race and income level, just want a government that's honest, responsible and doing its best to help those who need help, while getting out of the way of those who don't. |
| | Let's hear more from The Black Commentator: |
| | Howard Dean has taken history in his hands by hitching his ascendant campaign to a straightforward, anti-corporate message that does not pander to white racism. He presents whites in the South and elsewhere with the only principled choice they should be offered: to vote their interests, or vote for their bosses' interests (if they are lucky enough to have a job). Although corporate media called Dean¹s statement his "southern strategy," it is in fact the only position that holds out any hope for a national Democratic victory in 2004 — whether enough southern whites emerge from their racist "false consciousness" or not. |
| | What stands out for me in that paragraph is the term "anti-corporate." What does that mean, exactly? For that matter, what does corporate mean in this context? Why is it bad? |
| | Is it just because some corporate fat cats have been buying votes with campaign contributions? Fine: lot's wrong with that, but does that mean everything "corporate" is wrong? |
| | No, but that's the implication in that paragraph. That there's somehow a natural opposition between business and people, between capital and labor, between management and working classes. |
| | Quite true, in many businesses, through most of the Industrial Age. |
| | But are we still in that age? Everywhere? Are there not plenty of businesses that do plenty of good? More importantly, are conditions not changing, radically? |
| | Yes, there's still plenty wrong with plenty of Big Business. But there's plenty right, too, with businesses of all sizes. |
| | I think Republicans generally understand, in their bones, what's right about businesses of all sizes. How they produce jobs, income and rewarding occupations for people. How they give people useful and productive ways to invest their passions and employ others to do the same, and how those investments contribute to civilization. |
| | On the whole, Democrats understand other stuff better. Like the need to help people, regardless of the circumstances that put them there. Like the inherent equalities of human beings. Like the need for fairness and opportunity. |
| | There are some fundamental disagreements that will always be hard to bridge. For example, Democrats generally believe there exist a larger suite of natural rights than do Republicans. The right to an always-higher minimum wage for example. And the right to health care, regardless of one's ability to pay for it. |
| | But there are also fundamental agreements that can be found and put to good use. About honesty, accountability and responsibility in government, for example. On the need, as Phil Windley once told me, to "just get the roads fixed." |
| | In the long run, we'll get exactly that kind of stuff from government, for the simple reason that we're more connected to government than ever, whether government likes it or not. Same goes for every other institution you can name. |
| | What's missing, still, in spite of the grass roots success of the Dean campaign, is full credit for the power that's shifting, across the board, from Big Everything to connected customers, connected citizens, connected families, connected interest groups, connected markets for goods and services, for education, for government, for you-name-it. |
| | The demand side has enormous power now — far more than was even imaginable at the height of the Industrial Age, or even as recently as ten years ago. That power grows out of its connectedness, out of its ability to inform itself. |
| | The demand side now has the power to supply itself. That's the lesson of Linux, of "open source" everything, of peer-to-peer, of independent creators in everything from music to software, of the shift in media power from the few to the many, from the peerage of Big Network Powers to the peer-to-peerage of everybody with something worthwhile to contribute to the connected whole, whether it's a piece of music, a piece of code, an opinion, an observation, or a few bucks for a candidate. These developments are not opposed to business or government, but rather support both by providing more choices to the supply and the demand sides of marketplaces. |
| | That's what I was talking about when I slammed Ralph Nader three years ago in a Linux Journal editorial. Ralph hates business. Makes him very effective for some things, but amazingly clueless about others. Didn't get him a lot of votes, either. (Just enough to screw Al Gore, but that's a red herring.) |
| | The Net provides new conditions for everything: business, politics, education, government, law enforcement, retail, services, sports... whatever. These are connected conditions. Linked ones. Sourced ones. Most of all, human ones. |
| | The challenge for both Dean and Bush will be not to go back to The Usual Characterizations of The Other Side, no matter how eloquently those characterizations may be put. The challenge is not to "go negative" like candidates always did in the Age of Big Media, when you had 30 seconds to state your whole case, and throwing mud just seemed the most effective use of the time. |
| | The People are tired of that shit. Even those of us entertained by right wing rants on AM talk radio. |
| | Idea for the Dean Campaign: put a propsition out to the constituency: Should Howard Dean run negative advertising on TV about George Bush? I dunno, maybe they'll get a yes answer. But I'm betting they'll get resounding 'no.' It might fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but I'm here to tell ya, "going positive" is a winning strategy this time around. |
| | In the long run, we'll vote for politicians who make themselves useful. Helpful. Worthwhile. Fair. Interested. Honest. Positive. Ones who get their power from the people, not ones who just apply power to the people. Leaders, not rulers. |
| | Bush's message, if he "goes positive," will be a simple one: You're safer and more prosperous now. One can argue with both parts of that statement, but unless Al Qaeda blows something up stateside again, that's how most of us will feel. |
| | Dean's message has to be equally simple: You need a government that belongs to its citizens, and cares about all of them. |
| | In the long run, that message will get somebody elected president. If it isn't Howard Dean, it'll be somebody. And it won't wait until after 2008, no matter what happens in 2004. |
| | [Later...] Britt thinks Dean and the Dems need to Form the Great Centrist Party. A better way of putting it is, take over the formerly centrist party. I think they're doing exactly that, in a way. |
| | Where they have some distance to go is in articulating What's Right about the Center rather than what's wrong with the Right, and Bush in particular. |
| | Is it predictable that after Dean sews up the nomination, winning in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, he will confront a body of previously inert Democrats who will be reluctant to endorse an anti-Bush campaign based on the incumbent's venality? |
| | If that happened, how quickly would it happen? The nomination might well be sewn up by early March of 2004. How soon after that would Candidate Dean discover that the drumbeat which has been propelling him isn't resonating over hill and vale into the body of voters needed to proceed with the election of a new president, which is something different from the excommunication of a sinner? |
| | The people I know inside the Dean campaign are idealists. They're propelled by something more than just wanting Bush gone. |
| | But many of the Dean supporters I've met outside the campaign have a real dislike of Bush. I'm not sure it's the "hate" that's alleged by the ranters on talk radio. But it's a strong antipathy. |
| | I don't think it has much to do with the man himself, although I often hear about how "dumb" he is, or how he's really just a tool of Cheney and Rumsfeld (neither of which I think are true). |
| | I think this antipathy has much more to do with three much deeper and more troubling things: 1) the shitty way he was elected, which seemed deeply unfair and wrong (it should have caused a constitutional crisis, and didn't); 2) the way he changed from the "caring conservative" of his inaguration speech to the down-the-line conservative he later became; and 3) the way he got the country into the Iraq war, by giving erroneous information about weapons of mass destruction and by moving unilaterally, without the support of the U.N. and most of the world's other countries. |
| | There's a lot not to like there. But it's not enough. Not to most of the country. |
| | A trash-Bush strategy will assure four more years of the man. |
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