EdgeLeft: Obama, Pro and Con

by David McReynolds

November 1, 2008

(this occasional column may be reprinted or circulated without permission)

This will have been the strangest election in my political memory, which goes back to the 1948 upset when Truman beat Dewey. I was 17 years old then, a member of the Prohibition Party, (a tiny remnant of the Protestant reform movement of the 19th century). I had gone from Los Angeles to spend the summer organizing in Garden City, Kansas. (A city of 10,000 that would later gain fame as the place where the terrible murders took place, the subject of Truman Capote's book, In Cold Blood).

Clearly, even if I was then only 17, I was absorbed by politics or I wouldn't have been organizing in Western Kansas for a Prohibition Party candidate. I knew, as a student of political science (which isn't a science, but that is a discussion for another time), that Truman could not win. He could not win because he was deeply unpopular. He could not win because Humbert Humphrey, at the Democratic convention, had forced through a civil rights plank that caused Southern Democrats to walk out, and to run Strom Thurmond as the candidate of the States Rights Democratic Party (he got 39 electoral votes). He could not win because his support of the Cold War had alienated Democrats on the left, who nominated Henry Wallace (one time Vice President under Roosevelt) on the Progressive Party ticket. Unpopular to start with, bereft of both his left and right wings, he stood no chance of re-election.

I remember election night very well. The radio (no TV in those days) first reported that Dewey "seems to have lost control of the House" and would have to govern with a Republican majority only in the Senate. Late in the evening the commentators broke the news that Dewey had lost control of both the House and the Senate. Not, however, until the early hours of the morning did we learn that Dewey had lost, and Truman had won by a landslide.

That, however, will not happen this Tuesday, November 4, 2008. It is too late for an "October surprise". Liberal bloggers who have predicted yet another stolen election will have to reconcile themselves to an Obama victory. Democrats will score major gains in the House and Senate.

In a real sense, the "1948 moment" already occurred, when Barack Obama beat out Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party's nomination.

It has been a dirty campaign. McCain can be commended for not bringing Rev. Wright back in the campaign, but between him and Sarah Palin, (and their anonymous internet supporters) Obama was called a terrorist, a Muslim, a socialist, a Marxist, and possibly not even a citizen. In the final days of the campaign he was accused of trying to redistribute the wealth (blithely ignoring the fact Teddy Roosevelt supported the progressive income tax). Through it all, Obama kept his cool and rode the storm.

What are the pros and cons to Obama? Some of the pros are easy to tick off, starting with the simple fact he isn't McCain (who is not evil, but ended the campaign as a tired and irritable old man, abandoned by a slew of conservative intellectuals who revolted against his choice of Palin for the VP slot). Obama will certainly bring the Iraq War to an end. He will, one hopes, restore some sense of vitality to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. We can expect a repudiation of torture as an instrument of national policy, and the closing of Guantanamo. He will almost certainly make better judicial appointments.

But there are two very special benefits from the Obama victory. It will put paid to the long period of "counter-revolution" following the Civil Rights Revolution which began in 1955 and culminated in the sweeping legislation passed by Congress under Lyndon Johnson. But race was not dealt with that easily. Historically the U.S. had one great advantage over Europe - it was born without an inherited system of class. But it had one great disadvantage - slavery.

Slavery was, of course, a crime. It is hard now to realize our founding fathers had slaves, that a recognition of slavery was written into the Constitution. It also meant, as Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist, pointed out in his 1944 book, An American Dilemma, that the U.S. was living with an impossible contradiction. Faced with a racial group that was culturally alien to the Europeans, and a group that was deeply damaged (in ways that did not apply to Asian or Latin American immigrants) by the destruction of their language and their religion (something James Balwin brilliantly discussed in his essays), we had sought to create a system of "separate but equal" - of segregation.

Roosevelt didn't confront this - the New Deal was based on an alliance of Southern racists, committed to segregation, with big city bosses and labor unions of the North. Democrats accepted segregation South of the Mason-Dixon line (and in large parts of the North itself).

All revolutions have counter-revolutions, and following the sweeping actions under Johnson, working class white Americans were frightened by school bussing and by affirmative action. (And in fact, school bussing wasn't a good idea - integration could have been achieved through a program of low income housing). The white elite were largely protected from the impact of these changes. Blacks were very rare in the board rooms of corporate America. Well off liberals sent their children to private schools.

Richard Nixon saw in the reaction of working class whites a chance to bring what we now call "Reagan Democrats" into the Republican Party. At the electoral level George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, ran for President as an independent in 1968, 1972, and 1978, more or less openly as a racist, and quite openly as a populist appealing to the working class. In 1968 Wallace got 46 electoral votes and 13% of the popular vote. Most of those under fifty have forgotten George Wallace, forgotten the sense we faced a new Civil War in the South as forces around Wallace defied federal orders to desegregate schools. One can draw a line from the Wallace campaigns, and from Richard Nixon, to the present, and see how the once solid Democratic South became the solid Republican South, and how it was possible, with racism at the core, to persuade white working class voters to choose Republicans over their own class interests.

That is at an end. The Obama election doesn't mean racism is gone - but it does mean the period of Reagan Democrats has drawn to an end, and new political lines will be drawn. Obama will not govern from the left, but, I suspect, as a "left-centrist" trying to govern from the middle. In this sense his administration may have something in common with that of FDR in 1932.

There is a second major result of the Obama victory. It will, I believe, mark a profound change in how African Americans view themselves. It is not possible for any group to suffer prolonged oppression without absorbing some of that internally. I know, speaking as a homosexual, that I spent a good part of my life trying to run from a sense of guilt, a feeling that society might be right, and I was the one who was wrong. The gay liberation movement of the 1960's had a deep impact on how younger homosexuals viewed themselves. Not only are gay characters in TV and film no longer stereotypes, but gays (at least gay men) behave differently, In the 1950's if you went into a gay bar you went "from butch to swish", but today the men in a gay bar behave much the same way inside the bar as outside. The limp wrist is gone. The only way you can be sure you are in a gay bar is that there are no women.

Yes, the high rate of blacks in prison is in part a reflection of a racist, class-based justice system. But only in part. It is also a reflection of the self-hatred within Black society. I remember when I went to jail for 25 short days in 1961 for my part in organizing the Civil Defense Protests (and "what", younger readers wonder, "was Civil Defense" - go google), how shocked I was at the knife wounds, the razor cuts, on the faces, arms, and bodies of the black prisoners. These reflected the terrible violence the oppressed inflict on each other.

So I expect a re-definition of what it means to be black in America. This is something Bill Cosby has talked about, as well as Obama. I believe we will see a new African American emerge.

The Cons:

The pros are fine, but let's look at some of the "cons", the things Obama won't carry into the White House, the things the movement has to push for.

First, on foreign policy, Obama has pushed for expanding the war in Afghanistan and for targeting enemies inside of Pakistan. The war in Afghanistan can't be won - we need to get out, not escalate. What the Soviets didn't learn from the British history in Afghanistan, we should learn from the Soviet history. If we are truly worried about the opium crop, it would make a great deal more sense to buy that crop from the opium farmers and take it off the market (aside from some that is needed for medical purposes) than the current "war" on opium. Deeply as I despise the Taliban, that is a matter for the Afghan people to deal with in their own way, in their own time.

Obama's talk of hitting targets inside Pakistan not only is very dangerous in terms of Pakistan itself, but has already been used by Bush to justify the recent US strike into Syria. We don't need more troops in Afghanistan, but fewer. We need to get our troops out.

In the Middle East, Obama, along with McCain, has been captive of AIPAC, the Israeli lobby. There must be a change in US policy toward Israel, an end of US military and economic aid to Israel (and, for that matter, any US military aid to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.). While the abomination of the Occupation can only be ended by Israel, it must not continue to be funded by the US. No Middle East peace will be possible without direct negotiations with Hamas, as well as the PLO, without recognition of the legitimate Palestinian claims to East Jerusalem.

On Iran, there is reason to hope that negotiations will occur. But the US needs to back away from the repeated statement that it will not permit Iran to gain a nuclear weapon. I don't want any country to have a nuclear weapon (including the US) but what is curious about the discussion of Iran's nuclear program is that no one mentions the fact Israel has nuclear weapons, that the nuclear weapons race in the Middle East started with Israel, and that a primary goal of the US should be to seek a nuclear free zone in the Middle East.

On Cuba, let's hope that rationality prevails, and the US will recognize the current Cuban government, end the embargo, and open the door to free trade and travel (How ironic that, after all the talk in the US of the "Iron Curtain" of the Soviet period, we are the ones - not the Cubans - who have established an Iron Curtain regarding Cuba).

Foreign military bases - who needs them? The United States has military bases all over the planet, from Okinawa and South Korea and Japan to the Middle East and Europe. Why? Who threatens us? Against what enemies are these bases aimed? What kind of delusional foreign policy, inherited from the Cold War, keeps this expensive network of bases in operation? It is time to close them down. A true "new world order" would require the US to accept the fact it has a diminished ability to play the imperial role it assigned itself in the past fifty years.

Turning to the domestic front, I'd start with one of the issues almost never mentioned by either McCain or Obama - "Prison America". We have the largest prison population of any nation on the planet. What is wrong with us? To what extent is that prison population a result of the failed war on drugs? To what extent is it self-perpetuating (ie., prison doesn't train prisoners to be good citizens of society - it trains them on how to be better criminals)? What would happen, to take one issue, if we simply legalized marijuana?

On the health front, certainly Obama has a better plan than anything McCain had on offer, but it isn't as good as Hillary's was. And it isn't what we need - a single-payer health system, paid from by taxes, and guaranteeing health care to everyone living in this country. Obama won't give us that - we need to organize for it and fight for it.

Domestic spying - Obama voted for the FISA bill. What can we do to curb government intrusion into our lives? There is a problem with terrorism (some of which isn't Islamic but right wing) and liberals and conservatives should agree on measures to combat it. It will be with us for a long time to come. But what steps can we take to insure our safety without destroying our freedom?

Gay marriage is another issue which both McCain and Obama had to oppose (my hunch is that both men, privately, feel this is an area that falls under personal rights). I am not even sure how I feel about gay marriage (or, for that matter, about the institution of marriage itself). But surely gays and lesbians should have the same right to get married that straights have.

I might mention, in this context, that this most controversial of issues, which, like that of abortion, has been used to galvanize religious conservatives (not just evangelicals but Catholics, Jews, and Muslims as well), may be losing ground, as new forces emerge in the religious community, forces that may not approve of gay marriage or abortion, but also see poverty, global warming, and war as things which must be on their agenda. The hard edge of the evangelical groups, driven by charlatans such as Pat Robertson, may be giving way.

Do We Gain the Right To Imagine?

My own vote this Tuesday would would go to Brian Moore, the Socialist Party candidate, wherever he is on the ballot. But I know that at this moment in time none of the groups on the left have much strength (no matter what McCain's people think!). But would an Obama Administration, coming as it does at a time of deepening economic crisis, make it possible for us to imagine what a genuinely human economic system might look like, what an "American socialism" might be? A country where the decisions were not made in the board rooms of corporations run by multi-millionaires, but where the power of corporate America was democratized and socialized? Obama himself cannot (and does not pretend) to offer these things. But his election might make it possible for us to imagine them, to move from a world of fear to one of hope, to believe that we can re-invent an America which has gone so wrong, and done so much harm to our world - and to us.

(David McReynolds was on the staff of War Resisters League for nearly 40 years, was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980 and 2000, and the Green Party candidate for Senate in New York in 2004. He is a former Chair of War Resisters International, retired, and living on the Lower East Side with his cat. He can be reached at: dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com).