CLASS NOTES
Reed, Adolph Jr.
CLASS NOTES Adolph Reed Jr. Jesse's Snake Oil When I moved to Atlanta in the early 1970s, Hosea Williams (one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s many former "right-hand men" in the Southern Christian...
...This is the long-term pattern of Jackson's politics...
...First, it reinforced a tendency in the 1970s and early 1980s to define the concrete goals of black politics in terms of a racial trickle-down, a narrow class agenda in which gains for upper-status, comparatively well-off black people—bankers, architects, beverage distributors, or advertising executives—are held to be exactly the same as benefits for all...
...There's a simple answer...
...He would then dissipate the unrest through a series of marches, typically culminating in a rally at a symbolic location...
...Others, though, are more alienated and demoralized than that...
...They are more or less intransigent racists, sexists, homophobes, and xenophobes...
...PUSH's main publicly visible program from its founding until Jackson's departure was negotiating "covenants" with market-sensitive firms...
...While there is nothing inherently wicked about these goals, this approach, as Picard noted, marked a troubling turn in black politics...
...Moreover, getting votes and political education are often logically opposed...
...It can take a great deal of time and effort to persuade people that there are clear links between what is unsatisfactory in their lives and the workings of larger, identifiable forces that can be changed through collective action...
...Despite all the breezy talk about the need to energize black voters, blacks have never been the problem in the Democratic coalition...
...We need to confront whites' racism directly and struggle with them to overcome it...
...And that also requires long-term, face-to-face organizing...
...a presidential campaign stretches already limited organizational resources and relies on building support through indirect contact...
...Electoral logic exerts a pressure to water down programs and to reduce appeals to slogans...
...We have ample evidence of the ease with which third-party efforts can be marginalized and discredited...
...Running a presidential campaign requires institutional resources and organizational capacity on a scale far beyond what the left can muster on its own...
...He took potentially volatile, spontaneous protests and channeled them to generate demands that were compatible with what powerful institutions and individuals were prepared to concede anyway...
...The key focus has to be on what we would want to get out of presidential politics in 1996, given the real constraints that limit us...
...Paul Wellstone is probably the clearest, most articulate and resolutely progressive choice, but it is unlikely that he would be available because he is up for re-election to the Senate that year...
...Using a presidential campaign as a tool for political education also requires either a neutral mass media or powerful alternative sources of information...
...We need something much more substantial, a program and a credible strategy for realizing it...
...Under the right conditions (that is, if pushed by an aggressive, issue-based coalition), even a more conventional labor-liberal type like Richard Gephardt could be effective...
...This is explicit class warfare...
...Louisiana Republican Bob Livingston let the cat out of the bag at a press conference of House Republicans in February when he described their program as a "counterrevolution against sixty years of government...
...David Bonior is a solid, conscientious progressive but doesn't at this point have much visibility, though that could change...
...To the extent that they don't vote, they respond to the same kinds of appeals and grassroots-based efforts—as often as not tied to particular, highly charged local and state-level races— tnat otners do...
...Once again, the left would find itself on the margins of the political debate, waiting to be sold out by Jackson for more Get Out The Vote money, another airplane to use for the presidential campaign, a couple more jobs for well-connected supporters at the Democratic National Committee and maybe a bigger, softer "seat at the table...
...If it won't happen for mayoralty, school board, gubernatorial, or senate races, it's lunacy to believe that the pattern will shift for the presidency...
...His column appears in this space every month...
...We need to appeal to already mobilized liberal individuals and opinion-leading organizations who aren't necessarily prepared yet to bolt the party...
...What we need to find is a way of appealing to the white voters who should be our constituents but who have succumbed to the Republicans' strategy of—and rightist Democrats' acquiescence in—racial demonization...
...Many nonvoters don't pay attention to politics at all and are resistant to doing so...
...Whenever germinal expressions of collective discontent began to form among groups of black working and poor people—usually in a labor or consumer dispute or in a neighborhood after some outrage by developers, police, or other government authority —Williams would arrive, with an accompaniment of media fanfare, and assume spokesmanship...
...But this kind of initiative is self-defeating...
...Because Jackson poses no real threat for the nomination, Clinton would be able to sidestep debate with him, as the other candidates did in 1988, and perhaps even use him as a foil to curry favor with the right (which is how Clinton mainly deals with blacks...
...For years he pursued a related course with Operation PUSH, one that political scientist Earl Picard characterized some time ago as the "corporate-intervention" strategy...
...Challenging him in the primaries wouldn't alienate this cohort ¦ of voters—which probably includes the vast majority of the black electorate—in the way that a third-party initiative would...
...However, although non-voters come disproportionately from demographic groups most likely to support progressive initiatives, politics is more complicated than demographics...
...As the horrible Contract on America shows, their intention is to dismantle every function of government except making the rich richer and punishing everyone else...
...This style of brokerage politics is nothing new for Jackson...
...He has always sought to operate and be recognized as a political insider, as a leader without portfolio or without accountability to any constituency that he claims to represent...
...So why doesn't Jesse Jackson figure into this scenario as a standard-bearer...
...Not only did this strategy amount to selling out the insurgencies over which he inserted himself, and sometimes pimping them for his own personal and organizational gain...
...Another key element in the mix is that by March 1996 there will be a national Labor Party, which has union support and provides a foundation for a national progressive coalition...
...Organizing demoralized and apathetic nonvoters is an important undertaking, but it isn't an efficient strategy around which to build an electoral campaign...
...Some are naively apathetic...
...Then, of course, the same forces that created his candidacy dissolved it as the election approached...
...Perhaps other possibilities will emerge, especially as Congressional progressives continue trying to sort out a common basis on which to fight...
...Simply put, that's not how to build a movement...
...We need to connect with that constituency if we ever want to be successful...
...It's time for us to face the facts and stop all the empty blather about hope and energy and enthusiasm...
...There is no way we could swim against the tide of media opposition to win...
...Jim Bakker, the Maharishi, Celia Cruz's psychic circle, and every Oldsmobile and perfume dealer offer hope, energy, and enthusiasm...
...In fact, just the opposite...
...Taking the nomination from an incumbent president—even one so utterly worthless and bankrupt as Clinton—is probably too much to hope for...
...We face a frighteningly dangerous brand of free-market fascism, and we have to act as if our lives depend on it...
...Especially right now, we can't afford a politics of wish fulfillment or guilty white liberalism...
...Weakness in those areas, after all, is one of our greatest problems...
...PUSH ran as a simple extension of his will, and he has sought to ensure that the Rainbow Coalition would be the same kind of rubber stamp, a letterhead and front for his mercurial ambition...
...Because they do.* Adolph Reed Jr...
...He actually operated as a safety valve in local politics, tunneling frustration into acceptably non-threatening forms, and supplanting the organizing processes that might have otherwise generated grassroots leadership and demands for radical change...
...In the dream, all we have to do is mobilize nonvoters...
...Some percentage of those voters, though, are open enough to be persuaded by forceful, clear arguments over time...
...An insurgent Democratic candidacy is a more practical option...
...And he would negotiate a settlement with the targeted firm or government agency, gaining small concessions for the group on whose behalf he bargained, as well as emoluments for his own organization...
...These agreements, occasionally induced by threat of boycott, committed corporations to hire black managers and subcontractors and use black-owned banks...
...White racial bloc-voting is real...
...There are many potential constituents for a progressive initiative—already energized and attentive to politics—who would recoil from the idea of defecting from the Democratic party in presidential politics at this point but who would support challenging Clinton from the left in the primaries...
...It takes a great deal of effort to persuade the truly dispirited that any sort of political action can be effective...
...His trump card was appeal to his prior association with King...
...He functions to corral black and leftist insurgents and identify their baseline objective as advancing his status as a public figure...
...it cannot be compressed to fit the time frame of the campaign cycle...
...Jesse Jackson, like Williams a former King aide, has been attempting since 1984 to play a similar role in national politics...
...He then negotiates backroom agreements with Democratic Party elites that are mainly aimed at ensconcing his position as a legitimate power broker, ensuring his "seat at the table...
...An insurgency would face the same problems of media hostility as a leftist third party, but if a candidate were able to garner votes and delegates in early primaries, it would be more difficult simply to dismiss the effort or consign it to the fringe category...
...This leaves open the question of who the standard-bearer should be for an insurgent Democratic candidacy in 1996...
...For many the Republican takeover of Congress reinforces a tendency to circle the wagons around Clinton in the vain hope that he'll do something other than capitulate...
...if it weren't, we wouldn't be in the position we're in now...
...Some or many of the so-called Reagan Democrats are fundamentally anti-progressive, no matter what their income and social position...
...True, some nonvoters choose not to vote because of dissatisfaction with existing options...
...There are other reasons to avoid the vortex of a Jackson candidacy that don't have so much to do with his own questionable politics (which include a strain of conservative moralism that is particularly un-healthful now...
...Jesse's Snake Oil When I moved to Atlanta in the early 1970s, Hosea Williams (one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s many former "right-hand men" in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) was crafting a distinct role in post-segregation black politics: official, freelance militant activist...
...Nor do they have any difficulty voting for nonblack candidates...
...otherwise we'll remain vulnerable to those who would play to it to discredit progressive politics...
...We don't have either...
...it also meant that he undercut the potential for development of a more broadly oppositional black political movement...
...This is another effect of the snake oil that Jackson's campaigns introduced: the presumption that "energizing" voters requires little more than having some charismatic figure show up and give a fiery speech...
...And this does not mean that we should softpedal the struggle against racism...
...Most recently, when the Citizens' Party in 1980 tried to build from the ground up and around a coherent program, the media and "responsible" critics responded by creating a hollow, baseless and program-less John Anderson as the somehow real third-party option...
...Even in a protest campaign, gathering votes inevitably takes priority because reaching some threshold of electoral support is necessary to establish credibility and create a bandwagon effect...
...This is one reason not to encourage or support a Jackson presidential charade—either for the Democratic nomination or as an Independent—in 1996...
...Second, its focus on privately negotiated agreements actually, despite the rhetoric raising the specter of aggressive mass protest, depoliticized the pursuit of black interests by taking it out of the public domain...
...But supporting a progressive challenge to the Democratic Leadership Council in the primaries could provoke an ultimate split within the party, with the left-liberal wing breaking officially and creating a new, clearer fault line in American politics...
...teaches at Northwestern University...
...The vast majority of black votes cast have been for nonblack candidates...
...The substance of this curious role was simple...
...To the extent that they vote, black citizens overwhelmingly vote with the progressive wing of the Democratic party...
...Williams had the local news media's and elites' stamp of approval as the tolerably troublesome rabble rouser because he didn't really rouse the rabble...
...Movement-building requires more intricate and painstaking direct interaction...
...Barring shifts in political climate that would be both cataclysmic and fantastically felicitous, we can exclude the possibility that a genuinely progressive candidate—or, better, a candidate wedded to a genuinely progressive program— could get elected on a third-party ticket in November...
...Very rarely will whites vote for a black candidate for any office when there is a white option available...
...In addition to his political untrustworthiness and the corrosive and demobilizing role he plays in black politics, Jackson is ineffective as a vote-getter...
...He did just the opposite...
...The idea of creating a movement through a third-party presidential campaign under present conditions is a romantic dream...
...Our position is even more vulnerable and marginal than it was in 1980, and we operate in a more hostile and dismissive environment...
...The stakes are much too high...
...Another possibility is to run a third-party campaign without a chance of winning, as a way of building for the future...
...Doing so amounts to leading from a position of weakness and increasing the degree of difficulty in what is already a herculean task...
Vol. 59 • April 1995 • No. 4
