Particularly in the wake of the surge from Howard Dean, the Democratic Leadership Council (the conservative/centrist body that has exerted a great deal of influence on the Democrats since at least 1988) has sought to forcefully combat what they feel is the leftist insurgency within the party. Knowing the history of this organization in relation to black citizens may be helpful for those wanting to separate truth from fiction. This article is only the latest in a long salvo.
Who is the Democratic Leadership Council? The Democratic Leadership Council is an organization of conservative to moderate Democrats (originally their base was in the south but they've since expanded) that was created in 1985. It is believed that its creation was spurred by two inter-related events: Jesse Jackson's first presidential campaign; and a small focus group held in Macomb County, Michigan.
After Mondale lost (BAD) in the 1984 Presidential campaign, higher ups in the party wondered where they went wrong. Their conclusion was that their party had been hi-jacked by a host of what they called "special interests." None of these interests were more "special" than the one led by Jesse Jackson. The hi-jacking of the Democratic Party by "special interests" led to "regular folks" to flee the Democratic Party like the plague. Hence the term "Reagan Democrat"...lifelong Democrats who cast their vote for Ronald Reagan rather than Walter Mondale.
This finding was emphasized further by a focus group held in Macomb County, Michigan, a population of working class whites a bit Northeast of Detroit. When people held focus groups with men and women from Macomb, specifically about the Democratic Party, what they found astounded them. They found that these voters not only thought of the Democratic Party as the "black" party, they found that these voters blamed every significant problem they faced as individual voters and as part of a larger community, on black people. The end results were so problematic that the final report was allegedly destroyed.
The Democratic Leadership Council was created in order to take the party back from the "special interests" that caused Mondale to get wacked. Clinton's attacks on Jackson and Sister Souljah in 1992 (along with the execution of a mentally retarded black Arkansas inmate) were part of an explicit strategy calculated to erase that association in the minds of white voters.
Fast forward to 2003. Howard Dean is taking the country by storm, collecting more money from more people than any other candidate through a mixture of firebrand political organizing, and the use of smart mobs (collectives organized through the use of hi-tech means like blogging, IM, e-mail, etc.). His message is populist and has a progressive tint. The DLC response?
In the article I highlight above the DLC notes that the most important voting bloc is white men...and that this bloc is falling significantly. If they aren't somehow captured and fought for, the presidential election is LOST. Again they use the spector of "special interests" juxtaposing "special interests" (and by now you should know who that really refers to) against "white men." There are at least three problems with this approach:
1. The DLC is arguing implicitly that the success of the Democratic Party comes from following the mandates of the DLC. With the exception of Clinton's elections in 92 and 96, the Democrats have lost both houses of the Senate, the majority of state governships, and a significant number of state legislatures, under the DLC watch. This signals that CLinton's election was not so much the norm for the DLC strategy as the exception.
2. White men are the most conservative voting bloc in the country, and represent a special interest themselves. Moving towards this bloc inherently leads to a conservative policy orientation. And given the choice between a conservative-lite and a conservative, there is no reason to expect that the white male will choose Bud Lite over Bud. Plus there is every reason to expect that other constituencies will stay home, feeling their policy preferences aren't being articulated.
3. If we're strictly focusing on voting blocs (ACTUAL voting blocs rather than potential ones--I know, I know, focusing on them rather than on getting new voters is another problem but I'm short on space!) the most important voting bloc is NOT the white male, but the white FEMALE. And support for the Democratic Party among THIS group is growing...largely because they feel that the Democrats are more sympathetic on gender and race issues.
Either the DLC recognizes this...and willfully chooses to ignore it, or they don't recognize it...which means they are largely ignorant. Whatever the case, given their propensity to remove black americans from the status of regular folks to the status of "foreign cell" I'm not sure we should really be paying much attention to their pronouncements. Hopefully they'll take their beer (whether Bud or Bud Lite) and go home. Or be sent home by Dean.
Ward Connerly suggests something I can't agree on, and that is that the State's recognition of my racial identity of necessity changes the way that it regards me, and in particular that it entails an unjust discrimination. As the champion of the colorblind ethos, he is trying once again to summarily deracinate California through the initiative process.
The Coalition for an Informed California, have a number of contra arguments on their website. I'm glad they are there, and I suspect we'll all be hearing a good deal about it in the weeks to come.
I'd like to throw my two cents in right about now. I'll start with James Baldwin.
All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact - this may sound very strange - you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you
--James Baldwin
Part of representing the Old School is conservative, well maybe it's mostly conservative, but I am convinced that there is some wisdom that African Americans have been unable to communicate effectively to their own folks as well as the nation at large. There isn't much debate about the fact that Ward Connerly himself did not hear the beat of that drum. But what we are about is sounding it.
Connerly is talking about race, I am talking about identity, but something interesting happens.
Those of us who have been invested in re-creating black identity, as Baldwin rightly suggested we should, have not done so in a vacuum. We understand, as he did, that undoing the Man's version of what we were supposed to be required some thought. So we scoured the planet and came up with some answers. In the end we found ourselves not to be what the Man was saying and we could prove it. But if the Man was wrong about who we were, he was also wrong about who he was himself. It was in investigation of this duality of black and white that the contradictions of white supremacy became evident. Many people wrongly assume that all of the thinking of the 50s and 60s was done just in terms of civil rights. It was much more than that.
But not everybody came to consciousness at the same time. There are still many lessons that remain to be taught. It may be hard to believe but even today, after all the showing and proving that was done to show how wrong white supremacy is, there are still people in this nation who are attracted to being considered white. There are a lot of explainations for that which you are bound to hear, but not from me. What I'm saying is that it took Negroes changing themselves to black, having investigated the black/white dualism, that changed what America could be and what identities were valid here. That was all good.
You cannot come to understand your value as a human being without knowing what strengths arise from your history. It sounds cliche, but one really has to accept the pain of the past in order to transcend in the future. And when people overcome, as Negroes did in becoming black, they recognize how important and fundamental liberation is. Liberated people share their liberty. They recognize how close they had been to losing sight of their own humanity, and they refuse to allow it to happen again. They look in other peoples faces for the signs of pain they once suffered, they beat the drum and lead the way. This is what will always remain inspiring and grand about the Black Arts, Black Consciousness, Free Speech, Women's Rights, Gay Pride, Civil Rights and Chicano Movements of 20th century America.
So we started counting noses. You can't look into peoples faces without doing so. The liberated people demanded that they be counted, and that the government of the people started recognizing the people for whom they wanted to be. The census form doesn't say 'Colored'. It doesn't say 'ex-slave'. It doesn't say 'dark complected'. It says black and African American because that's who we have decided to be.
They said things like "My mother had diabetes and lived in a black neighborhood all her life, there was no hospital in that neighborhood. So the next time the government builds a hospital, it better take care of black women like my mother." And you will find at the bottom of reasoning for everyone who wants to be recognized that there is a need for service where there was no service before. Where people are outside of the mainstream of America and they know one of the reasons is race or ethnicity, they will demand recognition of that race or ethnicity for the purposes of social justice. People who have been liberated and people who await their due are on the same side in this matter.
There are many things for which no need exists to talk about racial or ethnic identity. I think that multicultural ethics has won and we are much better prepared to talk about Gay issues or latino issues when we need to. But we are also much better at knowing when ethnicity and preferences are not useful and get in the way. There aren't black and white lines at the movie theatre. Nobody is asking for Affirmative Action at the supermarket, despite the fact that was where it started.
Where the extraordinary needs and the demands remain are for services outside of the mainstream. This is where the burden of proof lies for those who would suggest that a blinded government provides best. Where there is uncontroversial equality, Americans won't stand for resegregation. But whereever race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual preference, religious creed or primary language is a barrier to mainstream goods and services, people will continue to demand that they be served and recognized, and a government of the people best be about that in the form the people demand.
As the political spin starts up, I expect the Old School to be disrespected and the notions of mainstreaming and liberation as I describe them to be cast aside. I expect majoritarian sentiment to be fueled by real white bigotry. I expect minority resentment to forget their independence from the Man. I expect a befuddled middle to guess without thinking outside of whatever boxes are drawn by partisans. Quite frankly, I expect that the wrong things will be done for the wrong reasons, just as was the case in support of Proposition 209. I expect that the money behind Connerly will make a complete mockery of the English language.
What I don't expect is for the need to make special recognition of special circumstances to go away. I don't expect to shut up about it either.
Remember those miners that were stuck in a mineshaft for 77 hours then miraculously released? Check out this story (may require free login to NyTimes). Since the event, one of the rescuers has committed suicide, and all of the miners are suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Though the writer of the article was able to capture their angst, there is a sense that the miners themselves haven't quite communicated their sense of pain to either each other, or to their wider community. Why does this matter? What the hell does this have to do with politics?
Every election cycle we see two competing narratives from pundits. On the one hand we see patriotic narratives cheering and reaffirming the vote as the pre-eminent sign of our vibrant democracy. "I've never seen so many people at the polls" is a common refrain.
The other narrative? One of hand-wringing. Why don't more people care about politics? Why don't more people come out to vote? Why do so many people just tune politics out? This narrative is focused on voter apathy and on the problems it poses for our vision of democracy. From these narratives we as readers are usually steered towards the conclusion that the people who are tuning politics out are to blame.
Here's where the miners come in.
Not only do they not seem to have communicated their suffering to each other (preferring instead to engage in projects that keep their minds and bodies occupied, or to pharmaceuticals), but the "community" in which they live has turned on them rather than on the company that should have kept them safe. Nina Eliasoph wrote a work entitled AVOIDING POLITICS. Eliasoph spent a great deal of time in a working class, white, suburban environment examining the ways that citizens grappled with politics in their community. What she found was that citizens themselves created a number of spaces in which deep discourse on pretty much ANYTHING of substance was frowned upon.
Politics? Nope.
Religion? Nope.
Race? HELL no.
What fills this gap? If people aren't talking about politics with each other, then where do they get their perspectives from? This is where institutions like the media step in.
When the miners were rescued, very few stores focused on the ways that the company that owned the mine neatly dodged regulations created to ensure miner safety. Fewer narratives focused on the complicit aid of the current administration in overlooking those regulations or getting rid of them totally. So when the average person in that community is thinking about the rescue...they focus on the rescue rather than the causes. When the miners decide to sue, the average citizen is now thinking of possible job loss and blaming the miners.
And the miners themselves because they are unused to dealing with sensitive issues in a group context don't quite have the language to describe what they are going through in a way that builds community ties. They're left to pills, to booze, to digging holes in the ground.
Unless somehow we can create the spaces that can effectively build those ties, we can pretty much kiss any attempt to build support for civic institutions whether through public initiatives like Americorps, or private initiatives, goodbye.
Vision Circle is now the home for Old School Thought, formerly known as the Old School Republicans. The reasons for the change are relatively simple. Firstly, I ran out of patience with the lack of traction at the OSR site. Secondly, it is more important that the thinking is Old School than Republican (although I am not changing parties). Thirdly, I like this hosting company better than that one. Fourthly I think that the Old School will do just fine here, and I save money in the deal.
Thank you for your patience.
Before it became apparent that Americans weren't exactly being welcomed with open arms in Iraq, I was skeptical. Of course, I'm skeptical ANYWAY but that's beside the point.
My thing was this. You're talking about a group of people being "overseen" by an occupying force that with a few exceptions does not look like them, does not speak their language, does not worship the same God, does not have the same interpersonal customs. If that isn't the recipie for problems--even before we take anti-American sentiment into account--I don't know what is.
So when I read that an Arab-American is suing the FBI, I'm wondering what took so long. The agents best able to properly grapple with Middle East (more properly Southwest Asia but that's another story) terrorists are going to be those agents the FBI will keep off the case for as long as possible.
Ok. We've been given a 25 year window to make due with Affirmative Action before the doors close.
Assuming that someone doesn't pull the rug out from under us, it now behooves us to ask a question that we haven't really begun to grapple with on a significant national level. What can we do between now and 2028 to abrogate the need for Affirmative Action in higher education?
Of course there is no one right answer...although there are probably several wrong ones. "Nothing" for example is a sure fire wrong answer.
Thinking about the civil rights movement, scholars like Charles Payne (author of the brilliant I'VE GOT THE LIGHT OF FREEDOM) argue persuasively that there were at least three modes of civil rights activism. One mode was largely legalistic...sue, get your case before the Supreme Court, and get the SC to change the law. The other mode was the large scale use of nonviolent protest. The third mode was door to door organizing.
The first two modes are what most of us think of when we think of the Civil Rights Movement, and its victories. Brown v. Board, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the student sponsored sit-ins...
But it's that third mode that really helped blacks and whites make the turn to a better democracy. Because they were about getting regular folks to recognize their rights and their full responsibility as citizens. This task was thankless. There were no cameras documenting these actions for prosperity. There was no cushy Supreme Court Justice job awaiting.
Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent (later National) Coordinating Committee was one of the thankless heroes of this movement. He's now working on teaching kids in Mississippi math. HIs ideas are worth serious discussion.
Ok. We've been given a 25 year window to make due with Affirmative Action before the doors close.
Assuming that someone doesn't pull the rug out from under us, it now behooves us to ask a question that we haven't really begun to grapple with on a significant national level. What can we do between now and 2028 to abrogate the need for Affirmative Action in higher education?
Of course there is no one right answer...although there are probably several wrong ones. "Nothing" for example is a sure fire wrong answer.
Thinking about the civil rights movement, scholars like Charles Payne (author of the brilliant I'VE GOT THE LIGHT OF FREEDOM) argue persuasively that there were at least three modes of civil rights activism. One mode was largely legalistic...sue, get your case before the Supreme Court, and get the SC to change the law. The other mode was the large scale use of nonviolent protest. The third mode was door to door organizing.
The first two modes are what most of us think of when we think of the Civil Rights Movement, and its victories. Brown v. Board, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the student sponsored sit-ins...
But it's that third mode that really helped blacks and whites make the turn to a better democracy. Because they were about getting regular folks to recognize their rights and their full responsibility as citizens. This task was thankless. There were no cameras documenting these actions for prosperity. There was no cushy Supreme Court Justice job awaiting.
Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent (later National) Coordinating Committee was one of the thankless heroes of this movement. He's now working on teaching kids in Mississippi math. HIs ideas are worth serious discussion.
For Moses the key wasn't simply changing the system, it was giving individuals the capacity to realize their OWN ability to change the system. So it wasn't just about giving someone a voter registration form, asking them to fill it out and turning it in, it was about educating people about citizenship itself. About educating them about the role of regular people in maintaining and growing a living democracy.
He now believes that the best way to continue this mission is to take the same principles and teach them to grade school kids in the south. By using their lived environment as a template by which to not only teach them higher mathmatical principles, but to teach them the value of teaching others like themselves, Moses is hoping to build a new cadre of intellectual-activists. The book that descibes this project is called RADICAL EQUATIONS.
Our first steps should be to institute programs in school that will both give kids the ability to understand and change their lived reality, and the ability to succeed at whatever mechanism colleges use to sort kids into niches. Like getting people in Mississippi to vote, this is a thankless job. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will never be a part of it. Tavis Smiley will probably never want to interview you about it. And you won't be recruited to join Cornel West at Princeton after you do it.
But I'm fully convinced that at the end of those 25 years, you'll be able to see a tremendous change that will make all the thankless work worth it.
More later.
Ward Connerly has recently announced plans to put an anti-Affirmative Action initiative on the ballot that would disallow the consideration of race or gender in public education, in contracting, and in government employment (might be wrong on this last piece).
Interesting response from the Republican Party--they don't want any part of Ward. Michigan's Republican Party has a tiny fracture beneath the surface that pops up every now and then--there is a staunch social conservative wing, and a more liberal cosmopolitan wing. Their unwillingness to support this initiative could signify that for the time being at least, the cosmopoles run the Republican tent.
Another spin though, would just look at 2004. Michigan looks to be a highly contested state in the presidential election...and the last thing Republican stalworths of whatever ideological stripe want is the "sleeper" to be awakened. The sleepers in this case are cities like Flint, Pontiac, Lansing...and of course Detroit. Connerly gets enough signatures to put this issue on the ballot, and he single handedly ensures that the mobilization engine is upgraded to 3.0...and black voters across the state will turn out to defeat it.
It is very possible that Connerly's initiative will pass...but I'm almost positive that there is no way for the initiative to pass AND still have a Bush victory in Michigan.
Just to gum up the works, I'm suggesting that everyone I know in the state of Michigan sign the petitions.
I hear "Mickey Mouse" is a popular name.
Tom Atlee 's definition of co-intelligence is "what intelligence would look like if we took wholeness, interconnectedness, and co-creativity seriously." His book, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All, is intelligent in that sense: it is a terrific bricolage of Tom's learnings from his own experiences and from his many friends.
In a nutshell, Tom offers us a persuasive account of what we can do, and how, to change our world -- not for the better as we as individuals might define it, but as we might define it if we listened to each other closely enough to arrived at mutual understanding.
A quote from the Introduction:
Gone are the days when the worst we could do was conquer a neighboring tribe or overgraze a local hillside. We are reaching a point where individuals and small groups will be able to create, or destroy, almost anything. We have moved beyond the scale of centimeters and miles down into the microscopic, even subatomic realms, and up into the planetary and interstellar realms, from angstroms to light years, from nanoseconds to gigabytes. We break up atoms and chromosomes. And collectively we change forests to deserts. We litter the upper atmosphere with layers of space junk zooming around earth at hundreds of miles an hour. Our inventions are transforming the lives of our grandchildren's grandchildren -- and we do not have the foggiest notion how. And we are doing all of this faster and faster, more and more, bigger and bigger.The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All was officially released July 4. You can read a sample chapter, then order it from http://www.taoofdemocracy.com/index.html.Meanwhile, individually, we can directly comprehend only a tiny fraction of what we are collectively doing. Our individual senses, nervous systems and brains are not capable of taking in the gigantic effects, both current and potential, that our civilization's creativity is capable of generating. Our nervous systems are set to respond to what is here and now and obvious: we can not feel radiation, the population explosion, the vital information missing from our newspaper, the disappearing ozone layer. And when we are faced with any significant piece of the full information, we get overwhelmed.
Stop and think about this for a minute.
We cannot individually comprehend the range, depth and detail of the consequences we are collectively generating for ourselves.Well, if we cannot appreciate our circumstances individually, perhaps we can do it collectively. Unfortunately, our democracy is not designed for that. Even in those rare instances when it is not being manipulated by special interests, it operates on elections and polls, on the numerical adding up of our individual opinions. Logically speaking, this cannot do the job that is required; if we can not individually comprehend our circumstances, adding all our individual incomprehensions together will not improve our understanding.
Let's be co-intelligent about this, let's get the word out, let's blog it!
I came across one of those old black men that give people fits, honest to a fault, unsympathetically political and conservative. His name is Clark and he's 73. He has a long memory. We talked politics.
I spent a great deal of time with him on this hot afternoon. We talked about, or more accurately he railed on about missing weapons of mass destruction, Colin Powell's great lie to the United Nations, voter apathy, Gerald Ford, the difference between GWBush and Ronald Reagan, MoveOn.org Affirmative Action, Harold Ford, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, black conservatives and the politics of the northeast, Pennsylvania in particular.
His father, he told me with his eyes fixed on mine, was born in 1895. He had something that was rare for black men who worked in the coal mines at the time, a sixth grade education. He could both read and write. This made him very attractive to the Republican bosses of the day who were agitating to weaken unions and wished to convince blacks that they shouldn't join white unions. The elder Clark refused and stuck with the pro-union Democrats. For this, the Clark house was firebombed.
He continued on and told me how much he loathed the passing of the Taft-Hartley Act, which he saw as nothing more or less than an excuse for union busting. I've never thought of it in any way, to me it's one of those vague memories - some bit of trivia to recite at games parties. It occured to me that his conviction is a bit stronger than mine, I possess the more optimisitic direction, he bears witness to the destruction of hope and the venality of party politics. I have always wanted to be one of those gruff old men who has no difficulty whatsoever in brazenly stating his opinion. In that future I will be talking about the past.
We seemed to converge on a point, I think. It's hard to digest two lifetimes of political lessons into an afternoon, but it was an odd one. We agreed that Jesse Jackson's infamously overblown 'hymietown' remark marked the beginning of the end of the Democratic party. He hopes for General Wesley Clark to announce his candidacy, I hope the Colin Powell will shed some light on what is going on behind the scenes between Defense and State. We both agree that Bush shouldn't and won't survive 2004. He believes that Bush would jettison Rumsfeld in order to try.
At the end of the afternoon, we embraced. He hollered out that he had hugged a Republican and we chuckled about it.