The late SNCC activist, Bob Moses, once told me about the significance of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. It was in the context of a wide-ranging conversation about struggle and organizing. He told me that the Civil Rights Act opened space for their voter registration efforts. On many levels, the legislation was woefully inadequate, but it criminalized any attempt to obstruct efforts to register people to vote. Bob said that without these protections southern sheriffs would have locked them up and threw away the key. The Act didn’t prevent the violence they faced, legal or otherwise. It didn’t settle much. But the legislation offered a different framework for the struggle over voting. Imagine what would have happened if they did not have those protections?
The context of struggle matters. The pretense of democratic restraint matters. And if one cares about the suffering of everyday people, one doesn’t embrace moments, a politics, or a politician that will deepen that suffering.
Bob went on to talk about the pitfalls of elections becoming the objective of organizing and of movements. When organizers place their hopes and aspirations in getting someone elected to office or shifting the center of gravity of a major party, they set themselves up for disappointment. He was thinking about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. I thought about Obama.
It was fascinating to hear stories about Lawrence Guyot and Stokely Carmichael and Victoria Gray. Of how they came to Atlantic City in 1964 with hopes and aspirations and the depth of despair when the Party and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. turned their backs on them. If you win, Bob said, the movement is often demobilized, and if you lose organizers are demoralized. His point was not to diminish the importance of elections, but to insist that we understand them within the context of struggle: that we must think about elections strategically with our broader aims in mind. It was an insight cured in aged disappointment.
I’ve been thinking about the conversation again lately, especially in light of the stakes of this presidential election. Remembering how I leaned in to hear the words of the soft-spoken giant and recalling what he was trying to convey: a moral and political lesson by way of historical example about keeping one’s eye on what truly matters.
I am voting for Kamala Harris in November. And Bob Moses’ words have helped me in that decision. I didn’t vote for Hilary Clinton in 2016. I had hoped to push the Democratic Party more to the left only to end up with the disaster that was Donald Trump’s presidency. So much has happened over the intervening years. So many people disappeared. Life in this country indelibly changed because of it all.
Maybe matters would have been different. Perhaps my close friends, Charlie and Larry, would still be here if we had a president who told us that Covid-19 was airborne. Larry fought like hell to hold on to life. Whatever Covid did to him, his body couldn’t match his will. Charlie told us that if he got sick, he would not survive. His words were prophetic. Maybe they would be here today – we would be playing golf and smoking cigars – if we had someone in the Oval Office motivated by actual public health policy rather than polling numbers or a performance at a press conference.
Instead, for four years, we watched the disaster unfold as Trump gave license to greed, selfishness and hatred. Witnessed a major political party morph into an autocratic political force as most of its members either cowered before Trump or made explicit their own commitments that America must remain a white nation. Observed what he did to the courts and the destruction left in its wake. As death and grief covered the nation, we were forced to endure a diabolical circus clown as president of the United States.
I haven’t been able to get over that fact. The dead and guilt continue to ride me.
But my position about the state of the Democratic Party and American politics hasn’t fundamentally changed – even as I have found myself at the White House among historians talking with President Biden about the historical significance of our current troubles, or as I have engaged in conversation with the Vice President or her staff about issues of race and American democracy. Mine is not a naïve engagement.
I have embraced what can be called a pragmatic political realism: where certain moral and ethical considerations drive my engagement with the political order. A politics released from the constraints of dogma but motivated by an abiding concern for a more just world – a world in which we stand in right relation with one another. You don’t leave your commitments at the door when you engage the powers that be. Instead, you try, within and outside of current political constraints, to open space for a different kind of imagining of politics. The concern here is less about the appearance of being right (the performance of a certain kind of political virtue) and more about the circumstances of the most vulnerable among us (to reduce the suffering of the least of these as we work for a more just world). Political labels be damn. The question is what and who motivates your politics.
I still believe corporations have an outsized influence over the Democratic party. I am not convinced that Kamala Harris’s position on free trade, her view of foreign policy (especially with regards to Israel and Gaza), or the triangulation on immigration will change the direction of the country or the exercise of US power across the globe. I still hold the view that American politics moves primarily from the center to the far right. And those who have political positions that do not fall within that spectrum are often viewed as electoral nihilists. We are told every year that our only viable political option is the Democratic nominee. Get behind the candidate, they say, or risk the future of the nation. In most instances, such talk amounts to political hokum. But not this election cycle.
I am clear about the dangers that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans represent. These political forces are an extension of the fundamental contradiction that sits at the heart of the country: they believe America MUST remain a white nation. The gathering at Madison Square Garden yesterday, for example, eerily echoed (if not substantively, it did symbolically) the 1939 Nazi rally organized by the German American Bund. These are people willing to throw into the trash bin the Constitution and any pretense to the rule of law to ensure that fact. An unholy alliance between the billionaire class and those who cling to the idea of a lily-white America (where women and others know their place) sits at the heart of it all. And fascism is its political expression.
Trump and his minions present a clear and present danger to democracy and to the people I care most about. And his election will make it even more difficult to organize and fight on their behalf. This is one of the lessons I take from that conversation with Bob Moses over a decade ago.
We don’t need to make Vice President Harris a savior. We don’t need to think of the Democratic Party apart from the general critique we might have of the corporate capture of American politics. We don’t need to give the Biden/Harris administration a pass when it comes to the horrors in Gaza. Speak as much truth as we can bare and then a little more.
That last sentence was James Baldwin’s not mine. And he insisted, as he faced down the prospect of a Ronald Reagan presidency in 1980, that we understand the strategic value of the vote without the crutch of the illusion that all will be settled if our candidate wins. As he wrote in “Notes of the House of Bondage,”
My vote will not get me a job or a home or help me through school or prevent another Vietnam or a third world war, but it may keep me here long enough for me to see, and use, the turning of the tide—for the tide has got to turn. And…if Carter is reelected, it will be by means of the black vote, and it will not be a vote for Carter. It will be a coldly calculated risk, a means of buying time.
My vote for Kamala Harris will not end genocide in Gaza. My vote will not upend the role of big money in elections or immediately transform the conditions of the poor and working poor or end the carceral state. But it may buy some time for the turning of the tide. And keep the diabolical clown out of office.
That’s why I am voting for Kamala Harris.
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