No Ideological Labels

I taught a course this semester on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ella Baker. It was an extended meditation on models of leadership and the genre of biography and autobiography—an attempt in the classroom to continue what I set out to do in We Are the Leaders. The students have been amazing as they struggled with these figures (desperately trying to avoid hagiography) and with the hubris of the form (the attempt to capture a life that inevitably seeps beyond the page.)

Returning to these three figures has been especially important to me in this moment. Ms. Baker’s commitment to participatory democracy and her faith in the power of ordinary people reminds us that the answer to Trumpism does not rest with any particular party or person, but with the American people organized on behalf of values and goods commonly shared. Ours is the responsibility to tend to and secure democracy. And this view holds no matter the ongoing efforts to “deform” our attention. If democracy is to be made real, it must be done by everyday people.

What I find powerful about this conclusion, and this hits particularly hard given our coarse politics, is that Ms. Baker enacts this view without the weight of dogmatic ideology. Studying her life shows that she holds steadfast to some basic commitments about justice. She affirms the dignity and standing of everyday people. She is profoundly skeptical of an economic system that assumes that some people are disposable. And even though she is critical of liberalism, she believes in private/public distinctions (she was fiercely protective of her private life).

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Throughout her long activist career, we see an unshakable commitment to building a more just society animated by values that could be described in a number of different ways (as Christian, progressive, etc.). But she never felt it necessary to describe her politics with an ideological shorthand. She didn’t need to call herself a feminist or a Marxist or a Black Nationalist or announce her commitment to nonviolence as a way of life. She simply lived her values and worked tirelessly, with others, on behalf of that commitment to justice.

I find this refreshing in a moment when so many are quick to billboard their politics with ideological shorthands—when political adversaries find it easier to dismiss a caricatured view of socialism than engage the particular policy positions of their opponents or when some are more interested in showing fidelity to an ideology (of being seen as right and virtuous) than with the matter of justice.

I say all this not to suggest that ideology doesn’t matter. Of course, ideology matters. And I am not interested in gimmicks like the “no labels” crowd who simply want to rebrand so-called centrist politics. Instead, I am trying to clear the underbrush that will allow us to get at a different way of being together—a way of living not gummed up by 18th and 19th century ideological labels and their many offsprings.

Ms. Baker did her work close to the ground, insisted that we engage people where they are and open pathways for the imagination to do its work on behalf of justice.

I don’t need the label of Marxist or socialist to help me say that the capture of American politics and government by billionaires is wrong (even as I acknowledge the insight that Marx offers when it comes to the workings of capitalism). I don’t need to conclude that Zohran Mamdani has betrayed his commitments because he met with Trump—that his politics demand a certain kind of performance and fidelity to what it means to be a member of the Democratic Socialist of America. I only expect him to govern in light of his stated commitments and the needs of the most vulnerable in the city of New York.

Let me be clear: I am not repeating the stale criticism of what some call purist politics: that those who refuse to accept the lesser of two evils fail to understand the nature of politics. And I am not commending a kind of crude practicalism that all-too-often justifies betraying one’s values. Instead, I want to follow Ms. Baker’s example: to “do and live” the work on behalf of the most vulnerable and a more just world. Ideological dogma be damned.

I keep returning to this line in T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker” from The Four Quartets. “In my end is my beginning.” It feels like much of our world is collapsing around us, but that end offers us an opportunity to do something radically different: to free ourselves from the shackles of an old world and build a more just one. That does not require ideological proclamations.

We need only roll up our sleeves and, like Ms. Baker, get to work and live our values without exception.

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