Sam Smith, March 2016 –
Lately, I’ve been feeling real glad that I got into activism in the early 1960s
because I’m increasingly getting the sense that I wouldn’t be good enough to be
an activist by today’s liberal standards.
For example, Jesse Benn,
writing in Huffington Post, said recently that “White people from across the
political spectrum are overt racists, hold implicit biases, and/or harbor
otherwise problematic, incomplete views about race. All white people fall into
one or more of these categories, from vehement anti-racists to card carrying
white nationalists.”
When such sweeping
generalities are applied to other ethnicities, isn’t it called racism?
Then there’s all this talk
about “white privilege” which seems to be applied equally to whites out of work
or underpaid as well as to Donald Trump.
Then we have the charge
that critics of Hillary Clinton’s loud approach to campaigning are “sexist”
even though Bernie Sanders also shouts a lot.
As Meghan Daum pointed out
in the LA Times, “Clinton is a shouter. Not the bellicose kind, like Sanders,
but the testy, scolding kind. Her rhetorical effect sometimes brings to mind a
parent counting slowly to three in an effort to get a recalcitrant child to
stop whatever it is she's doing right now.”
In fact, the problem in
each of these cases is that politicians appeal to their immediately present
audience rather than the even larger one watching it all on television. It’s a
rational thing to note and talk about. And you might want to even add the nearly
eight years of professorial lecturing we’ve gotten from the current president
who seems to think we are all his students.
And since substance and
integrity no longer matter much in American politics, journalists should be at
least allowed to cover it all more like the sporting event it has become
Of course, back in the 1960s we
had our problems as well. I was at a Student Non-Violent Coordinating meeting
when Stokely Carmichael came and said we whites were no longer welcomed in the
civil rights movement. Two of my activist friends went to prison and three
committed suicide after losing their way in the movement. There were many
activists who fought vigorously against the Vietnam War but didn’t have any
time for ethnic discrimination or anti-poverty issues. And as a 220 pound
iron-pumping 30-something, I was confronted four times at demonstrations by
protestors who were certain I was an uncover cop or an FBI agent.
Lots of people were doing lots of
different things in lots of different ways. And the point was to produce
change, not merely to prove one’s own virtue. So you were active also because,
with luck, you could actually change how people thought about things.
I knew early on that this was
possible because I had changed. In fall of 1965 I wrote, “The public must be
conditioned to the realities of the situation. They must be made to understand
the necessity of the undramatic, sufficient, and lengthy application of
American force in South Vietnam.” Less than a year later I wrote that LBJ’s
“Vietnam escapade has been an abject failure.”
One thing I learned from that
experience was not to be too hard on people who hadn’t figured it all out. Or
who still believed the lies of those at the top.
Today, it too often feels like
both liberal and conservative America consider politics an evangelical religion
where there are those who have been saved and those who will go to hell. And
the ones that don’t think like you are in the latter group.
Which is why so many liberals are
willing to define their faith as encompassing things like gay marriage and
abortion, while ignoring the economic issues that once made their politics
powerful.
For more than three decades, as
their own social and monetary status has improved, many liberals have been
drifting away from concern over economic matters, creating a huge cultural gap
between themselves and the middle and lower class. This has opened the way for
the right wing success now peaking with the candidacy of Donald Trump and Ted
Cruz. Liberals didn’t lose the support of the less successful white American;
rather they tossed it away.
Part of the secret of successful
politics is not to condemn those whom you’re trying to convince. Especially
since there aren’t enough liberals around to have a majority just by
themselves. They may get into heaven, but they won’t make it often to the White
House.
Besides, insisting on the right
words and right symbolism at best only gets you that. Picking the right issues
and the right actions and forming alliances even with those who don’t think and
talk right about everything can get some really important change.
I learned this as an admirer of
the community organizer Saul Alinsky, someone who wouldn’t be too well regarded
in liberal circles these days. A short time before his death in 1972, he was
interviewed by Playboy. An excerpt:
PLAYBOY: The
assumption behind the Administration's Silent Majority thesis is that most of
the middle class is inherently conservative. How can even the most skillful
organizational tactics unite them in support of your radical goals?
ALINSKY:
Conservative? That's a crock of crap. Right now they're nowhere. But they can
and will go either of two ways in the coming years -- to a native American
fascism or toward radical social change. Right now they're frozen, festering in
apathy, leading what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation:"
They're oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized
by urban crime, frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the
computerized world around them. They've worked all their lives to get their own
little house in the suburbs, their color TV, their two cars, and now the good
life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are
generally unfulfilling, their jobs unsatisfying, they've succumbed to tranquilizers
and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in long
term endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces. They're losing
their kids and they're losing their dreams. They're alienated, depersonalized,
without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel
rejected and hopeless.
They're the first to live in a total mass-media-oriented world, and every night
when they turn on the TV and the news comes on, they see the almost
unbelievable hypocrisy and deceit and even outright idiocy of our national
leaders and the corruption and disintegration of all our institutions, from the
police and courts to the White House itself. Their society appears to be
crumbling and they see themselves as no more than small failures within the
larger failure. All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them
rudderless in a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational
material.
I got my activist start
with help from an Alinsky trained Presbyterian minister, learning early not
only good strategies but the importance of treating everyone with
respect, finding unity in specific issues rather than a general ideology, and
approaching problems as a friendly human and not as a sociology professor
sternly parading theories.
As I wrote some years later,
“What if we were to start with the unhappy truth that humans have always had a
hard time dealing with other peoples, and that much ethnic and sexual
antagonism stems not from hate so much as from cultural narcissism? Then our
repertoire of solutions might tilt more towards education and mediation and
away from being self-righteous multi-cultural missionaries converting yahoos in
the wilds of the soul. We could turn towards something more akin to what Andrew
Young once described as a sense of ‘no fault justice.’ We might begin to
consider seriously Martin Luther King's admonition to his colleagues that among
their dreams should be that someday their enemies would be their friends.”
It’s not a bad way to start
bringing middle and lower class whites to the progressive agenda. Dump self
righteous liberal evangelicalism and find issues that, by pursuing, can make
friends with those they have been trained by the right to despise. Talk about
middle class white pain instead of white privilege. Teach ethnic commonalities.
Find what we share. And choose issues that will make things better for most -
regardless of the color of their skin.
One of the other ways the 1960s
were different was that we believed that if we worked hard enough in the right
way things would get better. We have to recover that sense. And working
together on things you didn’t realize you had in common is a great way to
start.
