Tales from the attic: Finding the right words

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.