Beyond the Democrats’ inner-party struggle; W. E. B. Du Bois and graphic art; bathrooms, Uber and power

Comments (1) Art, Politics

William Hogarth, “Canvassing for Votes.” 1784. Whig and Tory agents try to bribe the innkeeper, a woman sits on the statue of the British lion, counting her bribes. Nowadays, it’s the candidates who get the bribes, and the voters … not much. Wikipedia.

“Establishment favorite” Tom Perez, defeated Sanders-backed progressive Keith Ellison in the contest for chair of the Democratic National Committee. Obama worked the phones to pitch Perez to DNC members, as did Biden and former White House staff. A victory of the Clinton-Obama, corporate wing of the party over the progressives? Yes, but it’s not so clear what the vote means for the party, or where the line can be drawn between “establishment” and “progressive.” Chuck Schumer gave Ellison an early endorsement, and he’s Senate Minority Leader and the senator from Wall Street New York; Perez’s first move was to make Ellison deputy chair, and Ellison told supporters, “If they trust me, they need to come on and trust Tom Perez as well.” The alignment of forces seems somewhat opaque and complicated. What does the DNC vote mean for the party’s future? How it will respond to its defeat and the angry demands for change from its base?

The Democratic Party establishment has always thought every election loss teaches the same lesson, “Move to the Center.” But maybe they don’t all agree on the lesson this time. After all, in the 2016 campaign, the party’s emphasis was on winning over Republicans rather than moving left to energize its progressive base, and that proved a costly mistake, in the Senate as well as the Presidency.

“Move Left, Democrats” was the headline for Steve Phillips’ op-ed in the Times. He argued that Clinton lost not because of those Obama voters who this time voted for Trump, but because of Obama voters who this time chose third parties and because of the many more eligible voters who stayed home. He argued, the Democrats could have won them with a more left messaging. He highlighted, for one example, the drop in black voting in Pennsylvania (130,000 black voters stayed home, he says, and Clinton lost by 44,000 votes; he could have told a similar story about Wisconsin, and here’s a more developed argument). Phillips thinks that a more progressive message would have inspired these people to vote for Clinton.

Anonymous etching satirizing the 1784 parliamentary election, with the Whig politician Charles James Fox finding “a new way” to win votes. In today’s democracy, politicians use a similar approach, though not to the voters, but to the donor class. Note the realistic dialogue. Speculation by historians: the artist may have been a Tory. 

Two problems with Phillips’ argument were pointed out the next day by David Leonhardt, the Times’ Upshot editor. First, the Democrats can’t win back the Senate, House and state governments without a sizable number of those Trump voters, the ones Phillips dismissed as too “susceptible to messages laced with racism and sexism.” The second is that we don’t really know who turned out and who didn’t, another reason not to write off all the Trump voters (and Leonhardt might add that we don’t really know if Trump did pick up Obama voters, or if he won new voters and those Obama voters stayed home).  Leonhardt does agree with Phillips that the Democrats needed “an economic message that appeals to both center and left … a strategy that appeals to more white voters.”

There have been many similar articles and comments about whether the Democrats should move to the left or to the center, reach out to Trump voters or not. Most miss the forest for the trees. The reason the Democrats lost those rustbelt voters they were counting on is not because they didn’t offer progressive economic policies — they in fact took a lot from Sanders; and not because they didn’t reach out in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. This thinking is just about marketing; and even if changes in the marketing might have won the Presidency, it could not have won Congress and the state governments.

But it’s not just what you say; it’s who you are

The Democrats lost not just because of what they are saying; it’s more because of who they are. Clinton surprised progressives with her leftist talk and policies. The reason she didn’t inspire turnout but instead inspired unexpected levels of antipathy was not mainly because of what she said; it was because of who she is and who the Democrats have become since the sixties. She and they are the party that, along with the Republicans, abandoned the rustbelt and the inner cities. The Democrats enabled Trump. Their decades of neoliberal economic policy enabled Trump to brand Clinton as the establishment candidate in an anti-establishment moment, leaving a space for Trump to claim the role of the anti-establishment outsider promising “hope and change.” In politics, perception can be the most decisive reality, and there was enough truth in this perception.

Trump, too, will be found out, because, again, it is not what they say, it’s who they are.

But can the Democratic Party change to become a party that can truly promise fundamental change? Such a transformation would take a lot more than choosing a progressive like Keith Ellison to head the Democratic National Committee.

The party would have to become independent of the donor class. It would also have to become something political parties fear, part of a larger movement for change that is independent and that they cannot control, and a movement that organizes in the rural areas and small cities as well as the big cities, in the South and Southwest as well as the coasts and the Midwest. The progressives you find thinking about strategy in the elite media, the Times, The Washington Post, the major progressive websites argue over the messaging and the optics and which groups to target. But few conceive of the kind of independent mass movements that transformed the US in the 1930s and the 1960s.

Perez or Ellison. Different, but how quickly they embraced, how quickly the Sanders activists at the convention applauded when Perez invited Ellison to become deputy chair. They can reconcile because they are both acting within the same framework and with the same overriding loyalty to the party, working to take the government back from the Republicans — take it back for their party.

The inner-party struggle as spectacle

In a way, the focus on who leads the Democratic National Committee is a distraction. Even if these Democrats can win a presidential election and some more seats in Congress, they can’t change America. I like Sanders, I like him a lot, and it’s easy to become wrapped up in the spectacle of the inner-party struggle. After all, that is where the media focus, and there is a Wall Street power center and there is a populist power center that wants to “reign in” Wall Street. We have here within our reach the eternal drama, the cosmic conflict between good and evil, the good guys and the bad guys, and they’re close enough that we can tie up their phones and fax machines and mob their town halls and churn their stomachs. We can even sometimes change their votes. But to change America, the Democrats need to do more than come up with the right message (if only Hillary talked more about jobs and attacked Wall Street!) or change whom they’re talking to (if only Hillary had gone to Wisconsin!). That’s just marketing.

It’s who they are more than what they say, and history tells us that who they are has to be a part of something much larger. It’s not just about the authentic, the heroic individual, a Sanders, or a Bobby Kennedy. It’s certainly not about an Obama, who inspired and built a huge movement of millions for an election, only to demobilize them after they won it for him. The Democrats’ model is a party giving marching orders to a movement; ours has to turn that around, with a movement powerful enough to give them the marching orders.

Don’t wait for the Democrats; it’s up to you.

Note: More on these subjects in my earlier comments:

The brute power of the state meets the power of the culture

Headlines in one day’s papers: Trump rolls back Obama’s Department of Education ruling allowing transgender students to use bathrooms according to their gender identity. But the same day: A sexual harassment scandal at Uber, after former Uber engineer Susan Fowler outs the ride-share colossus for systemic sex discrimination. Her compellingly written story,”One very strange year at Uber,” sent shockwaves of the “I am shocked, shocked” variety through a tech world known for its pervasive sexism. One courageous woman tells a story in her blog, it goes viral, a hundred other Uber employees add their complaints, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick vows reform and enlists former attorney general Eric Holder and board member Arianna Huffington to lead an investigation.

The Trump/Republican regime is not all-powerful. America has been profoundly transformed by a decades-long cultural revolution which has made society far more humane and the continuing horrors far more visible. The Republicans may undermine or even destroy the EEOC, but their campaign to roll back the cultural advances is meeting serious resistance at all levels.

DeVos may head the Department of Education, but the students are all listening to Beyoncé.

Artlinks: W. E. B. Du Bois and the infographic

W. E. B. Du Bois, together with Booker T. Washington, Thomas Calloway and students, organized an Exhibit of American Negroes at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The infographics displaying statistics from his research are strikingly different from what we are used to in the media. Ellen Terrell gives the background on the Library of Congress’s website, where you can find 67 of the infographics. Allison Meir in Hyperallergic compared the imagery to “the crossing lines of Piet Mondrian or the intersecting shapes of Wassily Kandinsky.”

Also check out the beautiful infographics Meier gathered from the 17th century on in an article on “the history of visualizing science.” (Note: I came across these images first in The Public Domain Review.)

  • Taxable property
  • Household furniture owned by Georgia Negroes
  • Slaves and free Negroes
  • Freemen and slaves
  • Whites, Negroes by occupation
  • Negro property, two cities

 

 

One Response to Beyond the Democrats’ inner-party struggle; W. E. B. Du Bois and graphic art; bathrooms, Uber and power

  1. Anika Penn says:

    This is a great article. I like the framing of this DNC Chair race as a distraction and the discussions of what to do next as arguments over ‘marketing strategy.’ Insightful –

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