Across The Great Divide -- How We Can Get To Party Unity Without Uniformity or Loss of Values
Across The Great Divide -- How We Can Get To Party Unity Without Uniformity or Loss of Values
This is not about our future president. It’s about US. I’m thinking right now in ways that neither Bernie nor Hillary have articulated, and yet believe – that this party, divided by the heat of its differences, can still come to work together toward being the old Big Tent party of the FDR days -- by forming coalitions of different groups who are willing to put purity aside for what President Obama calls "better" (an important point I take from his Howard U. graduation speech). Don't remind me of past fights and words. Set those aside for now.
I’ve seen and felt the hardening of positions and feelings between us Sanders and Clinton Democrats. Though we knew it was coming, we've been often surprised and pissed off to learn how different our party's two camps really are. We've spent more time lately being miserable with each other than with finding a way to build a new party together. It's my political belief that the people's goal is to revive democracy even as our government doesn't respect that. Don't remind me of candidates' imperfect records. Set those aside for now.
Yes,
I'm a Berner attempting common ground, not because I'm a loser but because I've spent all my life in politics for the long haul, and for reasons I'll give below. The dynamics of this past year can't be fixed by sound bite thinking, so try to be patient and give these ideas a fair hearing. I'm borrowing them from Obama, Cornel West and activist/writer, Rebecca Solnit, whose book, "Hope in the Dark," I highly recommend to all Sanders and Clinton supporters.
Left, right, unicorns, realism, innocent, guilty, tit-for-tat ad hominems -- the binaries abound and bind us right now. Let's take a break and think about ourselves. Rebecca Solnit points out that "perfectionism is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this than leftists. We all of us know there's a growing gap between new movements -- BLM, environmentalists, students, youth in general and professionals -- and the old figureheads called establishment corporatists.
We progressives' feel a grumpiness of perfectionism. We too often hold that anything less than total victory is failure. But that's been a premise that makes it easy for us to give up. And we have seen how we've done that both today and, at mid terms and swear to again after the general election.
But don’t give up yet, Berners and Hillers. Remember, this is not just the U.S. This is Earth. We know it will never be heaven and unicorns.
We need to keep to to the realism that knows there will always be cruelty, violence, destruction and devastation. We cannot eliminate all of the rainforest devastation, rape, extinctions, land dispossession or deaths, even from easily preventable causes. But as Hillers (please don't take offense, it's just a short cut name) have pointed out, we can reduce them, outlaw them, undermine their sources and foundations. We can change.
When we make "better," as Obama has said, these are victories. Berners, for all their revolutionary ideals, insist that a better world is what we need to make, and soon; but a perfect world, never.
So the question becomes, what will we work on together to make it the Democratic Better. As Obama told Howard University grads this past week: “better” is the newer, stronger starting point for new battles and new victories. Being "right" has never gotten anything accomplished that didn't also strengthen oppressive systems.
Take the issue of how women used to make 66 cents to the male dollar and now we've made 77 cents. Old heads remember and say, so what were we complaining about?! It's really not so complicated for progressives and conservatives to acknowledge that women's 77 cents/male dollar IS better than 66 cents.
But what we keep seeing is that the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either 77 cents is a victory, at which point some of us shut up and stop fighting; or 77 cents is ugly, so our activism accomplishes too little or nothing, so we then say, what's the point of fighting, even -- binary politics that say incrementalism sucks and perfection is unlikely. Both versions are defeatist because both versions are static.
What's missing: the ability to recognize a situation in which we're traveling and we've not arrived. For us it's a politics that shows cause both to celebrate and fight in a world that is always being made and never finished.
That's the tricksy Coyote world view, where nothing -- no victory or great human triumph -- travels in a straight cause/effect line (like much of nature). That view needs to be in preference to the Yahweh world view of an old school, straight and narrow rule-bound road to paradise (like authoritarian systems).
Like activists say in Seattle: "We are winning. They don't say, "We have won." It's a different political world in which we can feel successful without feeling smug, where we can feel challenged without feeling defeated. Most victories anywhere in the world are temporary, or incomplete or compromised in some way, and we might as well celebrate them from time to time. Without stopping. So even if some day we women get dollar-to-dollar parity, that will just free us up – and fire us up -- to attend to something else. There will always be a something else. Get used to it.
When either religious or Christian activists mistake heaven for some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate American or Earth by, they burn themselves out like moths attracted to flames -- or they set up a totalitarian utopia in which others burn out. Paradise is not the place at which you arrive because, as for the moth, arrival is death. Paradise is the journey toward it.
Victories MUST be temporary or incomplete. What kind of humanity would survive paradise. The industrialized world has tried to approximate paradise in its suburbs -- with the luxe, calme, cul-de-sacs, cable, two car garages -- but we've seen that with all that comes a soft ennui that shades over into despair and decay of the soul, which also suggests that Paradise is already a gulag. Or there wouldn't be "mother's little helpers" in that world. Paradise doesn’t require courage, selflessness, creativity, passion from us; paradise, in all accounts, is passive, sedative, and if you really think about it, SOULLESS.
Cornel West has talked about this. We’ve got the term “politics of prefiguration" -- the idea that if we embody what we aspire to (be the change you want to see) we have already succeeded. It means, if our activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in our part of the world we’ve created a home in which to live, Even if it’s temporary or local, this paradise of participating is a long term home in which souls get made, fed, housed and live it up.
We could imagine alliances and affinities that are willing to turn up without badges of ‘right’ and ‘left,’ such as recent American militia movements – patriarchal, nostalgic, nationalist, gun-happy, full of weird fantasies about the UN – who have something in common with us: they prize the local and fear their erasure by the transnational; they don’t want to see their communities go down the tubes any more than we do.
Our political imagination has to define common cause, and we have to directly speak to each other about them. Our courage, respectful efforts and outreach, can create new coalitions like those that have succeeded in Oregon's stopping Nestle’s water encroachment and plastic bottle devastation, or in ending the radiated Nevada nuclear test sites, or in shutting down the WTO when Seattle’s unions, environmentalists, anarchists, indigenous activists coalesced in the 90's, or when Republican ranchers work with environmentalists in coalitions to shut down methane drilling in Wyoming. Defining and listing common cause goals means that activism need not be oppositional. Our old litigious activism now sees potential allies.
And so we need to go into the general election considering this: no wing of the Democratic Party is ever so good that it can’t stand a little revision, and no party wing's goals are ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing them is out of the question. That's how unity can exist without uniformity or loss of our values -- through common cause coalition building.
We cannot chain our new president in old mental, comfortable binaries. We can build a new power space that a female presidency can provide, in which we can find common cause with at least half the population. It could be a list of more humane domestic spending priorities. The president's space of common cause could develop with the Joint Chiefs – who already see climate change as the #1 security crisis for America's and the world's future -- and commander-in-chief, plans to implement green energy, communications, mobility, of the military, both to save it from losing its essential mission, and to save the planet's inhabitants from much devastation. This new presidential space can find common cause in that space to “better” use security technology to protect rather than sloppily kill innocent women and children in conflict zones. Or prevent conflict zones through prioritizing safety through climate impact response policies.
New political coalitions within THIS party can practice what activist coalitions win with. These coalitions can redefine this party. We can demand a new political space that a woman president can create -- to shift the paradigm that the ends are not as important as the means. We can join this president in privileging means that will actually define new ends. Don't remind me of past arguments about any leader's inability to change. We all can change.
We in this party can show the 1% who believe their money will run "their" American show, that the solutions that money can NOT buy are COLLECTIVE ones; that from THIS party of ideas come coalitions whose ideas work. That OUR coalitions put our common causes ahead of our differences -- that they are the source of "our" successes, even as they try to appropriate those successes as their own.
When we’re asked, what’s this new world going to be?” we answer, "We don’t know, but let’s build it together.” It’s the politics of here and now that is better than the ‘fierce urgency of now,’ that puts souls before money, puts context in front of our ideology, that rejects purity and perfection. Coalitions built on common causes have created pasts that the most brilliant authoritarians couldn’t have planned any better.
So, it’s not unicorns. It’s a risk for “better.” In an imperfect world, ‘better,’ as Obama and others have explained, is a fine outcome to live with and celebrate.
Right now, people worldwide both love and hate us for our floundering. But when we remember what victories we've had over the last century, we'll channel the hope that history gives us to revive democracy as a calling.
That's what "undergrounds" do. We'll laugh as we recall how others tried to throw democracy under the bus. Then we'll party in the streets as the now defunct RTS of London did, knowing we're never done, but living in the political coalition of common cause, paradise be damned.
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