New Southern Strategy — 3 — Left, Center, Right — A New Fight on a New Terrain
April 15, 2016
My father was not a Communist, though his father was and (in this season of tax returns) I will share that my dad’s tiny business was audited seven times by the IRS in the 1950s.
My father was a great admirer of John L. Lewis. As a working-class man, it was in his blood, and when he died we found the flyers he and others had done up to organize Chicago’s diamondsetters, most of them working piecework for big outfits. Lewis’ CIO revolutionized US society. It was a backbone of the New Deal. Its dialectic relationship with both the rise of the Communist Party, USA and the Black liberation movement has been the object of many studies.
Today, another leader of the United Mineworkers, Rich Trumka, plays a leading role. True, the times are profoundly different. But make no mistake, Trumka’s AFL-CIO has revolutionized our society today just as Lewis’ did 70 years ago. The last 25 years of our history are a direct product of Labor’s choices.
In the 1990s, the Clintons pioneered what I have called the ‘New Southern Strategy’ (the term has become quite popular of late, see for example ‘Donald Trump’s New Southern Strategy’ in the Huffington Post and ‘White Man’s Lament: There’s a new Southern strategy, and it runs through the North’ in USNews). The ideological and strategic underpinnings of the New Southern Strategy were to jettison the Democratic Party’s historic coalition with the Labor Movement and Black folk. The Clintonites, like the Reaganites, believed that the time had come to abandon Keynesianism and the ‘social pact’ with the working class that Keynesianism was premised upon. Clintonite and Reaganite alike looked at Keynesianism as a failed experiment which, while permitting the working class to expand its base in bourgeois politics, had failed to make the US safe for Corporate rule. On both sides of the aisle, party leaders felt that the changed international situation called for a diversion of domestic spending towards a renewed neocolonialism.
Clinton’s ‘inspiration’ was that the Reagan Revolution had opened up an opportunity for the Corporate Democrats. Clinton saw that if his party could shave off enough moderate Repubicans, they could beat the GOP without the need to ‘appease’ the Labor Movement and the Black community. To those who expressed concern that the new approach might alienate Black and Labor voters, the Clintonites cynically responded, “where else are they going to go?”
The Clintonites underestimated the Labor Movement and the Black community. Labor responded to the Clintonite challenge by organizing its own electoral machine within the Democratic Party. By the end of the 1990s, it became impossible for Democrats to elect their own to major office without overt Labor support. In 1998, Labor was instrumental in founding the Working Families Party in New York, and was elsewhere running its own candidates in Democratic Primaries. In 2007, Obama captured the Democratic Presidential nomination thanks to Labor’s strong backing. Last year, Labor forced a radical turn in the Democratic Party’s political direction in Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia. Recently, the success of the Black Radical Tradition conference in Philadelphia has shown that a new alignment is emerging in the Black community as well. Certainly, Black Labor’s activism in Philadelphia was the key force in mayor Jim Kenney’s recent victory over the Democratic ‘establishment’ favorite, Anthony Hardy-Williams, Mr. Pro-Charter-School himself.
Today, both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump owe something of their success to Labor. But what each owes is very different.
WEB DuBois argued in his ‘Black Reconstruction’ that the ‘Labor/Black Alliance’ is essential to any attempt to advance US democracy (also check out Henry Winston, “Strategy for a Black Agenda”). Under Trumka’s leadership, the AFL-CIO nationally worked hard to solidify that coalition. This effort led to Labor’s backing of Obama in 2007–8 and again in 2011–2012. For the first time since Reconstruction, Labor and Black folk, working together, determined the course of a major US political party.
Corporate America — always an attentive student of DuBois and Marx — understood the significance of that moment, even where the traditional Left did not. Citizens United, the abrogation of the Civil Rights Act and the birth of the Tea Party were key elements to their response to the new political conditions.
Bernie is not an ‘advanced’ form of Obama. Bernie is one face of this as-yet partially consolidated coalition between Labor and the Black community. Always pro-Labor and pro-Civil Rights, Sanders nevertheless comes out of neither movement but has rather gravitated toward both because, together, they represent the future of Progressivism in the US. Labor, meanwhile, has taken no unified position on the Sanders/Clinton debate. Within the Black community, Sanders’ position continues to improve in the face of a determined campaign from some quarters to closet-label him a racist (how else to interpret, for example, the statement in the April 3 edition of the Philadelphia Tribune that in Alaska, Hawai’i and Washington Sanders “as has been his style… rolled through another set of relatively non-diverse states… with Black populations barely hitting… 5 percent”?).
Still, to a certain extent, the Left, broadly speaking, faces the 2016 Democratic Primaries with its three primary components — Labor, the Black community and political Progressivism — divided. Of course, it is already something that the AFL-CIO has not bowed to the immense pressure to align with the Clinton camp. And Bernie must be given credit for the determined steps his campaign has taken to tackle the all-important issue of racism head-on.
On the opposite side of the coin is Trump, riding the wave of the Corporate knee-jerk reaction to Obama’s election in 2008. Did the AFL-CIO make important inroads against racism during the 2008 elections? You bet it did, enough to guarantee the white working class vote for Obama throughout the Rust Belt. But this does not mean that racism has ceased to be an important force within the white working class. Still: who has mounted the witch hunt against President Obama? Who has paid for the radio talk shows, the newspaper editorials, the political campaigns, the TV ads? There can be absolutely NO doubt that the campaign of racism fomented against Obama is driven by Corporate America, from both sides of the aisle. It started with the Clintonite drive to ‘teach Obama a lesson’ over his very first piece of major legislation as President: healthcare reform. That, from the Corporate ‘left’. From the Corporate ‘right’ came Citizens United, ‘birtherism’ and the Tea Party. Without all that, Trump would never have survived the Republican primaries. Trump, too, is a product of the new conditions.
To wish for a world without Trump is to wish for a world without a fight for equality and justice. So long as there are those willing to fight racial and class oppression, there will be those willing to do anything to ‘keep us in our place’.
*****
One of the great advantages to the current two-party system is the fact that the Corporate camp has been divided through much of the last 80 years. On the one hand, this is because they have always felt strong enough to afford themselves that luxury — to ‘gamble’ with a ‘New Deal’ as a response to world Socialism. On the other hand, genuine reform forces molded much of the Democratic party agenda in the 1970s, under the influence of the Civil Rights, Labor, Women’s and Peace movements. At times I think the ambivalence of some on the left over Hillary Clinton is because they do not see that the Democratic Party of today has ceased to be the Party of McGovern, or even of Howard Dean. That is, they do not see that the Democrat Party has already turned away from the concept of the ‘umbrella’ and that, if ‘movement’ and ‘left’ forces operate with increasing success inside the Democrat Party today, it is because they have forced themselves upon it. As the Republican Party reaches the critical mass of its own implosion, and those in the Clintonite camp are poised to suck in those shards closest to the ‘Reagan Democrats’ — the ‘Clinton’ Republicans — the Party’s Progressive wing resists because it has learned to stand on its own two feet.
There is value, for those of us on the Left, to maintaining the current status quo as long as possible. There are enormous divisions among progressives, starting with basic questions around the relationship between racial and class oppression. Too often, the voices one hears on the Left are those of football fans, not of political thinkers. Sanders is not a valid candidate because he is doing the organizing work so desperately needed in this country, but because he is a nice fellow who participated in Civil Rights demonstrations fifty years ago. Hillary is to be supported because she ‘cares’ and never mind which social forces her ascencion to the throne might favor. This sort of idiotic thinking has got to go. We are a political alternative, a nascent political party, not a fan club. We have a responsibiity to hammer out a higher degree of unity of action than we have now. And until we achieve that higher degree of unity, any attempt at a mass left party will be a disaster for the country.
What we all sense about Sanders, and what some few of us actually are able to put into numbers and reasoned discourse (don’t look at me), is that Sanders is pushing for something that is ABSOLUTELY VITAL if this country is to move forward: ORGANIZING. There can be no fight against racism, against Corporate America, for an advanced democracy, for socialism, unless we make real breakthroughs in mass organizing. Bernie has turned his campaign into a mass-organizing tool. He knows that many things can keep him from becoming the Democratic Party’s candidate for President. Simply ‘winning’ has never been the point with him. Remember his words in that first debate: it doesn’t mean a damn that you elect the nicest person in the world to be President if you are not prepared to back up your vote with mass fightback. After all, in 2008 we did elect the nicest guy in the world to the Presidency. And then we let the rightwingers rip him apart.
And then there are those two words most feared in US political discourse: ‘revolution’ and ‘socialism’. John L Lewis, a lifelong member of the Republican Party, was constantly attacked as a Communist. I point this out, not rhetorically, but because the organizing we NEED in this country cannot be accomplished within the ideology of today’s major political parties. Sanders is not an ‘outsider’ because he is a ‘Socialist’ or a ‘Social Democrat’ or a ‘Communist’ or a ‘Progressive’. Sanders is an outsider because he sees the need for thinking outside the traditional political box — which, after nearly forty years of Reaganism and its Democrat counterpart, Clintonism — is like the smallest box in a Russian doll, a stunted and claustrophobic space indeed. This country needs ‘sanders’ because it needs organizing and to get the organizing, it needs to break through to those new ideas.
All of which leads me to three conclusions. The first is that the Left has a duty to back Sanders, and I mean the ‘sane’ left especially and the workingclass left particularly. If what Sanders is fighting to build is to have a lasting impact, it cannot mire in petty politics and segregations. And our best bet there is workingclass leadership and participation.
Second, we must fight for these things from a LEFT stance, with a principled agenda. The fight against racism must be front and center on our political agenda. This means white workers fighting to win the hearts of white workers and it means bringing to the fore the new generation of Black leadership. Class consciousness without anti-racist consciousness is not revolutionary. It is reactionary. We must have constantly in mind the lessons of the ‘Black Reconstruction’. Our most strategic task, as a Left, is to build that engine of all progress, the Black/Labor alliance.
To fight as a multiracial, workingclass Left means to fight as such WITHIN the Sanders campaign itself. Those who have experience in ‘mass’ organizing know that this kind of work happens in a spirit of frank camaradie, is not dogmatic and is rooted in the respect and solidarity of those we work with.
But — and this is my final conclusion — if we are able to fight in this way within a SECTION of the Democratic Party, then we need to have the ability to fight this way within the Democratic Party as a whole. We need to stop holding our noses and work as if we, the ‘Left’, the ‘Bernie Democrats’ were already a separate political entity. There should be no question that there will be party unity in the general elections. There should be no question that we will push our ideas, values and agenda within the Democratic Party, at all levels, because it is our legitimate right to push them. Is that a capitulation to the Clintonites? No it is not. No Democrat can get elected in this country today without our participation. It is not the Clintonites who have to really take stock of that fact — it is us. We are the ones who continue to act and speak as if the Clintonites can simply walk into the room and whisk our cards off the table. They already know they can’t. They’re just praying that we don’t catch onto the fact, too.
There will come a day in this country when the Democratic Party splits and a new, purely Corporate party enters US politics. The new party will have great financial and organizational power. It will be flanked by a rabid right political formation made up of Tea Party, racist and fascist elements. On that day, the Left had better be able to say it did its homework. That it brought over to its side the best of our society’s pro-democratic elements, irregardless of their class extraction. That it fought vigorously to overcome the racial divide that hampers us. That it has laid the groundwork for a political mechanism to resolve its own internal conflicts and tensions, which will always exist. That it has trained up a new generation of leaders, activists and members who are capable of seeing a situation politically and not like they were rooting for their favorite team in the Stanley Cup. If, that day, the Left can say, “we did our job” — this country will win.
If not — then no hotter hell for humanity.