On centrism
Posted by Chris Clarke on November 6, 2008
Last night, as some in the blog wannabe-pundit world blamed African-American voters for the passage of California’s Proposition 8, a couple of African-American guys struck up a conversation with me in front of CNN’s Los Angeles headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. (I’d walked there with The Raven and her daughter and about 700 other people outraged over the proposition’s passage.) One of the men had been explaining to his friend why he found the issue important. It’s about equal rights, he said. He had gay friends he cared about. His friend was clearly a little uncomfortable, covering up with exaggerated bonhomie. “I don’t have any gay friends,“ he said. “Not that I have anything against all y’all. But I’m not gay. I don’t know any gay people. I’m interested in the soul sisters.“ Not gay, not gay, not gay. I got the picture. His friend was clearly amused: we shared a few winks.
The guy wasn’t at all unfriendly, just going through a moment of queer panic. I understood. I’ve been there myself. True, I was 14 or so the last time it happened, which was some years before many of last night’s marchers were born. But people go through the stages of confronting internal homophobia at their own paces.
Back in those days, it occurred to me, the number of more or less homophobic passersby who would wade into queer crowds to discuss the issues in a friendly tone was approximately zero. There are still queer-bashing thugs, of course, and they still operate on both the retail level and - as is the case with Howard Ahmanson, the Mormons, the Knights of Columbus and other backers of the denial of civil rights to at least ten percent of Californians - on the wholesale level as well.
But somewhere in the last couple of decades, after a constellation of events from the Stonewall riots to the tragic murder of Matthew Shepard, landmark civil rights cases such as In re Guardianship of Kowalski, Lawrence v. Texas, and Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, and cultural and political activism ranging from ACT-UP to Will and Grace, there’s been a shift in that Overton Window. There’s still hatred and brutality and fear, but it’s near-certain that barring a meteor strike that cleaves the planet in two and kills us all, gays and lesbians will eventually claim their full share of civil rights. Prop 8 is an outrage, and it is all the more tragic because of its futility: it will be overturned, eventually, and love and justice will prevail, and in the meantime innocent people suffer merely so that monstrous bigots can feel good about the injury they cause people they hate.
There are those who’ve implied the blame for the passage of Proposition 8 should be laid at the feet of African-American voters. The polls do indicate a subcurrent of opposition to same-sex marriage among some Black voters in California. But it wasn’t Blacks who funded Prop 8. Ahmanson, the K of C, and the Mormons have hardly been great friends of African-American civil rights either. And last night’s march was emphatically multiracial, even - it was Hollywood, after all - including some of the green and purple people usually invoked by defensive whites claiming they don’t see color. Turns out they really exist! And while some people have, quite justifiably, criticized the President-elect for his ambiguous and triangulating support of full civil rights for gays and lesbians, the one chant last night that routinely got everyone going, in which the crowd joined with the most fervor and enthusiasm, the one that struck the biggest chord, was “Yes, We Can.“
See, it’s all about the community organizing. Community organizing is how Obama upset the long-term predictions: he and his staff created a machine of people who knocked on a double-digit percentage of the front doors in the US, who engaged and persuaded and motivated their fellow citizens, who turned people out in record numbers to make political change.
And the remarkable shift in attitudes toward gay and lesbian civil rights - hell, the shift in the acceptance of the very right of gays and lesbians even to exist at all - is the result of protracted community organizing. It didn’t have a central office or an overriding strategy, and message discipline may not have been exactly uniformly adhered to, but it was community organizing nonetheless: in every county in the US, in nearly every family, one person after another made the choice to come out to their families, their coworkers, their friends. It remains a heroic action and was even more so a couple decades ago, and as a result more and more people whose ignorance of the issue drove fear realized they had close friends, family members, people in their communities whom they respected, who were denied the most basic civil rights.
That community organizing changed things, as relatively unorganized as that organizing may have been. When I was born the centrist position was that gays and lesbians needed either immediate psychiatric intervention or imprisonment or both, in places where they were granted to exist, which was hardly anywhere. The centrist position now is that gays and lesbians should not be harassed unnecessarily and they should be granted a basic, if truncated, set of civil rights. We clearly have a lot of work to do to shifting that center still further, but it has shifted remarkably in my lifetime, and probably in yours as well.
It happens this way: when politics ceases to become something “out there,“ stops being an abstraction driving images on the television screen or online rants, when politics comes into your living room and sits down and says “Mom, we need to talk,“ the world changes.
The center shifts, and governing from the center begins to mean something different.
President-elect Obama has said, explicitly, that he does not support same-sex marriage. He has also made it abundantly clear that he wouldn’t cross the street to oppose same-sex marriage protection laws, but still: he explicitly withheld support from full civil rights and our job is to speak out against that, to put pressure on him to amend that position. Obama is an Alinskyan organizer, and while Alinsky was one of the most effective radicals in American history, he was a consummate pragmatist. Alinsky said famously that an organizer should never take his or her base out of their comfort zone, but should strive to keep the opposition forever outside of theirs. The job we just hired Obama to perform essentially makes the entire country both his base and his opposition, so he is in a bit of a dilemma. Unless his governing strategy is markedly different from his campaign strategy, which many expect is unlikely, he’s going to approach the task of administration as a community organizer would, persuading the entire country to support his programs.
This, of course, necessarily means he will govern as a centrist. He’d do so even if he was a radical leftist, which despite the black helicopter fantasies of the right he seems not to be. The center is significantly to the left of the previous administration, so his policies may seem fairly progressive by comparison, at least for a time: taking climate change seriously, figuring out ways to withdraw from Iraq, repairing bridges both in the Realpolitikal metaphoric sense and in the literal public works sense. After eight years of Bush, sweeping the streets on a regular schedule will seem progressive.
But he’s going to govern from the center, because his goal isn’t - as I understand it stated - to enact change by fiat that can be rescinded by President Jonah Goldberg in 2016, but to build support across political lines, across state lines, for change that will not be so easily redacted by a single cadre of politicians.
To do so, he has to work from the center because that’s the only way you can change the people to the right of center. Alinskyan community organizing isn’t about power politics for the sake of enacting change from above: it’s about helping the community itself find ways to make change. Obama’s very campaign changed the country, and he hasn’t even stood facing Chief Justice Roberts and put his hand on that Koran yet.
There’s a risk, though, to governing from the center as a community organizer, and it is this risk - not Obama’s inevitable and understandable centrism - to which I referred yesterday when I said I was postponing my “cynicism about centrism.“ The risk is the one we faced in 1993: progressives, having ended twelve years of Reagan and Bush by sending DLC right-centrist Bill Clinton to the White House, disappeared for a number of years. The other side didn’t. The result: the culture- and enviro-warring 104th Congress, Clinton’s collapse on CAFE standards and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and clearcutting in the ancient forests, the hanging out to dry of Joycelyn Elders and Lani Guinier, and other such items from that particular period of ancient history.
The risk is that too many people on the left will think as expressed here, in this example (in a decades-long string) of the Sierra Club’s emphasis of pretend gravitas over long-term effectiveness:
“They have to have a balanced perspective,” added Dave Hamilton, director of the Sierra Club’s climate campaign. “They’re going to have to do what they have to do in a way that doesn’t bankrupt the economy, in a way that actually solves the problems they’re talking about. It requires being in the center and solving problems that are traditionally on the environment or left side.”
What I’m getting at is that Hamilton’s surrender to the right notwithstanding, it’s not our job to anticipate the objections to our positions from the right of center and then alter our positions to suit. It’s Obama’s job now to govern from the center, or hopefully just far enough left of center that rightists will come along without too much shooting.
Our job is to shift that center as hard as we can. If we don’t do that job, Obama will fail to attain even his relatively moderate stated goals.
This means, of course, putting pressure on Obama as well as on the usual bad guys. We need to repeal the “Defense of Marriage” initiatives that passed in California and other states, and we will. We need to put pressure on Obama and his administration to live up to their promises about sustainable energy policy, about funding public education, about calling it quits in our murderous adventure in Iraq. It means coming up with initiatives like DesertBlog’s 10-point environmental program for Obama and working to push them, on the environment and every other issue we face.
And when the Obama administration floats a proposal that we like, we damn well need to defend it. And defending it doesn’t mean doing what I’m doing now, writing on a blog. It just doesn’t. It means calling representatives and Senators and our neighbors. It means writing letters to dead-tree newspapers and calling radio shows and talking to co-workers. It means getting off our butts.
It means, I will suggest, getting hooked up with the community organizing structure by which the leftmost three-quarters of Americans swept Obama into office. After all, that network does work both ways, and even if you don’t believe that he’s predisposed to listen - which I do, surprising even myself - there are more of us than there are of him.
What it does not mean is expecting Obama to save us all and then getting butthurt when he doesn’t. That way lies eight more years of the Clinton administration, and probably eight subesquent years of someone worse than Bush. That by itself is something worth avoiding if possible, and we can indeed avoid it.
Yes, we can.
