The Frankfurter School

The 2008 Presidential Primaries are captivating the nation and the world as we watch and listen to this country debate and make choices around what kind of people we are, and what kind of nation we want to be. People are engaged and paying attention to politics at a level of breadth and depth that I do not recall ever seeing in my life. This is unquestionably a good thing, because the chief reason that the United States is in such poor political, social and economic health is that most of its citizens would prefer to leave the business of democracy to a professional class of people who make up the ranks of politicians, lobbyists and political journalists while we go about our busy lives. This political class is defined and controlled by money: the politicians must fundraise every minute of their lives, the lobbyists act as brokers between the politicians and moneyed interests, and the political journalists, nearly all of whom work for publicly traded corporations, compete only for ratings and advertising dollars and nothing else.

So when candidates come along who attempt to empower citizens, highlight their participation in democracy and champion their rights against these corporate interests, it represents real change from the status quo. For the longest time as the pre-season primary campaigns heated up, I wavered between supporting John Edwards, who made corporate power a central theme to his campaign, and Dennis Kucinich, whose policies for government regulation are nearly identical to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt, now considered the farthest left fringe of the Democratic party. But by the time the California Primary came around, my two favored candidates had dropped out of the race and I was left to consider Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I had followed both of them excitedly since their first days in the Senate; I voted for Hillary in 2000 in New York, and was captivated by Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. Both of them had disappointed me with many votes in the Senate that went against my views and seemed often to support corporations over citizens, war over peace, and repeatedly fail to challenge the Bush agenda, allowing regulations that had taken decades to put in place to come undone. I thought the angry partisans of “hope” vs. “experience” sounded like the hollow but equally fervent rivalry of Coke vs. Pepsi that The Pepsi Challenge had engendered when I was a teen. Sure, you like one better, but you realize they’re both sugar carbonated beverages, right?

But something happened in the campaign of Barack Obama for President, and it moved me to count myself among his supporters. His campaign has managed to use rhetoric, optimism, and his own biography to excite and unite a massive coalition of voters that defies party affiliation and involves people who had never before cared about politics. “You are the change you have been waiting for,” he tells us, as if to gently remind us how our government works: you do not vote every four years and hope things go well, you build movements, you involve yourself, and you work for the kind of country you want. The Christian Right has learned this very well, having spent the last 25 years running for school boards, state assemblies, and higher, and mobilizing massive grassroots organizations to achieve the changes for which they had previously only prayed. Progressives are losing the battle of words and ideas in this country, and no politician can possibly survive in this climate by sticking his or her neck out too far ahead of the movements that support those ideas. We are not organized yet and we have only just begun to pay attention.

A friend of mine, initially a Hillary supporter who had changed her mind at the last minute and voted for Obama, confessed to me after Super Tuesday that she still felt uneasy about her vote. She just didn’t trust Obama to make the right decisions all the time. I agree; I do not trust him either to always make the “right” decisions — we should not trust our leaders to do anything ever, we should try to compel them to do what is right, with whatever power we can muster. We must be critics, we must watch them carefully and demand transparency, because power is a corrupting influence, and because that is how our democracy is supposed to work. We must continue to pay attention, we must speak out, and we must organize to demand what we want and seek out and support many people, coalitions, and systems that advocate ideas we like. If we expect to vote for the man or woman we like the most, and then trust him or her to run the government while we go back to shopping, eating, movies and sports, then we foolishly relinquish all of our power to the people who are paying attention — the political class who gave us this Administration to which we find ourselves now subjects.

The kind of politics that Obama’s candidacy makes room for is truly transformational. There will be disappointments, and compromises, and he will most assuredly let us down. But this is a citizens movement and moment; we need to engage each other and our representatives, and we must take power back from the “corporate persons” the law now favors and demand accountability again to real persons and our common concerns.

The nastiness that promises to envelop the campaign as it deadlocks into the Spring is a media circus sideshow. Politics is dirty business, and Clinton’s negativity, race-baiting and fear-mongering are a mere All-Audiences Preview of the bitter nastiness we will see in the fall from the Republicans. Hillary Clinton is not entirely to blame for this, she has suffered and persevered through the worst kind of attacks as the right-wing hate machine invented itself on the carcass of her idealistic, liberal former self. She adheres to a politics of cynicism that was hard-earned by the times that she lived through. It is our duty to heed Obama’s call to organize ourselves and demand what we want. He has invited us in and has promised to listen, but our empowerment does not wither and die if he fails to win the nomination. We must stay focused on issues and the big picture, and forge alliances and coalitions with like-minded people. We must not repeat the lazy narratives created by the media to elevate conflict to blood sport, and we must not deepen the wounds between people who agree with us more than they disagree.

We must trust only ourselves to take back our democracy and then empower leaders who will champion our agenda. What we do to achieve this is much more important than the individual at the top of the ticket.

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