{"id":77871,"date":"2016-08-22T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=77871"},"modified":"2016-08-18T16:33:38","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T15:33:38","slug":"presidential-elections-need-not-matter-so-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/08\/presidential-elections-need-not-matter-so-much\/","title":{"rendered":"Presidential Elections Need Not Matter So Much"},"content":{"rendered":"

17 Aug 2016 – <\/em>Every four years in the United States, the symbiosis of Democratic-Republican duopoly and commercial media pentopoly\u2014which the host, which the parasite?\u2014whips up a froth, no, a chiffon pastry of primaries, debates, and conventions, decorated with attack ads, polls, and predictions.\u00a0 \u201cThe most important election of our generation,\u201d we hear yet again, and \u201cthe next president will shape the Supreme Court,\u201d though the campaign emphasis is a frosting of personality and image.\u00a0 The corporate candidates and commentators remain mostly mute on the pernicious products of capitalism\u2014war, climate change, wealth concentration\u2014that threaten human existence.<\/p>\n

In the end, we\u2019re left with crumbs: the real, functioning voter class (at best, 60% turnout of the 65% who are registered) chooses between two \u201cviable\u201d candidates.\u00a0 The electoral college reduces the contest to a question of turnout in a handful of \u201cswing\u201d states.\u00a0 And progressives\u2014in those select locales, anyway\u2014face the lesser-of-two-evils dilemma because, despite the paucity of choices, presidential elections matter.\u00a0 A lot.\u00a0 Maybe not always in foreign policy, maybe not to folks in the wealthier classes, but definitely in domestic policy, definitely for the working class, especially women and minorities, and also non-human endangered species, all of whom need those few diminished protections the federal government still provides.\u00a0 Though the influence of the person in the Oval Office is often exaggerated, notably in economy-shaping and war-making, a U.S. president does wield enormous power through policies, appointments, patronage, and persuasion.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t have to be this way.\u00a0 Presidential elections will matter less when presidents (and the judges they appoint) are less influential, and presidents will be less influential when the masses realize their collective power.\u00a0 Let us not eat cake.<\/p>\n

This, of course, is not a call for greater voter registration and turnout.\u00a0 A strong voting bloc can win concessions, but, in a corrupt and non-representative political system, votes alone will not bring profound change.\u00a0 If a progressive notion gains voter support, the Democratic Party is likely to co-opt the issue before the election, abandon it afterwards.\u00a0 In 1896, the Democrats temporarily adopted the Populist Party\u2019s enthusiasm for bimetallism.\u00a0 Today, Hillary Clinton gives lip service to Bernie Sanders\u2019s call for free college tuition and pretends to agree with his rejection of \u201ctrade agreements.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, Civil Rights Movement organizers learned a variant of this lesson.\u00a0 Unnerved by the disruptive power of direct nonviolence exercised by children in Birmingham and a threatened nonviolent occupation of Washington D.C., in 1963, President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy encouraged civil rights activists in the South to get out of the street and into the voting booth.\u00a0 In 1964, a presidential election year, most civil rights groups accepted this logic\u2014less disruption, more voter registration.\u00a0 They committed to a 100-day moratorium on demonstrations and direct action to ensure that the Democratic candidate, President Lyndon Johnson, who had succeeded the murdered President Kennedy and was backing a major civil rights bill, would not be defeated by \u201cwhite backlash.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short order, the attorney general, the president, and other national Democratic leaders betrayed the movement.\u00a0 Kennedy\u2019s Justice Department did little to protect organizers and would-be voters from white supremacist terrorism and unconstitutional disenfranchisement.\u00a0 Denied formal participation in two-party politics, Freedom Summer participants formed the mixed-race Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and sent a delegation to the Democratic National Convention to challenge the legitimacy of the official (white and racist) Mississippi delegation.\u00a0 Johnson made sure that convention officials recognized the racist delegation, which had no intention of supporting him, and offered only two at-large, nonvoting seats to the MFDP.\u00a0 \u201cWe didn\u2019t come all this way for no two seats,\u201d Fannie Lou Hamer declared, and led an MFDP walkout.<\/p>\n

Direct nonviolent action, not electoral participation, is how the Civil Rights Movement in the South, often powered by working-class black women, forced presidents to act against Jim Crow segregation.\u00a0 President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, did not want to enforce school desegregation ordered by the Supreme Court.\u00a0 \u201cYou can\u2019t legislate morality,\u201d he insisted, and sympathized with the concern of southern whites \u201cthat their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.\u201d\u00a0 But nine students in Arkansas, shepherded by Daisy Bates, forced his hand by daring to enroll in Little Rock\u2019s Central High School and not giving up when the governor sent armed troops to stop them.\u00a0 Having to choose between federal intervention and surrendering constitutional authority, Eisenhower unhappily upheld his office.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Democratic presidents were reluctant to take a stand on civil rights, especially considering that southern racists were a key Democratic constituency.\u00a0 When southern governors refused to protect the Freedom Riders, President Kennedy finessed the issue.\u00a0 Later, he tried to persuade movement leaders to stop Birmingham children from marching, but it was the children who persuaded him.\u00a0 Their courage and persistence exposed the depth of violence that underpinned Jim Crow apartheid.\u00a0 Faced with international condemnation, Kennedy responded by calling for legislation to outlaw public segregation, which his successor pushed through Congress.\u00a0 President Johnson rejected the MFDP delegation, but the resilience and suffering of nonviolent activists in Selma, in 1965, moved him to support publicly his own voting rights legislation.\u00a0 Both presidents acted more boldly on civil rights when the suffering of nonviolent activists\u2014as portrayed in newspaper photos and national television broadcasts\u2014won the sympathy and support of whites outside the South.\u00a0 Thus, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.\u00a0 Presidents are political animals\u2014always calculating, always checking the wind.\u00a0 The patient suffering of movement activists gave cover to Kennedy and Johnson to do the right thing.<\/p>\n

Put another way, Kennedy and Johnson were not acting as leaders.\u00a0 In U.S. political discourse, the term leader is used with little reflection.\u00a0 The assumption is that the presidential oath of office automatically creates a leader.\u00a0 The U.S. president, we are told, is not only the \u201cleader of our country,\u201d but \u201cthe leader of the free world.\u201d\u00a0 This is propaganda.\u00a0 If we believe the president is our leader, then we must look to him for guidance; we assume he actually leads.\u00a0 In reality, presidents play numerous roles.\u00a0 They act as head of state.\u00a0 They sign off on the decisions of others.\u00a0 They are dealmakers and power brokers, negotiators and bureaucrats.\u00a0 They are front men and celebrity spokesmen.\u00a0 They often mislead the masses, but seldom lead them.\u00a0 They rarely provide original ideas, rarely display the courage of their convictions.\u00a0 They don\u2019t go first.\u00a0 They don\u2019t show the way.\u00a0 Presidents are, in a word, conventional, and convention does not require innovation and initiative.<\/p>\n

Our major progressive accomplishments\u2014abolition of slavery, female enfranchisement, business regulation, worker protections, elimination of Jim Crow\u2014began outside the electoral system.\u00a0 Indeed, true leadership has often come from those denied the vote\u2014a clue to where the greatest political power lies.\u00a0 (Have you heard, for example, of Alice Paul and Septima Clark?\u00a0 Why not?)\u00a0 Meanwhile, the conventional men of politics have typically been the last to express support.\u00a0 \u201cGreat Man\u201d history teaches us, falsely, that a powerful leader will solve our national problems\u2014George Washington overthrew British tyranny, Abraham Lincoln ended slavery, Franklin Roosevelt saved us from the Great Depression\u2014and, thus, we should wait patiently, passively for a great leader to end our misery.\u00a0 But since presidents are not truly leaders, our job is to remind them of their job: public servant.<\/p>\n

Consider President Barack Obama: eloquent but not particularly courageous, a master of superficial sincerity, mourner-in-chief, believes in \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d overseas and incremental change at home.\u00a0 Given the opportunity, upon his election in 2008, to serve a progressive movement, he opted instead for dismal insider politics\u2014to the great surprise of his most avid supporters who mistook a presidential candidate for a leader\u2014and quickly lost a supportive Congress.\u00a0 Rather than encourage progressive activists to organize and give him political cover, Obama demanded that they \u201ccut me some slack.\u201d\u00a0 He would rather be presidential than heroic.\u00a0 But, as his belated endorsement of gay marriage shows, he is pleased when he finds it safe to do the humane thing.\u00a0 Just a guess, but he would probably love to be a civil rights president, signing legislation and executive orders that protect minority voters and reform the racist police-court-prison complex, rather than commuting drug-related prison sentences one by one.\u00a0 He might even take righteous pride in being a peace president, curtailing U.S. war-making\u2014he seemed to enjoy the Nobel Prize.\u00a0 If only a massive popular movement pulled him along, against his conservative nature, and showed him the way.\u00a0 The fault is ours, not his.<\/p>\n

Consider Bernie Sanders: He did what he could, impressively so, within the confines of the electoral system.\u00a0 He agreed to play the duopoly\u2019s game, and, in the end, his endorsement of Hillary Clinton followed those rules.\u00a0 If some of his supporters feel betrayed, the fault is theirs for mistaking a symbol for a savior, for extolling \u201cBernie, Bernie, Bernie,\u201d for expecting the great man to solve their problems.\u00a0 And how could they not fall into that trap?\u00a0 Our culture, Madison Avenue cant notwithstanding, emphasizes the virtues of hierarchy and obedience\u2014to parents, teachers, ministers, coaches, bosses, commanding officers\u2014over the virtues of activism, solidarity, and democracy.\u00a0 Hopefully, Sanders supporters will take seriously what their man told them: \u201cElection days come and go.\u00a0 But political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end.\u00a0 They continue every day\u2026in the fight to create a nation of social and economic justice.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, it was the Occupy Movement, despite insufficient training and strategizing, which created the cultural opening for Sanders in the first place.<\/p>\n

So vote happily for a presidential candidate, or hold your nose and vote, or don\u2019t vote at all, but help build a nonviolent movement to compel the president to act for human good.\u00a0 The greater that movement, the less presidential elections will matter.\u00a0 Learn from the successes and failures of the Civil Rights Movement.\u00a0 And keep in mind the words of Mohandas Gandhi, which Martin Luther King learned to quote: \u201cThere go my people.\u00a0 I must rush to catch up with them, for I am their leader.\u201d<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Timothy Braatz is a novelist, playwright, and professor of history and peace studies at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, California. His publications include <\/em>Surviving Conquest: A History of the Yavapai Peoples; From Ghetto to Death Camp: A Memoir of Privilege and Luck; Grisham\u2019s Juror; and <\/em>Peace Lessons (forthcoming).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 zcomm.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So vote happily for a presidential candidate, or hold your nose and vote, or don\u2019t vote at all, but help build a nonviolent movement to compel the president to act for human good. The greater that movement, the less presidential elections will matter. Learn from the successes and failures of the Civil Rights Movement. And keep in mind the words of Mohandas Gandhi, which Martin Luther King learned to quote: \u201cThere go my people. I must rush to catch up with them, for I am their leader.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonviolence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}