Adolph Reed is perhaps one of America’s most incisive thinkers, scholars and activist. However, when one thinks of today’s black public intellectuals, unlike Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West or Michael Eric Dyson, on the left, or Shelby Steel or John McWhorter or Thomas Sowell, on the right, Reed’s name infrequently comes up. Despite being an author of several books and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and activist, he is often under the radar. This is due to the fact that unlike the aforementioned “market intellectuals” who either sell attitude or provide glib rationalizations for audiences that have become markets, Reed tries to inform people of what they really need to know rather than what they what they want to hear.
In the May 2008 issue of the Progressive magazine, in which he writes a monthly column, he offered a trenchant argument regarding Barack Obama. We spoke for about forty-five minutes one Wednesday morning.
Norman Kelley: You have taken a pretty tough position on Obama. You have termed him: (a) “vacuous opportunist”; (b) a “performer with a good ear for how to make white liberals like him”; and then described him as: (c) a “neo-liberal.” Let’s go over those in some detail. If you hadn’t met him directly, you were in Chicago the same time that Obama came on the scene, right?
Adolph Reed: Right. I’d worked closely with his opponent [Alice Palmer] on the [Illinois] state race, who was the incumbent. There a set of unfortunate dynamics that played out there, which I don’t want to bore readers with, but we wind up having some negotiations with him. She had actually introduced him around as her successor and, primarily at the urging of people like myself and others in her inner circle, she decided to take back her commitment and hold onto her state senate seat.
So we were around the Obama people, as well as his broad camp of supporters at Hyde Park, there were a couple of fairly open meetings where we tried to discuss a way of solving this issue and couldn’t. And it turns out that what Obama did was get her thrown off the ballot by challenging her signature petitions.
That’s one interesting thing about Obama; he’s only had one real opponent for elective office prior to this [campaign] and that’s when he ran against Bobby Rush for a congressional seat and lost very, very badly.
Kelley: You also called him a performer who has a good ear for how to make white liberals like him. What’s your example of that?
Reed: Well, I guess the way I would put it in a different context is that he has a talent, and I think maybe his greatest talent, for saying enough of what the constituency that he’s talking to at the moment want to hear and saying it persuasively that he can leave them believing that’s he with them, while at the same time packing enough qualifiers so that he can deny the next day that’s what he’s actually meant. We saw him do that in the AIPAC speech even though he didn’t pack the qualifiers around it. He was very clear that Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel, and he said a couple of days later, “Oh, no, that’s not exactly what I meant.”
Kelley: That sounds like a talent that people said about Bill Clinton.
Reed: Absolutely. He’s a black fulfillment of Clintonism, and I should put that in a different way: he is a fulfillment of Clintonism so thoroughly partly because he is black, at least nominally. Because you remember, Clinton, at least for some of us, had this infuriating practice and knack for connecting emotionally, or emotively, with black audiences. So he gets props for being able to connective emotively with a black audience while at the same time speaking through the black audience to a white racist audience, ultimately, telling black people they needed to take personal responsibility. He shilled for that hideous crime bill at a black church in Memphis and that kind of thing, and Obama can get a way with being even more vicious and victim blaming than Clinton because he is black.
And he’s done that consistently as well; the Philadelphia speech, the Houston speech where he’s going about “We have to stop feeding our children Popeye’s Chicken for breakfast,” the haughtiness at the NAACP. As I said in another interview last week, I might accept that this isn’t beating up on a racialized imagery of the black underclass, that’s attacking poor black people in a victim-blaming way, if he would go and tell the hedge fund operators that he talks to that that shouldn’t feed their kids the equivalent of Popeye’s Chicken in the morning or they need to be responsible fathers.
Kelley: You also used the term neo-liberal to describe him. Let’s explore that.
Reed: This connects in a certain way because what Obama has to offer is not a policy program that addresses inequality; he never talks about inequality. He talks about opportunity and responsibility…
Kelley: Which are Republican talking points…
Reed: …If you noticed when he met with evangelicals a few weeks ago, he pledged to them he would give them more HHS [Health and Human Services] and HUD [Housing and Urban Development] budget because government can’t solve the problems that afflict poor communities in inner cities. And this has been part of his rap from the very beginning, this line that structural problems are too big, that real solutions come the neighborhood, grassroots and from churches and NGOs, and that’s like a hallmark of neo-liberalism.
In his meeting with evangelicals he got behind all the faith-based stuff; he basically gave them a promise to give them more of the budget than the Bush administration had while reiterating the claim that government can’t provide social services effectively. He has never taken a position on any kind of redistribution and his fiscal and economic policies are, as [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman has pointed out, were to the right of Clinton who had begun as the DLC’s standard bearer. His foreign policy is no less imperialist than Bush’s foreign policy. Like Kerry before him, his argument is that the war on terrorism hasn’t been fought efficiently enough. He’s on record for wanting to expand it; to redeploy troops to Iraq to Afghanistan and even into Pakistan.
What’s interesting about this is that I noticed that Tom Hayden, who been slurping down that Kool-Aide on an IV for sometime, seemed to notice last month finally that Barack Obama wants to expand the war. Well, Obama said that more than a year ago. I mentioned that in my November column in the Progressive. So one of the things that is interesting and mind-boggling, and I don’t mean interesting in a good way, is the will to believe in Obama even from people whose political identification is with the left, liberal-left and have been for sometime.
Kelley: So, you don’t see the Obama campaign as a potential opportunity, opening a door, for progressive forces to set the national agenda?
Reed: Well, I know one isn’t, technically, suppose to answer a question with a question, but I’ll start out with one. If we can’t get him to pay attention to us now when he needs our votes, why do we think he’ll pay attention to us when he’s elected, if he’s elected? I’m feeling less and less likely that he’ll be elected. This is like the logic of the 2 a.m. booty call. We’re saying in effect, “Well, I know he’s always out in public with her and he seems happy, but he’s told me that he really wants be with me.” There’s no reason to believe past a certain point that if this is what he does, this is what he really will do.
Kelley: So, what does this say about left of center, progressive organizing? The left doesn’t seem to be able to make politicians pay attention to issue it considers important, so the left is forced to go along with the lesser of two evils. There doesn’t seem to be any substantive organizing on the left. This has been the most organized that the left has been in a while. What’s been going on?
Reed: Well, I think you hit the nail on its head. The election season is too late to think about; it’s already happened. It’s a little bit like what happens with these urban renewal projects: by the time we find out about them, it’s too late to do anything about them except to try and find some way to negotiate the best possible terms of surrender, and this is the way this election stuff is.
Over the last 25, 30 years, and this is what I’ve been trying to get a more elaborate argument about, is that of all of American left of center politics—the labor movement, civil rights movement, women’s movement, public interest movement, environmental movement, you can go down the list—apart from disconnected individuals and small group list, sectarian activists, that is to say, all the left of center groups that have any institutional foundation for traction have long since fallen into a groove that assumes, or a groove that reproduces a political praxis assumes that the equivalent post-[Second World] war bargaining system is still in effect, and it hasn’t been. It hasn’t been for a long time.
For instance, I’m on the board of Public Citizen. Two of the most important things we’ve have done is lobby and litigate. Now, we can still win some victories on both those fronts; the Global Trade Watch campaign and Lori Wallach have both obviously successful in maximizing opportunities to win lobby and legislative victories on the trade front. Most of them, still no fault of our own, is more about stopping bad stuff than about winning good stuff.
The same is true in the courts, but in both of those areas, both in the legislature and in the courts, a logic of diminishing returns have set in because success in either of those domains depend being able to assume neutrality, if not some measure of good will, from the courts and the legislature. It is less and less possible to assume that.
The problem here is, to some extent, the changing of praxis, the changing of grooves is like trying to steer a battleship, and there are internal pressures that keep those institutions moving along the same path even though the returns are getting less. If you poked you head up and look down the road, you can see that this groove is going to run you into the ocean or onto an oncoming train, some place that isn’t good.
In this context what politics has been reduced to is the election cycle and going to elect your Democrat.
Kelley: Now this is interesting. It seems that the right understands just the opposite, they seem to understand that there’s another election that takes place between every four years; they mobilize, they organize…
So, this leads this question: How would you characterize the general state of left of center organizing as compared to the right? I mean, over the past 30 years the right has won the White House, controlled Congress, and have placed conservatives on the Supreme Court while the left has only been organizing itself on the Internet and has been unable to make any decisive policy victories that improve people’s lives
Reed: I think that’s absolutely right. In a way, and this is a simplistic account, but you can take the Goldwater defeat [of 1964] as a kind of iconic moment for the right. For them, that was kind of like the Canton uprising of 1928, they got routed and they figure out “We have to do something different,” and they had sense enough to understand that the result of the [1964] election they didn’t have the constituency that they needed, or the constituency that they needed to push the policy agenda that they have didn’t exist and they needed to create it.
And you don’t create in it in two years or four years; you create it by digging in real places that have names and addresses, and organizing people with who have real names and addresses, to implant a different way of conceptualizing what the pertinent issues are in politics, and building alliances that knit together constituencies around them.
I would recommend to everyone taking a look at Shapiro and Graetz’s book “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” which is really a nice examination of how the rightwing termed the estate tax into the “death tax” and built a durable alliance to defeat it even though no more than 2 percent of the American population has ever paid it. And as with everything else, part of the story is of acquiescence and the abetting of the liberals, for that’s what made the victory of the right possible along the way.
Part of the story that is true on our side of the ledger is a kind anti-politics strain that emerged of a section of the New Left. One vantage of the right had been that they knew what they were organizing for; they were organizing to win power. A lot people on the left were skittish about the idea of power.
Kelley: That’s an interesting point. I’ve had said that if you look at what’s going on the left is more interested in theory. Generally, the academic left is interested in theory, (I have coined the term the “theoriocracy”), but the right is interested in power. They organized to go after the economy, they went after the Supreme Court, they went after the White House and Congress, and then built these media outlets to get their message across and to challenge or denigrate, but the left doesn’t appear to be interested [dealing with the lack of effective power] or is slowly waking up to that reality.
Reed: I agree with your analysis completely, but I would also add in addition to theory is self-expression. Our politics tends to recede to being smart, and one of the things that the logic of being smart does it tells you that there is no way that you can win because the right is too powerful. But one of the other features is, bearing witness, and the politics of bearing witness and the politics of movement building don’t run on the same track. They are often in conflict.
Kelley: In what way?
Reed: It happened in the anti-war politics, and overlaps with a couple of the other pathologies, that have afflicted the left. The idea of the object of political action is to have a demonstration mistakes the tip of the iceberg for the iceberg. People like it because it gives them something to do, because they can get the sense that they are taking action in some way; in the sense of buying a red tee shirt takes action, ultimately. And it is a kind of low cost way of feeling that you’re doing something; so you got to the rally, you take your sign, you chant your slogan, you go home, you feel good about yourself.
Kelley: Your feet are tired but your soul is rested…
Reed: There you go; that would make a good tee shirt; put it on the cover and the back. But it doesn’t add up to anything, especially since we have fallen into— in the politics of demonstrations—what I have called the “permit regime.” We first of all go get a permit for the march and the authorities over the last 30 years have gotten really smart about this. They make sure you walk some place where nobody will see you, where you won’t disrupt anything, and where you gather some place where you won’t have contact with someone outside the demonstration, and they can’t see you or hear you.
The culture of demonstration has evolved to acknowledge this material reality, because I think that’s where all the young people juggling on unicycles, dressed up like from where turtles come from, from the fact that the mass demo is going on some place in a gully and will have no impact on anything. The last thing that Todd Gitlin wrote that I thought was any good was his book “The Whole World is Watching and the Unmaking of the New Left.”
Kelley: That’s one of the best books out there…
Reed: That’s something else that people ought to read. Unfortunately, I have to lay a lot of that at the feet of my generation and the New Left. The social fractions that make up the core base of this kind of leftism, are people whose lives are not going to be much affected no matter who wins. I mean, The Nation crowd, in so far members of the academy or elsewhere, are by and large well connected enough that they have got good stable jobs with decent access to healthcare and benefits and maybe pensions. No Democratic politics or no presidential candidate on the Democratic label has been able to go out and offer concrete proposals for making better the lives of most working people in this country.
Kerry’s so-called healthcare proposal was going cost a trillion dollars and by his own acknowledgment—and it was a complex Rube Goldberg contraption that was complex because he wanted to make sure that insurance companies were brought in—and by acknowledgement was going to leave half of the 46 million who are uninsured still uninsured. His antiwar stance of fighting it better and sending in more troops wasn’t going to do anything to ease the concerns of those Wal-Mart workers and public schools teachers, who along with their kids in the National Guard were otherwise being called up. You end but don’t mend the other…Not exactly privatize the pension system but you don’t shore it up, either.
Kelley: If either party is not going to address the needs of working people, why do you think there is no third party of some sort of independent political apparatus that can place demands on the system?
Reed: That’s a very good question. I spent more than the last fifteen years trying to build an independent labor party and it’s hard because of the kind of institutional factors we’ve had talked about before. We founded the labor party a few months before the ’96 election and we assumed that every one in the labor movement would be focused on election, and stuff usually starts a year or so before the actual election. And then you’re not doing anything except taking care of the everyday business that needs to be taken care of. And then all of these institutions [of the left] have shrunken revenues bases and are trying to do more with less, and some of it is just something, frankly, as venal as, “Well, not that I’m just doing okay,” but there’s a staff stratum that moves back and forth between unions and public interest groups, congressional staff to the DNC.
So they move back and forth and there’s a logic of not wanting to piss anyone off so they keep their options open, which really translates into a different version of “Well, I’m doing okay with things are they are, so why should I try to do anything different that might tick of the congressman at men that could prevent a bill from getting through. Some people might think that I’m an irresponsible radical.”
Kelley: If McCain doesn’t win the November election, you know the right will be mending itself. However, I get the feeling that if Obama wins, the left will sigh, let down its guard and just say what, “What is this guy to do for us?” instead of having a set of policies that they would like implemented.
Reed: Unquestionably, with Obama, as with Kerry, as with Gore, as with Clinton, in some non-trivial ways, our side would likely be better off, at least for the first four years of an Obama presidency, with Obama in office than with McCain, but that’s only one level of calculations. We also need to think of a long-term view. You go back to Clinton; Clinton was able to do things that would have been arguably difficult for a Republican do.
Kelley: Like the repeal of welfare….
Reed: The repeal of welfare, the elimination of the federal government’s 60-year old commitment to federal housing for poor people, NAFTA, those two hideous crime bills, and something else that people have only begun to pay a little attention to. It was under the Clinton administration that you saw the first significant burst of financial deregulations, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall [Act], another edifice of the New Deal, which kicked off the speculative wave of the dot.com boom that became later the dot.com bust. And the same thing that I have confirmed recently has been true of housing speculation, but even beyond those specific policy entailments that wound up wreaking a lot of havoc on so-called traditional Democratic constituencies, the longer term cost of Clinton’s victory was much more of a consolidation of his notion of neo-liberalism is what legitimate political aspiration is on the left. That’s what makes it possible for Obama, who is even to the right of Clinton, to proclaim himself as the boundary of progressive politics.
I want to reiterate what I said both in the Progressive and the Black Agenda Report. I am not arguing that people shouldn’t vote for Obama. In fact, what I’m arguing is that it is not clear that whether you vote for him or don’t vote for him is an important issue, or whether the cost and benefit of doing one of the other can be calculated clearly enough to come down on either side of that question.
I’m just not going to do it because I’ve just gotten to a point where I’m not going to ask someone to come and do it to me. I’m not going to offer to toss somebody’s salad; they may make me do it, but I’m not going to ask for it. But that’s just a matter of personal idiosyncrasy; I can’t argue against for voting for him. What I would argue against is for trying to justify voting for him [in the belief] that in the short term that he’s likely to be less dangerous than McCain.
Kelley: That’s something to keep in mind. I’ve been telling people that if he gets into office you have to watch him.
Reed: But once you vote him.… He hasn’t even counted up all the delegates, yet; he didn’t even leave an equivalent of cab money on the table, you know what I mean? He just got what he wanted and was gone. I think one thing that comes true in that New Yorker article ["Making It; How Chicago Shaped Obama"], although they are too much in support of him for it to come through quite clearly, is that is what his entire political career has been. There’s been nothing there but ambition. There’s been no alliance that he hasn’t sold out.
You can talk to people in Hyde Park about that, too. Some of my friends, including my doctor, who’s a longtime activist, who’s also Obama’s doctor and Jesse Jackson’s doctor—I told him the last time I saw him that he’s probably the only man in the world who can claim that he has had two fingers stuck up the behind of Obama and Jesse Jackson—well, he was a supporter of Obama earlier and before Obama went to the U.S. Senate, he had soured on him.
In the May 2008 issue of the Progressive magazine, in which he writes a monthly column, he offered a trenchant argument regarding Barack Obama. We spoke for about forty-five minutes one Wednesday morning.
***
Norman Kelley: You have taken a pretty tough position on Obama. You have termed him: (a) “vacuous opportunist”; (b) a “performer with a good ear for how to make white liberals like him”; and then described him as: (c) a “neo-liberal.” Let’s go over those in some detail. If you hadn’t met him directly, you were in Chicago the same time that Obama came on the scene, right?
Adolph Reed: Right. I’d worked closely with his opponent [Alice Palmer] on the [Illinois] state race, who was the incumbent. There a set of unfortunate dynamics that played out there, which I don’t want to bore readers with, but we wind up having some negotiations with him. She had actually introduced him around as her successor and, primarily at the urging of people like myself and others in her inner circle, she decided to take back her commitment and hold onto her state senate seat.
So we were around the Obama people, as well as his broad camp of supporters at Hyde Park, there were a couple of fairly open meetings where we tried to discuss a way of solving this issue and couldn’t. And it turns out that what Obama did was get her thrown off the ballot by challenging her signature petitions.
That’s one interesting thing about Obama; he’s only had one real opponent for elective office prior to this [campaign] and that’s when he ran against Bobby Rush for a congressional seat and lost very, very badly.
Kelley: You also called him a performer who has a good ear for how to make white liberals like him. What’s your example of that?
Reed: Well, I guess the way I would put it in a different context is that he has a talent, and I think maybe his greatest talent, for saying enough of what the constituency that he’s talking to at the moment want to hear and saying it persuasively that he can leave them believing that’s he with them, while at the same time packing enough qualifiers so that he can deny the next day that’s what he’s actually meant. We saw him do that in the AIPAC speech even though he didn’t pack the qualifiers around it. He was very clear that Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel, and he said a couple of days later, “Oh, no, that’s not exactly what I meant.”
Kelley: That sounds like a talent that people said about Bill Clinton.
Reed: Absolutely. He’s a black fulfillment of Clintonism, and I should put that in a different way: he is a fulfillment of Clintonism so thoroughly partly because he is black, at least nominally. Because you remember, Clinton, at least for some of us, had this infuriating practice and knack for connecting emotionally, or emotively, with black audiences. So he gets props for being able to connective emotively with a black audience while at the same time speaking through the black audience to a white racist audience, ultimately, telling black people they needed to take personal responsibility. He shilled for that hideous crime bill at a black church in Memphis and that kind of thing, and Obama can get a way with being even more vicious and victim blaming than Clinton because he is black.
And he’s done that consistently as well; the Philadelphia speech, the Houston speech where he’s going about “We have to stop feeding our children Popeye’s Chicken for breakfast,” the haughtiness at the NAACP. As I said in another interview last week, I might accept that this isn’t beating up on a racialized imagery of the black underclass, that’s attacking poor black people in a victim-blaming way, if he would go and tell the hedge fund operators that he talks to that that shouldn’t feed their kids the equivalent of Popeye’s Chicken in the morning or they need to be responsible fathers.
Kelley: You also used the term neo-liberal to describe him. Let’s explore that.
Reed: This connects in a certain way because what Obama has to offer is not a policy program that addresses inequality; he never talks about inequality. He talks about opportunity and responsibility…
Kelley: Which are Republican talking points…
Reed: …If you noticed when he met with evangelicals a few weeks ago, he pledged to them he would give them more HHS [Health and Human Services] and HUD [Housing and Urban Development] budget because government can’t solve the problems that afflict poor communities in inner cities. And this has been part of his rap from the very beginning, this line that structural problems are too big, that real solutions come the neighborhood, grassroots and from churches and NGOs, and that’s like a hallmark of neo-liberalism.
In his meeting with evangelicals he got behind all the faith-based stuff; he basically gave them a promise to give them more of the budget than the Bush administration had while reiterating the claim that government can’t provide social services effectively. He has never taken a position on any kind of redistribution and his fiscal and economic policies are, as [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman has pointed out, were to the right of Clinton who had begun as the DLC’s standard bearer. His foreign policy is no less imperialist than Bush’s foreign policy. Like Kerry before him, his argument is that the war on terrorism hasn’t been fought efficiently enough. He’s on record for wanting to expand it; to redeploy troops to Iraq to Afghanistan and even into Pakistan.
What’s interesting about this is that I noticed that Tom Hayden, who been slurping down that Kool-Aide on an IV for sometime, seemed to notice last month finally that Barack Obama wants to expand the war. Well, Obama said that more than a year ago. I mentioned that in my November column in the Progressive. So one of the things that is interesting and mind-boggling, and I don’t mean interesting in a good way, is the will to believe in Obama even from people whose political identification is with the left, liberal-left and have been for sometime.
Kelley: So, you don’t see the Obama campaign as a potential opportunity, opening a door, for progressive forces to set the national agenda?
Reed: Well, I know one isn’t, technically, suppose to answer a question with a question, but I’ll start out with one. If we can’t get him to pay attention to us now when he needs our votes, why do we think he’ll pay attention to us when he’s elected, if he’s elected? I’m feeling less and less likely that he’ll be elected. This is like the logic of the 2 a.m. booty call. We’re saying in effect, “Well, I know he’s always out in public with her and he seems happy, but he’s told me that he really wants be with me.” There’s no reason to believe past a certain point that if this is what he does, this is what he really will do.
Kelley: So, what does this say about left of center, progressive organizing? The left doesn’t seem to be able to make politicians pay attention to issue it considers important, so the left is forced to go along with the lesser of two evils. There doesn’t seem to be any substantive organizing on the left. This has been the most organized that the left has been in a while. What’s been going on?
Reed: Well, I think you hit the nail on its head. The election season is too late to think about; it’s already happened. It’s a little bit like what happens with these urban renewal projects: by the time we find out about them, it’s too late to do anything about them except to try and find some way to negotiate the best possible terms of surrender, and this is the way this election stuff is.
Over the last 25, 30 years, and this is what I’ve been trying to get a more elaborate argument about, is that of all of American left of center politics—the labor movement, civil rights movement, women’s movement, public interest movement, environmental movement, you can go down the list—apart from disconnected individuals and small group list, sectarian activists, that is to say, all the left of center groups that have any institutional foundation for traction have long since fallen into a groove that assumes, or a groove that reproduces a political praxis assumes that the equivalent post-[Second World] war bargaining system is still in effect, and it hasn’t been. It hasn’t been for a long time.
For instance, I’m on the board of Public Citizen. Two of the most important things we’ve have done is lobby and litigate. Now, we can still win some victories on both those fronts; the Global Trade Watch campaign and Lori Wallach have both obviously successful in maximizing opportunities to win lobby and legislative victories on the trade front. Most of them, still no fault of our own, is more about stopping bad stuff than about winning good stuff.
The same is true in the courts, but in both of those areas, both in the legislature and in the courts, a logic of diminishing returns have set in because success in either of those domains depend being able to assume neutrality, if not some measure of good will, from the courts and the legislature. It is less and less possible to assume that.
The problem here is, to some extent, the changing of praxis, the changing of grooves is like trying to steer a battleship, and there are internal pressures that keep those institutions moving along the same path even though the returns are getting less. If you poked you head up and look down the road, you can see that this groove is going to run you into the ocean or onto an oncoming train, some place that isn’t good.
In this context what politics has been reduced to is the election cycle and going to elect your Democrat.
Kelley: Now this is interesting. It seems that the right understands just the opposite, they seem to understand that there’s another election that takes place between every four years; they mobilize, they organize…
So, this leads this question: How would you characterize the general state of left of center organizing as compared to the right? I mean, over the past 30 years the right has won the White House, controlled Congress, and have placed conservatives on the Supreme Court while the left has only been organizing itself on the Internet and has been unable to make any decisive policy victories that improve people’s lives
Reed: I think that’s absolutely right. In a way, and this is a simplistic account, but you can take the Goldwater defeat [of 1964] as a kind of iconic moment for the right. For them, that was kind of like the Canton uprising of 1928, they got routed and they figure out “We have to do something different,” and they had sense enough to understand that the result of the [1964] election they didn’t have the constituency that they needed, or the constituency that they needed to push the policy agenda that they have didn’t exist and they needed to create it.
And you don’t create in it in two years or four years; you create it by digging in real places that have names and addresses, and organizing people with who have real names and addresses, to implant a different way of conceptualizing what the pertinent issues are in politics, and building alliances that knit together constituencies around them.
I would recommend to everyone taking a look at Shapiro and Graetz’s book “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” which is really a nice examination of how the rightwing termed the estate tax into the “death tax” and built a durable alliance to defeat it even though no more than 2 percent of the American population has ever paid it. And as with everything else, part of the story is of acquiescence and the abetting of the liberals, for that’s what made the victory of the right possible along the way.
Part of the story that is true on our side of the ledger is a kind anti-politics strain that emerged of a section of the New Left. One vantage of the right had been that they knew what they were organizing for; they were organizing to win power. A lot people on the left were skittish about the idea of power.
Kelley: That’s an interesting point. I’ve had said that if you look at what’s going on the left is more interested in theory. Generally, the academic left is interested in theory, (I have coined the term the “theoriocracy”), but the right is interested in power. They organized to go after the economy, they went after the Supreme Court, they went after the White House and Congress, and then built these media outlets to get their message across and to challenge or denigrate, but the left doesn’t appear to be interested [dealing with the lack of effective power] or is slowly waking up to that reality.
Reed: I agree with your analysis completely, but I would also add in addition to theory is self-expression. Our politics tends to recede to being smart, and one of the things that the logic of being smart does it tells you that there is no way that you can win because the right is too powerful. But one of the other features is, bearing witness, and the politics of bearing witness and the politics of movement building don’t run on the same track. They are often in conflict.
Kelley: In what way?
Reed: It happened in the anti-war politics, and overlaps with a couple of the other pathologies, that have afflicted the left. The idea of the object of political action is to have a demonstration mistakes the tip of the iceberg for the iceberg. People like it because it gives them something to do, because they can get the sense that they are taking action in some way; in the sense of buying a red tee shirt takes action, ultimately. And it is a kind of low cost way of feeling that you’re doing something; so you got to the rally, you take your sign, you chant your slogan, you go home, you feel good about yourself.
Kelley: Your feet are tired but your soul is rested…
Reed: There you go; that would make a good tee shirt; put it on the cover and the back. But it doesn’t add up to anything, especially since we have fallen into— in the politics of demonstrations—what I have called the “permit regime.” We first of all go get a permit for the march and the authorities over the last 30 years have gotten really smart about this. They make sure you walk some place where nobody will see you, where you won’t disrupt anything, and where you gather some place where you won’t have contact with someone outside the demonstration, and they can’t see you or hear you.
The culture of demonstration has evolved to acknowledge this material reality, because I think that’s where all the young people juggling on unicycles, dressed up like from where turtles come from, from the fact that the mass demo is going on some place in a gully and will have no impact on anything. The last thing that Todd Gitlin wrote that I thought was any good was his book “The Whole World is Watching and the Unmaking of the New Left.”
Kelley: That’s one of the best books out there…
Reed: That’s something else that people ought to read. Unfortunately, I have to lay a lot of that at the feet of my generation and the New Left. The social fractions that make up the core base of this kind of leftism, are people whose lives are not going to be much affected no matter who wins. I mean, The Nation crowd, in so far members of the academy or elsewhere, are by and large well connected enough that they have got good stable jobs with decent access to healthcare and benefits and maybe pensions. No Democratic politics or no presidential candidate on the Democratic label has been able to go out and offer concrete proposals for making better the lives of most working people in this country.
Kerry’s so-called healthcare proposal was going cost a trillion dollars and by his own acknowledgment—and it was a complex Rube Goldberg contraption that was complex because he wanted to make sure that insurance companies were brought in—and by acknowledgement was going to leave half of the 46 million who are uninsured still uninsured. His antiwar stance of fighting it better and sending in more troops wasn’t going to do anything to ease the concerns of those Wal-Mart workers and public schools teachers, who along with their kids in the National Guard were otherwise being called up. You end but don’t mend the other…Not exactly privatize the pension system but you don’t shore it up, either.
Kelley: If either party is not going to address the needs of working people, why do you think there is no third party of some sort of independent political apparatus that can place demands on the system?
Reed: That’s a very good question. I spent more than the last fifteen years trying to build an independent labor party and it’s hard because of the kind of institutional factors we’ve had talked about before. We founded the labor party a few months before the ’96 election and we assumed that every one in the labor movement would be focused on election, and stuff usually starts a year or so before the actual election. And then you’re not doing anything except taking care of the everyday business that needs to be taken care of. And then all of these institutions [of the left] have shrunken revenues bases and are trying to do more with less, and some of it is just something, frankly, as venal as, “Well, not that I’m just doing okay,” but there’s a staff stratum that moves back and forth between unions and public interest groups, congressional staff to the DNC.
So they move back and forth and there’s a logic of not wanting to piss anyone off so they keep their options open, which really translates into a different version of “Well, I’m doing okay with things are they are, so why should I try to do anything different that might tick of the congressman at men that could prevent a bill from getting through. Some people might think that I’m an irresponsible radical.”
Kelley: If McCain doesn’t win the November election, you know the right will be mending itself. However, I get the feeling that if Obama wins, the left will sigh, let down its guard and just say what, “What is this guy to do for us?” instead of having a set of policies that they would like implemented.
Reed: Unquestionably, with Obama, as with Kerry, as with Gore, as with Clinton, in some non-trivial ways, our side would likely be better off, at least for the first four years of an Obama presidency, with Obama in office than with McCain, but that’s only one level of calculations. We also need to think of a long-term view. You go back to Clinton; Clinton was able to do things that would have been arguably difficult for a Republican do.
Kelley: Like the repeal of welfare….
Reed: The repeal of welfare, the elimination of the federal government’s 60-year old commitment to federal housing for poor people, NAFTA, those two hideous crime bills, and something else that people have only begun to pay a little attention to. It was under the Clinton administration that you saw the first significant burst of financial deregulations, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall [Act], another edifice of the New Deal, which kicked off the speculative wave of the dot.com boom that became later the dot.com bust. And the same thing that I have confirmed recently has been true of housing speculation, but even beyond those specific policy entailments that wound up wreaking a lot of havoc on so-called traditional Democratic constituencies, the longer term cost of Clinton’s victory was much more of a consolidation of his notion of neo-liberalism is what legitimate political aspiration is on the left. That’s what makes it possible for Obama, who is even to the right of Clinton, to proclaim himself as the boundary of progressive politics.
I want to reiterate what I said both in the Progressive and the Black Agenda Report. I am not arguing that people shouldn’t vote for Obama. In fact, what I’m arguing is that it is not clear that whether you vote for him or don’t vote for him is an important issue, or whether the cost and benefit of doing one of the other can be calculated clearly enough to come down on either side of that question.
I’m just not going to do it because I’ve just gotten to a point where I’m not going to ask someone to come and do it to me. I’m not going to offer to toss somebody’s salad; they may make me do it, but I’m not going to ask for it. But that’s just a matter of personal idiosyncrasy; I can’t argue against for voting for him. What I would argue against is for trying to justify voting for him [in the belief] that in the short term that he’s likely to be less dangerous than McCain.
Kelley: That’s something to keep in mind. I’ve been telling people that if he gets into office you have to watch him.
Reed: But once you vote him.… He hasn’t even counted up all the delegates, yet; he didn’t even leave an equivalent of cab money on the table, you know what I mean? He just got what he wanted and was gone. I think one thing that comes true in that New Yorker article ["Making It; How Chicago Shaped Obama"], although they are too much in support of him for it to come through quite clearly, is that is what his entire political career has been. There’s been nothing there but ambition. There’s been no alliance that he hasn’t sold out.
You can talk to people in Hyde Park about that, too. Some of my friends, including my doctor, who’s a longtime activist, who’s also Obama’s doctor and Jesse Jackson’s doctor—I told him the last time I saw him that he’s probably the only man in the world who can claim that he has had two fingers stuck up the behind of Obama and Jesse Jackson—well, he was a supporter of Obama earlier and before Obama went to the U.S. Senate, he had soured on him.
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In a brief phone conversation days later, while clarifying a point, I asked Reed what did he make of Jesse Jackson’s castration remark regarding Obama “talking down to black people.” Reed observed: “That Jesse’s remark was consistent with his pettiness and it also reflects how the old school ‘race first’ crowd has been trying to get a handle on the Obama campaign.”
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