You don't always get to choose the terrain you're fighting on.
REBECCA GORDON
for TomDispatch
She
just laughed.
“What’s
so funny?” I asked.
“You’ve
been saying that as long as I’ve known you,” she replied with a grin.
How right she was. And “as long as I’ve known you” has been a pretty long time. We met more than a quarter of a century ago when my partner and I hired her as the first organizer in a field campaign to defeat Proposition 209.
That ballot
initiative was one of a series pandering to the racial anxieties of white
Californians that swept through the state in the 1990s. The first of them
was Prop 187, outlawing the provision of government services,
including health care and education, to undocumented immigrants. In 1994,
Californians approved that initiative by a 59% to 41% vote. A federal court,
however, found most of its provisions unconstitutional and it never went into
effect.
We
weren’t so lucky with Proposition 209, which, in 1996, outlawed
affirmative-action programs statewide at any level of government or public
service. Its effects reverberate to this day, not least at the prestigious
University of California’s many campuses.
A study commissioned 25 years later by its Office of the President revealed that “Prop 209 caused a decline in systemwide URG enrollment by at least twelve percent.” URGs are the report’s shorthand for “underrepresented groups” — in other words, Latinos, Blacks, and Native Americans.
Unfortunately, Proposition 209’s impact on the racial makeup of the university system’s students has persisted for decades and, as that report observed, “led URG applicants to cascade out of UC into measurably less-advantageous universities.”
Because of UC’s importance in California’s labor market, “this
caused a decline in the total number of high-earning ($100,000) early-30s
African American and Hispanic/Latinx Californians by at least three percent.”
Yes,
we lost the Prop 209 election, but the organization we helped start back in
1995, Californians for
Justice, still flourishes. Led by people of color, it’s become a
powerful statewide advocate for racial justice in public education with a
number of electoral and legislative victories
to its name.
Shortcomings and the Short Run
How do I hate thee, electoral organizing? Let me count the ways. First, such work requires that political activists like me go wide, but almost never deep. It forces us to treat voters like so many items to be checked off a list, not as political actors in their own right. Under intense time pressure, your job is to try to reach as many people as possible, immediately discarding those who clearly aren’t on your side and, in some cases, even actively discouraging them from voting.
In the long run, treating elections this way can weaken the
connection between citizens and their government by reducing all the forms of democratic
participation to a single action, a vote. Such political work rarely builds
organized power that lasts beyond Election Day.
In addition, electoral campaigns sometimes involve lying not just to voters, but even to your own canvassers (not to speak of yourself) about whether you can win or not. In bad campaigns — and I’ve seen a couple of them — everyone lies about the numbers: canvassers about how many doors they’ve knocked on; local field directors about what their canvassers have actually done; and so on up the chain of command to the campaign director.
In good campaigns, this doesn’t
happen, but those may not, I suspect, be in the majority. And lying, of course,
can become a terrible habit for anyone hoping to construct a strong
organization, not to mention a better world.
Lying, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued, is a way of treating people as if they were merely things to be used. Electoral campaigns can often tempt organizers to take just such an instrumental approach to others, assuming voters and campaign workers have value only to the extent that they can help you win.
Such an approach,
however efficient in the short run, doesn’t build solidarity or democratic
power for the long haul. Sometimes, of course, the threat is so great — as was
true when it came to the possible reelection of Donald Trump in 2020 — that the
short run simply matters more.
Another
problem with elections? Campaigns so often involve convincing people to do
something they’ve come to think of as a waste of time, namely, going to the
polls. A 2018 senatorial race I worked on, for example, focused on our
candidate’s belief in the importance of raising the minimum wage. And yes, we
won that election, but four years later, the federal minimum wage is still
stubbornly stuck at $7.25 an hour, though not, of course, through any fault of
our candidate. Still, the voters who didn’t think electing Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen would
improve their pay weren’t wrong.
On
the other hand, the governor we
helped elect that same year (and for whose reelection I’ll be working again
soon) did come through for working Nevadans by, for example, signing legislation that guarantees a worker’s right to
be recalled before anyone new is hired when a workplace reopens after a Covid
shutdown.
You’ll hear some left-wing intellectuals and many working people who are, in the words of the old saying, “too broke to pay attention,” claim that elections don’t change anything. But such a view grows ever harder to countenance in a world where a Supreme Court disastrously reshaped by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell is hell-bent on reshaping nearly the last century of American political life. It’s true that overturning Roe v. Wade doesn’t affect my body directly. I’m too old to need another abortion.
Still, I’m just as angry as I was in 2016 at people who couldn’t bring
themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton because she wasn’t Bernie Sanders. As I
told such acquaintances at the time, “Yes, we’ll hate her and we’ll have to
spend the next four years fighting her, but on the other hand, SUPREME COURT,
SUPREME COURT, SUPREME COURT!”
Okay,
maybe that wasn’t exactly the most elegant of arguments, but it was accurate,
as anyone will tell you who’d like to avoid getting shot by a random heat-packing pedestrian, buried under the collapsing wall between church and state, or burned out in yet another climate-change-induced conflagration.
If
Voting Changed Anything…
Back
in 1996, as Election Day approached, Californians for Justice had expanded from
two offices — in Oakland and Long Beach — to 11 around the state. We were
paying a staff of 45 and expanding (while my partner and I lay awake many
nights wondering how we’d make payroll at the end of the week). We were ready
for our get-out-the-vote push.
Just
before the election, one of the three organizations that had given us seed
money published its monthly newsletter. The cover featured a photo of a brick
wall spray-painted with the slogan: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it
illegal.” Great, just what we needed!
It’s
not as if I didn’t agree, at least in part, with the sentiment. Certainly, when
it comes to foreign policy and the projection of military force globally, there
has been little difference between the two mainstream political parties. Since
the end of World War II, Democrats and Republicans have cooperated in a
remarkably congenial way when it comes to this country’s disastrous
empire-building project, while financially rewarding the military-industrial
complex, year after year, in a grandiose
fashion.
Even
in the Proposition 209 campaign, my interest lay more in building long-term
political power for California communities of color than in a vote I already
knew we would lose. Still, I felt then and feel today that there’s something
deeply wrong with the flippant response of some progressives that elections
aren’t worth bothering about. I’d grown up in a time when, in the Jim Crow
South, voting was still largely illegal for Blacks and people had
actually died fighting for their right to vote. Decades earlier,
some of my feminist forebears had been tortured while
campaigning for votes for women.
Making
Voting Illegal Again
In
1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, explicitly outlawing any law or regulation
that “results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote
on account of race or color.” Its specific provisions required states or
counties with a history of voter suppression to receive “pre-clearance” from
the attorney general or the District Court for the District of Columbia for any
further changes in election laws or practices. Many experts considered this
provision the heart of that Act.
Then,
in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, a Supreme Court largely shaped
by Republican presidents tore that heart right out. Essentially,
the court ruled that, because those once excluded from voting could now do so,
such jurisdictions no longer needed preclearance to change their voting laws
and regulations. In other words, because it was working, it should be set
aside.
Not
surprisingly, some states moved immediately to restrict access to voting
rights. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “within 24
hours of the ruling, Texas announced that it would implement a strict photo ID
law. Two other states, Mississippi and Alabama, also began to enforce photo ID
laws that had previously been barred because of federal preclearance.” Within
two months, North Carolina passed what that center called “a far-reaching and
pernicious voting bill” which:
“instituted
a strict photo ID requirement; curtailed early voting; eliminated same day
registration; restricted preregistration; ended annual voter registration
drives; and eliminated the authority of county boards of elections to keep
polls open for an additional hour.”
Fortunately,
the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the North Carolina law in 2016,
and surprisingly the Supreme Court let that ruling stand.
But as it turned out, the Supremes weren’t done with the Voting Rights Act. In 2021, the present Trumpian version of the court issued a ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee upholding Arizona’s right to pass laws requiring people to vote only in precincts where they live, while prohibiting anyone who wasn’t a relative of the voter from hand-delivering mail-in ballots to the polls.
The court held that, even though in practice such measures would have a
disproportionate effect on non-white voters, as long as a law was technically the
same for all voters, it didn’t matter that, in practice, it would become harder
for some groups to vote.
Writing
for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito declared that states have a different
and more important interest in such voting restrictions: preventing voter fraud.
In other words — at least in the minds of two-thirds of the present Supreme
Court — some version of Donald Trump’s big lie about rigged elections and voter
fraud has successfully replaced racist voter suppression as the primary future
danger to free and fair elections.
Maybe
elections do change something. Otherwise, why, in the wake of the 2020
elections, would “they” (including Republican-controlled state legislatures across
significant parts of the country) be so intent on making it ever harder for
certain people to vote? And if you think that’s bad, wait until the Supremes
rule next year on the fringe legal theory of an “independent state legislature.” We may well see the court
decide that a state’s legislature can legally overrule the popular vote in a
federal election — just in time for the 2024 presidential race.
The
Future Awaits Us
A
couple of times a week I talk by phone with another friend. We began doing this
at the height of George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s vicious “war on terror.”
We’d console each other when it came to the horrors of that conflict, including
the illegal invasion of Iraq, the deaths and torture of Iraqi and Afghan civilians,
and the seemingly endless expansion of American imperial meddling. We’re still
doing it. Somehow, every time we talk, it seems as if the world has travelled
one more mile on its way to hell in a handbasket.
Both
of us have spent our lives trying, in our own modest fashion, to gum up the
works of capitalism, militarism, and authoritarian government. To say that
we’ve been less than successful would certainly be understating things. Still,
we do keep at it, while discussing what in the world we can still do.
At this point in my life and my country’s slide into authoritarian misery, I often find it hard even to imagine what would be useful. Faced with such political disorientation, I fall back on a core conviction that, when the way forward is unclear, the best thing we can do is give people the experience of achieving in concert what they could never achieve by themselves.
Sometimes, the product of
an organizing drive is indeed victory. Even when it isn’t though, helping
create a group capable of reading a political situation and getting things
done, while having one another’s backs, is also a kind of victory.
That’s
why, this election season, my partner and I are returning to Reno to join hotel
housekeepers, cooks, and casino workers trying to ensure the reelection of two
Democrats, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and Governor Steve Sisolak,
in a state where the margin of Democratic Party victories hasn’t grown since 2012.
From our previous experience, we know one thing: we’ll be working in a well-run campaign that won’t waste anyone’s time and has its eye on the future. As I wrote about the union’s 2020 presidential campaign for Joe Biden, more than winning a difficult election is at stake. What’s also important is building organized power for working people.
In other words, providing the kind of training and
leadership development that will send “back to every hotel, restaurant, casino,
and airport catering service leaders who can continue to organize and advocate
for their working-class sisters and brothers.”
I
still hate electoral politics, but you don’t always get to choose the terrain
you’re fighting on. Through its machinations at the federal, state, and county
level, the Republican Party has been all but screaming its plans to steal the
next presidential election. It’s no exaggeration to say that preserving some
form of democratic government two years from now depends in part on keeping
Republicans from taking over Congress, especially the Senate, this year.
So,
it’s back to Reno, where the future awaits us. Let’s hope it’s one we can live
with.
©
2021 TomDispatch.com
Rebecca Gordon is
an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. Prior to teaching at
USF, Rebecca spent many years as an activist in a variety of movements,
including for women's and LGBTQ+ liberation, the Central America and South
Africa solidarity movements and for racial justice in the United States. She is
the author of "American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for
Post-9/11 War Crimes" (2016) and previously, "Mainstreaming
Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States"
(2014). She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San
Francisco. You can contact her through the Mainstreaming Torture website.