Timothy Shenk, a professor of history at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, which is “within” (somehow) George Washington University, has a nice article up at the New York Times, A Lost Manuscript Reveals the Fire Barack Obama Couldn’t Reveal on the Campaign Trail.
What the good professor is talking about is a 250-page manuscript, given the title “Transformative Politics”, written jointly by Barack and a friend of his, Robert Fisher, when Barack was at Harvard Law School circa 1989-1990. Liberalism was at a low point at that time, with the Republicans having held the White House for three straight elections, a trick the Democrats had managed only once since the Civil War—and that thanks to the Almighty FDR, who had done it all by himself.
The Republicans, Obama and Fisher said, were repeatedly defeating the Democrats at the polls using all but explicitly racist appeals—the infamous “Willie Horton” ads1 used in the 1988 presidential campaign being a prime example—while Democrats had all but given up on winning elections and were reduced to hoping that they could rely on the courts to win all their battles for them. (This is the “fire” that Prof. Shenk alludes to, though it doesn’t strike me as all that flaming.)
Barack and Bob acknowledged that the great failure of the modern civil rights movement was that it had turned the white working class against the black working class—white workers saw the world as a zero-sum game and would never admit that they owed black workers anything. However “just”, and however necessary, affirmative action, was, it was a political nonstarter. Something new had to be devised.
As is so often the case, the analysis presented in the manuscript is more impressive than the solution—because who writes a book in order to solve an easy problem? The thing is, the account that Shenk gives of the manuscript presents little more than an intelligent presentation of the liberal conundrum summarized a decade or two before in the “inside” liberal gag, “a program that only helps the poor is a poor program”. Most Americans aren’t poor; why are they going to support—as in “pay the taxes to pay for”—a program that is specifically designed not to benefit them?
As I say, framing a question is a different beast than answering one. According to Shenk, Obama and Fisher had a “vision” of revitalizing an agenda developed by legendary civil rights leader Bayard Rustin following Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964, described in an article in the February 1965 issue of Commentary, From Protest to Politics The Future of the Civil Rights Movement. In that document, Rustin called for an expansion of the civil rights movement from one motivated and largely executed by black civil rights activists to a much broader coalition:
Neither that movement nor the country's twenty million black people can win political power alone. We need allies. The future of the Negro struggle depends on whether the contradictions of this society can be resolved by a coalition of progressive forces which becomes the effective political majority in the United States. I speak of the coalition which staged the March on Washington, passed the Civil Rights Act, and laid the basis for the Johnson landslide-Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups.
That coalition, of course, never materialized. For Obama and Fisher, the task was to make Rustin’s lost dream of a “March on Washington Coalition” a reality, . But it was easy to talk airily of programs that would benefit everyone. Designing them was another matter.
The simple fact is, Rustin’s dream was only a dream. The actual March on Washington occurred in the summer of 1963, when John F. Kennedy was still alive, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 not even imagined. It was only at that time the “March on Washington Coalition” could have existed, when the target of the civil rights movement was still the overt, state-enforced segregation of the old south. Once the act was signed into law, on July 2, 1964, the coalition immediately began to fall apart.
In his call for a coalition with “trade unions”, Ruskin ignores a problem that, in all likelihood, he was acutely aware of: the old “vertical” unions that comprised the American Federation of Labor, which organized workers according to “craft”—carpenters, electricians, plumbers, etc.—regardless of employer, were all explicitly racist. “Even” the supposedly exemplary United Auto Workers, a “horizontal” union that sprang from the AFL’s rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, was accused of racism by some of its black members. (See the discussion of the UAW in Wikipedia under the subhead “Politics and Dissent”.) One of the most common, and most persistent, examples of (erroneous) folk wisdom is that there are only a limited number of “good” jobs and therefore it is “necessary” to ensure that only “we” get them—and, throughout American history, white workers have, over and over again, defined blacks as “not us”.
Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, efforts in the late sixties and early seventies to overcome de facto segregation in the north in schools, in housing, and in access to “good” (union) jobs led to a furious backlash. In fact, that backlash was already manifest before Ruskin published his article, when George Wallace, running in the 1964 Democratic presidential primaries, ran up 30% of the vote in Wisconsin and 40% in Maryland.
The race riots of the late sixties, and the massive increase in black street crime that followed, deeply alienated white voters of all stripes, and significantly worsened living conditions for blacks living in the big cities, both because they bore the brunt of the soaring crime rates and collapsing real estate values, and because businesses fled the cities. “White flight” certainly existed before the riots, but it became “White panic” thereafter, also helping to turn the NRA from an association of hunters into one of terrified homeowners.
Ruskin did not have an answer for this, and neither did Obama and Fisher. In my “retrospective” on Obama’s presidency, Barack Obama, still not getting it after all these years, I quoted a passage from a review of Obama’s post-presidential memoir, A Promised Land, written by John F. Harris (because I didn’t read Obama’s book myself):
He [Obama] writes that he had expected that passage of the Affordable Care Act, “an item that most affected people’s day-to-day lives,” would be his best shot at “building momentum for the rest of my legislative agenda.”
Poor Obama! Self-deception, one might say, hath made its masterpiece. The whole purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to help who? People who didn’t have health insurance (disproportionately black). How did it plan to accomplish this? By taxing those who already had it! (disproportionately white) Why would anyone think that this was a plan that “helped everyone”?
Obama’s successful attempt to enact universal health insurance had precisely—precisely and predictably—the same political impact as President Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to do so—a total rout in the 2010 congressional elections that destroyed any possibility that Obama would enact further significant liberal legislation. Compounding the disaster was the actual, abysmal rollout of the APA, which went “live”—or, rather, “dead”—in October 2013—a demonstration of how inept the liberals’ beloved vision of an omniscient, omnibeneficent federal government could be in practice.
Obama ultimately ended up relying not on the courts but his “pen” to advance his agenda, issuing sweeping executive orders of questionable constitutionality, orders which were frequently countermanded by Republican judges—a testament to his failure to develop the white-black working class coalition he talked about, because he never seemed to notice that virtually all of his measures addressed either the economic needs of the poor or the emotional and economic needs of the “Nature loving” NIMBY upper-middle-class, ignoring everyone in the middle.2
Afterwords
In my “Still Not Getting It” post linked to above, I discuss why I think the liberal dream of a “New New Deal” is just that, and in the early going of my very long post, CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally., I discuss what I think would work.
1. Willie Horton, a black man convicted of murder in Massachusetts who committed rape while on a weekend furlough, was never mentioned by name by George Bush or “official” Republican campaign material—though the leniency of the furlough program itself was attacked aggressively by Bush. It was an “independent” ad that both named Horton and featured a picture of him, making him the “poster boy” of the furlough program, which turned an implicitly racist appeal into an explicit one.
2. Furthermore, turning over the keys to the economy to Wall Street bros Tim Geithner and Larry Summers did not prove to be an unalloyed success.
