As the brewhaha about #BLM interrupting Bernie, Hillary and now even Jeb has been going on, I've been thinking about #BLM's tactics and considering that it is time for the progressive movement broadly to step up its game.

#BLM has garnered a great deal of very necessary attention and I think that they are on to something. Elections are a huge media spectacle and by playing the democracy game by an altered set of rules, they have managed to inject issues of great urgency into the narrative of the periodic 5 billion dollar spectacle of our 1% dominated managed democracy. These urgent issues are generally utterly ignored by the media and the bipartisan candidates that are suddenly grappling with them, and they are certainly not discussed in the language that the oppressed use to describe their circumstances.

#BLM has made a broader public aware of the emergency in their community and is demanding that those that are vying for the presidency articulate credible plans to deal with it. Given the nature of the emergency and the fact that the holder of the office of President has a constitutional obligation to see to it that the laws are executed faithfully - this is not an unreasonable demand.

There is more than one emergency

At the other end of the pipeline that imports military equipment, training and tactics into communities of color is the imperial force that uses those things first. They are creating emergencies of their own, killing untold numbers of innocent civilians, displacing millions from their destroyed homes and unleashing brutal forces that throw entire nations into ungovernable chaos.

Needless to say, the same government that directs the used weapons and tactics of mass destruction into communities of color at home where a person of color is killed every 28 hours - is the government that is creating dire emergencies mostly for people of color around the globe.

The chief executive of this government carries on wars without the authorization of congress as required by the constitution. The congress does not appear to have the will to assert its constitutional power to perserve, protect and defend the constitution.

The chief executive of this government has arrogated unto himself the power to kill individuals at his own instance, becoming judge, jury and executioner. This has resulted in the cold-blooded, remorseless murder of at least one American teenager - because he had the nerve to be born to the wrong parents. While the loss of one American teenager is tragic, he is but one of thousands of innocent people slaughtered by the imperial drones.

The chief executive wistfully remarks that he is surprisingly good at killing people.

The chief executive is also surprisingly adept at torturing people who are held indefinitely without charge in a stinking gulag. Despite his protestations that he intends to close the gulag, he has managed to maintain its existence for the 7 years thus far of his presidency. Despite the powers vested in him as the commander-in-chief of the military, he has allowed the military to disobey his direct orders to release a prisoner of the gulag. This demonstrates that either he had no real intention of causing the release of the prisoner and is hiding behind a bureaucracy, or, that the military has quietly taken charge of some functions of government removing the people's elected officials from the top of the chain of command.

Along with indicating a crisis of democracy at home, these are surely emergencies which need urgent attention as people are dying in great numbers. Surely we must pay attention to these actions of our government despite the fact that the victims are not Americans.

Meanwhile, here in America there are other dire community emergencies. Poverty and lack of access to health care are killing people and shortening their lives. Environmental degradation allowed by a government of the 1% hellbent on deregulating industry are killing people and shortening lives. Speaking of which, the government of the 1% refuses to meaningfully address climate change (in actions rather than lip service.) This slow-moving emergency threatens to extinguish the ability of the planet to host much of the life including human life.

Surely these other emergencies are worthy causes to propel activists to interrupt the flow of the election spectacle.

The progressive movement as a whole should support and participate in interrupting candidates for high office and forcing them to respond to these emergencies with realistic, practical policy rather than allow them to blather on, avoiding these critical, oft-ignored issues. Further, the movement should have a plan B to guide their actions should the candidates refuse to respond appropriately. [More on that later.]

Racism and liberal movements

I intend to digress here before I get to the next point. Take my word for it that I have a point in mind.

Were you aware that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, famous feminist women's suffragist said horrible racist things?

…“American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters … awake to the danger of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!”

-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“What words can express her [the white woman’s] humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.”

-- Susan B. Anthony

During the civil war suffragists like Stanton and Anthony were active abolitionists and loyally supported the Republican party (which was in that time the liberal party), calling for the emancipation and enfranchisement of those held in bondage along with, of course, enfranchisement for women. After the war, the expectation of suffragists was that the Republican party would deliver universal enfranchisement. - Needless to say, things didn't go as hoped as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments attest.

Stanton (and other suffragists) considered the Republican party's failure to deliver the franchise to women a great betrayal. Stanton also felt betrayed by the abolitionists lack of solidarity when they took the politically expedient route and supported enfranchisement for black men alone.

Frederick Douglass explained, that he was sympathetic to the rights of women, but for black men, this was an emergency:

“I champion the right of the negro to vote. It is with us a matter of life and death, and therefore can not be postponed. I have always championed women’s right to vote; but it will be seen that the present claim for the negro is one of the most urgent necessity. The assertion of the right of women to vote meets nothing but ridicule; there is no deep seated malignity in the hearts of the people against her; but name the right of the negro to vote, all hell is turned loose and the Ku-Klux and Regulators hunt and slay the unoffending black man. The government of this country loves women. They are the sisters, mothers, wives and daughters of our rulers; but the negro is loathed....The negro needs suffrage to protect his life and property, and to answer him respect and education. He needs it for the safety of reconstruction and the salvation of the Union; for is own elevation from the position of a drudge to that of an influential member of society.”

Abolitionists took up a popular rhetorical device of the time, that this was, "the Negro's hour." The response was created by Republican Charles Sumner in senatorial debate with a Democrat, Senator Edgar Cowan. Cowan asked Sumner to justify giving the franchise to negroes but not to women:

This gauntlet thrown down to the Republican leaders brought out a paradoxìcal debate, many supporters of woman suffrage stoutly opposing the amendment, and many opponents defending it. Former suffragists not only acknowledged the justice of the woman's claim to the vote but admitted as well that it was a proper reconstruction demand. They contended, however, that while woman and Negro suffrage were both just and logical, the nation would not accept two reforms at one time; therefore the question of suffrage must be divided and the first chance be given to the Negro. “This is the Negro's hour” became the universal response to the woman's appeal.

Note the (not-really-so) clever appeal to pragmatism, "the nation would not accept two reforms at one time; therefore the question of suffrage must be divided." How often have we seen liberals and progressive lawmakers boldly support taking half a loaf (or less) for reasons of political expedience, in many cases the logic of which has been performed by pols practicing cranio-rectal inversion?

Due to this sudden invention of pragmatic politics:

Men who had stood shoulder to shoulder with the women leaders in their convention before the war when the women were serving men's causes, men who had earnestly and eloquently espoused in return the woman's cause when it was in a purely academic stage, now at the first opportunity to put theory into practice boldly chided the women for their selfish intrusion upon this, “the Negro's Hour.”

Much damage was done to the relations between black and white activists over this and the enmity that it engendered limited the possibility for interracial cooperation on civil rights issues for years going forward. The contention of whose group advances first has had echoes as recently as the 2008 election in the primary contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

[An excellent exposition of this can be found in the introduction to White Women's Rights by Louise Michele Newman. Also, NPR has an excellent interview with Lori Ginzberg, author of a book on Stanton that sheds light on these issues.]

End of digression, we return to the previously scheduled content already in progress...

Which emergency comes first?

I can already hear people grumbling about the idea of other groups appropriating #BLM tactics. Goodness only knows what sort of comments that will engender.

I understand that it's hard to focus on these other emergencies when representatives of the state are oppressing you and everybody that looks like you, harassing, beating and shooting people that look like you leaving you feeling endangered every minute of every day everywhere you go.

You can see this in action at the Daily Kos. During the period when Edward Snowden's controversial revelations that demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the government had established some of the means to implement an authoritarian state, the site's owner shared that other issues were of greater priority from his perspective. He flatly stated that to give priority to protesting illegal, unconstitutional exercise of executive power to spy on Americans indicated warped priorities of privileged white people:

I don't give a shit (183+ / 0-)

Seriously, I just don't care.

NSA spying is bad! So is stop and frisk. So is splitting up families by deporting children to countries they've never been to and don't speak the language. So is harassing American muslims.

Government overreach is bad. But to act like having the government track who you call is the height of government abuse is a very white privileged view of the privacy issue.

But as for Greenwald and Snowden? Seriously, I don't give two shits.

by kos on Fri Jul 19, 2013 at 12:40:39 PM PDT

It appears to me that Kos and much of the liberal/progressive movement have internalized the false logic put forward by Charles Sumner, that it is politically infeasible for more than one issue or group to advance at a time, that it is impossible, politically speaking, for the American polity to walk and chew gum at the same time.

This is hardly new. James Madison planned for it in Federalist #10 and deftly implemented it in the Constitution.

In a large Society, the people are broken into so many interests and parties, that a common sentiment is less likely to be felt, and the requisite concert less likely to be formed, by a majority of the whole. ... Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain qualifications, the only policy, by which a republic can be administered on just principles.

Divide and conquer has been an effective weapon of the ruling class against the people for hundreds of years. Allowing ourselves to argue about whose emergency must be addressed first when they all must be attended to urgently is a recipe for failure.

Seperately the people and groups organizing around the emergencies described in a section above are a constellation of balkanized "special interest" groups clamoring for attention and power, together they could be a formidable movement with the power to demand and enforce change which could extend far beyond the bare demands of proposing policy while campaigning.

This is where we get to Plan B.

Plan B

A movement must think a step or two ahead in its planning and consider some contingencies. Some come to mind immediately. What happens if no candidate will articulate policies that are suitable to the tasks we demand of the political system? What happens if a candidate does accede to demands, creates a credible policy but fails to win their party's nomination?

These reasonably foreseeable possible outcomes should be thought about and planned for.

The potential outcomes can be protested initially by organizing protests and boycotts of elections, including protesting at the polls.

After all, it is hard to imagine, as Markos might put it, a more "white privileged view," than participating in an election and granting legitimacy to candidates that refuse to stop the killing, brutalization and oppression of people of color both in the US and outside because they are "good on some issues," or are, "the lesser of two evils." Surely the lesser of two evils is still evil in this scenario. Similarly, it would make little sense for people of color to grant legitimacy to candidates who might be willing to address the emergency of their community, but refuse to meaningfully address climate change which surely endangers their lives and the lives of future generations, though by a different means.

Of course, it will take more than the election of a president to deal with these issues, but #BLM and progressives could develop solidarity in the process of protest that would create a useful and powerful alliance to continue to press demands going forward.