(Difficult questions, at a very knitty-gritty level. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Another progressive democratic dream is that of a multicultural community of free dialogue. Instead of conflict between different groups, all in their own spaces, why can't we simply come together to collaborate? Every participant could value the myriad differences of each member, learning from each other's unique capacities. Together we could create spaces where everyone could participate as equals.
Research indicates, however, that spaces of free multicultural collaboration are very difficult to create. Monocultural, monoclass, etc. groups and communities actually work together much better than diverse ones. Ironically, diversity actually tends to reduce social trust and the likelihood that participants will engage with each other as whole persons.
These findings have important implications for community organizing efforts that seek to generate power across different groups. This research seems to support arguments I have made earlier that some separation between different cultural, class, racial, etc., groups is likely more productive for long term social action efforts.
Sometimes a single demographic variable is very predictive, but often you don't get much deterministic information until you combine two or more cross-tabs. The big three R's are Religion, Race and Region. Wealth alone doesn't seem to have a huge effect on voting, except at the really high levels. However, the combination of wealth with Religion or wealth with Region (rural) is very significant.
One of my favorite blogs is by Andrew Gelman, a bayesian over at "Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science". I haven't been there for a while, but found these two posts really interesting:
(Another installment in this excellent series. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Externally, community organizing groups split the world into an always flexible "us" and "them." Until fairly recently, the group I work with, at least, didn't look very closely at the internal fractures we had across boundaries of race and class. However the social and cultural power of privileged and less privileged members can create destructive patterns if they are not dealt with directly from the beginning.
In my limited experience in Wisconsin with CHANGE--a congregational organizing group that is a member of the national National Organizing network--I have watched a range of race and class issues emerge that were not dealt with effectively. (Later I'll talk about how intermediary organizations like National Organizing work with local groups).
From what I have read elsewhere (see also this and this ), a reluctance to focus specifically on race and class in favor of more pragmatic and general visions of "self interest" and coalition building has been a problem with mainline community organizing groups more generally. This has led to the development of new groups outside of the larger national groups that deal more directly with issues of racial identity, nationalism etc. More recently, I know that groups like National Organizing have begun to address these issues more directly, but since my participation has been mostly limited to local work in our education committee, I am not a part of these wider discussions in the network.
The final in our five-part series looking at the Best Picture nominees, Telaroli takes a look at the hidden class politics of Atonement.
With lush photography and a beautiful cast, Joe Wright's Oscar nominated Atonement is being advertised as an epic romance, and while romance does weave itself in and out of the plot, it doesn't really get to the heart of the film.
From the opening shot, a long line of animal figurines representing all of the jungle and the natural order of things, it's clear that instead of love, this is a movie about class. For in England, the natural order of things, no matter how unnatural it may seem, is their rigid class system.
After the animal kingdom parade ends we meet Briony, a young girl with a gift for writing but without anyone to give her or her writing much attention. A quick conversation with Robbie (James McAvoy), the handsome gardener, subtly reveals that Briony has a crush on him. When Briony later asks her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) why she no longer talks to Robbie, it's obvious that she isn't doing so out of concern for her sister's relationship with Robbie, but out of her own selfishness.
Cecilia, without any hesitation, tells Briony that they "move in different circles, that's all," and in fact they do. Robbie's mother works for Cecilia and Briony's family as a housekeeper and cooke, leaving Robbie to grow up with the family. And even though the girls' father paid for his education he was always on the outside looking in. Despite his education, the story begins with Robbie working as the gardener, trying to get money for medical school, his attempt to climb a bit higher on the societal ladder. His feelings are for the older sister and as he daydreams of Cecilia in the bathtub, a military plane flies overhead, a reminder of his status in life and a view of things to come.
From here we follow Cecilia, Robbie and Briony into a fateful night that changes all of their lives. Before dinner, the two from different circles finally declare their love for each other. Unfortunately for them, a confused Briony interrupts their physical and emotional declaration. Later in the evening, when everyone is walking through the woods, Briony , out of both jealousy and not wanting to cross class lines, tells the police that she saw Robbie raping her cousin Lola.
The real culprit, the much richer chocolate magnate Paul Marshall, is of course never suspected, as it makes more sense to both Lola and Briony that the man who runs in a "different circle" would be the appropriate choice considering the crime. Even Cecilia's pleas to the police and her mother that Robbie is innocent and Briony isn't to be trusted aren't enough to outweigh their prejudice against the lower man.
Among the many identity-based divisions this nomination campaign has revealed in the Democratic Party, perhaps the largest gulf of all is between the class of elite party activists (superdelegates and $4,600 donors), and the emerging class of nouveau riche, grassroots activists within the party (small donors of $200 or less, high-level political media consumers, and political rally attendees). Consider the following statistics that compares how this "aristocratic" and "bourgeois" activist support is breaking:
Consider further that Clinton was well ahead of Obama in every insider's poll ever conducted, while Obama was well ahead of Clinton in just about every single blog straw poll and MoveOn.org poll ever conducted. There is a huge gap in the candidate preference of superdelegates, large donors and other party insiders (the Democratic activist aristocrats), and the preference of high-level consumers of progressive media, small donors, and political rally attendees (the Democratic activist bourgeois). Note that I keep calling one group the "aristocracy," and the other group the "bourgeois." Within the world of Democratic politics, neither group is really "the people." Unlike the great majority of voters, these are all highly engaged activists who ravenously consume political media, donate to a wide range of political campaigns, and engage in other forms of political activism on a regular basis.
The class groupings I am positing here are not based upon the personal income of the two groups, but rather upon their level of ownership over the Democratic Party. Each class of activist breaks about 60-70% in favor of one candidate. These two different types of activists are engaged in a direct struggle for control over of the Democratic Party. Their goal is to convince the working classes, aka the great mass of primary voters, to join their cause. Until this week, the two classes basically cancelled each other out. Only now has Obama has the taken the advantage.
More than two years ago, in an article that I believe was forwarded to Hillary Clinton's campaign staff at the time, I predicted that she would have serious problems with the bourgeois activist class:
Within the world of progressive activists, from the viewpoint of the working and middle class progressive activists, Hillary Clinton is seen as hopelessly aligned with the establishment activists, with the insider activists, with the wealthy activists, with the well-connected activists, and with every possible progressive activist "elite" you can possibly imagine. Is it thus in any way surprising that the activist base, which is largely on the outside looking in, generally does not harbor much positive feeling toward her? The progressive activist base considers the progressive activist elite to be the main culprit in progressives losing power around the country. We keep losing, and we blame them. Thus, why should it be a surprise to anyone that we dislike the person who is viewed as their primary representative? We literally hold her, and what she represents within the world of progressive activism, to be responsible for the massive progressive backslide that has taken place over the past twelve years.
This is a struggle between the volunteer envelope stuffers and the managers of the campaigns those volunteers try to help out. It is not really an ideological struggle, as exit polls have confirmed in state after state. It is, instead, a bourgeois uprising in responsive to the perceived failure of Democratic activist elites in their competition with conservative activist elites. The envelope stuffers are tired of volunteering for campaigns that either lose or, when they win, fail to make significant change in Washington, D.C. It is a progressive grassroots rebellion against perceived progressive elite failure. And if you really want to know what the seemingly vacuous "yes we can" or "change you can believe in" lines mean, at its roots it ultimately means an end of progressive failure to enact a progressive agenda. It is about the envelope stuffers growing tired of failure, and wanting to hope that their activism will actually make a difference this time.
Personally, I wish there was more of an ideological component to Obama's activist support. Also, whether or not Obama actually is the change the envelope stuffers hope for is entirely open to debate. However, no matter which side of that debate is more accurate, it does not change the reality of this class war. The Clinton campaign is aware of this class war itself, as evidenced by comments like "my supporters will be working" instead of attending caucuses. Further examples include any of the other attacks the campaign and its surrogates have leveled at the caucus system and Obama's creative class supporters (see here and here). For the Clinton campaign, the bourgeois caucus goers are interloping newcomers, while superdelegates are the "keepers of the faith." This entire argument over caucuses and superdelegates is being carried out in language that is strikingly reminiscent of political struggles in the late 18th century in America, Britain and France. This is a full-blown activist class war within the Democratic Party, and right now the bourgeois are winning.
Even if it lacks a clear ideological component, an Obama nomination strikes me as one of the logical endpoints to the new wave of progressive activism that began in response to Democratic and progressive failures around the Clinton impeachment, the Florida recount, and the Iraq war. The envelope stuffers are tired of losing, and they want a chance to see if they can do better.
In early 2004, I was working in the Chicago area for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, a state branch of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is very much my family union, and it has been a big help to both my mother, who in 1972 was fired from a middle school English teaching job for being pregnant, and to me, as the AFT helped organize my graduate school and then gave me a job after that, at over the past thirty-five years. As such, When the AFT endorsed Hillary Clinton, their endorsement meant a lot to me, even if at times I have disagreed with the direction of the union. My mother is a big Hillary Clinton backer herself, and given the union's demographics I have little difficulty believing that the membership as a whole supported their endorsement.
When I was working for the AFT, on three separate occasions in a three-month period we worked on new organizing campaigns were a local state branch of the National Education Association was the main opponent, rather than any school administration. The nastiest and most difficult of those three campaigns took place at a local community college in Cook County, which was so close that it required a second election (only one vote separated the two unions in the first election, and the five votes for "no union" necessitated a second election). During the second election, on more than one occasion I heard a teacher I was canvassing say a variation on the following: "you know, the problem with the AFT is that they are affiliated with the AFL-CIO." It was coded language for stating that the AFT was bad because it associated with blue collar and service unions, rather than being a professionally focused organization like the, at the time, non-AFL-CIO affiliated NEA. This new, loaded, class based messaging worked for the NEA in the second election too, as they cruised to a twenty-vote victory the second time around (about 150 people voted in both elections, so a twenty vote victory is big).
Paul Rosenberg has diaried here that wealthier Southern white flight to the Republican Party has been a significant driver of today's political alignments. The same theme has recently been explored by Paul Krugman at his blog. Krugman calls attention to an excellent academic article on the myth of the rich Democrat by Larry Bartells at Princeton. These things seem to run in fours. Paul Gelman at my favorite statistics website Statistical Modeling and Causal Inference has similar research on class, race, voting and between the states.
The conclusions from all four, add up to a powerfully convincing explanation. As Krugman puts it "once you take the great southern switch into account, there isn't much left to explain.... White men didn't turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story." Class separation on voting has increased from 4% in the 1952-1972 period to 14% in the 1976-2004 period. RICH white southerners became Republican, while POOR white Southerners remain Democrat. Class voting differences are more dramatic in poor states than in rich states.
The piece de resistance is a wonderful graphic from Andrew Gelman that collapses this issue into three powerfully explanatory images worth a 1000 words Some cool graphs of rich states and poor states showing famous red-blue maps for Bush vs Kerry disaggregated into three income levels, poor, middle and rich (rich is above the 95th percentile, poor is up to the 37 percentile). Here are Gelman's images:
Diversity is fundamentally about voices. That's why Paul's program that I wrote about last week was called "Chicago Voices." The point of the program was not to bring more people of color bloggers and women and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds so that they could be checked off of a diversity list. "Oh good, there are 30 African Americans here instead of 10 in a crowd of 1,500." That's not the point. The point of diversity is to hear different voices. Voice comes from experience, and power helps project and include voices.
The experience of a 2nd Generation Mexican-American man living in a small town is very fundamentally different than the one of a working class-white mother living in a metropolitan city, and both are very different from an African American woman working as a professional progressive political consultant in the South. Many of the Chicago Voices project participants were also using whatever platform they have -- whether it's a small local blog or partnerships with larger blogs -- to project the values and the ideas that come directly from their experience. Nezua is a perfect example of someone who is using the Internet and blogs as a platform for elevating the issues of his people, who are being oppressed in the current immigration battle. The way that experience helps different political activists see the world, including the problems but also the solutions, is valuable. Without them, we can't see the full picture of our progressive movement.
And it's not even about them being at the convention, though that was critical. What would have been much better, would have been if more people like them, who come from fundamentally diverse backgrounds and experiences, were actively sought out to be in the leadership grouping that put on YearlyKos. Gina introduced the committee members on Saturday night, and the group didn't look very diverse to me. I am not at all in any way diminishing the contribution these people made, and I am not placing any blame here. I just want to point out that leadership matters. A cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-class, cross-regional coalition planning that event would have made it an event that was more relevant to all of those people, and those people are the winning progressive coalition. The folks who are active on the DailyKos blog do not represent the long-term progressive coalition, because our coalition is not 92% white. That's the Republicans.
I am completely exhausted and must sleep, but I wanted to get this out there, and I want to say that I do have a vision for how I think we can address this issue that we've been grappling with, which I will begin laying out this week. I'm thankful for the opportunity to have gone to the conference, because it took me working really, really hard through those four days (and of course, playing hard, too - thanks Living Liberally), to get there, but I do know where I think things should go. So I want people to know I'm not just talking about problems, I am talking about solutions, as well, and really hoping to open up a good and productive dialogue.
