Defending Democracy
This week the Republican National Convention begins in New York City, the site of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. And even though black support for the GOP at the national level rarely if ever passes the 10% mark in the modern era, I expect that there will be a lot of black faces spotted…and at least some of them won’t be performers. When Bush spoke to the Urban League over the summer, one of his central arguments was that the Democrats had a long history of taking African American voters for granted, and perhaps they should give the GOP a second look. While people like Al Sharpton became indignant (even though it was revealed that a Republican operative not only helped to fund Sharpton’s campaign, but raised money for him as well), many of us simply snickered. We’d heard this refrain before.
Buried beneath the coverage about Kerry’s service (or lack of service) in Vietnam are a number of stories which are arguably much more important. To an extent the argument is based on the same claims of black pathology that drive the current “DL frenzy.” Every other group splits their vote between the two parties. The fact that black people don’t must reflect some type of problem. Maybe we just aren’t sophisticated enough. Maybe our leaders have led us astray. To the black pathology crowd, black voting patterns represent the central fact that black people still live life as if we barely had three tv channels, computers November 1948 saw the election of a man who was to become the President most responsible for putting into law the Civil Rights Revolution into law-— Lyndon Baines Johnson.
How he won that election is the source of significant controversy, as it is now common knowledge that he stole the election from Coke Stevenson (one of the most popular governors in Texas history). While Though Johnson was trailinged Stevenson by several hundred votes the day after the election, reams of ballots that just so happened to favor Johnson kept turning up almost out of thin air as it were. Stevenson knew what was going on, tried to fight it in court, but the judges were stacked against him. It’s been said that real life is far stranger than fiction. Indeed it is one of America’s greatest ironies that the man who arguably perverted democracy in his Senatorial election was the same man that expanded the scope of our democracy so significantly.
Now I don’t bring this up to channel Jelani Cobb and his focus on the imperfect past.
Rather, I bring this up to show that the state of our democracy has always been rather tenuous. Not just for black men and women who have been largely shut out of the ballot box until relatively recently in the grand scheme of American history. This has been the case for non-black Americans as well. The number of elections that have been significantly altered one way or another due to malfeasance is probably too many to bearably count and remain committed to democratic theory and practice. A couple of recent events should give us all pause as to what our responsibilities in maintaining and building on our government should be.
The first is the attempt by a group of Republican veterans to criticize John Kerry’s Vietnam record. The group (Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) argues that Kerry has a tendency to distort the truth when it comes to his record in Vietnam, exaggerating the degree to which he committed heroic acts that warranted the medals (which include two Purple Hearts) he received. Now in as much as Kerry has implicitly used his own record of military service in order to slyly critique Bush’s marked lack of similar service, one could argue that this is fair game. Kerry put it out there…he shouldn’t trip when someone calls him on it.
But buried in the coverage about Kerry’s service (or lack of service) in Vietnam are a number of stories which are arguably much more important. In order to defray the costs borne by the military, contractors provided many of the services to Iraq…services that would have previously been provided by the military. However it has been revealed by a number of sources that the contractors are in some cases overcharging the US government for their services, in other cases the contractors are accepting kickbacks from Iraqis,Iraqis and in other cases are being paid twice for services rendered once. Furthermore while traditionally government agencies oversee the contractors in order to ensure that they are actually doing what they are being paid to do, in this case the government has been forced to hire contractors to oversee contractors.
Which is kind of like asking the fox to watch the henhouse.
And this is even before we take the continued American casualties into account. Before we grapple with the Abu Ghraib scandal.
And this is before we take domestic policies into account.
I noted last weekin my last column that even as the Bush administration has cut the amount of money spent on HIV/AIDS in the majority of our largest cities, they are also increasing the degree to which they tie existing funds to ideological positions regarding condom use. You want money on HIV/AIDS? If the administration’s changes go into effect then you’ve got to say that condoms are ineffective —- even though the data says otherwise. If you even show how to properly put a condom on, and your funding is cut.
The Bush administration has pushed a number of other regulations that have largely passed under the radar screen. These include regulations that arguably decrease the number of workers able to get overtime pay for their labor, that allow controversial herbicides to be used even in the face of evidence that indicates that the herbicide will cause significant environmental damage, that would cancel mandatory tuberculosis testing for people whose jobs put them at special risk of contracting TB. And this doesn’t even begin to cover the story.
Each of these regulations, taken alone, should generate more coverage than an event that happened some thirty plus years ago. If you are a hospital nurse, wouldn’t you be more likely to care that the current administration made it much harder for you to be protected from getting tuberculosis, as opposed to a story about whether the wounds someone received a Purple Heart for were self-inflicted? If you work in a low-level management position and were used to receiving overtime pay to make ends meet, wouldn’t you be more likely to care about the attempt to prevent you from making overtime-type loot than you would be likely to care about whether Bush served his full stint in the National Guard?
To a significant degree the current debate reminds me a lot of the Dukakis-Bush campaign of 1988. Dukakis was leading Bush (the Elder) by a significant margin until Bush effectively shifted the campaign away from concerns about the economy, foreign relations, and corporate scandals, to a discussion about patriotism on the one hand,hand and Willie Horton on the other. Willie Horton was a particularly powerful means of drawing criticism away from government policies and towards the issue of black crime. As Dukakis spent most of that campaign running away from Jesse Jackson (and to a significant extent, black people) he was unable to effectively combat the ad, and arguably lost the election as a result. Kerry isn’t responding in exactly the same way here as Dukakis did in 1988…in fact he is being much more proactive and aggressive in critiquing the ad and the people responsible for it.
But yet and still if we are spending our time debating a war that significant numbers of voters weren’t even alive for, rather than on domestic and foreign policy, we are curtailing our ability to make decisions on important policy differences.
The second event has been reported in the pages of the New York Times. Officials in Orlando are using heavy-handed tactics in dealing with supposed instances of voter-fraud. They have gone so far as to enter the homes of elderly African Americans with weapons at the hip, asking them questions about their vote registering activity. Now they aren’t just picking on any elderly African Americans, rather they are picking on the ones most likely to be effective at getting the vote out. This one comes the closest to the type of activity that effectively prevented African Americans from exerting their strength at the polls in the South during the Jim Crow era. Combine that with the recent revelation that the Florida felons list is significantly over-represented with black men and women, and under-represented with Latinos (of a list of thousands, from what I understand only a few dozen are Latino), and we have the makings of some old school chicanery.
Both types of chicanery (getting people to focus on symbolic issues rather than substantive ones, and using explicit tactics to diminish black voting strength) have short- and long-term effects. Short-term? You’re looking at an increase in the election of conservative Democrats and Republicans in general. Long term, we’re talking about nothing less than the erosion of democracy.
What to do?
The answer is very straightforward, and only requires black people to shift the emphasis of their activities. As one of my colleagues has aptly noted, just voting isn’t enough. What we have to do in this case is use our networks for the purpose of informing voters (though to be honest, at the national level it isn’t black people who need to be informed) and critiquing the political parties on the one hand, and engage in various tactics to protect people’s right to vote (and protect black voting strength) on the other. The first activity is taken care of by simply taking a moment to talk about politics during book club or some similar activity. The second?
Not a week goes by when I get an email from one of my fraternity brothers suggesting a road trip. The combined might of our fraternities and sororities is nothing to trifle with…and for this population in particular it is nothing to make a 12-hour road trip on the drop of a dime. I remember hitting Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Baltimore and making it back to Michigan in the space of three days.
I hear Florida is beautiful in November.
As an addendum, the GOP is having their convention this week. Watch out for RIBP (Random Images of Black People). Oh. RIMR (Random Images of Moderate Republicans) too. And expect the Bush administration to tout its vision of an “ownership society.” Seems to me like if they really wanted everybody to own something, they’d support some form of property redistribution…but that’d be too much like right.
