By Norman Solomon
Dear Progressives,
With President Obama’s
second term underway and huge decisions looming on Capitol Hill, consider this
statement from Howard Zinn: “When a social movement adopts the compromises of
legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians,
not to fall in meekly behind them.”
With so much at stake,
we can’t afford to forget our role. For starters, it must include public
clarity.
Let’s face it: despite
often nice-sounding rhetoric from the president, this administration has continued
with a wide range of policies antithetical to progressive values.
Corporate power, climate
change and perpetual war are running amok while civil liberties and economic
fairness take a beating. President Obama has even put Social Security and Medicare
on the table for cuts.
Last fall, the vast
majority of progressives voted for Obama to prevent the presidency from going
to a Republican Party replete with racism, misogyny, anti-gay bigotry and
xenophobia. Defeating the right wing was cause for celebration. And now is the
time to fight for genuine progressive policies.
But let’s be real about
our current situation. Obama has led the Democratic Party — including, at the
end of the legislative day, almost every Democrat on Capitol Hill — deeper into
an abyss of corporate-driven austerity, huge military outlays, normalization of
civil-liberties abuses and absence of significant action on climate change.
Leverage from the Oval Office is acting as a brake on many — in Congress and
in progressive constituency groups — who would prefer to be moving legislation
in a progressive direction.
Hopefully we’ve learned
by now that progressive oratory is no substitute for progressive policies. The
soaring rhetoric in Obama’s inaugural address this week offered inspiring words
about a compassionate society where everyone is respected and we look out for
each other. Unfortunately and routinely, the president’s lofty words have
allowed him to slide by many progressives despite policies that often amount to
a modern version of “social liberalism, fiscal conservatism.”
The New York
Times headline over its front-page coverage, “Obama Offers a Liberal
Vision in Inaugural Address,” served up the current presidential recipe: a
spoonful of rhetorical sugar to help the worsening austerity go down. But no
amount of verbal sweetness can make up for assorted policies aligned with Wall
Street and the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.
“At their inaugurals,”
independent journalist I.F. Stone noted long ago, our presidents “make us the
dupes of our hopes.”
Unlike four years ago,
Obama has a presidential record — and its contrasts with Monday’s oratorical
performance are stark. A president seeking minimally fair economic policies,
for instance, would not compound the disaster of four years of Timothy Geithner
as Secretary of the Treasury by replacing him with Jack Lew — arguably even
more of a corporate
flack.
On foreign policy, it
was notably disingenuous for Obama to proclaim in his second inaugural speech
that “enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war” —
minutes after completing a first term when his administration launched more than
20,000 air strikes, sharply escalated the use of weaponized drones
and did so much else to make war perpetual.
Meanwhile, the media
hype on the inaugural speech’s passage about climate change has lacked any
indication that the White House is ready to push for steps commensurate with
the magnitude of the real climate crisis.
The founder of the
Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, Daphne Wysham, points out that the
inaugural words “will be meaningless unless a) the Obama administration rejects
the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline; b) Obama selects a new EPA administrator
who is willing to take action under the Clean Air Act to rein in CO2 emissions
from all sources; c) he stops pushing for dangerous energy development deep
offshore in the Gulf, in the Arctic and via continued fracking for oil and gas;
d) he pursues a renewable energy standard for the entire country; and e) he
directs our publicly financed development banks and export credit agencies to
get out of fossil fuels entirely.”
The leadership we need
is certainly not coming from the White House or Congress. “A genuine leader is
not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus,” Martin Luther King Jr.
observed. The leadership we need has to come, first and foremost, from us.
Some members of Congress
— maybe dozens — have shown commitment to a progressive agenda, and a larger
number claim a progressive mantle. In any event, their role is not our
role. They adhere to dotted lines that we should cross. They engage in
Hill-speak euphemisms that we should bypass. Routinely, they decline to
directly confront wrong-headed Obama administration policies. And we must
confront those policies.
If certain members of
Congress resent being pushed by progressives to challenge the White House, they
lack an appreciation for the crucial potential of grassroots social movements. On
the other hand, those in Congress who “get” progressive social change will
appreciate our efforts to push them and their colleagues to stand progressive
ground.
When we’re mere
supplicants to members of Congress, the doors that open on Capitol Hill won’t
lead very much of anywhere. Superficial “access” has scant impact. The kind of
empowered access we need will come from mobilizing grassroots power.
We need to show that
we’ll back up members of Congress who are intrepid for our values — and we can
defeat others, including self-described “progressives,” who aren’t. Building
electoral muscle should be part of building a progressive movement.
We’re in this for the
long haul, but we’re not willing to mimic the verbiage or echo the silences
from members of Congress who fail to challenge egregious realities of this
administration’s policies. As Howard Zinn said, our role is to challenge, not
fall in line.
________________________________________
Norman Solomon is
co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public
Accuracy. He co-chairs the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign organized by
Progressive Democrats of America. His books include “War Made Easy: How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political
Culture 2013 column.