As I watched  the returns come in last night, I found myself considering the question: What, as radicals in the United States of America, does an Obama presidency mean for “us”?  I’d like to share my thoughts with you.

 First, though, I want to think a little bit about this “us.”  I know that as a leftist in the United States I’ve often rightly felt a sense of marginalization and ineffectiveness.  If I turn on the news, even the “liberal” news, I’m confronted with a national dialogue whose values I cannot accept, whose priorities seemed skewed beyond belief, and whose intellectual framework I find pathetically inadequate to the problems that I see in my society. It’s easy under these circumstances to feel a general sense of antagonism toward my society as a whole, to feel excluded from the national dialogue and political process.  And it isn’t that difficult to begin to understand why that is the case: to develop an analysis of the institutional factors that combine to render my point of view practically invisible to the broader society.  When I look out into the official, respectable political process and see no one articulating my values, priorities, and perspective I conclude that I’m not really a part of the discussion.  This happens so totally and systematically that I am naturally highly suspicious of anyone who claims to represent me.

To be honest with you, I know that this is how I usually feel, and that feeling that way has often keep me on the sidelines, despite the efforts I exert to motivate myself with guilt and shame at my passivity.  Maybe that’s how you’ve felt from time to time.

Thinking about this election last night, I had to recognize that in many respects this campaign served to reinforce that view, and to confirm my analysis of our political process.  But I also think, in a small way, that Obama’s victory in the presidential election is a victory for me, and radicals like me.

Before I make that case I want to restate what I take to be that radical analysis, because I am too aware that even among people who agree with me ideologically, there appears to be a hair-trigger readiness to conclude that there is something suspect about delighting, in however minimal and balanced a way, in the result of a presidential election.  In order to dispel the charge of naivety I want to lay out the radical case as I understand it:

1. There exists a tremendous democratic deficit in our political institutions.  The two party system is generally one in which two political organizations, hardly organically connected to the real needs of the population, attempt to craft a public relations persona that will simultaneously speak to the national ideology as crafted by idiotic people on television and at newspapers and to whatever fleeting dynamics are at play in the electorate, while at the same time making it clear that they will serve the interests of the powerful.  There is little substantive discussion of what really matters to and will deeply impact the broad population, which has a pitiful impact on the nature of public debate and the processes of governance.
   

2. What actually happens politically has very little to do with the personalities of people in power, and much more to do with the array of institutional forces impacting those people. If we want to change what happens we have to make it possible for the  actual interests of the population to take an organized shape capable of checking the exertion of power by those who are currently in possession of resources, organization, authority, and privilege, and ultimately of refashioning the basic institutions of our society.
   

3. Obama is just as susceptible to those forces as any other president, and if the population does not play a more meaningful role in the public arena, we can expect Obama to continue the trajectory that we are currently on, working for and entrenching those interests that are currently mobilized to control the institutions of our society.  All things being equal, we should expect Obama to turn out like past US presidents: working to make our institutions run smoothly, despite the fact that the benefits are not shared fairly, and not remaking them in meaningful ways to share those benefits more broadly.  In the past, after a period of rule by those willing to work for the powerful at all costs, an inspiring president appears to clean up the mess, roll back the most egregious excesses, and put things back on track –  for the benefit of the powerful.  Our expectation is that barring something extraordinary, Obama will be that president.
   

4. Our intellectual culture will attempt to seize and manipulate Obama’s victory to reinforce the view that there is nothing wrong with American institutions and to diffuse the energy that brought Obama the election.  Last night I heard on the news, moments after the election was called, the conclusion being drawn that this election essentially answers the horrendous historical oppression of the black community.  The attitude was that the slate was wiped clean, and yet again racism was declared dead and gone, as if over night disparities between white and black communities in infant mortality, access to and quality of health care, economic well-being, and basic respect for their respective cultures (just to name a few bits of evidence for the continuation of structural racism in American society), completely disappeared.  I heard that once again we are a beacon to the world, the greatest country on the face of the earth – as if we are incapable of choosing our leaders, the most basic of democratic tasks, without at the same time affirming our global superiority.  The national dialogue will be maintained in such a way that anyone pointing out a more realistic appraisal of our institutions will run the risk of sounding like a sour defeatist, robbing us of the enjoyment of what was certainly a historic election.
   

So I have no illusions about what this election means for our institutions and culture, and what the likely outcomes of an Obama presidency are, barring the continued mobilization of the people of this country.

That last condition, though, that things will continue as usual unless the people of this country are mobilized to play a meaningful role in our society, is where my delight in this election, as a radical, lies.

Last night in his acceptance speech, I heard a United States president (to-be) articulate, ever so minimally, something that I could recognize as the ideology of activism, something that with some development could come to resemble those four points outlined above.

He said, “And I know you didn’t do this just to win an election. And I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.”

That’s right – political life is more than electing the person you admire, propelling a person into power, or winning a competition that often resembles a sporting event.  It is just a few steps from this to the view that politics is not about the political figure, it is about ordinary people solving real problems.

He said, “And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.”

How many times have we argued something like this: that it is the people who are ultimately responsible for the improvement of conditions over time, for the 40 hour work week, the end of slavery, the expansion of suffrage, and that it is the people, particularly those most affected by the injustices that exist, who need to act on the opportunity to solve the problems that face them, without relying on the authority of politicians or the sanctity of our institutions?

Ultimately I am a radical because I believe that the logical culmination of humane values and the principle that we need to solve real problems ourselves is the remaking of our institutions in a fundamental way.

I believe that the Obama presidency will provide us with the opportunity to magnify these small seeds of the activist perspective in the president’s public persona.  I believe that if this election makes many people feel optimistic, we should find a way to amplify that optimism, just as we recognize that it is going to be our responsibility to realistically criticize this presidency.  This is a window during which a community organizer is less likely to be declared a terrorist, a window during which the public dialogue may very well shift in such a way as make our work as activists less marginalized, a window during which the president will be more open to being influenced by sustained popular pressure.

And what does that mean for me, and maybe you too?

It means we need to seize this opportunity without being opportunists. We have to humbly recognize that we believe we have a perspective that is easy to understand, powerful in explaining our problems, and capable of proposing solutions to those problems.  We have to clarify the values that we believe in, values that are broadly accepted, and how our analysis and solutions will do a better job of realizing those values.  Our job is to simply be active members of our communities, to broaden the reach of knowledge, clear thinking, and concern for one another, to make it possible, through organizing, for our fellow citizens to develop their potentials for leadership and action. I find it hard to believe that our ability to quote the president, and connect with the hopes of his supporters, will make it harder for us to do that work.

I know there are countless people who have and will continue to do fantastic work as activists.  But I also know that there are many who look at the world through radical eyes and can’t quite get over their sense of  despair or ineffectiveness to join in. Now is an opportunity to join in, and if an Obama election does nothing but motivate someone to be more active, than it has done something good.

So let’s go.

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