The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 11

About last Tuesday.

Hm. 

So last Sunday I had an interview with the BBC about the upcoming election and what it means. I talk a bit about Obama and what he represented for black voters and whether he’d done the job he was supposed to do. And I’m talking a bit about Trump but not much. 

Anyway, afterwards I talked to the BBC interviewer about Brexit. No one saw it coming he said. 

But there’s no way that what happened there could happen here. 

Read my last newsletter, and of the doomsday scenarios I don’t think I actually mentioned the possibility of Trump winning. It wasn’t that I didn’t think he had the support, that was clear to me. I just didn’t think he had the numbers. 

Turns out I was wrong. 

Many of us were. 

I was only being a bit hyperbolic when I noted that Trump was on another planet and giving him the presidency was like turning nuclear codes over to the Joker. We’re facing very dark times ahead, particularly if you do think of Trump’s election as part of a broader transnational project that includes Brexit and what’s going on in places like Turkey and Russia. 

So what do we do now?

……

Where do we start?

First we start by acknowledging that every single elite with the ability to influence voters who had the audacity to say that either elections don’t matter, or that there was no difference between the two candidates should be stripped of their legitimacy. The vote I cast for Hilary Clinton was the hardest vote I’d ever cast in my life. And I cast it knowing that whoever I voted for, Maryland would still win the state. But I cast it believing two things:

1. Elections have consequences

2. Clinton’s margin of victory (remember I didn’t think Trump would win) would matter in delegitimizing Trump

The “red state/blue state” idea comes into being around the time Bush gets elected. People used it to argue that there were fundamentally two different types of societies—one primarily rural and to an extent southern, and one primarily metropolitan, and to an extent Northern. Red state folk shopped at Walmart, watched NASCAR, and hunted. Blue state folk did not. Although thinking of voting behavior like this is clunky, it kind of works.

Except for one thing in this case. We don’t actually have a red state/blue state divide.

We have a red county/blue county divide. 

Indeed if you look at any of the states that voted red in this election or even ones like Maryland that voted blue, what you’d see is a see of red, with bits of blue. 

Take a look.

See? The state of New York for example is blue around New York City, but red elsewhere. The state of Michigan is blue around the City of Detroit and then again around Lansing but red elsewhere. The state of Maryland is blue around Baltimore City and around Prince Georges County but red elsewhere. 

In the current electoral climate, the Democrats usually take the presidency when turnout in those areas is high, take individual governorships in similar moments. When turnout is low, they’ll lose. And every now and again we can take the Senate.

Simple math.

But we don’t just elect presidents/governors/senators right? 

At the state level we elect legislators as well. 

At the state level what does this blue county/red county divide lead to? 

Under the current electoral climate, the best we can hope for is taking the presidency and perhaps the Senate and some state governorships. Everything else is in danger of falling to Republican rule.

Trump’s slogan was “Make America Great Again”. And many of his supporters if you’d press them even just a little bit would talk about wanting to take their country back. 

Their country. 

Their country.

So I work a bit with photoshop. 

I took the map above, and created two maps. One with nothing but red counties, and the other with nothing but blue counties. 

Here they are.

What do you see?

I know what I see.

I see something contiguous and more or less compact.

And then I see…if all the areas in between the blue spaces were filled with water perhaps we’d have a large archipelago…something that’s more imagined than not. 

In other words I see a fully formed nation….and then something that exists virtually. Connected by the internet, by airports, by black popular culture (particularly black language), and by certain forms of commerce. 

It’s this reality we have to deal with going forward. It’s this nation that for the foreseeable future will control the majority of state legislatures, both houses of Congress, and by extension the state and federal government. 

And it’s this nation that has grown in part by pursuing what can only be called a cold civil war project. 

That may very well become hot.

….

Now the borders of these two nations are in flux…but I think over the past several years they’ve hardened. 

“Of course they’ve hardened. We elected a black president.”

Yes. they’ve hardened in part because we elected a black president. But this is far too simple. And doesn’t leave us with much in the way of political solutions. How do you solve racism other than “changing hearts and minds”? There’s no real politics in that, as worthwhile a goal that may be.

But I think they hardened more because of what that president did.

Let’s go back to 2008. When Obama runs for President, either he, or someone connected to him comes up with what was in hindsight a brilliant idea.

There were thousands of people who, energized by Obama’s run, got involved in campaign politics for the first time. I’m not just talking about voting, I’m talking about giving money to the campaign, I’m talking about registering people to vote, I’m talking about running for office. 

What to do with all of them?

Organizing For America. 

In their own words:

Particularly given the slow death of unions, which served the partial purpose of mobilizing and educating voters, something like OFA could, if done correctly, increase the number of competitive elections, make inroads into areas of the country given up for dead, and could advance a progressive policy agenda. It wouldn’t be a left policy agenda necessarily, but it’d be far better than the agenda proposed by the conservatives. 

And drilling down even further, given the tanking of the economy in 2008, such an entity could have provided five important functions:

1. It could’ve provided a progressive narrative to help people on the ground understand what was happening to them.

2. It could’ve dampened GOP recalcitrance to a progressive agenda.

3. It could’ve kept the House in Democratic control.

4. It could’ve turned races at the local level. 

5. It could’ve prevented the rise and growth of the Tea Party.

This last thing is important. The Tea Party rises right after Obama was elected, supposedly in response to Obama deciding to bail wall street out. It provides a narrative telling its members why the crash happened, it provided a set of solutions, and then provided a vehicle for people to organize around those solutions. The Tea Party ends up aggressively running people for office at both the local and national level, and ends up dragging the Republican Party even further to the right than it already was. 

OFA could have and should have served as a vehicle to either counteract the Tea Party or perhaps even to prevent it from occurring. 

Instead?

Read that quote above again. 

OFA didn’t serve that function because either Obama, or someone in the DNC connected to Obama, decided to dismantle it. Instead of using OFA to promote an alternative agenda and an alternative political institution, Obama instead fought for an insider-ish bi-partisan approach. 

It was that approach that lost him the House in 2010. That cost him even more in 2014. 

And it was that approach that cost Clinton the presidency. 

….

What to do given this?

“Maximum feasible participation” was an idea connected to the Great Society Programs of the sixties. I’m not sure who coined the term  but it simply meant creating local programs that had as much participation from local community based folk as possible. The big city mayors ended up effectively killing it because it created an alternative power base, one that could potentially destabilize their own political machines. 

I think we have to somehow create institutions designed to engage as many citizens in the act of governing as we can at the local level. This means transforming a range of organizations, from churches, to fraternities and sororities, to PTAs, into voter registration organizations. We need to take the act of voting and voter registration as seriously as the NRA and the right treats gun ownership.  

Doing this can increase the odds of taking the Senate, and increase the odds of taking the Presidency. At the state level it increases the odds of taking the governorship. And maybe state senates. And increase the odds of electing progressive city councilpersons and mayors. 

These institutions should only be connected to the Democratic Party to the extent that the party is the “natural” vehicle for local political action. It shouldn’t be funded by or run by people who serve roles in the Democratic Party.

We already have policy analysts providing radically different policy alternatives. As many of these policy alternatives as possible should be put on the ballot on city- and state-wide levels so as to build support for left-leaning agendas, and to increase turnout in off-elections. 

We already have people capable of running for office, although we don’t necessarily have the institutions in place to hold them accountable. We need to develop the capacity to run people both against incumbents who aren’t oppositional enough at the national, state, and local levels….and then run them.

With these two practices we should be…well…cutthroat in our organizing. People with the ability to influence voters uninterested or even worse oppositional to this project who proclaim themselves “radical” or even left-liberal should be shunned and shamed.   

If Trump governs like he campaigned—we can only hope he moves to the middle from the right like Obama did but i wouldn’t put too much stock in this—then there are a host of freedoms that are now in danger. We have to work on creating safe spaces for populations most in danger (Muslims, non-white foreigners). And we have to work on creating safe spaces of critique—it isn’t clear the “mass media” will serve this function given their decisive role in putting him in office in the first place.  

Now the elephant in the room is the white rural (and perhaps even suburban) voter. What to do about that? What to do about people who live and breathe in that area? I imagine something similar has to happen there. But whatever work happening there can’t be done by urban folk in general, and black urban folk in particular. I don’t like the concept of “allyship” (“allies”, “micro-aggressions”, and “privilege” are three words I’d remove from the english language if i could) but if we ever needed whites to do work we need them to help develop rural institutions that can provide both counter-narratives and counter-institutions. Because even if we’re successful in our mission in metropolitan areas—at best all we can take is the cities, maybe a few governorships. To get the rest? To cut into that red nation? Is going to take a lot more than getting black and brown folk together in cities. 

Finally. 

Dave Chappelle was on Saturday Night Live last night. (If you’re reading this Jennifer, thanks for letting me know!) His opening is worth watching….but afterwards he was filmed at an afterparty on stage with The Roots black members of the SNL cast and some others singing Radiohead’s Creep. 

it was glorious. 

What’s coming is dark. I’ll be brutally honest. Jews who survived the Holocaust, and African Americans who lived in the Deep South during Jim Crow may be the only US populations with the memory to really articulate what might be coming. 

But here’s what I wrote in the wake of the 2004 election:

(My youngest son Khari was three days from being born when I wrote this so I didn’t include him.)

What spirit do we bring with our fight? Check out that video of Creep if you get a chance. Or this one. 

If we’re going to go out, we should go out blazing. 

My name is Lester Spence. 

Send this broadly.