The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2. no. 16

If 2016 can take George Michael, resting peacefully in his sleep at the young age of 53, with just a few days left, it can fucking take anybody. 

Knowing this, I write. 

While my nephews are watching whatever passes for good cgi-animation and in between my second and third helping of holiday rolls, I write.

….

Over one thousand seats. 

That’s how many the Democratic Party lost while Obama was in office. Over one thousand national, state, and local seats. You can’t blame this on Putin, you can’t blame this on Stein, you can’t blame this on Cousin Pookie. You can blame some of this on gerrymandering, and some again on voter suppression. But I believe the Democratic Party and Obama should bear a significant percentage of the blame as they only appear to be interested in voter mobilization during Presidential elections—in the instances where voters have the least authority to hold the representative accountable. 

Someone at Democracy corralled me into writing a piece on populism and the Democratic Party. I don’t know how you can lose 1030 seats and even think you can just turn on a dime and become a populist party. That ship’s sailed. The more interesting question is…if we can’t count on the Democratic Party for anything other than presidential election mobilization energy (and we see how that turned out), and we’re stuck with the two party system, then what do we build? Where do we go?

Now “for real for real” I don’t really plan on answering that question either…but I think I’m going to take a shot at a thin slice of it, focusing primarily on black folk.

….

Sandy Darity took a shot at an exit assessment of Obama. I like the piece a lot.

Except.

For the first time in modern memory we’re talking about reparations. Ta-Nehisi Coates himself is responsible for some of this, but we can also point to the growing scholarship on the debt capitalism owes to slavery. There was a moment when people would argue (with straight faces no less) that modern capitalism and slavery were incompatible. If you’ve a labor force that only works under the penalty of death (and worse), how could you possibly have an efficient economy? You’d have to spend most of your resources simply keeping your labor force from rebelling right? Right?

Wrong.

To an extent then the focus on reparations comes from the growing popular realization that modern capitalism is intimately connected to slavery. (I know I know, some of us knew this already. There was a brother in Detroit who fought so hard for reparations years before John Conyers proposed a bill in Congress he was known as “Reparations Ray”.) And this focus is not a bad thing. Intellectually at least.

The political question though is another story entirely. From a racial politics perspective I don’t know how the hell we get a majority of people to agree to anything that looks even a tiny bit like reparations. Not a majority of legislators. Not a majority of judges. Not a majority of regular voters. If we can’t imagine how that works out without changing people’s sense of their own self-interest with a magic wand…then reparations from a racial politics perspective is only an intellectual exercise.

In fact, even from a black politics perspective we run into problems. Let’s say we were able to change people’s interests with a magic wand. How do we figure out who gets it? How do we administer it? How do we choose who administers it? How do we choose what form it takes? These questions are pretty important ones…but no one has good answers.

When Darity moves towards reparations and posits that Obama should’ve made more space for it….he’s both repeating a certain type of black radical common sense about what Obama should’ve done and ignoring both the limitations of the presidency and the limits of US politics.

Now perhaps that’s the point. Obama did do something many thought was impossible. Why only think about pushing against the glass ceiling limit…without thinking about pushing further?

I get that. But the “we’ve never had a [insert ethnic/gender/sexual identity here] in [insert position here]” isn’t quite the same as a “we’ve never had a policy in human history that redistributed wealth to a tiny weak minority based on a moral claim”. 

I’m also becoming less and less enamored of the racial gap arguments often deployed in these instances. Not because I don’t believe the gap exists—I do and it does. Rather because I think there’s an assumption folks are making that if we removed the racial gap in wealth, the entire structure of capitalism would change. I think this assumption is all wrong.

(Actually, there’s another possibility. That the people making the call to end the racial gap are only critical of capitalism to the extent that black people can’t partake in it.)

Because political science is so conservative a social science, probably only second to economics, it’s hard for some of us to really claim it and what it offers us in empirical heft. 

I’d point to an essay like the one Darity wrote as a good reason why we need more political scientists engaging in these types of debates. Not to say we don’t have our own flaws, but I think in this moment we’re more attentive to the constraints of American political institutions (and also to the constraints of political economy) than some of our colleagues are. 

    ….

We should take stock of what’s happening in North Carolina. Progressives in North Carolina successfully elected Roy Cooper governor. In response the North Carolina General Assembly voted to strip the governor of much of his power, and changed the election system as well. This in addition to attempts to make it harder for blacks to vote can only be read as a naked attempt at power. An attempt that will likely pass legal muster. 

Some colleagues in political science study comparative democracy. The democracy we practice in the United States for example isn’t quite the democracy practiced on the other side of the US-Canadian border. How might we distinguish them? If we were to think about all the various and sundry elements that go into a democracy, how would we distinguish democratic nations from one another? Could we point to certain nations and say, for example, that they aren’t democratic at all and then point at others and say that they are the very model of a modern major democracy.

Yes we can.

And guess where North Carolina fits?

If North Carolina were a nation, it’d come in…dead last.

North Carolina isn’t alone. Michigan and Wisconsin haven’t done exactly the same thing, but they’ve done similar things. With all those lost seats, and very few on the horizon—Obama probably had significant coat-tails in the social entrepreneur sector but had no coat tails to speak of in the Democratic Party—every time we see progressives get close to electing governors we’re likely to see something like this.

Our democracy is really only about 50 years old. We’ve been something like an anti-democracy far longer than we’ve been a democracy. If we just rely on history and norms to save us, we’re going to drown.

…. 

 My speaking calendar is starting to firm up for the beginning of the term. I’m going to be at Dickinson College and Hamilton College, I think I’m going back to Michigan sometime in the Spring semester, and I’m pretty sure I’m headed to Atlanta as well. If you’re interested in bringing me around holler.

I’m also on the board of one of the few left micro-grant foundations in the country—Research Associates Foundation. Most of Baltimore’s major activist organizations have received and relied on RAF grant money at one time or another. If you’re looking for places to give money at the end f the year I can’t think of many better than RAF. 

As technically this is the last newsletter before 2017, and the end of the first full year of The Counterpublic Papers, I want to thank you all for reading. This year has simultaneously been one of the best and worst of my adult life. Knocking the Hustle made a couple of “best of” lists. The Baltimore Magazine named it as one of its best non-fiction titles, and The Atlantic named it as one of the best books they missed. My children are all making their way in a very new environment and doing ok for the most part. But battles at Hopkins, in Baltimore, and the election, in combination with the deaths have all taken their toll. For many of us I imagine it’s been trying in more ways than we can count. But at least in my case the successes I’ve had come in part because of the work you all have done to pave a way for me. This counterpublic exists because you do.

See you in 2017. Lightly edited. Shaken not stirred.