The Counterpublic Papers vol. 4 no. 9

So two years ago about this time we were reeling in the wake of an election only a few of us predicted. I know I wasn’t one of them. And figuring out what to do in the interim.

To give you all a geographic idea of what we were facing I took a picture that depicted the presidential election votes by county (GOP in red and Democratic Party in blue), and then created two separate pictures, one depicting the red nation (the Trump nation) and one depicting the blue nation.

Here’s what I wrote two years ago:

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.

With the benefit of hindsight I can say this wasn’t hyperbole. That newsletter was also proscriptive:

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.

Now here’s the thing. When I wrote this, I noted that if we built something like this, we could make gains…but if I got an email from someone telling me that we’d cut Obama’s legislative losses by a third (during Obama’s eight years in office over 1000 seats were ceded to the GOP) I don’t know if I’d have believed it. I didn’t think about ballot initiatives at all in that newsletter…all I talked about were candidates. If you’d have told me that Michigan (and a few other states) would end gerrymandering I wouldn’t have believed you. If you’d have told me that three conservative states would expand Medicaid I wouldn’t have believed you.

All these things happened. And more. Baltimore passed local legislation making water privatization illegal. And it looks like the only way Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams don’t become the first black governors of FL and GA respectively is through theft.

In other words, on Tuesday we won.

And we have to claim this, not because it makes us feel all hopeful and in love with the possibility of change. But because it’s right. And it shows what can happen if we work hard to mobilize folk to take the state, to act like this activity matters (because it does).

I’ve already tweeted this, and wrote a piece about Florida’s Amendment 4 for Jacobin. Another piece should come out this week in Dissent. And I was on The Real News Network as well. 

The more I think about this, the more I think the future of our nation relies on taking the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments far more seriously than we currently do—in earlier writings I think I just focused on the 15th but it’s not about the 15th alone, rather it’s about the entire suite.

….

I was supposed to be in Columbus this past weekend talking about race and populism. I ended up not being able to go but I participated virtually. Because I had barely an undergraduate understanding of the Populist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries I took the opportunity in my paper to examine the role whites and blacks played in that first real populist moment. Turns out there was a fairly robust black populist movement, one so strong that we can arguably suggest that Jim Crow comes about in large part to make sure that movement (and the potential for interracial alliances across class) stayed dead. There are a number of books either out already or on their way out, I think there’s room for a book that uses that historical moment to tease out the contemporary political implications. Perhaps, again, connecting it to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and the abolition democracy DuBois laments in Black Reconstruction.

….

I’ve written about the Amazon HQ hunt. I knew it was a scam, that it was a vehicle to play cities off each other enough to make sure that it got off scott-free tax wise. What I didn’t know was that the cities involved all gave Amazon data, data that Amazon has sole access to. A significant chunk of Amazon’s revenue comes from its capacity to predict what consumers want—think I didn’t come this close to getting a second Instant Pot when they dropped the price? With the purchase of Whole Foods, and the slow rollout of physical stores, I can see Amazon using this data to further exert a stranglehold on their sector…but more to the point as policymakers and legislators themselves rely more and more on data to help make cities more “efficient” I can see Amazon rolling out a set of services to further make the “public-private partnership” common sense.

….

Over the past three weeks we’ve lost Ntozake Shange, who with For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf is probably one of the five or so most important feminist tracks of the 20th Century. We’ve also lost Roy Hargrove—at 49 years likely the most accomplished and productive trumpeter of my generation (we don’t have a range of generative hip-hop/jazz collaborations without him). Both suffered from health challenges—Hargrove’s health issues stemmed in part from his long battle with drug use, Shange had more than one stroke over the past decade. Both died too young. 

My name is Lester Spence. This is the Counterpublic Papers. We’ve only just begun to fight.