Voting, Political Parties, and Radical Politics

I caught the tail end of an argument today between a friend of mine and another Brown student whom I did not know, debating the merit of partisan politics as opposed to extra-political direct action, etc. Now, the friend of mine (who was arguing the relatively more mainstream position) wasn't against effective direct action, either the MLK kind or the OWS kind; I certainly approve emphatically of such demonstrations, as long as they're effective. But the one I didn't know was maintaining that there's no point working through the political system, because both parties are equally in the thrall of corporate money. This country's government has been under the control of monied interests for the last 150 years, he said, nearly non-stop, and the only time things have ever gotten even a tiny bit better has been when the people went outside the system to demand that things get better. I, being someone who likes the democratic, political system, tried to argue with him for a short while. Some of that concerned the question of whether Democrats are really no better than Republicans; he said the difference is negligible, but as this is plainly false I won't argue against it here. What I will do is defend my main point, which is that ultimately any outside-pressure social movement has to transform itself into a serious force within electoral politics if it wants to get anything done.


Let's start with this question: what is the purpose of the Occupy Wall Street movement? I'd like to think "making the world a better place," since in my view that (or some specific subcomponent of it) is the only worthy motive. But how does OWS want to make the world a better place? Well, we know they're against big banks, we know they're against certain forms of capitalism gone wild, and we know they're against rampant inequality, especially of the economic kind. Those are the problems OWS has with the world, and those are the problems they presumably would like to see fixed. But it should be obvious that all three of those are problems that are almost exclusively under the purview of the government. Okay, "switch to credit unions" day is nice and all, and theoretically if you scaled it up enough it might manage to hurt the banks a wee bit. That wouldn't actually fix the problems with the financial industry that led to the 2008 crisis, and it wouldn't do a damn thing about either of the other problems. To do anything serious about those things, you need government. Anyone who denies this point is factually mistaken.

What's the best way to make the government start behaving more like you want it to? I think the Daily Kos slogan captures the idea well: elect "more and better" people from the party you prefer. Step 1 in that is working hard to make sure that, of the genuinely viable national parties, the one which is better wins more elections. "Better" is a deeply comparative word here: even if one party is quite bad, if the other party is worse, you should still be voting for the "quite bad" party. (There's a limit, of course: if it's the German Nazi Party against the South African National Party, you should probably be voting third-party, or just revolting against the system in general. Neither American political party comes close to the awfulness of either of those, or any of the other legion of avowedly anti-democratic, anti-people parties in the world.)

Step 2 in that is (mostly) not giving the better party a blank check. It's saying to that party, look, we'll support you against these other guys, because lord knows they're worse than you'll ever be, but we will criticize you when you make the wrong choices, and we will challenge you directly in elections if you start making too many of them. Mainly that's about primaries, but the implied threat of a defection to a better third party if things get bad enough might be appropriate. "Bad enough" should be a pretty high standard, except in those rare cases when an independent (say, Lincoln Chafee) has a genuine opportunity to beat a mediocre party member (say, Frank Caprio) running on a better platform. If, as a movement, you keep striving for more and better members of the somewhat-better party to win elected office, you'll find that the world starts looking a bit more like you want it to.

One particular example that my interlocutor mentioned shows how some misconceptions can arise about these things. He asserted, to counter my "elect better politicians" idea, that the 1964 Congress which passed, among very many other great laws, the Civil Rights Act was composed mainly of the same people who had been there ten years ago. The difference, he claimed, was the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King's demonstrations, etc. Now I am not claiming that the civil rights movement was meaningless: it was vitally important. But one of the ways it might have been vitally important is leading to the election of better politicians. That doesn't just mean Congress (although it does mean Congress), it also means the President. It means John F. Kennedy, who I believe had rather thorough support among younger voters and among those voters more likely to like the civil rights movement. But let's get back to his original assertion, that the 1964 Congress was mostly the same as the 1954 Congress that sat while the Brown case was decided. Because it's not even remotely true.

There were 100 United States Senators in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, of whom 46 had also been United States Senators in the year 1954. 54 Senators, a majority, were new in the past decade. Even excluding those from Alaska and Hawaii, which were not states in 1954, there were more new than returning Senators. And clearly there was a difference: the vote on the Civil Rights Act among those Senators with at least a decade of tenure was 26 in favor to 20 opposed, just a 56.5% "yea" rate, while among Senators less senior than that the vote was 47 to 7. That's an 87% "yea" rate, and it's about 16.5 more "yea" votes than there would've been if the new Senators had voted just like the old Senators. Moreover, those are meaningful votes. Without those 16 (let's be conservative) votes, there would've been just 57 votes in favor of the Civil Rights Act. That's a majority, but it wouldn't have been enough to beat a filibuster, which in those days required a vote of two-thirds to pass. With 73 "yea" votes, it was possible to just plain vote down the Southern filibuster. With only 57, it would've taken fancy maneuvering. Maybe it still would've gotten done, but it would've been a lot harder (and I don't think it was easy!). It doesn't seem like a stretch, in other words, to say that the Civil Rights Act's passage was dependent on the fact that Senators elected after the Brown case were considerably more friendly to civil rights than those elected before that decision.

Elect better Presidents. Elect better Senators. Elect better Congressmen. If you do that, you'll find yourself living in a better world. If you don't do that, you'll find that the avenues available for affecting meaningful change will be limited at best. So look around at all the currently viable political parties, pick the best (or least-bad) one, and work like hell to elect more of them, and make them better. That doesn't mean neglect the demonstrating and what-have-you, because that's important too (among other reasons because it can help you elect better people). But it does mean don't give up on the process, on democracy, on established political parties, just because none of them are perfect, or even all that great. Politics is ultimately about the grass-roots; corporations still can't vote. It's one of the few things they can't do, in fact, so if you want to get some power away from them it might not hurt to use the one fundamental tool that's forbidden to them, and elect better people.