The View Through A Looking Glass

We are approaching the edge. The suburban land/paper/oil grand coalition of American politico/econo/social organization is on one side of the chasm. This is where we are now. This is the landscape that politics and culture must operate in at this moment.

The future is electronic, informational, energy will be renewable, clean, and more local. The future is dense, intelligent, energy-neutral. The future is electronic-based, not energy-land based. But we are not there yet. We are near the end, but still yet months or a year or two away from the real cliff edge. The bailouts going on now as we speak are the dying gasp of the old order, as Rent tries to lock itself into power in perpetuity.

The question is, can Obama be the bridge to the future, or is he destined to only be the last gasp of the old economic order? Does he represent the first start or the last gasp? Or both? The age we live in is a contradictory one. Massive forces are pulling in opposite directions. Maybe.

I am hopeful that Obama is the best we can do at this moment. He has played this about as well as could be done. If he weighed farther to the future, then he would not be on the stage. He has also shown a prescient knowledge of the calendar and in political position. His skill is to be on both the right and the left of his opposition, forcing his opponents into positions that lack a well-spring of growth. His are the politics of co-optation and aikido. And in the course of the calendar, his positions are realized. The debate moves to him. We have seen this time and time again. We have also seen that he keeps his cards close to himself. Everything he has done throughout the campaign has been part of a carefully drawn up long game. I have the sense that everything is going according to plan. He is playing chess, and so far has shown himself to be a master at setting up his pieces. So I am not ready to cast a verdict based on his moves to consolidate the Blue Dogs and the forces of suburbanization and militarization. There is quite possibly a larger chess game at issue that he is playing.

There is one wild card that is too often missed. The ground game. This is perhaps the future that Obama has already given us.

The question with this movement is the one that is faced by every movement. What happens to it after the election? Does it crystallize into organized action or does it fizzle away? This is the real deal. This is the ace in the hole. This is a trump card that has yet to be played. Because this is the mechanism by which Obama has gotten to where he is now. This is the horse he’s ridden throughout the whole game. Because the air war of ads and the pundit circuit is not friendly to Obama. The best he can hope for is to disarm it enough to allow the social networking to work. As long as he ain’t getting blasted on top, then he is able to organize down below.

The power of the many organized is mighty. And it’s not new. I’m going to give quite a large quote here, because this example is mighty instructive.

Thomas Frank, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

The push that started Kansas hurtling down the crevasse of reaction was provided by Operation Rescue, the national pro-life group famous for its aggressive tactics against abortion clinics. They called it the Summer of Mercy.; the plan was to commit acts of civil disobedience all across the city of Wichita in July 1991, just as the organization’s followers had done in Atlanta in 1988 and Los Angeles in 1990. Wichita was to be different, though. Here you had Tiller’s clinic situated among a population that is world-famous for its spiritual enthusiasm. The protesters meant to make this contradiction manifest—to force one aspect of the Kansas identity to clash with another—to set up a conflict so unresolvable that everyone in the state would eventually have to choose up sides and join in the fight.

What allowed Operation Rescue to succeed, and what made the summer of 1991 different from previous anti-abortion rallies, was the reaction of the city’s clinics, which voluntarily closed up for a week when the protests began. Although this disastrous strategy had been undertaken on the advice of the Wichita police, to certain elements of the pro-life movement it represented a bona-fide miracle. For once they had completely stopped what they called “the abortion industry” in its tracks. In July and August they descended on Wichita by the thousands, spreading out over the city, chaining themselves to fences, lying down beneath cars, filling the jails, and picketing the residences of abortion doctors and others they deemed to be complicit in the culture of death.

The summer’s climactic event was a mass meeting in the football stadium at Wichita State University. At first organizers expected seven thousand people; they reserved only half of the stadium. More than twenty-five thousand showed up. They filled the entire complex; they spilled over onto the end zones. Pat Robertson took to the podium and declared, “We will not rest until every baby…is safe in his mother’s womb”; the fundamentalist media critic Donald Wildmon lashed out against liberal bias in the news; the pro-life activist Joe Scheidler called for Wichita-style protests across the country; and Operation Rescue leaders phoned in speeches from jail. In one Spartacus-like moment, an event organizer asked those from out of town to stand up; according to press accounts, two-thirds of the audience did so. Then she called on Wichitans to stand, and the whole crowd got to its feet.

Lawrence Goodwyn, the historian of nineteenth-century Populism, proposes that “movement culture” is critical to mass protest: “The people need to ‘see themselves’ experimenting in democratic forms,” he has written. What Goodwyn no doubt had in mind were the Populists’ huge “educational” gatherings and their day-long parades through three Kansas towns, but the observation applies just as accurately to that great inverted-populist frolic in Wichita one hundred years later. This was where the Kansas conservative movement got an idea of its own strength; this was where it achieved critical mass. Other aspects of that summer may be hazy now, but every anti-abortion activist I talked to remembers this massive gathering with burning clarity. Mary Kay Culp, the Johnson County director of the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life (KFL), recalled how she and others from suburban Kansas City traveled by bus to the event. Bud Hentzen, a Wichita contractor who served at that time as a Sedgwick County commissioner, described the moment in the stadium as a kind of awakening. “My thought,” he said, was “bring on the vote.”

And bring it on they did. Tim Golba, a former president of Kansans for Life, recounted how KFL’s mailing list grew by ten thousand names in the six weeks after the rally. At anti-abortion gatherings Wichita conservative leaders signed up candidates for Republican precinct positions, “These people were laying down their bodies on the highway,” remembered Mark Gietzen, a Christian activist who was soon to become the chairman of the Sedgwick County GOP. “We said, ‘We admire you for your courage, for your conviction, but we’ve got something a lot smarter for you to do than lying on the highway.’” By August 1992, Gietzen asserted, “we had 87 percent of our people identified, firm, Operation Rescue-type pro-lifers as precinct committeemen and women.”

The parallels with 2008 are worth watching. There are two tests that I am watching. November 4th and whether the organization fades on the vine once that date passes. If Obama has a larger game in mind, that is the easiest place to look for the tell.