Obama and Campus Politics

With the inauguration of Barack Obama, CC ’83, campus activism, and the strategy of the left in general, enters a new phase. Much has been made of how this past election changed everything, how it smashed barriers and opens up opportunities, how it fulfilled the promise of equality envisioned by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Despite the euphoria, Oscar Grant was still executed by police in Oakland, Calif.. Economic inequality is still staggering. Latinos suspected of being undocumented workers, like Marcelo Lucero, are still exploited, beaten, and murdered with impunity. International law and human rights are still made ridiculous by the continued occupation of Iraq and Israel’s transformation of Gaza into a prison for collective punishment. The promise of democracy still remains elusive in a society dominated by corporations. Rather than a triumphant victory, the current political situation is ambiguous, representing both opportunities and pitfalls for the left as we fight for a more free and democratic society.

Over the past four years, campus activists have been able to rally coalitions in opposition to the policies of former president George W. Bush. Bush’s policies—from the Patriot Act, to the Guantánamo gulag, to the occupation and incarceration of Iraq—shaped a terrain in which militant leftists could fruitfully collaborate with the political mainstream in opposition to the Bush regime. The last four years campus politics was relatively simple: stop Bush from unleashing any more compassionate destruction on the world.

With Obama in power, the left faces a more complex task, one that has bedeviled radicals throughout American history. A Philadelphia radical of the 1830s observed that the Whigs “were sent to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and they obeyed their constituents.” But, he lamented, “the Democrats, what shall we say of them?” One hundred and seventy years later, activists on campus face the same dilemma. How does the left weigh the balance between co-option into safe compromises with the chance for enacting meaningful reforms?

The American political tradition offers many examples. The Workingmen’s parties of the 1830s were led into collaboration with the Democratic Party, giving northern urban Loco Foco Democracy its egalitarian edge. The insurgent Populist Party fused with the Democrats in 1896 with the joint nomination of William Jennings Bryan, ending the Populist revolt but setting the Democratic Party on the course to become the de facto labor party during the New Deal era. The Popular Front collaboration between liberal Democrats and communists during the New Deal created an open ideological terrain on which Roosevelt could pragmatically reinvent the American state. All these examples reveal the varied outcomes when radicals have attempted to navigate the fruitful but dangerous political space between collaboration and opposition.

Much has been done to link Obama with Abraham Lincoln, but, as historian Eric Foner recently pointed out in The Nation magazine, Lincoln also reveals the critical role radicals can have in shaping mainstream politics. Lincoln’s election was a triumph only for free-soil anti-slavery, accepting slavery as it existed but standing opposed to any extension of the Slave Power into new territories. Many abolitionists, rejecting the sin of compromise with free-soil politics, saw Lincoln’s election as a defeat, the triumph of electoral expediency over moral principal. However, within the crucible of Civil War, the radical abolitionists embraced politics and fundamentally transformed the war, seizing upon the initiative of slaves who rebelled and fled to Union lines and forging the Union Army into a revolutionary instrument of liberation.

History offers no clear blueprint for success, but it can remind us that the current situation is far from unique. What seems clear is that leftists should neither dismiss the new administration as hopelessly compromised and beholden to the powers that be nor lose their independence by becoming apologists for the Democratic party.

Many have come to power on the promise of change, but only under pressure has a single political promise ever been granted. The victories of workers and ordinary people have never been granted but have always been seized. Without a democratic rebellion from below, the insurance industry will prevent any real health care reform, and business will squelch any attempt to give workers power and respect in unions.

On campus, many have dedicated time and energy to bringing Democrats to power in Washington. In the next few years, the left must find strategies of collaboration and criticism that can give substance to the many promises of the campaign trail. Obama has portrayed himself as beyond ideology, as a technocratic administrator transcending left and right. While tactically clever, this is misleading. The ideals of the left remain in conflict with those of the right. The left stands for democratic equality, while the right privileges property rights. The left fights for freedom for all in the pursuit of happiness, the right for freedom from social restraint in the accumulation of wealth. The left stands for working-class liberation for control over workplaces and respect for labor, the right for capitalist globalization and a “race to the bottom” in social safety networks.

These are conflicts that no amount of expertise can solve. Obama’s campaign slogan of “change” was employed with Karl Rovian discipline and, at times, Orwellian vacuousness. Like previous moments of political transformation and national crisis, we face a time in which our politics, economy, and society can be evaluated, rethought, transformed. As Lincoln said in his annual address to Congress in 1862: “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” Like the abolitionists before us, the left today must struggle to make the world anew, stepping into this moment of political opportunity but never relinquishing the long-term ideals the define our tradition. On campus, in unions, and in community centers, the left must now struggle to give substance to the slogan of “change” without losing the critical edge of opposition.

Rudi Batzell is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and sociology. He is an editor of El Participante and a member of Lucha. He is also editor and chair of the Columbia Undergraduate Journal of History. History and Politics runs alternate Wednesdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com