Continuity
Posted on September 6th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Despite some early unfounded hopes, there was never likely to be much in a Palin selection that would satisfy Ron Paul supporters, and a fair amount from what we do know about her that would create cause for serious concern. Here is one account from a Republican who supported Ron Paul in the Iowa caucuses that describes his dissatisfaction with the convention, John McCain and Sarah Palin. I am less put off by some of the shots at Obama than this man was, but two things do stand out in his complaint about this past week that I think are quite important:
The worst, for me, was repeated harpings on the idea that Barack Obama was somehow “bad” because he was a community organizer.
I know what community organizers do. I have friends and family who are involved with social work and community organization. They register people to vote. They get people involved with the political process. They know the real, day-to-day problems of the people in their community like the back of their hand. They help people with their life problems, helping elderly folks keep the lights on and helping gro ups with a significant problem get organized enough to get the attention of an alderman or city hall. The people on the ground, the “community organizers” and very local politicians, do a ton of good work for the people of this country. And through that process, they gain a deep understanding of the real problems and thoughts of everyday people.
One of the oldest, and still one of the best, retorts against supporters of the welfare state and centralism has been that private institutions and local communities are often better suited to the work that the central government takes over from them, and they help ensure that power is not concentrated in distant and unaccountable bureaucracies. They create intermediate institutions that can shield the people from the power of the state and provide support from fellow citizens on a local level that frees people from dependence on the state. Conservatives may have reasons in specific cases to object to the goals or the agenda of particular organizers or groups, and I can see why conservatives would be suspicious of anyone who makes activism into a career. Another reason why so many conservatives seem to react to the phrase “community organizer” with such bafflement and amusement is that so many of the people engaged in the work of conservation, historic preservation and local community life are not self-styled, much less movement-oriented, conservatives. As Jeremy Beer said in the TAC symposium from 2006:
The conservers, preservers, savers, and protectors—conservatism once stood for such folks, and such folks were at one time conservatives. But they make bad apparatchiks. They aren’t ideologically motivated and aren’t “thinking big.” They are simply concerned, if often locally prominent, citizens. They may also be sentimental saps, but that’s understandable. As normally functioning human beings, they have formed dear attachments to their social and physical worlds. They like their communities, want to see them thrive and prosper, want to see them made or kept beautiful, want to preserve (or reinvigorate) their sense of their places as unique, and prefer to interact daily with people they know and love—or even hate.
Here is where Russell Kirk was truly exemplary. He ought to be remembered not as “the principal architect of the postwar conservative movement,” as the quasi-official adulation has it, but because he went home. There he restored an old house, planted trees, and became a justice of the peace; took a wife (and kept her) and had four children; wrote ghost stories about census-takers and other bureaucrats getting it in the neck; took in boatpeople and bums; and denounced every war in which the U.S. became involved—especially the first Gulf War, which he detested. And he also denounced abstractions because he knew they were drugs deployed to distract us from the infinitely more important work of the Brandywine Conservancies of the world.
No doubt there are some, indeed many, community organizers who are co-opted by parties and are turned into GOTV agents for politicians, and I can understand not being sympathetic to this kind of activist, but at some point there ought to be some recognition that these people are engaged to some extent in local self-government, which is something that we are supposed to consider important and vital to our political system. I can understand the critique of Obama here on the grounds that, by his own admission, his time as a community organizer was largely a flop, but surely the point here would be that Obama was not successful at what he tried to do rather than that the sort of work he was attempting was inherently worthless.
The other objection this Paul supporter makes is more important, because it reflects how readily Palin recites the lines she has been given on major issues:
There was one line at the end that really twisted things for me. “Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America … he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights?”
This is a fundamentally misleading framing of the issue of providing detainees with the ability to challenge the charges against them through a judicial process. There is no one proposing that Miranda warnings be given to members of Al Qaeda, and it is an insult to the audience’s intelligence to claim that this is the issue. The question is whether the government has the right to seize someone, whether a foreigner or a U.S. citizen, accuse him of conspiring with terrorists, strip him of all legal protections and keep him detained indefinitely without access to due process. The McCain/Palin position is apparently that the government can and should do this–remember that McCain regards Boumediene as one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in history–and meanwhile it is going to be the practice of the GOP to misrepresent the opposing view in the most absurd way. Unlike this Iowa Paul supporter, these things do not inspire me to vote for Obama, much less to send him money or change my registration, since Obama has shown elsewhere that he has equally little respect for constitutional protections, but they do confirm me in my view that McCain/Palin represents nothing but continuity with the policies of the Bush administration. I think it is clear for these and other reasons that dissident conservatives have no business lending this ticket any support.
Filed under: politics
Outstanding post.
I was disappointed to hear her rehash disingenuous narrative attacks during her convention speech. In doing so, she demeaned not only Senator Obama, but herself as well. Her unique story was somewhat lost in the in the fictional role she agreed to play. Our politics debases our personhood.
Just a bit on the community organizing. Often it is a way for people to come in from the outside and tell communities what big bad entities are causing all of their pain and misery and how a struggle against such an entity can make the community better. The problem there is that is often simply off the mark: communities could be made better by doing things proactively rather than resenting environmental decay, the caprice of the job market, etc. From what I can tell Obama fits this mold to some extent.
Brilliant post – too bad so many “conservatives” seem to have drunk the Palin/McCain Koolaid.
Conservatism is not a set of policy prescriptions. It is in the best interests of the Republican Party to say otherwise. Ironically, this seems to me to be why any wish on the part of actual conservatives to separate the “movement” from the Party is doomed to failure: people’s conservatism is not intellectual but programmatic.
When your electoral strategy involves cynically dividing the electorate, keeping your base partisan, uninformed, and reactionary is of vital importance. The obvious implication once you actually get into office is that you must appease what is for all intents and purposes a mindless mob. The GOP traded power for principle, campaigning for governing, a long time ago. What we are seeing now is simply karma in action. “My name is John!”
I was annoyed by Palin’s boast that mayors had “real responsibilities,” which seemed to elevate a government post in importance over the actions of concerned citizens. On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if your view of community organizers is too rosy. Steve Sailer views them as basically the heirs of the “mau-mauers” Tom Wolfe famously described:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-is-community-organizer.html
people’s conservatism is not intellectual but programmatic.
I disagree, wheelhouse; I think that it’s not programmatic but tribal.
I’m a former community organizer. I worked in the Bronx from 1984 to 1994. Even my family, from whom I had no intention of hiding anything, was uncomprehending about my work until my dad came to my good-bye party.
I grew up in a small Upstate NY city so my work was alien to family and friends. Crack cocaine was sold openly on street corners and on blocks. Residents went months without heat and hot water after landlords lost their title to their properties for non-payment of taxes. And Freddie Mac, can you imagine, was overfinancing properties with unaffordable debt that enriched brokers and landlords.
My job was to knock on doors and find people willing to join together to tackle these problems. That meant pressuring police to enforce the law. It meant organizing tenant groups to press owners to meet their responsibilities whether those owners were public or private entities. Connecting West Indian Anglicans with African-American Baptists and Hispanic Romanian Catholic is a job — there weren’t well-established lines of communication among them. Just as Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the GE’s Office of the CEO needs someone to arrange for meetings, do research, and help plan strategy, so too do people coping with challenges overwhelming their communities — communities that held their churches, families, friends, and connections to employment.
Community organizing’s focus on grassroots issues was in some sense a reaction against the ideological excesses of the Sixties even while it generally shared with the Zeitgeist attributed to the decade a spirit of Anti-Authoritarianism and a striving for social justice on behalf of those society had denied it. My kind of organizing focused on finding local leaders, people respected and compelling, and doing the leg work to help them effectively address the issues degrading their communities. It started with the directly immediate issues people confronted.
Ironically, given his speech, my organization met with Rudy Giuliani when he was US Attorney. He was engaged, solicitous, and exceptional in his staff’s follow-up. I’ve always thought that his encounters with our organization, The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, underwrote his confidence that a public safety focus would resonate positively in low-income, traditionally Democratic neighborhoods politically.
But it is difficult to make an untrue statement about the variety of people who have called themselves community organizers. Some are self-style advocates who gladly fill a well-understood role in media’s storylines. Others are disaffected with society and believe that changing society in broad terms entails working directly with those perceived to be its victims. Still others are like me: convinced that tremendous capacities lie in communities even when they are apparently bereft of them.
This particularity which makes the traducing of community organizing hard to answer also makes me, at any rate, sanguine. The grace of organizing for me was coming to know the many extraordinary people living
Anyway there have been many varieties of community organizing since its patron saint, Saul Alinsky, founded it as a cognate discipline to labor organizing in Chicago’s working class neighborhoods in the 30’s. Some could with justice be called “heirs of the mau-mauers.” Many, even when they occasionally entailed being rude to decision-makers, were opposite in the sense that they were devoted to day-to-day rather than ideological issues. Targets of pressure included Democratic politicians, offcials, etc., and business people.
Community organizing, as a field, will never be ready for prime-time. Many Americans, though perhaps fewer over time, live in communities that don’t need “organizing.” They’re smaller, elected officials are actually reasonably accountable to their electorates, the threads of connection and habit, effectively bind people. Many of the people the media latches on to are “advocates,” not organizers, and are required by media to fill a role from central casting. All good community organizing starts out as very local and acquires a national dimension only when problems are shared across regions and states.
It’s really simple. Barack’s job as a community organizer was to rile up blacks, Jesse Jackson style, to fight for and demand various largesse from the city government. That’s why the job is a ridiculous credential: It underlines his tribal affiliation; It underlines his big governmetn welfare state attitude; and he accomplished very little even in this role.
Obama’s role was actually the opposite of Jackson’s. He would have been working hard to pull together people affected by common issues across lines of ethnicity, age, gender, etc. Second, he would have been working hard to promote the leadership of those with whom he worked rather than himself. I think that’s in fact why he decided he was better suited to politics than organizing. He wanted to lead, rather than organize.
You are probably right though that encouraged people to target government to help.
You are also right that it’s not such a hot credential. But once you’ve pondered what “systems analysts” and “project managers” might have been up to, the vagueness of “community” and the pretension of “organizer” don’t seem all that much worse.