11 Responses to “Continuity”

1. gsmart, on September 6th, 2008 at 3:27 pm Said:

   Outstanding post.

2. Kyle R. Cupp, on September 6th, 2008 at 6:45 pm Said:

   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.

3. wheelhouse, on September 6th, 2008 at 7:21 pm Said:

   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.

4. Bustrofedon, on September 6th, 2008 at 10:14 pm Said:

   Brilliant post - too bad so many “conservatives” seem to have drunk the Palin/McCain Koolaid.

5. wheelhouse, on September 7th, 2008 at 6:15 am Said:

   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.

6. Josiwe, on September 7th, 2008 at 9:13 am Said:

   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!”

7. James Kabala, on September 7th, 2008 at 11:14 am Said:

   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

8. Elvis Elvisberg, on September 7th, 2008 at 3:30 pm Said:

   people’s conservatism is not intellectual but programmatic.

   I disagree, wheelhouse; I think that it’s not programmatic but tribal.

9. Brien, on September 7th, 2008 at 8:44 pm Said:

   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.

10. Roach, on September 8th, 2008 at 8:30 am Said:

    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.

11. Brien, on September 8th, 2008 at 9:12 pm Said:

    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.

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