{"id":183,"date":"2006-07-27T12:23:29","date_gmt":"2006-07-27T17:23:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.stier.net\/?p=183"},"modified":"2019-12-07T12:44:24","modified_gmt":"2019-12-07T17:44:24","slug":"183","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/?p=183","title":{"rendered":"Against Independence"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is occasioned by the entry of Michael Nutter into the Mayor’s race. But it is not meant to be a critique of Nutter, who is someone I like in many ways despite my doubts about his ideas on taxation<\/a>. (I’ll write about him and other Mayoral candidates soon.) It is, however, a critique of a style of politics that Michael Nutter, more than any other Mayoral candidate, exemplifies. You might call it the politics of independence. It is a style of politics that I grew up with, and that is important for some people in Neighborhood Networks. But it is a style of politics that I have come to distrust and that I hope will play less and less a role in Neighborhood Networks and other progressive circles in future.<\/p>\n

The politics of independence has an ideal for candidates and an ideal for voters.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The ideal for candidates is to be, in Shirley Chisholm’s wonderful campaign slogan, “unbought and unbossed.” (Chisholm, however, was NOT independent in the way I criticize but a part of more than one strong movement.) The ideal candidate is an independent, someone not tied to any faction or movement, someone who comes at each issue without prejudices and with open mind, someone who makes up his or mind after considering all positions and the evidence, and someone ready to fight alone for what he or he believes in.<\/p>\n

The ideal for voters is, similarly, to be independent. The ideal voter doesn’t commit too soon. The ideal voter is someone who hangs back before making up his or her mind, and evaluates each issue and candidate independently of all the others, without any prejudices and with an open mind. The ideal voter is also ready to fight alone for what he or she believes.<\/p>\n

I’m a teacher of, among other things, the history of political thought. So let me point out that this ideal can be traced back to the origins of Protestant thought and conscience in Martin Luther. In some ways, it goes back to Socrates who questioned and challenged the ideals of his own time in Athens.<\/p>\n

There is much attractive about this ideal of independence. Indeed, to some extent, this ideal is part of what we philosophers call a formal conception of rationality. To be rational is, if nothing else, to carefully weigh all the different points of view on an issue, to examine all the evidence, to be free of prejudice, to examine things before us, without “fear or favor.” I don’t want to dispense with this ideal entirely.<\/p>\n

But I distrust it in politics because politics is never wholly a rational business. It is about organizing people. And it especially has to be about organizing people if our goal is to serve the people–and especially the common man, the average person, the working or middle class person– who politics should serve.<\/p>\n

The history of the last forty years in politics, especially on the left side of the spectrum, is a history of growing disorganization. The most important organizations on our side are crippled. The labor unions have lost more than half their membership and a good deal of their political clout. The working class based urban political parties that were once so powerful have, except here and in Chicago, practically disappeared. And, in Philadelphia, unlike Chicago, our party is fractured into, on any given day, five to seven factions that fight one another, mostly for power and patronage. And the reform groups, like the ADA and the NDC and the reform democratic clubs in New York and California\u2013the predecessors of Neighborhood Networks and Philly for Change\u2013also retreated and, in many places, collapsed in eighties.<\/p>\n

These organizations once played a critical role in mobilizing the working class and their professional-managerial class supporters. They were not perfect organizations by any means. The political machines lived and died by patronage and often corruptly raked off money from the city treasury, in part to serve their constituents with turkeys on Thanksgiving, but even more to serve their leaders and their allies among city contractors. The unions, too, were sometimes corrupt–altough far less so than the news media usually said–as they sometimes they were in bed with the companies they were supposed to be fighting and sometimes served their leaders more than their members. \u00a0And the progressive (n 2019 I would say professional-managerial class) reformers turned all their attention to new issue movements connected to race, sex, and and the environment and forgot about the importance of organizing to serve working people (including working class Black people and women). Even worse, progressives forgot about the importance of organizing and their politics became focused on writing checks to the professionals who head advocacy groups.<\/p>\n

But every measure that served working people and created the middle class in the twentieth century\u2014from the Pure Food and Drug act to the Forty Hour Week to Workman’s Compensation to Unemployment Insurance to Public Housing to the patronage and later civil service jobs that helped build the middle class to Social Security to the GI Bill to federal aid to college students to Medicare and Medicaid to the Clean Air and Water Acts to the Civil Rights Acts to the Occupational Safety and Health Act\u2014every single one of them was enacted, often over the opposition of business leaders, by the combined forces of labor, urban political machines, and organized progressives. Al Smith and Robert M. Lafollette built these alliances in the early 20th century and they stayed powerful into the 1970s.<\/p>\n

And, in the fifty years during which urban political machines and the labor movement and the reform groups have been mostly replaced by political candidates who are self-starting entrepreneurs, who campaign mostly by means of the media, and who are independent in that they have no permanent ties to any organization, working people and our cities have lost ground. After inflation, the wages of working people have been pretty much stagnant since 1973. The wages of people with a no more than a high school education have dropped by over 20%. Our cities have been ravaged by the transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial economy and by white flight, which has left behind many economically distressed neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

None of this was inevitable. European countries have dealt with the same economic transformations we have, yet their economies are much less unequal than our own because of their workforce training, \u00a0health insurance and industrial policies. Their cities are in much better shape because of creative public investments in public transit, in housing, and in revitalizing commercial areas and reusing historic buildings.<\/p>\n

What accounts for that difference is the role of organization and money in politics. In Europe the left remains highly organized and that organization can counter the monetary advantage of the right. But our style of politics in the US is heavily dependent not on foot soldiers but on the money that buys consultants and media time. This money comes from very well off professionals and businessmen. Their agenda is generally not one that has much place for the concerns of working people.<\/p>\n

The supporters of the politics of independence know that this is a problem. And they have their solutions: ethics legislation, public financing of campaigns, free media time for candidates. These are good ideas and I have supported them and will continue to do so. But they are not sufficient, for three reasons.<\/p>\n

The first is that there is simply no way to totally eliminate the power of money in politics. Money always finds a way to flow through the system and serve the people who have it. We need an alternate source of power to combat the power of money.<\/p>\n

The second is that limiting the role of money does nothing to build up the organizational power of working people and the poor. We may limit pay to play if we reduce the importance of money in the city. But how do we empower Black and white working class communities to, for example, fight the political influence of developers who run over them and the indifference of politicians who ignore them?<\/p>\n

And the third is that campaign reform doesn’t deal with the problems created by political officials who are independent of political movements. Even when we elect more or less liberal candidates, they are still lone rangers who tend to be much more concerned with their image in the media\u2013which sustains their influence\u2013than they are with building the political organizations that can be used to enact truly progressive legislation. As I pointed out in my post on learning from the minimum wage campaign, our politicians today rarely seem interested in building the organizations they need to attain the goals they claim to support. Yet without that outside organizational effort, they and we won’t enact the legislation important to us. The problem is exacerbated when we give progressive politicians credit for taking the right position, even if we rarely find them working to build the movements that can actually enact the legislation they claim to support.<\/p>\n

Last night at the Philly Young Democrats event, I heard a few people criticize Governor Ed Rendell and Representative Allyson Schwartz for not using their massive war chests on behalf of our Democratic candidates for state representative and senator and the US House who are struggling for money. Many of those candidates can win this year, but not if they can’t raise the money they need. But the reluctance of Rendell and Schwartz to help other candidates is also a product of our independent style of politics. Rendell and Schwartz fought the political organizations to get where they are. And they did it more or less on their own, independently. If someone like Allyson Schwartz, who is in a district that his historically competitive, were to get in trouble, there is no organization to come to her rescue. No wonder she wants to win so big this time that she scares off Republican competition in the future. And no wonder that both Rendell and Schwartz embrace more moderate views than \u00a0sometimes would prefer or \u00a0seek the support of business people in their districts. They are fewer and fewer \u00a0organizations on the \u00a0left that they can rely on in a close election or that can hold them accountable.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to go back to the days of the political machine. I don’t care much for political organizations that, like the Pennsylvania House Democrats, punished their member who opposed the pay raise. I very much do want to go back to the days of a powerful labor movement, however, and think we progressives must support people who understand the importance of working with and building the labor movement. And I do think that the fundamental goal for progressives today is not to elect independent candidates but to build an organization that can mobilize people to fight for progressive legislation and that can put our own candidates into office. We need political officials who are part of our movement, who are responsible to us, and who will work to build that movement.<\/p>\n

That is why the organizational model of Neighborhood Networks is the City Democratic Party we sometimes criticize. We don’t want to kill the ward system but reinvigorate it and make it more progressive.<\/p>\n

And that means that progressive organizations like Neighborhood Networks and Philly for Change can’t be independent in the way I described above. We can’t sit back and wait for issues and candidates to come to us. We can’t act without prejudices. We have to have the courage of our convictions. We have to be aggressive and move quickly and early in finding issues on which to build our movement and candidates who we can support.<\/p>\n

So while independent thought is always to be encouraged, respected, and admired, independence in politics can be very problematic. “Independent” is not a word I use in praising politicians anymore. I don’t want to stand alone with my conscience and I don’t want my politicians to do so either. I want them to be part of a movement for change that knows, as a slogan I wrote for Neighborhood Networks puts it, that “the power of organized people can defeat the power of organized money.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is occasioned by the entry of Michael Nutter into the Mayor’s race. But it is not meant to be a critique of Nutter, who is someone I like in many ways despite my doubts about his ideas on taxation. (I’ll write about him and other Mayoral candidates soon.) It is, however, a critique of a style of politics that Michael Nutter, more than any other Mayoral candidate, exemplifies. You might call it the politics of independence. It is a style of politics that I grew up with, and that is important for some people in Neighborhood Networks. But it is a style of politics that I have come to distrust and that I hope will play less and less a role in Neighborhood Networks and other progressive circles in future. The politics of independence has an ideal for candidates and an ideal for voters. Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[56,57,58,15],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s35YuU-183","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8259,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions\/8259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcstier.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}