http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jul/08/america-no-community-activism
We've plenty to protest about in the US, but on the streets there is
no dissent. Why is our liberal mood so paralytic?
Clancy Sigal
8 July 2010
In my middle-class neighbourhood, you can organise people around
dog-walking exchanges, the crimewatch duty roster, mutual
baby-sitting, earthquake preparedness and dire household emergencies.
But even the most liberal-minded among us seem totally spooked by the
currently toxic idea of politically organising our private economic
tragedies into any form of communal resistance to Bush-Obama's class
warfare – skyrocketing unemployment, home foreclosures, bank
failures, vanished investments and social service cuts that directly
affect us. Politics? Ugh. Please, don't bother me. I'd rather talk
about Tony Soprano's latest session with his leggy shrink.
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, each family deals with its own
economic injury like a death in the family, but even more
tight-lipped. After all, who likes to be known as a loser?
My local area is not noticeably conservative. We probably have a
majority of liberal Democrats and a plurality of Jews. We dutifully
vote centre-centre-left, contribute money at a safely impersonal
distance to mass mailings from good causes, and generally speaking
have all the right opinions. The French have a phrase for us: bien
pensant, well-thinking, comfortable in received wisdom. In this case
the liberal orthodoxy of anti-racism, hand-wringing for Haiti and
Darfur and, around here – a real kicker this – a stubbornly emotional
attachment to Israel right-or-wrong.
The current atmosphere around here reminds me of the Eisenhower 50s,
when the twin gods of the underworld, senator Joe McCarthy and FBI
chief J Edgar Hoover, ruled the mass mind. You could go to jail for
shooting off your mouth. My campus-newspaper rants were enough to get
me blacklisted and – absurd in hindsight – closely tracked across the
country by the FBI as if I was a Soviet spy.
Yet even in that apparently static time, seeds of resistance were
bursting through unfriendly soil. Nothing was possible … until it
was. Almost overnight, it seemed, at the height of the cold war, by
the government against its own dissenters, the African-American civil
rights struggle ignited a controlled burn of resistance across the
board. A byproduct was that the apparently invincible House
Un-American Activities Committee collapsed like a paper tiger when
don't-give-a-shit yippies like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin mocked
it with absurd street theatre. Surprise! A nation of Rip Van Winkles
woke up and began to laugh at their own fears.
A big difference between then and now is that our collective lifeboat
was rising due to a buoyant postwar economy. But now our lifeboat is
springing leaks. The Obama government's zombie-like inaction in the
jobless crisis means that a lot of us are catching, or soon will
catch, more of the misery contagion that is devastating the poorer
parts of Los Angeles county. Instead of acknowledging the shared
pain, each of us individually is pushing to get into the upended
lifeboat, struggling to stay afloat, frantic to hold on to what we've
got. There are so many assaults on us on so many fronts – gouging
health insurance payments, car upkeep, mortgage due, the BP Gulf
disaster, the trillion-dollar Afghanistan war – how can we possibly
catch our breath?
Theories abound about why our liberal mood is so paralytic. Old left
mass-based action-oriented organisations don't exist any more; unions
are down to 12% of the workforce, and anyway are castrated by
allegiance to a Blue Dog-dominated Democratic party; suburbia killed
militance; Latinos, many illegal, tend to be politically inert; black
leadership is feeble when not corrupt; a young generation has no
memory of what it was like to have an activist or an antiwar movement, etc etc.
And when all else fails, there is the "bowling alone" thesis (after a
popular book by Robert Puttnam of that title), which "proves", with
statistics, that the whole idea of community engagement has collapsed
because of TV, urban sprawl and more women in the workforce (!)
The late, great Chicago community organiser Saul Alinsky liked saying
that the only way to activate people is to appeal not to altruism but
to their self-interest. Yet perceived self-interest is unpredictable
and sometimes comes from the heart as well as the pocketbook. For
example, all across the country, ordinary, deeply conservative
Catholic parishioners have recently been motivated to march, protest,
sit-in and even barricade themselves when they felt threatened by
local church closures demanded by a cost-cutting hierarchy hungry for
money to pay out in the sex assault cases.
Rank-and-file parishioners didn't organise by listservs or electronic
communication but face to face, neighbour to neighbour.
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