Adolph Reed: “Sitting This One Out”
I’ve been meaning to post about Adolph Reed for several months now. I was reminded by (yet another) e-mail I recently received from a friend pleading with me that I vote for Barack Obama instead of Ralph Nader this November*. Their pleas laced with the assumption that I’d even be voting for Obama if Nader weren’t on the ticket.
Asking me to vote for a worthless candidate simply because the other guy is worse is akin to asking that I partake in participatory fascism. This is a microcosm of the larger problem the Left has had throughout the reign of the Neo-Cons for the past couple of decades.
Adolph Reed is a professor of Political Science at U Penn and he is one of the few folks with anything interesting (and sane) to say about the election. Reed’s piece “Sitting This One Out“, published in The Progressive late last year, clearly argues why expecting [insert any Democratic presidential candidate] to shift left after an election campaign that has appeased the right to get elected is but a wishful fiction.
Reed’s is a call for a different recognition of what a political movement entails — it is certainly not something you do once every four years. As he says, “We didn’t vote ourselves into this mess and we’re not going to vote ourselves out of it.”
Participating in a protest or a rally is also not a movement. It’s therapy (we all know it). As Reed argues, a political movement “happens through cultivating one-on-one relationships with people who have standing and influence in their neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, families, and organizations… This is how the populist movement grew in the late nineteenth century, the CIO in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement after World War II. It is how we’ve won all our victories.” And as he points out, “it is also how the right came to power.”
Please read Sitting This One Out.
*After voting in every election since 1996, I decided a couple of years ago I was not going to vote at all. However, I recently decided to give it one last shot by voting for the candidate who, in my opinion, would be the best for the job. I ask that my liberal friends (especially) respect my Choice.
