DEmocracy is more than elections

Note: Voting is one aspect of political activism. To bring out the transformative change we need, it is important to connect voting and elections to a broader, protracted process of community building and organizing. In the aftermath of the 2008 election, Grace Lee Boggs wrote this passage with Scott Kurashige. Excerpt adapted from The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011)

Where are the leaders for today’s movement coming from?

It seems to me that just as most people are still thinking of revolution as the seizure of state power and instituting wholesale changes from above, our ideas of leadership have been stuck in the concept of the vanguard party created by Lenin over a century ago in a Russia where the overwhelming majority were peasants unable to read or write and without access to daily papers, let alone to radio, TV, or the Internet.

The year 2008 represented a breakthrough, as growing numbers answered the call of Barack Obama: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” The morning after Obama’s speech at the Democratic Party convention, for instance, I received a hope-filled e-mail from Rob “Biko” Baker, the young African American who is the executive director of the League of Young Voters and organizes Milwaukee youth in the Campaign against Violence:

After last night’s historic event, I woke up convinced that we can realize our beautiful dream. It wasn’t the candidate that changed me. It wasn’t the speech. It was the faces of those around me showing me that we, as Americans, are sick of the status quo. We are tired of inequality. We are ready to step up to be leaders in the greatest tradition of the men and women who placed this flag, this land, into our hands.

I believe we have what it takes to tackle the contradictions that continue to divide us. We can truly become the “Change Generation.” We face problems unprecedented in human history, and we must meet them as brothers and sisters. We are going to have to work harder every day, to convince the skeptical, and demonstrate the power of the Beloved Community over and over again. If we want it, we can do it. Last night we proved it.

It was not Obama’s policy proposals (which were not that different from those of other Democrats) that inspired this fervent response from Biko. Nor was it Obama’s charisma. What inspired it, I believe, was participating in and witnessing the drama of the Democrats nominating an African American for president on the forty-fifth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, thus demonstrating before the eyes of the world the power of grassroots organizing. Even Bill Clinton had a role in this drama. His speech not only sanctified his own presidency but also disclosed why a section of the power structure supports Obama—to improve our image in the world.

These transformative energies at the grassroots level are our best hope in this period when the government in DC has essentially become dysfunctional. It was block by block, from the ground up, community organizing that won the White House for Obama. Inspired by his eloquence and audacity, his commitment to change we can believe in, and his faith in himself and in human possibilities; and determined to leave behind us the shameful legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the Iraq War, and the other atrocities of the Bush-Cheney regime, we began to heal and redeem our country and ourselves. Americans of all ages, ethnic backgrounds, and faiths; members of unions, churches, synagogues, and peace, women’s, and other community groups discovered in ourselves the energy that comes from renewed hope and commitment to a just cause.

So we went door-to-door in neighborhoods all over the country, persuading strangers and folks who had never voted or who had lost faith in voting, to vote for Obama. It was a great feat—one worthy of celebration. The participation of so many millions of Americans from all walks of life in the Obama campaign, their interacting with him at rallies, the tireless canvassing by volunteers, the patient waiting in long lines to cast ballots prior to and on election day—all this means that we have taken a giant step toward becoming a more responsible, more democratic, and more self-governing people.

Where do we go from here? Some people will use the experience to advance their own careers. Others will be content with Obama’s closing down Guantánamo and undoing similar Bush-Cheney abuses. Still others, outraged at Obama’s appointments of unyielding Zionists, right-wing Democrats, and economic heavyweights whose only concern is growing the economy, will organize protest demonstrations, trying to push Obama to the left. Or they will regret that they did not vote for Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney. But I see a different path ahead.

Our responsibility, at this watershed in our history, is to face the past honestly and do the things necessary to heal our selves and our planet. Healing our society will require the patient work not primarily of politicians but of artists, ministers, gardeners, workers, families, women, and communities. It will require new forms of governance, work, and education that are much more participatory and democratic than those collapsing all around us. It will require enlarging our vision and decolonizing our imaginations.

Obama can’t create these new forms from the Oval Office. They can be created only at the grassroots level. I do not delude myself that he will be able to initiate the profound changes in our values, in how we live, how we make our living, and how we educate our children that are urgently needed at this milestone in our evolution. We are in the midst of a cultural transition as far-reaching as that from hunting and gathering to agriculture eleven thousand years ago and from agriculture to industry three hundred years ago.

Our challenge now is to recognize that the future of our country and our planet is as much about us as about Obama, that in our communities and our cities we have become responsible for grappling with the issues he is wrestling with—the economic meltdown, our unsustainable lifestyle, the future of the U.S. auto industry, the health and education of our children, and how to extricate ourselves from our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and resolve the many other crises in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Because we played such a huge role in electing him, because these issues are so critical to our daily lives, and because our transformation toward taking greater responsibility has been so great, we cannot return to the old separation between we, the people, and those we elect to office.

How do we continue this transformative process? How do we join in the work, calloused hand by calloused hand, of remaking this nation, block by block, brick by brick? How do we nurture this new spirit of service, sacrifice, patriotism, and responsibility, wherein each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but also each other?

We might begin by discussing these and related questions with our families, neighbors, coworkers, classmates, church members, bible study groups, book clubs, garden clubs, bowling clubs, or at any gathering we find ourselves.

Movement elder Vincent Harding, reflecting on the meaning of Obama’s election, argues that we need to see ourselves as the midwives of a new America. Like Biko Baker, Harding found himself in Denver among the tens of thousands listening to Obama’s acceptance speech in person. “It seemed obvious to me,” he wrote, “that my young brother seems to offer the place where all the ‘we’ people can stop our waiting and carry on our work to create the pathway, the birthing channel toward ‘The land that never has been yet, and yet must be.’ Not only is something trying to be born in America, but some of us are called to be the midwives in this magnificent and painfully creative process.”

Harding reminds us that the new possibilities that are animating millions of Americans and people around the world did not spring out of thin air and they were not handed to us from above. They were potentialities that millions of us have nurtured for years. Now we must continue to care for them and help them blossom.

We are creating a revolutionary alternative to the counterrevolutionary and inhuman policies of the U.S. government, but we are not subversives. We are making the leap forward in the precious human qualities of social responsibility and creativity, now necessary and possible in the evolution of the human species. We are creating the kind of global citizenship that Martin Luther King Jr. said every nation needs to create to preserve the best in its traditions. We are struggling to change this country because we love it.

The Next American Revolution is available from the University of California Press, please click here.