good
many liberals and
progressives are shocked at Bush’s victory. Republican gains
in the Senate and House only make it worse. It is not
that we were unaware of the Republican advantages. We knew
that the Bush campaign constant talk of the war on terror
stirred fear and excitement among many voters that worked to
Bush’s advantage, as did the so-called morality issues of
abortion and gay marriage that evoked the peculiar American
obsession with sex. And then there was the Republican
propaganda machine, run by skilled and ruthless operatives,
whose messages were amplified by networks of evangelical
churches, and dutifully trumpeted by a sympathetic corporate
media.
Still, many of us expected
the Democrats to win, or at least we expected Kerry to win.
We thought we could overcome Republican advantages by
bringing new voters to the polls. The conventional wisdom
has it that non-voters are preponderantly low-income,
minority, and young, all groups that favor Democrats. But
while that is broadly true, the pool of non-voters is vast,
and voter get-out drives inevitably target only specific
groups in the pool. So, the Republicans could launch a
voter drive too, and they did, targeting suburban and rural
areas, and drawing on networks of fundamentalist churches to
widen their reach. State constitutional amendments against
gay marriage also helped draw right-leaning voters to the
polls. The turnout effort on both sides was remarkable, and
in the end, it was probably a draw.
The underside of the voter
turnout campaign was the Republican effort to bar
likely-Democrats from actually voting, by obstructing the
registration of new voters, by placing challengers at the
polls, by issuing false warnings of the risks of voting, or
simply by making sure the lines at the polling places in
Democratic districts were insufferably long. And then there
were the efforts by state and local Republicans to distort
the vote count. Reports abound of voter registration forms
discarded, of provisional ballots not counted, and of
suspicious tallies by electronic voting machines with secret
codes and no capacity for a recount. We may never know what
actually happened in the belly of these machines.
So, what have we learned, and
what to do now? The usual lessons are that we should try
harder next time – or vote harder, as one wag said
recently. And we should promote an agenda of democratic
reforms that make vote suppression and outright stealing
less likely. I am for those things, but we are unlikely to
win them unless we first win some elections.
In any case, I think there is
another lesson in the failure of our efforts in campaign
2004. The democratic and egalitarian victories in American
history were not won with voter guides and get-out-the vote
campaigns. Nor were they won by Democratic Party
initiatives. When we restrict ourselves to these
conventional forms of electoral politics we cannot match the
money and propaganda, the voter guides and get-out-the vote
drives, of the right.
Electoral politics by itself
doesn’t work for the left. Or rather it only works in the
context of great upsurges of popular protest. This is the
lesson of the mobs of the American Revolution, of the
abolitionist movement that preceded the Civil War, of the
labor movement of the 1930s, and the civil rights and
poverty rights movements of the 1960s. The drama and
disruption created by these movements gave them
communicative power to match the propaganda of party
operatives. The issues the movements raised also drew
people to the polls in numbers far greater than voter drives
can do. And because the movements were disruptive, because
they impeded the functioning of major institutions,
politicians were forced to respond.
So, yes, we should work on
our agenda of democratic reforms, including a national right
to vote, a national voter registration system, the
implementation of the National Voter Registration Act,
Election Day a holiday, non-partisan election officials, and
so on. But we have to do more. Everything we know about the
Bush regime argues they will be reckless and aggressive, in
Iraq and perhaps Iran, and at home with their tax and
spending policies that threaten dire economic instability,
and with social policy initiatives that are both cruel and
short-sighted. The time when mass protest is possible will
come. We should be ready and receptive, obdurate and bold.
The hip-hop voter registration campaign had a slogan, “vote
or die.” They were on the right track.
Frances Fox Piven is Distinguished Professor of
Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
A member of the executive board of Logos, her most
recent book is
The War at Home (New Press, 2004).
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