Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, and speaker. He is the author of several books, including “Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11” and most recently “Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics”.

AD: You were active in the John Edwards campaign. Given your broad critique of the Democrats, why did you think his campaign was worth supporting?

PS: I did some canvassing for Edwards at first in part for two less-than inspiring reasons. First, my son got hired as a full time field manager for Edwards in Muscatine, Iowa, in mid 2007. He asked me to help him out on occasion and I had some skills that I figured could be useful for him. I canvassed door-to-door for a state-level public action citizen’s group (Illinois Public Action Council) back in the early 1990s and I was pretty comfortable with that sort of work. 

Second, being new to Iowa, I wanted to learn more (and maybe write) about the presidential political process in the much ballyhooed nationally significant Iowa Caucus. I figured that being active would be useful in an “experiential observation” sort of way. It was. As time went on, I realized I was probably going to do a book on the Obama phenomenon, which I’d already been writing about. The volunteer role provided a lot of face-to-face and phone contact with voters, including Obama supporters. That ended up being very valuable for my 2008 book.

I could have tried to help Dennis Kucinich, the most truly progressive candidate in the Democratic field, but he had few resources and did not make a commitment to Iowa. I figured I’d probably Caucus (vote) for him in January 2008 but working for him wasn’t really an option; there was basically no Kucinich operation in the state.

Now in fact, Edwards was the least objectionable and most outwardly “progressive” of the viable Democratic candidates (Kucinich and another progressive candidate Mike Gravel were not remotely viable) at the time. Edwards could be counted on, I thought, to spout many of the same terrible core foreign policy ideas – the standard imperial language – as other leading Democratic and Republican candidates. (As a U.S. Senator [D-North Carolina] in the fall of 2002, Edwards did not merely join Hillary in voting to give George W. Bush the right to use military force as he pleased in Iraq. He (quite despicably) helped draft the ill-fated congressional war authorization document! In contrast to Senator Clinton, Edwards would apologize again and again for his former pro-war position, but his regrets came too late in the wake of the abject imperial fiasco that was “Operation Iraqi Freedom” – a richly bipartisan affair, like the equally illegal Afghanistan invasion and U.S. torture practices before and after 9/11.)

But Edwards, the son of Piedmont mill worker, was staking out an unusually advanced (for a major party candidate) position of “fighting” for the poor and the working class against concentrated wealth and power. Edwards’ rhetoric suggested that he would campaign against poverty, economic inequality, and corporate power and on behalf of union rights to a remarkable degree.

Edwards ended up being surprisingly easy to work for in Iowa. He had a lot of union backing; I would go out and canvass with working class activists from United Steelworkers, UNITE-HERE, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). It was a lot of fun working with those people. It was also highly enjoyable to talk to hundreds of voters and citizens – not just about the election (subjects shifted to concrete policy issues beneath and beyond and candidates in my experience) – in my part of the state. Like Ralph Nader (who endorsed Edwards for the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries), I came be somewhat surprised and impressed by the extent to which Edwards was wiling to run to the aggressively “fighting” economic-populist left of the “corporate Democrats” (as Edwards and Nader both called them) Clinton and Obama. Repeatedly referring to the labor movement as “the greatest anti-poverty program in American history” and proclaiming (in a paraphrase of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935-36 campaign rhetoric) that he sought and welcomed the hatred of the rich, Edwards rightly (in my opinion) mocked Obama’s “Kumbaya” notion that meaningful progressive policy change could be attained by conciliating and “finding the middle ground” with corporate interests and the Republican Party. Edwards in 2007 and early 2008 mounted what the excellent American Marxist author and political analyst Mike Davis rightly calls “the most chemically pure pro-labor candidacy in a generation.” According to Davis in The New Left Review last summer:

“However one feels about Edwards’ character (as exposed in yet another bedroom scandal uncovered by right-wing bloggers), he was the only major primary candidate [to run as]…an insurgent with an ideologically distinctive platform – in his case, angry economic populism. The former senator from North Carolina (the son of a Piedmont mil-lworker turned into a millionaire lawyer) staked out a programmatic space that had been vacant since Jesse Jackson’s mobilization in the 1980s: the priority of economic justice for poor people and workers. Discarding the banal euphemisms of his 2004 vice-presidential campaign, he spoke directly of exploitation and the urgency of unionization, proposed a new war on poverty, denounced ‘Benedict Arnold CEOs’ who exported jobs, and, in a debate with Obama and Clinton in Iowa, argued that it was a ‘complete fantasy to believe that a progressive agenda could be advanced by negotiation with Republicans and corporate lobbies.’ Only an ‘epic fight’ could ensure healthcare reform and living wages. (Obama’s response was typical eloquent evasion: ‘We don’t need more heat. We need more light.’).”

Edwards’s “fighting” campaign rhetoric may have disqualified him (well before the exposure of his marital infidelity from serious presidential consideration) at the elite level but it was enough for me lend his campaign hours of real support in the late summer and fall of 2007. Quite predictably in America’s corporate-managed dollar democracy, Edwards’ “angry populist” campaign – notable for occasionally stunning platform oratory and detailed policy prescriptions (many considerably less progressive than Edwards’ fiery rhetoric, it should be noted) was predictably mocked and marginalized by the dominant corporate communications and funding authorities. He was rendered officially “unviable” (along with the often eccentric and quirky Kucinich, who absurdly threw his supporters to Obama) by the middle of January 2008, well before Edwards’ bedroom shenanigans were exposed.

I told people I knew who cared about the Caucus to work for Edwards without any illusion as to how truly progressive he really was or about his chances of securing the nomination. (I naturally had no idea in mid 2007 that Edwards would later be discovered having undertaken a scandalous extra-marital affair with Rielle Hunter).

Part of my motivation was defensive – to block Obama. With his unmatched capacity to de-fang popular resistance to American Empire and Inequality at home and abroad, a properly elite-vetted Obama struck me as something of a ruling class dream in the post-Bush environment – a marvelous vehicle for wrapping core conservative, system-maintaining policy continuities in the deceptive flag of progressive “change.” Maybe, I thought, Edwards could stop the Obama ascendancy or at least slow him down.

Also, while I harbored little faith that Edwards could win the nomination, I felt that a strong labor-backed Edwards showing in the primaries might help unions and other progressive, anti-poverty forces attain more policy and platform leverage in what could turn out to be a brokered Democratic convention, torn between the giant Wall Street-bankrolled machines of Clinton Inc. and Obama Inc., in August of 2008.

Edwards’ warnings about Obama’s “complete fantasy” and the need for an “epic fight” with the big corporations seem pretty relevant as Obama’s lame corporate-captive health reform collapses on itself. The pathetic refusal of not-so liberal in power-Democrats to use their 2008 electoral mandate to pursue progressive change or to fight the corporations and the Republicans has quite predictably sparked a revival of the right wing as seen most dramatically in the remarkable victory of the reactionary Republican Scott Brown in the recent special election to fill the former U.S. Senate seat of the late Teddy Kennedy.

But of course nobody remembers those warnings as we consume the latest news on Edwards’ sexual behavior, finding out just the other day that Edwards has finally acknowledged that he is the father of Ms. Hunter’s two-year-old daughter. Pretty pathetic. Welcome to U.S. political culture.

AD: You frequently point out that the American public is well to the left of both the Democrats and the Republicans on a range of issues. What can the American public do to make democracy more meaningful in the United States?

PS: We have to embrace and undertake the difficult and painstaking and day-to-day work of re-building and building and then expanding rank-and-file grassroots organization and capacity on key issues beneath and beyond the corporate-crafted candidate-centered narrow-spectrum biennial and quadrennial electoral extravaganzas the masters stages for us, telling us that these rigged contests are the sum total of “politics.” As Lance Selfa writes in the latest issue of the U.S.-based International Socialist Review:

“Waiting for Obama to do the right thing is a fool’s errand. Politics has to be conceived as something that goes far beyond electoral calculations. What’s needed more than anything is activism and mobilization that blows open the narrow political space where anything progressive is associated with Obama and opposition falls to right-wingers.”

That is very nicely stated! In fact, here’s more from Selfa, who notes some of the small but important ways in which people are in fact acting on issues beneath and beyond the big electoral fake-democracy: 

“Here, there is some good news to report. The National Equality March in October marked the emergence of a new generation of activists who are unwilling to hear lip service from Democratic politicians and unwilling to wait for their rights. The thousands of students up and down California who are protesting the state’s draconian cuts are laying the basis of a network to defend public education. Grad student employees at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana struck and won a victory from an administration determined to impose concessions on them. The Ford workers who voted down a concessionary contract the company and union wanted to foist on them showed that workers don’t just have to take anything despite the recession.”

“Many of these struggles are fragile, fledgling, and still by-and-large defensive. But they provide the foundations for further organization to pressure the government to respond to the progressive majority instead of to a loud, right- wing minority.”

“Along with the revival of real resistance comes the urgent need for new politics. Without a political alternative that is independent, and to the left of, the Democratic Party—that is, from both parties of big business—anger at Democrats in office will always mean turning them out for Republicans, and vice versa. Such an alternative to the two-party shuffle won’t be built soon, but it must be built.”

I concur on the whole, though I would add that we’re running out of ecological and repressive-technological time to build serious grassroots movements and independent left political alternatives in what is still the world’s most powerful (and dangerous) country. The alternative has to be built soon. I presume that I don’t need to elaborate on the ecological issue. By “repressive-technological time,” I mean that the power elite enjoys ever-deepening technological and related institutional and informational capacities to liquidate the rights of free speech, privacy, public assembly, and the like. The specter of corporate-imperial totalitarianism within and beyond the U.S. “homeland” (a lovely phrase that Obama uses now) is not to be taken lightly in my opinion.

A final reflection and memory. Nearly a month after Obama was elected and more than a month before he was inaugurated, a militant, largely immigrant-based union local in Chicago occupied the door and window factory of an absconding employer to demand the compensation that was due them. The union and its supporters mounted a highly effective public relations campaign highlighting the harsh disconnect between the massive federal bailouts that were being made to parasitic “too big to fail” banks and the economic misery being imposed on ordinary working Americans who did enjoy government protection. “They Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out” was the (very effective) slogan. This quintessentially working class and unapologetically populist struggle quickly became a highly popular cause celebre not just in Chicago but across the country and internationally. It even held the U.S. corporate media’s news cycle for a couple days. I know because the strike knocked me off Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” television show in Manhattan and I had to fly back to the Midwest from New York City and was stuck for hours in front of airport televisions covering the event. Support for workers who had technically broken the law by staging an occupation of their workplace was widespread. (The President-Elect felt compelled to endorse their action – probably his shining progressive moment; it’s been all downhill ever since). The Republic Door and Window workers really struck a chord of populist dissent that resonated across the country. They didn’t wait to get the okay from Obama or the Democratic Party or any other politicians or elected officials or with electoral considerations in mind. They had developed and utilized the rank and file institutional capacity to undertake a morally righteous direct action at the immediate shop-floor and community level and thereby forced events from the bottom, compelling media and politicians to follow in their wake. We need hundreds and then thousands of little and big and then merging epic fights like the one fought in Chicago two Decembers ago. That’s where the real and relevant Hope for Change can be found, not in the masters’ elections and candidates and all the rest of that citizen-marginalizing rubbish. Iowa 2007 was my first and last foray into electoral politics, for what that’s worth.

Part 1 of the article can be found here.