Going With the Flow
As a member of Democracy Spring, I partnered with others in Philadelphia to lead the organizing hub ahead of the April action in DC. I know many who marched from our home in Philly down to DC, and many more who were arrested that day on the Capitol steps. I have decided to express my opinions on the recent developments with the INCC because I had so much hope and admiration for this movement and, more specifically, the rhetoric of its leadership in their commitment to principled strategy. I invested time and faith in this movement because I believed in it. The sense of community and adherence to the winning philosophy of nonviolent strategic conflict that I saw at the nonviolence master training in DC was inspiring and far beyond the pale of what I had encountered in other movements and protest efforts before that point.
That being said, the INCC — this interim group of essentially self-appointed leaders of the Democracy Spring movement — have now publicly called for the endorsement of Hillary Clinton. And I know they insist on semantic distinction, saying that this is not an endorsement and encouraging others to act as they see fit — but what is this if not an endorsement? “We don’t support her, it’s just the best strategic position.” But at the end of the day, if you’re telling people that it’s in their best interest to cast a ballot for Clinton, then you have endorsed everything she stands for and the system she props up. It is a vote of confidence in everything corrupt that we oppose. It is surrender: “I think this is all bullshit, but I’m still gonna go along with it. I’m gonna buy in. I’m gonna throw my hat in the ring. We don’t have a choice and our strategy says we must.”
I say fuck that.
And what’s interesting to me is that I am not alone in saying “fuck that.” In fact, by their own polling, by their own chart, the INCC has found that 48.6% of Democracy Spring members don’t think there should be any partisan electoral engagement whatsoever.
49% of the people who voted on this question do not want to cast a vote for the lesser of two evils. They don’t want to cast a vote for genocide in Palestine, for starvation in Yemen, for bombs over Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for regime change in South America and Africa. We do not want to cast a ballot for war profiteering, and we do not believe that our power and our opportunity as a movement depends on any one candidate making it into office. (And, furthermore, if we WERE to engage this election, the time to do so would have been in April, when we could have seen a mutually-beneficial boost in attention by working with Bernie Sanders.)
We, the majority dissension, got into this movement because we understood that the issue of money in politics is genuinely outside of partisan bickering. We understood that the corruption and greed that run rampant in this system are malignant. That it is ubiquitous. That this entire thing is infected; rotten to its very core from the inside out. And we engage it strategically if we want to win, but we do so within the context of a theory of change, within the context of pillars of power, understanding that our political arm is but one of many routes that we can take to redirect and deconstruct the channels of power in this country so that it comes back to us — the people — its rightful owners.
We stood in April and stand today against a corrupt system that pits us all against one another and then terrifies us into voting for a figurehead that represents everything that’s killing us. Clinton is the iron fist in a velvet glove, sold to us for fear of its bared and unabashed counterpart. It’s superficial, it’s surface — it appears to be the better option, under an illusion of necessity. But at the end of the day, the amount of time, focus, energy, and opportunity that is wasted on this question of whether we should or whether we shouldn’t — is Trump scary enough? Is Hillary really that bad? It’s distracting and it’s divisive. This distracting, divisive reality was always offered to us as justification for our non-partisan, omni-partisan position.
The bottom line is, she is rotten, too. Nothing about her past actions or her current posturing provide us with any reasonable expectation that promises made today will ever see us to victory on our issues. At that Ivory Tower level, in their class, it doesn’t matter the color of your skin, your gender, your religion. Clinton and Trump and all the corporate cronies leeching off the American people operate under different rules, with a different mindset, that is extremely unique to this minority ruling class. The slow, incremental push for meaningful reform has not won us any major victories with Democrats or Republicans. A candidate receiving corporate funding and bipartisan support such as Clinton is no more likely to see us through to a real victory, but is in fact more likely to offer us a superficial step forward, a political gesture that will subdue the passionate demand for reform without getting us any closer to it.
By siding with Clinton on a strategic basis, the INCC has chosen to bow to the intentional pressure applied by the very people we seek to unseat. Such a fear-based motivation does not open our minds and move us forward. This system is built to keep our minds closed, and by voting for fear we are helping them to keep our vision shortsighted. It keeps us focused on the immediate, the next crisis, living in this constant state of emergency. 49% of Democracy Spring revolutionaries said fuck that shit. I don’t think that this movement or true revolution takes such a position as the INCC has. The toppling of these pillars of power to redirect it toward the people, I don’t think that necessitates a vote in this system. I don’t think that buys into this election.
And yet this small group of individuals who call themselves the Interim Council, this steering committee, the folks in charge — who put in all the work, who have every right to say what it is and where it goes and what it means — it was their blood, sweat, and tears behind it after all, right? They were at the top, calling the shots. Keeping it running. Their opinion sits at about 25%. And they came out to say “Well, we hear you, but oh well. We gave it time, we were tactful, we were considerate, but fuck you anyway because we’re going to do what we want.” They are going to misrepresent and minimize and marginalize the majority of movement members and their opinions. These valid, revolutionary people who sacrificed their time, their energy, who put their livelihood on the line to travel to DC and risk arrest, who were putting in the hours leading up to April, who marched their asses all the way from Philly — their majority opinion is not of significant consequence to this body of leaders.
The justification for this position is that it is strategically informed, and its executors defensively condescend to movement members on this point, insisting that they must know best, and that any who knew the intricacies of this philosophy would recognize the necessity of this electoral engagement. We the dissenters understand that there is a deeper strategy, a wider strategy behind these theories of change and revolutionary action. We know that there is more at play than just the election, that the political pomp and circumstance of government and the politicians who orchestrate its machinations are not our only target. Pillars of power are multifaceted and our means for dismantling them are far more diverse than this election.
True movements and revolutionary momentum are not things dictated by steering committees and organizing bodies. These ideals and forces exist objectively, beyond our efforts, and what we do is strive to achieve them, strive to make them manifest and recruit others to do the same. So often in that process, we invest so much of ourselves that we feel a sense of ownership that simply does not exist. I believe this is what has distorted the judgment of our beloved INCC.
Democracy Spring is free to be an organization that goes against the wishes of 50% of its membership, but it should not call itself a movement when it does so, because such action is not revolutionary. I got arrested, I sacrificed, I put my children’s comfort and safety on the line for the unknown of getting arrested in DC — literally under the banner of Democracy Spring — but I did not do so because I believed in some organization or charismatic leadership. I did not do so because I put my faith in the strategic judgment and sage opinions of a select few organizers. I did so because I believed in the principles and strategy I was led to believe were behind the action, laid out to us in the early part of this year.
I put everything on the line for revolution. And if Democracy Spring’s INCC as it calls itself today stands for voting for Hillary Clinton, then I am no longer in any way affiliated with Democracy Spring. I will stay with the revolutionary spirit that first brought me to Democracy Spring, as its leadership departs from that spirit’s inspiring presence. I follow the natural flow of the movement as it unfolds, not self-appointed movement leaders and their pompous disregard for the voices and beliefs of the membership that gave it life.