On 10/27/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This post was originally meant as a response to Stan Goff's call for voting
for the Democrats in the midterm elections, but it will focus mainly on
Bill Fletcher's article "Race, the Democratic Party and electoral
strategy"–originally a speech given at Columbia University.
Stan cites this article in his blog entry as "giving the elections some
historical context" which it does. Unfortunately, it is not quite broad
enough and is content to stick within the framework of US politics and
particularly the rivalry between the Democrats and the Republicans.
<<<<<>>>>>
Perhaps a brief glance at what DuBois and some other African-American
intellectuals (Henry Moon, William Nowlin, Edgar Lee Tatum) during the
Jim Crow era called "balance of power" might be useful. While
developed at a time of mass disenfranchisement, the idea was intended
to provide a strategic rationale for the use of the ballot. As a
theory, "balance of power" held that a solid bloc of black votes could
determine the outcome of elections (at whatever government level)
where the white vote was pretty evenly split.
Importantly, one premise was that African-Americans would not be tied
to a particular political party. Both the 1948 Truman and the 1960
Kennedy wins in which black votes in several key states provided
decisive margins of victory appeared to give the theory validity.
Ones's acceptance/nonacceptance of such validity may be less important
than recognition that potential African-American "oscillation" - Chuck
Stone's word for switching from one party to the other depending on
political deals made and how well they were kept - was short-lived.
The first post-Voting Rights Act presidential election was 1968 and
while black voters had been moving towards the Democrats since the New
Deal, a combination of things from 1960-1968 sealed the
African-American electoral realignment (consider that Nixon received
about 33% of black votes in 1960, about 10% in 1968). The result of
this was what Ron Walters called "dependent-leverage" politics in
which black votes cannot achieve much. The "independent-leverage"
strategy that he proposes in contrast is comprised of two options:
third party (although he considers several possibilities -
African-American, multiethnic, labor-based) or oscillation (a return
to "balance of power" theory).
Michael Hoover
