Cindy Sheehan's Challenge

First, one detour to set the context for this note: I would not have considered writing about the responses had I not noticed a buzz especially among so many people who have generally never expressed an opinion about antiwar politics to me. Certainly, these folks have voiced their rejection of the war, but until now none had talked about the movement itself. One anecdote may make this more tangible. A teacher, who knows about my antiwar activism but rarely ever spoke with me about the war and even less about the movement in opposition to the war, asked me if I had “heard about Cindy Sheehan’s resignation… Cindy was outraged by the Democrats giving Bush everything he wanted… Cindy is also disappointed with all of us for not doing enough.” Soon afterwards, a parent at the same school praised an antiwar speech that my 10 year-old daughter gave to her school’s Memorial Day assembly but then the parent went on to comment about how hard antiwar activism must be…how it was burning out people like Cindy Sheehan. Now maybe this person was subtly reproaching me for appearing to encourage my daughter's outspokeness about the war, but this was the first ever conversation that I had with this person! Sheehan had reached into my daughter's school! These casual encounters suggest just how widespread the reaction is to the RS. Certainly, it made page one of all the major newspapers and is probably feeding the babble on talk radio and the cable channels.  Google News lists more than 750 articles on the topic barely 24 hours after the statement. Note that Google News trawls 4,500 newsources around the globe. Seventeen percent isn't bad!

One more observation: if there is ever a way to resign from a movement, Cindy Sheehan has found the right one. Not only is the discussion that she has prompted necessary and even timely, but she has found a way to build the movement even when departing from it! Better a sharp break than the slow, unconsidered withdrawal that seems to accompany so many of the “burnouts” that we hear about.

The first wave of responses (in the blogsphere, listserve chatter, op-ed pieces) is interesting in a number of ways:  (1) movement veterans have found in it an opportunity to recognize the personal costs of their own involvement;  (2) others have noted to expansion of the movement since the first Camp Casey; (3) consistent with the second, some have engaged in “damage control” by noting that the progress of their plans for the movement; (4) there is some “I-told-you-so” gloating from a number of points on the political compass (far right theme – she was a puppet of the left; identity politics – she is exercising her middle-class privilege; “left” – only a matter of time before you learn the truth about the Democrats-MoveOn.org-reformists; liberals – she long ago left the mainstream for the “far left”). Regrettably, with few exceptions, like Ron Jacob’s CounterPunch.org piece, few seriously engage Cindy Sheehan’s critique of the Democratic Party and others seem to deliberately ignore it, in favor of condemning the vaguely identified, “Washington leadership.” Equally, and regrettably, too few people do Cindy Sheehan any justice when they do not engage some of the erroneous assumptions in RS.

One thing worth taking up from RS is its unambiguous condemnation of the Democratic Party's failure to exercise their power to cut funding for the war. Indeed, RS goes beyond condemning the failure to condemning the party itself. Some have noted that the Democratic Party is interested in keeping the war going through the 2008 election season. For this reason, the argument goes, whatever their dubious commitment to antiwar politics, political opportunity trumps principle. Hence, Bush’s $100 billion. More rope? Maybe...but many more dead too.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that the Democratic Party surely does not want to assume responsibility for “losing” Iraq if it were to assume the presidency in 2009. In fact, it is fairly clear that the country currently blames the Republicans for the war and its outcomes. All the Democrats have achieved in their failure is to have made the public—poignantly personified (again) by Cindy Sheehan—aware of the party’s complicity in the war. In fact the Democrats now have the worst of all worlds: it is viewed from the left as traitors, from the center as squeamish, and from the right as simple losers. And all three are probably right!

Explaining the Democratic Party failure to stop funding of the war is easy if we accept the stock explanations: it is the Party of the Vietnam War…the party of capital…and on and on.  These observations have little validity as explanations although they are certainly have much factual weight. For antiwar strategists, the questions needed for an explanation include: Is the Democratic Party a political party in the classical sense? That is, is it an institution that combines interests, shapes public opinion, embraces and develops an ideology, marshals a voting base, exercises discipline over its members? Another set of questions should focus on the political process since that is the key way to understanding where to intervene (or not): What are the connections between grassroots political opinion and party voting behavior? How does the party discipline its representatives?

Sadly, there is an answer to the last set of questions in RS—one that I think is incorrect. RS posits that public opinion itself is distracted…more interested in American Idol that the costs of war. In short: apathetic public gives you weak social movements gives you irresponsible government. Here’s where I wish more folks seriously engaged Cindy Sheehan with the respect that we should accord someone who has probably spoken to and with more Americans that most. Despite my own rants against the national attention deficit disorder rankling the ever shrinking minds of the public, I think that Cindy Sheehan might be a little too pessimistic. Clearly the public is engaged: they threw out many of the war mongers in Congress and believed—erroneously it turned out—that they elected peacemakers. Moreover on a wide range of issues, from the climatic distortions of global warming to immigration, the public is clearly “in motion” (to dust off a seductive old saw).*

The disconnect between this motion and Congressional behavior is potentially interesting. It calls for a range of practices and strategic choices on the part of those folks who traditionally connect public opinion with public policy—not the political parties (for I don’t think they exist in the traditional sense) but the social movements. The upcoming UFPJ conference in Chicago and the US Social Forum in Atlanta offer opportunities to conduct these conversations. Cindy Sheehan’s entrance onto the national stage and now her (hopefully temporary) departure has served notice of the urgency of such discussions as a prelude to effective action.

* This is not to suggest that the public is not distracted. Instead I think, but this needs fuller elaboraton and exploration, that there is a connection--dialectic if you will--between the distractedness of the public and the failures of the politcal class and the social movement leaderships.