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General News    H3'ed 12/6/22

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Three Conversations about Politics

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Since I turned 18, I doubt I've ever missed a vote. Certainly, though, I never missed a presidential election. In 1968, at age 24, for instance, already swept away by the anti-Vietnam War movement, I voted for antiwar Democrat Eugene McCarthy in the New York primary. Even though McCarthy would win the popular vote nationally in the Democratic primaries, he lost the nomination, in a distinctly controversial fashion, at the Democratic convention to former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, hardly an antiwar sort of guy. Still, in the election to come, I voted for him, only to see Republican Richard Nixon (of the notorious "Southern strategy" and later Watergate infamy) beat him nationally, become president, and later expand that American war in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. (Note that Alabama segregationist governor George Wallace won more than 5% of New York State's vote that year, a reminder with Nixon that there has long been a Trumpian quality to American politics.) And then, four years later, I would vote for George McGovern, again to end that war, only to watch Nixon win for the second time in a landslide (even in New York!). Sigh.

Still, to this day, I do go out and vote, although, on my way to the polls, I sometimes have to ask my wife whom I should vote for farther down the ticket. So, in my modest, haphazard fashion, I've participated in American politics, but never, like TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, just back from the front lines of the recent midterm elections, in actual campaign work. Not since, as a child on Halloween, I took a donation container door to door in my apartment building for UNICEF, have I ever, as Gordon describes so vividly today, tried to directly convince anyone to do anything political in a campaign of any sort. (And given the recent midterms, as you'll see when you read her piece today, thank heavens she, and so many other political activists like her, did so in a big-time way!) She has what she calls a "political vocation" and, given our present American world, the 2022 election season, and the 2024 version to come, thank goodness she, like so many others, does.

Still, I wouldn't claim that I had no political vocation whatsoever. In my own fashion, here at TomDispatch, I've labored week after week, month after month, trying to put crucial information about how our world actually works and who is (and isn't) responsible for that in front of anyone willing to read such pieces. And that, in its own fashion, has, I suppose, been my vocation, my version, you might say, of going out on the campaign trail " though what the reader does with anything I publish at this website is, of course, up to him or her. Now, if you want to think a little about what your own vocation in life might be, political or otherwise, check out Gordon. Tom

Living for Politics
Or "Just Living"?

By

"Welcome back!" read my friend Allan's email. "So happy to have you back and seeing that hard work paid off. Thank you for all that you do. Please don't cook this evening. I am bringing you a Honduran dinner " tacos hondureà ±os and baleadas, plus a bottle of wine." The tacos were tasty indeed, but even more pleasing was my friend's evident admiration for my recent political activities.

My partner and I had just returned from four months in Reno, working with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, on their 2022 midterm electoral campaign. It's no exaggeration to say that, with the votes in Nevada's mostly right-wing rural counties cancelling out those of Democratic-leaning Las Vegas, that union campaign in Reno saved the Senate from falling to the Republicans. Catherine Cortez Masto, the nation's first Latina senator, won reelection by a mere 7,928 votes, out of a total of more than a million cast. It was her winning margin of 8,615 in Washoe County, home to Reno, that put her over the top.

Our friend was full of admiration for the two of us, but the people who truly deserved the credit were the hotel housekeepers, cooks, caterers, and casino workers who, for months, walked the Washoe County streets six days a week, knocking on doors in 105-degree heat and even stumping through an Election Day snowstorm. They endured having guns pulled on them, dogs sicced on them, and racist insults thrown at them, and still went out the next day to convince working-class voters in communities of color to mark their ballots for a candidate many had never heard of. My partner and I only played back-up roles in all of this; she, managing the logistics of housing, feeding, and supplying the canvassers, and I, working with maps and spreadsheets to figure out where to send the teams each day. It was, admittedly, necessary, if not exactly heroic, work.

"I'm not like the two of you," Allan said when he stopped by with the promised dinner. "You do important work. I'm just living my life."

"Not everybody," I responded, "has a calling to politics." And I think that's true. I also wonder whether having politics as a vocation is entirely admirable.

Learning to Surf

That exchange with Allan got me thinking about the place of politics in my own life. I've been fortunate enough to be involved in activism of one sort or another for most of my 70 years, but it's been just good fortune or luck that I happened to stumble into a life with a calling, even one as peculiar as politics.

There are historical moments when large numbers of people "just living" perfectly good lives find themselves swept up in the breaking wave of a political movement. I've seen quite a few of those moments, starting with the struggle of Black people for civil rights when I was a teenager, and the movement to stop the Vietnam War in that same era. Much more recently, I've watched thousands of volunteers in Kansas angrily reject the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned a 50-year precedent protecting a woman's right to end a pregnancy. Going door to door in a classic political field campaign, they defeated a proposed anti-abortion amendment to the Kansas constitution, while almost doubling the expected turnout for a midterm primary.

To some observers, in a red and landlocked state like Kansas, that wave of resistance seemed to come out of nowhere. It certainly surprised a lot of professionals, but the capacity to ride it didn't, in fact, come out of nowhere. When given a choice, it turns out that a substantial majority of people in the middle of this country will vote in favor of women's bodily autonomy. But many of them won't do it without a push. To build such a successful electoral campaign required people who'd spent years honing the necessary skills in times when the political seas appeared almost unendurably flat.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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