King, Obama, and the Politics of Hope

As an organizer in the downtrodden, gang-infested streets of the Black and Latino communities of South Side Chicago in the 1980s, Obama saw plant closings and disinvestment destroy lives and communities.

He couldn’t explain exactly what organizing meant. Instead, “I’d pronounce on the need for change…. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.” (Dreams From My Father, p. 133)

After experiencing the limitations of local organizing, he went on to law and politics to find greater leverage. He also tapped into Martin Luther King’s politics of hope. That combination has opened up the country to the possibility of new politics, and new goals.

Millions of people around the world, desperate to turn the page on the disastrous Bush era, had a huge stake in this Obama’s election. We all need to press for an end to government corruption, corporate profiteering, parasitical behavior by Wall Street, foreign policy run by bombs, wiretapping and torture. It’s time to reverse the course of the American Empire, along with its neglect of the world’s people and exploitation of its resources.

The world experienced a justifiable crisis of confidence in U.S. capitalism. President Lula of Brazil put it well when he expressed outrage that those who propagated the neo-liberal policies of belt tightening and social disinvestment on the developing world never followed those standards themselves.

It seems that finally the majority of U.S. voters have recognized the full dimensions of the crisis and folly that the Bush regime ushered in.

So today, with Barack Obama as the American President, we must ask, as King asked in 1968, “where do we go from here?” King answered his own question by organizing a Poor People’s Campaign to demand that government address the historic racial inequalities created by slavery and segregation. And he joined a strike of the poorest of the poor, black sanitation workers in Memphis. King in 1968 became a shining advocate for economic justice.

In Memphis, King left a legacy of joining labor and civil rights organizing to gain union rights. King also sought bigger goals: redistribution of wealth and power, an end to racism and war, a “moral revolution.” He wrote, “we must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.”

Obama doesn’t promise as big a leap. He is a reformer, interested in finding pragmatic solutions to pressing problems. But, like King, he promises an alternative to war. And, like King, he envisions a program to deal with racial inequality by reaching beyond race to address problems facing all working people.

“What would help minority workers are the same things that would help white workers: the opportunity to earn a living wage, the education and training that can lead to such jobs, labor laws and tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation’s wealth, and health-care, child care, and retirement systems that working people can count on.” (The Audacity of Hope, p. 246)

Many Americans think that sounds pretty good. John McCain, in response, called Obama a socialist who wants to turn the tax system into a welfare program.

People throughout the world strive to put a human face on capitalism, while America has become what King warned against: a country where “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people.” It is indeed time for a change.

With our economy and government practically in ruins, Democrats will be hard pressed to address our economic disaster. We did it under worse times in the 1930s, and we can do it again today. We will be pressing for a new law restoring the right of workers, without fear of being fired, to organize unions, which remain the best “anti-poverty program” around, as King put it.

“Hope is that thing inside of us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that there is something greater inside of us,” Obama said after winning the Iowa primary.  Since then, his campaign has proven that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when organized together.

Bringing about significant change won’t be easy, but his dramatic and joyful election victory affirmed the power of organizing. In my hometown of Tacoma, Washington, I witnessed the unique vibrancy of the Obama campaign. I have never seen more involved, energized people, working so hard in an election campaign. And it happened almost everywhere.

The movement that elected Obama now needs to keep moving. A President Obama will need us to both support him and to push to fulfill our hopes and his promises.

We now need to take the next steps to make real the promise of a revitalized democracy. That won’t happen without mass citizen involvement. As King would tell us, we still need to organize.

To even take incremental steps out of the wilderness created by Bush’s disastrous regime, people at the grass roots must build a mighty movement. And to sustain the politics of hope we need to dream of a different kind of country.

The danger now is that the Democrats may move so far to “bi-partisanship” with Republicans, who oppose every major tenant of social reform, that we can’t get the things that we need out of this historical moment. That is not the model we need.

It is a good time to think big, as King did. Real change requires a continuing movement from the bottom up to transcend privileged and entrenched power in both parties. It requires a political commitment to stop our downward cycle into militarism and war; to overcome religious and ethnic hatred and division; and to enhance human needs and human rights.

That would be a politics of hope worthy of the American promise to insure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. It would be a politics of hope worthy of Senator Obama’s heartening rhetoric. It would be a politics worthy of Martin Luther King’s legacy of struggle for a better world and the creation of a beloved community.

Across our national borders, let’s all try to stay connected and try to stay active. Colleagues, and brothers and sisters, let’s keep hope alive!