11-06-08, 10:37 am

Many people shed tears across the country after President-elect Barack Obama claimed victory Nov. 4th. For many of an older generation – white and Black – the victory was linked to the struggles and sacrifices of the civil rights movement.

Even the Reagan right-wingers such as William Bennett attempted to sound 'centrist,' saying, for example, that Obama's challenge was to 'govern' as a 'unifier' rather than be the leader of a 'movement.' (This from the good soldier of the right-wing 'culture war' that lashed out frequently at African Americans).

My favorite comment though came from Joe Klein, an old New York Magazine guy and inside dopester with the cynicism of a Tammany ward heeler who made his bones in pop journalism by baiting Black militants and radicals until he found his way to Bill Clinton. Looking pleased as punch, Klein said that he had received an email from a friend in Afghanistan, an 'entrepreneur' who told him that with Obama as president the Taliban would be ready to negotiate, an example of the new world under creation.

Afghanistan doesn't really have an economy for entrepreneurs, and the Taliban, created by the Pakistani ISI and the CIA, holds major portions of the country. But the silliness of people like Klein and the major media generally, the pundits of the center and the right, scurrying around to throw words together that will hold our interest until the commercials, may be amusing but are mainly unimportant now. What happened Tuesday was a great people's victory.

As a US historian and a partisan of the socialism that McCain and Palin confused with President-elect Obama's advocacy of a revival of progressive taxation and regulation, here are some of my preliminary thoughts about the election:

1. As an old Civil Rights activist once said in the 1950s, 'if you can beat racism you can beat anything,' and yesterday the people, led by the labor movement and a broad and diverse coalition of democratic forces, beat racism, which was the last line of 'defense' for the Republican Right.

States like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the trade union movement is strong but the right-wing had long cultivated divisive prejudices among workers in small and medium-sized cities, turned in solid victories. The support a unified labor movement gave to Obama, the turnout and activism of African Americans, but also a diverse coalition of people of all races and ethnicities created a coalition that would have been considered unlikely four years ago, much less 40 years ago.

2. Barack Obama appears to have won by well over 7 million votes, the largest victory for any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In terms of the percentage of the electorate that he won, Barack Obama did better than any Democrat elected after the Civil War except of course Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Both of whom did better in percentage terms than Obama but are also known for implementing definitive legislation establishing trade union rights, Social Security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, Medicare, Medicaid, and major environmental and consumer protection legislation.

Like this election, the labor movement and the civil rights movement provided the mass base that enabled the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations to do what they did. War, however, in each case helped to create a new balance of political forces that undermined both the New Deal program after World War II and Johnson's Great Society Program in the 1960s.

3. Barack Obama can build on the New Deal and Great Society traditions, which are the policies that turned the historically factionalized and regionalized Democratic Party into a majority party, to build a new and inclusive political majority that will do in the 21st century what Franklin Roosevelt sought to do during the Great Depression.

Today, when it comes to a national health care system, labor legislation to protect trade union rights, and the social safety net the US has fallen behind most other industrialized countries. The pundits will say that the American people are not ready for a real national health care program of the kind that Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has put forward under the slogan, 'Medicare for All,' (HR 646), or for the expansion of labor union rights and major increases in minimum wages. They said the same thing about Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, the National Labor Relations Act, and the minimum wage and hours provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1930s. When the people supported those laws fervently, however, the pundits insisted they should be as limited as possible.

4. Working people, the broad left, even rank and file communists and socialists really revered Franklin Roosevelt, even if their party leaders often criticized his specific policies and sectarian leaders denounced him and those on the left who supported his administration (which the usual self-isolating sectarians are doing now about Obama).

Most working people have really come to respect and admire Barack Obama. He will need the active support of labor and progressive activists in all of the peoples movements to govern effectively. Franklin Roosevelt not only won such people over but brought many of them to Washington to lead or staff a wide variety of New Deal agencies and implement policies of relief and reform in the agricultural sector, in public works programs, in the NLRB, and to a lesser extent in the expanding regulatory agencies. They, along with prominent agency leaders and cabinet members who co-existed with traditional Democratic Party politicians, became the New Deal. They helped to bring about and then defended the changes against a powerful and ruthless right-wing opposition. Obama will need activists from the organizations of the broad left in and outside of his administration if he is to be the transforming president that he can be.

5. Lyndon Johnson was never revered by progressive activists and his disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War turned many of the people and forces FDR brought into the New Deal coalition against him. Barack Obama can learn from the failure of the last progressive government (on domestic policy) that the US has had by moving boldly to get the US out of Iraq and moving also to develop multi-lateral, diplomatic and developmental policies for the regions of the world that Bush has targeted for military intervention. Without a progressive foreign policy it will be difficult if not impossible for an Obama administration to advance a progressive domestic policy.

Lyndon Johnson feared that if he 'lost' the war in Vietnam, the right would accuse him of losing to 'communism' and his domestic program and administration would collapse. Instead, because he could not go beyond the political straight-jacket of Cold War politics, he destroyed his administration by escalating a war that his domestic enemies supported and those most likely to support his domestic policies opposed.

Obama must not make the same mistake. Since he is not mired in a Cold War or militarist mindset, and his withstood the hysterical and comical attacks of those who sought to link his policies with 'terrorists,' I don't think he will. Obama is intelligent enough to understand that 'terrorism' is a police rather than a military matter, a problem that requires allies and international cooperation, not unilateral military interventions.

Will he be able to begin the cutting down to size of the military industrial complex, the reduction of first tens of billions and, assuming he is re-elected, hundreds of billions in military spending? This will probably be one of the biggest battles of his administration. It is one in which labor and the broad left must fight to be on the same side, to realize the enormous benefits that will derive to the society from a US military budget that will not be many times greater than any other in the world.

Let me conclude by saying that this election was a great people's victory, not only for those African Americans who were mentioned on TV yesterday, but for so many others: Paul Robeson, Ossie Davis, Ben Davis and Angela Davis, Henry Winston, A. Philip Randolph and Claudia Jones, to name a very small number of African-American activists of the political and cultural left. It is also a great victory for all of the people of all races.

The first Africans were 'imported' into North America in 1619 and North American slavery persisted until the end of the Civil War in 1865. After the defeats of the struggle to democratize the former slave states, segregation and disenfranchisement did not end legally until the 1960s, a century later. The victories won in the name of Civil Rights were pushed back after the late 1970s in terms of policy. Those defeats went hand in hand with the Reagan administration's war against labor and the poor. Winning this battle against racism is part of the catching up that the people must do and, in the present political situation, can do.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.