By Irami Osei-Frimpong (January 28, 2018)
I’ve been thinking about Ann Richards and Obama.
Everyone loves Ann Richards. I think she was great. Or at least I think she was fine. She won Texas without teaching people how to govern, so it snapped right back. Obama is similarly blessed. There are no principled Obama Democrats. The Obama coalition is held together by aesthetics, and insofar as it is held together by a vision of governance instead of aesthetics, it’s vaguely libertarian because that’s what you get when you have a governing coalition that’s held together by aesthetics. I suspect that this is why Obama was so good at electing GOP legislators and governors. He elected a lot of other Reagan Republicans, and he converted a lot of black people into being Reagan Republicans. Reagan was Goldwater Republican, and Goldwater Republicans are Libertarians, so it shouldn’t be that big of a surprised that Obama created so many Republicans. If folks deeply believed in his style of governance, they would eventually vote Republican, anyway.
Contrast that with FDR or even Kennedy. After they left office, there were still principled FDR and Kennedy Democrats who were convert by FDR or Kennedy.
The goal isn’t to get people to pull the Democrat lever this one time; the goal is to move people to a better vision of governance. Anything that’s not that is not going to enable black people to be free.
You can say that there are principled Clinton Democrats, but I think principled Clinton Democrats are snakes because that’s the principle of governance Bill Clinton taught America.
Black people, we are a people who need good governance more than anyone else in this nation, because we can’t be free until we see justice, and we can’t get justice without revolutionizing the US political structure towards justice for Black people. FDR’s revolution provided justice for white people at the expense of black people. We simply need the same quality of governance for everyone.
Black People, remember that white Democrats don’t care about racial justice for black people. They care about beating Republicans, and not offending too many of their white Republican cousins in the process.
Our politics is not and cannot be Democrat politics. Our politics is revolutionary politics, and when the Democrats balk at the kind of revolutionary politics we need to be made whole, we must, from time to time, shut Dems down.