Obama and King

Politico's Glenn Thrush has a shockingly thoughtful piece (shocking because it's in Politico) on the ideological intersections and divergences of Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr.'s careers. It gets at the enduring race-class divide in American political philosophy--as further separated by time, circumstances, political realities and personal temperament. Thrush's is a brilliant survey, which I recommend very much.

I do, however, somewhat differ with its suggestive conclusion, which is what makes stuff like Thrush's piece worth reading. Let's get right to it:

King dealt with issues of class and economic equality gingerly at the start of his career.

That was changing as he delivered his speech 50 years ago. “I Have a Dream” is a race speech--but King did allude to a broader movement to address economic inequality in the nation’s cities....

King didn’t embrace economic inequality as a central theme until the summer of 1967, when he began organizing a multiracial Poor People’s Campaign, an unsuccessful effort to prod the Johnson administration to pass a national economic bill of rights. He was murdered a year later supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

Yet even at the end of his life, King--unlike Obama--viewed his struggle as fundamentally racial, according to his biographer Taylor Branch.

It's the final passage's essence that I disagree with, although I readily confess that my disagreement comes in the form of a hard, yet unprovable, assumption.

It seems to me that when assessing King's career, one must look at the totality of its movement, its trajectory, its unfinishedness--and King's trajectory was clearly, I would argue, toward a synthesis that heavily favored a class-over-race analysis of economic inequality. (The commie-paranoid J. Edgar Hoover undoubtedly agreed.) Had King lived but another 10 years, that trajectory would have been confirmed, I think--blending, in the process, King's ideological approach more intimately with Obama's.

Comments

[AnneJ]

I have a dream.. of what could have been had he lived and been successful with his poor peoples' campaign.

I have a dream... Of republicans actually working with this president out of concern for the country.

Hey, I can dream can't I?

[Peter G]

I would agree with you too. There are other things King left to later years. He didn't really touch on the war in Vietnam until 67 either. There wasn't much point to diluting his message until the war became unpopular. He was still ahead of the curve in 67 and was criticized for his words. What might he have achieved when the main legal battles on civil rights had been won and he had more freedom to address other issues we can only speculate. But I believe you are correct, the trajectory was clear.

[Robert Lipscomb]

I have no idea what Rev. King would have done.

If fifty years later, we want to our political agenda about class rather than race, we must convince white workers to join us. Neither they nor anyone else will never join any group that vilifies them and ridicules them.

If we want to win, we must find a way to engage them. Engagement always requires respect, empathy and validation of the other person's feelings. Bill Clinton was ridiculed for, "I feel your pain", but it was highly effective.

While I completely disagree with the conclusions reached by Reagan democrats, they were not "wrong" to feel the way they did. A well worn chart used by the left documents that median wages stagnated beginning in the early 70's and lower incomes dropped. That was just about the time African-Americans became partially economically enfranchised. White workers were not bad people for adding one and one and getting three - especially with the help of Reagan.

If you want to win the game, then you have to win back the Reagan Democrats.

If you only want to win arguments, then make white workers your inferiors and your enemies.