TCG National Conference 2006 - Building Future Audience

Transcripts

National Conference 2006
Saturday, June 10
Transcript: Colin Greer,
“The Politics of Belonging”

Greer

If I may I’ll take just a few minutes to tell you a little bit about me, so you’ll have some sense of the perspective that I’m coming with and from. As you just heard, I direct the New World Foundation, which is a small progressive foundation in New York City which funds community-based activism. We fund in communities all over the country and seven other countries and we fund only at the grassroots base, where we believe that organic opposition to regressive politics actually takes root and grows and develops.

We’re a foundation that’s unusual in that we began as a family foundation, created out of a robber baron fortune. The robber baron was responsible for the Haymarket Massacre back in 1886. His daughter became a labor organizer and decided to spend the money against her father’s interests. She in turn funded not only the Wallace presidential campaign in 1948, she funded Houdini and John Dewey. And the foundation moved from a family-based board 15 years ago to a community leadership board, so that our board now no longer has the kinds of people who hired me—the person who actually hired me was Hillary Clinton—we now are managed by a board that’s 80 percent leaders of communities around the country. So it’s sort of a national community foundation. Some years ago, the New York Times called us an “unapologetic liberal foundation” and we were actually offended by the title “liberal.” We are unapologetic but we think of ourselves as radically progressive. [Laughter and applause.] It allows us never to infringe the C3 tax codes because we are completely nonpartisan: We like neither party particularly.

So that’s the foundation. I come to the work with a lifelong interest in theatre but I’m a novice. So it is a little awesome actually to be speaking to an audience of theatre people, as someone who grew up absolutely theatre-obsessed, but it was the path not taken. Speaking to you is, as my daughter would say, a very awesome experience. In that context I need to say that I come to you not quite understanding the audience and so as I have learned from John Eisner at the Lark in introducing a Bare Bones, you are actually sharing in a rehearsal process here, and I am not completely off-book so I am going to refer to my notes. I will try to be concise enough so that you’ll have time for questions.

Let me first say a little about the context that I think we face in the country at this time. Not necessarily an unusual context but certainly an immediate and pressing one. The first element in how I would identify the context is that we live in the face of a ruthless imperium. That we have a president and an administration that have gone beyond the legitimate framework of autocratic government in the United States. Seven hundred and fifty pieces of legislation have been sent back to Congress because the president believed they contravened presidential power. The use of wire-tapping and intelligence services to break down the free operations of a free society. The stealing of elections on a grand scale, which I’ll say more about later. The preemptive role of the U.S. in the world. One could go on ad infinitum. But it is clearly an imperium and America clearly is the axis of a global corporate market aggression on the world. I say that without actually a value judgment and try to be just descriptive. [Laughter.] If I were making a value judgment I would use a lot more adjectives. [Laughter.] But I’ve learned that this description of the world as it is works without the adjectives.

In that context I need to say this is not an unusual position for America to find itself in. It is the American default position, that we have windows of progressive activism and flourish, and then retreat to what’s called normalcy, and normalcy in America tends to be reaction. The most recent of course was McCarthy, but there are many, many examples of this from the beginning of the republic. So I say that only to say that we’ve been here before, we can find a way out of it again, but it is powerful and forceful with new kinds of powers because of the power over the media and the power of communications and the short memory span of the American public.

So it is fearsome. But at the same time the thing I would quickly draw your attention to is that progressive life flourishes in America. Progressive ideas are developed, organizations on the ground in every state are fighting battles for power at the state level; in many states they’re winning power. Not always through the Democratic party but through community-based organizations. You see signs of it on the margin, because they’re not reported heavily, but if you look you see the polls are showing that 15 to 1 Americans see the Republican party as the party of wealth. That’s a big change in ten years. It hasn’t been developed as a political electorate at this point but it is a point of view that’s very significant. In the last three years, positions on gay marriage in America have changed dramatically, from 10 percent being in favor to 48 percent being in favor. That’s a dramatic change for an intervention that everybody said was poorly timed, ill-considered, and lost the election in ’04. It’s a tremendous breakthrough in terms of civil rights and antidiscrimination, and the public has moved in that direction. Religious polling shows that most religious groups, including evangelicals, are looking to pursue the social justice mission of their faith. They mean different things by it in different places, but there is clearly a gathering of steam around an anti-market domination of our worldview.

Now there’s a barrier to that progressive force moving to movement potential. In America, change happens through social movements. It’s not a parliamentary democracy where you can un-elect somebody who’s there except every four year period, and then very limited because of the role of the money in elections.

Movements grow in America out of the base. They grow out of artists, they grow out of grassroots organizers. It’s through those roots in the arts that language begins to be reformed and activism takes on a more daring and aggressive role. That’s being cut off in America right now by the force of and the emergence over time of what I think of as a political class. A political class in America is that group of people that you would think of as professional wonks, pollsters, message-creators, politicians, campaigners, funders and donors - there’s a class of people that shape what’s legitimate and doable in American politics. And for a few decades now that political class has been infatuated with what it thinks of as the fixed center in American political life. They think this is a centrist nation and that political life can only occur close to that center. That political class emerged pretty much after 1972 and grew over the course of the ’70s and ’80s.

In 1972 the American Left, and there was then a Left in America, was destroyed in the same way the Right was destroyed in 1964. The Goldwater defeat was actually replicated on the Left by the McGovern defeat. The McGovern defeat was so devastating that professional politicians basically cut themselves off from Left-thinking. And cut themselves off entirely from the base of people that make political life real at the local level. This is post Civil Rights, the height of the women’s movement, it’s the zenith of the environmental movement, and at that point all of the movement force that’s in communities all over the country was cut off. And we went to a government by NGOs, big Washington-based organizations that negotiated with government what was tolerable for public policy.

And between 1972 and 1980, that retreat from a serious progressive politics was intensified by the misreading of a series of elections. The political class misread the Carter defeat. They thought Carter had been thoroughly rejected by the American public and forgot that Carter was actually rejected because of the Iranian hostage crisis, and that the shadow Reagan administration had directly negotiated with the hostage-takers to hold the hostages through the election, so that Reagan promised them a better deal after the election. That’s documented—I’m not being conspiratorial about this. But the election was lost marginally because Carter couldn’t bring the hostages home. Whatever other dissatisfactions there were with Carter, he lost marginally.

And then there was Ronald Reagan who defeated, we’re told, the Soviet Union. And that defeat was again misread. Because we’re told it was a market economy beating the Soviet Communist economy. But in fact it was the mobilized resources of the state—not the market economy but the military and nuclear might of the state that was weighed against the Soviet Union. And it was this state versus that state that triumphed. The market economy had very little to do with it. It was the force of the state. And of course it was also pushed by movement potential in the country because the freeze movement was pushing and pushing so that Reagan’s room to maneuver on nuclear negotiations was pushed to a level of readiness to make deals that there hadn’t been before. So that moment was misread both in terms of what caused the victory and what the role of an active American public was in that victory.

And then the Clinton victory, jumping a few years, was also misread. There it was understood that the victory came because you had a Democratic candidate who was charismatic, who understood the issues and had a third way, a way in between the extremes and offered us a chance to create a new kind of politics. When in fact what we had was a candidate who won marginally because Perot was in the race. And Perot was actually running on behalf of the American working class, ironically. So in fact Clinton won marginally because the vote had been taken away from the Right by a new working-class consciousness that was mobilized around Perot and a new belief in the possibility of a decent and free election.

So you have this political class that’s grown over time, socialized by a series of misreadings, which leads them to an enormous crisis and collapse of imagination. They have no idea what really is possible in America and they keep using polls to predict the future, forgetting that polls only really tell you about what is immediate. They’re very useful in tactical election campaigns. They’re very, very un-useful in terms of building a future.

I remember speaking to pollsters during the freeze movement and they were saying the freeze movement has to begin to scale down its demands, because the “public,” this hypothetical American public, won’t accept it. And in a question debate much like this, I asked one of the pollsters, were you three years ago in your polls able to predict the rise of the freeze movement? And of course he said, no, there was no sign of it in the public. So why can your polls tell us where it goes, if you couldn’t tell us it was coming?

And similarly pollsters now are looking at America in this very fashionable polling system now that compares American polls with Canadian and shows that Canadian public is moving on a progressive trajectory and the Americans are becoming more reactionary and more patriarchal. They used “patriarchal” as one of the lynchpins in the analysis. And when I was talking to those folks, I asked really what was for me a very simple question—I hope it will be simple for you: In 1951 was it possible in the polls to know that in 1953 there would be a civil rights movement that would change the face of America? No, it wasn’t in the polls. The polls would have told you that America wasn’t ready to desegregate, categorically. So it says nothing about imagination, nothing about what people can dream, what people can enact.

So the political class is lost in the narrowed frame. And here’s where I want to make a transition to the person that spoke to you last year, George Lakoff. When Ben asked me to give this presentation, the initial interest was around the fact that I disagree pretty profoundly with George Lakoff. I’m not actually going to use this occasion to go off on George Lakoff. [Laughter.] But I’d be glad to in questions. [Laughter.] But Lakoff, I’d like to talk about in terms of the political class. He is actually, you know, a card-carrying member of the political class I’m describing, and so what George does is with a linguistic training do what my father-in-law who was a great advertising copywriter on Madison Avenue did without thinking very much: He changes messages. And you can have impact top-down if you’re selling products, changing messages, but you don’t build from the ground up and build a public mandate for a worldview and an agenda with message-changing.

My barber, the other day, used an analogy I thought was interesting. He said that if he has someone sitting in that chair and says, “Would you like me to bleach your hair?”, generally he gets a response like, “No, that sounds kind of dangerous, it’s going to hurt the roots and bring all kinds of chemicals into my hair,” but if he says, “Can I lighten your hair” then people are much more ready to do it. So I think of the messaging at this point in American political life as the difference between bleaching and lightening. We need more than that to make serious change in America.

I think George’s notion of the elephant is a very interesting one, and I’ll talk just a few minutes about that. The elephant in the room for George, you know about. The elephant in the room for me is what I call the myth of the mainstream. Everything the political class does and thinks is predicated on the idea that there is an American mainstream and that it’s a fixed position. It forgets that in fact the center is always a relative point between two extremes and the extremes are in play and as the extremes get pushed in one way or another, the center changes. It’s not a fixed position.

The important thing about progressive politics is to know you’re always working with the modification of the fixed position. It isn’t fixed, the center, and the shaping of the American public mind. The elephant is really for me the myth of the mainstream.

It takes me to the elephant image because… I don’t know if people here know the George Orwell short story, “Shooting an Elephant”? It’s a wonderful short story in which Orwell describes being a British pasha soldier in India and an elephant had charged a tent or two and then retreated and it was clear to him that it was a pretty peaceful elephant who’d been frightened by some people. And so George went out to chase the elephant, and he had his gun, and he had it within sights, and he could shoot it, and he realized it was an innocent elephant and why shoot it? But behind him were these crowds and crowds of Indians who had come to see the white ruler show why they rule—shoot the elephant. You know, save us from this future danger. And he said it was clear to him in that moment that he didn’t want to shoot the elephant. The elephant didn’t need to be shot. But if he didn’t shoot the elephant, the public behind him, the Indian public, would lose their belief in the power of the British empire. It was all in that gun at that moment. And so he shot the elephant.

And the elephant that I’m talking about, the elephant about the myth of the mainstream, needs to be shot. It’s the reverse of Orwell. It’s not being shot for fear that there is a public out there that will hate you, lose their trust in you, and you’ll lose your position. So the elephant needs to be shot. This elephant needs to be shot. It can be shot with a thousand bullets, or it can be shot by simply shining the light of truth on it. And my hope is that we can shine the light of truth on it—and then maybe shoot it with a thousand bullets. [Laughter.]

It’s based on the misunderstanding that the Right wing’s electoral victories in all these twenty-some years are in fact very marginal victories. They never win by very much. They are extremely smart at building the power that comes from elected office. So they have created a political power that comes out of a marginal electoral base. At best they have about 30 percent of the public that unthinkingly will vote for them, and even that can be diminished around certain issues. But they use the wins, and they’ve been building wins through stealth politics for a long time. They use them extremely effectively. And the political class has misunderstood that as a public mandate. But it isn’t a public mandate.

Let me say a few things about the fragility of what looks like a public mandate. If you look at the election in 2000, no question about the fact that that wasn’t a mandate. If you look at the election in 2004, it becomes maybe, maybe some gains were made. When you look at that closely it turns out that the victory was a combination of a number of factors. First, it was the use of security. There were something like 25 to 30 false alarms during that election period where we went to red alert. So the security issue was put front and center on the public mind, even though there was no pressing security question. We were at war. Critical ingredient. The Republicans outspent the Democrats in swing states, not total spending. The Republicans stole elections. We have a history now—there’s a wonderful piece by Robby Kennedy in the current issue of Rolling Stone that documents very, very closely how the election was stolen in Ohio, Florida and New Mexico. So we have a ruthless misuse of the electoral process. In addition to the cheating you have the very, very ineffective Democratic party strategy - cut off from the base, not working with local people. In Florida alone in 2004 there was not one Democratic party official that spoke Spanish. So they have not been serious about building the electorate. They pulled out of something like 25 states before election day because they decided they weren’t winnable, which meant that the Republican plurality went up, because the Democratic plurality wasn’t engaged. So Bush was campaigning in New York that he couldn’t possibly win and built the vote numbers, while Kerry left states—there was no office in Atlanta by the time of election day, no Kerry office in Atlanta, so the Democratic party vote went down. So it looked like quite a large, 3 million, plurality but in fact it was a combination of ineffective tactics and some very bad electoral fraud in several states. I won’t go into the details of the fraud but it’s a good article, extremely well researched, and fascinating that it had to be published in Rolling Stone and not in the Times, not in the Washington Post, not on television.

And then look at the public a little more closely. Look at the entertainment the public chooses. The American public, to the extent that there is a public of any kind of cohesion, loves to watch the movies of Hollywood and the shows of Broadway. Go to see Wicked, like it or not, Louisiana and Virginia are sitting all around me and North Dakota and South Dakota, we’re listening to a play that is almost explicitly a description of the Bush Administration. [Laughter.]People choose progressive politics for their entertainment. Look at what happened to the Schiavo case. Look at what happened to gay marriage this week. Look what happened to the Clinton impeachment.

The public is saying no to the Right-wing cultural agenda. But the political class is telling us this public is really cultivated in the mind of Kansas. And Tom Frank’s Kansas book is a metaphor for the American public. And both the book, the story about Kansas and the American public, all three are wrong-headed, because they take the position that race and gender are simply cultural issues, they’re identity politics, and they have nothing to do about winning elections in America. They have everything to do with winning elections in America, they are what America is about, they are the nature of the struggle we face. Unless we deal directly with the fact that the civil rights movement is unfinished, that the women’s movement is not only unfinished but being rolled back, there can be no progressive politics in America. It’s not simply “identity politics.” It’s the identity of the nation that’s at stake. And it’s real politics.

If you look what’s happening in South Dakota and the ban on abortion, and the unbelievable legislation that was passed in Indiana, which is the direct opposite of the abortion ban but run by the same people, which is in Indiana a woman who brings her baby to term if she’s drug-addicted is imprisoned on a felony. In one state you have to have an abortion if you’re drug-addicted and in the other state you’re not allowed to have an abortion because it’s immoral. And yet despite the outrage of those conditions you have the centrist politicians like Hillary Clinton arguing that we have to find morals to talk about abortion because the Right has claimed the moral agenda.

Well, the abortion issue, reproductive rights issue, race and affirmative action, those are moral issues. They grew out of an American moral consciousness and we sublimate our morals if we really believe that we have to be cool and calm in the face of this outrageous assault. Outrageous assault requires outraged response. Now, violence is not necessarily the other side of that impatience. Engaged, political forcefulness is other the other side of that.

And here’s another place where the political class really misses the boat entirely. Messages without forceful message-carriers really don’t help any. A clever message without a charismatic deliverer is not going to work with the American public. Every time there has been a strong progressive movement, there has been a base, and there’s been an articulate and forceful communicator.

When FDR was bringing through the New Deal administration, he was picking out legislation that had been built in the states. It wasn’t invented in Washington in one weekend; it was built in the states. But he basically said, we have nothing to fear but ourselves. It was a forceful container for a new agenda. We don’t have a forceful container because the cool minds of the political class are preventing us from seriously engaging. Their minds are reinforced by the way funding is distributed So that the folks who are likely to be more active, more articulate, more dramatic and more demanding really get dramatically reduced funding. Too much of progressive life is depending on philanthropic funding. And I’ll say a bit more about that soon but you know it well from the theatre world that you are unhealthily dependent on the beneficence of the wealthy. And sometimes it is very beneficent and sometimes it’s controlling and forces you to look to outcomes that might not be your first choice. Certainly that’s true of community activism in the political arena.

So I see the myth of the mainstream leading to two major characteristics in the political class. One I like to call the politics of calm and the other I call the politics of belonging. Politics of calm are basically cool it out, don’t get associated with the sixties. Whatever you do, don’t get associated with the sixties. That was a violent time and we do not want to be violent. That was a time when progressives were fooled by the Soviet Union. They thought that Communism was a good thing. Don’t get caught up in that. So whatever you do be very restrained in how you present yourself and chase the Right. They’ve got the right angle on what the public wants. And take a slice of the Right. Get the more benign side of it and frame your agenda around that.

The politics of calm is basically keeping the national women’s groups out of South Dakota in this battle against the abortion ban. It’s local activists and young women in there fighting it out—the national groups are staying out of it. Imagine however though, if the wonkish political class had been daring, say, in the Clinton Administration. The deficit—the big target that had to be removed. Reagan had warned the American public and certainly warned the political class that the deficit was a vehicle by which Republicans were able to say there’s no money for public services, there’s no money for public investment. They cultivated the deficit as a political strategy. So what did Mr. Clinton and the new “third way” wonks do? They decided well, we’ll get rid of the deficit. So they got rid of the deficit and then what happened? Because he’d actually been cultivating relationships with the market, the market then took that deficit in tax breaks in the beginning of the new Bush era. Rather than saying, we will use the deficit to spend on the public and use it as an investment in the re-rigging of the American economy. We didn’t do that. We passed NAFTA instead. We gave away the satellite system. The satellite system alone in 1992 would have paid off the deficit if we’d not simply given it away to the communications industry. But it was given away, and the deficit was reduced on the backs of the quality of life of America. And that led to welfare reform. Now, welfare reform for many people was a complicated process. Isaiah Berlin had a wonderful phrase in which he said when you give up on complexity you get tyranny. And so I’m very much eager to look at the complexity of an issue. Welfare was extremely complex. But now because welfare was diminished and reduced and removed in the way it was, and the women and families who depended on it reduced in public esteem in the way that they were, we now have a Right wing that’s fairly legitimate, at the Hudson Institute, calling for a reform of child labor, arguing that child labor laws actually deny the child the right to work.

So having given up, not standing firm on not the policy of welfare but the principle of welfare, we gave up very steadily the principle of public support for the children in our society and the commons in general.

So, the politics of calm leads us to a kind of paralysis. And the politics of belonging is a fascinating one. There’s an interesting new book by Todd Gitlin, who was once the head of SDS. And he talks about how he put his flag out after 9/11 and we underestimate the value of the flag and the progressive need to get in touch with our patriotism because we’re being left behind on patriotism. The Left was too violent in the 1960s and we have to stop doing that.

Think about the flag for a second. It’s not the same issue as patriotism. The flag is the flag. Hillary Clinton’s new proposed legislation to criminalize the burning of the flag is in fact a deep infringement on free speech; the burning of the flag is not an infringement on patriotism. So to associate patriotism with the flag is in fact idolatrous and those folks of faith ought to be very clear about that.

Nevertheless the flag has been associated with patriotism and has led to this politics of belonging, where people want to wave the flag and say, yeah, we may disagree with you about health care reform but we really are in there with you on the war. And that led to a tremendously serious problem in ’04. Five hundred thousand women in Florida who had voted for Gore in 2000 voted for Bush in 2004 because of the security issue. Because the patriotism flag was waved so loudly. It’s a big like the Monty Python movie Life of Brian. In Life of Brian there’s that wonderful scene where people say “I’m an independent person,” “I’m independent,” “I’m independent,” “I’m an individual,” “I’m an individual,” “I’m an individual.” And someone says, “I’m not an individual” and they turn around and kill that person. [Laughter.] That’s sort of marketing freedom to the world.

And the politics of belonging is not to notice that. The politics of belonging is to think about how you get elected in the next election and not the horror of the child that was killed in the recent bombing when Zarqawi was assassinated. Not that that wasn’t the logic of our policy there or that it wasn’t an improvement to have a killer removed from the scene but the fact that there was no lament for the child is indicative of the way in which we try to belong by cutting off our sense of what’s going on, our own conscience and forcefulness that that conscience would lead us to.

So what about forcefulness? When two sides engage, the winner won’t be the one with the better message. I’m not saying the message is unimportant, but it’ll be the person who’s there in a committed fashion. And here’s where the politics of belonging and the politics of calm get into a serious difficulty. There is this thing I think of as the thin line; the great German philosopher Adorno talked about the thin line that separates us from what could be better than we have, and the same thin line separates us what could be worse than what we have. Treading that thin line is a very difficult process. Because indeed, you can provoke the worst in pursuit of the better. There’s a lot of examples of that in world history. The 20th century is loaded with it.

The fact of the matter is when emotions rise to a fever pitch, that is when movements are in process, they can move to the Right or the Left. And where the best organization is with the most forceful commitment of a worldview and imagination and vision is, is where the power will accrete. And in the last 20 years progressives have generated no forceful image. No forceful leadership. In fact, Obama in the Senate two weeks ago was interviewed and asked why is it that Democrats don’t stand for anything these days? And Obama said, “That’s not true. Democrats will stand for anything!” [Laughter.] So the thin line is occupied by progressives in a quiet calmed belonging fashion.

The fight in South Dakota is a quick and fascinating example about this. The activists on the ground are terrified of nationalizing the South Dakota ban on abortion because they feel it will disrupt the quietness of local politics. Which is exactly why the Republicans chose South Dakota to lead this initiative. There are 11 states waiting to follow it but South Dakota is a quiet state. To be hard-nosed in South Dakota makes you feel a little uncomfortable. Nationalizing the issue is in fact the only way to put that issue in the Supreme Court with a real clear message from the public at large that you can’t be a reactionary on this one because we won’t tolerate it. The voice of the public is quiet because of the quietness of South Dakota politics. The refusal to nationalize has become a kind of progressive political class response. Whereas if you remember what Governor Wallace did in Alabama around desegregation—and fortunately at that time we had a justice department that would intervene—but he basically broke U.S. law and said, “I will not desegregate.” What they’re doing in South Dakota is breaking U.S. law, saying they will not permit abortions. It happens to be the law of the land right now that abortions are legally protected. They are infringing it and there’s no justice department action, and there’s no demand from anybody in the political class that that in fact be challenged. So you have this belonging thing that puts us on the thin line, letting the force of it go to the Right. If the force of it goes to the Right, you will get movement emergence on the Right.

Fortunately that’s not the whole story. Just as there are community theatres exploring new language and new exploration of the experience of the Other, there are community organizations all over the country where local leaders, organic organizations are challenging the power of this Right in their communities. They’re doing it courageously and they’re winning in a number of places. It’s fascinating that if you look at the ’04 election data, every city in America with 500,000 persons or more, no matter where they are, red state or blue, voted Democratic. Every state with 50,000 or more, half of those voted Democratic. The youth vote, 18-24, went 3:1 for Kerry. The Hispanic vote was more than the same proportion. The most interesting one was men with guns. Men with guns voted 70 percent for George Bush. Nobody’s surprised at that.
Sixty-eight percent of men with guns who belong to unions voted for John Kerry.

So being part of an organized political force is critical. And yet that union force that’s so critical is also being reduced in its power by the political class. If you look at the New York subway strike, Toussaint led the union out on strike, and the press publicized it as a leader who was imposing complete difficulty at a difficult time on the public. It’s Christmas, we ought to be able to get around and spend, and this is not a good thing to do to the American public. Interestingly enough, he went out on strike not for the protection of his senior union members but to protect new workers coming into the union. That’s exactly the same reason that the French were out on strike in a general strike for three weeks. Exactly the same issue. Are we going to protect young people or are they simply going to be like immigrants, cannon fodder for the market machine?

And when Toussaint went to jail while they were rioting in France, here no significant labor leader came to New York to stand in solidarity with him. Not a single one. So here we have the only significant leader of color in the union movement going out on behalf of young people, and not a peep.

The Economist had a piece recently in which it talked about how American market developments are an aggressive forceful powerful daring entry into world global markets. And Europeans, the French in particular it said, have a kind of weak-kneed, socialized, spoiled un-daring business class. That may or may not be true. But what’s interesting, the reverse of that is true in terms of political debate and political battle. The French went out to the streets, the Chileans just went out, the high school strike in Chile recently. The Chileans went out. Kids won’t go to school because their teachers aren’t being paid enough. In the U.S. we have the reverse. We have this aggressive market force and a very, very quieted political culture and debate.

But inside the communities that I’m talking about, and there are many of them, they are the communities that elected the new mayor of L.A., brown-black coalitions, cross-ethnic coalitions, cross-race coalitions, gay and farmer alliances. Gay and farmer alliances! They’re winning victories all over the country at the local level. The way it preceded the New Deal. If you think about the thin line that I mention and you think about these people in mobilization, the way I like to describe it is that these are people who are not the violent side opposite of calm. They are the engaged, restrained other side of calm. You don’t see riots in ghettos. You don’t see soldiers on the front line mutinying. You don’t see teachers leaving their schools. But you see the mobilization at the local level to say no to the assault of the national policy machine on communities. And they’re extremely restrained but they’re extremely forceful. And that restraint and forcefulness is the power that will keep us on the progressive side of that thin line as movements emerge in America. They need to be deeply supported; they’re deeply under-funded. And they need to be constantly in motion. You don’t win that battle once and for all—it’s constantly in motion.

An interesting example for me is—and I’ll try to close out on this one—is the way Brokeback Mountain echoed what happened with The Producers when it was a first a movie. Do you remember the line from The Producers, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it”? Well within five years that was advertising copy. I think it was either Hertz or Avis that used it. Brokeback Mountain, “I wish I could quit you,” is now advertising copy. It’s being used in a series of ads I’ve seen in New York. So very quickly an intervention that shifts ground while it continues to have impact underground, as clearly Brokeback Mountian is having impact underground, over ground in the political class it’s gets stolen as a message and then used in a variety of other places. You’ve heard it with protests—songs. Protest songs. “We Shall Overcome,” talking about competition between Wachovia and Citibank. And one of them will. [Laughter.]

So it’s very important to realize the intervention is not in itself enough. It’s important to have done the movie. It’s important to have a theatre piece that opens people up. It’s important to keep doing it. It’s not a once-and-for-all affair. People have to be mobilized and kept mobilized. Organizations have to keep renewing their membership. And it’s very hard to do this in this culture when so much is dependent on philanthropic resources.

And philanthropy is not only extremely overcautious, it’s very afraid of its tax position. So it in fact oversees a politics of calm. It doesn’t want to have disruption, doesn’t want to have congressional hearings. Rather than say, let’s have congressional hearings, let’s get this out, let’s argue about it—no, let’s avoid the congressional hearings. So the way in which things are funded adds a layer of calm and quietness to a politics that’s roiling. I mean, people are dying, we’re at war.

Interesting thing: I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the old Marxist organizational life of the 1930s, but the Trotskyites were the people that argued for permanent revolution. And that comes out of an interesting American tradition. Emerson talked about the need for permanent reform. That you never can finish the process of reform—it’s an ongoing trajectory to an imagined goal. The light of the tunnel. The Trotskyites believed you never even worried about the light at the end of the tunnel because keeping things in motion…

[BREAK IN TAPE]

…same model, but it’s now permanent war. Instead of permanent revolution, we have permanent war. And in permanent war you continue to do what you want when you want to do it. Commander-in-chief is the ruler. So it really is a direct translation from Trotsky and the faith-based organizing of the Republican Right is in fact a direct copy of the Communist cell-party model for organizing top-down control of community organized bases with cellular leaders all over the country. They have in fact used that model. They have a precinct captain for every 300 people in every area they go into. They’ve actually taken the Communist party model, which is fascinating.

So you have this Right-wing revolutionary movement, in effect, and a political class in America that’s afraid of it and believes it’s captured the American mind. And it hasn’t. And so it’s as though we were in a nightmare. I’d like to conclude with that image. [Laughter.]

Before you appreciate the politics of what I had to say, let me just read you this, because it’s a child’s poem that seems to me to sum up exactly the challenge. Somewhat oversimplified but it’s the simplicity of truth, I think. It’s Ogden Nash’s poem about his daughter Isabel.

Isabel was once asleep in bed
When a horrible dream crawled into her head
It was worse than a dinosaur, worse than a shark
Worse than an octopus oozing in the dark.
“Boo!” said the dream with a dreadful grin.

…You can see Bush?) [Laughter.]

“I’m going to scare you out of your skin.”
Isabel, Isabel didn’t worry
Isabel didn’t scream or scurry
Isabel had a cleverer scheme.
She just woke up and fooled that dream.

Thank you. [Applause.]

Question

Amazing stuff. What do you think of the leadership of the minority speaker in the Democratic congress, Nancy Pelosi?

Greer

What leadership?

Question

Of Nancy Pelosi. …Oh! [Laughter.] That was good.

Greer

Yeah, the immigration bill is a good example of it. There’s no responsible leadership. Their definition of responsibility is to actually sponsor the more humane of the bills but it’s a totally inhumane bill and no one will actually step outside of the box, and she won’t step outside of the box. We ought to be doing better than this.

If you’re really serious about challenging immigration, and one wonders why we’d want to do that, given that we’re a nation of immigrants, but if you are going to challenge it there’s a simple way to do it and that would be to triple minimum wage. If Americans were doing those jobs the immigrant demand will be much less. We won’t triple the minimum wage. We’ll build a wall on the border instead, and she basically agreed to the troops on the border. So that leadership is nonexistent as far as I can see.

And Biden, on the other side, is fascinating. Talk about the politics of belonging. In order to oppose the gay marriage ban said here we are dealing with insecurity on our border—how can we deal with gay marriage? So let’s screw the immigrants and fight against this idiocy? But rather than saying we’ve been caught in a scapegoating model.

We need to remember Bonhoffer. You know, Bonhoffer was the great German minister who said they came for the Jews and I didn’t say anything, they came for the Communists and I didn’t say anything, they came for the artists, they came for the gays, and when they finally came for me there was no one there to fight for me. And it’s not immigrants against gays, it’s about a view of America as an open society embracing its differences. [Applause.]

Question

Could you speak to Russ Feingold?

Greer

He’s great. [Laughter.] Russ is great. I think there’s no chance that he’s going to become the President of the United States. But if in fact he doesn’t… Let me just say Paul Wellstone was a very good man, close friend of mine. But what Paul did is so characteristic and Russ is not as well rooted in a progressive politics as Paul. But what Paul did when he began his exploratory committee for the presidential campaign—he hired this political class and they immediately started to tell him he couldn’t do what he knew he needed to do. And so even when he won the battles he’d exhausted his staff. You’ve got to be able to say “I’m not interested in that. For 30 years you guys have proved the only thing we can guarantee is you’ll be wrong.” The political class has failed in every campaign. Schram ran the Kerry campaign, wouldn’t let Kerry fight against the Swift Boat nonsense, so you had the soldier who was paralyzed, wouldn’t let him fight because you don’t fight, it turns off the public, and they control the candidate and the battle inside takes up so much energy which should be used in the campaign. So I worry only that Russ will build around him a team of people who know how to do it, but what they know how to do is fail and lose.

Question

Can you talk a little bit more about the quality of life [inaudible]…

Greer

Right. I think, obviously, it’s complex. Because the differences in how individuals use their wealth are quite wide-scale. But I think the impact of infatuation of America’s romance with wealth is the issue, and I think wealthy people who are unconscious about the costs that are paid for their wealth experience themselves in dangerous territory. They feel on the defensive. Without an analysis of how that wealth is accumulated, young people of wealth have little to do but hold onto it and protect it because they feel somebody else wants it and that’s been the education of the last 20 years. The hordes out there want what you’ve got. Their complaint is really only about their wanting it. Not an image if it being shared more equitably. I’m hesitant and you probably can hear it to say that wealth conditions people to calm, but I think that the ability for a narrow group of people to experience unprecedented wealth, this is wealth beyond what the pharaohs could have dreamed of, means that they easily retreat to autocratic solutions. And since that wealth was primarily in the last 20 years made on the kind of regeneration of business that came through the unleashing of the market in the ’80s, there is a sense that business people, the command style of running an organization, is in fact the way to manage a society. So wealthy people are not only living on the fat on the land, they believe it’s better for the land to be ruled from the top down. It’s a kind of convergence of self-protection and belief that they know better. I wouldn’t want to be so simplistic as to say that young people who got wealthy are turned off to politics because for so many I know it’s not true. And for many of course it is. I think there a collapse of the Boomer generation. Not their children so much but the Boomers themselves, my generation, is really collapsed. It bought in and what I didn’t say about the political class is that the Boomer generation allowed us to feel close to power and close to the edge of change and we’re reluctant to give up the proximity to power and trust where power doesn’t yet exist. But power can be grown there.

Ben Cameron

Colin, thanks for being here today. When you and I had lunch part of what we talked about, that I hope you’ll share with us, is your resistance to Lakoff being about an imposition of a frame as opposed to a lot of your work, going into a community and harvesting, in a way. Could you share a little bit of that with us and talk about the importance of theatre vis-à-vis that?

Greer

Sure. I meant to use the world “harvesting.” Ben liked it a lot when I used it at lunch. [Laughter.]

So I’ve described the political class working top-down and building what they called frames, and they have reframing projects all over the world. Poverty is no longer a word that should be used, according to the Lakoff model. We should be talking about an economy that’s good for all rather than combating poverty. And with abortion we should be talking about access to reproductive health, not abortion. There are millions and millions of dollars going into these reframing exercises. And I think what I was saying to Ben at lunch was that those exercises miss a number of critical things and we try to operate in a framework that’s quite different from that. What they miss is that people are remaking the language of politics all the time in the work they do. When they’re talking to each other - living wage campaign for example, which has now been successful all over theatre country, even successful in Florida when the presidential election went to Bush they passed the living wage amendments. The language of living wage came out of communities, came out of people being in action together.

What I was saying is that I think what we need to do and what we do at the foundation is we try to listen very closely to how people are talking about their own conditions. We try to invest in leaders who are sensitive to the needs for their organizations to be built in dialogue with their constituents, so that the richness of the experience, even the pain of the experience, comes into the work through people’s own language. And then the language of politics grows from that.

And it seemed to me that theatre people do the same thing, that theatre people are trying to explore the experience of the Other, walk in other people’s footsteps, find the language they hear through their internal third ear and bring it to a public and that the job of political professionals ideally would be to harvest that language. To listen to where it’s happening, to begin to take it to the next level and test whether in fact it has people being responsive to it. And where that happens to be the case to then invest in your media campaigns. But not to do it top-down so that people are forced to occupy ground that’s not their own.

Campaign finance reform is a very good case in point. It’s a nice phrase. Many millions were spent in polling to find the right phrase for it. And then foundations and donors said to community organizations, you all experience the problem with not being able to raise money for candidates. It never then said, how do you think about that experience? What would you say a serious way of talking about reform would look like and how would you talk about this to your constituents? No, it said, we’re going to do campaign finance reform. And we’re going to put money into it and if you want money for election work you’d better do it through this vehicle. And so many people didn’t get it. Nobody therefore heard that if you went to a community they would probably tell you about campaign finance reform, if you don’t give us campaign finance reform of primary campaigns, it’s not going to help, because we’re losing the primary. If you don’t use your control of public policy to force media conglomerates to give free time for elections the way they do in Europe, so you only have a three week campaign and everybody has access to television time, you aren’t going to reduce the price of elections. No matter what you do to control it nationally, money will leak through like water.

So if you listen to local people, they will tell you—here’s how we experience it. You can make all the rules you like about money and wealth—it will come through—people find the ways to get it through. If you really want to help us, do something about television, do something about primaries. So there is a consciousness on the ground that really allows ideas to grow from the direct experience of the problem.

On the theatre side, I’ve been fascinated in working with the Lark around the way a global language of justice is beginning to be shaped. I couldn’t tell you what that shape is yet but I know as people start to explore their differential experiences of injustice then issues begin to come to the fore and ways of experiencing those issues in ways they can’t if you’re involved in a national dialogue around shorthand fortune cookie statements. But as theatre people are struggling to build language to capture the powerful new solidarity that’s possible through global connections, there’s a kind of visceral understanding that for that to really produce solidarity it has to come through people’s experience.

You can’t have a $30 million millennium project, Jeffrey Sachs’s project, that spends however many years and $30 million to have a crucial finding. The crucial finding of Jeffrey Sachs’s research was, there’s poverty in the world. [Laughter.] And there’s a lot of it. And the second crucial finding was if we wanted to do something about it, we could. But nobody talked to local people about how do you do that? Nobody talked to local artists about, how would you frame this, how would you describe your experience of this, how would you describe your affront and outrage at this in a way that other people might join?

So listening to the roots and the arts is barely done except through the indigenous, independent voluntary ways in which you all do it and the organizations we fund do it. But it’s very very critical. The Culture Project does it from another point of view—it works on the issues. It works on the issues and tries to create dialogue around the issues. So the death penalty, for example, which everybody said was off the agenda, America’s not ready to deal with the death penalty. Really, theatre there made a significant difference. They actually did a private showing of The Exonerated for Governor Ryan in Illinois before he declared the moratorium on the death penalty. Couldn’t get a more direct relationship. Not causal, but it pushed him over the edge. The drama of it pushed him over the edge.

So theatre in terms of the issues and theatre in terms of actually building new language and then harvesting the good sense, wisdom and visceral experience of people in their work is critical. Paulo Freire had this when he opposed teaching reading by simply having textbooks that people learned to read from, and said, basically, have people talk about their experience. Identify the words of their experience and put those on your butcher block and let those be the first words people learn to read. Then they will read their own words and they will learn about the power of their own words and experience. And it led to a tremendous effect. Black slaves, another great example. Black slaves when they were denied the right to learn to read, reading became a critical thing to learn to do. It wasn’t a hypothetical, it was, we’re being denied this, it must be worth having, we’ll get it. And if "We'll get it" is in the local experience of people, and that "We'll get it" is what needs to be harvested into a political movement.

[Applause.]

Contact conference@tcg.org or Jenni Werner, National Conference Director at 212-609-5900 x233.