Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 07:36:05 -0600 From: "Richard D. Mohr" ______________________________________________________________________ Against Grassroots Politics by Richard D. Mohr (February 1996) "Power To The People" was a slogan that epitomized the radical 1960s and a whole style of politics -- grassroots organizing of the masses directed at seizing power for the masses. Recently from within the gay community there have issued renewed calls for structuring gay politics as a grassroots movement. Some calls have unsurprising sources, like NGLTF's think-tank director John D'Emilio, but others are shockers. Conservative gay columnist Marvin Liebman has insisted that "to achieve our aims, we should learn the importance of local grassroots organization." Curiously: he cites arch-homophobe Louis Farrakhan as a model for gay politics. Now there are only two things wrong with "Power To The People": 1) Power and 2) the People. To a minority, The People can be deadly. Ask any Tutsi. Undeterred by this problem, John D'Emilio defends "popular grassroots movements" based on an argument from history: history teaches us that "mass protest and political organizing" is what works to establish what he calls "progressive change." His evidence is the 1930s labor movement. But this very movement and the era it molded was a catastrophe for gay people. As charted in George Chauncey's _Gay New York_, the vibrant and visible gay world that existed from the 1890s to the early 1930s -- an era of High Republicanism -- was annihilated in FDR's labor-driven Democratically-dominated 1930s. Gay visibility was an easy target for the family values espoused by the communist-inspired communitarian-shaped labor movement. The more grassrooted that movement was the worse off we were. What is more, the flop of organized labor in the 1980s and 1990s should suggest that, the worth of its aims aside, grassroots politics is not even effective anymore. Urvashi Vaid has railed: "We enact our lesbian agenda by building a movement for power. Why are we afraid of power? We surely will not make things more fucked-up than they already are." Fear is not the problem. Rather, grassrooters misunderstand both the value of power to gays and the nature of power in the contemporary era. The values that gays are most deeply and frequently denied are those of dignity, respect, and equality, not those of happiness, well-being, and liberty. When gays _are_ subject to diminished happiness and liberty -- when as gay we, for example, are bashed or lose jobs -- this diminution is chiefly a vehicle for indignity, insult, and degradation: it says you are less than fully human, you are scum. Power can get you liberty and maybe even happiness, but it cannot get you dignity and respect, any more than a gun held to a person's head can command authentic religious allegiance. What gets us dignity and respect is raising social consciousness -- and that does not occur through political actions analogous to a mass labor strike or a stampeding herd. We raise social consciousness of gays and gay issues in two ways -- by making personal contacts and by revising culturally received opinions. The former is best done one-on-one. That we are everywhere and not, in the main, ghettoized means that one- on-one contacts hold out great hope for change. For eventually everyone will know first-hand that someone important in their life is gay. However, to avoid the "some of my best friends are..." syndrome, this strategy must be supplemented with general cultural reform. We have to tackle those matrixes of values and ideas (for example, stereotypes) that are so entrenched in society that they determine how the general population perceives and judges us. This engagement must be a cultural project, not a narrowly political one. Indeed consistent political progress will be made only when we change the general cognitive atmosphere and the effective feelings of the "common man," constituted and driven as they are by bogeys and vestiges of taboo. Our ability to effect such cultural change is facilitated by the fact that in the current age power itself is increasingly configured in cultural rather than political or physical forms. Power as pushing and shoving has given way to power as lure and enticement. Power as repression and coercion has become power as regulation and manipulation. Cyberspace is replacing physical space, and the television has already replaced the gun as the chief means of social control. As a result, the rally, the union strike, and the town meeting are becoming as antiquated as the telegraph as means of both communication and direct action. But the good news is that gays have or are quickly coming to have creative access to the means of cultural transformation -- the media, even media empires, the arts even without the NEA, books, magazines, editorial pages, educational forums, talk-shows, movies, plays, computer networks, and religious study groups. You would have to be dead not to have noticed that outside the political and legislative realms, the social and cultural climate for gays has radically improved over the last few years. And already this cultural ground-shift is beginning to translate into political change. In last November's elections, we won in Maine against a particularly insidious anti-gay state referendum drive and we won because the referendum's organizers could no longer count on unthinking, automatic visceral responses to gays in a political fight that played out as a straight up-or-down vote on whether gays are good. To a large degree our hopes for continuing social and political progress lie along vectors of cultural transformation rather than with mass marches, telephone trees, leafletting, get- out-the-vote drives, and all the other debris of dated grassroots campaigns. -30-