Are grass’s roots that much more impressive than trees’?

When I came to the center yesterday, it was clear that I had rolled in via Vélib’. “Be careful tomorrow with Vélib’,” one instructor warned me, because today’s general strike will make the bicycles extremely valuable. With at least the RER B scheduled to be out of commission, it’s entirely possible that I would have to walk to work, as every bike in the city will be in use by commuters displaced by the “perturbations,” which are nominally to protest government actions towards raising the retirement age and trimming civil service pensions.¹

At yesterday’s orientation for the new year-long students from Chicago, the warnings about the strike were repeated. “La grève,” students were told, is a part of French culture, and now that you’re in France, you should get used to it.

The idea of a general strike in the US strikes me as completely outrageous, and not just because only about 12% of the workforce is organized.² After all, only 8% of the French labor force is organized (yes, you read that correctly), but here the unions are “bien implantées.” Instead, the general strike makes no sense because there’s an American fetish for grassroots activism. I want to expand on this idea a bit here, so that, at least for me, I can try to figure out why political action feels so suffocating in the US. Suffocating and useless.

But before I continue, I want to throw this out: the closest thing we’ve had to a general strike in my political lifetime is the threat among huffy, self-interested libertarians to “go Galt.” The continued activity of the allegedly anti-free market US economy more or less proves that either the goGalters haven’t gone Galt of that none of them is, actually, or as a collective, as crucial to the US economy as John Galt is/was.³

The Tea Party and the Galteteers, though, will have to wait a bit, since, first, I want to talk about 2008. Barack Obama’s election, as Jay Smooth points out, was both a “huge, transcendent, symbolic moment” as well as “a good, but mundane, political moment that could turn out well only if we put four years of work into it.” Jay managed to capture my own ambivalence over the election, and, as I wrote about the 3CT confab “The Event of Obama,” one of the main take home messages of the election of Obama was the idea that we may have a President who, if not politically in line with the grassroots, at least might respect the efforts of the grassroots.⁴ Obama’s election seemed, as far as tactics were concerned, to be proof that if enough small-timers get together, massive change can occur. But although there are obvious mistakes with this belief—namely in the way that, once Obama had the nomination, he was able to mobilize the non-trivial organizational power of both labor unions and the DNC—the fantasy remains. Hillary Rodham Clinton was the establishment candidate, but the grassroots stepped in and said that, instead, they wanted Obama. Furthermore, Obama himself had worked as a community organizer, suggesting that he had a certain respect and appreciation of the work grassroots organizers do.

And we’ve seen how that has worked out. At least from the view I get over here of the US, the grassroots that worked so hard for Obama has more or less abandoned him (not that I can blame them) to the degree that we’re hearing about potential bloodbaths at the ballot box come November. But, if we take the charitable view, there is a segment of the American population that has taken Jay’s advice and continued the grassroots pressure on “our employee,” the President. And that’s the Tea Party.

I find this (and, again, I’m trying to be charitable for the moment) fascinating. One grassroots gets Obama elected and then recedes in frustration over his administration, despite understanding that it was only with their continued effort that Obama would pursue policies that the grassroots supports. Instead, a completely new grassroots organization emerges to put pressure on the administration, but it’s a pressure from a completely different political position.⁵ My suspicion is in two parts here: first, that the grassroots supporting Obama was possibly over-romanticized (remember: labor, DNC, Obama’s own operations); and second, that the Tea Party depends, as I suggested in the last post, on being grassroots in order to derive its legitimacy, despite being dubiously grassroots.

So why is the grassroots so important? I don’t know. I won’t perform a history of grassroots activism, but I will note that the OED traces the word to a distinct American heritage, finding the first example in a description of Roosevelt:

1912 McClure’s Mag. July 324/1 From the Roosevelt standpoint, especially, it was a campaign from the ‘grass roots up’. The voter was the thing.

That line about “the voter was the thing” aligns grassroots activism with a very specific sense of anti-collective action. Power (sovereignty) is located in the specific voter and in the specific desires of the specific voter. And without dusting off Tocqueville, I suspect that there’s a whole lot of (American) value placed in approaching politics in this fashion.

Perhaps the importance of grassroots activism in the US is indicated by the pejorative term “astroturfing,” that is, creating a “fake” grassroots movement (you know, like the Tea Party) by funneling centralized cash into various ephemeral organizations that are provided with seemingly sui generis letters to the editor ready for submission to local newspapers and the like. Astroturfing proves that there’s a certain legitimacy attached to grassroots, if organizations are willing to hide their involvement to give cover to a sort of organic movement. Note that I’m not talking about companies or advertising campaigns, which, for obvious reasons, want to hide their corporate/marketing sources, although one could (should) argue that the Tea Party is viral marketing for both Fox News and Koch Industries.

But this all comes at what cost, leading to the question in the post’s title. Obama’s election was partly the result of grassroots work, but it still was obviously not just that. The transcendent aspect of the election had to do with raw numbers of voters turning out and so on, whether they were so inspired by their own dissatisfaction with the previous administration, or encouraged by their union, their family, on DNC canvassers hitting the streets. Eventually the tree took over, precinct captains were assigned, and so on. And in the aftermath, as I said, it was the “Yes we did!” sensibility that conquered the narrative, this idea of an amorphous “we” that spontaneously rallied around a certain candidate and, totally organically, voted for change.

I’m not sure anyone believes the strong version of this narrative, or if anyone did, they have certainly abandoned it by now. But this strong version is crucial to the continued Tea Party success.⁶ Read any mainstream article about the Tea Party, and it’ll have narratives similar to the kinds of narratives we heard in 2008. “I’ve never been political before,” one person might say. Another might say, “I finally decided I had had enough.” A third, “So I decided to have a little get together at my overleveraged house.” And then on their list of demands is merely “wanting American back,” with some muddled talking points affixed that reference communism or something… not much different from “I want change I can believe in.”

Ultimately, though, these reasons are selfish. Egotistical. Individualism is always the realm of the narcissist, and that may be most obvious when it comes to political expression, which is the main issue I have with not only the popularity of grassroots activism, but also with the (Tea Party’s) need to maintain the fiction of the grassroots. The individual stirs to action only when the individual has personally had enough, the story goes, when the America that individual imagined is now no longer available.

Compare this with the rally in France on Saturday or the general strike today. Sure, the Roma marched for their own rights, but they were joined by tens of thousands of non-Roma who don’t like what the Republic is doing–not to themselves, but to others (Roma). And today’s general strike, though called by seven unions, is being supported by other organizations–organizations that are potentially totally uninvolved with the specific issues on the table. The constituent, centralized organizations are able to call upon their members to sublimate their individual concerns for the greater good of what the organization (the community, even) wants to do, a good determined at least indirectly democratically.

The Tea Party demands no sublimation.⁷ Can you imagine these people rallying in support of the mistreatment of others? (Undocumented workers, victims of institutional racism, etc.) It’s absolutely incomprehensible, since the crux of the organization is self-interest.⁸ Look at the rhetoric: “America back.” “Restoring.”⁹ There’s nothing altruistic or communitarian here. It’s petulance in tricorners and court shoes.¹⁰ And it’s not even forward-thinking petulance. It’s womb-seeking regression.¹¹

When a movement has clarified structure, has an organization helping design and refine the collective desires of the membership, the movement makes sense. Saturday’s rally was to protest the government’s recent actions regarding Roma and other Travellers. But the specific issue also resonated with larger issues: the racism and xenophobia of the state and its Sarkozyite slope toward police power. It all fits within a family of political concerns. But the American fixation on the grassroots, now most visible with the Tea Party, disallows that kind of clarity. One price of organic structure is that you get blobs, fuzzy entities that are largely illegible. So while I understand why the Tea Party has to keep up that fiction (who would turn out and march “Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Lets give Rupert much more dough!”?), I don’t understand why the American fantasy relies on it so much.

I mean, didn’t this financial crisis teach us why overvaluing individualism might be, you know, a bad thing?

1. In fact, it felt like there were more bikes around than normal. [↩]
2. I don’t recall from where I got Sunday’s “7%.” I thought it was from this David Harvey paper, but that does not seem to be right. [↩]
3. What the fuck do I know. It’s not like I’ve actually read this book. [↩]
4. Later, I draw a strong connection between grassroots with self-interest. I maintain that there’s always an element of that that is then sublimated, as the self gives its interest over to the collective organization that often emerges out of grassroots activism. I doubt many non-profit organizations were founded by fiat from above; concerned people got together and realized the value of collective action. It’s that second step, so feared by the “definitionally” decentralized Tea Party that condemns it to being a collection of confused, selfish gnats. [↩]
5. Someone needs to do an anthropological study on the “Change We Can Believe In”ers-cum-Tea Partiers. [↩]
6. I’m aware that larger Tea Party organizations have emerged, but my sense of them–in other words, how they exist in the media narrative–is of them as sort of tenuous alliances. This of course helps the larger Idea of the Tea Party to avoid damage when someone acts the racist, but it also helps continue the fiction of the founding of the Tea Party(s). [↩]
7. I’m not sure “sublimation” is the right word here, but I think the point is clear. [↩]
8. There’s a Niemöllerin aspect to the French model that can’t be discounted, of course, where self-interest supports some sense of community involvement, because one hopes that the community will have your back when the state turns against your particular group. But we have majority actors (middle-class, white French) involved in the community–hypothetically the safest demographic in the Republic. At the same time, I’m not sure how far you can go calling “a rising tide raises all ships” self-interested. [↩]
9. Yes, this rhetoric existed–and I probably used it–during the Bush administration and Obama campaigns. But it took the absurdity of these whiny wannabe tax cheats for me to see the problem with this approach. [↩]
10. Making the Tea Party the aesthetic and philosophical equivalent of, um, Marie Antoinette? [↩]
11. Wombs left crowded by unwanted pregnancies, but, still… [↩]

Tags: Barack Obama, community, France, general strike, grassroots, Greve, Hillary Rodham Clinton, individualism, Jay Smooth, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, OED, Paris, self-interest, Tea Party, velib