I Wish I Could Inspire Like MLK
We’ve all been there. You are chatting with someone and suddenly they proudly announce that they are throwing away their vote in 2020 because they aren’t “inspired”. I’ve tried every response I can think of to this argument with no results except wasted time. I’m as tired of listening to “both sides” talking points as I am of listening to pearl clutching about how voting for less than utter perfection is “beneath” the speaker. So now I just blink and determinedly change the subject with an air of someone politely ignoring an outbreak of flatulence at the table.
It really makes me appreciate what Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow civil rights leaders were up against. I never before grasped the difficulty of what they accomplished.
MLK traveled the nation reaching out to the children of slaves. These people knew in their bones that the power brokers in both parties literally didn’t care about them. Even worse, they weren’t wrong. They actually were marginalized in every conceivable way. They had no good candidates to vote for. So come on black voters! I need you to vote for the guy who wants to run a highway through your neighborhood and redirect property tax moneys from black schools to white ones because the other guy is an open KKK member! Talk about a tough sell. That’s like telling a Fight for 15 advocate that his options are the guy who wants to abolish the min wage entirely or the guy who wants to reduce it to $6. Feel “inspired” yet?
These votes were not feel-good votes. Which is fine. It is not the purpose of voting to entertain you. What they are is the path to power. It’s how every effective movement in U.S. history has ever achieved its goals. Even the bad ones like Prohibition. You join together and form a voting block that shows up every single election to vote for the least-bad candidate on your issue. The leaders of your movement become politically significant because they wield that voting block. They don’t even have to hold office themselves to effect change because when you lead a voting block you become a power broker and politicians begin seeking your favor. This puts the movement leaders in a position to seek concessions.
Honestly it’s probably better if the movement leaders aren’t politicians so that professional rivalries and self-advancement don’t get in the way of their issue advocacy. It’s a lot easier to evaluate someone’s platform objectively if they aren’t running against you, yeah? Fewer conflicts of interest.
To build an effective voting block MLK motivated people to turn out and vote for candidates who were actively bad on their issues so long as they were less bad. He showed them that by doing this they would create a future where they were cared about. Where they mattered. Where they had a seat at the table. Where racism in a candidate was detrimental rather than mandatory. He showed people that the way to change the world was to show up and vote.
And it worked. It always works.
But it doesn’t work quickly.
It would be decades before the civil rights movement started reaping the legislative fruit from becoming an active voting block. Only after legislators trusted black voters to have their backs did they start pushing civil rights issues. They had to know for certain that these bills wouldn’t cost them their seats. You know what doesn’t convince legislators? Claiming that you would totally have voted if they’d done X. Bullshit. They won’t believe you and frankly I don’t either.
Votes come first. Action comes later. If you aren’t voting you don’t count. It took a flood of votes decades to wear away congressional racism like water eroding rock. Not a moment, a Movement. One still in progress half a century later but however far we have to go you have to appreciate how far we’ve come.
So how did MLK do it? Especially in the beginning when so much effort was being expended for so little tangible results? How did he batter down the walls of voter apathy — “It’s all rigged”, “Neither candidate inspires me”, “Both sides”, Jim Crow — to get people to the polls decade after decade? It takes an element of faith to keep voting when you aren’t getting what you want immediately. The ability to inspire that faith is what made the civil rights movement successful. It is what let them headline history instead of being a footnote.
I am relatively sure he didn’t do it by reaching across the table and smacking folks upside the head. Resisting that urge alone qualifies him for sainthood.
Power comes from giving, not from withholding. Always. This is why the smart cookies in the Democratic primary are pulling out their pompoms to sing Biden’s praises. They know that if Biden loses there will be no influence for anyone. But if Biden wins their influence will be proportional to his gratitude. The more they helped, the more influence they will have.
Conversely, the more of a foot dragging PITA they were the less influence they will have.
If you want to make someone powerful then voting for them is the bare minimum. You also need to vote for who they tell you to vote for. Enthusiastically. While letting everyone you can know that they can credit your vote to the person you want to empower. The positivity they feel toward you for your help will be associated with the person you are boosting. This matters far more than your leaders actions btw. A leader can say and do all the right things but if their base doesn’t obey … well they aren’t really a leader at all then, are they? More of a mascot.
More importantly, other politicians will note when someone can bring the votes. When Kamala Harris dropped, for example, she went all in to get the #KHive Riden with Biden. She rallied to his side with a substantial voting block in her pocket before he was a shoe in and look who is Vice President now. Meanwhile Warren wasn’t just late to the party, she became a lame duck when her own base turned on her in a shower of snake emojis. The very people a Warren pick would be trying to bring to the table had publicly repudiated her. So what would be the point of choosing her? Warren’s shot at the nom died the day Bernie started running and her shot at VP the day he turned on her.
Giving. Supporting. Helping. Joining. Loving. This is how you get a seat at the table. This is how you make a difference. It worked for the civil rights movement and it could work for the Revolution … if they’d quit bitching and pitch in.
