If like many other progressive-minded Americans, you’ve viewed the present state of government as an indicator of our nation’s political future, then you know there’s little reason for optimism. The tyranny of the two-party system is virtually unbreakable; its hold on our electoral culture — on our political imagination — is so thoroughgoing as to make any attempts towards reform practically absurd.
The recent efforts and successes of “outsider” candidates to capture elected office and lay the foundation of an alternative political reality — Perot in ’92; Ventura in ’98; Nader in 2000; Dean in 2004 — ultimately crumbled for lack of popular substance, legitimacy and coalition-building clout.
In the language of American electoral politics, “Independent” has come to mean marginal. It describes a candidate with little or no chance of winning, and a movement with few meaningful platform issues or actionable policy recommendations.
Thankfully (or curiously, depending on your political persuasion) Dr. Lenora Fulani, grand dame of the grassroots, doesn’t speak Electorese.
With several political lifetimes condensed into her ageless 54 years, Dr. Fulani continues to fight the fight of what she deems “the average American”: that individual, consigned against his will, to align himself with a political party (usually Democrats) that doesn’t speak to his basic needs or interests — whether he is aware of them or not.
This is not as bizarre as it may seem at first glance: Making people aware of their real needs and interests, and exploiting their frailties, is what political organizations have been doing since the advent of the popular vote.
Where Dr. Fulani and her Independence Party (IPP) differ is their lack of interest in either electing party candidates to office, or its corollary — seizing political power. In the opinion of a great many, it is this difference that consigns the IPP to the margins of America’s political culture. Interestingly enough, this is precisely where Dr. Fulani believes her party’s hyper-populist notions of liberal democracy — democracy in its purest theoretical form — can be most effective.
Loosely stated, the goals of the IPP are to foster and implement institutional political reform in American politics. This is accomplished, in Dr. Fulani’s estimation, not through seizing power in a corrupted system, but through promoting and nurturing a more intelligent use of the franchise among working- and under-class voters. She believes that by educating voters on the interests that they hold in common with the great majority of Americans — housing, employment, education and safety — interests that the major parties use to bait prospective voters and then wedge them apart, she can create a new, revolutionary Politics of Inclusion.
It’s a noble agenda, and if rationality was the key driver of human behavior, it might even be an inspiring one. But it’s more often the case that passions dictate our voting choices. And it’s certainly the case that political advertising — a method far more effective than grassroots circulars and person-to-person appeals — elicits and exploits those passions.
Dr. Fulani concedes that emotion, by and large, is the coin of popular elections. If what she suggests is true, then it’s even moreso the case when the target electorate is the working and under-educated poor. There is also the fact a significant segment of America isn’t a part of that demographic, and thus may not only perceive the interests of that group as foreign, but as fundamentally antithetical to their own — be they real or wrongly perceived.
To the extent that politics is the forum of competing worldviews, the odds are stacked heavily against Dr. Fulani. Quite frankly, it’s a game that she can’t win. But she fights the good fight, and she hopes the good hope. American democracy is the better for it.
This editorial originally appeared in an NYU student publication.
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