The movement has to go protests in the streets

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Socialist Action: How do you view the significance of Reagan's reelection?

Dave Dellinger: Elections are always overvalued in this country. When Reagan was elected the first time, it was interpreted widely in the press-and unfortunately in the movement-that the country had made a big shift to the right.

He had been elected by approximately 26 percent of the electorate and large numbers of people were voting against Carter and the status quo as much as they were voting for Reagan.

Also Reagan had the kind of "homey" TV personality that attracts votes from those who mistakenly think that presidential elections make a major difference in how the country operates. But not nearly as many people had moved to the right as was claimed.

Perhaps most important, electoral campaigns become a substitute for realistic teach-ins, genuine mass demonstrations, and direct action. Before the 1964 campaign, Martin Luther King and others signed a disastrous six-month moratorium on demonstrations so that Goldwater wouldn't get elected. Instead we got LBJ.

A candidate who wishes to be "viable" must appeal to the money people who control the media and the resources that make a successful electoral campaign possible.

What Mondale did in 1984 is typical of what so-called progressive Democrats have done over and over again. It's customary to say "Well, everyone moves to the center."

But Mondale began a little to the right of center and moved further to the right.

S.A.: What was your opinion Jackson campaign?

Dellinger: 1 was not one who urged "Run, Jesse, Run," because I don't think that, in the long run, anything can be accomplished through the Democratic Party. But he came to Vermont and urged people to go into the streets to "Bring the Boys Home"-from Lebanon and Honduras:

He drew his strength from Black anger and from the gains the movement for basic change has made in the last two decades. Without these he would have been nothing. And most of the time he knew it and opened himself to input from these two sources. So I worked some with the Rainbow Coalition.

The danger in doing that was that you might give people the illusion that something significant can happen within the Democratic Party. To me the aim is more to keep in touch with some of the people who are within the Democratic Party but who don't belong there—in particular the Black forces that supported Jackson because he gave public voice to their concerns.

I mentioned Black anger. I think that there has to be more than anger; there has to be hope. The coming together of the Rainbow Coalition and some of the things Jesse said and did, such as going to Syria, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Cuba, gave hope and stirred people's imaginations. The way the Democrats reacted showed that there is no hope within the Democratic Party, but the emotions stirred won't go away.

James Baldwin said something perceptive that I can only paraphrase, something like this: "What Jesse has done is reach the man in the street; the man on death row; and their children, relatives, and friends. And it ain't going to go away, baby."

I know Jesse well enough so that I was able to do what one has to do in principled politics. When I met with him, I told him where I admired his stands and where I thought he was wrong, including his hope of reforming the Democratic party. He's going to need a lot of criticism-and a strong, independent movement-to keep him from going the way of most politicians. And even so, it may not save him or the "official" Rainbow Coalition.

But there is an important dialectic in process. For example, Jesse's electoral campaign helped prepare for the current civil-disobedience actions against South Africa, and those actions bring a healthy pressure on him to go beyond electoral politics.

S.A.: During the election campaign, we saw all sorts of left activists involved in the Rainbow Coalition, or later, the Mondale campaign. As a result of this, we saw a decrease of activity directed toward visible mass protests. Now that Reagan has been reelected where do you see the movement going:

Dellinger: I wouldn't say that there was a decrease of such activity in the (continued on page 8, in “Labor must take a stand before U.S. troops move into combat”)