The Citizen's Party, or Don Quixote Lives

As the 20th century wound down and the country shifted to the right, Dr. Barry Commoner, author of the seminal work, “The Closing Circle,” decided, as so many utopian dreamers had before him, that the United States was ripe/needed a 3rd political party. Proving once more that I lacked common sense, I agreed with this modern day Don Quixote that the twin wind mills of the Democrat and Republican parties rested on an unstable base and might be toppled. 

Commoner’s fledgling political movement, which took form as the Citizen’s Party, an overtly environmental grassroots effort to bring the ideas of Commoner and other leading environmentalists into the political realm, was formed to throw sand into the gears of the established parties.

A raging debate within the movement over whether to stay entirely local - that is, run candidates for school boards, city councils, local districts, etc. - or to go national, knowing there was no chance of winning but to put the message on the stage, so to speak, was eventually settled. Commoner would run in the 1980 presidential race featuring Ronald Reagan on the Republican side of the ticket and the vulnerable incumbent, Jimmy Carter, on the other. While Commoner put up a symbolic fight at the national level, the concurrent priority would be to organize and possibly run candidates in local down ballot races like school board and city council. 

This would be the first time I would dip my toes into the fetid water of American electoral politics at more than a grunt level, convinced that the changes necessary could not and would not happen if the debate remained static. But the kind of radical change I thought was needed would require a majority of Americans to dramatically shift their perception of America’s purpose. 

The US was a young and initially somewhat innocent country, overly sententious in its foreign interactions and, despite the genocide of the indigenous population and the stain of slavery, completely convinced of its exceptionalism and the importance of its great democracy-spreading mission. The problem as I see it is that the US is akin to a beautiful and ambitious young wife who traded her virile but penurious husband for a wealthy old tycoon. Wealth and luxury are to be had, but at a terrible price she is loath to admit. To date, however, the vast majority of US citizens are not even aware of the tradeoff.

Over the course of the year during which I poured my heart and soul into the movement, I would learn much about retail politics, as well as the nearly impossible barriers to a third party candidate crashing the Democrat-Republican duopoly that had fossilized since the demise of the Whigs in the 1850s. Researching for Commoner state-by-state requirements for ballot access, I realized that in a first-past-the-post system such as that in the US, third parties were basically doomed. 

However, since the purpose of the Citizen’s Party was not to win the presidency but rather to put its environmental platform before the public, the effort was still worthwhile. 

The other, and in many ways more depressing lesson I absorbed from my time working on this nascent effort in the Bay Area was the self-defeating nature of liberal elites and the supercilious attitude the leftist “vanguards” would display towards the working-class communities they claimed to believe in. This was an attitude I would confront in numerous movements in the ensuing years. After spending many months among Berkeley activists I found myself agreeing with George Orwell that "socialism is a magnet for sandal wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers."

This lesson was a hard one and came about when Dr. Commoner asked me if I could work with local community leaders in Oakland to expand the party’s efforts across the bay. Initially I was involved in the San Francisco chapter, directed there by Professor Alan Brotsky, whom I had clerked for at his law firm in the City. The SF chapter had grown exponentially over the course of a few months. From initial meetings attended by ten or twenty curious souls in church basements and public library conference rooms to large gatherings of several hundred, word was getting out about the movement. 

At the point where the meetings were outgrowing available venues, and many attendees were crossing the Bay Bridge from Oakland and Berkeley, a decision was made to open a second chapter in Oakland, a heavily African American community where I had moved at the beginning of my second year of law school. While Oakland certainly maintained an inferiority complex regarding its more glamorous cousin at the other end of the Bridge, it did not fit the “there is no there, there,” derision, heaped on it since Gertrude Stein had uttered that dismissive putdown in the ‘30s. Oakland was a proud working-class city. It remained defiantly loyal to the outlaw Oakland Raiders, the black and silver bad boys of the National Football League, featuring the Snake, Toos, The Assassin, Dr. Death, and the Stork. 

It had recently been the home of one of the great and irascible baseball teams ever put together: the Oakland A’s of Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Bert Campaneris, and many more colorful stars. The A’s were outfitted by their equally outrageous owner Charlie Finley in gorgeous kelly green, gold, and wedding gown white uniforms. And, to the chagrin of the baseball traditionalists, white shoes! The horror. But the boys sure could play, winning World Series championships in ‘72, ‘73, and ‘74 while their haughty neighbors the Giants, playing in their Candlestick arctic wind tunnel, languished.

Oakland also was home to a large, proud, and thriving black middle class. It was here that the Black Panthers had formed, initially to stand up to the brutal and racist Oakland PD and to distribute food, where needed. Though, like all American cities it had its ghettos, it also had beautiful neighborhoods like Lake Merritt, where we lived. The hills above the city contained redwood groves and seasonal streams with breathtaking views across the Bay, along with miles of running trails where I spent many afternoons on long runs with my dog. 

With Professor Brotsky’s help, I organized the first Citizen’s Party gathering at the Oakland Public Library, a few blocks from Lake Merritt. We did little promotion and were therefore surprised that, mainly through word of mouth, there were fifty eager attendees asking for literature and questioning how they might become involved. While I was nominally “the chair,” the structure was purposefully non-hierarchical, and being chair mainly entailed drafting an agenda and passing around the mic at meetings. While the San Francisco chapter leaned heavily Caucasian, Oakland was initially very different. The diversity was breathtaking: Black, Latino, and Asian, with even a smattering of Native Americans. Most worked with their hands in foundries, the port, machine shops, or at the auto plant down the Nimitz Freeway in Fremont. 

The meetings were freewheeling, the mic passing from hand to hand, while I took notes that would be turned into agenda items for the following week. The crowds grew from barely fifty to multiples of hundreds within a few months. The agenda was being developed by the people who were impacted daily by the legacy policies of corporate driven decision-making. The attendees came to think of the varied negative impacts on their lives as environmental racism, as it became increasingly apparent that while the benefits of the multinational corporate driven consumer economy skewed heavily towards the wealthy and white, the negative impacts of that system - the air and water pollution, the toxic waste legacy - fell disproportionately on the poor and people of color. 

Environmental racism would require a remedy of environmental justice! Six months on, even the largest church assemblies could not hold the crowds. At that point,  in consultation with Dr. Commoner and Professor Brotsky, we made a fateful decision. Some attendees wanted to expand south to the heavily working-class cities of Fremont and Hayward, while others thought that Berkeley, with its university campus and leftist politics, was fertile ground. Berkeley won out, and the eventual demise of the Bay Area Citizen’s Party was sealed. 

The first meetings followed the pattern of Oakland. While the professors and university officials lived in craftsman bungalows, mission-style cottages, and architectural digest abodes in the Berkeley Hills, the flatlands remained heavily black, both working class and poor. Interested in this new environmental movement that Oakland friends and family were continuously promoting, the crowds were overflowing and enthusiastic. And then, over several months and a few meetings, it happened: the professors and the graduate students in philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology arrived. Peoples’ Park natives hijacked the agenda. Rather than earnest discussions of the difficulties in balancing work and family life in a hyper market driven economy, the white leftist agitators, promoting Trotsky and Mao, took over the meetings. Instead of listening to the personal narratives of the diverse audience, they began preaching and talking over the less formally educated attendees, telling them what was in their best interest. 

Over the course of the next months, the diverse membership shifted. No longer did the audience reflect the diversity of the East Bay. It became whiter, wealthier, and less relevant. In one absurd evening that summed up the coming collapse, a conversation that began by discussing the lack of affordable housing devolved into a debate followed by a motion to plant orange trees on Telegraph Ave, so the homeless in People’s Park could obtain free food!

While back east over the holidays, I was voted out as East Bay chair to be replaced by a campus radical combining the ambitions of a Roman emperor with the strategic vision and operational planning of a not so bright basset. I was done. And a few months later, like so many leftist movements in the United States, the Citizen’s Party was consigned to the dustbin of history. 

What the Citizen’s Party could not accomplish was to convince working class union members, diverse non-white populations, and upper middle class student activists that they shared a common interest in a different future, a future in which the pie would be sliced differently, and jobs would be less subject to the vagaries of Wall Street sharks and resource extracting companies. This failure, which mirrored the much larger and more critical one infecting the Democratic Party, resulted in a historic schism that would have long-term impacts on the democratic experiment’s ultimate failure in the US.

Meanwhile, the conservative insurrection against modernity, the New Deal and a racially inclusive society had a detailed plan for standing athwart history and screaming stop! It was a pellucid and pallid road map to a future bathed in sepia tones of an imagined past. A past that conveniently scrubbed the dark sides of American history from a public reckoning.

The guiding light for the still nascent conservative movement was a memo written by US Chamber of Commerce president and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. The brilliantly conceived strategic plan directed a small cabal of wealthy trust fund heirs to fund a vast array of right wing think tanks created and expanded for the singular purpose of defending the fortunes of the wealthy white aristocrats and businesses that formed the backbone of this newly emerging conservative reaction. 

Powell laid it out in a speech and widely circulated paper that claimed American business was under assault by socialists and well-meaning fellow travelers. Its goal was to turn the page from the New Deal and the Great Society. To defend business and its prerogatives by taking over the courts as well as the court of public opinion. This was the long game to be played out over years and if necessary, over decades. In a war for the soul of America, conservatives needed to change the very idea that the government was there to help and instead convince the public that the changes wrought by the likes of Social Security and Medicare, the Civil Rights and Voting Acts - the Clean Water, Clean Air, and Endangered Species Acts, did not represent progress towards a better future, but rather an existential threat to the American way of life.

The Democratic left, smug and self-righteous in their virtuosity at the end of the 1970s blinked, believing the struggle had been won and the divisive battles around race and the environment were over. This proved a tragic error as the ensuing decades would show. The conservatives would hone in on white insecurity as the economy raced forward and the unionized factories that had ever so briefly contributed to raising millions - black and white, to middle class lives were dismantled and shipped piece by piece to lower cost nations, a policy designed by these very conservative leaders to break the back of organized labor. 

The left went along, and in a shift with enormous consequences, moved on from fighting economic battles to focusing on cultural and identity issues. On the economic front, the focus of the Democratic party shifted. Before the factories were gutted, the union workers and employees had represented the strongest and most loyal supporters. These mainly blue collar folks were the recipients of government services. As private unions were disappeared, and public unions rose in their place, the emphasis changed. These new public union supporters DELIVERED government services. The difference, barely acknowledged, was, and remains profound. In the earlier model, where your supporters receive government services, the quality of the services delivered is critical. In the latter, so long as the budget grows and more government employees are added, the quality is secondary to the ever increasing budget!

Gone were efforts to unionize and fight for higher wages for the working class to be replaced with struggles focused on affirmative action, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. 

While the left became increasingly fractious, each group struggling for its proper place at the table of American democracy, the right unified - corporate power, white grievance, and religious fervor coalescing around a unified view of a white America looking angrily at the future and reverently at an imagined past. 

Against this, the small group of hopeful Citizen’s Party activists were a less than minor blip soon to be forgotten like so much dust on the wind in a raging storm. I had dipped my toes in the water of politics just as the tsunami approached and life would be forever changed.