If Martin Luther King Were Running for President, Would Dems Choose Him?
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)
As Bernie Sanders supporters risk sinking into a state of depression, let’s recall that it’s sadly normal for visionary leaders to be underappreciated by the American public. Henry David Thoreau, the father of American civil disobedience, was scorned for his support of radical abolitionism. Thoreau did not believe in incrementalism when it came to abolishing slavery.
Bernie Sanders is part of this American non-incrementalist counter-tradition. Future history books will look kindly on Bernie as the father of Medicare for All, but for the time being, it’s a dream deferred.
The most notable example of an unappreciated visionary is Martin Luther King, whose approval ratings had tanked to only 25% just prior to his assassination.
The seeds of disapproval were planted in April of 1967, when King rejected the incrementalism of his previous activism. No surprise, then, that Bernie was defeated by the Gang of Incrementalists, also known as the Democratic Party.
Said King:
“For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
The consequences of Martin Luther King’s shift away from incrementalism and into antiwar activism were harsh. According to a feature article in Smithsonian Magazine about King’s shifting popularity:
“An outraged President Lyndon Johnson cut off all contact with King. And a great number of black Americans — including many old allies and colleagues from the civil rights years — warned that his stance could have devastating consequences for their cause.”
Today’s Dems accept the sanitized version of Martin Luther King, but what about the MLK who had given up on incrementalism? In 2016 the Dems chose an incrementalist and lost. In 2020 they’ll be “chasing bad money” as professional gamblers say, betting on yet another radical centrist.
A follower of MLK, civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, campaigned for president in 1984 and 1988 under the banner of the Rainbow Coalition. Jackson gave it a good run on both occasions, winning numerous primaries, but as usual the Dems coalesced around incrementalists, both of whom lost.
Then-independent mayor Bernie Sanders was one of the few elected politicians to endorse Jackson and the insurgent Rainbow Coalition.
During the pre-Super-Tuesday frenzy of orchestrated endorsements that put Biden over the top, Jessie Jackson endorsed Bernie Sanders. At that moment I monitored a CNN Sunday March 8 politics program as well as Jake Tapper’s The Lead on Monday March 9, to observe a comparison of the centrist Klobuchar/Buttigieg endorsements of Biden with the Jackson endorsement of Sanders.
Like the string section of the DNC orchestra, CNN pundits fiddled in harmony with the Biden endorsements while failing to even mention Jessie Jackson’s dissonant endorsement of Sanders.
If the incrementalist MLK of 1963 were running today, the Dems might choose him. But King, the antipoverty fighter of 1967, would be spurned by a party that prefers to stay in the center and risk losing rather than presenting a progressive alternative to Republican faux populism.
The depth of our conditioning against visionary voices is reflected in how MLK is truncated in our schools. As Stephen Sawchuk wrote in his Education Week article about King:
“By the time he was murdered on April 4, 1968, King had become both more impatient and more broadly focused on poverty and social conditions rather than exclusively legal remedies for segregation. Yet he is still too often reduced in school curricula to just one speech, if not four words: ‘I have a dream’.”
The next time we have a transformative candidate like Jackson or Sanders, we need to be prepared for just how deeply the consciousness industry, with all its moneyed layers, will impose upon us the same 25% maximum approval ceiling that stifled the courageous Martin Luther King.
But with Sanders we still have a fighting chance. The campaign is done but the movement continues.
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