Up and Down at the Mall

Up and Down at the Mall

Michael Kazin: Up and Down at the Mall

Organizers of the ?One Nation? rally on the Mall last Saturday clearly meant to show the vigor, determination, and drawing power of the grassroots Left. Without a celebrity speaker and with little advance coverage in the mass media, they managed to attract at least 100,000 people. But what sort of Left was on display on this afternoon of perfect weather just one month before the midterm vote?

It certainly lived up to Jesse Jackson?s dream of a ?rainbow coalition.? African Americans from the Transport Workers and the SEIU marched along in matching t-shirts and hats; while immigrant rights activists chanted, in both English and Spanish, the trusty vow that unity would make defeat impossible. I saw?and heard?an excellent Asian-American drum corps, groups of beefy white machinists from Cape Canaveral, and teachers from New York City who were still wearing hats from 2008 endorsing Obama in Yiddish. Labor clearly made up the largest and most spirited contingent there, and at least half the unionists were black or Latino.

Inevitably, the sects turned out as well, repeating the same lines I?ve heard at every Washington demonstration since the heyday of the Vietnam War. The Socialist Workers Party, the Spartacist League, and some tiny group called the Socialist Alternative all hawked their papers with headlines denouncing the ?Wall Street parties? and promising that a ?united working class? would put an end to the profit system. For some people, it will always be 1934. A rather newer sect showed up too: the 9/11 truth squad, equipped with a charming inflated elephant, a bevy of rhetorical questions, and an excessively loud bullhorn.

Alas, the overall message of the rally was not so clear, either about whom to blame for the nation?s ills or how to cure them. Signs and speakers condemned big corporations, of course. But for the unionists, the problem was a lack of ?good jobs? caused by overseas production; while the large antiwar contingent held big oil responsible for endless wars in the Middle East.

A deep ambivalence about Barack Obama was evident too. From the podium, a black West Point graduate, jobless after serving two years in Iraq, briefly praised the president for signing bills providing for health reform and financial regulation. But he got passionate only when voicing ?the frustration and disappointment? he assumed everyone in the crowd shared. Nobody booed Obama, but his name was seldom mentioned, and it elicited few cheers.

This ?One Nation? was fiercely united on just one thing: stopping the likes of Beck, Palin, Boehner, and their wealthy backers from surging into power. ?This is a defining moment for America,? asserted Ed Schultz, an MSNBC talker who may have been chosen to lead off the speech-making to show that an angry white guy from the Midwest can be a dedicated progressive too. ?The Lord is blessing this march,? he declared to a crowd otherwise as devoid of religious talk and symbols as the Glenn Beck march a month before had been saturated with them. Schultz?s hyperbole grated on me. Still, if talk of a ?defining moment? helps inspire people to make phone calls, canvass neighborhoods, and persuade their friends and co-workers to turn back the Grand Old Tea Party, it?s fine with me.