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HOWARD ZINN ON THE ELECTION

Howard Zinn, Real News - There are certain moments in history when even a small difference between the candidates may be crucial, may be a matter of life and death for large numbers of people. I mean, when the French had a change of presidency in France during the Algerian War, it made a difference in their bringing the Algerian War to an end. And I think that there are such moments, and I think this may be such a moment in American history. That is, we've gone through an insufferable eight years with the Bush administration, probably the worst administration in history, and, I mean, two wars in one presidency, and a total disregard of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and a shattering of the economy. And in this situation, we are desperate for change. So even though Obama doesn't represent any fundamental change, he creates an opening for the possibility of change. That's why I'm voting for him; that's why I suggest to people that they vote for him. But I also suggest that Obama will not fulfill that potential for change unless he is enveloped by a social movement which is angry enough, powerful enough, insistent enough that he fill his abstract phrases about change, fill them with some real, solid content. . .

You're not going to break the paralysis of the two-party system within the party system. In other words, you're not going to break it in the electoral system by putting up a third-party candidate whose showing will inevitably be pitiful and will therefore only be a demonstration of the weakness of the movement outside of the electoral arena. If you choose to go into the electoral arena, you'd better go in with strength. If you're going with weakness, you are not doing a progressive movement any good. To me it is a waste of Ralph Nader's energy to throw himself into the electoral process, 'cause his energy is best used by building a movement, by doing what he has done for most of his life very effectively, reaching out to millions and millions of people who will not vote for him but who really believe in his ideas, and help him to organize those people so that whoever is elected as president will then have to face a constituency, a citizenry which demands change. . .

The obstacle to change is not that people don't want change. People want change. But most of the time, people feel impotent. However, at certain points in history, the energy level of people, the indignation level of people rises. And at that point it becomes possible for people to organize and to agitate and to educate one another, and to create an atmosphere in which the government must do something. I'm thinking of the 1930s; I'm thinking of Franklin D. Roosevelt coming into office not really a crusader. Roosevelt came into office, you know, with a balance-the-budgets history. It was not clear what he was going to do, and I don't think he was clear about what he was going to do, except that he was going to be different from Hoover and the Republicans. But when he came into office, he faced a country that was on strike. He faced general strikes in San Francisco in Minneapolis. He faced strikes of hundreds of thousands of textile workers in the South. He faced a tenants movement and an unemployed council movement. And he faced a country in turmoil, and he reacted to it, he was sensitive to it, he moved. That's what we will need. We will need to see some of the scenes that we saw in the '30s. . .

We get there by somebody starting it off, like the four kids in Greensboro in 1960 who started off the sit-in not knowing whether it would spread. We need somebody who is losing their home because they can't afford to pay their mortgage, we need them surrounded by their neighbors who then do not allow them to leave, do not allow their furniture to be taken away. This is what happened in the '30s. In other words, we need direct action, we need civil disobedience, we need to raise the level of tension in the country, because only that kind of indignation is going to have some effect on the people in Washington. . .

Unquestionably. If we have a Democratic administration, that administration has to be the target of a new social movement. Problem with the years of the Clinton administration is that whoever in the United States really wanted to go beyond the Clinton administration in foreign policy and domestic policy became complacent, and they did not organize, and there was no real movement in the country in Clinton's time, as there had been in 1960s, to push Clinton into any good direction. That will have to be different when Obama and his administration come into office.