Hillary Clinton’s remark on Martin Luther King’s role in the success of the American civil rights movement triggered a firestorm in the US and world press. Clinton said that Dr King’s dream “began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights act of 1964. it took a president to get it done. Thus far, the wide debate has focused exclusively but wrong-headedly on race and the presidential campaign. Yet pundits have failed to notice the equally important implications of Clinton’s assessment for US foreign policy should Senator Clinton win the White House, especially in the Middle East.
Many commentators saw Clinton’s remark as disrespectful of Dr King’s role. They also see it as a not so subtle suggestion that black America needs a “white president to achieve new gains. Others describe Clinton’s remark as inadvertently helping Barrack Obama by likening him to the great civil rights leader.
But such views on the domestic implications of the comment miss the mark. I believe it is far more likely that the Clinton campaign is based on a deliberate strategy to invoke race, which Obama avoids, hoping to undo the latter’s appeal as a candidate who transcends race and courts all Americans. This, I believe, is the real meaning of the comment, though I also think the strategy is dangerously divisive. The Clinton campaign reckons that the way to defeat the charismatic Obama is to subtly suggest he is a black not a national leader – the leader of a social movement with a very particular constituency and not a serious candidate as president for all Americans.
When seen in this light, the dubious campaign strategy notwithstanding, reveals Clinton’s troubling lack of understanding of social movements. She has sent the signal that only official institutions can be the vehicle for the change that most Americans now see as essential on a whole range of issues. Such an understanding is surprising, especially coming from a “baby boomer , who, as a college student, experienced the movement-driven turmoil of the 1960s that deeply changed America. Moreover, Clinton was at the time a strong supporter of equal rights for blacks.
This apparent contradiction should remind us all that Clinton is not the liberal icon that some – especially those on the right – imagine her to be. Her positions on national and international policy issues indicate clearly that her liberal credentials have been exaggerated. Nothing, however, makes her less of a liberal than her notion of change as only driven by political institutions.
As a political scientist I tell my 101 students that political institutions are inherently conservative and highly resistant to change. I usually use the American civil rights movement to make that point. The lesson of the African-American struggle, which inspired democracy advocates around the world, is that direct action is necessary to pressure political institutions to respond to the demands of real, progressive social change.
In the early 20th century, African-Americans faced legislative and executive hostility to equal rights. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People resorted to the judiciary branch of the federal government as the only institution amenable for even incremental change. Through a series of law suits, the principle of “separate but equal was gradually undermined, until the landmark Brown vs. Board of education decision in 1954 dismantled segregation.
But the vehement opposition to that decision was a clear indication that a real transformation in American social consciousness required a much more forceful shaking up than a staid judiciary could provide. A mass social movement emerged precisely on that premise; committed both to non-violence and to real change.
The police brutality against the peaceful civil rights activists shocked the nation. It was only during the civil rights direct action campaigns that Americans faced up to the hypocrisy of a nation that had prided itself with slogans of “justice and liberty for all .Contrary to Senator Clinton’s claim, history tells us clearly that it “took a movement to get it done and that President Johnson would have never been able “to get it done were it not for Dr King. Institutions do matter but for meaningful, deep change social movements matter even more.
Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East. Should she win the White House, Clinton’s ahistorical view of the role of social movements would mean that yet another American president is incapable of understanding the real politics of the Middle East. Everywhere in the region social movements – rather than established political institutions – are the springboard of developments capable of altering the status quo.
Thus handicapped, Clinton as president will be very likely to repeat the mistakes of her predecessor. She too will be taken by surprise every time an important change takes place in the Middle East. Arab countries in particular are increasingly suffering from a widening gap between their autocratic regimes and the people. Real politics now for the most part takes place outside the institutional channels which are dominated by the governments’ rules of the game. If she really believes that official government institutions are all that matters, then Clinton as president would see very little.
Take Egypt as an example: If this notion of “institutions drive change is taken seriously, then all the labor protests, the student protests, the faculty movement for independent universities, the judges’ movement for an independent judiciary, the Kefaya popular movement for change, and the young activist bloggers are simply background music, compared to whatever statement a member of parliament or some appointed minister might make.
Moreover, the US will continue to pursue the very policies that alienate more people. Expect the US, for instance, to exert precisely the same pressure on “moderate Arab regimes to adopt unpopular policies that only exacerbate the gap between those regimes and their own people. Don’t be surprised if a Clinton administration lumps all Islamist movements together and crafts policy to deal with them at the Department of Homeland Security.
It is not too hard to imagine “President Hillary Clinton coming to the region and delivering a speech similar to the one Bush recently gave in Abu Dhabi – one widely derided as totally disconnected from Middle East realities. Like Bush, we can expect her to praise all sorts of authoritarian and repressive governments in a speech meant to be about promoting democracy. We will not be surprised when she refers only to elections, and not real popular participation, as the criteria for democratization successes.
Expect her to come to a region that has suffered from colonization – old and new – but also a region proud of its own resistance movements, and mention “occupation in her speech only once (as Bush did) to refer to the Syrian troops that have already been driven out of Lebanon, not the Israeli occupation, nor the American one for that matter, both of which incite anger and resentment on a daily basis throughout the region.
When you are so clueless about what and who is important, any serious transformation will certainly take you by surprise. Even worse, you are likely to see those changes as a threat to US interests. It is disheartening when Americans, who should know better, forget or distort their own history of social movements, like the civil rights movement which have inspired the rest of the world.
Let’s just hope that Clinton’s comment on Martin Luther King is just part of a campaign strategy designed to defeat a charismatic challenger and not really what she genuinely believes about the way real, but peaceful, social change can be achieved both at home and abroad.
Dr. Manar Shorbagy is associate professor of political science. She is specialized in US politics and teaches at the American University in Cairo.
