The elections of last Tuesday were reportedly very bad for progressives. And in many ways they were. But in some ways, they could serve as a catalyst for something great. The question is: Which way forward from here?
After a major progressive mobilization helped bring Obama into the White House & give Democrats a large majority in both houses of Congress, too many progressives seemed to think they could just sit back and watch the inevitable progress occur. Instead, progressive perspectives were shut out of the health care debate, economic & financial policy debates, climate & energy policy debates, & foreign policy debates, to name just a few of many progressive disappointments.
And why expect anything different? For most of two decades, Democratic leadership has clung to a strategy of corporate-friendly centrism while Republicans have marched ever rightward. Progressives have constituted a loyal Democratic base that can be mobilized to turn out votes, then promptly ignored when it comes time to make policy. This second-class status has been accepted in favor of a “lesser-evil” calculation that rightly recognizes the increasingly greater evil represented by the Republicans in recent years. But a compliant base that makes no demands gets no results, as progressives have seen.
Meanwhile, the right-wing minority mobilized furiously during the last two years, channeling popular discontent into a misguided & overhyped Tea Party movement. While the Dems were silencing their progressive edge in the name of centrism and moderation, Republicans abandoned any pretense of moderation and amplified their fringe voices to fire up their base.
And look where it got them.
Now, I’m not saying that the Tea Party is a great role model for progressives. I’m well aware that TP success has been largely due to wealthy benefactors and the giant corporate right-wing megaphone of the FOX Noise machine. Tea Party leaders pander to prejudice, fear, and ignorance to build a base, and misdirect legitimate grievances toward an agenda that serves interests often contrary to those of their aggrieved followers.
But the Tea Party has gotten some things right:
1) Appeal to populist sentiments. The diversity of political opinion is too often depicted as a simple spectrum from left to right (& supposedly election results prove the country is moving back to the right). But just as important is the spectrum from bottom to top. These days many at the bottom of the political-economic pyramid know deep down that something is seriously wrong at the top. Those on the right misidentify the source of the problem as “big government.” Those on the left understand that unaccountable private institutions pose a greater danger than public ones, and that many of the problems with government can be traced to the distortions by powerful private interests which control both government and major media, the two institutions essential to a functional democracy.
The Democratic Party, having become so dependent on corporate campaign money, has abandoned populism in word and deed, which is what opened up the field for the Tea Party to channel a lot of the legitimate anger & disgruntlement on the ground. If a progressive populist movement is going to arise, it won’t come from the Democratic Party.
2) Build a movement that retains autonomy even while collaborating with one of the major parties. Progressives have been much too wedded to the Democratic Party in a way that allows us to be taken for granted and disempowered. For a while, the Green Party offered a vehicle for those of us who wanted to build political power entirely independent of the Dems, but for various reasons that vehicle mostly broke down after 2004. At this juncture, I can see the wisdom of building a progressive populist movement independent from the Democratic Party, but which still collaborates with the Democratic Party. When collaboration makes sense. And be independent when independence makes sense.
3) Appeal to emotions & passions as well as intellect. Too often Dems and liberals in general seem to expect superior policy wonkery to carry the day. But we humans are more often motivated by our emotions. For the last two years, conservatives have been fired up while liberals & progressives have been either wonky, sleepy, or distracted. Of course, conservatives appeal to a narrow range of emotions – mostly just fear and anger. For progressives, while there are plenty of reasons to be fearful and angry, we also have a much broader emotional range to engage. But the key point is to engage how people feel as well as what we think.
4) Appeal to a genuinely American patriotism. Many progressives have understandably mixed feelings about America’s founding fathers and founding documents (colonial conquest, genocide, slavery, etc. are not matters to be taken lightly), but it’s a mistake to allow the Right any special claim on patriotism, the founders, or the Constitution. A nation ruled by “we the people,” in a “government of the people, by the people, & for the people,” in pursuit of “liberty & justice for all” — that’s an ideal we can agree is worth fighting for, yes? Jefferson and Paine were two of the great political thinkers of their time, and are worth quoting. (Jefferson: ““I hope we shall […] crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”; Paine: “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”) And though the founders may have excluded the majority of actual people in their original conception of “we the people,” they also included a process for amendment of their original document, in pursuit of a “more perfect union.” The hard-won progress of the next two centuries is also something to take pride in.
5) Some solutions are actually pretty simple. We may live in a complex world, but that doesn’t mean solutions to problems always have to be complicated. “Medicare for all” is a simpler and better solution for health care reform than the overly complicated, gazillion-page bill that eventually passed through Congress like a kidney stone; a carbon fee returned to the public is a simpler & better solution to the climate crisis than setting up an elaborate cap-&-trade regulated market; public financing of elections is a simpler & better solution to the influence of big money in politics than playing a kind of regulatory whack-a-mole constantly trying to anticipate where corporate influence will next rear its ugly head. Simple doesn’t always mean simplistic. And it’s way easier to explain.
This has gotten long, so my suggested list of progressive populist strategies & talking points will have to wait for another day.
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