Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
If You Want to Build a Grassroots Base, Don't
Look to Powerful Democrats in Washington for Cues
November 17, 2012 |
Millions of Americans are eager, even desperate, for a political
movement that truly challenges the power of Wall Street and the Pentagon. But
accommodation has been habit-forming for many left-leaning organizations, which
are increasingly taking their cues from the party establishment: deferring to
top Democrats in Washington, staying away from robust progressive populism, and
making excuses for the Democratic embrace of corporate power and perpetual war.
It's true that many left-of-center groups are becoming more
sophisticated in their use of digital platforms for messaging, fundraising and
other work. But it's also true that President Obama's transactional approach
has had demoralizing effects on his base. Even the best resources—mobilized by
unions, environmental groups, feminist organizations and the like—can do only
so much when many voters and former volunteers are inclined to stay home. A
month before the 2010 election, Obama strategist David Axelrod noted that
"almost the entire Republican margin is based on the enthusiasm gap."
A similar gap made retaking the House a long shot this year.
For people fed up with bait-and-switch pitches from Democrats who
talk progressive to get elected but then govern otherwise, the Occupy movement
has been a compelling and energizing counterforce. Its often-implicit message:
protesting is hip and astute, while electioneering is uncool and clueless. Yet
protesters' demands, routinely focused on government action and inaction,
underscore how much state power really matters.
To escape this self-defeating trap, progressives must build a
grassroots power base that can do more than illuminate the nonstop horror shows
of the status quo. To posit a choice between developing strong social movements
and strong electoral capacity is akin to choosing between arms and legs. If we want
to move the country in a progressive direction, the politics of denunciation
must work in sync with the politics of organizing—which must include solid
electoral work.
Movements that take to the streets can proceed in creative tension
with election campaigns, each one augmenting the other. But even if protests
flourish, progressive groups expand and left media outlets thrive, the power to
impose government accountability is apt to remain elusive. That power is
contingent on organizing, reaching the public and building muscle to exercise
leverage over what government officials do—and who they are. Even electing
better candidates won't accomplish much unless the base is organized and
functional enough to keep them accountable.
Politicians like to envision social movements as tributaries
flowing into their election campaigns. But a healthy ecology of progressive
politics would mean the flow goes mostly in the other direction. Election
campaigns should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around.
Vital initiatives to break the cycles of capitulation and lack of
accountability will come from the grassroots.
* * *
"Bringing the vibrancy and democracy of activist movement
culture to a political campaign is necessary but complicated," said Torie
Osborn, a longtime progressive organizer in the Los Angeles area, whose dynamic
grassroots campaign for the state legislature nearly advanced to the November
ballot. "Activist protest culture is spontaneous, often angry and wildly
uncontrollable. Campaigns have to be rigorously disciplined and
controllable."
The mismatch takes a toll. "Ultimately one shortfall of our
heartbreaking 1 percent loss was that our volunteers did not show up in force
until the very end," Osborn told me. "Our field program counted on a
'movement' turnout, but our experience was that the energized volunteers didn't
really want to do what the campaign needed. They wanted to be on Facebook, to
blog, to go to events, even drive around and put up lawn signs, but not the
voter-contact work of walking and phoning—at least not at the scale we were
counting on."
Osborn's assessment tracked with my simultaneous experience as a
candidate for Congress in California's North Coast district, a mostly liberal
area north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Our campaign drew on my four decades of
activism and several years of groundwork, including hundreds of speeches and
other public appearances in the district. I'd been a member of the state
Democratic Party's central committee since 2007, and our campaign had traction
inside the party—despite the fact that its hierarchy was hot-wired for my main
opponent, Jared Huffman, a five-year state legislator who had boosted his
career with major donations from big corporations.
During my run for Congress, I participated in Occupy
demonstrations in more than a half-dozen cities across our far-flung district.
(Because of my long record as an activist, some local Occupy organizers set
aside their aversion to allowing a candidate to speak.) A deft organizer of
some of those protests, Pat Johnstone, coordinated much of my campaign's
fieldwork. "From the beginning, Occupiers have expressed concern about
being 'co-opted' by progressive groups," she observed. "Occupy
provided a renewed vision of what is possible when we rise up together.
However, the success of any movement depends on building and sustaining
capacity. Partnerships and coalitions are an important part of that growth. How
strong can any grassroots movement be without the strength of numbers?"
Early on, I announced that our campaign would not accept money
from lobbyists or corporate PACs. Instead, we kept our eyes on small donors. I
spoke at more than fifty house parties, and we developed a large e-mail list to
update supporters while asking for contributions and volunteers. The campaign
drew in hundreds of volunteers and more than 7,000 individual donors, raising
$750,000. We approached fundraising as an outgrowth of grassroots support—not
the other way around.
Our organizing approach and my unabashed progressive positions
paid off as our campaign fought for support from unions. The first breakthrough
came from the legendary longshore union ILWU, which followed up its endorsement
by hosting a fundraiser. I also received solo endorsements from AFSCME locals
and the UAW, along with a dual endorsement from the California Federation of
Teachers and a triple endorsement from SEIU California. Another major victory
came when our campaign jolted expectations by depriving Huffman of a
pre-primary endorsement from the California Teachers Association. Those
hard-won victories were partly the result of my strong pro-labor commitments,
like unequivocal defense of pensions. But sadly, the progressive California
Nurses Association stayed out of the race. And the bulk of the labor
establishment—including the building trades, the big labor council in the
district and the state labor federation (AFL-CIO)—lined up with the
garden-variety liberal Democratic politician making his way up the ladder.
I was fortunate to get support from several progressives in
Congress. Strong endorsement letters went out from Representatives John Conyers
and Raúl Grijalva. Days before the June election, Representative Dennis
Kucinich campaigned alongside me. But in the district it was a different story
with retiring Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, whose fervent antiwar politics have
lost steam when approaching endorsements. In 2010 she went far out of her way
to help Jane Harman, a leading pro-war congresswoman and Blue Dog Coalition member,
fend off a primary challenge from an antiwar progressive. This year, thirty-six
hours after primary election night (with 40,000 votes still uncounted and a
small margin between me and the runoff), Woolsey endorsed Huffman—who has never
indicated that he will challenge the military-industrial complex. The takeaway:
we need to build an independent progressive power base instead of relying on
any politician.
After campaigning nonstop for eighteen months, I received more
than 25,000 votes in the primary (15 percent) and missed getting into the
November runoff by 174 votes. (Huffman finished in first place, with 37.5
percent.) With just two Republicans among the dozen contenders in the
"top-two open primary," one of the GOP candidates slipped through to
the fall ballot. If I'd gotten past the primary and consolidated progressive
support, I would have gone into the general election with an initial base of
about 30 percent. At that point, I would have had to pull quite a populist
rabbit out of the hat to win.
"Technically, our campaign has ended," I wrote to
supporters after the protracted vote count. "Politically, it's
continuing—with plans to build an ongoing coalition on the foundation of what
we've already done together." Dozens of people involved in my campaign
quickly went to work on other ones with heightened skills, knowledge and
abilities to draw in volunteers. Meanwhile, our campaign is morphing into a
coalition for the long haul (GrassrootsProgress.org [3]), aiding
efforts to elect progressives to local office within our district as well as to
Congress elsewhere in the country.
* * *
Overall, progressive insurgencies did not perform well in House
primaries this year. A few bright spots appeared when David Gill beat the
Democratic machine in a central Illinois district and liberal challengers took
out centrist incumbents in Texas and Pennsylvania. But even with high-profile
support from national netroots groups, progressive candidates—notably Ilya
Sheyman in Illinois, Eric Griego in New Mexico and Darcy Burner in Washington
State—lost by sizable margins. Each contest had its own dynamics (Burner was
outspent six to one by a self-financed opponent who dropped $2.3 million,
whereas Griego had a money advantage), but the pattern is grim.
Yes, progressives are usually underfunded, and money matters a
lot. But it's hazardous to internalize Mark Hanna's timeworn dictum,
"There are two things that are important in politics. The first thing is
money, and I can't remember what the second one is." We forget the second
thing at our peril. In a word, we need to organize.
For progressives, ongoing engagement with people in communities
has vast potential advantages that big money can't buy—and hopefully can't
defeat. But few progressive institutions with election goals have the time,
resolve, resources or patience to initiate and sustain relationships with
communities. For the most part, precinct organizing is a lost art that
progressives have failed to revitalize. Until that changes, the electoral
future looks bleak.
In my race, basic progress ended up reflected in vote totals to
the extent that I was able to reach out and talk with people over the course of
years. Yet many of the shortcomings of my campaign were related to fieldwork.
Votes slipped through our fingers when we didn't do adequate follow-up with
contacts made long before election day. As our campaign grew, so did the
dilemmas of time, staff, volunteers and money. By any measure, we ran the
strongest grassroots campaign in the race, but it wasn't grassroots enough.
Fragmentation of core constituencies was another problem. From the
outset, it was obvious that half of the twelve candidates didn't have a
snowball's chance of getting through the primary. With rhetoric that sounded
leftish, those six candidates received a combined total of 8.6 percent of the
primary vote, while I lost by 0.1 percent. Huffman was no doubt exceedingly
grateful to these anemic "protest candidates"; he could go on a
cakewalk to the November runoff against a GOP candidate in a heavily Democratic
district.
My counsel to prospective candidates: do not launch a campaign
unless you can give it your all and plausibly consolidate most of the
progressive electorate along the way. Do thorough groundwork for a long time.
Keep meeting people and adding to your database of contacts. Listen and learn
about political microclimates. Work on building coalitions. Encourage
volunteers and treat them with respect. Insist on meticulous, accurate and
principled work from staff. Remember that better process is much more likely to
result in better decisions; when disagreements flare within the team, strive to
assess the clashing outlooks. Keep your eyes on the prize: not only winning but
also making progressive activists and groups stronger for the long haul.
A campaign with resonance should keep evolving after the election.
Donor files, e-mail lists, working relationships, infrastructure, public good
will and more can sustain and expand alliances. High-quality compost from one
campaign should invigorate the growth of others.
Winning or losing an election can hinge on the decisions of just
one group or even one individual. We may not feel powerful, but an internalized
sense of powerlessness represents another triumph for a system that thrives on
vast imbalances of power. Let's get more serious—and effective—about gaining
progressive power in government, shall we?
Links:
[1] http://www.thenation.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/norman-solomon
[3] http://grassrootsprogress.org/
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/[1] http://www.thenation.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/norman-solomon
[3] http://grassrootsprogress.org/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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