I've been amazingly uplifted by the upwelling of opposition, on this site and others, supporting a filibuster of the Alito nomination. My personal gratitude goes out to everyone who has been pouring in time to make this a possibility, to stiffen the backbone and resolve of the Democratic Party.
Now, as I read over the various DailyKos front page stories and recommended diaries on ways we can influence more Senators to commit to filibustering Alito , I noticed that one tactic - one major point of leverage - which seemed obvious to me has not yet been mentioned.
So, here goes
Calling and emailing and faxing are great places to start of course. But, beyond that, here's what I'm going to be doing tonight and tomorrow to stop the Alito nomination...
It's simple : I have my Rolodex ( old school ) and
I'm simply going to call people I know - one after another - to convince them to make their own phone calls, send emails, and faxes, sign petitions.
And, if they are especially frisky, I'll work to convince my friends and family to join with me and do the same : to spend a couple of hours calling people they know who likely would be receptive, to convince those folks to take action....
How far will these waves ripple ? I don't know. That's beyond my power to predict.
But, I can say this with certainty :
NOT all those who are dead set against Alito and willing to take action to promote the filibuster are on the Internet, and MANY have not noticed the rapid upwelling of opposition on the net which has stiffened the resolve of Democrats in the Senate.
No, indeed. The DailyKos, and the various other blogs and sites working for a filibuster, are not the whole universe of the left - not by a long stretch.
But, if everyone on this site, and allied sites, who already has called, emailed, faxed, petitioned were to convince people they know - people who don't frequent Internet political sites and may not be fully aware of the gathering push for a filibuster.....
Well then. We could double the numbers of people applying political pressure to support the filibuster.
As Georgia10 said, let's get to work.
____
What I've just sketched out is basic political organizing, but I suspect the apparent power of the Internet - in politics - has clouded a basic truth :
Sites such as the dailyKos excel at gathering like minded folks, yes. But the people we can exert the most powerful direct influence on tend to be those we know personally, people whose hands we've shaken, people we've hugged, cried and laughed with.
The Christian right - which now sees in Alito the culmination of an over two decade political organizing project bent on achieving political supremacy and theocracy - rose to power initially not on rivers of cash or ties to powerful politicians. Mainly, at first, the Christian right built political power the old fashioned way - through hard work, personal networks, skillful organizing....
So, back to the filibuster :
If every person here on the DailyKos and elsewhere on the net who has already lent their voice in support of the filibuster also can convince just one friend, relative, or associate to join in, well then - Senators who might support the filibuster but don't currently will suddenly notice that popular support has doubled. Convince two people, well then it triples.
Can you convince one other person to join in ? I can. Can you convince two ? Three ? I bet I can do that as well.
As Georgia10 said.....
UPDATE :
If I had known this diary would hit the recommended list, I would have added some more material. I'll have a piece up on Sanctifying the Evangelical Vote" :
If it could ever be organized, the so far amorphous and conflicted evangelical vote could be an important factor in politics.
.
Well, someone could rightly say the same about the American progressive and religious left now, couldn't they ? Let's try it out :
If it could ever be organized, the so far amorphous and conflicted vote of the progressive and religious left could be an important factor in politics.
-sounds about right..... err,
left, eh ?
OK, back to Ridgeway. He detailed, in his Village Voice piece, the process of the Christian right's entrance into politics :
Scheffler himself has little experience in political organizing. He previously ran unsuccessfully for state office in Iowa; then last summer he took a training course in political organizing at the Freedom Council's headquarters. This past winter in Des Moines, Scheffler became the catalyst for fundamentalist organizing.
"So many times we holler, but we don't take a stand," Scheffler told the Dallas County group. "If we want those Christian values returned, we have to get out of the pew."
Well, try updating Scheffler's statement their for our purposes :
"So many times we holler, but we don't take a stand," Bruce Wilson told the DailyKos community. "If we want our progressive values returned to politics, we have to get up, turn off our computers - for a while anyway - and talk to the non-internet population, our friends and family first and then - later - people who we might be able to win over to our progressive values, to them pull away from the voting bloc the Christian right has cobbled together. We have to evangelize our values in the same manner as the Christian right began to do 20 years ago..."
So, how does that sound ? Good ? OK ? So-so ? Capische ? Am I onto something here ?
I'll add more in a bit - on how we need to do that ( above ) and more : we need to move intpo electoral politics. Me, you, all of us. If we want our values represented we have to engineer the same sort of takeover of the Democratic Party as was engineered two decades ago, by the Christian right, in the takeover of the GOP. We have to learn the mechanisms of electoral politics and get out the door to caucus, to organize, to build political strength. Just as the Christian right did 20 years ago. If we had been paying attention - to the Christian right takeover of the GOP, we would have come to this realization long ago.
Well, that's water under the bridge -
the crucial lesson now is that regardless of whether the filbuster against the Alito nomination is successful or not, our task remains the same, and in this sense Monday changes nothing - we have to learn political organizing, get out the door, make mistakes, and - above all - try. The Internet - and this site - is powerful, yes. But now we need to project our movement off the net and into the real world, to shake hands, look folks in the eye, persaude them, organize ourselves into a political force.