A diary was recently posted at MyFDL, called Nurses say: Come Join Us on September 1 on Main Street, Don’t Return to DC, to which I posted a lengthy reply. This diary is an elaboration of that reply.
It's not my intention to make the Nurses feel overly bad about what they're not doing, especially since they're doing something to make this country a better place. They thus have that going for them, compared to most Americans.
However, I'd rather have fewer friends, and dispense tough love, in the hopes that the recipients would respond in a manner that, I believe, would aid them in their avowed, democratic purpose. I have done this before (see, e.g., 'Dreamer' Van Jones, Naive Fool, or Cynical User? ) and will doubtless do so in the future.
Like most activists in the US, there doesn’t seem to be the slightest move towards making an electoral threat. To me, this is like fighting with one hand behind your back. You’re not going to win that battle, even if you do get some good karma that ripens in a future lifetime.
Imagine if the Tea Parties had merely had “actions” of one sort or another. Perhaps one day they dumped tea into a local body of water, perhaps on another day they threw IRS tax forms into a bonfire, perhaps on another occasion they handed out mock Kenyan birth certificates with Obama’s name on them, etc. There’re “actions” galore that one can think of, that might be fun; and furthermore, many are, indeed, educational.
Question: What would have been their effect on the Republican party?
Answer: Zero
The Tea Partiers made electoral threats, and carried them out. On the other side of the fence, Democrats in WI recently made electoral threats, and carried them out.
Both the Tea Partiers and the WI Democrats show us (well, show me) that impacting the composition of legislative bodies is certainly possible. The Tea Partiers have already shown a muscular effect in Congress, even though they don’t have majoritarian numbers. I expect that the WI Democrats will do the same, provided they can get 1 Repub to vote their way some of the time, and/or dump Scott Walker. And they are on a path that may result in them picking up another seat during the next election. So majoritarian dominance is also a possibility.
If the Nurses really want to make a difference, they can start the process of progressives becoming electorally aggressiveness at the Federal level, by running candidates for Congress. To ease their entry into the realm of electoral politics, they can commit to a number of minimalist candidates in the mold of the Full Court Press. (Nurses: Don’t even go for 435 races, if you don’t have the support on Day 1. Start, e.g., with 43 races.) For nurses’ groups that live in very red districts, they can instead register as Republicans, and run as progressive Republicans, as I elaborated on in :
Wanted: Republicans who plan to sell off CA and NY, to pay the national debt which is about progressives targetting Republican primaries as progressive candidates, which is particularly important and logical in uber-red districts. Exposing ALEC is a topic that these progressive Republicans would be concerned about – who are expecting to lose, but educate in the process.
Going after Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge , in which I suggested another progressive pillar for the progressive crashers of Republican primaries, to embrace.
My aunt was a nurse, and when she wasn’t working, would spend her spare time helping people (including giving them shots) at no charge, plus helping her church. I know what good-hearted people nurses can be. However, no matter how golden your heart, if you don’t use your head, your good efforts will be mostly wasted, in terms of collective solutions to societal problems.
Now, if these nurses want to be like my aunt, and help people on an individual basis, that’s just fine – they can make a huge difference in individual persons’ lives. However, if they want to make large-scale changes to society, via the political process, then they need to ask themselves if they’re not kidding themselves with their Main Street demonstrations, and just spinning their wheels.
While my aunt has a good heart, she’s also very tough, let me assure you. I very much doubt that that she’s politically astute enough to figure out how to effect societal-level change, if she ever put her mind to it, but if she “got it”, I think she’d let the politicians “have it”. :-)
My dear, activist nurses: You need more than a good heart for societal level changes. You need the toughness of my aunt, and the astuteness of her nephew.
(Yes, I realize that doesn’t sound very humble. Well, too bad.)
You’ll also need the support of progressives from other walks of life. This is an untapped resource, much of it frozen in a limbo of ineffectiveness by Veal Pen faux-progressive organizations.
Somebody needs to start the avalanche rolling. That’s not going to be MoveOn, it’s not going to be the AFL-CIO (Note: While I was writing this diary, a front-page diary went up about a new AFL-CIO political strategy, viz., New AFL-CIO political strategy draws attention, but specifics remain shrouded. I will happily eat my words, if the AFL-CIO gives me good reason to do so!) , it’s not going to be the Progressive Democrats of America, and it doesn’t look like it will ever be the PCCC, either.
So, the field is yours, if you want to make history. In order to do that, you’ve got to go beyond “feel good” actions, and even educational actions. You’ve got to not imagine that Veal Pen failures, like MoveOn and the AFL-CIO, are going to lead the way.
The question of "What activism is effective?" doesn't seem asked very often. I'm on MoveOn's mailing list, and I don't recall them asking members to join a phone conference, say, to discuss activism methodology. Ditto for AFL-CIO, Progressive Democrats of America, Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Apparently, all these groups have leaders who paint the broad brushstrokes of their respective organizations, and don't make it easy for them to be confronted with questions about their organization's strategies' efficiency.
BTW, I'm also on the mailing list of the Tea Party Nation, and it's the same, there. The Tea Parties, though, are clearly the pace-setters in electoral activism. (I'm referring to their strategy, not their ideology.) Though their leadership is also closed off, it seems much more shrewdly led than all the progressive groups, which mostly fail to effect promising change. Although not a proven strategy, yet, Tea Party Nation has recently announced that it will target Republicans in general elections, as well. (See Tea Party about to cross the Rubicon, become more effective - Wimpy Progressives, watch out! Gee whiz, is it possible that Tea Party nation strategists have hired a competent political game theorist?)
One person who does ask the meta question about what constitutes effective activism is Denis Rancourt, who I hope our nurse friends check out. While I'm not overwhelmed with the answers Rancourt has offered, so far, he is at least asking the right question. Perhaps if our nurse friends study Rancourt's thoughts on the matter, that will inform their analysis, but allow them to develop their own answers.
I see information warfare and electoral activism as tightly coupled, and don't like to see the former without a clear, or at least easily discoverable, link to the latter. However, for those people who are quesy about electoral trouble-making (perhaps because they want to watch the Tea Parties score more successes before they're sufficiently motivated /snark), I've also made suggestions for injecting progressive memes where they normally don't see the light of day. See my links at Progressives are Stupid if they don't seize their opportunity to educate their Republican neighbors
To bring things full circle, from the MyFDL ariticle:
We’ll be asking something very specific of our elected officials, and that is not about where or whether or not they take an August or Labor Day vacation. We want them to pledge their support for those who damaged Main Street so badly to pay to repair it. Main Street is taxed enough, let’s establish a Wall Street Transaction Tax — it could raise $350 billion to rebuild our country – an amount sufficient enough to make a real difference on Main Street, where the emergency is felt most directly.
There is nothing wrong with this demand. I strongly support it, and I'd love for National Nurses United to hold onto this demand. However, to not fight with one arm tied behind their back, they need to dredge up as many challengers for elected office as they can, who are committed to a Transaction Tax. And they need to appeal to other, already-organized supporters to give their candidates a running start. (E.g., the Internation Association of Firemen's union.) If they can't raise the funds for "serious" candidates in 2012, no problem - they can run them as minimalist Full Court Press candidates, and thus lay the groundwork for future electoral victories.
What matters most about an avalanche is the huge amount of snow that ends up at the bottom of the mountain; not the smallness of the snowball that started it off, at the top.
