Over the past few weeks I have done quite a bit of reading trying to understand what is happening in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party--in order to offer some perspective.
So far, the most helpful text I have come across is Martin Luther King's Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
I want to encourage everyone to take a minute to consider this text as a reflection not just on the specifics of the dilemma the Civil Rights movement faced in the year following the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but as a more general insight into the problems the progressive movement now faces one year after the election of Barack Obama.
This is a problem MLK called the "Second Phase."
Some MLK Quotes To Get Us Oriented
I want to start out with some lengthy quotes--because these quotes set up the idea of the "Second Phase" and because reading MLK is generally cathartic. We need to go back and read giants like MLK to remind us how deeply we are all in this together, and then to climb on their shoulders to see what the road up ahead looks like from here.
These quotes are from the Introduction to Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
One year after the greatest achievement of the Civil Rights movement, MLK wrote of the major crisis the movement now faced. Now, I do not mean to suggest, here, that what the progressive movement is going through, today, is the same as what MLK was describing for the civil rights movement. That would be insulting. It is an analogy--a general description of what happens in the year after a major social movement achieves its goal. As you read this, think about the situation, today:
On August 6, 1965, the President's Room of the Capital could scarcely hold the multitude of white and Negro leaders crowding it. President Lyndon Johnson's high spirits were marked s he circulated among the many guests whom he had invited to witness an event he confidently felt to be historic, the signing of the 1965 Voting rights Act. The legislation was designed to put the ballot effectively into Negro hands in the South after a century of denial by terror and evasion...President Johnson, describing Selma as a modern Concord, adressed a joint session of Congress before a television audience of millions. He pledged that "We shal overcome," and declared that the national government must by law insure to every Negro his full rights as citizen.
That is the scene MLK sets, and we can see where it is headed--a year later, things had changed:
One year later, some of the people who had been brutalized in Selma and who were present at the Capital ceremonies were leading marchers in the suburbs of Chicago amid a rain of rocks and bottles, among burning automobiles, to the thunder of jeering thousands, many of them waving Nazi flags.
One year later, some of the Negro leaders who had been present in Selma and at the Capital ceremonies no longer held office in their organizations. they had been discarded to symbolize a radical change of tactics.
A year later, the white backlash had become an emotional electoral issue in California, Maryland and elsewhere. In several Southern states men long regarded as political clowns had become governors or only narrowly missed election, their magic achieved with a "witches" brew of bigotry, prejudice, half-truths and whole lies."
[...]
During the year, in several Norther and Western cities, most tragically in Watts, young Negros had exploded in violence. In an irrational burst of rage they had sought to say something, but the flames had blackened both themselves and their oppressors."
Now, MLK uses this introduction to set up the idea that the Voting Rights Act represented the successful finish of the "first phase" of the Civil Rights movement--the recognition that bigotry was institutionalized in America, and required a non-violent movement to bring about the change necessary to classify this structural discrimination illegal. Phase One ended with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Then came the Second Phase--the realization of the promise of the Voting Rights Act. It did not go well:
When Negro looked to the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared. The Negroes of America had taken the President, the press and the pulpit at their word when they spoke in broad terms of freedom and justice. But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood. The word was broken, and the free-running expectations of the Negro crashed into the stone walls of white resistance. The result was havoc. Negros felt cheated, especially in the North, while many whites felt that the Negros had gained so much it was virtually impudent and greedy to ask for more.
It is a brilliant assessment of how a movement forged national unity on the most difficult issue in our history, and rode that unity to an historic legislative victory. But then the unity fell apart. Betrayal led to frustration. Anger led to outbursts. MLK then concludes with this, profoundly insightful observation:
The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point had been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels and other facilities with whites. Even the psychological adjustment is far from formidable. Having exaggerated the emotional difficulties for decades, when demands for new conduct became inescapable, white Southerners may have trembled under the strain, but they did not collapse...The real cost lies ahead.
Phase One
What an amazingly valuable insight MLK presents for any political movement standing on the edge of frustration and chaos one year after they have achieved a massive political goal, and are now feeling the pain of betrayal.
What was the goal achieved by the progressive movement? If you can put aside your cynicism and your anger for a moment, I think you will see that it was very clear: saving the country from the rise of a radical right-wing Republican Party propelled into office by a Christian nationalist base that sought to use the military without cause abroad and turn back the clock on equality at home.
In simpler terms: We wanted to put the Democratic Party back in control of the Senate, the Congress, and the White House.
That was the focus that drew tens of thousands--some even say millions--into political activism for the first time in their lives. We came to online communities. We went to meet ups. We joined the party, volunteered for campaigns, spent our own money to get to know the electoral system, went door to door, quit jobs, built entirely new social communities, and we worked 24/7/365 to achieve that goal.
From roughly 2004 until 2009--five full years--this movement had a clear goal and a sense of itself as involved in an historic mission.
And we were celebrated by those we sought to get into office. Members of Congress, Senators, presidential candidates, Hollywood celebrities, leading members of the press--all gave us room to push our goal on a national stage. And we did. And we succeeded.
That was Phase One.
Phase Two: Small Change to Big Costs
Now, what has happened in the past few months is that the promise of "change" has tarnished and all the allegiances we once had have started to pull back. The party is no longer listening to the movement that pushed to elect Democrats as a strategy for saving the nation from ruin.
This is the time, when the realization of the alternative to radical Republican rule has become difficult--seemingly impossible. This is the time when we are realizing how relatively low the costs of have been to dislodge radical Republicans by electing Democrats promising change. This is the time when we realize how difficult it is to push the country to the next level of commitment and spending--to advance an agenda of real change, with the big investment necessary, and the real change to people's everyday experience that will come with true reforms.
What does this mean?
It means we must re-examine the core goal of "electing" as the main focus of a progressive movement. It means we must be willing to really articulate what it means to realize "change" over a period of 5 years. It means we must be willing to refocus and rebuild our community on those new ideas rather than allow ourselves to become irrelevant by virtue of the fact that we are in chaos.
Arguably, there are many people who have already made a quiet departure to this kind of refocus.
The people I know who transitioned from being Obama volunteers to being OFA workers have already decided that the way to realize change is to stop focusing on elections and to work hard to advance the legislative agenda of the Obama administration. We may not agree with 100% of that agenda, but we cannot dispute the fact that those who have re-focused their movement energy in this way have already begun to rebuild. They have formed new social groups, they have new habits and commitments, and--most importantly--they see themselves as advancing towards a new set of 5 year goals.
What about the rest of us? What have we done?
About half of us have stayed within the same general framework of a movement focused on elections, but have simply switched from being pro-Democrat to being anti-ruling party. What is crucial to note about this half of the progressive movement (and I do believe it's about half) is that it has not set up a new set of goals. The movement is the same--same structuring concepts, same social groups, same organizing principles and technology. What has changed is the opposition to the ruling party as a reaction to the frustration of betrayal (understandable). But the movement has not been renewed. Some new concepts have been introduced (e.g., corporatism), but no blueprint discussion has been created.
The other half of us have also stayed within the same general framework of the movement focused on elections, but we have put aside our feelings of betrayal to maintain a certain level of civic discourse. Rather than refocusing our goals and starting over on a new set of 5 year achievable outcomes, we have focused on defending the debate from the forces of rage that threaten to topple it. This seems like meaningful work--indeed it is--but is also a way of avoiding the very same work as those who introduce rage have avoided: the work of defining and organizing the Phase Two.
Realizing Change
So, what then should Phase Two be? It should be a refocusing of the movement on the realization of change.
Towards that end, let me begin answering that by asking a very basic question:
What does it mean in economic terms to realize the kind of real change we wanted when we worked so hard to elect Democrats from 2004 to 2009?
That, again following MLK's lead as he was formulating Phase Two for the Civil Rights Movement, can be a key to starting Phase Two for many of us, today. We are battling over health care, over taxes, over banking policies--true. But deep down, what we really want is to change a very basic economic direction of the country. And we want to change it for a very specific reason.
What does it mean to me? This is how I answer the question above:
To bring a strengthened and safeguarded Middle Class--the great achievement of last progressive era--squarely into the 21st Century
To utter a phrase that MLK would never in a million years have said (and I apologize to his spirit for doing so, but...): Over the past 20 years, the American middle class has been systematically fucked over . The realization of economic change, therefore, means turning that back that reality, such that, the Middle Class can thrive again as the basic for 21st Century America.
Also following MLK, for me the key to strengthening the Middle Class requires two basic observations about prevailing economic ideologies of Communism and Capitalism. One more quote from an MLK speech (16 Aug 1967) says it better than I ever could:
What I'm saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis.
The economic reality we are after is a form of socially aware capitalism in sync with what we might call "spiritual" awareness. "Spiritual" can take many forms (e.g., Jesus, Gaia, Buddha, Tao, Nature, Family, Community, Torah, Koran, Bahá’u’lláh--whatever) but I think that hits at what MLK meant. We need an economic foundation for our country that generates work and income for all without extinguishing our individualism or our recognition that there is a "higher synthesis" than profit and loss, income and expenses.
Phase Two, in other words, begins with the realization that we all must ground our ideas of change in a basic, far reaching, idea of economic change in this country.
This is a difficult pill for many to swallow, I suspect, because over the past 20 years, the American left has systematically taught itself that cultural realities are more real and more urgent targets for change than economic realities. I am not disputing this. Rather, what I am suggesting is much more simple and direct than it may seem at first glance:
if we take the time right now to define "change" in terms of a realization of a basic economic principles, we have a very good chance of strengthening the progressive movement and rising out of the current mnorass of betrayal and anger that now weighs heavily upon us.
Full Employment
One example as to how we can get started on defining this core economic principle is to ground it in a well-known, but ignored goal--a goal that translates easily into a political slogan: full employment.
Ultimately, the left, as well as substantial numbers of people in "the middle" and on the right, believe that everybody who can and wants to work should be able to. We do not link employment to theoretical abstractions like "natural unemployment," but link work to human dignity. The basis of a just and healthy society is full employment.
Without a return to the goal of full employment, progressive reform has effectively been stripped of meaning. This does not mean that we will achieve full employment soon--but it does mean that we should bring this core progressive principle out of the attic and put it back in the center of the table.
Now, from "full employment" we can begin to weigh our priorities and begin to sketch out those policies that we migh advocate for in the weeks and months ahead.
More importantly:
"full employment" can be the focus for movement building meetings and discussion--the kernel for building the face-to-face communities that can then be grown with social media
When was the last time you were invited to a meet up to brainstorm about ways to apply a progressive as policy? Been a while, eh?
What if--hypothetically--we designated one day in the first week of February as a day for meet-ups to do just that? And then, after groups of 5-20 discussed this, they reported back in diaries here? If that happened, that would be the first steps towards stepping out of the angry end of Phase One and into the start of a new Phase Two.
Conclusion: More To Come on Phase Two
There is much more to discuss about Phase Two, but let me just sum up what I think are the key points.
- We have been here before: MLK teaches us that no matter how frustrated we are right now, there have been betrayals far worse in the progressive movement and with far graver consequences.
- Those who hit this wall before us, found a way forward: After the impasse of 1966, the Civil Rights movement redefined Phase Two along multiple paths--cultural, economic, political--advancing the work of "realizing" civil rights.
- We may not all agree on the best way to move forward on Phase Two, but that's OK: Some of us may reject an economic basis for Phase Two, but what is important is starting the work of defining what "realizing change" means.
- Defining the "realization of change" can offer a useful focus for meeting face-to-face and jump starting movement building work that was once the main focus of our energy (e.g., the Meet Up phase).
- Without reconnecting to discuss big goals and ways to implement them, we are destined to keep fighting the same fights over and over again, and to revisit the same frustrations and anger again, and again, and again.
- Focusing on economics does not mean abandoning an interest in elections: It simply means defining anew what we are working to accomplish at 1, 3 and 5 year intervals. We achieved our last 5 year goal--we have Democrats in control of all branches of the federal government. Now we need to redefine new goals to achieve.
- Not everyone needs to dedicate themselves to this work of defining Phase Two--but those who do must make themselves and their effort known to everyone: It is really important that people begin to act again like leaders who are doing the work of defining Phase Two, rather than just being members of the general kaffeeklatsch. Make yourself known to those who would participate and to others who are doing the same work.
- Begin to see social media as a place to grow what happens in face-to-face encounters: Progressive movement social media needs to find balance again between debate and informing. We have lost that balance, understandably. But now is the time to get it back. More and more, we need to start treating blogs again as places to inform, not just places to inflame or vent.
- Don't wait--get started right now: If this discussion has helped crystalize any ideas for a meet up, do not wait until tomorrow. Send 5 emails, make 3 phone calls--do it right now. Schedule a meeting to discussion ways "full employment" can be translated into food policy or energy policy or education policy or urban development or labor policy or immigration policy. If you have the spark of an idea, get it burning right away.
- Bury the hatchet--forgive and forget: Everybody has been annoyed, hurt, insulted or just aggravated by others in the movement lately. That is normal. Try not to carry these arguments forward, but just focus on what we are building. If helping one group's version of Phase Two does not work for you--try another. But do not obsess over what is wrong with other efforts. Focus on what we are creating, not on what we are tearing down.
This is a big task, but the hardest part is getting started. We have done this before--and those progressive giants whose shoulders we stand on had done it many times before most of us were even born. Transitioning from Phase One to Phase Two of a movement is the real work of change.
It's our turn to carry the torch.
