[tl;dr – do one activist thing a day, such as make a phone call, and you too can save the world!!!!]
There is a lot of frustration right now around the sense of helplessness that liberals and progressives are feeling, stemming out of a general consensus that we, collectively, have failed in some intrinsic way.
In regards to the election and voter support for progressive issues, well…we did fail, that is true..
The myriad of ways we’ve failed, or at least failed to rise to the challenge of the far-right Republican juggernaut, are well articulated in David Roberts’ excellent Vox piece, “Everything Matters” so I won’t rehash it here (do go read it, though!).
But all of that, I think, can be laid down at the feet at the core belief most of us on the Left have always invested in, and believed despite clear evidence to the contrary: the shining light of justice and equality is brighter than ignorance and fear.
For decades, the heart of the liberal/progressive agenda has been to shine that light in order to educate people about what is right, what is moral, what is ethical. We’ve believed that this tactic would work in the long run, because we just knew that changing people’s minds and hearts would effect positive change for all of us.
We are wrong.
Not because it’s not a noble effort, or because it’s worthless*. Changing peoples’ minds and hearts is a wonderful thing…on the few occasions it can be done.
Resting the whole our our progressive agenda upon it, though, has not worked and will not work.
It reminds me of the hopeless type of atheist zealot who insists that if they could just teach religious followers the illogical fault lines of their sacred texts and their dogma, then those people will somehow “convert” to atheism. But that is not how it works. The only religious people who get deconverted by seeing how illogical their faith is are those who were already questioning it to begin with, whereas “true believers” see the inconsistencies as more reason to believe. They trust that by putting their faith into the miraculous, they become part of the miracle.
This is the powerhouse of the far Right – they put their faith into things that are illogical and factually wrong and hold onto that faith no matter what argument is made against them. It makes sense to them where it counts: emotionally. They are not going to change their minds because Liberals have opened our hands and hearts to them in an effort to show them the error of their ways.
But we persist in thinking that those bright, shining activist events will create change by spotlighting the righteousness of our claims. We believe that the spectacle holds the seed to long term progress. We get bound up in ideas of grand gestures — marches on {somewhere}, huge and dramatic protests (StandingRock), etc.
But the thing is, spectacular show-outs are not how long-term politics is done anyway. Short term, such marches/protests/sit-ins/fund-raisers can be productive and help raise awareness, but one only has to remember all the wasted passion of the Occupy Wall Street movement to understand that just showing up with righteousness and facts on your side does not create actual change.
This is the real lesson liberal and progressive activists need to grasp: being politically visible is not the same as being political.
The GOP grasped that knowledge a long time ago and ran with it while the progressive Left became enamored of The Spectacletm in hopes of changing minds.
The GOP has done politics by grounding itself in the far-right for the sake of votes since the Carter era (which is one reason Reagan won). They set up calling banks in the early ’80s to drag housewives and working husbands out to call their representative to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. They started at basement level with school board elections and groomed young men from childhood to be politicians. The gerrymandering of districts we’re so in an uproar about now has been planned and in process since the 1990 census. Yes, really.
You’ll note that all of this worked.
The Republicans tied themselves to evangelical Christians and the far-right for their votes, put “boots on the ground” to get their chosen candidates into office, and within 20 years they were reaping the benefits. The last 15 have just been the culmination of what came before. Everyone is looking at the last 10-15 years and wondering what happened, when “what happened” really got launched in early 1980s, twenty years before 9/11.
Meanwhile, for all practical purposes, Liberals have relied on Dem leadership to carry the load for too long, and it’s cost us, mostly in that Dem leadership has steered the party too far into “moderate” waters to chase the hopeless goal of compromise, and left many groups behind (and no, I don’t mean white men). The majority of us talk theory and show up for protests. The few really hard working activists we have get run straight into the ground until they break or quit because they have no one helping them consistently (I’ve seen this happen over, and over, and over).
The end result is that the GOP is used to liberals quietly sitting back and only showing up for the big-bang issues, because that’s how we play the political game if we do not actually live in Washington, D.C. We keep investing in our faith that “the truth will set you free” over and over while the GOP paves over the forest.
That is not how it has worked, and it is not how it is going to work.
Those days need to be over, now. We need to teach the GOP a lesson by proving that we are ON TOP of the issues and their bullshit. There is only one page from the GOP playbook we need to steal, and that is to make the political the personal — make political action a weekly if not daily item on the “to-do” list.
Show up for the show-outs if you can, but not all of us can do those things, for many reasons (family, health, finances, etc.). There is no reason to be frustrated about that. Stop believing that if we cannot participate in The Spectacle, we’re not doing much.
Because we CAN effect change. Every one of us. We CAN save the world. A feasible action plan is fairly easy, not some impossible quest. It will take longer and is not as glamorous, but making the political the personal works:
- support local Dems running for office, vocally and financially; know your reps and call them enough that their offices know you (email, fb, & twitter are not as effective as calling, thems the breaks)
- use the “We’re his problem now” spreadsheet and take ONE action a day — make a call, read up on a bill being introduced. That’s enough, that WILL effect change if you do ONE action a day.
- Demand that liberal/progressive leaders keep bushing the bulwark of the Democratic party back toward the Left where it belongs. Don’t let them repeatedly allow the passion and power of the show-out moments (Occupy Wallstreet, Obama’s first win, Bernie Sander’s supporters, Standing Rock protests, etc.) fade away because they are too much of a challenge to the monied, capitalist interests.
Seriously: ONE action a day will do all of this. Call your representatives, call bill sponsors, call government agencies, call your local Democratic Party headquarters. That sounds like a lot but one call a day? That’s over 250 calls if you don’t count weekends!
One action a day: you can do that!
* NOTE:
I am not saying that the emotionally-driven, one-on-one outreach aspect of the liberal/progressive agenda is useless. We should keep trying to change hearts and change minds through individual interactions with people we personally know, and by displaying the kind of behavior we know is morally right.
But if that kind of outreach and education was truly effective on a mass scale, it would have been effective 50+ years ago.