In Quick Hits, community member House of Progress points us to a Harper's article on the current ineffectiveness of the American left. It is not a new article (published last month), and I have not read it (although it looks interesting, as it offers a century-long historical context). However, there is no shortage of articles discussing the ineffectiveness of the American left, and so I wanted to take a moment and comment on those articles in a general sense.
Whatever you perceive to be the shortcomings of the American left in affecting political change in this country, and whatever the actual shortcomings may be, there is no quick fix or gimmicky solution. Just developing better framing, finding candidates with different demographic backgrounds, yelling louder, or holding firmer to your principles or stated negotiating position isn't really going to do much in the end. Fundamentally, it all comes back to persuasion and organizing: using your message and your current resources (volunteers, money, media, technological tools) to marshal as many supporters and new resources as possible. From that point, you apply that message, those supporters and those resources in an attempt to change the institutions you would like to see changed.
This is obvious in elections, where campaigns are in the public business of gathering resources (money, volunteers, media appearances, endorsements) in an attempt to spread their message and convince a majority of the electorate to vote for them. But, this applies to legislative campaigns, too. Even then, persuasion and organizing is still all there is--members of Congress just become the main electorate.
If you find existing progressive infrastructure woefully inadequate, I am not writing this to dismissively say "go start your own organization." Rather, I write this, as I have written this in the past, because it is the way I look at politics, and it is the only solution I have on offer. No matter who you are, if you want to make a difference in politics, then you persuade people to join you in a cause. Once you do that, then you convince them to take a collective action on behalf of that cause (even if that action is just voting). And then, most importantly, if that actions ends up making a difference on behalf of that cause, then you will probably be more persuasive and convincing in the future.
That's it. There is no great strategy to be unearthed. There is no secret that everyone else working in politics has missed. It's just persuasion and organizing.
In this context, three things need to be remembered whenever "why the left sucks" articles appear:
- Obama still dominant among the center-left Right now, no one has organized more people in the American center-left than Barack Obama. It isn't even close. By at least an order of magnitude, he has more supporters, a bigger email list, more volunteers, and more donors. As just an example, in November of 2008, he had eight million more emails than even the ultimate online behemoth, MoveOn.org. Because of this, he has more support among the membership of many progressive organizations than even the leaders of those organizations (not all of those organizations, mind you, but most of them). Obama's persuasion and organization among the center-left rank and file makes it almost impossibly difficult to marshal enough resources to effectively oppose him from the left.
- Center-left still heavily outgunned by the right With the possible exceptions of popular support and familiarity with Internet tools, the right still outguns the left when it comes to every type of political resource. They have a bigger media empire, they get more quotes within mainstream media, they have more money, more lobbyists, they publish more polls, they make about twenty times as many calls to Congress, and they have higher voter turnout. They do more, and have more, of pretty much everything.
- The critics aren't exempt. "Why the left sucks" articles are actually persuasion pieces, and thus part of the politics process described above. The authors are targeting grassroots lefties and leaders of center-left organizations, urging them both to take a new direction with the application of their resources. They do not stand above or outside of the political process--they are an inevitable part of it. As such, if they think the left has been largely ineffective, there is no way to exempt themselves.
Complaining about "the perpetual campaign" as, for example, Evan Bayh did during his retirement announcement two months ago, has become commonplace and cliché. However, politics is nothing if not a perpetual campaign of persuasion and organizing. In fact, that is really all politics is. Whether you think the left is ineffective or not, or even whether you are on the left you not, if you want to make a difference in politics, you have to deal with the brutal, never-ending difficulty of persuasion and organization. No one is exempt from it, and no one will figure out a strategy around it. It is the only way.
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