| Although I was already planning to work in progressive politics, and very likely would have stayed a lefty for my entire life because that is who I am, when I was 22 years old (a quarter of a century ago now) I made a commitment that really helped seal the deal for the long haul. I had just met the already legendary organizer Heather Booth, who remains one of my life heroes, and we had just started talking about potential organizing jobs, and she stopped mid-sentence, looked at me dead-on and said, "What I'm looking for is people who will make a lifetime commitment to work on behalf of social and economic justice. Will you do that?" And I said yes.
Making that commitment has helped me make the right decisions when offered $25,000 a month from big corporations to help them do things I wasn't comfortable with, and has helped me make the good (moral, not financial) choices about what jobs and projects to take on and to pass up. And it helps me take the long view when the political system gets as frustrating as it is now. A while back I wrote a sentence in a post that I had a more patient view of how things were going politically than many movement people did, and Chris Bowers urged me to write a post specifically about that. Given how frustrated we all are with the likelihood of another war cave-in, and just in general with our Democratic friends right now (see, for example, Matt Stoller's post on throwing everybody out), I thought now would be a good time to write on that topic. |
| The first reason I am more patient is my love of American history, which is the main reading I do when I'm not working. If you look at the patterns of American history, you know that real progress is sometimes made, quite a bit of it every once in awhile in a relatively short period of time, but that progress is never uniform and it usually takes longer than the history books portray.
Teddy Roosevelt created the national park system, partially broke apart the big trusts and brought us some measure of food safety; but had no use for unions or women's suffrage, allowed some of the worst lynching to go on in the South in the nation's history, and was a serious military adventurer. Woodrow Wilson brought us the single most important economic reform in the country's history, a progressive income tax, and his ideas set the stage for many New Deal era reforms and the United Nations; but he was perhaps the worst stone cold racist president in the country's history, was vehemently opposed to women's suffrage, and got us into a stupid, wasteful war we had no business being in. FDR gave us Social Security, labor law reform, the minimum wage, financial regulation and a massive increase in domestic spending and job creation; but did nothing on civil rights, interred the Japanese in WWII, and screwed Jews trying to save themselves from the Holocaust. Kennedy and Johnson helped push through civil rights laws, Medicare and Medicaid; but got us into Vietnam.
There are no straight lines up in the history of American progressivism. We gain and we lose, we chip away, occasionally there's a big breakthrough, but it always has been and always will be a constant- and frequently heartbreaking- struggle. The other thing is that our gains almost never happen overnight. We live in a culture that wants instant results, but democracies (at least this one) don't provide them. The movements to break up the trusts and create a national parks system began to build up a head of steam in the 1880s, 20 years before Teddy Roosevelt finally got it to happen. Social Security had been pushed by the Socialist movement more than 20 years before it happened, and the labor law reform sought by John L. Lewis had been part of Eugene Debs demands in the 1890s. The forgotten early hero of the civil rights movement, A. Phillip Randolph, was doing effective organizing for civil rights laws in 1930s, and even after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks launched the more well-known civil rights movement in 1954-55, it was a decade before the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were in place. The anti-Vietnam war movement found its voice and got organized in 1962, in the Port Huron statement written by the Students for a Democratic Society, but the troops weren't home until a dozen years later. This stuff takes time.
The second reason for my patience is just that I've been in full-time political organizing for so long myself, almost 27 years now. In that time, I've lived through many horrible moments- the Reagan-led Republican landslide in 1980, the 1994 election debacle, the election-stealing of 2000 and the Bush years. But I've also lived to see some great things even in this relatively bad quarter-century of politics: the passing of MLK Day and renewal of the Voting Rights Act in the 1980s over Reagan's vehement objections; the stopping of Reagan's horrendous Central American war; the end of apartheid and Mandela going free; the passage in 1993 of the most progressive federal budget and economic plan since 1965, as well as several other progressive pieces of Clinton-era legislation; and the stopping of a host of right-wing attempts to privatize Social Security, destroy Head Start and the school lunch program, roll back arsenic in the water regulations, etc.
So I've seen a lot of good things happen in a fairly gloomy period in history. But even more importantly that I am seeing is the flowering of a new progressive movement and vitality. I don't need to write much about that, because this new movement is well-known to the OpenLeft.com community and since so many of you are at the heart of it. This new movement has already accomplished a lot but it is just getting started, and don't forget the time it took other movements to make significant accomplishments. But as a reader of history, and a participant in progressive organizing for all these years, I am dazzled by the things already being accomplished: a Democratic victory in 2006 that would never have happened without it; a new fear of being primaried which makes conservative Democratic politicians very nervous; new progressive governors and legislatures in several states doing exciting things; a clear shift to the left in the Democratic primary debate; a shift in the center of debate over what to do in Iraq (think where we were just 18 months ago); a shutting down of the attempts last year to roll us on net neutrality.
It is very easy to be discouraged and pissed off about short-term setbacks, especially the big ones like the Democrats folding on the Iraq war and FISA, and I certainly have been feeling very down. But we also have to remember that this is a very long-term battle, and commit ourselves to pacing ourselves for that long-term fight.
My third reason for having more patience, or at least more optimism, is that I have seen how the small changes in regular people's lives from having some measure of governmental power really does matter. Being a community and labor organizer in Nebraska and Iowa gave me a strong sense of how close to the edge so many people in this country live, and how little things we were able to deliver from the government really do matter. I've known older people who froze to death in the winter in Iowa, and I still burst with pride that I helped to change that by getting a law passed to prevent utility shutoffs in the winter. I've been thanked by parents for my role in getting the Family and Medical Leave Act passed who were able to stay home with their dying children. I've talked with low-income folks who were able to make their house payments and keep their home because of the extra money they got from the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Those kinds of conversations don't ever leave your mind. It matters that better people than Mitch McConnell and John Boehner control the conference committees where the details of legislation are written. It matters that decent people like David Obey and Robert Byrd are writing the details of the appropriations bills. It would matter if there was a Democratic president, even a moderate one like Clinton, because there would be staffers who could get all kinds of really valuable details inserted into legislation and line items inserted into budget bills that would truly help a lot of people.
I make this point because most of the attention in media and activism tends to be featured on the biggest issues, which are of course incredibly important. But knowing how hard it is to get the big stuff done, and knowing how much it matters to everyday people to do little things right, helps sustain me for the day-in, day-out fight.
My reasons for being a little more patient and a little more optimistic about what is happening in politics right now are not an argument that we should lessen our demands for an end to the war, or for major action on global warming, or on any other issue.
We ought to push as hard as we can, organize day and night to make change happen. But, I also believe that we should not despair, that we need to work always with the long-term in mind, because it is the steadiness of the long-distance runner that really makes the big changes in policy and in politics over time. |
