Theory of Change: How I Stopped Being a Radical

by: Chris Bowers

Thu Jul 01, 2010 at 13:54

A slow news day has me thinking meta.  Specifically, it has me thinking about how far I have drifted in my politics over the past decade, becoming disillusioned with the radical, agitating left, and growing much more willing to engage politics from the mainstream and institutional inside.

More in the extended entry.
In the year 2000, without the foresight of the Bush years and the political aftermath of 9/11, there was a pretty decent, even pragmatic, progressive argument to be made in favor of supporting the Green Party.  The argument went something like this:

  • It was led by someone who had actually delivered on progressive change much of his life, Ralph Nader.  He had built numerous, successful campaigns, and lasting institutions to keep running those campaigns, which over the previous three decades had engineered an entire swath of consumer protection laws.

  • It was allied with a new army of headline grabbing protesters.  Starting with Seattle in December of 1999, lefties were actually taking to the streets, getting media coverage when they did, and altering the political debate on corporate power as a result.  This activist, protester strength was reinforced by the "Super Rallies" in the autumn of 2000, which at the time were quite notable for getting thousands of people to attend a campaign appearance.

  • It was international. An international neoliberal wave required an international populist response, and the Greens were the only political party with an international presence of both protesters and political candidates.

  • It was growing.  Both domestically and internationally, Green parties were increasing their number of supporters, and regularly winning converts.

  • It was creative and self-organizing. Even apart from the new technology used in the anti-globalization protest movements, websites like NaderTrader, VoteSwap and VoteExchange were, collectively, some of the first instances of mass, self-organized online activism.  This combination of creative organizing and strategic thinking demonstrated real promise for the future.  Nothing like it was happening in either major political party.

  • Change and third parties were in vogue. The 1990's had the strongest electoral showing for non-segregationist third parties at both the Presidential and Congressional level in decades.  In that context, and if the Soviet union could fall, why not the two-party system, too?
If you were a lefty looking for a pragmatic means to achieve change in 2000, supporting Nader and the Green Party seemed neither unreasonable nor impractical.

But it didn't work.  In fact, it completely backfired, and did so in almost exactly the way that center-left opponents of the Green Party said it would.  Here is what happened after 2000:

  • Public policy under total Republican control of all three branches of government proved to be far more extreme and right-wing than even a mix of Republican and DLC control.  This undercut the notion that change could not happen through the Democratic party, even through the right-wing of that party.

  • The anti-globalization movement promptly, and at the time I thought rather cynically (I had participated in previous anti-globalization protests), transformed itself into an anti-war movement less than three weeks after September 11th. This undercut the notion that protesters were an actual populist movement, and not just protesting for the sake of it.

  • Al Gore came out against the war in Iraq in September of  2002, which really hammered the first and second points on list list home, at least for my part.

  • It wasn't long before the rallies for Democratic candidates like Howard Dean and John Kerry put anything that the Greens did to shame in terms of pure size.  This was also the case in terms of clover online organizing, which quickly became dominated by pro-Democratic progressives.

  • The Green Party shed over 80% of its supporters, and as a result had to be taken even less seriously by Democrats than it was in 2000.  Further, Democrats like Howard Dean made the party stand up and notice left-wing resentment far, far better than Ralph Nader had ever done.
The last point is perhaps the most important of all--the Greens lost most of their supporters because they failed to convince people they were making a positive difference. Whether they convinced you or not is irrelevant, since ultimately you cannot make a difference unless you are persuading people to join you.  Politics is fundamentally about the mobilization of resources in support of your cause, and if you are losing your supporters (who are the most important resource of all for lefties), then you are abjectly losing your political campaign.

This isn't to imply that some sort of unquestioning devotion to political candidates with a "D" after their name has proven to be some sort of cure-all for progressive woes.  That is far from my point, and if that is the point that is coming across it is due to my own lack of clarity.  Defeat after defeat on the legislative front has shown us the tremendous limits to purely partisan and electoral organizing as well.

Rather, what this article is meant to imply that any successful left-wing organizing must persuade large numbers of people that it is, and will continue, to make a positive difference.  We can't win without broad based popular support, even though we often lose with broad-based popular support.  And to get those people behind you, you need to convince them you have a workable theory of change.

Not everyone is going to be convinced by the same theory of change, and we should not expect them to be so. However, what I do hope to convince most people of are the qualities that under-gird any successful theory of change: the need for popular support, the need to demonstrate results, the need to be engaged in the process at every level (including Overton Window agitation, but also including finding more ways for people to become activists, and even to having a Capitol Hill presence), and the willingness to participate in a long slog.  If you can't meet all of those criteria, you are never going to convince me that you have a successful theory of change.  I hope you won't convince many others, too.

With vanishingly few exceptions, supporting third parties fails to meet every criteria in this test.  This is not a universal conclusion, but it is nearly so.  I feel a lot better thinking about the concrete victories, however few,  that were won on health care, education, and, if it passes, financial reform, then I do thinking about Al Gore opposing the Iraq war even as I marched in the streets against it.

No matter how many defeats were mixed in with these victories (and there were a lot more defeats in the mix), it is nice to have some victories that will actually help people, rather than just signing a manifesto.  It is why I plan to continue progressive agitation and organizing within existing institutional structures (the Democratic Party, Congress, mass media), rather than outside of those structures.  I know that not everyone lefty reading this will agree with me, and that many who do not have reasonable arguments for why not.  However, I also hope that most of you reading this will agree with me, and that you will join me, and that in so doing will will make enough of a difference for our efforts not to be in vain.

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