Features > May 23, 2007
Dancing Into the Majority (cont’d)
But a focus on local organizing and building institutional movements links CodePink with groups like PDA. In four years, CodePink has established more than 250 local chapters, each of which runs autonomous campaigns and actions in their own communities while receiving ideas and assistance from the national unit. These campaigns include lobbying members of Congress and coordinating diplomatic visits, such as a program that sent a delegation of 15 women to Iraq to meet with local women and hear their stories.
“There is this Beltway culture,” says Dana Balicki, CodePink’s media coordinator. “And we are hammering at it to make sure there’s a real element of public discourse.”
Another prime example is the fledging Aurora Project, spearheaded by Bill Fletcher, Jr., founder of the Black Radical Congress and a Belle Zeller Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Fletcher looks to Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988 as models. Jackson and his allies, Fletcher says, promoted “a vision of a non-party political organization that could operate inside and outside the Democratic Party and had a very broad tent within which progressive social movements could find a place but where people of color did not get lost.” Jackson’s coalition took a less democratic shape than originally hoped, but for many of those involved, the potential of the model remains.
Like PDA, Aurora Project organizers hope to build local electoral organizations that are networked nationally. However, unlike many other movement organizations, issues involving race and gender factor prominently into the Aurora Project platform.
“Organizations, given the history of the United States, do not have the option of taking a pass on race if they want to build a majoritarian movement,” says Fletcher. “Attempting to build a bloc that avoids it invariably ends up failing or stumbling at the minimum.” Last December in Washington, D.C., more than 50 experienced activists met to discuss strategy at the Aurora Project’s founding meeting. Organizers are currently traveling around the country talking with local leaders about their plans, which, according to Fletcher, have been met with enthusiasm.
Even MoveOn, an organization whose leadership focuses more on national issue advocacy than organizing the grassroots, has spawned 200 active local chapters through its electoral fieldwork and Internet technology. Similar to PDA, these autonomous groups hold public educational events and participate in national advocacy campaigns while fostering relationships with their congressional representatives, bridging their outside activity with electoral organizing.
“A number of members of Congress have met with our [local councils] because it’s clear that these are some of the people who are influential in the district,” says Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn. “It’s very exciting to start to see influences in engaged citizens rather than the local crew of lobbyists.”
The path ahead
The Party in the Street is music to the ears of lefty lawmakers, many of whom now hold key committee and subcommittee chairmanships but have not had an organized, national grassroots arm backing their congressional battles for quite some time.
Relationships between members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) and movement-partisan activists are quickly developing and provide mutual benefits. For example, when a legislator proposes a favorable new bill, organizers immediately contact their local representatives to seek out co-sponsors. And the broad networking ability of these groups raises awareness about issues for which progressive legislators are fighting. “I think that when they get their membership to start sending emails, it puts on the radar screen issues that many members might otherwise not be thinking of,” says Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who founded the CPC while a member of the House.
But as Sanders’ insistence on running as an independent suggests, the Party in the Street model presents serious trade-offs for its members. “Their ties to the Democratic Party are both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness,” says Heaney. While aligning closely with Democrats allows for easier recruitment of politically socialized members and access to Washington leadership, groups can grow disconnected from their membership or experience co-optation.
Navigating that liminal space could be the largest obstacle for the Party in the Street’s success. Members of social movements often advocate morally principled but legislatively impractical causes while Democrats seek sound political victories, sometimes undermining justice in the name of compromise. As Heaney notes, people balancing between the movement and the party—which don’t always see eye to eye—are in a precarious position. “There is that force in the party which is trying to pull people out of the social movement and there is a force in the social movement that’s trying to pull people out of the party,” says Heaney. “In a sense, they are not two institutions that go together real easily.”
This fear was dramatized in March when some in the anti-war movement lambasted MoveOn for its actions on the Iraq Accountability Act. Polling its members, MoveOn asked if the organization should back Pelosi’s phased troop withdrawal plan, which was up for a congressional vote. In doing so, they ignored a bill sponsored by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), which was never brought to the floor for a vote, but that called for immediate troop withdrawal. Other anti-war groups, such as United for Peace and Justice, and Code-Pink, saw this sole focus on Pelosi’s bill as a compromised one—one that was more in sync with the will of the newly accessible Congressional leadership rather than the country at large.
“There is a danger that you can be so supportive [of Democrats] that you no longer have a balanced view of what’s really happening,” Balicki says. “If you get too far inside the Beltway, you can be sucked right in.”
There’s also a danger of alienating potential allies, especially members of third parties who are skeptical of Democratic partisan motives. “The problem with PDA and MoveOn and others,” says Scott McLarty, media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States, “is that by focusing on the rehabilitation of the Democratic Party, which I think is a hopeless prospect, they don’t allow for the possibility of a new kind of politics.”
But if members of organizations like PDA can master that balancing act, the model could succeed in building a progressive majority in the United States. One unlikely inspiration could be the activists who occupy a similar, albeit more established, organizational space on the right. Groups like the Christian Coalition have cultivated a regimented mass organization focused on local organizing that has successfully pushed their principal issues to the forefront of the GOP agenda while remaining independent of the party. To emulate that success, progressives must remember that Democratic electoral victories are not ends unto themselves; only through a focus on sustained, local mobilization and leadership development can progressives begin to shift away from issues-based pressure groups that have dominated left politics since the ‘70’s.
Democratic primaries could provide a natural arena for the Party in the Street to assert its influence. “By putting your maximum program out there and challenging in primaries,” says Domhoff, “you have a chance to reach the general public.”
But as Flanders notes, organizations like PDA must also “work outside of its comfort zone.” It’s a sentiment shared by Fletcher, who notes “a recurring problem in progressive circles, where they come to be dominated by what can best be described as white economic populists. But when it comes to issues of race and gender, there’s a soft peddling in the way of bringing us all together.”
Constructing a broader and stronger progressive tent includes establishing vibrant chapters in communities of color and in historically Republican districts, two constituencies often taken for granted or ignored by national Democrats. Carpenter was enthusiastic about inroads PDA has made in “red districts,” but expressed pessimism about progress in heavily black or Latino locales, something he says PDA is actively addressing through its Diversity Caucus and by assembling a racially diverse executive board.
The kids can’t be ignored, either. As Heaney and Rojas document, the Party in the Street “is composed mainly of the young (18 to 27) and the old (46 to 67), with relatively fewer participants outside these ranges.” Energetic young folks are playing a crucial role organizationally and at the polls, meaning that special attention should be paid to youth recruitment and leadership training.
Perhaps most important, movement-partisans must support and run candidates with bold policy initiatives that will excite an electorate that’s increasingly cynical about government. And intra-party debate should be encouraged. As MoveOn’s Pariser puts it, “A diversity of opinions is a strength.” But only by formulating a strong progressive platform that addresses the concerns of middle- and working-class Americans can movement-partisans avoid political obscurity and shift the Democratic Party to the left.
Groups like PDA cannot yet contend with the influence of more established, corporate-friendly bodies like the Democratic Leadership Council. But if organizers follow the model they have devised and remain open to self-criticism, the Party in the Street might give a lot of progressives reason to dance. “Every great social movement begins in the street,” says Carpenter. “But it ultimately ends in the halls of Congress.”
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