A New Hope
Calling all activist groups to form a coalition of change, to make primaries our primary battle.
TLDR: We need to contact activist groups to urge them to work together and create coalitions that can focus our election efforts. The people need to know that change is possible and who they need to support to make that happen. Not just donate, vote and spread the word. Primaries should be our primary battle, because a general election between a corporatist Democrat and a maga Republican means we’ve failed.
(See end of article for list of groups and recommended action letter.)
We have a hundred different activist organizations going in a hundred different directions. Most of them seem to be focused on asking corporatist politicians to listen to us. Imagine what we could accomplish if we came together and focused on a common goal. The recent success of Zohran Mamdani in New York was a coalition victory between the Democratic Socialists, the Working Families Party, and various other progressive Democratic groups. Going up against Cuomo—backed by the Democratic corporate arm all of the way up to Bill Clinton—created the perfect example of the old idea of settling for the “lesser evil” vs the new movement of supporting real progress. (Help me, Zohran Mamdani, you’re my only hope.)
Groups like Justice Democrats and Swing Left have been trying for years to get more progressive candidates into office. Their efforts have struggled for lack of support. They’ve even lost candidates due to AIPAC funded opposition. Little progress has been made without the support of party leadership. These failures have left the people of the nation unconvinced that these groups can bring the change they claim. More recently, Bernie Sanders helped found Our Revolution, with the same goal in mind. That one at least carries the name recognition that so many Americans have come to trust. Good candidates are hard to find; I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to discover Collin Allred was affiliated with Third Choice (the group that backed Sinema and Manchin).
We need to regroup, circle the wagons, form a shield wall, and stand together. There are 90 million eligible non-voters, nearly 60 million disaffected Democrats, and 30 million Republicans who are sick of the status quo. They’re sick of corruption supporting excess for the rich while average Americans suffer and our planet burns to the ground—even if their animosity isn’t always properly directed at the real culprits. That means we have well over 150 million people (fully half of the nation) ready to vote for change. They just need something to vote FOR.
Democratic constituents continue to argue that their party can’t bring reform because they don’t have the votes, while failing to understand why the party doesn’t have the votes. Do we think they’re stupid? That they don’t realize that if they championed reforms that the people want and need, while standing against voter suppression and election interference, that they could drive out tens of millions more voters? Do we really think that the two parties have almost exactly the same amount of support, decade after decade, by pure chance? They maintain razor thin margins so that they can perpetuate the status quo and blame it on the other side. Why else would Democrats refuse to pass anti-corruption laws in blue states? They don’t need Congress to overturn Citizens United, they could do this right now in their own states. They don’t want to.
Over 80% of Democrats take corporate PAC and AIPAC money. They refuse to stop bombing Palestinian children and tell us to shut up and accept the lesser evil. They refuse to increase minimum wage while they vote for pay raises for themselves. They refuse to ban AR-15s or build public housing or create universal healthcare to fix problems that every other developed nation handled long ago. It’s not just that they don’t have the votes, they won’t even platform these ideas. They’re scared of how much support it would bring out. They’re scared of winning too much and then actually having to follow through on those promises.
But Americans everywhere are finally seeing the writing on the wall. We don’t have to settle for the lesser evil—we can build something good. Mamdani’s campaign for NY mayor was followed throughout the nation because it was a breath of fresh air. It was a victory for the working class, a victory for those who want to save our environment from corporate devastation, a victory for those who refuse to be complicit in genocide and war for profit. It proved that no matter how much money they throw at an election, together we can still beat them.
For decades, corporate money ruled elections because people voted according to the information they got from standard television and media. So whoever controlled the media and flooded TV with the most ads got the votes, simple as that (especially when lying is legal in political ads). But the age of information has changed that. We can communicate and organize and share information instantly with thousands across the nation. We can show what campaigns are doing in real time and create a sense of community, both locally and nationally. Flooding the zone with propaganda ads doesn’t work against an informed electorate. They can try to counter with disinformation and astroturf campaigns (and they surely have been), but the thing about the truth is that it rings true when we hear it. A person has to already be immersed in disinformation and have poor critical thinking ability to be convinced by disinformation.
To be sure, that has been most of the populace, with our poor civics and history education. Even so, the failures of the past 50 years have created an awareness that what we have right now isn’t working. Even if people aren’t sure about the details, they’re sure of that. Violence, fascism, and capitalist exploitation are self-defeating. The worse they get, the more people rise against it. Systems of exploitation undermine their own foundation, until there is nothing left to stand on. That system is beginning to collapse and the rich see that as well as anyone.
There is a small group of “neoreactionaries” who are trying to put themselves into a position to shift power after that collapse. They want neofeudal cities where the rich live in luxury off the slave labor of the few survivors remaining. This is pure idiocy and will fail even if they’re allowed to try, but these are very arrogant and stupid people. What we need is to band together to change the power dynamic. Until we get ranked choice voting as the norm, that means coming together to back one progressive candidate and educate the district or state they are running in. Coalitions work, because it shows solidarity. There has been so much corruption, lies, and sabotage that the common people have a deep-seated mistrust of politics in general. Having a multitude of endorsements creates trust. So do local campaigns by local people.
If we can find candidates that are not beholden to corporate money and educate the electorate, we may actually have a chance to bring change before it’s too late. One thing it will do, is galvanize those who are already in office, who will realize that acting as a corporate stooge will soon become more a liability than a benefit. That should have already happened, but not enough focus has been on educating constituents on how their representatives are actually voting. If we had common websites to track progressive policies from Democrats (Republicans already do this), then we could get out the crooks. People are voting for incumbents on name recognition, without even knowing what a terrible job they’re doing.
If we had a common site for candidates—like Ballotpedia, but expressly for progressives—then people would know who to back without splitting their vote. Most importantly, we need to make primaries the primary battle. Even most of those who vote in general elections fail to show up for primaries. If we let corporatists get the nomination, then the general election means little other than perpetuating the good cop, bad cop system that is currently failing us.
We can do this. We must do this. Get loud, get active, bring hope. Find the suffering and tell them we have a solution, that we need their help. We need to ask for money less and ask for action more. Voting and spreading the word is more important than donating—especially if you’re trying to ask for money from people who are already being exploited. Just look at how much Kamala Harris’ campaign brought in and how little good it did her. We need overwhelming turnout, focused and unified. With that, we can win past even a corrupt election system. All we can do is hold to hope and move forward with the expectation that victory is possible.
Contact activist groups and tell them to unify:
Hello, I’m a supporter of a progressive America that helps Americans, instead of enabling corporate exploitation and civil rights abuses. We have many activist groups supporting change, but few coalitions that are focusing our efforts. Please consider contacting these other groups so that together we can back progressive candidates in primaries that will bring real change, as well as educate the electorate about the vital need for voting in the primary. With the right message and our combined efforts, we can convince the 90 million eligible non-voters that change is possible and revolutionize our political landscape.
(Please comment with any groups that I have missed.)
Groups to contact:
Ian, once again your points are all well taken and I couldn’t agree more with your premise that we need “all activist groups to form a coalition of change, to make primaries our primary battle.”
With the right strategy and processes, that is how our issues and grievances can gain the acceptance of a majority of our citizens. And that, in turn, will help us identify and elected competent progressives who will fulfill their Constitutional Purpose.
As I’ve noted earlier, it will just take the strategic and sustained nonviolent resistance of 3.5% of us to get our issues framed in the Overton Window. (Or whatever you want to call that dynamic of achieving a critical mass of people who can inform and inspire enough of us to end the tyranny and fix our democracy.)
I suggest that the “coalition of change” we need from our progressive leaders requires a unifying mission statement for its purpose. I also think that the mission statement should be linked to the Constitution’s mission statement (the Preamble).
Here’s an example of a mission statement they could use:
As the leaders of progressive activist groups, we are committed to working together to educate our fellow citizens by leveraging the persistent nonviolent resistance of our activists. Our purpose is to frame our issues and grievances in the Overton Window, and that includes our expectations that our elected leaders will fulfill their Constitutional Purpose as well as fight to end the powers of corporate personhood.
Regardless of what mission statement they use, I propose that this coalition of activist leaders get their activist followers to demand that they expect their elected officials to pledge to fulfill their Constitutional Purpose as well as fight to end the powers of corporate personhood.
Throughout your post you’ve highlighted how critical it is to teach our citizens the importance of voting and understanding what they are voting for.
I suggest that we should not only engage with Ballotpedia to find out what our representatives and candidates for office are selling to their constituents (to get elected), but we as citizens should also share our expectations for what we want them to do while in office (i.e., promote our general welfare using best practices). That’s how we collaborate to solve the problem of our democracy backsliding into autocracy.
In addition, all the activists in all the organizations that you’ve referenced share the same root cause grievance that made the activists get active in the first place. And that is the fact that SCOTUS decided to give us the “legal” fictions that unlimited and anonymous money is speech and corporations are people. Every grievance with our government is either caused by, exacerbated by or exploited by those powers of corporate personhood.
This is a simple and strategic action that will help build the coalition as well as frame these two concepts and issues. Then we can build a majority of citizens that will know who will fulfill their Constitutional Purpose and who will work to end the powers of corporate personhood.
What do you think?