You say you want a revolution
by Tom Sullivan
Something Robert Reich wrote soon after November 8 is still plenty relevant:
I have been a Democrat for 50 years – I have even served in two Democratic administrations in Washington, including a stint in the cabinet and have run for the Democratic nomination for governor in one state – yet I have never voted for the chair or vice-chair of my state Democratic party. That means I, too, have had absolutely no say over who the chair of the Democratic National Committee will be. To tell you the truth, I haven’t cared. And that’s part of the problem.It's something to which few activists paid attention until last year's Democratic primary fight. I don't recall it being as big an issue during the 2008 primary as the fight itself. That was then. This is now.
From that perspective, one 2016 pattern stands out. Compared with previous presidential contests, the partisan gap between big-city and non-big-city voting patterns widened. Trump won because he rang up unusually high margins (although not unusually high turnouts) among voters across all social strata in suburban, small-city, and semi-rural counties, especially in the Midwest. In many of those places, Democrats are not an organized presence at all.Now where have I heard that before?
Anti-institutional tendencies in today’s culture make the idea of dismantling the existing order attractive to many people. But social science research has long shown that majorities need strong organizations to prevail against wealthy conservative interests in democracies. The real problem in US politics today is hardly too much unified organizational heft on the center left; it is too little. Unless the Democratic Party becomes stronger and more effective, a radicalized Republican-conservative juggernaut is likely to take over for decades.Dismantling the existing order was the attractive notion that gave us Donald Trump. We are all about to be lab rats in an over 300 million-subject experiment in how well that works. Reich believes instead the order of the day for progressives is to transform the Democratic Party from "a fund-raising machine into a movement."
The lesson of the 2004 election was that the fortunes of a political movement cannot ride upon the fate of a presidential campaign; if anything, it should be the other way around.
Likewise, the fortunes of a political movement cannot be made dependant upon the courage of politicians. The point of a political movement is to make the courage of politicians irrelevant.