Activism: Progressives Pay the Price for Confusing a Party With a Movement

For some on the left during the last national election season, watching the peace, green, and economic and social justice organizations squander their resources of money and manpower backing a campaign that had almost no likelihood of delivering on its promise of change, instead of using those hard-earned resources to build a movement, was more than a little frustrating, irritating and depressing. In the following paragraphs, David Sirota explores how many of these groups confuse the fortunes of the Democratic Party with the interests of their members.

by David Sirota

The difference between parties and movements is simple: Parties are loyal to their own power regardless of policy agenda; movements are loyal to their own policy agenda regardless of which party champions it. This is one of the few enduring political axioms, and it explains why the organizations purporting to lead an American progressive “movement” have yet to build a real movement, much less a successful one.

Though the 2006 and 2008 elections were billed as progressive movement successes, the story behind them highlights a longer-term failure. During those contests, most leaders of Washington’s major labor, environmental, anti-war and anti-poverty groups spent millions of dollars on a party endeavor—specifically, on electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. In the process, many groups subverted their own movement agendas in the name of electoral unity.

The effort involved a sleight of hand. These groups begged their grass-roots members—janitors, soccer moms, veterans and other “regular folks”—to cough up small-dollar contributions in return for the promise of movement pressure on both parties’ politicians. Simultaneously, these groups went to dot-com and Wall Street millionaires asking them to chip in big checks in exchange for advocacy that did not offend those fat cats’ Democratic politician friends (or those millionaires’ economic privilege).

This wasn’t totally dishonest. Many groups sincerely believed that Democratic Party promotion was key to progressive movement causes. And anyway, during the Bush era, many of those causes automatically helped Democrats by indicting Republicans.

But after the 2008 election, the strategy’s bankruptcy is undeniable.

As we now see, union dues underwrote Democratic leaders who today obstruct serious labor law reform and ignore past promises to fix NAFTA. Green groups’ resources helped elect a government that pretends sham “cap and trade” bills represent environmental progress. Health care groups promising to push a single-payer system got a president not only dropping his own single-payer promises, but also backing off a “public option” to compete with private insurance. And anti-war funding delivered a Congress that refuses to stop financing the Iraq mess, and an administration preparing to escalate the Afghanistan conflict.

Of course, frustrated progressives might be able to forgive the groups that promised different results, had these postelection failures prompted course corrections.

For example, had the left’s pre-eminent groups responded to Democrats’ health care capitulations by immediately announcing campaigns against these Democrats, progressives could feel confident that these groups were back to prioritizing a movement agenda. Likewise, had the big anti-war organizations reacted to Obama’s Afghanistan escalation plans with promises of electoral retribution, we would know those organizations were steadfastly loyal to their anti-war brand.

But that hasn’t happened. Despite the president’s health care retreat, most major progressive groups continue to cheer him on, afraid to lose their White House access and, thus, their Beltway status. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that Moveon.org has “yet to take a clear position on Afghanistan” while VoteVets’ leader all but genuflected to Obama, saying, “People [read: professional political operatives] do not want to take on the administration.”

In this vacuum, movement building has been left to underfunded (but stunningly successful) projects like Firedoglake.com, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and local organizations. And that’s the lesson: True grass-roots movements that deliver concrete legislative results are not steered by marble-columned institutions, wealthy benefactors or celebrity politicians—and they are rarely ever run from Washington. They are almost always far-flung efforts by those organized around real-world results—those who don’t care about party conventions, congressional cocktail parties or White House soirees they were never invited to in the first place.

Only when enough progressives realize that truism will any movement—and any change—finally commence. © 2009 Creators.com

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--And How We Take It Back and The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

This essay appeared first on truthdig.

Firedoglake is an online news site featuring political reporting and blogs including Emptywheel, TBogg, Christy Hardin Smith, Laura Flanders, Spencer Ackerman (Attackerman), the Seminal, and La Figa. The FDL Book Salon also features online discussion with book authors every Saturday and Sunday at 5pm ET.

Howard Dean's Democracy for America is a nationwide progressive political action community of one million members providing campaign training, organizing resources, and media exposure in support of progressive issues and candidates up and down the ballot.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee provides "needed infrastructure and strategic advice early to progressive candidates so they can run first-class campaigns and win. And when PCCC-endorsed candidates get elected by working hand-in-hand with the progressive movement, they'll trust the political instincts of progressives and be sturdy allies as we work with them to pass a bold progressive agenda."