Change Happens Between Elections

The late, great Molly Ivins counseled against gloating over electoral victories.  But she died in January 2007, before repugs went all  Stop the Ni**er all the time.

So I have spent the last five days gloating up a storm and I hope you have, too.

Because now the real work starts.

You think Tuesday did not change enough?  Well of course it didn't.  It's an election.  Elections don't change anything. Elections merely confirm the changes that have taken place since the last election.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

There is a clear path to change. Conservatives understand this. You take over the party structure. That’s what they did in the 1950s and 1960s when they were disgusted by the moderate Republicanism of Dwight Eisenhower, Earl Warren, and Nelson Rockefeller. They took over party structures and local offices and turned them into bastions of energized conservatism. Note that conservatives basically don’t run 3rd party campaigns. Libertarians might talk about doing this–but they almost all vote Republican in the end because they know that they are moving their agenda forward by doing so.

Any reading of history shows that change within the American political system does not come through third party campaigns. It comes through the hard work of organizing our communities to demand change. Eventually legal and political changes are necessary–but only after people are organized to demand them. Look at the major movements in the last century. The labor movement, African-American civil rights, the women’s movement, gay rights movement. Each of these movements spent decades (or a century) organizing for change. For each of them, there was a moment when it all came together and they could demand transformations of federal and state law, which for gay rights is happening right now.

SNIP

There’s a reason socialists and communists worked to reelect FDR in 1936 and 1940, even though they thought he was a sell-out to the capitalists. They knew he was the best hope they had to build the kind of society they wanted and that by running some kind of 3rd party, they would completely alienate the base of people they wanted to organize.

SNIP

To summarize:

1. Change happens outside the election cycles–elections are for institutionalizing the changes you have attempted to make in the past 4 years.

2. Every single U.S. president has blood on his hands. Voting in a presidential election is always a choice between two evils.

3. We need to think less about our own personal moral position in voting. It’s not about you. It’s about the community where you live. Even if you vote for Jill Stein, the blood of Pakistani babies killed in drone strikes is on your hands. You cannot wash off that blood without changing the system–something that 3rd parties have never done. You want clean hands–organize the American public around the issues you care about. It will take the rest of your life. That is the timeline of real change.

4. There actually are lessons from the past on these issues. There are lessons in how to organize. And there are lessons about what third parties do and do not do. When someone can tell me what value a third party has had to pushing the agenda to the left in the last 80 years, I’ll be real interested in hearing it.

5. We need a tougher and smarter left. The self-described left punditry and journalists in 2012 has been individualistic, holier than thou, disorganized, and narcissistic. The real story of the left this year is smart and tough–the Chicago Teachers Union. That’s how you demand and make change. Writing editorials obscuring the differences between Obama and Romney and encouraging well-meaning people to protest vote is worse than worthless–it’s mendacious and serves as a tool for conservatives to continue pushing this nation back to the Gilded Age.

Laura Flanders at The Nation

Let us learn from the Dreamers, the young immigrants who made themselves a force to be reckoned with this election. People lead; leaders follow. It could have been worse. People led us back from a brink last night, but it will require the irrepressible force of powerful, passionate social movements that believe in themselves as much as they believe any politician, if we are to force the ship of state off its conventional course, and if f we are to live up to the determination, bravery and smarts that voters showed this election.

Loomis again:

Importantly for progressives needing to learn some lessons about how change takes place in this country, many of these ballot measures show that grassroots organizing works. The gay rights movement and marijuana legalization are social movements creating unstoppable forces for change on the grassroots. They are organizing on the ground and then demanding and successfully creating social change. This is how you do it.

One more day to gloat.  Then get out there and organize.