On Progressive Politics: Its the Strategy, Stupid

[JCanete]

10. The article sets up a straw-man by suggesting that Sanders thinks we should refocus

our efforts on the white working class. He has never propagated a notion that we should downplay our efforts for social justice and equality, and there is nothing in his rhetoric that points to what this person is saying. Not to mention, that’s pretty damn apparent in his actual policy positions. Sanders, in-spite of being the first candidate to first say “Black Lives Matter,” in-spite of being the candidate who wants to decriminalize drug use and rid ourselves of the for-profit prison system and overhaul our justice system, DID IN FACT pull white voters, not by compromising at all…simply by speaking truth to the things that actually ail them.

This person is also making the astonishingly harmful claim that people can’t be won over, that their own social consciousness can’t change. “Full Stop. Period.” Well there you go. He has established a barrier based on some intrinsic quality of a voter base, and now there’s no point in actually trying to scientifically get to the bottom of what makes them think or vote the way they do; that is just who they are. To adopt this kind of thinking is not only to misdiagnose a condition based upon rigid, un-inquisitive “common sense” thinking, but then to try to build a political strategy on-top of those faulty premises, and then boldly, blindly, to claim “It’s the Strategy Stupid.”

If Martin Luther King had thought this way, there would have been no reason to march. Civil disobedience would have been absurd in the face of that “reality.” But the truth is, people do change. We are very influenced by our cultures and our bubbles, but those can be burst. Our human history is a testament to the evolution of social mores and changing mindsets. Think about how we have evolved on homosexuality in our own lifetimes. This writer has simply drawn an arbitrary line and basically said that “those people” aren’t capable of change.

So…lets go on shall we?

Do you know what an impractical strategy is? Its one where you put all of your energy and effort into being the understudy for the part in some sociopath’s warped play. I do not give a crap how palatable the democratic message is to the power-brokers who will ultimately either fund their campaigns, or pour millions of dollars into the campaigns of their opponents to defeat them. Because being moderate for the sake of working within this system rather than working to change it does not equate to making things possible.

I would contend, and we have 20 years of evidence to support this, that it does the opposite. We are destined to forever by the minority party in Washington, because that is the role that we’ve always auditioned for, we just don’t know it. We play nice with corporations and they support us to an extent, and then they use their media arm to destroy us…to make it such an uphill battle that only the most charismatic human beings with the luckiest timing playing a perfect political game can thread the needle.

What’s the game here? Why it’s Democracy! You can’t have one if you only have a single ruling party. Its good for us to have a “choice.”

It does not matter how moderate our message is if we never have the levers of power in our hands anyway, and this election cycle and the media’s role in it should be pretty compelling evidence that at the end of the day, it has the biggest hand in deciding who the leaders of our free world will be.

And yet, we think we can play nice. And yet, we think we can court them and coax them with encouragements to throw the people a bone. THIS is the fantasy.

Either we take on the media that is destroying our democracy, or we keep understudying for a part in the sociopath’s play.

PS-Hillary Clinton running on the most progressive Democratic Platform we've seen didn't happen without Sanders and the left pushing our party in that direction. In fact, it never happens without somebody pushing for it. FDR famously said "make me" for a reason. People on the inside track need actual cover if not outright pressure to be progressive.