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PROGRESSIVE CHANGE REQUIRES MORE THAN SLIM MAJORITIES [1]
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Date: 2023-01-18
Mass mobilization is just one part of what's needed for the huge majorities needed for sustained structural change.
Underlying my life-long political activism was the confidence, commitment, and energy that came from the belief that I was part of The People. Like most of my political peers, I believed that the issues I was working for were in the interests of, and would ultimately have the support of, the vast majority of American people. What kept us back was ignorance, inertia, and the power of the rich over government, media, and the economy.
However, the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a breath-taking punch in the stomach. It negated my understandings. Even after Biden’s victory in 2020, the attack on the world as I had assumed it to be continued with the escalating militance of so many semi-fascist Republicans, expressed in physical attacks and the increasingly brutal state laws targeting women, gays, and African-Americans – as well as the constant effort to dismantle the entire public sector in favor of a survival-of-the-most-ruthless free-market capitalism.
The 2022 midterm elections let me breathe again. But the Republicans did capture the House of Representatives and so many of the elections were so close! The next elections could easily fall on the other side. There was clearly a huge segment of the population – somewhere between a third and nearly half – that was “all in” for the far-right, or at least willing to give power to a party increasingly shaped by the far-right. And that movement’s goal was to permanently crush any chance of creating the kind of humane society I had spent my life working for.
It was painfully clear that I was not an embodiment of the vast majority of The People. Just as disturbingly, the broad business support that helped fuel Trump’s original surge and that continued to support the de-regulatory and tax cutting stances of the many, slightly less personally crazy, right wing politicians currently seeking to succeed Trump, meant that building a coalition strong, broad, and stable enough to successfully push for structural change will require more than incremental increases in the electoral turnout of our own base. The kind of majority we need will also require securing the support of at least some people who now vote Republican.
It was clear that I – and those politically like me – had to re-think a lot of assumptions.
MAJORITARIAN DEMOCRACY IS ABOUT NUMBERS
The United States’ version of democracy – winner-take-all representative government, with minority rights protected by constitutional language enforced by the courts – is only one of many. And is full of flaws. But, for the time being, we have to deal with what we’ve got – majority rules.
About a decade ago, headlines proclaimed the demographic inevitability of a Democratic majority. The country was on the verge of minority-majority status – a huge percentage of whom, along with women and youth, were assumed to be loyal voters whose needs and world views would support New Deal-style change. It didn’t matter that a clear majority of whites have voted Republican in every election for the past 50 years – they were disappearing.
Didn’t happen. In 2022, over 70% of registered voters were still non-Hispanic whites . And a majority-white electorate will probably remain in place for at least another 20 years. Population changes turn into voting numbers very slowly if only because much of the non-white population will not be of voting age or be citizens until several decades later. Not to mention that People of Color's historically lower voting levels – the result of obstacles created by repression and poverty – will stretch the delay even further. And the combination of GOP gerrymandering with their push to restrict voting access promises to further dilute voting number’s connection with political power. Furthermore, it’s not inevitable that minority voters of the future will continue to support Democrats. Recent voting trends among certain Hispanic groups, middle-class Asians, and Black men show increased conservatism – 47% of Arizona’s Hispanic votes went to GOP nutcake Kari Lake.
While the 2022 “Red Tide” didn’t flow, Republicans won a majority of votes overall for seats in the House of Representatives – a reversal of their lower national totals in the previous two midterms. Even more ominously, in recent years more than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party , particularly in white suburbs previously considered liberal. A lot of these are former Democrats. In addition, “much of rural America seems to be turning into a one-party region in which people are actually afraid to express dissent from their Biden-hating neighbors....’” ((Paul Krugman, NYTimes 10/21/22) While most of the high profile election deniers lost in the 2022 midterms, at least 60% of the Republican candidates who publicly rejected the validity or integrity of the 2020 election results won — about 185 of 308 . And they own the Supreme Court for years to come.
Even if Donald Trump ends up in jail, neither the Republican Party nor its fanatic fringe is going away.
MAJORITIES ARE CREATED AT THE MARGINS
Majorities don’t require unanimity. Even a one vote plurality gives the victor the full power of the position, with the ability to make any legally-allowed changes you want within the purview of the office. Given the closeness of recent elections, it is quite possible that increased turnout of people of color, naturalized immigrants, youth, striving women, even people in some of the neglected corners of the country will bring narrow Democratic victories. In the 2022 midterms, a total swing of less than 7,000 votes in five districts would have kept the House of Representative under Democratic control. There is enormous hope in those numbers.
However, the more polarized the political world becomes, and the more unsettling the desired policies to the big-business establishment, the bigger the electoral majority needed to push through and keep significant changes. The deepest reforms passed under both FDR (the New Deal) and LBJ (Civil Rights and the Great Society) required super-majorities – historical anomalies that only lasted a short while. The rich and powerful do not often willingly give up their advantages. History has repeatedly shown that they fight back, using all the forms of influence, persuasion, and force at their comment – including, if necessary, murders – even if that requires subverting democracy. And non-elite people’s expectation that disruption will bring hardship, their anxiety about losing the gains of the past, make them fearful of change. A significant portion of the population goes along with – or even demands – continuity, no matter how flawed.
To preserve (much less improve) democracy while gathering the political muscle needed to pass and implement the structural changes needed to address poverty, climate change, racism, health care, and a dozen other crisis-heading parts of our world, it will be necessary to go beyond current strategies to increase our base’s turnout and keep up the pressure through demonstrations. Under current circumstances, that will only win slim and easily lost electoral majorities.
Getting major progressive policy through the federal system, and even more so getting it through the states, will require more than a bigger, more activist, and more stable Democratic Party with a much stronger progressive wing (and, perhaps in some cases, even a viable third party). Libertarians, authoritarians, and religious fundamentalists only need to rip the public sector apart. Liberals and progressives are trying to build a better and more justly organized world – a slower, longer-term project. Doing this will require the type of sustained majority that can only be won by getting votes from people who currently vote Republican – particularly former Democrats and Independents.
It is probably impossible, and probably not desirable, to win over voters stuck in either the libertarian or authoritarian core of the Trumpian coalition. Those people are obsessed with ending abortion and birth control, who want national policy based on a patriarchal religion or apocalyptic fanaticism, or who believe the Federal government is an enemy and armed vigilantes are their only protection against dictatorship. Similarly, there is little chance of winning over people whose major motivation is racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, and anti-women fury. And it will be rather difficult with committed libertarians – capitalist anarchists who see all government as negative, all taxes as theft, and all non-profit-seeking activity as worthless.
Is anyone left? Five percent? Ten? More? A lot of the people we need to pull in do not currently identify with the Democratic Party, much less with The Squad or the Progressive Caucus. It’s a sobering prospect. Gaining their votes, election after election, will at a minimum require some meaningful reframing of current progressive or left-liberal positions, the addition of new or forgotten demands, and probably a lot of flexibility and compromise. But it's necessary. With all due respect to Dr. King, the arc of history only bends in the direction it is most forcefully pulled.
As part of this, progressives have to more clearly describe themselves as the best balancers of the deep contradictions whose interaction creates the energy that makes our society prosperous, our world more peaceful, and our own lives better. We need to better explain the relationship of centralized coordination of major systems with increased resources for local and individual initiative. We have to (re)embrace various strains of nationalism – from the economic (e.g. supporting the return of manufacturing to the US) to the cultural (e.g. being clear that the US history has as much to be proud about as to change) – while acknowledging that equitable trade with the rest of the world benefits everyone and structural inequalities (both domestic and international, both racial and class) need to be dismantled. We need to emphasize the defining strengths of continuing to be a welcoming immigrant nation while recognizing the necessity of securing our borders. We need to stress that inclusion of previously marginalized groups does not mean the expulsion of those already present. And much more.
All this raises the difficult political question of balancing the importance of maintaining a “maximalist” vision of how we want the world to be with a pragmatic platform of what is winnable and what can build the kind of super-majority we need to push further. The one “good thing” we have going for us is that capitalism will continue to generate crises – our job is to be in a position to take better advantage of those opportunities than our opponents.
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