Oftentimes bloggers and other
pundits write stuff that if reexamined turns out to be ill-conceived and just
plain wrong. However, looking at the essay below written after the 2014
election, I think it remains relevant to the struggles of 2016. Therefore I am
reposting it. Harry Targ
What to make of the elections – and what we should do next
Progressives
must engage in education, agitation, and organization around social and
economic justice issues while fighting the politics of fear.
I am looking at exit poll data and,
as in prior election seasons, more Democratic votes came from the young, women,
African Americans, Latinos, voters with post-graduate degrees and educational
levels at or below high school, and low income citizens. This national polling
data comports with results from many individual Congressional and state races.
These groups of voters (or comparable groups of non-voters) will stay the same
or increase as a percentage of potential voters in 2016 and beyond.
This data speaks to the necessary expansion of electoral and “street heat” strategies that prioritize several issues. Progressives need to continue to combat racism and sexism in all its forms. This translates into reversing voter suppression laws and other tactics to stifle voting, renewing the Voting Rights Act, pursuing equal pay for equal work legislation, opening the doors for citizenship to all migrants to the United States.
In addition, support for an expanded
economic populist agenda is central to any progressive historical change.
Candidates for public office should be pressured to support living wage
legislation at the national and state levels, expand on worker rights to form
unions, a green jobs agenda, revising the Affordable Care Act into a single
payer system, and federal legislation (paralleling the United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights) guaranteeing every worker the right to a job.
A
program of social and economic justice should be basic to every candidacy in
2016.
This program of social and economic
justice should be basic to every candidacy at the federal and state levels in
2016. To advocate for such programs, movements inside and outside the electoral
arena should spend the next two years engaging in education, agitation, and
organization.
In addition to struggles over
concrete policies, progressives should engage more vigorously in ideological
struggle. In general, this means addressing racism as a central undercurrent in
American political culture: research and education that documents the
centrality of the racialization of the 2014 election would inform discussion in
the weeks ahead.
Also, a centerpiece of American
political history, paralleling and sometimes overlapping with racism, is the
politics of fear. The sources of fear in the past have included racial and
ethnic others, foreigners, and communists. This election season fear was
generated by half-truths about terrorists, particularly from the Islamic State
of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an invasion of Central American children, and a
mysterious contagious disease traveling from Africa to the United States.
The
politics of fear must be challenged, not accommodated.
The politics of fear must be
challenged, not accommodated, introducing a politics of reason. That is
progressives should demand that candidates address real issues rationally,
demonstrate arguments using data, and to the contrary avoid simplistic sound
bites. The people who need to be motivated should be treated with respect,
including assuming that they understand their self-interest and can be
convinced by compelling arguments.
Finally, campaigns opposing big
money in politics need to continue. This includes the only short-term challenge
to big money that has any chance of electoral success; that is organizing
masses of people. In addition to increasing the struggles to build multi-issue
mass campaigns, progressives can avail themselves of a multitude of media
projects: alternative radio and television, free distribution newspapers,
blogs, websites, and Facebook networks, as well as organizing study circles on
college campuses, in senior centers, community centers, and public libraries.
I feel this morning the way I felt
the day after Ronald Reagan was elected president. While the Reagan presidency
institutionalized a neoliberal economic agenda that has shaped the national and
global economy ever since, we also witnessed in the subsequent years the
largest rally in United States history against nuclear weapons, a vibrant
Central America solidarity movement, an anti-NAFTA campaign that almost
defeated the passage of the treaty in Congress, various huge mobilizations
against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the election of the first
African-American president in United States history.
Joe Hill was correct when he urged
his comrades, “don’t mourn, organize.”
Posted by Thorne Dreyer, The
Rag Blog.
[Harry Targ is a professor of
political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National
Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and
Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. ]
