In all the partisan jockeying around whether or not to ban some or all Congressional earmarks, a small detail has been overlooked—the fact that Congress gives away some $1.7 billion per year in completely unaccountable, uncompetitive, sweetheart deals to private industry. Here we are still bickering about the $100 billion-over-10-years price tag to give health care to over 30 million uninsured Americans and fix our ailing system, but pols on both sides of the aisle have nary blinked an eye in handing out a tenth of that, without public debate, to defense contractors and developers.

With families across the country suffering from the downturn and tightening their belts—and pleading for even the most meager of unemployment benefits and other aid programs to be extended—Congress handed bags of cash to for-profit businesses in contracts based not on, say, comparative estimates about how many jobs would be created versus other potential projects but, blatantly, based on personal friendships, payback for campaign contributions and promises to base some work in the Congressperson’s home state or district.

When you really look at how the legislative sausage gets made in our United States Congress, it’s enough to turn you into an anarcho-vegan…

Is it really any wonder that the supposedly superiorly efficient and cost-effective for-profit health insurance companies are whining like babies about the prospect of actually having to compete with a publicly-funded health insurance option? Of course they prefer non-competitive handouts and monopolies. What smart businessperson wouldn’t?

In February, the Justice Department launched an investigation into five members (Dems and Reps) of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee for allegedly accepting $840,000 in campaign contributions in exchange for funneling $2.4 million in federal monies to just one defense contractor, 21st Century Systems. The charges were dropped, but the specter (and evidence) lingers. It’s too bad that all those poor folks without health insurance can’t scrape together a few hundred grand to line the pockets of those Members of Congress who are holding back health care reform.

In the mid-20th century, as New Deal economic investments in public spending and, well, the public in general were making Americans happier, healthier, better-educated and generally better off, and as surging social movements were starting to question even more deeply the pro-corporate economic policies of the past that had ruined regular people and ruptured the common good, Milton Friedman and his band of pro-corporate economists quickly stopped using the phrase laissez faire capitalism and switched to free market capitalism. Genius! Free market, after all, sounds like we’re taking the cuffs off the lean and mean market machine to let it fairly compete in the economic ring. Laissez faire, on the other hand, sounds… um… lazy. Lazy capitalists. And Freedman would be damned if that image of greedy robber barons who sit and get fat off the hard work of others would be permanently sealed in the public imagination. As long as you call it the free market, the illusion of fair effort masks the reality of backroom deals and biased handouts.

The reality is the free in free markets stands for free money. From our pockets.

Americans got angry about the bank bailouts, but not angry enough. There’s a deeper problem afoot in our nation, a problem cemented in our economic policies, defended by our politicians, exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling to even further open the floodgates of corporate money into politics. We are a nation by, of and for corporations.

In 1816, Thomas Jefferson prayed, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” Almost 200 years later, our work is still cut out for us.

Get ready to applaud, folks. I’ve a new section of the Movement Vision Lab in which, when I read a book that I think is useful for grassroots organizing and movement building, I’m going to not exactly summarize the book so much as summarize what (I think) are the most important lessons to be learned from it. In 800 words or less (while still hopefully using full sentences…).

The first book I’m tackling is one of my favorites, Freedom Is An Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements by UC Irvine professor Francesca Polletta. I had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting Francesca a few weeks ago and trading ideas and experiences of social movement building. A total geek treat for me. And an excuse to go back and re-read her exquisite and enjoyable book about participatory decisionmaking in American social movements and organizing. Here are my top take-aways. I suggest reading through the end, which really packs a wallop…

1. Participatory democracy is a strategic leadership model

There is a false dichotomy out there that collective decisionmaking is an ideological choice but an ultimately impractical, unstrategic one. But participatory decisionmaking is also strategic for four reasons:

First, participatory decisionmaking builds trust among leaders/members. This becomes really valuable when putting your bodies on the line together in direct action or when dealing quickly with surprise crises.

Second, participatory decisionmaking leads to better decisions. The word “crowdsourcing” wasn’t in vogue when Polletta wrote this, but she might use it now. Many minds are better than one and that’s often how the best innovations arise.

Third, it develops leaders. Especially for leaders locked out of most decisionmaking in their lives and, thus, whose perspectives have been systematically devalued, participatory democracy helps leaders value their own opinions, while also developing new skills to voice those opinions.

Fourth, participatory democracy is “prefigurative”. (Good word, right?) We should aspire to effect political change without reproducing the structures we oppose, thereby also modeling the alternatives we wish to bring about more broadly.

2. Participatory decisionmaking need not be unwieldy.

In the movements Polletta studied, particularly the Civil Rights Movement, it wasn’t that everyone had to agree on every single decision nor that everyone’s opinion was weighed exactly equally. The point was not unanimity but discourse, so everyone felt bought into the final decision, even if it wasn’t their personal preference.

Also, Polletta writes, “Equality has sometimes been interpreted as prohibiting any differences in skills or talents.” Wrong. The point is to not be overly deferential to traditional hierarchies of expertise but to recognize each person’s unique contributions and honor “differences in skills and educational background, not by denying them, but by reasoning and learning together on the basis of mutual respect.” Still, some people may have more valuable insights on a given topic and that is okay.

The pitfall, Polletta warns, is if groups use participatory democracy to avoid hard decisions. Then it really can drag on…

3. It ain’t just for white folks with too much free time…

Sometime in the late 60s, civil rights activists who had been big participatory democrats (particularly within SNCC) turned against the practice. It became seen as a while elite, process-heavy luxury while the shift toward a more black power-oriented politics and incorporation of military metaphor into militancy favored centralization and hierarchy. Polletta notes that this disregards the fact that, historically, it was Ella Baker, James Lawson and Miles Horton who introduced collective decisionmaking to civil rights circles.

4. We need more popular education.

If we’re going to meaningfully involve grassroots leaders in the decisions that shape our political work, then we need meaningful political education—not just training to bring folks up to speed on the particular issue we’re working on, but more broadly, to help them be deeper-thinking, analytical leaders.

I was most struck by the connection between popular education and participatory decision-making Polletta unearthed. In the 1930s, Ella Baker and Miles Horton (among others) trained at Brookwood Labor College, a popular education school that sought to “serve American labor with trained, responsible, literally educated men and women from the ranks of the workers.” The participatory pedagogy of Brookwood (informed by John Dewey) shaped Horton’s approach at the Highlander Institute, also a landmark of political education. But this is noticeably a seriously lacking piece of our infrastructure today…

5. We are uncomfortable with participatory decisionmaking…

…or we should be, anyway. The idea of real, democratic decisionmaking in our movement (or movement-aspiring) organizations challenges implicit hierarchies within our own organizing, in which we “assume that leaders know their followers’ interests better than the followers themselves do.” And as much as we rhetorically claim otherwise, let’s face it—there’s a lot of professional organizers empowering themselves to agitate on behalf of their leaders rather than the patient work of helping leaders agitate for themselves.

Polletta notes that people’s understanding of what is or isn’t democratic in the context of decisionmaking is based on personal history—largely with family and culture. Quite honestly, professional organizers have a choice to exploit the life experiences of poor people and people of color living in (and sometimes replicating) very undemocratic structures by manufacturing processes that are slightly more democratic, and thus attractive, but not fully participatory. I have no doubt that organizers who rush through process in the name of expedience have the best of intentions. But it is seriously time for us to consider whether our ends justify our means.

“We are not only culturally confused, our confusion makes it difficult for us to even imagine our confusion.” — Introduction, The Populist Moment, Lawrence Goodwyn

I’ve been re-reading Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment at the suggestion of the brilliant George Goehl from National People’s Action, though it seems lots of people I talk to are reading it right now, and for good reason. I’ll write more soon about the general lessons I’ve taken from the book for mass mobilization in today’s environment, but in the meantime, I’m thinking about the recent elections in Iraq and the recent turmoil between Obama and the Democrats and the left. Goodwyn describes how once-agrarian and revolution-prone nations like the United States sought through industrialization to centralize power and covertly quash any democratic impulses. The tool of such subtle domination is culture—“the creation of mass modes of thought that literally make the need for major additional social changes difficult for the mass of the population to imagine.” Today, despite stolen presidential elections, Supreme Court rulings handing more political buying power to big business, and health care reform legislation that is fundamentally a good idea but repeatedly sunk by the greedy insurance industry, that we the people continue to buy into the modern myth of democracy simply allows oligarchy to persist unchallenged. As a populace, we are complicit in our silence.

The progress from the industrial age to the information age didn’t change Goodwyn’s thesis. In fact, it solidified it. Now we have supposed “digital democracy”—a democracy so strong and far-reaching that we can vote for America’s next Idol and crowd source our news instead of relying on stodgy, fact-based reporting. In the era of the Populist movement and the industrial revolution, democracy was a dazzling distraction in the wake of hard-won enfranchisement for women and people of color and landless white men as well as new immigrants, and with rapid urbanization leading to a shared sense of public and investment in political participation never before realized. But we have turned the naïve illusion of real democracy into outright farce. Virtual democracy. Our votes count in Second Life so what does real life really matter?

Do the Iraqis really think that—in a political context where their country was destroyed by outside national and corporate interests and its greatest resources (like oil) sold to the control of major multinationals—picking between candidates of one tribe or another who are all in the corrupt pockets of the corporations means democracy is blossoming in Mesopotamia? While it was heartening to see millions of long-disenchanted Americans renew their spirit in electoral politics to rally around the candidacy of Barack Obama, is our general disappointment a year into his presidency any surprise—not as a reflection on the President himself but of the fundamentally elite, anti-democratic, pro-big business nature of our nation?

The result of the political consolidation of power, says Goodwyn, is the “gradual erosion of democratic aspirations among whole populations.” Translation: We don’t think much can change because we’ve lost faith that we the people can change things, we got our hopes up that Obama could ride into town and that he could change things, but we’re in the middle of a rude awakening. Amidst an economic crisis that is causing double digit employment, record foreclosures, employers cutting benefits, Congress argues about whether to extend the most basic of unemployment benefits while handing out billions to the big banks. It’s critical that we see this moment not as a unique snapshot in one new presidency amidst an economic downturn but rather a moment of truth bared in a too-long history of elite interests playing puppet with our government and deceiving us all that democracy is the rule.

I’ve had a similar interaction several times recently. It goes something like this:

Me: I’m interested in how radical ideas become possible.

Them: Oh, you mean like how there weren’t enough votes to pass the public option?

Me: No, that’s a policy. And anyway, that’s not even the radical policy. We all know that was single payer.

Them: Oh, so you mean single payer?

Me: Nope, still a policy. An idea is broad, a concept, something that gets manifest in policy.

Them: Ah, like equality? Or fairness?

Me: No (now with a hint of frustration in my voice but trying to hide it), that’s a value.

Them: I’m confused.

At which point in the discussion, I try to breakdown roughly my understanding of the difference between values, ideas and policies — which may seem academic, but frankly, it helps when as a field we at least all know we mean roughly the same thing when we use the same words, but also for a progressive infrastructure that is acutely focused on policies but deeply lacking in transformative ideas, the tendency to conflate the two simply masks this profound problem.

Just as it was easier to explain to my kid the body parts of humans by pointing to the body parts of a stuffed cat, let’s use the Right wing as an example.

The Right believes in segregation, that we are not all equal and those who are inferior (morally, economically, racially, spiritually) can and should rightfully be separated from those who are superior (and those who are superior because of God-given or hard-earned talents and not because of flaws in any “system”). In their value system, it is unjust to force those who are naturally superior to co-mingle with those who are inferior. Segregation, while maybe not explicit, is implicitly a Right wing value.

Because of their values, Right-wing conservatives want social, political and economic structures to allow for — or, in fact, encourage — segregation rather than mandating integration and pluralism. Therefore, they spread the idea that freedom is about the choice to be separate, that (borrowing a page from liberal rights rhetoric) anything less infringes on individual expression. The idea here, albeit a highly misleading one, is that segregation is freedom and choice (where as integration is forced, imposed, against our will).

The policies, then, are things like school vouchers or charter schools, specific public or private practices that implement the idea of “freedom of choice” in social, economic and political institutions and promote the value of segregation throughout society. It’s easy here to get confused, since school vouchers are “an idea” for how to concretize “freedom of choice” in the school setting. But really, these are policies — concrete expressions of an idea that can actually be implemented to engrain that idea more and more deeply in our universe.

Now a progressive example.

Americans believe that all human life has value. It’s why we oppose holocausts and genocides, why we criminalize murder. [We sometimes make exceptions for when you do something heinously wrong (i.e., capital punishment) but part of the reason we're still debating the legality of capital punishment (and should be doing so even more vigorously) is because it conflicts with this deeply held, American value.]

And if we value human life, we value preserving it. That’s why we care for sick people in hospitals, even if they don’t have health insurance. Caring equally for all human life is a core value.

Valuing human life equally doesn’t necessarily translate into the idea of universal health care. The idea becomes attached to or associated with the value (or one or more values) as part of its popularization. Arguably, it is only in the last century that valuing human life was remotely associated with health care. Before, it might have meant access to jobs or the vote — that is, when the value was even ascendent (vs. during slavery, internment camps, etc.). But beginning in the early 1930s and moving forward, an idea was spread by progressives that if we value all human life, it is our collective role (vis-a-vis government) to ensure quality health care for each and every one of us. That idea, which has risen and fallen over the decades, with the rise and fall of the core value itself, leading to Medicaid and Medicare but also rollbacks on immigrant services in the 1990s, is being again tapped to advance health care reform today.

How we do it, how we concretize the idea of our collective duty to provide quality care for all, those are policies. Whether single payer, public option, regulation of private insurance, the marketplace structure… these are policy options. True, some play to certain ideas more than others. Single payer is most true to the idea I’ve laid out here, while the marketplace concept apes the private sector and reinforces the center-Right idea that the best way to provide any service to the public is through private markets. It’s worth noting that you could hold that idea and still share the value of human life. That’s why I think these distinctions are so important. Left, right and center, we often argue over policies as though we disagree about core values — and sometimes, we do. But certainly the left-center breakdown over health care reform (which is really strangling us right now) is about ideas not values. I truly believe that the centrists in Congress value all human life (maybe not quite as much as their own, but still…) but we have disagreements about the ideas those values point us toward, the ideas that should shape not only our health care system but our larger society (which, observers correctly point out, however we implement health care reform will certainly do).

I think that by focusing our political arguments narrowly on policies, or grandly on values, we’re often missing the crux of the contention, the ideas that we believe are the best expression of often-shared values but, in choosing one set of ideas versus another, point in very different practical directions.

The definition of the word “ideology” is the study of ideas. I think we need more ideologues and not just policy wonks.

Super billionaire Larry Ellison and his BMW Oracle Racing team have just won the America’s Cup. How did Ellison do it? Raw talent? His own bootstraps? Not exactly. Ellison bought the best captain in Cup history and made the race’s most expensive boat, spending at least $500 million but reportedly up to $1 billion on the thing.

Here it is, by the way. When I was searching the internet for a picture, I kept passing this one by thinking it was that new hotel in Dubai. Alas, it’s a boat.

Now neo-liberal economists will try and tell us that wealth and money are not zero sum games, that Larry Ellison spending $500 million on a boat has nothing to do with the perpetuation of global poverty. However, the average 10-year-old will tell you otherwise. Ellison could have spent that money on, say, improving public schools in the farmworker towns not far from Silicon Valley, or ameliorating the blight and medical problems in communities living next to computer waste dumps that companies like Oracle populate.

Or, to put it in perspective, the star-studded Hope for Haiti telethon raised a mere $58 million. And no I don’t care how much Ellison may have, in fact, given to Haiti or Indonesia or Tibet. If he has $500 million left over to spend on a one-time use boat to win a race — a boat so big and impractical that it can’t even fit under the Golden Gate Bridge — something is fundamentally wrong with our world and our economic system. And if we can honestly look at this situation and defend Ellison, defend his “individual right” to spend his money however he wants, without regard for the collective good that got him here, then there is something fundamentally wrong with our values.

And you didn’t think I paid attention to sports…

Here’s the email I just sent to everyone (hopefully including YOU!) publicly launching the Movement Vision Lab. As promised, please use this post to leave your ideas, requests and general comments on the new and improved Movement Vision Lab.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I know that when you heard the Movement Vision Lab was leaving the Center for Community Change, you panicked. Where will I go for occasionally sarcastic but always sharp insights on radical ideas, grassroots movement building and general derision of liberal spinelessness matched with inspiring hope for a bold alternative? Well, fear not. The Movement Vision Lab is back and better than ever.

Check out my new online home: http://movementvision.org

Go there right now and you’ll find my rant about how progressive discontent with Obama is really masking discontent with our movement’s shortcomings. And you’ll find a post on five alternative forms of resentment that could mobilize the Tea Party set instead of racial animus. (I’d encourage you to add to the list!)

Plus from time to time, I’m posting great articles, book notes and web finds that I’m sure you’ll find of interest.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing with you my vision for the kinds of ideas and questions I hope to explore more deeply going forward — and, most importantly, asking for your input! What social movement questions keep you up at night? What kinds of radical ideas would you like to know more about (or just know exist, for starters…)? I’d like to make the Movement Vision Lab as helpful as possible to the important work you’re doing.

With that in mind, I’ve created an “open thread” (in web speak) for you to log-on and post your thoughts, greetings, whatever you want along these lines. Help me start the conversation right now about how together we can build a broad-based radical movement to transform our nation and our world. Log-on and share your thoughts.

And please bookmark http://movementvision.org and share this email with your friends to help build our list.

Thank you as always for the work you do. I look forward to continuing to work alongside you.

Sally

In the category of “duh” but still incredibly valuable for being said — and well-said at that — is Rich Benjamin’s recent article on AlterNet “White Racial Resentment Bubbles Under the Surface of the Tea Party Movement.” Benjamin cooly reveals that underneath their anti-tax, anti-elite, intensely nationalist, pseudo-populist anger is good ol’ fashioned racism. Anti-tax code phrases like, “You should keep your own money!” really mean, “You shouldn’t have to give your money to those good-for-nothing poor people of color and immigrants.” The complaint about “government death panels” manufactures fear that the politically correct, liberal government will keep minorities alive at the expense of elderly whites (and by extension all white folks, who will hopefully someday become old).

Even the colonial imagery with which the Tea Partiers have slathered themselves harkens back to white-dominated, segregation America.

David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has suggested that, perhaps instead of the stupid, politically wimpy spending freeze, progressives propose national legislation stating that tax revenues flowing from and federal spending flowing to each and every state in the union break even by government mandate. No more shall the angry white people in “pure” states like Idaho be able to complain about tax hikes on those “diverse” and “pluralist” hell holes like California and New York that pay for Idaho’s roads and schools and health care. No more welfare for white states! If the milky tea set resents our nation’s move toward inclusion and cultural richness, along with things like (gulp!) equal treatment of women and progress toward racial justice and celebration of the American values of openness that invited immigrants here in the first place, then let them retreat into their own economic enclaves and see how well they fare alone. Forget red, white and blue. Just red and white from now on.

(Fortunately, corporate oligarchy knows no color or nation and I’m sure that Wal-Mart and chicken processing plants will be happy to continue to exploit an all-white workforce just as they have the white, black and brown working class. But luckily, the white radical separatist Anti-merica won’t have to contend with unions or any of those pesky groups trying to keep corporate power in check.)

Ah, the poor white people… If only they could be free. Benjamin astutely notes that the “individual rights” mantle to which the Tea Partyists desperately grasp is a manipulation of the identity-based rights assertions they have so long resented.

“Tea Partiers will bend your ear about “freedom from government” or their “Hunters’ and Fishers’ Bill of Rights.” This white-inflected rights-based outlook champions individual and neighborhood “freedoms,” withdrawn from the common nation, preoccupied by private interest, poised to behave according to private caprice. Tea Partiers contrive the right to live, make money, own property, zone neighborhoods, or protest taxes at will, without regard to the common good, a troublesome offshoot of rights-based agitprop.”

In her brilliant and still important book Mobilizing Resentment, Jean Hardisty details the work of Right wing leaders for decades to gin up the specific, race-based resentment that continues to percolate through the ranks of conservatism. But, Hardisty also contends, there are other forms of resentment mass America — right, left and middle — are experiencing. The Right wing has chosen strategically to fan and mobilize racial resentment, to fuel an us-versus-them narrative that conveniently obscures the real destruction caused by elite Right wing and conservative economic power. But if we listen to where people are at — including the misguided but ultimately hurting like the rest of us Tea Party followers — there are other deep and palpable resentments we could mobilize instead.

I offer the following list of alternative resentments stewing in the American public at large, to be tapped instead of racial resentment and hopefully toward more constructive (including racially unifying) ends:

1. Wall Street resentment. Obvious, but apparently not as obvious as we think. Recent polling suggest that the American public, across party lines, are more pissed off at Wall Street bankers than Obama, Congress, pretty much any other aspect of our political or economic structure. But the fact that, despite things like the Showdown in Chicago and other mobilizations of average Americans against outsized corporate power, the anti-government sentiments of the Tea Party still capture public attention says something about (a) the corporate Right’s keen interest in diverting attention from itself and (b) the rest of our failure to sufficiently and creatively gin up and channel anti-corporate anger ourselves.

2. Resentment at the sale of our democracy to the highest bidder. Even those who have swallowed the lie that government by-the-people-and-for-the-people is somehow inherently opposed to the people’s best interest should be offended by the recent Supreme Court decision to allow unlimited corporate influence in elections. As if it wasn’t bad enough that K Street owned Congress and the White House through back door channels. Now we’ve blown open the front door, too. The fact that, in case after case, politicians act against the public interest in favor of corporate interests — not because government doesn’t work but because Right wing and corporate elites have broken government — is pitchfork worthy indeed.

3. Ol’ fashioned class resentment. Not that we need to eat the rich or anything, but in an era of rampant economic crisis affecting the working class and middle class and even swaths of the upper-middle class as well, the fact that the super-rich are still super-rich and big business bonuses may be down but are certainly not out should put all our panties in a bunch. That Marx was onto something. At least with his analysis… That is not to say (as many Marxists do) that race has nothing to do with it, that everything reduces to class. Our American stratification of class is deeply racialized as is the way we experience and manifest class divides. But whereas once whites might have naively have pretended that their small, white sloop was better than the sinking dingy of poor people of color, now that we’re all in a bottomless, drowning boat, it should be more obvious to us than ever that our common fate — and common interest — stretches across race.

4. Rejection of stale nationalism. I recently observed some focus groups in which white working class and middle class folks were presented with optimistic messages about the economy that often began with something like, “America is the greatest nation in the world…” They objected. Not just to the non-reality of the statement today. It was as though they resented being lied to, being told all their lives that if they kept their heads down and worked hard and didn’t make trouble, in our great nation, they too could become great. Instead, they vastly preferred a narrative that said, in effect, “Our economy isn’t working for anyone on either side of our border and it’s time we fix it for everyone.” For generations, we have been told that our self interest is most wisely linked with the self interest, narrowly construed, of the American nation-state. The super-capitalists didn’t buy that. They linked their interests with globalization, money beyond borders, profit and exploitation that knew no bounds. Yet we kept our heads down, worked hard, didn’t make trouble — and now look what happened. If we continue to appeal to nationalism as our salvation, not only will we fail to build the global identity and political vision that is truly needed for our and the globe’s progress, but we will play directly into the hands of (now-global) economic elites who want us out of their internationalist hair.

5. General resentment of elitism. Americans are quite united in their opposition to elitism, they simply disagree about where to place the label. The conservative base resents liberal elites. The progressive base resents the corporate elite. The working poor resent the intellectual elite. The religious evangelicals resent the Church-based elite. Can’t we all just get along? The underlying premise of resentment of elites is the deeply condescending idea that we are not as qualified as “our superiors” to make decisions for ourselves, our communities or our nations — decisions about our economy, legislation, our spiritual guidance, etc., etc., etc. Jeff Sharlett captures this well in The Family, the idea that Right wing Christian elites are driven by their sense that their elite power is driven by their God-given superiority and duty to make decisions on behalf of the rest of us. Wherever it manifests itself, we should all be offended by such an insulting and belittling concept of power. But of course, if we continually fail to align across narrowly construed and misleading ideological interests and instead fight among ourselves, perhaps we the people are as incapable of wielding power as the various elites claim…

Ultimately, resentment must be channeled into hope to be politically meaningful. Resentment gets us all the room. Hope gets us on our feet and out the door to do something about it. But getting in the room together is a good place to start — especially if we can find a way to get more of us in the room together, united across race not divided by it.

Thanks to Eli Pariser for this one. Internal presentation from Netflix on company culture. I often feel social movement organizations are too rigid, too risk adverse, too unwilling to adapt… We could all learn a few things from this presentation.

My favorite part is this quote from The Little Prince:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

It is impossible to turn on the television or open a newspaper today without apocalyptic speculation on the status of Obama’s presidency. The opinion media, pack animals that they are, have latched on to the storyline that stalled health care reform plus Massachusetts election results plus a still-sputtering economy means the White House is stumbling. But what’s more noteworthy than the media blowing a story out of proportion to have something dramatic to talk about is the fact that liberals seem to also be piling on to the narrative.

Once afraid to criticize the White House lest they be disinvited from the cocktail parties or Common Purpose meetings, even the usually tow-the-line liberals are now sharpening their elbows (see, e.g., this, this and this). Freud would call this transference. In lemming-like fashion, the liberalati are joining the chorus undermining Obama to distract attention from where the fault really lies. Let’s look in the mirror and acknowledge what is really happening…

Liberals failed to build any real power in the period leading up to Obama’s election.

While it’s fair to say that liberals laid the moral and political groundwork for Obama to win, he mostly won on his own — thanks to the unpopularity of Bush, the faltering economy and an unprecedented grassroots organizing effort the Obama campaign built largely on its own. With a few exceptions like MoveOn and SEIU, which did genuinely offer some muscle that helped Obama to victory, the rest of the left had little practical claim on Obama’s presidency. So any seats at the table the left were given stemmed from the benevolence of the White House not the demands of powerful constituencies. And the nature of any power—but especially false, illusory power we don’t feel we have a legitimate claim to—is that it creates a desperate insecurity. You don’t want to do anything to jeopardize your seat.

It’s not surprising that it is only now that Obama seems on the ropes—and thus the seat at the table depreciating in value—that more liberal leaders are stepping out to critique Obama. But to the extent their criticism isn’t about opportunism but genuinely holding the White House accountable to the best interests of the majority of Americans, it’s too little, too late.

Liberal interest groups have lacked the audacity and ideology to channel the frustrated, populist majority.

Even without any nuts-and-bolts role in the election of Obama, the left could have projected itself as the rightful representative of the majority of Americans. But that would have required believing that (a) the majority of Americans support bold ideas for changes to our economic and political system (which poll after poll shows they do — for instance) and (b) liberals are ideologically and morally positioned to lead that majority. Therein lies the rub. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, “born-again” Christians represented at most 15% of the electorate. And despite the fact that Reagan won mostly because Carter lost (evangelicals had previously backed Carter by a four-to-one margin), Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the evangelical movement boldly claimed to represent a governing majority in the wake of the election (i.e., “Moral Majority”). Their audacity became one of the most successful self-fulfilling prophecies in recent political history and re-shaped our legislative and cultural landscape, despite the fact that fundamentalist Christians were not and have never been a majority of Americans.

On the other hand, the majority of Americans think our economy is working for the elite but not for working people, that we need health care reform and financial regulations and government investment to spur recovery, that the interests of communities should be balanced against the tyranny of big business. While it’s far time we get beyond the false dichotomy of right-versus-left, the kinds of policies average Americans are clamoring for are most commonly identified with classic liberalism. And liberals and Democrats are championing these policies, they’re just doing so in an apologetic, cautious way. Imagine if Democrats and liberal interest groups had acted from the get-go as though most Americans support bold health care reform. Do you really think we’d have the cobbled-together, compromise-destroyed policies now stalling in Congress?

The Tea Party movement swayed political power not because it actually represented the majority of Americans (witness the poor turnout at the national conference) but because they projected such power. Meanwhile, liberals actually represent the majority but are failing to rhetorically and demonstratively connect with the populist masses. Maybe its because we’re afraid we can’t explain our failed attempts at centrist accommodation, including policies that got our country into the mess we’re in. Perhaps it’s because liberals are psychologically accustomed to being underdogs. I’m not sure. But what worked for Obama in the election was that he spoke from his heart and articulated his hopes and dreams as the hopes and dreams of the nation. That’s Obama at his best. Rather than critiquing the President for when he falters from his heights, the left should aspire to replicate anything close to moral leadership.

The original phrase, “the winter of our discontent,” comes from Shakespeare. In Richard III, Shakespeare characterized King Richard as a deeply negative, even malevolent character. It turns out, this was just a dramatic plot device, to make Shakespeare’s story work. Rising liberal discontent with Obama may serve the same purpose—to further our convenient narrative in which the left is righteous and effective but not victorious because of the failure of forces beyond our own control. Good grist for the talking heads in the media. But not helpful for a movement in need of deep self-criticism and self-correction.

New Robes?