Progressives Have a Chance to Dominate American Politics for the Next 40 Years

By Sara Robinson, AlterNet. Posted June 10, 2009.

I'm going to offer a couple of reason why the long-term prospects for the progressive movement are actually pretty good. I think in the long term, the spirit of the country is with us, and there's a couple of reasons for that. Then I want to get into three core strategies that I think we need to focus on to make the most of the opportunity.

So, I want to say flat out that I think that the progressive movement has real potential to be a lot longer and a lot stronger than most people think. And I'll flat out say -- if we play our cards right, we progressives have the potential to dominate American politics for the next 40 years. We have a huge opening here.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first one is the millennial generation, the kids born between 1980 and 2000. They are anywhere between 10 and their mid-20s right now, and they put in their first historic appearance in the 2008 election. They were the ones who really got Obama fever and put him over the top. They are far and away the most multiracial generation in American history -- about a third of them identify as mixed race.

Unlike their elders, they were raised from babyhood into consummate team players and self-organizers. They believe in the power of the collective. It's in their bones. They understand the power of collective action. They organize into teams. They have raised the use of technology in self-organization to a generational art form. They believe in community. They are progressive, in their bones, to their core. Kudos to their boomer and Gen Xer parents who raised them that way.

They're also natural born systems thinkers. They know that the problems that we're facing aren't isolated pieces and parts that can be solved by this committee and that agency. They understand that its all one thing and that if you're going to solve it all, you've got to tackle it all. And there are strategies that they use to do that, and they've been taught these strategies by their entertainment and their families from babyhood.

This unique generation caught Obama fever at the critical age, when people's lifetime political attitudes are shaped. They are progressives now, and if we don't let them down, most of them will be for life. And both their sheer numbers and their solid organizing skills make them a very solid bedrock on which we can easily build a progressive structure that could stand until 2050.

Along these same lines, let's not discount the power of collective memory. In the post-war era, conservatism had a hard time making a comeback as long as most of the country's voter base had its memories of 1929 and World War II. Religious and free-market fundamentalism had a hard time getting any traction in the post-war decades because our grandparents knew first hand where that road led, and they weren't having any of it.

It was only in the 1970s when those old survivors were finally outnumbered by younger voters that anyone could take their ideas seriously again. Likewise, today's conservatives are going to have a really hard time of it as long as there's anybody around who remembers the crash of 2008, and that's going to be a good long while.

The other reason the coming years belong to progressives is that there are deep structural shifts afoot that no conservative media dissembling, no amount of bank bailout money and no amount of willful denial can continue to paper over.

The corporatist order has failed us utterly and completely. Most of us here know this -- we've done the math. We know that an economy built on dwindling oil supplies, vast global inequities, and exploiting the resources of a finite earth is simply not sustainable. The current is recession is happening in no small part because we are finally bumping up against these facts. K Street and Wall Street both think they can rearrange the deck chairs and get things back to normal -- defined as five years ago. But here on the progressive side of Main Street, we know that normal as we've known it in the post-war era is over. And rearranging deck chairs isn't going to help when the whole boat is sinking.

The country has faced crisis points like this one before. And when it does, it always turns to its progressive side. Conservatives are just constitutionally incapable of providing the answers, vision or the incentive to lead America to a new kind of future. And the sooner and more decisively we progressives step forward and show America where we want to take it, the more confidence they'll have in our ability to lead them there.

This is the best moment we've had in 80 years. The country is hungry for big changes. It's time for us to step forward boldly, give them a new vision to grab onto, and show them just how much better things can be.

But we also need to make sure that the cons stay bottled up. The first part of that is to write a full and accurate history of the Bush years -- the kind of history that makes inquiries, takes account, names names and kicks butts.

See more stories tagged with: millenials, progressive majority, sara robinson

Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

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