The Left's New Majority

By Colin Greer, openDemocracy.net. Posted December 14, 2005.

Something vital, exciting and underreported is happening across the United States: marginalised groups in the poorest communities are joining forces to improve their condition and win local electoral victories. This is the America of Latinos, African-Americans, religious progressives, union members, young people, and single women. Combined, these mostly progressive groups of the left constitute an actual and significant national majority. If the Democratic Party taps into this energy, it could help create the next social and political momentum in the United States and even win presidential elections. But typically, Democratic leadership does not work closely with these groups, their natural constituencies. This relationship has yet to become a reality.

The right's debt

Since the 2004 presidential election, the fashion on the American left has been to look at what the right did and try to do the same, as though the right have won a major victory in American consciousness. Even the second wave of progressive critics, who complain we obsess too much over Republican strategy, end up using the right's supposed victory over hearts and minds as an axis from which to build their arguments. But George W Bush never won a public mandate. The plurality he earned was largely a result of the withdrawal of Democratic campaigns from most states, in a flawed strategy to focus on "swing states".

My intention is not to deny the power of the Republican Party as an electoral machine, but to emphasise that that is all it is. Poll after poll has found American citizens largely in support of progressive solutions to public problems, even as Democratic Party support for these ideas has dwindled.

Every single American city with a population of over 500,000 voted for John Kerry in 2004. And more than half of all cities with over 50,000 inhabitants did the same. The American public rejected Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998, just as they rejected the vicious manipulation of the Terri Schiavo case in 2005.

In special elections in California in November 2005, voters rejected six right-wing legislative initiatives dealing with access to abortion, authority over union dues, and political lobbying. It was a failure for Republican superstar governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had personally endorsed four of the ballot initiatives. But it was a triumph for the coalitions of community-based groups that have been organizing aggressively around social values in recent years. These were the same groups who paved the way for former union leader and Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa to become mayor of Los Angeles in May 2005. We can learn from their success. (Just think, as late as 1980 Ronald Reagan launched a presidential campaign from the Red Republican stronghold of California!)

The New World Foundation has just put out a report called "Building the New Majority" that describes how key voting groups - in communities of colour, among women, union members and young people - are forging a "new majority" for progressive causes. This web of both the old progressive base in American politics and the new demographics of immigration and youth already add up to the potential of a strong progressive oppositional force in American political life.

True, the right itself has effectively organised base constituencies of fundamentalist evangelicals, and disaffected and frightened working Americans. But the progressive work on the local frontline has not been about trying to "do something the right does", but rather about drawing effectively on old progressive organising traditions.

After all, the right learned its most effective strategies for organising at the base, directly from the leftist movements of the 1930s and 1960s. Even the most successful rightwing evangelical church models of recent years are practically a replica of Communist Party cells of the 1920s and 1930s. That was when the "red scare" referred to leftists and not to Republicans. Now, of course, the red scare is of a different political stripe.

Meanwhile the Democratic Party fixates on chasing the centre and the so-called "swing voter" in its electoral strategies. In chasing the right for ideas, it has forgotten what power it could gain from building a forceful position on behalf of Americans (potentially the vast majority) who are not represented by the priorities of the current Republican administration. Only by organising at the frontline in communities across America, will they establish a core political force for uncertain voters to swing to. Organising at the swing only dispirits the base.

In today's America, the political centre is located somewhere between the extreme right and the supposed extreme of the left. Actual progressive political life in America is completely discounted, even though it is thriving in cities across the United States, where communities elect progressive officials and pass progressive policies such as the living wage.

Colin Greer is president of the New World Foundation in New York. Among his books is A Call to Character (HarperCollins, 1995).

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