John Stauber on Strategy for Progressives: Where Do We Go from Here?

Posted 1/25/05

>From the website exploring political strategies for progressives called

<www.wheredowego.org>

John Stauber is executive director of the Center for Media & Democracy and
founder of prwatch, a quarterly journal that investigates corporate and
government propaganda. He is the co-author with Sheldon Rampton of a number
of recent books including Banana Republicans, Weapons of Mass Deception, Mad
Cow USA, Trust Us We're Experts and Toxic Sludge Is Good for You.

Stealing a line from Dickens, it now seems both the best of times and the
worst of time for American progressives.

It is the worst of times because the pro-corporate far-right has
successfully exploited the 9/11 terror attacks to establish a political
environment of fear and loathing similar to the Cold War. A resulting
follow-the-leader mentality has enabled the Republican party to use its
tough-on-terrorism rhetoric to consolidate its control over every branch of
the federal government. The cowardly mainstream media performed like a
propaganda arm of the Bush administration prior to the 2003 US invasion of
Iraq, allowing the war's neoconservative architects and promoters to confuse
and deceive the American public into supporting what most people now see as
a foreign policy disaster of biblical proportions.

Since the invasion of Iraq, the mainstream media that promoted the war has
generally failed to acknowledge its culpability or to redeem itself by
seriously challenging the Bush administration's foreign policy debacles.
Indeed, the success of right-wing talk radio and Fox News, amidst the
reality of Bush's electoral victory, is likely to drive the corporate media
further to the right. Even public radio and television rarely show much
interest in airing the views of social and political critics much to the
left of Jim Leher.

It is the worst of times also because the dominant anti-government,
pro-empire, let-corporations-rule ideology of the Bush administration is
simply unsustainable in reality, fueling and guaranteeing future crises and
worsening conditions both in and outside the US. The attack on Iraq is just
one glaring example of how bone-headed right-wing policies are failing
miserably. Rather than defining and addressing the real threat of terrorism,
the Bush administration behaves like a fireman putting out a fire with a
hose spewing gasoline. As predicted by progressives before the attack on
Iraq, Bush's blunders are aiding terrorism by fueling hatred for the US
while bogging down US troops in an un-winnable war in Iraq. The Bush regime
is unable to figure an exit strategy, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians,
and overseeing the almost daily death of American soldiers.

It is also the worst of times because the right wing political leadership
and its large and well-organized grassroots base have been emboldened by
Bush's defeat of Kerry, and they are committed to escalating their efforts
and consolidating their influence. Absent a counter-force of effective
progressive organizing, they will succeed.

Stealing a line from American patriot and revolutionary Tom Paine, these
are the times that try our souls, particularly progressives who set aside
differences with mainstream Democrats and united in an attempt to dump
Bush/Cheney and the neocons as a first step to revitalizing American
democracy. What can progressives do in the face of four more years of the
Republican one-party state?

While eventual change is inevitable, its form and shape is not guaranteed,
and progressive politics will not emerge in America out of the current
crises unless progressives do something that in my half-century of living I
have never witnessed. The challenge for progressives is to define ourselves
and our goals and then develop, fund and build whatever organizations we
need that can propel progressive politics into the mainstream, running
candidates, winning elections and wielding political power.

As a first step we need to study and understand how the right wing has
managed to is to achieve power. They started more than four decades ago, and
their success has been methodical, deliberate and impressive. Sheldon
Rampton and I examine it in our book Banana Republicans: How The Right Wing
is Turning America into a One-Party State. Just sixteen years after the
crushing presidential defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, Hollywood actor and
California Governor Ronald Reagan stormed into the White House in 1980,
leading the Regan Revolution that continues today in the neconservative
movement.

After Goldwater's defeat the far-right aggressively and ambitiously
organized itself on campuses, among funders with now-familiar names like
Scaife, Bradley, Mellon and Coors, and built right wing think-tanks, groomed
new political leadership and right wing intellectuals in academia and the
media, creating its own media, establishing terms that framed political
debate, and united a sometimes fractious constituency that extends from the
Bible Belt to Wall Street, able to set aside differences to win elections.

Banana Republicans is a primer on how the right has won politically, and it
has won in part because it views politics not as a debate but as a war in
which the enemy, liberals and progressives and Democrats, must be vanquished
and destroyed.

Many progressives are looking for hopeful signs, but hope does not create
change and false hopes can even thwart change. Hope for the best, but
understand that hard, deliberate, practical work based on realistic
political assessments and a willingness to commit years and decades to the
fight is what creates change.

The first step is to better define ourselves and our political goals and
objectives, and then create the relationships and institutions we need to
win victories. The good news is that for progressives, this is also the best
of times in a very long time. It's hard for people under 40 to believe this,
but never in my 52 years has the progressive movement in America been as
vibrant, diverse, united, funded, heard, respected or established, as it is
today. On many key issues, the American public is in tune with progressives,
including issues of economic justice, corporate accountability, campaign
reform, national health care, getting out of Iraq, and many more.

Thanks much to the internet, the information sharing, networking,
organizing, muckraking and mobilizing capability of progressive activists is
unparalleled in my lifetime. Consider, for instance, the Battle of Seattle
in the Fall of 1999. Tens of thousands of people engaged in non-violent
activism, shutting down a crucial meeting of the World Trade Organization,
even though up to that point the mainstream corporate media had mostly
ignored or denigrated the fair trade movement. Or consider February 15,
2003, when hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets across the
country, as millions did across the world, in a massive non-violent
mobilization to oppose a war that had not even begun. Up to that point
anti-war voices were almost completely blocked out of the mainstream media's
coverage of the ³run-up to war.² This appalling media self-censorship
continued after February 15, but the massive size and coordination of the
nation-wide protests were impossible to ignore.

The success of Howard Dean was due to his ability to tap into the
progressive anti-war movement, and to utilize the internet to raise over $50
million dollars in small contributions. Joe Trippi describes how
progressives using the internet have changed politics in his book The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised, almost succeeding in a grassroots uprising
upsetting the dominance of the Democratic Leadership Counsel - Republican
Light - within the Democratic party.

The crises and challenges facing the US and the world have no historical
parallel in terms of their scale or the global environment in which they are
unfolding. The promise of progressivism is that adherence to democratic
principles of democracy, equality, justice, human rights, and the
recognition of the ecological limits of our planet, can guide wise personal
and public policy decisions that create a livable world for all. That,
indeed, is an idealistic agenda, but it is progressivism that is the
realistic American dream and the practical hope for our future, if we are
willing to take the steps necessary to move beyond protests and punditry to
political power
.
What needs to be done? Here are some suggestions.

1.) We have to organize for political power. Shutting down the World Trade
Organization meeting in Seattle, putting half a million anti-war activists
into the streets of New York city during the Republican convention, these
indeed are impressive achievements of political protest and media theater.
But they don't translate into building progressive organizations that can
get political candidates elected, and that is the real battle we have to
fight and win. Some individual progressives have figured out how to thrive
in the face of right wing dominance. Look at Wisconsin Senator Russ
Feingold, one of the most progressive politicians in Washington, the only
senator to vote against the US Patriot Act, a strong opponent of the Iraq
war, the leading Democratic fighting to get big money out of politics.
Senator Feingold clobbered his right-wing millionaire military-veteran
opponent on November 2nd, even as pro-war presidential candidate John Kerry
barely won over Bush in Wisconsin. Feingold is intelligent, principled and
politically fearless. He knows how to organize effectively and has built a
strong network of loyal contributors and campaign workers across the state.
He can articulate his positions, whether enraging the right by voting alone
against the Patriotic Act, or infuriating his liberal constituency by voting
to confirm Attorney General John Ashcroft. Feingold is a nice
straightforward guy, but he is not media-genic, charismatic, tall, rich or
Waspish. He is living, breathing proof that political progressives can
thrive even without the support of their party leadership whom Feingold
regularly upsets. (Hillary Clinton, a major raiser of big money who voted
for the Patriot Act and for war, once told Feingold to ³grow up² and stop
attacking big money's influence in the Democratic Party.) Progressives need
to organize for political power by running as individual candidates, forming
local political organizations, and doing so both inside and outside the
Democratic Party. Russ Feingold is an example of how to stay true to
principles and run an effective winning campaign, as was the late Paul
Wellstone.

2.) Progressives need to create new political organizations for political
organizing, advocacy and electoral success. The Democratic Party has been
dominated for decades by the thinking of the Democratic Leadership Council,
a pro-big business ideology that has been termed Republican Light. John
Kerry was a mainstream liberal who probably lost the 2004 presidential
election in the Fall of 2003 when he voted to support Bush's war on Iraq.
Yet, I thought that supporters of independent candidate Ralph Nader and
Green candidate David Cobb made a strategic blunder by not uniting behind
Kerry for the sake of toppling the current regime, rather than seeing Bush
returned to office emboldened and strengthened by what he thinks is a
mandate for his policies. Progressives come in many shapes and sizes, and
occasionally we need to form coalitions to topple the far right hegemony
over US federal policies. I personally support Green and Democratic and
independent progressive candidates. Here in Madison, Wisconsin, an
admittedly liberal town that I call home, there has been built a
tremendously successful local progressive political organization called
Progressive Dane that over the past ten years has been able to elect dozens
of people to office It is a model of what progressives can do in other
communities as well to mobilize outside the Democratic Party, electing our
own candidates locally, while forcing the Democratic candidates to seek
support and approval of an organized progressive constituency.

3.) Build Political Organizations from the Grassroots Up. I am an
environmental activist and have been since the word was coined in the 1960s.
Yet, I am a critic of the environmental movement as it is now constituted
because it is no longer a movement, it is a bloated, political impotent
collection of DC-based non-profit fiefdoms that every year battle each other
to raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars from the public and from
foundations. Think of it, every year the biggest environmental organizations
in the United States with names like the Wilderness Society, the National
Wildlife Federation, Defenders of Wildlife, Natural Resources Defense
Council and Environmental Defense raise and spend among them hundreds of
millions of dollars. Yet the environmental movement is politically impotent,
consistently losing most fights despite the fact that environmentalism is
overwhelmingly popular with Americans of most political persuasions. How is
this possible, how can we have a politically popular well-funded movement
that is a consistent political loser. As I've in my book Toxic Sludge Is
Good for You, it's because these huge non-profit environmental organizations
behave like businesses, and most of them now take money and services from
the very corporations that whose lobbyists and trade associations are
undermining environmental protections. While the Big Green environmental
groups prosper they treat their ³members² like nothing more than suckers at
the end of a direct mail appeal. The real environmental movement, made up of
tens of millions of committed Americans, is at the grassroots, but very
little of the annual hundreds of millions of dollars accumulated by the Big
Green groups goes there to organize, fight and win political victories. What
is happening with environmentalism is happening with other progressive
causes and issues. Progressives need to build new organizations that are
strong and vital from the grassroots up, not bloated bureaucracies that are
out of touch with the movement they grew from.

4.) Learn What the Right Learned from the Left. Since the 1970s pro-business
right wing political lobbyists, consultants and PR specialists have been
studying progressive movements including the labor movement, the civil
rights movement, the student movement, the anti-war movement and the
environmental movement. They have invested in political organizing skills,
computers and data-base programs, and they have married big money to new
technology to create what seems like an oxymoron: corporate grassroots. In
fact today the most impressive, effective and high-tech grassroots
mobilizations are by corporations, their lobbyists and the political right.
Each year a group called the Public Affairs Council holds a Corporate
Grassroots Conference where for a one thousand dollar fee hundreds of
lobbyists and PR specialists for the biggest corporations in America share
their organizing successes and teach skills and tactics, such as how to turn
thousands of employees into effective grassroots lobbyists for the companies
that employ them. Tobacco lobbyists and tobacco PR experts explain how to
organize well-funded front groups to stop health care reform, to disguise
attacks on public rights as ³tort reform² and to win on our other corporate
causes. These meetings are closed to journalists, but you might want to buy
your way in. Go to www.pac.org and you can find out more. Meanwhile, nothing
similar exists for progressives, who are good at organizing impressive
one-shot protests but weak on building and sustaining grassroots
organizations that can actually get people elected or win political
victories. We need to learn from the right wing organizers what they have
learned from the left..

5.) Frame issues and communicate effectively. Any PR expert will admit that
if you can get a debate fought with your chosen rhetorical terms, you will
win the debate. The political right spends a fortune through its think tanks
(that are really sophisticated PR operations) and political consultants to
shape and frame public policy debates in ways that the right can win, using
sophisticated polling and simple focus groups. Recently George Lakoff,
author of Try Not to Think of an Elephant and other more scholarly books,
has been schooling progressives in how to frame and market issues. Read
Lakoff.

6.) Take the Moveon-model to the next level. Moveon, the brilliant and
effective internet-based activist group founded by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd,
came into its own during the 2004 election. Their email action alerts
reached millions, and raised millions of dollars for Democratic candidates
and for advertisements against George Bush. Two million people at the end of
a mailing list is impressive, but it's not enough. The real trick now is to
marry the Moveon model to more old-fashioned community organizing, and
empower local progressives to build their own political and activist
organizations, make their own decisions, and build from the grassroots up.
Its unclear currently if Moveon will take this step, but if not others
should.

7.) Think in terms of years and decades. It took the political right sixteen
years after the 1964 Goldwater electoral debacle to again take control of
the Republican Party and win the Reagan Revolution, and they've never looked
back. In the four decades since 1964, despite significant internal
differences, the right wing has consolidated its power and moved the entire
political landscape far to the right. Is the progressive movement willing to
develop strategies and tactics that see down the road for decades? Is the
progressive movement ready to fight for the right to govern America? If not,
then the progressive movement will remain a political footnote, not a
powerful forced for change.

8.) Seize issues that are winners, and expose media lies. Most Americans
support national health care, most Americans support environmentalism, most
Americans believe in fundamental values of fairness and think that giant
corporations and special interests have too much power. Most Americans would
have opposed the war in Iraq had the mainstream US media explained what the
progressive media was reporting: Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11,
his internally hated regime was weak and contained, weapons inspections were
working. A majority of Americans who voted for Bush in 2004 still believe a
the lie that Iraq was behind 9/11. It takes a lot of effort and money and
the failure of mainstream journalism to mislead the American people.
Progressives need to fight and win political battles on key issues where the
majority of Americans already agree with the progressives, and progressives
need to develop communications strategies that confront the failure of the
mainstream media to expose and debunk the sorts of lies that allowed the
Bush neoconservatives to mislead America into supporting the attack on Iraq.

9.) Be the media. One of the most exciting and successful movements in
America received almost no media attention in 2003; I'm referring not to the
anti-war movement now, but to the media reform movement. Progressives,
working through exciting new organizations like FreePress.net, built
powerful grassroots coalitions that included conservatives, and pressured
Congress into fighting back against the Federal Communication Commission's
efforts to allow even greater corporate consolidation and control of the
media. This media reform movement continues to grow. On one hand it is
challenging the stranglehold that a half-dozen corporate giants have over
the US media. On the other, an exciting alternative media has grown up that
consists of traditional left magazines like the Nation, the Progressive,
Mother Jones and In These Times, but now also is reaching many millions of
Americans through the web. Community radio stations, syndicated programs
like Amy Goodman's Democracy Now, Indymedia websites, 'wiki' sites like
Disinfopedia <www.disinfopedia.org>, and hundreds of liberal and left blogs,
are busting open the media monopolies and enabling progressives to educate
and inform millions in ways not possible just five years ago.

10.) Unite the progressive ³live wires.² Ronnie Cummins, the founder of the
Organic Consumers Association and a longtime peace and justice activist, has
a term he uses to describe committed, activist progressives: the livewires.
Cummins has spoken and written about how progressives need to organize, by
uniting across class and racial and gender and issue divides, and linking up
the live wire leadership from the grassroots up who realize that for
progressives to win, progressives must unite to support each other's causes,
candidates and movements. Live wires are the real progressive leadership,
whether working in a factory, farming a field, lobbying for clean air, or
running for city council. We need to nurture and grow progressive
leadership, and by becoming a live wire in our own communities and
organizations, and reaching out to create live wire networks that work to
achieve some of the goals I've outlined above, we'll succeed.

11.) Challenge and Overthrow Corporate Power. No one ever said that
democracy, social justice, equality, ecological consciousness, health
living, and other progressive goals were easy or guaranteed. Just the
opposite, it is the greedy elite that have come to dominate our daily
personal and civil lives because they have but one simple agenda, amassing
more money and more power, as much as they can get away with. Some people
like to say that corporations are governed by people, and that they will
make positive change. The reality is that corporations are run by their own
internal logic to amass more power and control, and they run the people
within them. One of the biggest long term challenges facing progressives
will be to build new economic institutions and organizations based on
democratic principles. The power of the moneyed corporations which Jefferson
and other founders warned about has come to dominate our lives and politics.
While we challenge the power of corporations we have to remember that the
goal is to replace corporate power with economic democracy, creating and
funding new models of business that are based on successful experiments from
the experience of US cooperatives, worker self managed businesses, and
European democratic socialists.

12.) Have fun. Have fun? How in the face of the current crises, the war,
global climate change, massive poverty, can we have fun? OK, bad choice of
words. But I mean this: enjoy living, love your family and friends, relax
more, strive for personal happiness, keep it all in perspective, treat
everyone with respect and support your fellow progressives in the cause.
Every generation has its challenges. We all have to do our best, and we need
to love life in doing so because otherwise no one will want to join our
revolution. We need to walk our talk, show that we are committed, but also
show that living by the values we espouse as progressives we have great
lives. The social and political changes we need to make should be seductive.
A healthier environment, a happier workplace, a more rewarding experience
with friends and family, embracing diversity, mutual aid in times of crisis,
healthy communities, involved local citizens, music, art, singing dancing,
camping. To me these are values of progressives, and values that make life
wonderful. I believe in the values of democracy, human rights, ecological
protection, mutual aid, and equality. Those are democratic American values.
As someone else has said, ³I believe in life before death.² Amen

The views expressed here are those of John Stauber, author and activist, and
not necessarily those of any organization with which he is affiliated.

Copyright 2004-2005 wheredowego.org
For more information, email info@wheredowego.org.