I sent this to a group of progressive activists who were meeting in Philadelphia in June 2007. I couldn’t attend because my daughter was graduating from middle school at that time.
The May 2007 primary was disappointing for many of us. But I thought then, as I still do now, that good things would come out of the effort many of us had made during and before that primary.
While I very much want to hear what you all have to say, I don’t think you will lose much from my absence as I’m still too close to the recent election to have had the time and energy to think through what it all means for the progressive movement in this city.
So let me just make a few undigested observations that have struck me over the last few years and that were reinforced by what I learned since January.
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There is a progressive mood and an emerging movement in the city. People are enormously frustrated with our government—as they should be because we simply have one of the worst municipal governments in the United States I have ever experienced or read about. I probably spoke to eight to ten thousand in the last five months. The vast majority are eager to see us advance innovative, progressive policy ideas and they recognize that our transactional, special deal oriented government blocks the way time and again.
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There are three broad themes to which people respond: government reform, including reducing the waste, inefficiency, and lack of energy that afflict our government; protecting neighborhoods from development driven only by market criteria; and providing justice for the 25% of our population that is left out of mainstream life. Some people clearly find one theme more critical than another. But most people to whom I talked responded positively to my claim that a reform movement should address all three issues to one degree or another and that fixing each problem will help us fix the other two.
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The vast majority of these people are either unorganized or organized only in civic or issue groups that refrain from broad political activity. I met lots of activists in all parts of the city who wanted to help progressive candidates. But many of them they didn’t know how, beyond taking part as individuals in one campaign or another. They did not have stable ongoing organizations with lots of members who might be involved in politics. (See also 5 below.) In other words, our activists are still mostly individuals who haven’t spent a lot of time taking part in the organizational work that can help them expand their power. And the result is that in a political world in which most folks pay little attention to local politics, it is very difficult to reach people beyond the activists.
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So what we need, more than anything else is to help organize beyond the relatively small number of activists who attend our meetings now. I’m not sure how. I’m inclined to think we need to focus on issues that (a) really touch people where they live and (b) can be used to show people why our politics is broken in the city. We need a lot of good issues activists focusing on different issues. And we have to have a broad, community / labor alliance on these issues. Casinos, transit and health care are three good ones. I also think that planning and zoning and gentrification issues are going to be at the center of our political debates over the next ten years.
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Ultimately we have to find a way to bring issue activism to bear on electoral work. This is very hard for a whole bunch of reasons, from the legal status of issue and civic organizations, to a political culture on the left that disdains politics and politicians, to a fear of embracing challengers on the part of issue activists and labor unions, to the dependence of so many progressives on government funding, to political candidates and managers who find it hard to think beyond the immediate election in front of them. And our lack of money for organizing, issue activism and political campaigns is a very, very serious problem.
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At some point the barriers are going to be overcome, initially through patient education and organizing, and then because something unexpected—some issue, some indictment, some disaster—will create a political fire that can’t be put out before Election Day.
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So we have two jobs as activists. First, we have to prepare the tinder and kindling to take advantage of that political fire. That is, we have to keep developing the ideas and organizations to channel the heat that will eventually arise. And, second, we have to keep lighting matches—keep trying to find and take advantage of issues and events that can set the fire ablaze.
The whole history of progressive political reform in this country teaches us that no one can predict when a mood will become a movement of activists and when the movement of activists will find mass support. (Looking back, the “politically dead fifties” provided the intellectual analysis and the nascent organizations that made sixties radicalism possible.) We can’t know when that is going to happen in our city. But if we are true to our ideals and to our vocation as activists, we have to keep working on the assumption that it is can happen here. We will win sometimes and lose more often. But at some point, the fire next time will be in Philadelphia.
Marc
PS I’m sure there will be a few people in the room tomorrow who think that Michael Nutter’s victory was the political fire I’m talking about and there are just as many who think that Nutter’s election was a victory for the wrong kind of progressivism, that is for what I have called good government reform not social justice reform. I hope you all don’t get bogged down in that debate. For what it’s worth, my sense is that Nutter’s victory is a good thing because he does promise a new way of doing politics in Philadelphia. But Nutter’s campaign never enunciated in a thematic way a broad progressive reform agenda. He certainly helped strengthen the mood for reform, but his campaign did not create a movement. And he faces a City Council and political establishment that is little changed. Still I believe that Michael Nutter has the potential to stimulate a progressive movement in the city and it is our job to help him do so.
(By the way, progressive movements in American history develop after an election as often as they do before. No one would have predicted the New Deal from Roosevelt’s campaign speeches and no one would have predicted that the election of Jack Kennedy would stimulate the civil rights movement. But the elections of FDR and JFK did much to create a sense of hope in people. And the expectations they raised ultimately pushed FDR and JFK to be more progressive than their previous careers would have led us to expect they would be.)