Be Timeless, Not Timely

Movement building occurs when we prioritize timeless principles over timely responses.

Because policy makers are thinking about the next election and not the next generation, our politics remain at a standstill.

Sadly, this is also true of the broader progressive movement that’s been rightly critical of elected Democrats. It is important to show power & numbers and tell elected officials that they’ll get unseated if they do the wrong things. What’s missing is a broader context.

A bigger, more important story

“Next election pressure” has to be part of a larger, cohesive narrative describing a progressive future. We worry too much about “speaking our elected officials’ language” instead of giving them a better vision of a future and a story that they can use to make the right policies and get re-elected. Run for office if you want to do that. Even then, telling a bigger, better, simpler story will still work better.

The difference between “we’ll un-elect you” and “there’s a train leaving the station that everyone’s on board except you” is subtle and substantial. The first narrative is timely. It is framed in terms of the next election that’s 2, 4, or 6 years away. It can be fired off quickly with context. The second, stronger narrative is timeless. It can be used candidates on the campaign trail just as easily as during my annual Christmas political “debates” with my family.

Marshall Ganz in a recent interview with The Citizen said:

The legislative process has been much more responsive to the creation of crises that legislation is needed to resolve than it has been to, “Gee, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we made things work better?’ So, the job of those trying to create change is actually to create crises that require legislative solution.

What Ganz calls “creating crises” I call telling a story bigger than a specific policy or an election.

Example: Health Care

During President Obama’s nomination speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, he said something I wish he and others would remember: “don’t make a big election about small things.” That type of thinking would have benefited us all on health care reform.

Let’s describe what we want the days after the next election to be like. Instead of yelling and screaming about whose head you want on a silver platter, talk about the progressive future in a way that’s simple and compelling (and probably excludes your least-favorite elected officials).

Let’s replace “Democrats that block health care reform will be challenged in primaries and face the wrath of constituents on election day.” with the following:

America is a place where we give a damn about one another and are proud to see people be healthy and succeed in life. We pay homage to our heroes big and small every day. It is disgusting that being unlucky enough to inherit susceptibility to certain illnesses or being injured in a car accident puts not only our lives but our dreams in danger. The best way to protect our dreams and our future is to protect our health from any and everything that threatens it. Right now, the biggest threat to our health comes from insurance companies that determine who gets help and who doesn’t, who’s in pain and who isn’t, who lives and who dies. There are more people in this country who know this is unacceptable than who think this is OK. That majority will rule tomorrow.

This says the same thing while simultaneously communicating the values that are the foundation of a progressive framework for every policy debate. They are the values that define our progressive future.

Movements transcend elections.

Minutiae murders movements.

The necessity of elections must not distract us from our broader goals of building power and creating a better future. Don’t forget this tomorrow or the next time a politician does the wrong thing.

One Love. One II.

Open Gates – My FCC Testimony

On Tuesday, December 15, 2009, I testified at an FCC workshop entitled “Speech, Democratic Engagement and the Open Internet.” Video of the hearing is embedded below and available on YouTube. The moderator introduces me at 58:27, and my roughly 6 minute remarks begin at 59:07. The Q&A that begins at 1:26:18 (My answers are at 1:28:00-1:29:29 and 1:41:20-1:43:31).

My message was that an open internet is necessary for the political participation of all people of all shapes, sizes, races and income in the future. My full opening statement with references is below.

One Love. One II.

21st Century Worker Justice

This is the first part of a series on how labor organizing will evolve in the coming years.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece recently called Dave Bing’s last second shot. In it, they talk about the challenges facing Detroit’s mayor, devoting special attention to how they feel he must handle unionized city employees. The anti-union sentiment of this piece is regular fare for Wall Street Journal columnists.

The fundamental premise of labor organizing is that when workers are treated fairly, everybody wins: the customer, the company, and the employee. This is as true now as it was at the time of the Boston Massacre (the result of a dispute between Boston ropemakers frustrated at their employers’ willingness to undercut wages by hiring off-duty British soldiers who could afford to work for less). It’s a realization that customers are best served by solid businesses with happy, productive workers.

The strategy and tactics of unions must evolve like everything else that’s ever existed on Earth. The economy has evolved beyond the wildest dreams of the original labor organizers, but their guiding principle endures. The problem is that the criticism of unions often comes from those that disagree with it’s premise (i.e. conservative columnists at the Wall Street Journal).

Space must be created within the labor movement and the broader liberal & progressive community for a dialog on what evolved unions look like and how they interact with business and government. This has not happened in any scalable, visible fashion for the same reason that there has yet to be a reasoned, meaningful dialog about US-Israel policy: fear of being called an anti-Semite. In the context of rethinking unions, the fear is that you’ll be labeled as anti-union or anti-worker/human rights. The nuance-less zero-sum game must end because it leaves us with broken union models like most teacher unions.

No matter how business and government evolve, there will always be a need to ensure that workers’ needs are met. Without that, businesses, economies and governments will inevitably fail. You could even argue that the economy being divorced from the everyday realties of workers is one underlying cause for our current economic situation.

I’m surprised that labor itself hasn’t driven this conversation more publicly, but my sense is that the hesitate to do so because they don’t want to give those that disagree with their existence any public statements to latch on to. A dose of boldness is needed to see through the short-term impact of a few negative news cycles if it means creating a more robust organizing model for workers in future generations (assuming that’s the goal).

So how do we proceed?

One Love. One II.

What are we fighting for…

I have been non-partisan voter registration efforts for some years now and one line that was particularly salient (given Obama’s candidacy) during the campaign was that “People died so that you could have the right to vote.” I am excited that millions took up this call and participated in this election but what will be our generation’s clarion call? I know people died for us to have the right to vote but many more put to death their selfish tendencies as they invested their dreams in the generations to come. What do you think we should be fighting for?

UPDATE: Thankfully, there is an organization, Generation Vote that is at the forefront of defining and shaping the youth agenda.

Stay up fam,

Brandon Q.

To Attack Community Organizers is to Attack Black Political Thought

This piece is part of Day of Blogging for Community Organizing Justice: “I Am a Community Organizer”.

Republicans don’t like Community Organizers. Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin ridiculed them specifically in their speeches last Wednesday at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN. This modern crop of Republicans has demonstrated how much they hate grassroots organizing in many ways with their hatred or unionization, their damnation of dissenters inside and outside of the government, and their willingness to ignore the rights, thoughts, and actions of the people of foreign nations that they decide to invade destroy occupy “help”.

While these positions on their own are outrageous and not in line with the ideals of the America that Republicans claim to love so much, it is consistent with another thread of modern-day Republican rhetoric and practice: racism.

For every generation leading up to [and including] the current one, the only foray for Black people to better their lives collectively has been through community organizing. When I say community organizing, I don’t just mean the highly visible ones like Malcolm & Martin, I mean the invisible ones that most of us will never hear or speak of that sacrifice their time, treasure, and talents so that people’s day-to-day lives are better and that their voices are heard. This is the path that nearly all Black politicians have taken to attain the capital needed to even run for office, let alone win. For one to minimize the work of organizers is to minimize the thoughts, actions, and efforts of all minorities and underrepresented groups who wish to uplift themselves individually and as a whole.