This is so what people need to realize. Because it’s not about candidates, it’s about building a movement.
You can’t get away from it. The conservative movement rewards its friends and punishes, smears, intimidates, bullies, discredits and otherwise “neutralizes” its opponents. That is how they were able to get Congress to lower taxes on the rich and corporations, break unions, defund schools and the rest of the things that have made them so much money and wreaked havoc on the rest of us. The money was not for politicians who run for office today (not all of it, anyway); it was to build organizations to execute long-term strategies to get what they want tomorrow.
The moral of the story: the right put its resources into long-term movement building, setting up think tanks, radio shows, even an entire TV network to reach the public to persuade them that conservative ideas would make their lives better. They infiltrated and took over organizations like the National Rifle Association and set up rapid-response organizations to pressure politicians. They deliver for their constituents – the billionaires and their giant corporations – and keep “our side” from delivering for ours, the American people.
On our side the money, resources and effort tend to go into candidates, with so many people looking for a “messiah” candidate to lead them out of the wilderness and somehow convince the public of the rightness of our cause. Then after the campaigns are over, the infrastructure dissolves, the expertise disperses, needing to be rebuilt from scratch two or four years later. It is a remarkably ineffective approach.
Some might say the right’s success came about because there is so much more money on the corporate/conservative side. But we have the numbers. Imagine if 100 million left-of-center Americans gave an average of $100 (27.4 cents a day) each year to build progressive organizations… (Hint: That adds up to $10 billion a year.)
Imagine dozens of fully funded, fully staffed progressive organizations reaching out to all corners of America, employing people to write op-eds, appear on the radio, speak to audiences, knock on doors. Imagine TV commercials telling and showing people how progressive values and a progressive approach to issues would do good things for regular people. Imagine our elections after a few years pushing back against the kind of propaganda we constantly have to hear from the right, usually unanswered.
Money put today into efforts to build an ongoing information infrastructure is money put into every single progressive initiative and candidate in every single future election.
Being Debbie Downer here, but it looks to me like their math is seriously off. There’s something like 120,000,000 tax returns filed, so some 120 million people with incomes. Some of those, eg spouses, might not have incomes but want to contribute anyway. So say 200,000,000 total with money to give. Every poll I see has actual progressives down at around 15%. That may be low, but the fact that we’re a smallish minority is sad but true. And then a lot of progressives couldn’t donate $100/yr to save their souls.
Your main point is right, of course. IF we all worked together, even at a poor 15%, we could do a lot more.
The Left should become like the Right? No thanks. Tomorrow Obama goes to West Point. While there he will tell us how many U.S. combat troops he will leave behind after we exit in December. Then he will tell us that he’s an “interventionist,” but not a “unilateralist.” That he’s an “internationalist” and not an “isolationist.” Which means that when he goes to war (and he has) he brings some friends along. Since taking office Obama’s CIA has staged a coup in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Egypt and Thailand. He has attempted several coups in Venezuela and killed 2500 human beings with his drones. Including half a dozen American citizens. He’s had help from his friends in Saudi Arabia, Israel and England. Does any Progressive believe that Obama’s awful foreign policy should be packaged and sold? Because that’s what the Clintonites have in mind. Even bigger and better as neo-cons like Bush tend to do. We need to sell less packaged crap and force more facts to be introduced into the body politic. And not by top down organizational hacks. Net neutrality.