What Do We Actually Stand FOR??

"Resistance" is futile without a vision

If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything, harder than you think, it’s a beautiful thing.” -Public Enemy

Makes you think, huh.

In the anxious days since January 20th and Donald Trumps inauguration, one of my most hated words from Trumps America 1.0 (2016-2020) has begun to pop back up. “Resistance". The list of things that this word can be applied to is endless. We are told we must, above all, “resist”. Resist Trump, resist Elon Musk, resist RFK Jr, resist the NCAA’s changed rules about transgender athletes. On a recent all day zoom meeting session, for a cause I really believe in, the first person to speak talked about the need to create a “strategy for resistance”. Resist Resist Resist. I hated the word the first time around and I hate it even more now. I will, this fall, nominate it for my alma maters famous banished words list.

This does not mean I don’t see the urgency of standing up against (most of) the things happening right now. I am, after all, a man of the left (I refuse to be excommunicated based on where I live and who my friends are, thank you). I don’t like Trump, don’t think the country is headed in a good direction, and am disgusted by, in particular, Musk (tangent- I better never hear any of you brave heterodox conservatives call any liberal “cringe” again after the way you lick the boots of this flabby, zero charisma nerd). We’ve lived in an oligarchy my whole life but it was better when it was seventeen percent less annoying. When real harm is being done to people, those people, and those who care about them, of course have a duty to stand up and do what we can to stop it. This requires immediate, reactive action on a condensed timeline. In other words, resistance.

The problem is, as far as I see it, we aren’t actually capable of stopping very much. We simply don’t have the power. And that powerlessness gets to the the rotten core of everything that’s wrong with us as a movement, as organizers, as the broad left of center. It also gets to the evil black heart of the Democratic party, but I am not a Democrat, have no faith in them, and no real interest in helping them. If they haven’t figured it out by now they never will. But for us, in the real world, organizing real people? For us there is still hope. We gotta pull our heads out of our asses pretty quick though.

We’ve lost our power because we don’t have a vision. For basically a decade, every time I’ve been in “movement spaces” (blech), we’ve almost exclusively discussed how to stop bad things from happening. Sometimes we were able to stop the specific bad thing. Sometimes we weren’t. But, if you look around, it would be hard to convince yourself that life is better for the average American than it was a decade ago. Let alone the average Sudanese, Congolese, Yemeni, Palestinian, or any of the billions of others suffering under the heavy thumb of U.S. empire. I could cite all the familiar stats about inequality, inflation, life expectancy, etc. here in the states but it’s common sense. The overall trend is in the wrong direction.

So obsessed have we been with the immediate, the urgent, the “resistance” that rarely, if ever, have we discussed how to make good things happen, how to advance a proactive agenda. In other words, how to improve peoples quality of life rather than just prevent it from further deterioration. And I have a sneaking suspicion we don’t talk about it because we don’t actually know what we want. We know what we are against but not what we are for. We know what we hate about America but not what we love. And we know what we don’t want our country to be, but we don’t actually spend any time thinking about the good things it could become. We’ve become so cynical and so reactive that not only do we not advance a detailed vision of the future, we don’t even dream.

And as we retreat from dreaming big, if we are honest with ourselves we must admit that we the organizers have never been less powerful. And the sooner we confront this fact the sooner we can do something about it. Why are we so ineffective? Why are we so easily run over? Why is it that, even when our supposed “allies” are in power, we can’t get them to actually do anything to meaningfully improve our lives and the lives of our people. I think it starts with the fact that we actually don’t agree on a vision for the future, a vision of the America we want to live in. Or at the very least we don’t know whether we agree because we simply don’t talk about it. We’re too busy talking about how bad the orange man is.

This is perhaps Trumps greatest gift to elites. You could say he killed the Democratic party but they’ve been slowly killing themselves since at least 1978. And the Democratic Party, of course, is nothing if not elite. The way he has cut grassroots movements off at the knees by breaking the brains of their leaders and organizers however is wholly unique. No longer do we build power or strategize for the long term. In fact doing so, in may of these places, is seen as at best naive and at worst a mark of privilege. How can you worry about that when bad things are happening right now?

Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others

What I would say is….how’s that working out for us? Has our “resistance” prevented all (or any) of the bad stuff from happening? For all our urgency, have we improved life for the poor, people of color, the oppressed? Have we stopped the violence? Take, for example, Black Lives Matter, and it’s related protests. For all the momentum they had in 2020 and 2021 has there been a single meaningful reform in policing that they won? Has the average black persons life gotten better in the last four years?

When I started working as a community organizer, seemingly a lifetime ago at this point, I would often find myself in rooms with other organizers, activists, and various “movement people” (yuck). Sometimes these would be official meetings and sometimes they would be after hours hangouts with drinks. This happens less often now that I’m an old dad in a small town, but it still happens enough. A decade or more ago, when I would end up in these rooms, we would spend a big portion of our time talking about what the world would look like when we won. How society would be structured when the people had real power. We thought, in time, it was inevitable that we would win. So it made sense. Back then, I hated these discussions. They seemed so distant, so dreamy. And there was stuff that needed addressing NOW. People were dying, people were suffering. I thought we should spend less time dreaming about the future and the big picture and more time living in the here and now. Fixing the shit.

Maaaan, I miss those days.

Now it’s very much the opposite. Too much time reacting and not enough time proposing alternatives. And of course it’s been disastrous for us. In the last few months there’s been lots of discussion of how the left, the movement, the organizing organizations have lost so much power. In 2020, when orgs like DSA and BLM were ascendant the place we find ourselves now, a few short years later, would have seemed unthinkable. Where did it all go wrong? Most people have pointed out that we saddled ourselves with ridiculously unpopular issue fights, such as the transgender athlete thing mentioned above. Some have correctly talked about the toxic culture of these organizing efforts. Ten dollar words and unintelligible academic jargon. “Offense archaeologists” searching for reasons to excommunicate members. There’s a lot of truth to these things, I’ve been here a long time and seen it all. It’s also true that we’ve let our movement be dominated for too long by the most unlikable and uncharismatic nerds on earth. “Resistance” let’s not forget, is a catchphrase that comes from Star Wars.

But I think we’re missing the forest for the trees. All these problems pale in comparison to the fact that everyone knows what we stand against but no one knows what we stand for. And that’s because we ourselves don’t know. I think people are way more willing to put up with your annoying jargon and even your unpopular culture battles if they see you advancing a positive, concrete vision of the future and they understand how it will benefit them and their friends and family. But, again, we haven’t done this because we don’t have one. We should start to create it, without relying on political parties to do it for us (The Democrats don’t have a vision because they don’t actually believe in anything). And we should start now, because as long as we don’t have one we will continue to hemorrhage support, people, base, and power.

I used to think that we probably all largely agree on the future we want, that maybe we don’t actually have to talk about it that much, maybe that would be a waste of time since we’re already on the same page. But now I’m not so sure. I think our lack of forward focused discussion might actually be covering up some pretty fundamental disagreements that have been festering for a long time now.

If I had to guess, based not on open debate but passive aggressive comments and rolled eyes at meetings, the big fault line in our movement is between what I will call “equity” people and “representation and diversity” people. I’m in the first camp. I want overall inequality in this country and the world at large to be reduced, drastically. People in my camp have the broad goal of raising the floor for everyone, economically, to reduce suffering. This obviously could be done in almost infinite ways but a few examples are by ensuring everyone, regardless of race or class, has quality affordable housing. Or quality, affordable healthcare, through a single payer system (remember those days?). Or reducing the cost of groceries and healthy food. Or providing efficient transportation. Or increasing the pay of workers and union density. People in my camp are suspicious of means testing and targeted programs and generally favor approaches that include as many Americans as possible. The goal is to provide every single person with a minimal quality of life and modicum of dignity, regardless of any ascriptive identity characteristics.

Then there is the other camp. They don’t spend a lot of time thinking about overall inequality although if you asked them I suppose they would say it should be reduced. What they worry about is the racial, ethnic, gender etc. makeup of the classes, the racial wealth gap, the gender pay gap. They would like there to be more black billionaires, more trans Senators, more female late night talk show hosts. I suspect they would have very little beef with the 1 percent if the 1 percent was fifty percent female and acceptably racially diverse. A word that gets thrown around a lot in this camp is “mobility” as in “economic mobility”. My problem with economic mobility is that, in a society as drastically unequal as ours, if you don’t reduce overall inequality, someone moving up from the lower strata necessarily implies someone moving in the equal and opposite direction. This doesn’t bother this camp however because the assumption, I think, is that person on the way down would be a white man with unearned privilege. This may seem like a straw man, but I’ve heard in meetings more times than I can count, some version of “well, straight white men could use a little more suffering if we’re being honest!”. An argument I simply can’t get behind, knowing the number of straight white men that I do who live in trailers or in their car or in a utility shed behind a gas station. To put it in a pretty polemical way, this group believes that we should distribute suffering more evenly, whereas me and my group believe we should get rid of the suffering. I don’t want white men to suffer because I don’t want anyone to suffer. And this is fine, we’re allowed to disagree. I just wish, you know, that they’d say it with their chest.

Another way to put this is that there is an obvious but unspoken fault line between the old school lefties and the new school wokesters.

There is also an unspoken division between those who seek to cozy up to power, to amass a cohort of “allies” in the media, in DC, in academia and among the wealthy and famous, and those who are either suspicious of, or disgusted by those tactics. I suppose you can guess which side of that one I’m on.

Empty storefronts in Reed City, MI

The time is long past to have these debates and expose these fault lines publicly, out in the open. Time to air it all out. It needs to be done, because we need to move on to building a concrete, practical, but ambitious vision for the future. One that is proactive not reactive. One that can inspire people. We need to move past resistance.

The good news is that community organizing 101 gives us the blueprint for how to do it. I’ve probably beat this horse enough, but a lot of babies got thrown out with the bathwater when somehow suddenly we decided that old school, Alinsky style organizing was the exclusive province of white men and therefore inherently racist. This is the type of organizing I do, of course, but there’s no reason that the “representation” camp couldn’t use it for their ends. Other than the fact that their ideas are much less popular with poor and working class people than mine are. But, you know, that’s the rub.

In organizing 101 we start with a listening campaign, designed to discover peoples deepest concerns. Listening campaigns should engage a broad cross-section of the community you are organizing, and should be conducted by lay leaders from all walks of life. When enough listening is done we hold an issues convention and decide on which issues we care about, which are the broadest and most deeply felt. From there, it’s no huge step to say “what do we want to do to address them?”. And from there, conversations about a bold vision for the future organically sprout. If you’re doing organizing right, there is a place in the cycle where this type of visioning should naturally occur. You don’t have to force it.

Perhaps what we need is a movement wide listening campaign and issues convention. Perhaps we need to get back to our roots, take the time to have real conversations, evaluate our priorities. Perhaps, if we took the time to do this, much like in local organizing, a beautiful and concrete vision of the future would naturally bloom in our minds, hearts, and laptops. I think there’s still, despite it all, a great opportunity for consensus. I’ve seen it happen with leaders, regular people, farmers and plant workers and grocery clerks. It just happens, you don’t have to coach them. I see it every day in my work. I’ve seen them sketch out beautiful, inspirational, positive visions for their communities. Not just the things they don’t want but the things they do, aspirations for the way they could live and their kids and grand kids after them, if we won. If they can do it, us, the professional organizers, the foot soldiers of the non-profit industrial complex, should be able to too.

But, if I’m being honest, I don’t think it will happen. When I talk, in these rooms, about the need for this type of big step back, the urgent need to develop a proactive vision, to stand for something, people tend to get mad, or panicky. Maybe because they’re too anxious about all the bad things happening, or maybe it’s because they don’t believe we can actually win. I don’t know. If it’s the former, I can’t really blame them. Right now it seems like possibly the worst time to stop reacting and resisting, with every day seemingly some new program on the chopping block for the federal government and the worst type of evil nerds using their pale hands to wring more profit from us at every turn. But I suspect that there are those who don’t actually believe we can win and therefore don’t see the utility in dreaming of a positive future, and that I can’t stomach. They look at me as a pie in the sky hippie type. And, you know, guilty as charged. But I think if you don’t believe we can win you should reevaluate your place in the movement and look for signs of hope. Big things are possible, miracles happen daily. To be cynical is not only poison to a movement, it is a crime against God.

Our own history tells us this. The civil rights movement was deemed naive and ridiculous from the start. America was too racist for them to win, everybody knew. Too evil. Too racist and evil until they won. They built power, and they won. Ditto the labor movement. An eight hour day, at one point in America, seemed insane. And, if you’re doing real organizing, you should see it in your local work. Thankfully whether this big step back and visioning happens at a national level or not is largely irrelevant to me; I know that either way, I’ll keep building at the local and state level. And once in a while a minor miracle will happen and a bunch of affordable housing will get built in Frankfort, MI or a community policing program will be funded in Battle Creek or we’ll win a bunch of money for poor people to fix their roofs and furnaces in Flint.

I’ve largely taken my shoulder off the wheel of the broad national movement’s culture, because I have my local work to give me meaning, because I have a wife and two kids and no free time or money, and because there are forces above me that are completely indifferent. Whether that aircraft turns or not is out of my control and I make no pretense otherwise. But I guess I would just like it to be known that we’re capable of doing two things at once. What I’m talking about is far from impossible. I think that we’ve been 100 percent focused on reacting and resisting for a long, long, time and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. It’s true that building this sort of consensus, this sort of positive vision for the future, will take time. It has to take time, if it is to be done right. But I don’t think there’s any other option, other than to continue to lose power. Which is no option at all. All the more reason to start right now.

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