I appreciate this reply because I think you’re being more honest about the nature of your pushback, and that clarity helps.
To reiterate: I’m not claiming to have a master plan to solve racism. No one does. What I’m arguing is that the only thing that’s ever worked is organizing through shared material interest; not because it cures racism, but because it creates contact, contradiction, and stakes. I don’t expect a hospital town hall to turn a bigot into an ally. But I do believe that’s a better starting point than waiting for moral evolution on its own.
I don’t think that’s abstract. It’s what real politics has always looked like. You want concrete examples? Look at the Poor People’s Campaign in the South, where Black and white communities came together around shared material demands like housing, jobs, and healthcare. Look at Kansas voters defeating an abortion ban in a deep-red state by organizing across faith, class, and partisan lines. Look at the original CIO campaigns in the 1930s, where interracial union organizing succeeded even in segregated states because the focus was on the shop floor and the boss, not abstract moral unity. More recently, look at groups like Down Home North Carolina, which are doing deep listening and year-round canvassing in rural counties that most national Democrats have written off, talking about hospitals closing, wages stagnating, and how both parties have let people down. That’s what local, cross-racial organizing can look like. That’s what it has looked like.
You’ve said I sound like I have it all figured out. I think you’re mistaking a rhetorical and political strategy for arrogance. I have clarity about where power comes from, and it’s not donor strategy or elite messaging. It’s people. The problem isn’t that your objections are invalid. It’s that they always seem to function as reasons not to act. To delay. To wait for better conditions. But better conditions don’t just show up. They’re built.
The same tension shows up in many of my arguments with Rodo and Snoop. It devolves into them claiming they’re not advocating for abandonment while their entire posture implicitly leads to abondonment.
Yes, the old local institutions are gone. That’s not the end of the story. If the parties used to function because they were embedded, and they’ve lost that, then the only viable path forward is rebuilding from the ground up. If we don’t, we’re stuck managing decline and pretending the map is just what it is.
I get that your focus is 2025–2028. Mine includes that too but also 2030, 2032, 2034, 2036 and 2038. Because if no groundwork is laid now, there’s nothing to build on later. You may see my approach as speculative, but the current strategy is failing in real time, and that’s not speculation.
So, for me, this is about choosing to fight on the terrain where real political change has always happened: through contact, trust, and struggle. That’s what the left, in my estimation, has forgotten.
1. I should read Theda's book, or at least read plenty about it. I'm not familiar with the material she covers/history she unearths. You mentioned that in a later post, not in the above but regardless. . . .
2. You skipped over an important question, probably not intentionally but your last line makes it more potent. WHY has the left "forgotten" this? I mean, "the left" is full of smart people, and what's more, historians are well represented. Not to mention, as you say, the left hasn't given up on community level action since the 1960s. So there had to be a reason for the changed approach. It can't have been a hundred thousand academics and grad students just forgetting what worked.
Maybe it's better to say it like this: every jeremiad needs a motive force, or what we would today call a "villain." Indeed, you've talked about the need for narratives with clearly identified bad guys and good guys. Terrific. Who's the bad guy in your jeremiad? It seems to be the "donor class" and "consultants" etc. But they don't like the left and the left doesn't like them. How are they forcing the left to forget?
3. I understand your impatience with what you see as defeatism and perhaps a concomitant quietism. Part of that is the message board format, though, don't you think? I mean, when it all comes down to it, what we have in common is that we post anonymously on a message board forum. What else are we going to do but talk about shit endlessly? You could make a case that this forum is precisely the opposite of the type of organizing you think necessary. So regardless of the merits of your ideas, regardless of their content, isn't it predictable that the response will be something short of grabbing a pitchfork and running to the nearest civic society organization?
4. I was like you when I was in my 20s. That type of youthful energy and exuberance is important -- irreplaceable even. I don't think anyone here wants to make you into some disillusioned cynic, even if sometimes the rhetoric seems to imply otherwise.
We've just been burned too many times by the Mamdanis of the world. Or maybe I should say, the reaction to them. The GOP is trying to make him the face of the liberals for a reason -- he's exceedingly unpopular in various parts of the country, especially the ones we're talking about here. I haven't seen polling on that; let's just accept for now that he will be dismissed by millions based on superficial knowledge. That's undoubtedly true. Maybe it is only because we haven't been organizing or whatever, but right now, Mamdani is a problem. Not a major problem. Probably not even a minor one.
Your response, I would assume, is that Mamdani isn't a problem for NYC. It's just that local organizing won't necessarily produce the same results everywhere. Mamdani wouldn't be right for, say, Baton Rouge or Atlanta. That's why we have elections everywhere. The basic principle of meeting people where they are applies in cities and in the countryside. About that, you're surely right, if it's possible.
But we do live in an age of the internet, and one of the consequences has been that it allows people to get outraged by shit that doesn't remotely affect their lives. The Times had an article about Aurora, CO that I didn't read. The headline says that Trump's claims that Aurora was taken over by gangs wasn't entirely wrong, that it was complex. Let's just say that's true. My question: why would anyone fucking care about Aurora, CO? It affects nobody's life. It is not a harbinger of things to come, obviously. But people did care, just as they did about they/them and eating pets in Ohio.
Or trans participation in sports. Or migrant caravans. Or Jewish students at Harvard being harassed. This is the outrage machine.
5. And then finally: Is it possible that the success of the right-wing organization was that it was accompanied by all this phony outrage? I mean, take QAnon as an example. QAnon is probably a signature example of what Skocpol was talking about (though it might have post dated her book; I don't know when it was written). And it's been pretty damn successful considering what an utter load of bullshit it has always been. But to what extent does its organizational success depend on the energy created by Pizzagate and all the subsequent, more amplified and more unhinged bullshit? And is that something we can replicate.
I mean, do we need our own Marjorie Taylor Greenes? People who can go into a community, spout utter tripe and nonsense, but be accepted by the people there because they also cling bitterly to idiotic conspiracy theories. You might not have been around long enough to experience the "chain email" but everyone my age knows about it, and has probably been forwarded emails from family members that were forwarded to them and so on, with the most ridiculous claims being parroted as if they are evidently true. Do we need that?
Maybe we do. I'm not judging it. Meeting people where they are is not something I do well outside of the context of my atypical life experience, so I don't have anything to say in that regard. I just think it's anathema for liberals to MTG it up. We would be hard pressed to find engaged foot soldiers, so to speak.
