Building Progressive Power: Politics Is Changing (Part 1)

This is going to be the first in a six-part series on a strategy for building progressive power. Today, I begin by discussing how changes in media and technology are creating an opening for progressives to change the top-down nature of political power. In upcoming posts, I will focus on building organizations that actually work; money and progressive politics; developing leaders for the progressive movement; building a multimedia communications machine; and using people-to-people organizing models that work.

The times, they are a-changin'

The coming of TV in the 1950s profoundly changed American politics. Now, the coming of new media is changing things just as profoundly. Bottom-up organizing, communications and fundraising strategies through new technology and new media has become an antidote to the passive-viewing, big money, consultant-driven politics of the TV age.

In the 1930s through the 1960s, politics had a vitality to it that was different from the later TV-dominated era. Labor unions, civil rights organizations, big-city political machines and all manner of civic organizations had an active, engaged membership that came to meetings, organized their precincts and neighborhoods and was actively engaged in the politics and issues of the times.

While there were a variety of factors that changed this dynamic, perhaps the biggest was the power of the TV medium. As Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone, as people watched more and more TV, they engaged less and less with their neighbors. People got used to passively receiving their information from commercials and TV news. As TV ads came to dominate political campaigns and got ever more expensive, consultants and the moneyed elite became the only power brokers who really mattered. As TV itself got more and more corporatized, bought up by huge corporate conglomerates, the news that people received became more conservative in its nature and format. All the while, TV journalism got less substantive as it shifted away from covering real political issues and trended towards sensationalism, especially crime and celebrities. (And when the two combined, as in the OJ Simpson trial, now that was TV heaven!)

We can't blame TV entirely, of course. Flush with the successes of the New Deal, the civil rights movement, Medicare and Medicaid, the environmental movement and used to decades of electoral success, progressivism got flabby and tired and generally fell asleep, while the conservative movement developed and funded a long-term strategy for success.

Whatever the causes, the bottom line is that even when Democrats were elected, it was more because of clever TV advertising and symbolism, and had very little to do with movement politics, so the Democratic Party kept drifting rightward. After Gingrich swept away the historical Democratic majority in Congress and Bush won the presidency and used ugly scare tactics and symbolism at its worst to solidify the right-wing's hold on power, this country teetered on the brink of disaster.

Thankfully, hope is on the way, as step-by-step, a new progressive movement is breathing new life into the Democratic Party and American politics. Fundamental to this movement's potential is that technology and new media have become a powerful tool for engaging frustrated grassroots activists. Their willingness to take on conventional wisdom and work for change has dramatically altered both politics in general and progressivism's hope for the future. The netroots movement raised tens of millions of dollars, made tens of millions of volunteer phone calls, organized tens of thousands of events ranging from house parties to rallies to press conferences and drove and shaped the traditional media's coverage of dozens of major issues. They literally turned the tide of the 2006 elections.

I don't believe that the netroots is the only game-changer, or the only thing shaking up progressive politics, but they have had a transformative effect. I will always remember a contrasting pair of conversations in early 2005, less than a week apart, which I think captures the difference between the old way of doing Democratic politics and the new. In the first, a top staffer inside the Democratic Party called to complain to me about an article I had written saying that all the punditry's conventional wisdom about how the Democrats had no chance to retake Congress was wrong, and that we were actually beautifully positioned to win if we ran an aggressive populist/outsider campaign. He complained that the Republicans had too much money and too many advantages, and that I was raising expectations too high. A few days later Wes Boyd from MoveOn.org called, and he and I had a great conversation about how important it was to win control of Congress and what we could do to fundamentally alter the political dynamics of the 2006 cycle so that the pundits would be proved wrong.

The contrast could not be more telling: a defeatist insider lecturing me about how victory was too much to ask for vs. a passionate and hopeful strategy conversation with a movement leader from the outside. That pretty much sums up the nature of our political moment.

Next post: Building Organizations That Build Progressive Power

Mike Lux is the President of American Family Voices, an issue advocacy group sometimes described as the "free safety" of the progressive movement, consults for progressive organizations and donors through his consulting firm, Progressive Strategies L.L.C.