When progressive groups fail to challenge what they oppose in Congress because they think the other side is too big, has too much money, or has already won the public opinion war, they should take a lesson from Friends of the Earth [FOE] this past week.
I'm reading a lot of uncertainty everywhere about how progressive both the Obama administration and Congress will turn out to be. Many of us are trying to divine what agendas lie behind the curtain based on cabinet appointments and committee chair posts. Isn't this tea leaf-reading a waste of time?
We have little, if any, influence over these decisions (except, possibly, to raise a big, public stink about a totally unacceptable choice). It seems to me that our goal (as several netroots writers have pointed out) should be to figure out how to influence policy once the new Congress and administration are sworn in.
The people who will be taking power are transitioning from election mode to governing mode. So are the wingnuts, by pushing the "center-right nation" meme. What is the online progressive community doing to manage the same transition? What, exactly should we be doing? Is fretting openly about White House staff appointments the best use of our energy? If not, what is?
(Blogging isn't organizing, either. But the two can intersect, and/or interact. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Popular conceptions of civic action in America have become extremely impoverished. While struggle goes on in many arenas of our society, coherent traditions of community organizing in America have mostly faded to myth in the popular imagination.
Old black-and-white newsreels of marching students, brave sharecroppers, and police-wielded water cannons from the 1960s flicker through our minds. But these images have lost most of their concrete meaning and contain few coherent lessons for social action.
I've been writing about community organizing, but I haven't been clear about exactly what I mean by this. There is no single effective model of "community organizing." Currently, however, the approach Saul Alinsky developed in the 1930s on the back streets of Chicago has become dominant in America-for good or ill. I call the current version of this model "post-Alinsky" since it has been significantly developed and changed by people like Ed Chambers, Ernie Cortes, Heather Booth, and others who came after Alinsky.
