Organizing Where We Have the Most Leverage: in the Cities
George Goehl is the executive director of National People’s Action Campaign, a network of metropolitan and statewide organizations that are building independent political power to advance racial and economic justice.
In Democratic Promise, his landmark account of the populist movement, historian Lawrence Goodwyn describes achieving collective self-confidence as a critical benchmark for powerful democratic movements. He rightly argues that reaching this psychological tipping point allows social movements to grow exponentially.
Congressional gridlock and austerity have not just expanded inequality in our nation; they have constrained people’s sense of possibility, undermining faith in politics as a means for creating change and in the idea of government as an equalizer in our society.
As a result, these days progressives can build collective self-confidence by starting where we have the most leverage: in the cities. Twenty-seven of the nation’s thirty largest cities voted blue in 2012. In itself, this does not constitute transformative change, but it does present a battlefield for creating next-generation policies and for recruiting candidates to run on a “people and planet first” agenda. And as citizens benefit from this agenda, their faith in politics and in good government will grow.
Our work in cities needs to be part of a plan to shift the politics of state governments, which control too much money and too many rules to ignore. If we can energize a sizable base in a state’s major cities, we are positioned to flip the politics of that entire state.
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To win such victories, we’ll need a new people’s politics that combines street heat with electoral power. This requires an independent movement accountable to a constituency and a set of principles, not simply to a political party.
This movement has already begun. TakeAction Minnesota, for instance, has 54,000 supporters and raises more than $500,000 annually from its members. In 2012, it defeated a constitutional amendment requiring state residents to have a photo ID that once had 80 percent support in the polls, and it has elected members to the State Legislature and to local city councils. Recently elected Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges is TakeAction’s longest dues-paying member. Organizations with similar ambitions are taking shape across the country.
Just imagine this: in 2015, campaigns are launched in forty US cities that advance a progressive economic, racial and climate-justice agenda. Simultaneously, a thousand movement candidates win races for mayor, city council and other local offices. These fights galvanize a new base that shifts the nature of state politics. Working from one narrative, we connect our policy and electoral wins into a unified story that captures the public’s imagination. Heading into 2016, we could constitute a powerful independent force in American politics. This would change the political calculus for candidates in both parties, while generating the self-confidence that the movement needs to keep on building.
