When in the Course of human events…. well, events have now gone severely sideways.
We live in a country that is permanently and intentionally rigged to give disproportionate voting power to rural voters and small states. This design cannot be changed. As long as we rely on the federal government and the collection of states as drawn to design our society, we are swimming upstream against a mighty current.
We have to keep swimming, but we should also take a look at what territory we progressives actually hold. We hold the cities on the West Coast, along with many across the rest of the country. We hold these urban areas because people who value progressive ideals, like working together and respecting diversity, have chosen to pick up and move to the cities to live and work with each other.
One of the few glimmers of hope I’ve had since that recent Tuesday when it all went to hell is that the cities here in the West have started to join together rhetorically to resist. Many have declared their intention to remain Sanctuary Cities in the face of threats. We may soon realize that the cities are ALL we control. On the plus side, that’s where most people live, and where most culture thrives, and where most wealth is based. You could do worse than controlling the cities.
SO- how can we turn this single strength into a movement that leads our culture forward, instead of backwards? We can start by recognizing that the cities will either hang together, or hang separately.
There are several interesting city-level political movements swirling around right now. The fight for a $15 minimum wage and mandating sick time are just a couple. How much more powerful would it be if these battles were fought and won as an alliance though, instead of one city at a time? How big a headline would it be if the 20 biggest cities on the west coast voted together to raise wages?
Our system is designed today to force cities to compete with each other. Each city tries to grab a slightly bigger piece of the pie by undercutting other cities with tax giveaways for corporations, by lowering wages, and by resisting environmental progress. If we could instead work together, we could insist on a level playing field and actually move forward. In a very interesting and unique moment, Portland Oregon just passed a law to tax CEO’s based on how much more they earn than their median worker. Of course, a big argument against the law was that companies will just move to a city that doesn’t tax them. We could get away from this zero sum game if we would join together in an entirely new way.
How about Mass Transit? Could be cross-fund these systems and make them more unified? How about a transit pass that works in any city that participates? How about the purchasing power of a league of cities, versus a single city on it’s own?
I would wholeheartedly support an alliance of progressive cities passing legislation together using their own brand new legislative body. We don’t have to debate each issue alone, and cut off from each other. Portland has LOTS in common with Seattle, with San Francisco, with Los Angeles. We have far more in common as cities, than we do with the eastern half of our respective states. It’s about time we start to build a political structure that leverages our actual bases of power and our common goals. These goals will always be opposed to what is best for rural areas where there are more cows than people.
In short, the existing power structure is broken and hijacked by our political enemies. We need to resist there where we can, but we also need a new structure to allow us to continue making forward progress, to give us successes and hope, to make it clear that the resistance is stronger and smarter and more populous than the Senators in Washington DC will ever admit.