In Step One, I wrote about The Problem™: the left has been left behind. Despite the greater-than-average survival rate of the true progressives in the 2010 mid-terms, the left is still largely ignored - treated as if it is invisible.
So what else is new? After the round of grief and remonstration, a lot of people out there are agreeing that it's time to talk solutions. It's idea time. So, let's make with the ideas...
In the search for answers, the first step is usually toward the past. What has been done? What has worked before? In this case, how have other groups shouldered their way into relevance?
Interestingly, despite their ideas and beliefs being anywhere from 50 to 250 years out of date, the right wing is in one respect far ahead of the left. The discussion we're beginning to have here is one they started over thirty years ago. The question for them was one of identity. An underrepresented segment of the right wanted in. They had learned through painful experience that they were expected to contribute money, show up at the polls, and then go home and hide in the closet for the next two years. Pun intended.
Needless to say, they didn't like it one bit. Fortunately for them, the corporate interests had no problem with ideological whack jobs, so long as they were ideological whack jobs who voted in the corporations' interest. So, the loud and angry ultra-right-wing lunatic fringe made it perfectly clear to the Republican Party that if they didn't get a seat at the table, nobody was eating. They colonized radio, clawed their way into television, and kneecapped the GOP whenever they got out of line. A scant thirty years later, a certifiably insane crybaby is now the celebrated mouthpiece for their "movement" (the results of which remind me of "movements" I've had in the privacy of my own home), the Republican Party is now so unrecognizable that their moderates are now called "liberal" Democrats, and they're beginning to launch members of their ranks directly into office.
The lesson here? As seemingly self-defeating and painful as it may be, withholding the contribution and the vote - even working against unsatisfactory candidates and officeholders - works. This isn't to say it's a great idea, just one that has worked in the past. It wouldn't be difficult to implement, either. Cribbing from the right, the left could pick a few litmus-test issues (repealing DADT and securing rights for the LGBT community, restoring taxes to their progressive pre-Reagan era levels, ending corporate personhood, etc) and demand that the candidates act on them. Anyone who doesn't play ball takes his glove and goes home. Crude but effective.
However, I think as a whole that we can do better than to copycat the right. So...
- There have already been a number of calls to "primary" candidates, from the local level all the way to the White House. Talk about sending a message...
- Get out those petitions and start putting progressive "wedge issues" on the ballot as referendums and ballot initiatives. Over and over. Doesn't matter if they pass so much as it matters that they are there. One Dennis Kucinich drags the whole Presidential primary to the left, after all...
- As a number of people have suggested, crank out a "Tea Party" for the left. And in this case, make "party" the operative word. No need to scream obscenities and step on people's heads to get attention. I think the left is more clever than that. Clever enough to pull off a few ComicCon-versus-Fred-Phelps type ready-made media oddities to keep people riveted...
- As Jello Biafra said, don't hate the media, become the media. While we still can, chew up the bandwidth with podcasts, sites like this one, internet television and radio, pirate television and radio, etc. Get louder and louder and LOUDER. Get so loud that the MSM, in it's indefensible laziness, picks up the story and runs with it. The right has had a great deal of success with this, and the left has more recently begun to get in the game...
- Protest, protest, protest. Not just gatherings, but sit-ins. Strikes. Civil disobedience. I admit that I'm thinking particularly about LGBT issues here. In the same way "pro"-lifers used to lock arms and block clinics, why not a few hundred gay couples locking arms to block, say, a Mormon church? But I digress...
- Start your own progressive buzz-word think tank. We can't keep letting the right have all the fun with reductionist pejoratives like "Death Panels" and the like. Start calling the Bush Tax Cuts the White Power Tax Cuts. Refer to homophobic Republican Senators as Homocrites (homosexual hypocrites). Call the Blue Dogs what they are: Traitors. Refer to the plan to privatize Social Security as the Pull The Plug Plan (the PPP for short). Surely people more clever than I can do better...
- Hold a contest for the Official Progressive Protest Write-In Candidate and befuddle the winner by making her/him the recipient of every protest vote in the country. If it comes to withholding votes, do it by having 36,000 write-ins in the California Senate race for Pat Benatar...
You get the idea. Now give the idea. I deal with adversity through humor, so my ideas can often wind up as little more than practical jokes. I've seen some smart cookies on this site. Let's bake us up a dozen chunky, warm, gooey, chocolate-chip winners and run with them.
Any takers?