There’s this Thing. It’s Called the Wheel.

Here’s the Most Effective Way for Progressive Activists to Channel Their Energy into Lasting Change.

The stories started while most of us were still suffering hathead from our pink pussyhats. In The New York Times, it was “After Success of Women’s March, a Question Remains: What’s Next?” In USA Today, it was “Women’s March movement: What’s next and will the momentum last?” There was puzzling and concern (some of it felt more like concern trolling) about how to make sure the energy apparent at the marches didn’t dissipate but somehow materialized into “action that produces political change.” (All of this was, of course, ignoring the very real political impact of march itself.) The Times article came right out and said that such an outcome (real political change) has “eluded all other popular movements,” suggesting that its idea of all popular movements spans only “from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter,” and ignoring, say, the Civil Rights Movement or, more recently and relevantly, the Tea Party. The same article (like many of the other pieces discussing this issue in the media, and even on liberal blogs and podcasts) also expressed concern that it would be hard to turn the movement into political action because the marchers represented such a “vast array of issues, from reproductive rights to mass incarceration to environmental activism, raising questions about how to create a cohesive movement.”

Then these articles, and many written in the month since, have gone on to describe various efforts to organize or channel the energy that came out of the march. In some cases, the story is about the fundraising success of existing long-established interest groups, from Planned Parenthood to the ACLU, and the idea is that the political energy of the marchers will or should operate through one’s role as donor to organizations that will then carry on the mission through direct service provision or through the courts. In other cases, the stories are about the momentum flowing into the creation of new organizations. These include (but are very much not limited to) Indivisible, formed by former Congressional staffers to provide direction on how to get your representatives to listen to you; #Knock Every Door, whose co-founders thought there wasn’t sufficient effort in 2016 campaign to reach out to people and want to organize canvassers who will knock on every single door in the country; Swing Left, which encourages people in safe congressional districts to find the nearest swing district and go help canvass there to try to tip it blue; and Run For Something, seeking to convince millennials to run for down-ballot offices. Then there’s Operation 45, Movement 2017, Movement Match (take a quiz to find your perfect activism match!). Joshua Holland’s February 6 guide to these groups in The Nation is probably just the tip of the iceberg. In these cases, the idea seems to be, let’s pour our energy into starting something fresh and new that will succeed because it’s so different from everything that has gone before (or just because it’s us and our friends, and that’s really cool).

Reading and hearing about all these disparate efforts, I couldn’t help thinking, Wouldn’t it be great if there were a single organization that had a history of bringing the whole range of different liberal and progressive issues from women’s rights to workers’ rights to civil rights and poverty alleviation to environmental protection together under one umbrella, an organization that had a grassroots infrastructure that extended all the way from the national level down into every town or county in every state in the country, an organization that already had ballot access in every precinct or ward or district in the country to facilitate running progressive candidates for office?

But — wait. It’s coming to me. I think I’ve got it… Yes, that’s it. I knew I’d heard of it somewhere. It’s called the Democratic Party, and the awesome thing is, you don’t have to invent it.

But… Aren’t they the people who just lost the last election, who got us in this mess in the first place? Aren’t they in bed with Wall Street? Isn’t this about being grassroots? Isn’t this about forcing The Establishment to listen to us, and aren’t they The Establishment? I wanna be part of the resistance.

Here’s the thing. And this is where I’m going to abandon all snark and get very earnest and passionate. The Democratic Party is neither more nor less than what you — yes, you — make it. If you think it’s just part of the establishment, and you don’t like either party, and you want to be part of something that’s about change, so you’re not going to get involved with the Democrats, then you — yes, you­ — will have ensured that the party and its future nominees at every level will fulfill your worst prophecies. If you find, join, activate, and if necessary take over your precinct, town, county, and then state Democratic Party apparatus, the party will reflect what you believe in and will nominate and elect the kind of candidates you want (maybe you!) who will focus on the issues you care about. And this is entirely doable. We have before us the very recent and powerful examples of first the Christian Coalition and then the Tea Party doing the exact same thing to the Republican Party. We’ll get to how to do it in a minute.

One problem is that far too many of us on the left — and I grant that I’m talking particularly about the academics and professionals I have the most contact with — have fallen into a habit of being consumers and cultural critics of politics rather than participants. We read all the best liberal blogs and webzines, we listen to all the best podcasts, we’re well-versed in the latest memes, and we’re ready to offer nuanced critiques of Hillary’s campaign or how the DNC should be run. We have come to accept as a metric of how “grassroots” a campaign or movement is its ability to collect a large number of small-dollar donations online in a short period of time. We decry the Citizens United decision and big corporate money in politics and the elected officials in both parties who are apparently influenced by corporate lobbyists and big bucks. Even if we’re not Bernie supporters, we believe that politics is all about money nowadays, and since the Big Money is mostly on the Republican side, there’s a certain amount of defeatism about our ability ever to have any influence. We have come to think of ourselves as fundamentally powerless to change how things work in Washington, and many of us don’t even think about changing how things work in our own states or cities or towns. Among other reasons, those with at least a college degree are more likely than those with less education to have moved multiple times as adults and to live far from where they grew up, contributing to a tendency to approach politics from a less local, less attached position. The handwringing I described above — oh dear, however shall we translate the energy of these protests into political outcomes — is a direct result of this kind of detachment. (After all, the reporters writing those stories are themselves members of the same highly-educated, highly-mobile, observer-critic-pundit group.)

I am going to argue that the best and most effective thing we can do now is to direct our energy into our local Democratic parties and to make the local parties one of the main vehicles for our activism. I argue this for both the most practical and the most idealistic of reasons.

First, for the practical reasons. The Democratic Party already exists everywhere. The time and effort that goes into creating a new organization, defining what it is, getting the word out about it, and getting people to sign up for it, is considerable. Doing that in every precinct, town, county, congressional district, and state in the country is pretty much an unthinkable amount of work. Sure, there are places where the party has fallen into disrepair or disuse, but that just makes it that much easier for you to take over and decide what it should be doing and then do it. Where there is still a local party leadership, I am willing to bet that most of them will be thrilled to have dozens or hundreds of energized activists show up excited to get involved. Many of them have been limping along, struggling to find volunteers willing to keep the headquarters open, register the voters, make the phone calls and knock on the doors. If you and your friends show up and want to do that work, you will be your Democratic Town Chair’s new best friend. Next thing you know, you’ll be on that Democratic Town Committee, because your Town Chair wants a committee made up of people who are eager to do the work. And when you’re on the Democratic Town Committee (or precinct or county or whatever it is in your area), you get to have a major role in deciding who will get the nominations to run for local and state offices on the Democratic ticket. Because that’s how it works. There’s not a secret process by which some unknown group of “others,” mysteriously constituted, become members of the party organization and decide who will run or what issues will be important. It’s not the Masonic Lodge or a private club — you don’t need two letters of recommendation. You just need to show up and be ready to work. And if for some reason, you find your local party leadership doesn’t welcome your involvement? Learn the rules for challenging them in the party elections and bring along enough people to the meeting to replace them (or get those people to the polls on primary day, if that’s the process). If you can get a few hundred people to show up at your local airport to protest the Trump travel ban, you can almost certainly take over your local Democratic Party if it’s not sufficiently welcoming to the new wave of activists.

In addition to the fact that the party already exists in every part of the country, there are other practical reasons for using it as your vehicle for activism rather than inventing a new organization. For example, through the party, you have access to voter lists with addresses and telephone numbers that make it far easier to do phone or in-person canvassing. The new # Knock Every Door group is apparently planning to try to gather names and contact information from the people they’re canvassing as they go, but they’ll have no information for the houses where nobody was home that day or where people refuse to talk to them. With the Democratic Party, you’ll also know that the information you gather while canvassing will be entered into a party database and shared with candidates up and down the ticket to help defeat the bad guys in the next election. With a brand new organization that may or may not continue to exist by the time of the next election, all that time you spent knocking on doors and talking to voters may come to naught if the organization has disappeared or if its leaders choose not to share the information you gathered when election time comes around.

Want to change things on your town council, in your state house, or in Washington? It also makes a huge difference that the Democratic Party has ballot access everywhere. The difference in the amount of work it takes to get your person on the ballot if they’re running as a Democrat compared to if they’re running as a third party is huge. In many cases, you have to collect a prohibitive number of signatures on a petition to get on the ballot as a third party. As the Democratic Party nominee, you don’t need to gather any. If you or your candidate don’t have your local party’s support (although you might easily be able to get it, see above), it’s a lot easier to win a primary than to run as a third party. Turnout in local-level primary elections is, sadly, extremely low, but if you want to make change, you should see that as an incredible opportunity. Again, if you have the capacity to get a few hundred people to show up, you may well be able to win a low-turnout election and make sure it’s you (or your favored candidate) occupying the prime political real estate of that Democratic line on the ballot. (Remember, this is exactly what the Tea Party did to the Republicans.) In many parts of Red America, it’s a lot easier than that. Republicans are running uncontested for local and state offices everywhere. Finding people who are willing to run for those seats, and organizing the relatively small numbers of voters it would take to win them, is eminently doable. It’s also one of the most important things we can do to take back Congress, given that it will be state legislatures (in most cases) deciding on the boundary lines for new Congressional districts after the 2020 Census.

The next reason is both practical and ideological. We on the left are an incredibly diverse group, and that is both our greatest strength and a potential weakness. We don’t have a single race, or a predominant social class, or a single overarching issue that unites us. We are multitudes. We are all colors, identities, national origins, religions, socioeconomic statuses, and education levels. Different ones of us are most passionate about civil liberties, reproductive freedom, environmental protection, voting rights, health care, child protection, police brutality and the incarceration state. As imperfect as the Democratic Party has been and still is, it really is the only entity in this country that offers a roof to house all of these causes and peoples. Someone at the Women’s March had a sign that said, “If you agree with everyone in your coalition, it’s not a coalition.” None of us should expect that we’re not sometimes going to have differences within a party broad enough to include all of us. We wouldn’t be who we are if we didn’t have to duke some of these things out. But quite honestly, having to duke it out with, and forge compromises with, and listen to, people who are not exactly the same as you is — or should be — a pretty important part of being a liberal or a progressive in the first place. In my own life, the times when I had the greatest contact with the broadest range of people have been when I have been most involved with the Democratic Party. When I have focused instead on my professional life, or on single social or environmental issues that mattered to me, I have ended up surrounded by narrower and much more homogeneous groups. We need to understand that while the Democratic Party is the most useful and sensible vehicle for accomplishing our own particular progressive goals, it also has something to offer us by putting us in rooms with people whose differing perspectives and positions we need to understand better. As awesome as your Sierra Clubs or your ACLU chapters or your Black Lives Matter groups might be, they’re just not going to do that. So don’t try to find your “activism match” and isolate yourself among the most like-minded people you can find.

At the same time, as we bring the enthusiasm of the Trump resistance into our local Democratic Parties and make the party our vehicle for bringing about real and lasting change, we should also make sure that the party is truly reflecting and representing all of us. Do the work to make it the party you want it to be. Your local party organization should be sending a representative to local Black Lives Matter meetings and should be making sure someone from BLM is on that Democratic Town or County Committee. The same goes for your local clean rivers or land conservation group. If you are the representative from the local party organization sent out to a meeting of one of these other groups, you might need to be humble and patient and listen to some criticism. You might need to be able to say, “Yes, I agree that the party hasn’t always listened to/done right by/cared enough about this. That’s why I’m here — because I/we want to change that.” And when you go to a march or participate in a protest, identify as a Democrat. Let your fellow progressives see that the party is there with them at the barricades.

In a piece entitled “Sustaining the Momentum of the Women’s March: Where We Go from Here,” Truth-Out.Org said, “As organizers, we must break out of silos and work across communities to resist the attacks we all know are coming. For too long, our communities and organizations have been pitted against one another.” We have a tool with which to do this, as well as to register and mobilize voters, get on ballots, and change the world. It has already been invented. It’s called the Democratic Party. Let’s use it.