“If you want to move US public policy to the left, what you have to do is to identify incumbent holders of political office and then defeat them on Election Day with alternative candidates who are more left-wing. I think this works pretty reliably. To my mind, the evidence is pretty clear that even the election of fairly conservative [candidates] pushes policy outcomes to the left as long as the guy they’re replacing was more conservative. And if your specific concern is that the Democratic Party isn’t as left-wing as you’d like it to be, then what you need to do is identify incumbent holders of political office and then defeat them in primaries with alternative candidates who are more left-wing. It’s noteworthy that even failed efforts to do this, such as Ned Lamont’s 2006 run against Joe Lieberman and Bill Halter’s 2010 run against Blanche Lincoln led to meaningful policy shifts simply by being credible. But left-wing critics of the Democrats often seem to me to be somewhat in denial about their poor record of success with these endeavors. “If we can’t beat a Senator in Connecticut, let’s take on an incumbent president who’s substantially more liberal than Lieberman” isn’t a logical program of action. The right lesson to learn from these Senate bids is that they’re worth trying again if circumstances are right, but that even they may be too ambitious. You walk before you run. Maybe you win state legislative and House races before you win Senate elections. Research indicates that previous experience in elective office is one of the main predictors of candidate success, so perhaps it’s only through a concentrated effort to increase progressive representation in state government that a pool of talented primary challenges can be generated. Or maybe there’s a great Senate challenger right around the corner, and if so that would be well worth writing a column about.
This prescription is, I’m afraid, boring. And the solution proposed is, I’m afraid, hard work. But politics is hard work! The Republican Party has become very ideologically rigorous because the conservative movement now has a decades-long record of defeating incumbent officeholders at all levels in primaries, and then of having those winning primary candidates win a general election. This was and is an impressive achievement that required a lot of hard work over a long period of time.
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—Matthew Yglesias, How to Move American Politics to the Left, in response to a piece by Jeffrey Sachs. Needless to say, I’m with Matt. My own advice would be to visit your local Democratic Party, join the Town/Village Committee (outside of big Democratic-dominated cities, this is really easy) and demand the recruitment of progressive candidates. You can have an outsized impact in local politics and the results will filter up. (via ilyagerner)
This reminds me of something I was listening to on the radio a few months back. One of the local public radio station dedicates about one hour a day to the question of “how do we reinvigorate the left, elect progressives, fight the system without changing the system, etc…” Well one of these weeks, as part of their ongoing discussion, they decided to report directly from a cruise ship. This wasn’t just any cruise ship though, it was a cruise ship with progressives such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Alan Grayson on board. The aim of the cruise was in part to help address the question that Matt attempts to answer and many other concerns about how to best combat the rightwing. Now why they opted to hold this meeting on a cruise ship is beyond me but I view it as symbolic representation of where the progressive movement stands today. That is to say, it is on a bourgeois cruise in the middle of the ocean, stocked with ample champagne, lobster and any other creature comforts, while remaining completely and dangerously disengaged from those it seeks to help.
