Voters were looking for leadership during this election, and they found it on moral issues—because progressives haven’t given them anywhere else to look. Longtime activist Sally Kohn says the left needs to take some lessons from the right and lose our divisions, frame our ideas so right-leaning folks can latch on, and get out of our issue boxes to connect with other progressives and the general public. Only then will the movement be able to grow.
Sally Kohn is the director of the Movement Vision Project at the Center for Community Change.
I have to be honest. I was angry at the left before the election. Now, I’m furious.
On election day, 22 percent of voters said “moral issues” were the most important to them—and 80 percent of those folks voted for Bush, accounting for his margin of victory. For years, I’ve watched progressive activists shrug their shoulders with hopelessness as religious conservativism grew—writing off people of faith or downright insulting and alienating them from our movements. We continue to watch with wonderment, decrying how the country has moved to the right—as though this is a natural phenomenon, an irreversible trend, a done deal.
Wrong. The country hasn’t moved to the right. It has been moved to the right. And now it’s time to move it back! I have faith that we can do this. We’ve moved mountains of public opinion before—on segregation, voting rights, the New Deal. Our values are good and righteous. We’re bound to win—if we can just figure out how.
But at the moment, in the struggle for the hearts and minds of America, the right wing is winning. Most Americans buy into conservative explanation for their problems—and are primed to accept conservative solutions. And moral laxity is elevated as the primary problem—threatening everything from the family to the economy. The right carefully nurtured these paradigms, and then triggered them to win the election. This year, it was the Federal Marriage Amendment, which the right used to fire up conservative values among voters as the Democrats and liberal groups turned their heads. We ignored the Amendment, knowing it wouldn’t pass, just as we ignored the eleven state-level amendments, figuring they would. Unopposed, the right framed the values debate for the election.
We’ve lost if we continue to throw up our hands at America’s moral conservativism. We’ve also lost if we pander to it. (Oh, wait. We did—with a presidential candidate who didn’t challenge right-wing morality but bought into it, with opposition to gay marriage.)
Campaigning in Ohio, I talked to working-class white folks who hated Bush but said Kerry wouldn’t make things any better. In Ohio—which lost 230,000 jobs under Bush—that’s probably true. Kerry supported NAFTA as much as Bush did. Voters were looking for a difference, for leadership—and they found it on moral issues. We haven’t given them anywhere else to look.
Moving forward, our primary mission is clear: stand for something, and move the country toward our vision. Here’s how:
1. Identify what we stand for.
It’s not about passing minor reform legislation anymore—that wasn’t really working before, and it definitely won’t for the next four years. We need bold leadership and big ideas that compel the country in a different direction.
But what direction? What is our vision for the future of America? What are our big picture goals for society, politics and the economy? What kind of America are we trying to create?
Our opponents use their vision—smaller government, no taxes, big military and social conservativism—to frame everything they do. What are our shared goals? We’ve yet to articulate a common agenda for positive change. In this election, it was our opposition to Bush that united us, not a clear sense of common goals and priorities. If we can’t identify our long-term goals and set shared priorities, we’ll continue to be diffuse and fractured. With a common vision, we give direction to ourselves and bold leadership to the struggling public. There's no question we have a vision—let's discuss it, debate it, articulate it and spread it.
2. Organize ourselves to move that vision.
Doing more of the same isn’t going to bring us different results. Much of our current tactics come from habit, not intentional strategy. Organizations become wedded to what they do and the way they do it. But setting ourselves to win means figuring out what we want and what we have to do to get it—seeing ourselves as part of a common strategy for change, each of us playing complementary and essential roles.
Imagine the changes we seek are like lines of dominoes, standing on end. Up until now, groups have pushed issue by issue or community by community on single dominoes. Every once in a while, one falls over. We get a good tax credit or Will and Grace. But generally, the dominoes are too big and entrenched.
Pushing single dominoes isn’t going to cut it anymore. We need to step back, together, and figure out the few dominoes that we can all push that will make all the rest fall. So-called “partial-birth abortion” and ending the estate tax did this for the right. If we identify our long-term vision, then we can find our tipping points that would take our agenda great leaps forward. And all work on those points together.
That means we have to stop defending our organizations and our niches and figure out how we can effectively work together to win. This is a relay race, so it’s not enough to be a great runner if you’re running off on your own or in the wrong direction. We need team players going for the same goal. And (to extend the metaphor too far), if we’re running a triathlon, we may need runners and bikers and swimmers. But golfers and basketball players need to be retrained! For too long, we’ve assumed that our well-intentioned work will lead to change. It’s time to question those assumptions, let go of our organizational habits and figure out what roles each of us must play from now on to achieve our big picture goals. That's scary work, but essential.
We have the infrastructure we need to move our vision if we start using it that way.
3. Connect our vision to people and their lives.
We know that the right’s vision for the country will only make most people’s lives worse. This will become more obvious over the next four years. An opportunity is on the horizon—for us to fill the void with alternative explanations and solutions. We have to communicate it in a way that connects and compels the majority of Americans.
This isn’t the same as pandering. We should not compromise on our vision to make it easy to digest for a right-leaning public. But we should communicate in a way that resonates with where people are—leading with those parts of our vision that folks can best connect to. It goes back to those key, tipping-point dominoes—like partial-birth abortion on the right, which even connected with pro-choice voters. Start where we can connect with people, and bring them along to our larger vision.
This means being more rigorous about our communications. Our ideological purity has not served us well. The right might rather say “partial-birth baby killing”—but is thoughtful enough to know that wouldn’t fly. We have to let go of our language and categories that aren’t meaningful to anyone but us. In Ohio, outside of Akron, an election volunteer from New York was walking around in a “Keep your laws off my fucking body” t-shirt. That sort of self-expression feels good, but it alienated her to folks on the street and did more harm to her cause than good. Similarly, issue activists cling to their labels—so environmental activists insist on talking about global warming even though people might be more receptive to hearing about renewable energy through the lens of job creation. We can’t be so elite as to assume that what moves us will move the general public. We have to talk about our goals in ways that people can hear.
And finally, this means actually talking to real people and moving them. It’s not enough to write reports about our vision. We need to connect it to community and electoral organizing at the grassroots level, that applies concrete alternatives in people’s lives—and informs our vision with on-the-ground experience. We then have the spaces for launching our vision, and means for building a strong and committed base to help us move that vision even further.
This election isn’t a wake-up call. It’s the final round in a fight we’ve pretty much been losing for the last 40 years. It’s time we get up, fight smarter and win. I know it’s possible. Around the world and throughout time, movements for justice have surmounted stronger obstacles than those we face now. This hope, and the potential for a stronger progressive movement going forward, is what sustains me in what otherwise are the darkest of times.
