Senator Bernie Sanders’s announcement of his candidacy for Presidency of the United States of America was no shock.  For at least a year there had been murmurings about a possible candidacy and, like many other progressives and leftists, I am certainly excited by the prospect of his campaign.

That said, I must confess that I am equally unsettled, not by the Sanders candidacy but by the almost complete absence of serious discussions regarding broader Left/progressive electoral strategy.  I must qualify this statement before I am pounced upon.  Among some who have a go-it-alone approach to electoral work, i.e., working entirely outside of the Democratic Party, there have been some discussions.  I do not wish to dismiss such discussions, though I find them lacking any concrete, historical analysis of the workings of the USA electoral system and, thus, substituting ideology for politics.

Among those to the Left of Center, however, who believe in working both inside and outside of the Democratic Party, there is an equally disturbing tendency.  It appears in the form of an every four year discussion of which candidate to support for President of the USA, followed by engagement in their campaign, followed by the equivalent of a four year hiatus in a cave abandoning any deeper examination of electoral work.

Yes, there is no question but that there are many committed activists who are engaged in electoral work.  I recently spoke with a young progressive who spent years doing electoral work and confessed that he hated it.  Yet what he seemed to hate, more than anything else, was the lack of any sort of larger context.  To put it simply:  is this all there is to activism?

Senator Sanders’s announcement overshadows the fact that when it comes to electoral strategy, left/progressive forces who are working both inside and outside of the Democratic Party largely lack one, at least at the national level.  To a great extent this has been the case since the decline of the National Rainbow Coalition after its fateful March 1989 Executive Board meeting when the organization was turned into an extension of its leader, Rev. Jesse Jackson.  Since that time there have been a number of national organizational projects, e.g., the New Party, the Labor Party, the Working Families Party, Progressive Democrats of America, each of which have made important contributions to thinking about how progressives can engage in the electoral battle.

Missing, however, is something more basic:  how do we win?  I am not posing this with despair but rather as a concrete question.  If one looks state-by-state in the USA, who are the forces that need to be identified to be at the core of a progressive electoral initiative?  What are the alliances that need to be built?  What are the specific obstacles or challenges in each state?  What are the financial demands that must be addressed in order to build winning campaigns?  What sort(s) of organizational infrastructures need to be created that can identify candidates; train campaign managers and activists; and build standing electoral formations in our towns and cities?

Instead of such discussions there is too much so-called debate on the pros and cons of supporting Democratic Party candidates, on the one hand, and on the other, an exclusive focus on a candidate for President of the USA.

I realize that some electoral activists will be particularly irritated by this essay, quite understandably concerned that the hard work in which they are engaged is being ignored.  My apologies in advance.  I am not addressing the work of this or that individual.  I am more than anything else speaking to the groupings of leftists and progressives who are relatively passive when it comes to electoral strategy only to engage once the spoke on the wheel of the four year cycle approaches.

In the 1960s, key leaders of what came to be known as the “New Right” began working feverishly to construct a winning strategy.  Among other things they seized upon the momentum created by Alabama Governor George Wallace’s Presidential campaigns in order to identify a base—particularly Southern white conservatives—with the aim of bringing about a political realignment.  In 1968, despite the fact that they despised Nixon, they united with him, albeit tactically, in order to both outflank Democrats and progressives, and to position themselves for the advance of their own agenda.  They also supported theoretical work and propaganda (Note:  consider the recommendations made in the now infamous Lewis Powell memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce), and helped to build mass movements, e.g., anti-busing; anti-choice; anti-Equal Rights Amendment.  Theirs was a long-term project that only started to come into fruition, electorally at least, with the anti-tax campaigns of the 1970s and, later, Reagan’s election in 1980.

With the notable exception of certain theorists, such as former Jesse Jackson aide Jack O’Dell, there is very little collective thinking by left/progressive forces that compares with the scope and scale of that initiated by the Right.  It is such thinking that we desperately need.

None of what I am writing is to suggest that anyone turn away from progressive electoral campaigns in which they are involved or about which they may be considering, e.g., the Sanders campaign.  Rather, this is a call for a parallel discussion, and one that I believe is equally urgent.

There are some dangerous authoritarian tendencies that can be observed in the advanced capitalist world, including but not limited to the USA.  In neighboring Canada, there is Canadian law C-51 which is under consideration in Parliament that would criminalize much of the protest activity that is common in a democratic society.  In the USA, we have witnessed voter suppression efforts combined with the infusion of money on a nearly unprecedented scale, all of which contributes to an undermining of democratic engagement.

As such there is great urgency in advancing a large-scale discussion of the fight for democracy and progressive power in the USA.  This needs to be a very concrete discussion that properly analyzes the actual situation and is then linked to the progressive individuals and institutions that are committed to carrying through a long-term strategy aimed at winning power for the powerless.  Such a discussion must be concrete and must stay away from self-satisfying ideological truisms and precepts.   It must ask the question, first and foremost, who are the forces that have a material interest in the victory of a progressive movement?  That question is then followed by this:  what do we need to do to get those various forces aligned such that they recognize their mutual interest in a common goal?

Time is of the essence.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the host of The Global African on Telesur-English.  He is a racial justice, labor and global justice activist and writer.  Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com. 

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