Despite the fact that it’s not a major focus of the blog, I think a lot about local electoral politics. What often stands out to me is the fact that local progressives* (see note at bottom), despite making up a rather large portion of the political establishment in Iowa City, don’t do very well in elections. And this goes both locally and statewide.
I have a stock explanation for this, and some readers are probably tired of hearing it. It’s that progressives aren’t committed to doing the kind of organizing from the ground up that’s required to build a mass movement. Instead, they preach at the choir. Or, at best, they try to recruit a couple of new members to the choir.
They also base some of their ideas on unpopular slogans. And activist movements are often a mess, but that’s less a cause than an effect of the factors listed above.
For a moment, however, let’s get past this high level criticism and into the details.
Local Politics Are Messy
The fact of the matter is the local politics are messy. What I mean by that is that local politicians rarely follow the simplified ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ narrative that many progressives who play electoral politics like to build.
Let me give some examples. During my time on the housing commission, one of my few fellow members who provided a reliable left leaning vote was actually a landlord! And a far less reliable member was a staunch non-profit, low-income housing advocate.
For a second example, we might consider recent local debate over historic preservation. The city council debated saving a historic Czech building from being demolished and turned into housing for wealthy people. One of the most reluctant council members was a workers’ and immigrants’ activist who, in debate, often took the side of the interests of the property owner. And on the other side of things, two of the biggest supporters of saving the building were some of the biggest YIMBYs on the council.
Let’s look at a third example. We’re wrapping up a county supervisor primary where a cop is running as a left leaning candidate and a black racial justice activist is running as a right leaning candidate. (Whether the cop would actually vote as a left leaning supervisor is a separate question.)
Whew!
The Lesson
My point here isn’t to call out politicians or officials by name. That’s not important in this case.
Here’s my point: progressives aren’t very good at electoral politics because they don’t get how it works. They don’t get the voters, and they don’t get what motivates and drives politicians and politics.
Most politicians and, more importantly, voters don’t accept the basic narratives we tell about politics – sharp divides between the interests of different groups, class and racial alignments in politics and interests, and so on. This means that we have to dig a little deeper to find the nuances in their views and how they motivate those views.
And when we take part in politics, we have to take this into account.
All this, of course, returns me to the point about organizing. If we want to build a working-class movement on the left, one that does see politics in the ways we see it, we have to build that movement from the ground up.
We can’t start by pretending that politics and politicians are already oriented in this way.
N.B.
*In this post, I use “progressives” as a catch all term to include everyone to the left of mainstream Democrats. As many readers know, I often distinguish between ‘progressives’ and ‘leftists’ in my posts on this blog. This is because they have different politics. For present purposes, however, I’m putting them into the same box.
