The instinct for participatory democracy is of course good, and no progressive worthy of the name can reject it. But respecting the favored issues of individual coalition groups and creating an umbrella message--and party--designed for maximal appeal to a neglected majority of voters are two entirely different things. While the appeal must not contradict the beliefs of any coalition members, it must focus much more strongly on the issues that mean most to the neglected majority. Here, a sharp distinction must be drawn between issues teaching, a crucial service provided by coalition members, and umbrella messaging, which temporarily suppresses the preferred issues of individual groups in favor of basic issues that the coalition members share with the "less woke" general public.
And, beyond correctly choosing the basic issue to emphasize, what makes the umbrella message most powerful is its framing: its skill in weaving the basic issues together into a moral story--with heroes and villains--that average voters find compelling. The name "Peace and Prosperity Party" was meticulously chosen on that basis. It takes three issues that Sanders and Trump showed to have deep resonance with the public--economic insecurity, corruption of government by political money, and resistance to military interventionism--and skillfully weaves them into a moral narrative with heroes and villains. The heroes are the members of the Progressive Resistance, the Peace and Prosperity Party itself, and all its sympathizers. The villains are above all Wall Street and "War Street" and the political lackeys of both parties, corrupted by their money, who serve them. Individual billionaires who corrupt policy in favor of austerity or war--like the notorious Koch brothers, Pete Peterson of Fix the Debt, or pro-Israel fanatic Haim Saban, are especially good candidates for the devil's horns in this narrative.
One final note on making peace a central issue in this narrative. Although Sanders--and to a greater extent Trump (when still a candidate)--showed that opposition to endless U.S. military interventions is an issue with legs--it's clearly (and sadly) not as deep a concern for U.S. voters as their own economic plight or corruption of government by pay-to-play politics. But it's deeply illustrative of the corruption issue, since the military-industrial-surveillance complex ("War Street") gets what it wants whatever the glib promises of presidential candidates or the wishes of U.S. voters. So placing War Street alongside Wall Street as the two main corrupters of U.S. government is both the truth and a winning rhetorical flourish. And even more, it's phenomenal niche marketing, since the market for peace is one the Democratic Party--alarmingly and hypocritically, given Trump's supposed unfitness to govern--has decided utterly to abandon. Just ask Tulsi Gabbard.
Any resistance coalition groups who temporarily suppress the issues they care and teach most about for the sake of a winning umbrella message are not compromising their integrity. Rather, they're embracing the only terms on which a neglected majority, preoccupied with their own economic and political disenfranchisement, will ever open their ears to other issues. Naomi Klein's climate justice agenda seeks to care for the global majority abandoned by neoliberal capitalism, precisely in order to win their allegiance to climate action. An ardent climate activist myself, I see this as a model for addressing all other progressive issues.
A Final Footnote: Prosperity Rhetoric and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
In closing this article, I need to make a final point, since it relates deeply to the Progressive Resistance coalition now building. I was recently delighted to hear that Steve Grumbine, the influential leader of Real Progressives--a large progressive organization and resistance coalition member--has personally decided to back the Draft Bernie for a People's Party movement rather than the Green Party. Like Steve, I share Green Party values and personally have nothing against Greens; also like Steve, I feel the Green Party, by its name, image, and style, is simply unsuited to attract large numbers of our "partially woke" electoral majority. In fact, in his video announcing his support for the People's Party (see pinned post), I was delighted to hear him express the need for appealing to the "partially woke" in terms closely resembling my argument for proper resistance framing in this series.
Unsurprisingly, for those acquainted with Steve and Real Progressives, an essential condition the People's Party had to meet for securing Steve's support, was openness to learning about and embracing modern monetary theory (MMT) as a guide to its economic policies. Now, Steve is a self-described evangelist for MMT, and he admittedly initially rubbed me the wrong way by the force and exclusiveness of his evangelism. But the passion of his conviction also induced me to look deeper, since I couldn't agree with Steve more strongly that a populist economic message must be the leading theme of a successful third party. With the caution appropriate to a pure amateur in economics, I've made MMT a working hypothesis for my own political activism (see Progressive or Bust), since it strikes me as plausible intellectually and I love its implications for defeating the needlessly cruel austerity economics I utterly detest. Consequently, I strongly urge all principled progressives to investigate MMT.
In closing, I'm delighted the People's Party is open to MMT--and not just due to MMT's merits, but for marketing reasons of my own. While I treasure the People's Party as a progressive alternative to the marketing-challenged Green Party, I remain an unconvinced skeptic about Bernie Sanders accepting a third-party draft. Without Bernie, the People's Party seems pretty thin on messaging, and embracing MMT would give it a unique product to market. But MMT itself--just as Steve describes the Green Party--is a bit too esoteric and highbrow for your average Joe or Jane. Consequently, it needs it own marketing framing. Adopting the name and marketing framing of the Peace and Prosperity Party would provide pretty paper and ribbon with which to package MMT, as well as adding a "pro-peace" arrow to the People's Party's marketing quiver. And a message that treats current endless war spending as "weaponized MMT" (analogous to "weaponized Keynesianism"--war spending to stimulate the economy) is a strong real-world argument for the validity of MMT. I intend to explore this argument in an upcoming article.
But for now, I strongly urge the People's Party and its coalition allies (especially Real Progressives and the Progressive Independent Party) to explore adopting the killer umbrella name and narrative of a Peace and Prosperity Party. The fate of the climate issue--and most other progressive causes, which require winning the allegiance of "average Joe" voters--may depend on it.
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