A.R.: Okay, yeah!, well good.
R.K.: I also...and where does the bottom up come in in terms of electoral politics versus movement building.
A.R.: Oh, well,...that... I think" Off the top, the sort of ...I think a crucial distinction is between a de facto assumption that the constituency for a left politics is already out there just waiting to be convoked, called together, and I think that's what feeds what I consider the fantasy of electoralitis- if we could just get the right candidate who could light the spark that would condense the movement. I think, actually, the factoid that I opened the interview with is instructive in this regard.
In 1944, 68% of Americans thought that there should be a fundamental right to a job. In the 60+ years since then, or 60 years since then, no, 70 years since then, man I'm getting older, 70 years since then, we've fallen farther and farther behind on the propaganda front. We've seen the atrophy of, along with the decline of the labor movement, we've seen the atrophy of independent sources of information and interpretation about policy and world events.
A smaller and smaller percentage of the population, of the working population, has access on a daily basis to alternative views to the neo-liberalism consensus about the facts of life basically, and ,I mean, like with your program and others, one of the frustrating contradictions is that, for most people the only way to get access to alternative views of politics and interpretations of events is through already being sophisticated enough to want to go look for them and so what we've lost is a movement culture, such that your nephew or your neighbor or your coworker will engage with you, find out about the publication or the radio broadcast and then tell somebody else about it and tune in and then spread the word that way because it takes organizers, or people who are committed to movement building, to make those links. That's what we now have.
R.K.: Talk about movement building. What is movement building, what's involved with that? When you say it takes movement organizers and movement building, what does that mean?
A.R.: Well I mean, it takes first of all having some general vision of how the society could be a better place and it takes talking to people, right, face to face, to people with whom you have standing in your workplace and community, family, bowling league, your wine sipping club, kid's baseball league, or whatever, and over time a cultivating of shared understandings and the conversation about how the society could be improved and what kinds of things we can support that's possible to imagine in practical terms, that we can support that could make the society better than it is. This takes me back to the difference between the electoral domain and what I would call the movement building project. It's kind of like the difference between how one approaches making contacts with people in an election campaign and how one approaches making contacts with people in a union organizing campaign.
In the election campaign, you want to cast the net as widely as possible because the whole point is just to get more votes than the other guy gets. So, it calls for diluting the program to appeal as broadly as possible to people where they already are. So, at the crudest level, the approach to door knocking is entirely different. In an election campaign ,when you knock on a stranger's doors you don't want to engage with them, you drop the literature and you say a couple things and then leave because it's all about covering as many as you can.
In a union organizing campaign, or a community organizing campaign, you want the old lady to invite you in for tea and cookies because you want to talk to her, you want to build a relationship with her, you want to develop standing because it's from the standing that you have in people's lives that it's possible to be, through which your ideas of what's credible, what's possible for us to do, can be real to people and can ... it's through those contacts that your opinions become trustworthy and that's what I mean as the key to the movement building project. It's not a matter of... there's this tendency, I know, among progressive groups to form coalitions, right, and to go out empty organization goes to empty organization and they form the coalition and what the coalition turns out to be often enough is like fifty pieces of stationery with the letterheads on them, but they don't really represent anything.
And again, I appreciate the sense of urgency that people feel ,but what's coming to grips with the fact that the left has been basically liquidated as a significant force in American politics means is that in practical terms it means acknowledging that you have got to walk before you run, you've got to crawl before you walk and we're at the crawling stage now. I know it's not comfortable for a lot of people to hear that because they want things to change but you know, what that also means then is how we should think about what is the most we can hope for in the electoral realm and I think the most we can hope for is getting behind candidates who will be less worse than the others and what that means practically is to slow the pace of liquidation of all of the social protections that we've wanted since the 1930's.
R.K.: That's horrible!
A.R.: Well, I know, but there's only one thing I can think of that's worse and that's denying that that's the situation that we're in.
R.K.: Wow. Yeah. And you know when I read your article and I read the reports of the article it made me think of Chris Hedges' book, The Death of the Liberal Class...
A.R.: Oh yeah.
R.K.: Right along the same lines"
A.R. Right.
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