3: In many respects, even the best Democrats in Congress are not providing much cutting-edge leadership. Grassroots activism should be providing leadership to them rather than the other way around.
If it had been left up to the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the superdelegate reform would not have happened. Overall, the reform proposal got scant support -- and some notable vehement opposition -- from Democrats in Congress, including some who are often praised as "progressive."
4: When grassroots activists lead -- and are willing to fight like hell, astutely and reasonably and unrelentingly -- the Democratic leaders can sometimes be compelled to follow.
It's virtually impossible to name a profoundly positive social change that was first initiated from Capitol Hill or from the DNC leadership.
5: We need to methodically organize -- inside and outside of the Democratic Party -- in order to effectively harness the progressive energies that require public education, activism, and expressions of outrage.
Grassroots organizing -- local, regional and national -- is crucial. That's what happened on the superdelegate issue. Overall progressive strength and organizational muscle led top national Democratic Party powerbrokers to conclude that the party must earn a lot more trust from progressives in order to win more elections. Those powerbrokers came to understand that failure to ditch the power of superdelegates would only worsen the falloff of grassroots support and enthusiasm for the party's candidates.
6: Election campaigns should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around.
Winning elections -- to defeat Republicans while electing more and more progressive Democrats -- is absolutely vital. GOP control over the federal executive and legislative branches, and therefore increasingly over the courts as well, must be rolled back: beginning with the midterm elections this fall. In the absence of hallucinatory political analysis, defeating Republicans will require supporting Democrats on the general-election ballot.
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