When Obama was president, a conservative group that called themselves the Concord Project, presumably preparing for the 2010 elections, put together a series of videos about how movement conservatives could seize control of the Republican Party.
Their message was simple: get inside the Party and take it over.
Even simpler, they noted, party precinct committee members are, in aggregate, the single most powerful political force in America.
Here's one of their clips, running just two minutes and well worth your taking a moment to watch:
This strategy, now being openly advocated by Steve Bannon, worked for the conservatives who wanted to take over the GOP and evict the "weak" Republicans they saw as standing in the way of rolling back Roe v Wade, reversing decades of racial and gender progress, and rigging election laws to create a permanent Republican majority.
Today, because of these very same types of efforts by Bannon and people like him on the right, Trump-aligned neofascists have seized considerable control over the Republican Party in almost every state in the nation.
Successful nations with power distributed over multiple parties are:
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using government to improve the lives of their citizens with national healthcare systems
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maintaining high quality public schools and colleges
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keeping big money out of their politics
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and building a green infrastructure for the future.
But to do that here takes political change within one of our two parties. A political revolution, to paraphrase Bernie.
Revolutions never happen from the top down, even when they look that way, as Thomas Paine pointed out at length in The Crisis. Without popular support they fail right away or their foundation is so weak they don't last.
Instead, changing American politics and creating a progressive future requires large numbers of us working from the bottom up, getting directly involved in the daily, messy work of the Democratic Party.
When, in 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders ran for president on the Democratic ticket, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez volunteered as an organizer for his campaign.
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