Eight years into the general crisis of US democracy, almost everybody on the broad Left agrees: The assignment is to win governing power.
Liberal Democrats can’t and won’t lead the way out of this crisis: Biden tried and failed. Only a Left-wing program of redistribution can reduce inequality, salvage democratic institutions, and reduce the appeal of right-wing populism.
To implement such a program, we need governing power. Only by wielding the power of government and the state can we implement our agenda.
This broad consensus comes in hard line (socialist) and big tent (progressive) varieties, and many debates about how to build power while navigating the fracturing Democratic Party coalition and ballot line are urgent and critical. We disagree about much. But we all agree on the need for governing power, which requires electoral and legislative majorities.
This is a big bet with huge stakes, and the program required to make it happen is ambitious. Socialists and progressives will spend at least a billion dollars over the next five years to defeat MAGA at the federal and state level and replace it with Left governing majorities.
Allow me to make a modest statement: We might not succeed.
We might keep losing to Trump and MAGA outright. There could be a third Trump term, or Vance, or worse horrors beyond our imagination. But there are other scenarios besides these that would also mean failure.
We might depose MAGA federally but fall well short of governing power. Come 2029, zombie liberalism could stagger forward again, owing to the steep barriers standing between Left-wing candidates and the general election ballot.
We might finally get a Left-wing president, but even a visionary and assertive Left-wing administration will struggle to govern without a deep Congressional majority, or in the face of all-out resistance from the right-wing judiciary and conservative states. They could fail and surrender the presidency to the right in 2033.
Allow me to strengthen my modest statement: If success means establishing a durable Left-wing hegemony that resolves the triple crises of American democracy, global capitalism, and planetary climate change, we probably will not succeed.
If we do not succeed, as is probable, most people’s lives in the US will keep getting hotter, more expensive, more violent, and more volatile, as climate changes, wealth is further redistributed upward, and the benefits of 20th century US hegemony recede into a distant memory.
No wonder we’re so intent on winning governing power! The hellworld alternative is hard to fathom. My argument, however, is that we must fathom it.
Betting everything on governing power would be a catastrophically risky gamble. If we go for broke on a long-odds governance strategy, and lose, we’ll be left with nothing to work with in the 2030s and 2040s. The only thing worse than living in hell is living in a hell for which one has not prepared.
Put another way: We are well into a great power transition from the US-led 20th century into a new world order. Such transitions are marked by chaos and uncertainty. When volatility is the order of the day, presuming to predict the future, or staking everything on one trajectory, is exactly the wrong thing to do.
My modest proposal for the Left is that we hedge against the possible failure of our political governance strategy by making tangible investments in social and economic power bases that will be resilient to our political defeat. Directing 25% of our political and organizational spending to durable assets would be a wise and prudent hedge against such political failure.
If we continue to lose politically for the next decade, we could at least enter 2035 with more power resources to work with than we have now.
We should be spending funds on land, real estate, and educational and media institutions, designed to create a long-term physical power base for the Left regardless of what comes in the next several decades. Land and real estate are the key here. Educational and media institutions should be considered, but only to the extent that they are strongly anchored in place and endowed for longevity. We should also be considering business enterprises and alternative, durable revenue streams for all of the above, outside of traditional philanthropy.
My modest proposal for the Left is that we hedge against the possible failure of our political governance strategy by making tangible investments in social and economic power bases that will be resilient to our political defeat.
The appeal of durable and resilient investments is evident in the growing interest in member-governed organizations, especially labor and tenant unions and party organizations. The Left is moving towards these forms out of a desire for organizations that are more long-lived than protest movements, more stable than brittle staff and Board-led nonprofits, and not exclusively dependent on a favorable political environment. But member-governed organizations represent the floor, not the ceiling, of the kind of durable investments that we should be making now. People are already working to rebuild the labor and tenant movements, and to build political party instruments. I’m less convinced that anybody is thinking about tangible assets at scale.
Consider: How much money was spent by Left social movement organizations from 2010-2024? What benefit do we have from that money now? What place in the world do we have to go, to lick our wounds and decide what’s next? How many of our “power-building organizations” are still paying rent money to their enemies on the first of every month, and every single time they hold a member or staff retreat?
In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the educator Myles Horton and a few forward-thinking supporters made a leap of faith by establishing the Highlander Center in Monteagle, Tennessee. Highlander became a proving ground for some of the most impactful change-makers of the 20th century, including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and labor organizers with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It has weathered attacks from the right and remains a valuable resource for organizers in the Southeast and beyond to this day.
A more recent example of an inspired investment in land and education is the Watershed Center in Millerton, New York. Built in 2014 by veterans of Occupy Wall Street, Watershed quickly became a training hub for millennial social movement leaders, including people responsible for organizing the Green New Deal and the Squad in Congress.
How much has one Highlander Center been worth over the last century? How much has one Watershed Center been worth over the last decade? Why should we not have such a center in every state of the country, and more movement schools, media, and housing too?
In his memoir The Long Haul, Myles Horton wrote, “We thought there would be other places like [Highlander] in every state within two or three years if we did a good job.” Horton did his job well, but too few have followed suit. This is a long haul indeed, and victory in the short run is far from certain. Can we afford to spend another billion-plus dollars on go-for-broke political strategies without learning this lesson?