The Republicans who started taking over school boards and town councils in the 80s and 90s understood the long game. They wouldn’t change it personally, they would plant the seeds. They’re the ones who started slowly resegregating schools and planning developments based on conservative “values” etc. Then after that ball got rolling, it snowballed into more and more stuff. Those people are mostly gone now, but we are where we are because of them.
Because they understood that all the shit that actually affects the daily lives of people in their localities is done at the local and state level.
So we have to take it back. Start planting the seeds of progressive values. Will it take time? Of course. It would probably take less time since we have better tools now than they did 30 years ago, but it’s more than waving a wand and having progressives run for national seats and ignore local shit. Because if all the city councils and school boards are run by republicans, nothing will actually ever change.
I’m not going to mock you too hard since I was you a couple years ago but sheesh man you just don’t get it at all.
Roe was just overturned not because the right won the presidency. It was overturned because the right spent decades creating a legal and political system that relentlessly required an oath to their main cause, refused access to power to anyone at any level who disagreed and which sent an army of believers to infest every level of government with the sole purpose of rigging the system in every way possible. They failed hundreds of time and still never gave up. The more hurdles they faced the harder they fought.
Dems read a poem and will have a special meeting of the judiciary in a month.
I agree with you that we need to care more about local elections. No question about that. I think we are both biased by where we live though. Where i live local politics offer no hope. My only hope is at the national level. Where you live national politics offer little hope and your best hope is at the local/state level.
By saying you have no hope at the local level, you are just perpetuating this right wing lie.
Maybe you would have no hope running against an unopposed incumbent for school board. But your run would show people that local non-crazy people are willing to finally put up a fight. So the next person who runs can learn that they aren’t alone, and can lean on the things you learned from your run. And that person might not win either.
Did you know only 5% of first time candidates actually win their race? So why do they bother running if they aren’t gonna win? The point is to get our foot in the door. That’s what the Republicans did 30 years ago.
I totally fundamentally disagree that people running for school board 30 years ago is how we got here. Rush Limbaugh did 100x more than all of those people combined.
Maybe if Dems had done that 30 years ago that may have worked but we are about to get hit with a giant tsunami of right wing shit regardless of what anyone does at this point and there isn’t even a faint hope that anyone, entity or effort on the left has any chance to stop it anymore. Certainly me losing my local school board election won’t do anything besides waste my time and make me miserable. Hell winning would probably be worse.
Maybe that makes me a keyboard warrior but it’s also reality.
Back in the 1960s and ’70s, it was the left, not the right, that focused on state power. With the exception of two years, Democrats controlled the majority of state legislatures from 1960 to 1973.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, the right decided to develop a countervailing movement. ALEC, founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and a group of conservative activists and officials with funding from longtime conservative donor Richard Scaife’s foundation, was one of the first to begin this work. “Conservatism is weakest at the local level,” warned a onetime executive director of ALEC. “Government at the state and local level is still overwhelmingly controlled by liberals, in large part because conservatives have concentrated too much of their attention and energy on Washington.”
Court reform isn’t enough either. Your entire system is broken, top to bottom. No part operates correctly. Every branch at every level is a nightmare of system failure, corruption and riggage.
Thinking you can have significant change without running the risk of civil war is bonkers. Whether you are willing to push for that change should depend on your risk tolerance.
The idea is basically that you contest every race in every state with the best candidate possible, and voters at every level are exposed to your ideas. You win some, which develops a bench, and from there you can gain at the next level, and so forth. It’s true and it should be part of the strategy but not all of it and maybe not the majority of it.
We also should probably be open to pro life anti gun Dems and pro choice pro gun Dems. Especially if they wink wink nod nod are willing to nuke the filibuster and then pretend to be shocked what that does to their pro life/pro gun issue.
Basically we need to be able to contest like 65-70 Senate seats to have hope of getting to 55-60, and we need candidates who will nuke the filibuster and reform the court. Work backwards from there.
The problem is we also need to maintain democracy for 20-30 years for all that to play out, which is very unlikely.
The thing that is left out of that is that re-electing a bunch of these octogenarian establishment empty suits is not going to get the job done. Like if the goal is for our grandkids to have the rights we had when we were born, sure, keep doing that. Maybe it’ll work out, if humanity survives climate change. If the goal is to increase our odds of surviving climate change and restoring those rights, then we need to pack the court and reform the democracy, so “vote harder” needs to mean “show up informed in the primary and vote accordingly.”
running is not about having a (D) next to you on the ballot. it means voicing a plan and a vision and repeating it until enough people have heard you and maybe changed their mind