Change beyond the ballot

In 1964, the party of President Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to talk about civil rights -- even sign the Civil Rights Act -- and position itself as the party of desegregation, but it wasn't ready to fight desegregation in its own ranks. Not yet. After a bitter standoff, the Democratic National Convention finally offered the Freedom Democratic Party's leader, Fanny Lou Hamer, a seat where she could observe the proceedings, but not vote.

Just four years later, the picture had shifted significantly. The Voting Rights Act was law and the Southern delegations had been desegregated, but the power of the old party machine hadn't passed to the grassroots activists who'd forced the transformation. It remained bottled up at the top of the party structure.

Rather than overhaul state-level infrastructures, party leaders gradually made an end-run around them. That's partly why state parties like Mississippi's have been in such sad shape for so many decades. Among other changes, the party altered the rules of the nomination process (and the convention) to emphasize statewide primaries -- now generally the norm -- taking power out of the hands of local party bosses. Advertising themselves via television, candidates could "run" campaigns by communicating directly with voters without the help of embedded state-level movements.

Actually growing the party's base seemed to scare the establishment. Whenever the Democratic National Committee appeared on the verge of launching a massive voter registration program, they backed off. Insiders who lived through the period recall how in the 1980s, when Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition showed that massive numbers of new Democratic voters could indeed be activated with just a little attention to the base, the party's major donors refused to fund such an effort (allegedly for fear that any massive voter-registration drive would only push the party into Jackson's hands).

Today's "outsiders" are once again working hard, organizing locally, and counting on being seated at their party's table. Whoever the nominee may be, he or she is guaranteed to enter the general election stronger in terms of state-field operations and possible resources than any Democratic candidate in decades. In no small measure, it will be those "outsiders" the party has to thank. When Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006, Eli Pariser, the director of the liberal mass-membership group MoveOn.org, boasted of the Democratic Party, "We bought it, we own it, we're going to take it back." If a Democrat does indeed win in November (by no means a certainty), Pariser isn't going to be the only one with bragging rights -- or expectations.

The key questions are: Will progressive activists use the continuing primary race to raise solid policy demands about peace, justice, the environment and healthcare -- and will whoever turns out to be the Democratic candidate actually listen? Let's keep in mind that those hopeful base voters aren't doing all this work simply in order to get a change of personnel in the White House. It's change in their lives and their communities, as well as in the country at large, that they need and want. Even a shift of power in both chambers of Congress in November 2006 has brought them precious little of that.

If history offers any hints, real change relies on movements very much like the one that, however inchoately, has slowly been forming, I believe, just beyond our sight in these last years. This is, of course, exactly the part of our political landscape that our media covers least well and least often (and maybe those ranks of new organizers are actually lucky for that).

It's often forgotten that the conservative movement, sidelined by President Johnson's smashing defeat in the 1964 election of the original conservative presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, spent the next decade and a half largely out of the limelight, building up its forces to challenge the Republican Party establishment. Through the use of the new technology of that moment -- especially direct-mail fundraising -- and the mobilization of new ground troops (evangelical churches) through cheap media (talk radio and cable television), they found ways for outsider candidates to mount effective primary challenges and rattle the incumbents, while they moved, increasingly triumphantly, from the local to the state to the national level.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the right had a storyteller in the White House who could retell America's tale their way. His narrative threw out the 1960s and 1970s version of an all-in-the-same-boat society. It declared government the enemy and asserted that individuals (and, more importantly, corporations) unfettered from government regulations were what made the country great.

Reagan himself didn't deliver all that much beyond that. It was in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years that the right secured the tax cuts, deregulation, and rollback of government programs they had sought so long. Eventually, they did secure many of their goals exactly because, in the 1980s, the gang that brought Reagan to office didn't rest on their laurels, having elected a president. They built their movement and mobilized every last resource, in season and out, to change the national discourse and shift public opinion inside the Beltway, in the media, and in the states.

Asked in South Carolina last month which of the Democratic contenders he thought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have endorsed, Sen. Obama responded, "He wouldn't endorse any one of us." That's because King was building a movement meant to hold all candidates -- and presidents -- to account. It was that movement which made it impossible for LBJ to try, however feebly, to accommodate Fanny Lou Hamer at the 1964 convention, that movement which literally changed the faces in politics, that movement which made the candidacy of Barack Obama possible, as the later feminist movement would Hillary Clinton's. It's that movement the Reagan right learned from so well and today's progressives would do well not to forget.

The swirl of the primary season is intoxicating -- and the media loves it. But real change happens on a different timetable. If you're looking for estimated times of arrival, the problem is: We don't know that timetable yet.

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

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