The conservative movement is on the march to power. What happened to movements on the left? asks SamAdlerBell
Photo: Victor Twyman/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images When I was young, my activist friends and I would often speak of something we called the movement. “This will be good for the movement,” we’d say.” Or, “They do good movement work.” He was a “movement lawyer”; she, “an artist dedicated to the movement.” I assumed this expression referred to something real: international socialism, maybe, or trade unionism. I wasn’t sure.
By contrast, the conservative grassroots are ablaze. The parents, pundits, and propagandists behind the “critical race theory” crackdown, and now, the moral panic over LGBTQ educators, have been startlingly successful — not only at creating media spectacles, but at recruiting activists, electing school board members, and passing laws. Anti-abortion measures, meanwhile, sweep the country in anticipation of a possible repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Democratic efforts to capture the energies of the 2020 BLM uprisings were similarly demoralizing for all involved. Mayors made fitful, largely self-defeating gestures at constraining their police forces, while party leaders gave a pathetic half-hug to the movement and tip-toed around its politically inconvenient slogan.
Whether one celebrates or laments the fact, it cannot be denied that nonprofits have taken the place of other civic or party institutions as the site of grassroots Democratic politics. And perhaps no single arena of American life is more replete with talk about “social movements” than the nonprofit sector. “Nonprofits have learned to speak like social movements,” says Daniel Schlozman, author of When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History.
Much ink has been spilled — by centrist popularists and socialist radicals alike — about the perverting effects of allowing nonprofits to lead the Democratic Party’s left flank. I won’t rehearse those arguments here. But what I do want to say is this: American political parties really are capable of transformational change when they are “anchored,” in Schlozman’s language, by movements. The Democrats and labor did it in the 1930s. The religious right and the GOP have done it since the 1980s.
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