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I grew up in San Francisco, where
there are more liberals, progressives and radicals per square inch
than any place in the United States. Everyone in S.F. belongs to
a union -- the waitresses, the longshoreman, the nurses. The Green
Party actually wins elections in SF, and, as one pundit put it,
San Francisco is more pro-peace than Switzerland.
I have lived in Nashville, Tennessee
since 1989 so I am not used to being around 1,500 revved up progressives
all gathered in one place. Heck, we would have a hard time finding
1,500 progressives in the whole state of Tennessee, let alone gathering
1,500 of them in one room.
After all, Tennessee is the state that
threw the 2000 election to Bush by failing to vote for its own native
son, Al Gore. The country music industry, located here in Nashville,
is a major cheerleader for George Bush, patriotism, and the war
in Iraq. Recent country awards shows were awash in red, white and
blue and the fans booed the Dixie Chicks.
Having learned to live with Southern
Baptists and SUV-driving Republicans, I turn the other cheek when
I am labeled a communist or a socialist or worse by vehement anti-tax,
anti-government conservatives who bristle at the suggestion that
government might have a positive role to play in modern society.
My friends and I -- Gen X radicals, old hippies and left leaning
church folks -- seem to be out of touch with mainstream Tennessee.
So I was excited to be at the Take
Back America conference organized by the Campaign for America's
Future in Washington DC on June 4-6. It was an historical turning
point: the largest gathering of progressives in over twenty years
and energy was high. I was surrounded by Bush bashers deconstructing
the neo-con agenda, talking about how the Patriot Act, budget deficits
and stacking the courts with conservative judges are all part of
a larger plan to permanently dismantle America's safety net. Warning
cries went out from leaders of major national groups such as NOW,
Win Without War, and the AFL-CIO about the imminent danger posed
by the Bush administration. Missing weapons of mass destruction,
working poor people not getting a tax refund, 40 million people
with no health care, crony capitalism, Bechtel and Halliburton contracts
to rebuild Iraq, union bashing -- all the horrors were repeatedly
endlessly by speaker after speaker. The mantra was Bush must be
defeated in 2004.
As exhilarating as this was, a lot
of the people I met at the conference were liberal, Washington insiders.
While it is great for the Beltway people to come up with a new vision
for the country, who is going to do all the grunt work out in the
hinterlands where elections are won or lost?
I met very few Southerners at the
conference. The South is one of the crucial areas of the country
that will determine the future of America and it is moving to the
right, not the left. As Jesse Jackson, Jr. points out in A More
Perfect Union, Southern Democrats such as Bill Clinton are similar
to moderate Republicans who are out of touch with the real needs
of the vast majority of the people who have been the traditional
constituents of the Democratic Party. Clinton and the Democratic
Leadership Council Democrats may be social liberals but they are
certainly not economic liberals in the tradition of FDR, Truman
or LBJ.
The South remains the bastion of states
rights or local control. And this has a direct effect on the lives
of African Americans, 50 percent of whom still live in the South.
Here in Tennessee, the state's legislature's Black Caucus consists
of 17 out of 132 legislators and there is no progressive or liberal
caucus. How do we mobilize enough people to defeat Bush in Tennessee?
I found some hope in the opening speech
by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. His polls show that the majority
of Americans want more spent on domestic programs than on tax cuts.
They want quality health care, prescription drug reform and safety
net and education funding. According to his data, the country is
evenly split on many issues but becoming increasingly polarized.
Republicans are winning on the issues of security and "a clear direction."
At this point, polls indicate that Bush is favored in the 2004 election
52% to 48% over any Democrat. Republicans are unified. 95% of them
will vote for Bush.
No such unity exists in the Democratic
Party. Battle lines have been drawn between the centrist DLC and
the liberals/progressives who attended the conference. The rallying
cry of the conference was that the Democratic Party needs to set
itself apart from the Republicans by taking a strong stand on the
above-mentioned bedrock issues. The Democratic Party will not win
elections by being Republican Lite.
The DLC holds the purse strings of
the Democratic Party but the recent MoveOn.org presidential poll
shows growing grassroots support for candidates who offer an alternative
vision.
300,000 people voted in MoveOn's recent
online Democratic presidential poll with Howard Dean receiving 139,360
votes, Dennis Kucinich 76,000, and John Kerry 49,973. These three
plus candidates Carol Mosely Braun, Al Sharpton and John Edwards
all spoke at the conference. Although all were warmly received,
Dennis Kucinich appeared to be the conference favorite. He brought
the crowd to its feet repeatedly during his fiery speech. He hit
hard on all the issues that are motivating progressives -- the war
in Iraq, NAFTA, the military budget, healthcare reform. I suspect
most people here in the South have never heard of Kucinich, but
he is a true progressive populist, and, as Bill Moyers reminded
us, it was farmers and workers who were the backbone of earlier
populist movements.
MoveOn founder Wes Boyd was a keynote
speaker at the conference and the workshop on online activism was
well attended. MoveOn, True Democracy and other online activist
sites have demonstrated a way around the conservative lock-hold
on the media. As time goes on, progressives will need to be even
more inventive in their use of alternative media.
Bill Moyers and Jesse Jackson both
gave uplifting speeches, heavy with historical references and spiritual
overtones. Moyers traced the history of progressive movements in
the United States, dating back to the 1892. Addressing the conference
banquet, he said, "You are the heirs of one of the country's great
traditions - the progressive movement that started late in the l9th
century and remade the American experience piece by piece until
it peaked in the last third of the 20th century. Its aim was to
keep blood pumping through the veins of democracy when others were
ready to call in the mortician. Progressives exalted and extended
the original American revolution. They spelled out new terms of
partnership between the people and their rulers. And they kindled
a flame that lit some of the most prosperous decades in modern historyŠ"
Moyers called for a revitalization
of this historic progressive movement to extend and preserve democracy
both here and abroad.
Jesse Jackson called for unity. He
was the only speaker who mentioned the Green Party. (I heard Nader
was not invited to the conference.) Jackson, using the metaphor
of the quilt wherein each piece forms a part of the whole, said
that progressives need to all come together and that Democrats need
to make their peace with Nader and the Green Party and invite them
to be part of the quilt. He said the progressive message should
call for policies that "invest and grow" the economy, creating economic
security for all, not just the rich. We need to invest in public
schools, affordable housing, higher education, the infrastructure,
and children. We need to close the digital divide, close the southern
divide, and close the race divide. He pointed out the South is in
the red zone -- those states that voted for Bush in the last election.
Jackson's Rainbow Push is planning an organizing drive in the South
in the coming months aimed at working people. He ended by saying
it is time for a workers' march in Washington, DC, harking back
to the 1968 Poor People's March that Martin Luther King, Jr. was
organizing when he was assassinated in Memphis.
Meanwhile, back in Tennessee, only
1,200 of the 8,000 registered voters in my Democratic district voted
in the election of 2002. The working-class African American family
in the next block voted Republican. They told me they were tired
of the Democratic Party taken African Americans for granted. A small
group of us have come together in a group called FinD 18 and we
are working to register and empower voters in local precincts on
the assumption that most of them will vote Democratic. It's hard
work, going door to door, sweating in the sultry heat of summer.
Yet even here people are mad and ready
to get to work to defeat Bush. The Howard Dean kickoff party at
a local club the other night had a respectable number of people
in attendance.
Perhaps we need a Take Back Tennessee
conference. Perhaps we need to bring together in one room all the
progressives in Tennessee to craft a plan "to keep blood pumping
through the veins of democracy."
Nell Levin is the organizer of Tennessee
Alliance for Progress. She can be reached at nellrose@earthlink.net.
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