She muses

A great call to action to the US progressive movement.

A taste…

“What I’d like to do today, however, is do something that was never really explicitly done for me, which is to express, succinctly, some useful lessons learnt by folks in my generation, and put them out there for debate and discussion for those of us, whatever our age, here at this turning point for the next generation of netroots/grassroots activists.”

…

“What is called for right now are three massive parallel movements: engagement, coalition, and party reform.

engagement

The first movement, already underway, calls for an across-the-board engagement with the structures of United States Governement from the local to the federal level. We need to build a culture that embraces engagement, embraces policy, and embraces, above all, the value of working in partisan politics. For too long, many liberals have prided themselves in remaining outside of politics, have refused to “get their hands dirty” with partisan politics; that disdain for party politics has yielded exactly what one might expect, a triumph of the party that was willing to dive in over the one that wasn’t. We need to reverse that. We need to valorize getting involved in the process; we need to grow a new generation of activists committed to a lifetime’s work of writing and shaping the laws of the land at every level of government. We need to get the discussion from the trite “lesser of two evils” debate into the territory of “which office are YOU going to run for?” or “what do you think of this bill?”

In my view, people who don’t get involved in politics, especially local politics, don’t really have much grounds to complain. The era of complaining is over. The era of engagement has begun.

coalition building

Second, a new generation of liberals and progressives must define a new form of coalition building that will bury, once and for all, the divisive, counter-productive and ineffective politics of purity and atomization that have bedeviled American progressives for the better part of a half-century.

Politics is not about being pure. It is about building coalition. It is not that we don’t have ideals or ideology. We all do. Every last one of us. But successful politics in the United States happens only when our political pragmatism is informed by our ideals; history has proven that successful idealists are the ones who build pragmatic coalitions. That is the essential formula. The success of the conservative movement taught us that though ideology may well be the motor that drives a political party, it is pragmatism, patience and coalition building that forge political success.”