Think big.

When I get into conversations, whatever the circumstances, above all I’m going to try to

Think big.
Although we have personal experience to ground us in the world and allow us to question the killers’ version, we don’t always have full-fledged alternative stories to take the place of those highly polished narratives our bosses require us to recite every day. We can help each other organize all the knowledge we have that doesn't fit the world of Father Knows Best.

• Data insufficient.
I know that people are smart and care about their communities, so I used to think that all folks need is more information. If they had all the facts, other people would come to see the world the way I do. Corruption at Enron, the history of western domination of the Middle East, the health effects of our automobile economy, the stats on family violence . . . if only they knew, we’d all be off to save the world in no time. “Just give us the facts we can use,” some union staffers demand of educators, “enough of this touchy-feely discussion stuff.” They figure that the right data about the presidential candidates will keep the members on the straight and narrow.

Well, we do all need more information, but it’s also true that we all have a lifetime of experience. There’s no great mystery to sexism or Halliburton; the information is out there and doesn’t take a technical degree to understand. The people who line up behind the control freaks don’t do so out of ignorance, or at least, not from ignorance alone. How the facts fit together is the bigger problem.

The right has a good track record of spinning their own worst crimes. When the Nixon scandals hit the headlines I remember feeling, Aha! Now everyone will really understand the corrupt nature of militarist capitalism! Instead, for many people Watergate merely proved the corporate line that we can’t trust any government. Similar formulas flooded the public forum in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; in the well-founded criticism of the Federal Emergency Response Agency’s failure, many lost sight of Halliburton’s guiding hand in the disaster (incompetent cronyism was the least of it; as Dick Polman and others wrote, the regime had years before deliberately crippled FEMA to make room for disaster profiteers). Cal Thomas offered a two-fer, attributing Katrina not only to the “failure of government,” but also to New Orleans’ “dependent culture” (News-Sentinel 3-6-07). The false reports of mass rape and murder assured the rest of us that, after all, the people of New Orleans deserved the disaster. I forget which preacher who told us God sent the hurricane to punish gay people. As political workers, we’ve got to fight corruption, and also the racist, corporatist way it’s spun.


• Pandering is for pimps.
At first glance, this rootedness and resilience of our political stories seem to confirm what the Players think they know already: since our prejudices are fixed, to get people to vote against their interests, simply associate peace and democracy with gun control and people of color. Progressives, meanwhile, scramble to find corresponding populist buttons to push: The People, United; human rights; malefactors of great wealth*, and the like. With all these attacks on immigrants, sometimes we emphasize the abuses of the ICE raids, counting on images of teary moms to soften the heart of U.S. racism--rather than confronting the savage deportation policy itself.

Let’s see: in this corner, Christian broadcasting, hate radio and internet, the corporate media, and legions of Karl Rove clones; and in the other corner, We Shall Overcome, droned as a dirge, with much rolling of eyes heavenward. Who will win this battle of the soundbytes?


• Tiptoeing around the hard parts means stumbling in the dark.
Or we might downplay some of the right’s most cherished wedge issues, in the hopes they’ll just fade away for a moment, as in the eye of a hurricane; as when, for instance, we plaintively ask workers, What’s more important, your job or your guns? As I write, Democrats are terrified that the gay-marriage folks are going to provoke a high turnout among Christian voters in the coming elections. But since when has the Right needed an excuse to campaign against gay people?

Sometimes progressive types try to build a big-tent story that will accommodate the baloney we bring with us while, we hope, leading us eventually to Higher Thoughts-- Daddy diverts baby Joey from tearing out the cat’s fur by substituting a great big teddy bear. Thus, for instance, the union organizers that somehow never get around to challenging corporations’ role in our society; consumer advocates that don’t question the premise of rising consumption; the film-maker who hitches his anti-war message to Arab-bashing imagery. However much lip service we pay to the idea that we can all learn and change, in practice we’re tempted to accept that our ideas are fixed, that the best we can do is pander to them or paper them over.

It’s important to resist the temptation to pile up interest groups behind some vague feel-good flag, because the contradictions won’t bide silently for long. At the very least we have to distinguish between raising employee wages and boosting corporate profits, between discouraging drug abuse and throwing kids in prison, between Halliburton’s multiethnic lackeys and government that reflects the interests of all.

Likewise, we don’t need to be trivializing our own suggestions. Once upon a time there was a presidential candidate named Kerry. He thought it would be nice for us to have health care, but spent most of his air time apologizing for his own proposals. He begged us to tolerate better health care by seasoning it with standard government-bashing borrowed word for word from Halliburton:

Toledo, Ohio-- Sen. John Kerry trumpeted his health-care program Tuesday as a recipe to bring down soaring medical costs, rejecting Republican contentions that a democratic plan would mean a government takeover.
“I want to make it very clear what my health-care plan is and what it isn’t. My health-care plan is not a government plan,” Kerry told voters at a Toledo senior citizen center. “You choose your own doctor. You choose your own plan. You choose not to be part of what I offer? Your choice.”
Earlier, Kerry told a group of elderly voters in Milwaukee, “I have no new bureaucracy at all in my program.”
President Bush had contended on Monday that Kerry had “a massive, complicated blueprint to have our government take over the decision making in health care.” (Knoxville News-Sentinel, 9-15-04.)

During that election, Kerry was also handicapped by having the same war policy as Halliburton. O, no, now I recall he did have some positive suggestions on this core issue. Don’t take troops from Germany he said, when Halliburton wanted to do that. Or was it the other way around?

Obama’s 2008 ads pulled the same stunt with the wars, health care, the environment and the role of government in general. I’d read earlier pronouncements of his about needing to build public support for major changes, but his campaign language undermined the rationale for that; apparently he calculated that swing voters prefer slogans to substance.


• Mental maps are not fixed; we can redraw them.
Since we depend so much on these integrated knowledge networks, we can’t simply try to avoid the hot-button issues, or find buttons of our own to push. Instead, we’ve got to identify and dismantle the core ideologies of domination, while we identify and help emerge the democratic stories that folks already have. It’s not the facts of murder by design and murder by neglect and murder for profit that are scarce, but accessible models of how these fit together and how we might build something better.

In my lifetime, in my country, feminism has been perhaps the most successful democratic movement. Despite various cooptations and unfinished business, feminism has vastly changed the options for men and women not just because of savvy lobbyists and effective campaigns, but because literally millions of people helped reconstruct gender roles from the ground up. In thought and practice they’ve challenged some of the core institutions of this society. They’ve revitalized the culture and operation of many grassroots and non-profit groups, making us more effective in dozens of ways. Even Christians and Muslims have had to change the way they talk about women.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t have to push the steady incremental changes in employment practices and policing and parenting and health care access and all the rest of it. But these practical gains --by no means complete-- come not because feminists’ goals are so modest but because they are so far-reaching; because these policies and programs require and reinforce each other and derive from a common, coherent, compelling understanding of the world; and because they have engaged many many men and women in creating it. As much as the women’s shelters and the legislative campaigns, the much caricatured struggle over language has really changed the choices available to women and men. Their successes have come not from nibbling away at the margins but from challenging the very premises of patriarchy.

It’s a commonplace of democratic education, or any effective political activity, for that matter, that we start with where The People are. We don’t talk down to folks and we don’t talk over each other’s heads. But we move, all of us, supporting each other. Otherwise, what’s the point?

So when we’re talking to the neighbors, I think it’s important to think big; to think in terms of broad paradigms or models of the world.

This is only to reaffirm what many do already. Whether we’re talking about better wages or better policing or healthier kids or safer communities for all kinds of people, we tie those in to the bigger idea of a just society. Every fight for a stop sign on a busy corner is part of the fight for democracy; do we make that clear?

One of the right’s favorite issues is guns. We think about hunters versus liberals, or Second Amendment versus gun control. I reckon the real issues are contending ideas of freedom and responsibility, security, manliness. If I don’t like hundreds of millions of guns floating around, I need to challenge the underlying ideas that encourage people to need and value and fire them at each other.

My state has no state income tax. Our fair tax organization has fought hard to establish a progressive income tax, against strong opposition among people of all classes. But the real issue is not taxes versus no taxes, but a government that serves millionaires versus one that serves the rest of us. Folks have every reason to fear new taxes that simply subsidize the rich. But we can embed tax reform in the larger campaign for economic democracy and shared responsibility.


• Put some meat on them bones.
At the same time, by big ideas I don’t mean abstractions. We have programs and strategies, not just sentiments. So chanting "peace and love" as we pass out flowers to passersby works better when we target specific decision-makers and institutions with specific demands.

What is “peace”? Do you think it’s a good idea? Why? What do we know about ourselves that makes us think we can construct such a thing? What would you get out of it? What does it take to get there?

How about “justice”? Who's got it, and how do I get me some? Weekend sale at Walmart?

What do we mean by “fair trade”? Do you reckon it’s possible to have an economy that meets everyone’s basic needs but doesn’t cause cancer? What in your experience would lead you to such a conclusion? Is there really any such thing as worker-managed enterprises? Should local mill workers have more of a say in forest management than tourists or out-of-town environmentalists? On what basis?

So we need to think big in another way: as if we might someday have a democracy. Beyond the skirmishes at the margins of capitalism, in my lifetime we’ve rarely had to get specific about how a just society might operate. Thank goodness! because it’s largely uncharted territory. But our neighbors are rightly skeptical. An economy not based on stealing from our neighbors? How absurd!

Maybe we’ve wandered too long in the wilderness. Certainly for me it’s easier to see what’s wrong than to imagine something right. Then too, I find the opposition role more comfortable than one in which I’d share responsibility for community decisions. Metzgar describes his dad’s thinking about the constant struggle with the bosses at the steel mill:

He, like other adults in my neighborhood, liked to quote the sportswriter Grantland Rice’s maxim: ‘It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.’. . . In my neighborhood, Rice’s maxim was about doing your job well, playing your role, holding up your end, pulling your own weight in a game that would be determined by such a complex confluence of actions and reactions that no one person or group could be held accountable for the outcome-- while everybody was always completely responsible for how they did their job. It’s what sportscasters today often call ‘a blue-collar attitude.’
It’s an attitude that recognizes that others are the stars and superstars, and that they have more responsibility for outcomes than you do. But precisely because your own role is necessarily more limited, performing it well is all the more important-- because less is asked of you, you need to strive for steady perfection in achieving the more easily achievable. On the other hand, while your responsibility is less, it still exists, and nobody, not even the superstars, bears sole responsibility for the outcome. In labor-management relations, this attitude meant recognizing that you could never be in control, that the key decisions were made by others, that the ruling class, whether it had a right to or not, was going to rule. The most you could do was stick together with your own kind and apply your weight with as much shrewdness and cunning as you could muster to affect both the overall outcome and the ways that outcome affected you and yours. If you did that and lost, it was both sad and painful, but you had at least done your job.
The moral complexity and potential integrity of this view of things was often illustrated in my father’s tales of his battles with industrial engineers. . . . And even though their basic purpose was to force and entice him to work harder and faster, he didn’t object to what they were doing-- they had a job to do, just like he did. The basic contest between them was necessary and inevitable, part of the larger contest between workers and management to determine what constituted a fair day’s work. Left to themselves, workers wouldn’t work as hard, as fast, or as well as they should. But left to itself, management would use up workers like so many spare parts. But together, my father running his machine and the IE watching and timing, they engaged in a contest of wits that was, according to him, ‘about as good a way as any’ to determine a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay (131-2).

Here Metzgar is mainly talking about two things: first, the wise understanding that while none of us can change the world by ourselves, we each can do our part; and second, his dad’s comfort with the adversarial role separately from the outcomes on the shop floor. Certainly we owe what little democracy we have to constitutional checks and balances, the institutional fact that no one faction of our rulers can control all the decisions in all the arenas. But I’d guess that getting too accustomed to being the minority party, the dutiful dissenters, the lonely voices of conscience, saps both our will and our imaginations-- and the credibility of the alternative possibilities that we pose.

* I’m coming to think that there is no great anger about the inequality of wealth in this country. We’re pissed off about a lot of things, but I’ve rarely seen the kind of visceral intensity about wealth that people bring to issues like clearcutting redwoods or Bill Clinton’s sex life. For instance, before the last election a number of union members in West Virginia acknowledged that Halliburton was a rich kid who didn’t care about working people, but they planned to vote for him anyway (as the Defender of Freedom). There doesn’t seem to be much left of the sort of 'levelling instinct' Rudé ascribes to the common people 17th- and 18th-century Europe (224). I don’t know why. Is it from media-fostered ignorance— the hallucination that any of us might achieve the life of Hollywood celebrities, and spend thousands of dollars on toenail polish for our poodles? After all, this is the first society since Asians first crossed the Bering Strait that was founded on unlimited possibility. It could be that, just as European peasants and workers often attacked Jews rather than their lords, many Americans dare not aim at our corporate bosses, and instead attack those house servants, the professional class (people like me); and thus transmute economic issues to cultural conflicts expressed through religion and sex roles. Or do we accept obscene levels of inequality because we understand the underlying truth?: that if we did have anything like a fair distribution in this world, U.S. middle class living standards would drop to Mexico’s.