Yes, Positivity, Pangloss, Partisanship, Propaganda, and Populism
Eight years ago Yes! Magazine published a political platform of progressive policies, along with polling showing strong majority support for each proposal. Now, eight years later,
we can show almost total failure to advance any of the proposals, most of which were focused on the U.S. federal
government.
Where there have been any small successes, they have mostly come at the state or local level or outside the United
States. New York State just took a step toward free college and Washington State toward shutting down fossil fuels while
everyone was watching Donald Trump's twitter feed. Most of the world's nations are working on a new treaty to ban
nuclear weapons from the earth, while Obama's government has invested heavily in new nukes and (far more offensively,
I'm told) Trump has tweeted about them.
The general federal-level failure in the United States is very clearly because the U.S. government in Washington D.C. is
a financially corrupted and anti-democratic structure, and because the U.S. public is generally disinclined to hold it
accountable. The United States enjoys remarkably less activism than many other countries, and suffers as a result.
A huge reason for the activism shortage is partisan loyalty. Of that minority of people who will do anything at all,
many will only make demands of or protest members of one political party. For the other party all is forgiven. And most
policy positions are utterly expendable at the slightest shift in the party line. Witness the current Democratic fever
for believing the CIA on faith and desiring hostility toward Russia.
This partisanship masks the steady destruction of each area in that Yes! platform as it progresses unperturbed through
presidencies of both parties alike.
Putting forth a positive program and pushing for it is exactly the right thing to do, and not for simplistic or
mystical, but for very practical reasons. And informing each other that we are a secret majority is exactly right as
well. But there is always a danger of Panglossian distortion in an attitude of positivity. The fact that someone can
start an organic urban garden should not actually blind us to the fact that the taxes paid on the garden's income will
go toward preparing for wars, destroying the earth's climate, imprisoning the garden's neighbors, poisoning the garden's
water, and forbidding any honest definition of what "organic" means.
So it was with both eagerness and trepidation that I picked up the new book, The Revolution Where You Live, by the Cofounder of Yes! Magazine Sarah Van Gelder. It's a book about local activism that doesn't try to spin away the
general context of growing apocalypse, but tries to find models for duplication and expansion. Some of the stories are
familiar or from decades gone by when we know there was greater activism afoot. But some are neither familiar nor old.
These tales of local organizing succeeding against economic, environmental, and racist evils should be far more present
in our minds than some silly hope that Hillary Clinton be subtly impolite while celebrating with Trump at his
inauguration.
These accounts collectively also seem to point to the critical importance of investing in local banks and divesting from
evil corporations. This focus should be useful to activists in all fields.
Any Panglossianism in Van Gelder's book is by omission and not unique to her but nearly universal. I refer of course to
the fact that she has written about touring localities in the world's war machine without ever mentioning it. Even in an
account of admirable efforts to improve the treatment of refugees, there is no mention of how they became refugees. Van
Gelder, like virtually all liberals in the United States sincerely and rightly laments the hoarding of wealth by the
super rich and the subsidies given to destructive (non-war) industries, without ever remarking that all that hoarding is
simply dwarfed by public spending on a program of mass murder that makes enemies of 96% of humanity -- a program the
likes of which has never been seen in any other time or place.
I don't think local activism can succeed unless it impacts international and national policy, and in large part its
activists don't even intend to do that. Many have declared opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline an unqualified
success as long as the earth-destroying monster is run through someone else's backyard. Van Gelder asks a local activist
what world she envisions, and she says she's already in it -- a testimony to the life-fulfilling nature of activism but
also to the propaganda that has so many Americans convinced the status quo is not a fast train to catastrophe. Van
Gelder asks another woman doing great work where power comes from, and she replies "It's when your head, your heart, and
your hands are aligned."
That's not false, but it's lacking something. We could have thousands of people with their heads, hearts, and hands
aligned and still destroy the climate, launch the nukes, or establish a fascist state. Power, I would say, comes from
mobilizing enough people to take the right actions for change, inspiring others to help while dissuading those who would
resist. I think local activism is far more a place to start than is generally imagined. I think elections, especially
federal elections, have become largely a distraction. I think partisanship and the propaganda of corporate media are
powerful poison. But I think viewing local or personal satisfaction as sufficient will be fatal. We need local and
global action that understands itself as such. Or we need close collaboration between those who want to stop one
pipeline and those who want to stop them all.
We also need to take advantage of new activism that will come from those who will, come January 20th, suddenly object to
all sorts of horrible policies they've accepted amicably for the past eight years. But we need to nudge such people into
a principled nonpartisan frame of reference that will allow their activism to last and succeed.
We should also be looking for ways to empower states and localities, including through secession, and through global
activist alliances.
The hopeless wreck of a U.S. government infects the United Nations, of course, through its veto power and permanent
membership on the "Security" Council. A reformed global body would undercut the power of its worst abusers, rather than
empowering them above all others. In a preferable design, I think, nations with under 100 million population (roughly
187 nations) would have 1 representative per nation. Nations with over 100 million population (currently 13) would have
0 representatives per nation. But each province/state/region in those nations would have 1 representative answering only
to that province/state/region.
This body would make decisions by majority vote and have the power to create chairs and committees, hire staff, and by
three-quarters majority reshape its own constitution. That constitution would forbid war and participation in the
production, possession, or trading of weapons of war. It would commit all members to assisting each other in making the
transition to peaceful enterprises. The structure would also forbid violations of the rights of the environment and of
future generations, and commit all members to collaborating on environmental protection, poverty reduction, population
growth control, and aid to refugees.
This more-useful body for planetary preservation would facilitate education and cultural exchange programs, as well as
the training and deployment of unarmed civilian peace workers. It would not create or collaborate with any armed forces,
but would apply the rule of law equally and advance restorative justice through mediation and truth-and-reconciliation.
Any member or group of members would have the right to compel a vote on whether to create on a planetary scale any
program that the member had itself created and shown capable of advancing disarmament, environmental protection, poverty
reduction, population growth control, or assistance to those in need. Other members would be permitted to vote no only
if they could establish that such a program had not worked in the province or country proposing it or could not work
elsewhere.
Members would each choose their representative to a two-year term through clean, transparent, nonpartisan, and
exclusively publicly funded elections open to all adults, verified by the public hand-counting of paper ballots at each
polling place, including ranked-choice voting, and including on the ballot and in any debates all candidates qualified
by the collection of the signatures of 1% of constituents.
All major meetings and proceedings would be live streamed and archived as video available online, and all votes be
recorded votes. Member dues would be assessed based on ability to pay, with deductions for members' success in meeting
the goals of lower military spending (including through a member's taxes to the nation it is part of), lower carbon
emissions, greater equality of wealth, and greater aid to poorer members.
I'd like to see polling, even in the U.S. and other large nations, on public support for that sort of positive proposal.
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David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
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