The Precinct Leader: Party, People, Power

On the one hand we have foreign- and economic- policy establishments ruling the affairs of our people here and abroad through Democratic- and Republican- party administrations. On the other hand, we have provisions, in our American System of government, for a democratic administration and oversight of our republic.

What options do we ordinary people have to overrule, when necessary, the mismanagement arising from established policies and mistaken doctrines? How are we to go beyond whipping up the vote, then sweeping up the floors and taking out the garbage after election party is over?

Precinct

Political jurisdictions have been created in all kinds of sizes, from local school and water boards to federal districts and executive positions. A tiny jurisdiction sits in the midst, called a precinct. Within that precinct are a number of precinct positions, so that administering the precinct will be shared by a number of elected and appointed operatives of a local political party, depending on how many registered voters of that party reside in the precinct.

Basically, the precinct is the smallest political unit in the nation. It’s power in the scheme of things is located in its proximity to ordinary voters and family members. The challenge of the precinct leader is to summon neighbors and friends into collaboration around political solutions and coordinate with other precincts so as to reach as high as needed to command the use of those solutions.

What’s the appeal of this smallest political unit in the U.S. system of government? The precinct is designed to bring our government into your neighborhood and your neighbors with you into active participation in our government’s programs and decision-making through the political party.

People

The first line of defense of our democracy is a citizenry educated to govern. Our public school system is a critical institution to that. To live up to that potential, classroom teachers and community must be committed to and equipped for that task.

Teachers strike for pay increases and classroom funding.

Can we help with this, as political agents? Yes, if we have a number of teachers working in our ranks, and if the rest of us train our minds to think as classroom operatives working the ropes of critical thinking. Why take this approach? Because if we limit our reach as operatives to preaching ideology and selling electoral commodities, then we can never cultivate a bond of understanding and trust required for good governance.

What happens when we settle-in to cultivate such bonds, whether it be in a classroom, kitchen or coffee house? We will invariably tell our stories, because there will be stories to tell and stories to hear. Storytelling is a part of self-realization and group development.

Options for An Effective Citizen Leader

What would it mean for you to get underneath the tensions that drive social changes? It might mean knowing how to leverage seemingly small strategic advantages so as to undermine and overturn the power and failed policies of entrenched interests.

What are the options for doing this? We have three paths for solving a problem:

• Relief work
• Advocacy
• Political solution

To bring this into practical view, suppose our immediate concern is our school system. How would this work?

• Relief work: concentrate on one local school
• Advocacy: work on underwriting a school system
• Political solution: advance through political command of necessary resources the entire school system as part of a comprehensive social development

To clarify this, the congressional or legislative lobbyist is an advocate — a political player for sure, but advocating a particular interest. On the other hand, a politically influential think tank — one penetrating some avenue of government and normalizing a culture of public opinion — is working in the sphere of political solution.

If you are not satisfied with fixing one part of a mix of problems, then the political solution is your path.

The politics of social change

We can see, in this proposed scheme, that the precinct position, though lowly, falls in the realm of political solution, which means the precinct leader, though seemingly relegated to the role of electing party candidates, is actually tasked with employing political solutions to master current social development.

What are social developments we might encounter?

Let’s focus on personal struggles that force to the surface insurrections and seizure of political power as means of setting things right. This will likely take some form of mass action:

• Mass strike
• Controlled tactically directed strike
• Regime change

The mass strike is interesting, because it arises from a condition of social disintegration. It is not containable in any existing political order or mastered by any ruling political establishment. It makes fluid the political field, even if on the surface it seems a status quo has it all under control. In that fluidity, good and bad political formations will take shape and vie for power. There is both opportunity for and danger to an operative interested in justice.

Economic capacity

Sooner or later, all roads go to organizing economic resources. Such resources are identified, created, employed and improved upon by people, which means the cutting edge of economic development is human development.

So what do we have to work with?

The meltdown of the world financial system in 2008 is not easy to explain, but it must be explained and understood as a matter of self-defense, because protecting and sustaining this system is, so far, the prime directive of our U.S. government. This means shoring up bad debt, infusing liquidity into troubled financial institutions and underwriting this program with public administration of austerity to our people.

Why not support our financial system? Because it is a system largely decoupled from the well-being of the means of production necessary for underwriting human life — decoupled in defiance of provisions of our U.S. Constitutional for internal improvements and realigned to serve as a money machine for speculation. This system is unsustainable.

Government

What if a social crisis becomes so severe as to make our government a hapless agency and our elected representatives dysfunctional in addressing the practical problems we face? Then we are stuck with reaching into ourselves and administering good doses of self-development aimed at becoming an effective vanguard for overhauling, if necessary, doctrines and institutions ruling our political affairs.

The key to government is its relation to those being governed. Are we to be governed as citizens or as subjects? Is the citizen to be actually empowered to rule national and local policies and practices? If so, how? And what must we bring to the table to be effective administrators of justice and decent conditions of life?

Consider the American 1865–1877 Reconstruction experiment, which attempted a wider reach of federal-government activism. What was its social aim? What were the political means? Who was the citizen in this context?

The emancipated slave, supposedly elevated from status of property to that of citizen, was to be the vanguard of an entire transformation of Southern Society from plantation to industrial system. Military enforcement of laws coupled with infusion of free-market capital were the means of securing the objective. But the citizenry, both in defeated South and victorious North, was not sufficiently prepared to understand and sustain the mission. After the Northern population lost interest in salvaging the civil rights of Blacks, the same forces of Northern capitalism who argued that employing Federal powers for such a noble venture as Black liberation went too far, turned the Federal power to disciplining the emerging forces of organized labor in the North.

Let’s consider another model: Al Gore’s Reinventing Government, which reintroduced market forces as supposed corrective agency of federal government excesses. This changed two fundamental axioms of governance: the public budget became a larger version of the household budget; and the citizen became a mere consumer, with our government as a dispensary supported by public-relations and complaint departments.

Proponents spelled out four principles for employing the federal agency of government to current social development:

• Putting customers (the American taxpayers) first
• Cutting red tape
• Empowering employees to get results
• Cutting government back to basics

Can a mere consumer and complainer meet the demands of governing a people, national interest and historical challenge?

Setting up shop

One aspect of recent political ferment is the Occupy movement. Borrowing from that playbook, what would it mean to occupy the party? That is, how do we do it and what would we gain by it?

Political party can be cursed with factions undermining each other for advantages of power. But the party also provides means for citizens having no property, title or rank a chance at organizing power bases to advance their shared interest.

What do we have to work with so far, as Multnomah County Democrats?

• A platform as policy-program base
• Policy groups and legislative action teams under auspices of Platform, Resolution & Legislative Action Committee
• Communication group capable of stretching our core into our precincts and across our counties, including the County Democrats Reader as forum for engagement

So now we need to create pipelines of engagement and development among our disengaged neighbors. Where should we begin?

• Identify your interest. Without that interest, what’s your motivation for becoming politically active?
• Develop that interest, through engagement of other people. As you engage other people, embrace their interests as well. Carefully work out a meeting of minds.
• Organize a constituency to advance that interest. Start with your family. Then meet your neighbors.
• Establish your home base as a meeting place for your collaborators and you, to work out your collective interest. Prepare your home as a place of information, conversation and planning.
• Learn about your party. How does it work? How can you make it work for you? What stands in the way?
• Learn about your district and its precincts.
• Identify, meet and engage your legislator, party leaders and precinct leaders.
• Participate in district and county party meetings to help identify and join together in powerful actions for the common good.

The Crux

Political elites are unavoidable even in democratic societies. If anyone among a people understand and know some important principles and courses of action not widely understood, if empowered to act in behalf of the whole, then they are, in fact, elite — a select group. The question is: what is the nature of that elite? Is it merit, or does it at some point become an unmerited privilege? Does the general population advance under such leadership into a popular intelligentsia or is it relegated to standing outside closed doors and cheering on designated heroes?

In a sense, the classroom teacher is an elite person, but she or he, being tasked with advancing the classroom students to a higher stage of thinking and know-how, makes the teacher a vital instrument in our social development.

So, should we not reckon in our political culture this state of affairs?

For in-depth study:

Revolution or Reform? — Rosa Luxemburg

Mass Strike — Rosa Luxemburg

Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money — Thomas Paine

A Short History of Reconstruction — Eric Foner