Martin,
You don’t remember me. When you were in a tough primary 9 years ago, I came to your office to discuss marriage equality. You’d answered a question about marriage for LGBT couples with some weasel words designed not to offend. (I was offended.)
I presented 5 years of data from 13 states, and your eyes glazed over as you tried to figure out how to get me out of your office. Now you’re a Senator, and I’ve retired from a successful movement to change the law so that Mississippi is as free as Massachusetts, and we need to talk…again. Democrats lost an election, and its results threaten the country.
There are 3 things I want you to know as our nation faces an unprecedented crisis:
1. Every un-American and malevolent action of the new administration spreads alarm. As a leader in the opposition, you are talking to a new audience: Americans who haven’t been involved in politics. They need leadership, and that means seeing someone who has risen inside the system simply, clearly and consistently say ‘no’ to our country using its immense power to do bad things to innocent people. (See how I built that sentence?) One thing you can count on for the coming months is that the new administration will use executive power to do cruel, irrational things to vulnerable Americans. So how our elected leaders describe what is happening is going to save the republic.
2. One of the ideas I tried to explain, that day in March 2008, was the notion of ‘losing forward’. Losing forward means that we set up a moral choice for the majority of voters who don’t already care deeply about the outcome. Do you want to line up with them, the people who think ‘tough’ means putting a 5-year-old in handcuffs? Or do you belong with us, the movement that says America is too strong and powerful to beat up on immigrants? We’re not going to win those fights — the executive branch sets immigration policy — but there are ways to lose that make the majority look at us with fresh eyes. Not as the powerless losers who can’t stop Trump (that’s his frame) but as the superheroes who are standing for what is right and good about our nation, despite the odds.
3. No one alive has been in this situation. While I respect the experience in parliamentary procedure shown by @SenSchumer, and the rebellious instincts that drive Senators Sanders and Warren, they got where they are by winning elections in progressive states. To recapture a source of political power peacefully — and yes, I believe that is the crisis we face today — the skills of those who have used civil resistance to win impossible fights will be needed. Rep. John Lewis, whose response to last week’s travesty (federal agents refusing to inform him who they held in custody, against a court order) was to take a seat and wait, has a lot of teach all of us about how to move the middle. It’s not with compromise. We cannot compromise with what is illegitimate and immoral.
In our present situation, I think this is how we ‘lose forward’:
*Make the argument for American values and principles tailored to the crisis of the week. Keep it simple — test it on your own 8th grader if you have one, or borrow one, but lay it out in clear language. Use positive images: immigration reform that respects families, budgets that keep our elders living independently, etc. You’re good at this; see if you can get any…more experienced…Democrats to follow your lead.
* Rely on activists to dramatize injustice and create crisis. Last weekend, a spontaneous nationwide resistance proved that chaos can work for good. We pressured judges to solve a crisis we set up — had no one showed up at IAD, there would be some devastated immigrant families, but no crisis. We need you to use your platform to simply state the problem: This administration is breaking our nation’s word to these families for no reason; they’ve already been checked out thoroughly. They put a kindergartener in handcuffs because his mom was born in a Muslim nation — that’s just not right.
* Choose fights that let us do our part. We know you can’t stop the United States Senate from seating a radical Republican activist judge in the SCOTUS. We won’t stop agitating when you lose that fight, or blame you for his participation in terrible decisions. We need you to articulate the reasons this is part of a crisis (that’s Merrick Garland’s seat, to Americans who voted for Obama in 2012). Explain to those who aren’t already resisting WHY so many of us reject the crisis Republican politicians in Congress have created. They may not join in, but they will hear a link between the movement and the outcome they want: their country should be free and fair again.
* Use tactics that let us align the movement with Democrats. Vote no. Make short speeches about why. Refuse a quorum, to make the news chase that rabbit instead of whether the nominee is qualified. But don’t explain. I beg you, do not vote to approve anything this administration does and tell voters why. Hillary Clinton will take your call if you need more info about where ‘I did it, and here’s why’ will get you in this polarized time.
That brings me to the closing argument: Listen to Black Lives Matter and their elders, like John Lewis. Learn from the Serbian resistance, which overthrew a democratically elected nightmare without violence. All the knowledge we’ve developed as activists, in fights where we had no chance to succeed, are worth as much as all the political consulting money can buy right now. There are only a few Americans alive today who can tell us what it’s like to win what everyone, deep down, knows is right when moral right has no leverage in the halls of power. You can use the power of the deliberative body in ways that will let the resistance follow you into the voting booth, when the time comes.
Meanwhile: We’re going to resist, and we want you to oppose.
