The End of the Progressive Murphy Myth
Looking at images of Governor Murphy in Camden, hamming it up with former Republican Governor Chris Christie and Democratic party boss George Norcross, a single thought came to mind: Murphy jumped the shark. The expression “jump the shark” derives from an episode of “Happy Days” in which Fonzie literally jumps over a shark while on water skis. Since then the expression has become shorthand for something that is publicly still going on but really is played out, over.
Murphy, of course, is not over. He’s running for President. His decision to hobnob with two Trump associates may be part of a plan to relocate himself on the political spectrum. Or maybe he just wants access to the party boss’s vast fortune come campaign time. But the show of “Murphy as Progressive” has jumped the shark. It’s time for NJ progressives to change the channel, to change their strategy, to rethink their theory of change. Murphy jumped the shark and it’s a gift to the progressive movement if we are smart enough to seize it.
The Endless Disappointments of Top Down Change
“I had high hopes for Murphy” — many progressives have told me this, often in a tone of bitter disappointment. I never quite harbored those same high hopes, I think because of my lived experience. As a lifelong South Jerseyan, what I’ve seen of political power is that you are either with the political machine or an enemy of it. You pledge fealty, get a patronage job or maybe get shuffled into office. Or you can question the machine and you’re a problem that has to be quashed. Those are really the only two paths available to those paying attention to politics below the federal level. Over the years, I have consistently been the “problem that has to be quashed.”
What’s more, growing up working class, I absorbed ideas about politicians and powerholders — that they are far away, living very different, foreign lives we can’t understand and they can’t understand ours. I don’t think this is a completely unreasonable view. After all, most of our lawmakers are millionaires. Our government is by and large a plutocracy.
I watched Murphy with interest but have never subscribed to the notion that a single politician could or would save us. This, after all, is what our nation does every presidential race and it keeps us stuck in a vicious cycle of euphoria and despair. Placing all your hopes in one person is pretty disempowering. All you can do is vote, hope, and wait.
Time for a New Theory of Change
Over the past few years, the idea that progressives should offer Murphy political cover and avoid him as target has been vigorously advanced in some corners. The reasons for this are probably varied but I think at the heart was a limiting theory of change, a narrow reading of Alinsky’s structure based organizing, or perhaps an attempt to apply what works well in workplace organizing to the less straightforward work of building power to topple a political machine, work that really requires distributed and momentum based organizing.
Keeping close to power may help you extract transactional wins but I don’t believe it gets you big system change. And a close alignment with power comes with risk. Yes, you may get some wins. But in the process, you may end up trading away principles. You may end up trading away people.
The next wave of statewide progressivism needs to be grounded in momentum based organizing. This path lets us access the best of structure based organizing — the skills and tactics. But it is undergirded by the transformative vision of protests and mass mobilizations. That is what we need to break up machine politics and put power in the hands of the people.
What Needs to Shift
I’ve been thinking deeply and reading voluminously about what a reinvented progressive movement would look like. I am currently most invested in three important shifts. Those shifts are: 1. metrics (the way we measure change), 2. targets and tactics (the way we make change), and 3. audience (who we make change with and for).
Rethinking Metrics
To date, the progressive movement has tracked success and failure electorally. If we win elections, we’re winning. If we lose elections, we’re losing. That makes sense to a point but those aren’t the only metrics available to us. There are other numbers. The number of people on our membership lists. The number of actions we hold. The number of people at actions. The number of people we train. Etc. etc.
And there are ways to track progress beyond numbers such as listening to shifts in public narrative, the stories people are telling about the way power operates. When I first began organizing in South Jersey, people often told me I was going to get myself killed. Worse yet, they sometimes told my parents this. My father has lived his whole life one town over from the place where Sweeney and Norcross grew up. My dad’s a decade older and watched them set up shop. People’s warnings made him nervous. Everyone believed it was dangerous to question the way things are in South Jersey, to dare to find your voice. No one criticized “he who should not be named.”
But now that has changed. The landscape has shifted considerably, for a variety of reasons. I would certainly not credit South Jersey Progressive Dems alone as the source of all that seismic activity nor would it say the shifts are wholly positive. Things are uncertain, destabilized and in that, I see opportunity. I know some will say, “well whose stories are you listening to? It has to be the empirical data of polling or the narratives of powerholders swapped in back rooms.” I disagree. What people on the ground believe is an indication of what is possible.
Rethinking Targets & Tactics
Progressives need to make smart decisions about targets, not bank on the notion that if we make nice with powerholders maybe they’ll reward us, throw us a bone. (We’re not dogs. Why should we be catching bones?) It isn’t our jobs to shepherd incumbents back into office with the hopes of enjoying favors or sharing clout. The decisions about who to target for change should be based on who can make that change.
For too long, the progressive movement has been sitting around waiting on the result of a lawsuit about ballot design. Legal tactics can be powerful (though as Roe has reminded us, legal wins can be overturned!) but we should have developed a toolbox full of tactics to accompany it, tied to an overarching strategy that could be edited and evolve over time. Legal strategies and lobbying have their place but publicly facing tactics are not expendable. They are the lifeblood of the movement. Without them, we’re not visible. And if we’re not visible, we’re not growing, we’re not building power.
Rethinking Audience
Just as some bought into the idea that progressives should censor any criticism of Murphy, too much of the work in the past has been aimed at winning the respect of the establishment. The theory seems to go like this: if you prove to the powers that be that you are smart and capable, they’ll work with you. You just need to garner the wins and press attention to stand out, to charm them. To me, this theory is based on a flawed assumption that people in power will voluntarily share power, that they will decide on their own to align with the people rather than fellow powerholders.
We should be working to reframe public narratives on the causes we care about. Our messaging should be pointed towards the public, should include the public, should be collaborative, visionary and loud. We don’t need politicians’ approval to work to change public narratives. We just need to get to work and stay at work, always rooted on the ground, getting the message out.
The End of the Murphy Myth
Murphy stepping into the party boss’s warm embrace is an opportunity for the progressive movement to step back and reassess both the strategies we invested in and the timeline we made assumptions about. The machine hasn’t been dismantled during Murphy’s time in office. All that means is that change is still underway. Politicians don’t make change; people do. Politicians merely ratify it.
Just as one man was never going to dismantle the machine, the timeline for change was never going to neatly align with one politician’s term in office. To quote Rebecca Solnit, change is “a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.” Only the people can do that kind of collective, continuous work of wearing away what is wrong and building to construct something new. Progressives who are surprised today by Murphy have a new opportunity to return to the grassroots to join the movement at work. South Jersey Progressive Dems will meet you there.
