A little more than a year after the 2016 election the Democrats and left wing politics in general finds themselves in a promising, though somewhat uncertain position.

On the one hand, their electoral fortunes have increased dramatically, driven by a backlash against the historically unpopular Trump Administration, the Republican Congress, and local Republicans like Chris Christie who have ineptly mismanaged state and local governments around the country. It took a little while for this to materialize, but when contests finally moved into more competitive ground in the 2017 elections the Democrats swept them. At this point Democrats are swinging districts by something like 10 points on average, and their lead on generic ballots are just as large. If they maintain or increase these margins, and historical precedence suggests they almost certainly will, they will sweep state elections next years and may even win back the Congress despite historic levels of gerrymandering and an awful Senate map. Even if Trump and Republicans maintain control of Congress and stave off impeachment it seems inevitable that by 2020 they’ll essentially just be locking themselves into Versailles, waiting for the rest of the country to burst in and get rid of them once and for all.

But on the other hand, almost no one would attribute these wins to any particular enthusiasm for the Democratic party. They didn’t win the elections on the basis of any particular unifying issue or ideological vision. They got the better end of the healthcare debate, sure, but that was surprisingly low profile during the campaigns themselves. Their campaigns weren’t anything exceptional, nor were they driven by particularly charismatic figures. There were good candidates in the race down ballot, of course, and they were great by and large, but they only achieved anything like a national profile after the election. The two most high profile Democratic candidates were a Wall Street financier on the one hand, and a guy whose tepid middle of the road style was hardly inspiring.

As for the Democratic leadership, if anything they’ve been a liability. I’m not sure the revelations about DNC shenanigans in 2015-2016 had much impact at the polls, but between the power plays at the DNC, efforts to tamp down on impeachment talk, the inability of the party brass to craft a convincing message, and repeated failures at the nuts and bolts of running political organizations (if you went canvassing for the Northam campaign, you probably remember that they had chronic logistical problems for months at a time), almost all the news from that front is discouraging. The fact that candidates like Lee Carter wracked up impressive wins despite being cut off by the Virginia Democratic party suggests that their impact on races was something around nil. In terms of broader public perceptions, a Saturday Night Live sketch skewering in the week after the 2017 elections may have approximated public perceptions of them pretty closely.

In other words, by most accounts, the Republicans were beaten by a public backlash and the Democrats benefited even if they weren’t doing a particularly good job harnessing that backlash. This led some to conclude none of this really matters. Whatever their flaws, Democrats are benefiting from a favorable political environment, and when political environments are favorable it tends to lift all boats electorally.

The idea that political fortunes are often determined by a broad set of factors largely outside of a party’s control is probably accurate. Sometimes that’s even a good thing to remember, not every election is a vindication/rejection of some particular ideology. But in this context it’s not a very helpful observation. So what if 90% of any given election result comes down to the wider political environment? It’s the 10% we care about. Furthermore, it’s not like people and political movements can’t actively change the political environment, they certainly can. Figuring out how to do that is essential to turning electoral wins into routs and consolidating political gains after the winds have changed.

The Democrats still have a long way to go in working this out. The answer is out there, among the people, but it needs to be brought together and crystallized into a strategy. For those of us who want to translate it into results, we have two ways to try to go about this. If the Democratic party continues on as it has, trying to work out the answer while remaining insular and driven by top down attempts to control the direction of the party I’m convinced the party will remain in the doldrums, even if it does win the next election or two. Only the active efforts motivated voters on the left taking control of their political destinies can do this, and either the party needs to be opened to them, or they need to carving out some other significant means of asserting control over political and economic institutions. Only that can achieve a more permanent answer to our current troubles.

No More “Listening Tours”

The archetypal example of this top down approach for me is the “listening tour” and op-ed “dispatches from Trump country”. 2016 was the election that launched a thousand “listening tours.” Surprised by their dramatic misreading of the political climate, everyone from the Huffington Post to the Third Way to Facebook decided they try better understand the mysterious people of “middle America” by going on listening tours. Pretty much everyone else has periodically dispatched people periodically to this or that Midwestern industrial town or rural county or abandoned mine to figure out how people the people there are reacting to the world of Trump.

As (questionably) well-meaning as these efforts may be, they’re all hopelessly flawed. One problem is that, despite their professed desire to find answers by openly listening to people typically shut out of the public discourse, usually what they’re actually looking for is validation of whatever narrative frame they had going in. As many of those who read that piece on Third Way’s listening tour last month know, the people running these tours have an amazing capacity to take focus groups and extrapolate whatever they want. But even the best pieces tend to boil down to the same collage of disaffected people and shuttered factories. This isn’t an inaccurate picture in and of itself, but that was more or less what the elite opinion of the state of middle america was before the election. Then as now the prescription is always that they’re just the losers of inevitable globalization and nothing can be done for them besides placating them with cultural appeals and vague promises of “jobs jobs jobs”.

In all this, they’re missing tons of relevant details. Virtually none of these pieces will ever get into the fact that much of what the so much of what surprised the Democrat’s working class base last election was that they’ve confidence that they’d actually follow through on labor policy or things that would actually help them. Either that, or they spin it as though those things don’t appeal to them. They don’t get into the fact that, whatever Trump’s appeal to industrial working class voters, his base is still basically the same set of elderly, petite bourgeois suburbanites and rural voters who always vote Republican. In fact, they tend to treat these two very distinct groups almost interchangeably. Meanwhile, they don’t touch on the vast body of voters and non-voters who are don’t fit into some preset mold of what a blue collar person from middle America should look like.

But it’s not just that these “listening tours” are ineffective, they’re galling to the point of being counterproductive. I’m a Midwesterner who has plenty of friends and family who have seen their situation deteriorate depressingly in the last couple of decades, but neither they nor my home town look much like the narrow caricatures presented in this pieces. I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. When Politico ran a piece on Johnstown Pennsylvania after the election, they pissed off the residents. As one progressive group in Johnstown put it:

“We are OUTRAGED that this POLITICO reporter and EVERY reporter who comes to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is only looking to tell a story of American Carnage. … Many, many citizens here are not misogynistic, racists like the Neanderthals in this article. They are working hard to make a difference.”

Meanwhile, the residents of Monessan were so upset with their mayor Lou Mavrakis for playing to the stereotype that they voted him out of office in favor a young, progressive activist and band teacher Matt Shorraw (yes, Middle America has those too). Shorraw later went on to win the election handily, despite Mavrakis continuing to carry on a nasty and bizzare campaign even though he wasn’t actually on the ballot for anything.

But what the real problem with all these “listening tours” and “dispatches from Trump country” is the mindset that informs them. The whole notion rests on the idea that someone sees them-self as some sort of elevated steward of the political system, which is presumptuous and weird even if they think they deign to go out to darkest Wisconsin out of a sense of noblesse oblige. Whatever they say, they don’t really want a dialogue. They don’t want an exchange of ideas. They certainly don’t want to concede any sort of meaningful authority to people beyond empty platitudes of “real Americans.” What they want is a one way extraction of data points that they can manipulate for their own ends.

In this way, they’re part of a broader over-reliance on methods aimed at heading off, rather than addressing, popular sentiments. These methods take many forms. You see them in management techniques that people develop in order to placate workers without actually giving them anything. You see them in the way people use metadata analytics to boil down what large bodies of “want” rather than letting them decide for themselves. You see them in the way people craft overly complex pieces of policy that are inaccessible to people, designed to prod people through a thousand different means into doing what the draftee wants oblivious to the fact that people find that incredibly obnoxious. You see it in the way people reduce donor lists down things that are merely meant to be farmed for money, ignoring the fact that if people won’t donate to something if they’ve lost faith in it. You see it in the way people try to pick their voters, rather than letter voters pick them, through micro-targeting and district generating gerrymandering algorithms.

People can do a lot with these types of methods, but it’s exactly the over-reliance on these them that have made the political press, the broader political class, and the Democratic leadership in particular look like (and act like) something vaguely analogous to the aliens in Solaris. To a large part of the population, they’re just these vaguely distant allegedly living entities unable to interpret things that that would be obvious to a functioning human being. They periodically try to communicate with people by projecting their aspirations back at them in ways that are off by just enough to be unsettling. Most people suspect they’re possibly hostile, but they’re too inscrutable for anyone to say for certain.

And if I’m being perfectly honest, it isn’t just the leadership and people in high places doing it. Professional activists like to reduce their performance down to metrics like how many doors knocked and carefully formulated scripts that only present the appearance of dialogue. People would rather psycho-analyze and anthropomorphize the “average voter” rather than realize that they are the average vote. We like to think about ourselves as policy wonks, but don’t worry as much about the work of actually speaking to people. We nit pick and excoriate the deficiencies of everything, but we don’t carry out the crucial work of consensus building by demonstrating that our goals are really the goals of most people. My point here isn’t to play into the whole “liberal bubble” notion. Quite the opposite. I’d like to impress on everyone that you’re not insulated, you’re not removed from the broader political culture, and you’re not “out of touch”, not unless you choose to be anyways. Own that fact or people are going to keep telling you that “real america” is a bunch of horny handed Republicans until the end of time.

More Democracy

If there was a meaningful takeaway from the elections earlier this month, it’s that the Democrats did well because they showed up. We had more people running, we had more people volunteering, and at the end of the day, we got more people to the polls. This may sound like an empty truism, but it’s not. A large part of the reason Democrats won in so many places was because they fielded more candidates in more places than they usually do, forcing Republicans to try to play defense more places than usual. These weren’t simply placeholders either, they were people who clearly approached their candidacies very seriously, thought independently about how best to deal with the unique challenges of their constituencies, and had a clear passion for their policy positions. The energy was all self directed and coming from the ground up.

All this is a welcome contrast to 2016, when large portions of the electorate seemed to be consigned to the role of passive players in politics. They weren’t ambivalent, but they weren’t being asked for, nor did they provide, much input into the political process beyond voting and maybe doing a bit of the legwork of campaigning. This wasn’t unique to 2016, of course. Over the last few decades Democrats have been struggling to fill a void left by the gradual collapse of labor unions, which had not only carried on a large part of the nuts and bolts aspects of political campaigning, but by acting as something of a permanent conduit for large numbers of people to participate in a larger socioeconomic movement in a way that other NGOs simply can’t (e.g. the ACLU is great, but nobody is an ACLU household). And all this was happening at a time when the social movements of the 60s and 70s which had enfranchised and mobilized so many people were becoming increasingly demoralized. This was all exacerbated by the apparent belief by many in the party that they had to maintain distance from their activist base and their causes in order to maintain a viable electoral strategy.

At points, the left has successfully filled that void. In 2006 and 2008, revulsion with the Bush Administration and the Anti-War movement created renewed enthusiasm which prominent political figures actively tried to channel, first Howard Dean through his 50 state strategy and then Barack Obama through OFA. Democrats won those reelections, far beyond what could have been expected from a simple backlash against Republican extremism/incompetence, and they seemed poised to reshape the political landscape permanently. But after 2009, when Obama decided not to largely demobilize the OFA, use it for limited tactical purposes, and tie it up in the existing structures of the Democratic party and his administration.

From that vantage point, the explosion of grassroots participation is especially encouraging. More importantly, the effort is driven much more by its own initiative than it was in the past. While in a lot of ways this is still fairly passive, i.e. people are largely reacting to the Trump administration rather than specifically demanding something, there’s certainly a greater sense of people exercising a sense of ownership. People aren’t waiting to be recruited, they’re just running. People aren’t waiting to be recruited to run. More people are actively contesting internal Democratic party elections. Others are organizing for themselves through groups like Indivisible or the DSA, whose membership has mushroomed up several fold in the last year.

More active participation of this kind isn’t just good because it keeps the gears of political organizations turning, but because it rejuvenates them and leads to better policy. Democracy and upward mobility in both economic and political contexts isn’t just nice, it’s functional. The best way, and I’d argue only real way, for a party to speak to the public is for them to become a platform for the public to speak for themselves. The only way for a party leader to truly understand what people from different classes, sexual orientations, occupational groups, racial communities, or groups is for those leaders to be people from those classes, sexual orientations, occupational groups, racial communities, or other groups. Engendering the participation of people from such a broad range of perspectives creates more room for creative solutions to problems, it leads to more tenable consensuses, it offers a greater sense of meaning to the whole political process and so forth.

I encourage everyone to take active part in shaping the process. Don’t just be a part of something greater than yourself, make it your own. Volunteer on campaign, go to organizing meetings, etc. If you feel the traditional party or their campaigns are shutting you out or they’re too stifling, organize your own. There are plenty of options to chose from these days, you can find a chapter Our Revolution, DSA, Indivisible, or countless other groups relatively near-by. Better yet, organize your own chapter.

Even better still, run for something, in local elections, party elections, what have you. It may seem daunting, but everybody has to start somewhere. The advantages of controlling your own political destiny will outweigh the costs. Popular movements that rely on patronage from on high can quickly become rudderless if their patrons lose interest. If you rely on party recruiters and people on the political career track to field candidates, you’re going to find your party run by strivers and apparatchiks. If you leave crafting policy to the “professionals” you’re never truly going to see your interests represented. Participation will ensure that your views will be represented, and those of your community will always be represented. Don’t be discouraged if people deride you dismiss you or try to convince you that you have no right to participate directly in the electoral contests. Ultimately, there is no highest authority when it comes to politics.

And don’t just do this in the narrowly defined realm of politics. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, we live in an age when we need to decide whether the democratic forces of society will be able to overcome the autocratic influences of business, or whether they’ll be overcome by them. Try to form a union, take part in a boycott campaign, bring public accountability to your workplace, or church, or community. And in all your efforts, find the part of whatever it is you’re work on that speaks to you and channel it, bring your own insights, leave your mark.