From Foreclosure to Fair Lending by Chester Hartman

Author:Chester Hartman [Hartman, Chester; Squires, Gregory D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781613320143
Publisher: New Village Press

A New Political Bloc to Advance Our Long-Term Agenda

One of the verities community organizers inherited from the 1970s was, with a few exceptions, an aversion to electoral politics. The thinking was that getting involved with elections could compromise the ability to be oppositional. Many community organizers saw liberal and progressive groups in other sectors get too caught up in the inside game where Democratic Party operatives called the shots. It may have made sense at the time, but this approach is no longer sufficient if organizations are serious about building power to move a transformational agenda. As we build relationships and alliances and foster a powerful infrastructure, we need a strategy for exercising power in the electoral arena—critically independent power, with an inside-outside strategy. This calls for increased focus on building 501c4 and 527 organizations with significant and independent sources of financing.

An imperative we face today is the need to break open the narrowness of the current political debate. The limits we see in electoral and legislative arenas reflect how leaders in both parties are unwilling to rein in abusive corporations. This spells the need for a new political force that can pull politics in a new direction, creating space for candidates who want to lead us toward a new economy. Eventually, this independent electoral force would be sizable enough to actually inform the politics and decisions of both parties. It would reward elected officials who are willing to put principles over party and it would take on corporatist Democrats. This is one of the ways in which the forces we have in mind would be independent, for this electoral force would bring repercussions to bear against anyone who continued to favor the consolidation of financial power in the hands of the few at the expense of shared prosperity, opportunity, and inclusion for the rest of us.

Creating an independent force does require dealing with the tension between two hard realities. On the one hand, we are far from a moment that will give way to an alternative progressive or populist party. On the other, neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party is likely to become the party we need or want anytime soon. Which means that we have to work both outside of as well as within the current two-party structure, and make it work for us.

Everything we do on the inside must be linked to democratic organization that is deeply rooted in independent community, labor, and faith-based movements. Because we have not been so good at navigating these tensions over the past forty years, it’s been bit of an either-or strategy. We either tend to get drawn into the inside game, losing our critical independence, or we have opted out of electoral politics altogether and largely have been an oppositional force. Neither is sufficient.

There are many historic models of independent political organizing that we can draw upon for inspiration: from the white abolitionists and black political leaders who came together in the 1840s and 1850s to the suffragists

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