Where's the Movement?

[BEZERKO]

This is an article by George Lakoff published earlier in the year. I think the elements he lists as being necessary for a progressive movement are dead on.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/wheres-the-movement_b_435045.html">Where's the movement?


In the emerging Obama mythology, this is the question attributed to President Obama whenever he is asked to take the lead on a progressive issue. It is not an idle question. Leaders can only lead if there is a pre-existing movement for them to get in front of.

Moreover, there are other conditions. The idea behind a movement, and the language expressing its goals, must also pre-exist in public discourse. In other words, the movement must already have:

• a popular base;
• organizing tools;
• a generally accepted morally-based conceptual framing;
• an overall narrative, with heroes, victims, and villains;
• a readily recognizable, well-understood language;
• funding sources;
• and a national communication system set up for both leaders and ordinary citizens to use.

The base is there, waiting for something worth getting behind. The organizing tools are there. The rest is not there.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/wheres-the-movement_b_435045.html

[Ozymanithrax]

1. Well, if you define leadership as finding a mob to run in front of... n/t

[BEZERKO]

2. Or maybe leaders or leadership is more like the face of the movement

I remember reading a few years ago, I don't remember the exact phrase, but it went something like 'leaders don't give rise to movements, movements give rise to leaders.'

[Ozymanithrax]

3. I think movements are opportunities for leaders to emerge...

Not everyone answers that knock. There is a dearth of such leaders today.

I'm awaiting a twenty-first century Gandhi.

[BEZERKO]

4. Actually, I was just trying to post to my journal,

but I had to go through a DU forum to post to my journal. I'm just saying what I've started tonight is a work in progress. I haven't been politically active for that long. Less than most DU members, I'm guessing. I joined my county party and started going to meetups in 2003, and there was and still is a lot to learn. Something was wrong with the progressive movement and the Democratic party, but I couldn't put my finger on it. There was just this sense that they were too tentative and too willing to concede and surrender. This was before I had ever heard of George Lakoff, and it was before all of the fantastic books we've since read by Lakoff, Drew Westen, Jeffrey Feldman, Naomi Klein, Barbara Ehrenreich, etc. I didn't realize that I had one advantage over most of the people who were more experienced than me in political advocacy. And the advantage that I had was that I had no experience, which meant no pre conceived notions, no college political science classes, no brainwashed drilling in conventional political wisdom or emotional investment in the traditional fundamentals of political activism. I was watching C-span in 2003 when Jeff Faux, a N.E. berry farmer and founder of the Economic Policy Institute gave a speech, and it was like he was reading my mind. He talked about how Democrats in recent history had developed a troubling habit of conceeding the big story in order to win smaller policy battles. Bill Clinton in '94 famously said before the two houses of congress and the american people "The era of big government is over." He said that this might work for a short while, but conceeding the big picture was having a destructive effect on their ability to realize progressive victories. He called the ideas that Democrats were conceding defeat to were "crackpot ideas." More to the point, he talked about how conservative activists had "made room in the culture" for their leaders to push America (toward a cliff) toward a more conservative future. That's all I want my DU journal to be about. Develolpment of a cognitive policy that will lead to the realization of a more widely understood progressive worldview and hopefully make the enactment of progressive material policy a reality.