The Third Party That’s Winning
http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/04/the-third-party-thats-winning/
That was just one of several big successes for the Working Families Party around the country this fall, perhaps the most notable being the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio and a progressive slate of candidates in New York City — including Public Advocate Letitia James, the first black woman to hold citywide office, and Melissa Mark-Viverito, the first Latina Speaker of the Council. These WFP candidates are expected to push a progressive agenda for New York that includes expanding paid sick days, levying a tax on the wealthy to fund universal pre-kindergarten, and much more. The New York City victories have attracted new attention to how the WFP exercises power at the ballot box and in city and state legislatures, leveraging quirks in local electoral systems and existing progressive bases to make a third party viable.
But it is the ways that Working Families is wielding its power outside of liberal New York that deserve a closer look. As public discontent with mainstream Democrats builds, is it possible for a third party to grow — not by running a famous big name on a presidential ticket, but from the bottom up? And if it succeeds at that task, can Working Families pull national politics back in the direction of ordinary people and away from the one percent?
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When the major parties agree, as they often do in supporting, say, corporate-style education reform, a third party can promote ideas and issues that would be otherwise neglected. In Oregon, for example, the WFP worked with local student groups to put forward a plan for rethinking college funding. They found a WFP-backed Democrat to sponsor it, and the measure wound up passing unanimously in the state legislature. The party is now working on a bill that would create a state bank to invest Oregon’s public money at home instead of with Wall Street and provide cheaper loans to state residents. Such proposals are unlikely to come from the major parties, which each receive massive campaign contributions from big banks, even at the state level.
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It all comes down, in the end, to how power gets built. It requires coalitions and trust; institutional support and enthusiastic activists; lots of organizing, and perhaps most of all, a willingness to pick the right fights. Bertha Lewis knows perhaps better than anyone else how hard those fights can be. But she thinks they’re worth it. “Sometimes, in years past, you couldn’t tell a Democrat from a Republican. No one wanted to talk about race; no one wanted to talk poverty. This whole conversation that we’re having nationally about inequality is because [groups like WFP] kept to our principles and our ideas and kept saying, ‘There is inequality, there is inequality, there is inequality.’ ”
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