Jobs, not cuts: Moveon.org’s American Dream movement flounders

Yesterday, 255 affiliates of the progressive organization, Moveon.org, held rallies throughout the United States to protest recent debt ceiling deal cuts and call for “jobs not cuts.” Most of these rallies aimed to show that cuts in spending cannot solve the US unemployment crisis. They targeted congressional representatives who voted for the massive cuts and hoped to spark a national grassroots movement to challenge Tea Party extremism.

I attended the first meeting of a local North Carolina chapter back in July, before the debt ceiling crisis materialized. Despite the good intentions of participants, I immediately sensed that Moveon.org had a difficult road ahead. Only about a quarter of the 40 people who signed up attended the meeting. Though Moveon.org said this was going to be a truly grassroots movement, they submitted a heavy-handed eight-page meeting agenda to organizers throughout the country.

We were first to go around the room and share our—mostly quite depressing—personal stories of suffering and loss since the beginning of the 2008 economic crash. We were all good sports about it, but it didn’t do much to energize us. Then we were to pick our top priorities from a list of 40 progressive policy suggestions geared toward economic revival and protecting the nation’s social safety net. These were not uncomplicated, slogan-driven suggestions. One example:

Impose a tiny tax on every Wall Street trade. A tax of just 1/20th of a penny on every trade could raise more than $100 billion annually with little impact on actual investment. Speculation, “flash trading” and outrageous bonuses would be reduced and we’d have a lot more money to pay for programs that Main Street needs.

And another:

One reason that the rich do not pay their fair share is that the tax on capital gains is capped at 15%. In the past, companies reinvested capital gains to avoid paying taxes. Now they do not need to. Hedge fund managers’ income also should be taxed as income, not as capital gains, so that hedge fund managers have to pay their fair share.

On their own, they’re not terribly complicated, but even our highly educated group, which included university professors and others with advanced degrees, found it hard to parse all 40 of our choices and decide upon priorities within the allotted two hours. After the meeting, Moveon.org promised to tally the national votes to determine the issues that we found most galvanizing—this way, they would determine the focus of the movement just in time for a nation-wide protest scheduled for August 10. Organizer Myra Schwartz of North Carolina says, “I do agree that [message-creation is] a challenge, since we do not have our own news network or deep pockets of corporate sponsorship… One challenge will be to present a unified message…because simple is often better, and yet we know as progressives that real concerns are hard to pin down to a bumper sticker.”

But the debt ceiling agreement angered liberals and progressives throughout the country and ultimately put an end to this nonsense. Progressive Americans went reeling in response to this legislation, which includes massive spending cuts but no catalyst for new job creation. “Jobs not cuts” provided a straightforward, understandable rallying cry, and we were all spared the burden of creating slogans based on things like imposing slight taxes on Wall Street trades or taxing hedge fund managers.

So, Moveon.org dodged the message problem, but judging from news reports, it still failed to present a unified, nation-wide cause to the media. Reports of modest local rallies abound, but they mostly fail to communicate that these local gatherings were part of a nation-wide day of protest.

These news reporters are certainly guilty of simplistic, under-researched reporting, but Moveon.org surely shares some of the blame. Better attention to press release distribution and a better-publicized call for nation-wide action would have gone a long way to fix this problem. Instead, small protests are framed by the media as local gatherings that are operating on their own—and completely outside of any kind of national campaign. Yes, Moveon.org is said to be involved, but these are just local affiliates doing local actions. This was careless and negligent planning. Progressives should have learned this from the Tea Party—that is, while various actions happen in local contexts, movements gain political influence by casting themselves as a unified, nation-wide political force.

Still, organizer Rohima Miah says, “I do think we focused on the main issue of jobs—and the need to continue to provide a social safety net for the less fortunate. We also tried to express our desire to make America a better place for all, not just for the wealthy.” Schwartz adds that, “We strongly got our message out, got folks passing by interested, and delivered Moveon.org’s American Dream Contract to [a state representative’s] office to let her know that not all of her constituents want to cut the deficit if it means cutting programs that help those in need to survive and move up.”

But there are other disconnects. Joshua Holland’s astute analysis at Alternet argues that it’s going to be difficult to rally progressives using a Tea Party-influenced mode of social organizing. Yet comparisons between the two have been encouraged by Moveon.org. At the meeting in July, for example, organizers were encouraged to stress that we were starting out bigger than the Tea Party.

But individual activists do not necessarily see the Moveon.org project as a direct foil for the Tea Party. Schwartz says:

I am not getting the sense at all that the American Dream movement is a mirror version of the Tea Party. From my experience thus far…with this group, we are of all ages, backgrounds, experiences and faiths and are not bound by some sort of “burning hate” for a certain group or policy, unless you would call disdain for unbalanced tax policy and failure to invest in America’s future a type of hatred. From conversations, I have found that we read all sorts of materials to form our own opinions, and we rely heavily on research, science, goodwill and the belief that government can work for the good of all if the people force it to work for the good of all.

Therein lies part of the problem. Schwartz characterizes some of the online criticisms:

I got a kick out of reading the comments on the [local news] website where the article about the protest was posted—lots of talk about “socialists” and “they were paid to protest” and “they are parroting what Obama says,” “why don’t they get a job” and “they have an agenda to ruin America” type postings. Those are the folks who will be especially hard (or maybe impossible) to reach!

She’s right, of course. The thing to remember, though, is that progressives have been struggling since George W. Bush’s presidency to articulate a common political narrative and message. Schwartz rightly points out that we tend to prize researched analysis and nuanced argumentation—things that usually fail to galvanize mass movements. The Tea Party, by contrast, knows how to capitalize and feed on mass anger and political alienation in ways that energize people. After hearing about all the suffering that federal policies have wrought back in July, I just felt deflated and tired.

I’m not saying that we need to take up the Tea Party’s anti-intellectualism to gain popular traction, but I do think we need to take up the populist messages they’ve cornered. That’s what historically galvanizes the masses in the United States. Yes, uncritical populism tends to be reactionary and conservative, and, yes, we need to be careful about that. “Jobs not cuts” was a good start at streamlining, but we need to continue crystallizing the ways in which recent policies hurt regular people. Instead of becoming mired in erudite analysis and paralyzing melancholia, we need to keep finding ways to energize and empower people. Toward that end, we stand to learn a lot from the Tea Party, so let’s pay attention. Let’s do more organizing and less talking; Americans are in pretty dire straits right now, and there’s no time or energy to lose.

Front page photo: a Wisconsin protester holding a sign with “Reality” and “Tea Party Meeting” pointing in opposite directions, 2011. Photo by Wispolitics.com, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.