>Or you could say that the "Left" - whatever that is exactly - got so
>wrapped up in electoral politics (which includes lobbying elected
>officials) that it forgot to build a constituency.
Name one self-identified Left group that does any electoral work except for the month before an election? Even DSA is not doing much these days to take over Democratic County organizations, as the Christian Coalition and the Gingrichites did throughout the 80s and 90s on the GOP side. Organizations like unions and the NAACP do electoral work, but the Left in any self-identified and organizational way has abandoned the effort almost completely.
And lobbying is not electoral work-- it's leaching off the electoral work of others mostly. A lot of leftists bash unions for their electoral work choices, but depend on the fact that unions keep some progressive Democrats in office in order to pass any of their favorite policies.
What is "building a constituency"? Organizing a union to win concrete power in a workplace I understand. But all organizing has to have goals and the exercise of power in mind and part of any policy gains in a democracy is winning elections. Lobbying, protesting, marching-- they all only matter if they change policy and that only happens if politicians making the wrong policy are replaced or the threat of their replacement is so credible that they change their voting patterns to prevent their own ouster.
The problem is that too much of the left does the protesting and marching with little strategic vision of how it relates to the electoral results. Electoral work is not just door-knocking at election time-- it's analyzing 435 Congressional districts and 100 Senate races and figuring out what issues will undercut the coalitions supporting the opposition. Republicans regularly focus on what they call "wedge" issues that they hope will pit labor against environmentalists, the poor and the middle class, gays against working class communities, and so on. The Right doesn't just try to win issues that they want; they pick issues that will destroy the coalitions that support a whole range of policies they oppose. Conservatives don't just like school vouchers ideologically-- they see it as a wedge issue to divide Catholics and inner-city blacks from the public school unions.
The Left largely lacks both organizational vehicles for long-term strategic electoral work and a strategic vision on how to use the issues its working on to upset opposing political coalitions that currently support conservative politics.
-- Nathan Newman