For those of you that don't regularly read Al Giordano's campaign analysis at The Field, um, you should.
Al Giordano's perspective on the Presidential contest is fascinating. A long-time leftist activist and organizer who left the country in opposition to Clinton centrism, Mr. Giordano has broken with many in the anti-globalization/anti-capitalist ranks to enthusiastically support Barack Obama's candidacy.
I'm personally loving this: As a longstanding community organizer, journalist and foot soldier on the left (with the scar tissue upon scar tissue and a string of hard-won victories to prove it) my frustration with the ineffectiveness of so many that consider themselves also of the left in the United States in recent years has boiled over. I am so sick of having to be lumped in with those masturbatory practitioners of bad performance art that they call activism. Really. I had to leave the country 11 years ago to find better change-agents worth reporting on.
And suddenly, along comes a political candidate inside the United States - a category of person from the last place I expected this to come from - giving a nationwide teach-in and lesson-in-civics about how to effectively organize for change.
Here's an unspoken little secret: The success of Obama's campaign challenges those that still subscribe to broken patterns of activism - whether the zombie-like attempt to repeat the completely coopted street protest tactics of 1968 (or of 1999) or the academic purity troll approach that complains without even attempting to organize real people - and is driving various of them absolutely crazy with envy.
To every fellow and sister of the left that, practically on automatic pilot, bemoans that Obama has taken center stage when it comes to organizing for change in the United States (I've heard your whispers about "We can't wait to see Al disillusioned in 2009! That'll show him!" as if you're actually hoping for bad news), I say: Show me the better plan.
Show me how you are effectively organizing real people. Show me how you stopped the Clinton machine in the 1990s from auctioning off the Democratic Party (oops, too late!). Show me how you stopped the war in Iraq. Show me a single political battle you that have won with your tired old tactics and "framing" of "issues." Then I'll take your complaining more seriously.
The skinny kid with the big ears that don't look like the men on dollar bills is doing, right here, right now, what none of you complaining about him have accomplished: He's built a nationwide grassroots organization - and trained thousands in the nuts and bolts of how to do it on the local level - in a way that facilitates simultaneous horizontal organization and that can sustain the kind of pluralism that says: hey, you don't like the way I'm doing it? Do it yourself then!
I'm glad that this is happening in my lifetime. For a long time, I doubted that it would.
That's so well-articulated it's almost criminal. Giordano's long-view analysis of social movement structures, tactics, and most of all, opportunities fits a theorist's (though he's more of a doer than a thinker) historical context onto this campaign in a way that is incredibly useful. Even the best campaign analysis (TPM) loses a lot of perspective being bogged down in the day-to-day minutia of surrogate conference calls, etc.
Al Giordano also hosted the New Orleans panel at Netroots Nation '08.
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