Progressives gathering in D.C. to redirect focus from extremist rhetoric

Exactly one year ago, ABC News and Yahoo! News conducted a joint survey that revealed some depressing news. Across America, people from all walks of life were reporting that the torch that lit the way for generations of Americans as they staked their claim to the bounty of our nation was, for all intents and purposes, a thing of the past.

Asked if the singularly American ideal that success is all but guaranteed through hard work and perseverance was consistent with their experience, more than half of those surveyed said it was not. The American Dream, most agreed, is a relic from another time.

It’s easy to understand the respondents’ discouragement. A year ago the economy was on life support; and things are even worse today. At last count 14 million Americans are officially out of work (real joblessness is worse because that number doesn’t include large segments of the population who have given up looking for jobs, or people who are working part time because they can’t get a full-time job.)

“We’ve just sat here and watched Obama get beaten to a pulp and where have been our rallies, where are our protests, where are our marches for jobs,” said longtime civil rights activist and community organizer Van Jones.

On Sunday, a coalition of progressive groups led by Jones is gathering in Washington in an effort to raise their collective voice and take control of the nation’s political discourse back from what they say is a small but vocal minority of right-wing reactionaries, the tea party, who are out of touch with the values of most Americans. Jones’ mission is to join progressive groups under “a common banner” and to create what The Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel called an “independent people’s movement willing to challenge the grip of private interests on the public good.”

Jones formally inaugurated his “Rebuild the American Dream” movement over the summer, but this will be the group’s first national conference. It’s being organized in conjunction with the Campaign for America’s Future and will run through Tuesday in Washington, D.C. The organization is now called simply the “American Dream Movement.”

Meanwhile, American industry is a pale reflection of what it was 30 years ago, so there are fewer opportunities for all those jobless workers to find gainful, secure employment. Even new college graduates are facing limited choices, and many will wind competing for the same minimum wage restaurants and retail gigs as the newly unemployed.

By all accounts, things aren’t going to get better any time soon. In August the International Monetary Fund slashed its Gross Domestic Product forecast for the U.S. to 1.6 percent from the 2.5 percent estimate it made just two months earlier. Against this backdrop the nation’s leaders are engaged in a seemingly endless tit-for-tat that ensures more time will be spent on partisan rhetoric and name calling than on fixing the country.

Our collective hardships, and the inability of government to solve them, have generated widespread disillusionment and anger among a populace with a lot of extra time on its hands. Nearly two years ago, a small group of Republican activists funded by a handful of conservative nonprofit groups was able to exploit that discontent and forge it into the national movement we know as the tea party. Meanwhile, the grassroots Left that helped Obama get elected in the first place has been relegated to sideline seating, partly as a result of being drowned out by their conservative rivals — but more accurately, progressive organizers say — because they haven't been shouting loud enough.

The target group for the “American Dream Movement” message — like that of the tea party — is the population of working-and-middle-class Americans who have little or no history of political activism but are struggling to make ends meet.

In an interview last week with the Tribune, Jones — who was forced out of a position as President Obama’s green jobs advisor in 2009 over a controversy involving statements he made as a young activist — says he is seeking to create a positive counterbalance to the tea party that involves hundreds or thousands of local groups operating under the American Dream umbrella. He says to date roughly 70 organizations have signed up and local groups have been hosting “house parties” where strategy is discussed at a grassroots level.

“Nothing like this has existed for people who are progressive or even moderate,” he said. “We have a lot of groups but most of our groups have a lot of issues that we’re working on or are limited to one single issue, or a single identity group; but whose job is it make good economic policy to save the middle class or anybody that wants to get in the middle class? Labor unions maybe did that 50 years ago, and the Democratic Party is supposed to do that on paper, but I don’t think there is anybody who’s manning that watchtower anymore. And so that’s what we want to fill in.”

Like the tea party, the American Dream Movement is promoting its own ten-point “Contract for the American Dream” that includes pledges relating to taxes, the environment, healthcare and education. To generate the contract, Jones put out a public call for solutions via the Internet and says he received input from more than 130,000 people.

He says the organization will soon invite candidates for office to sign on to the pact and gain the widespread support of the movement.

“Right now we are just getting started but eventually we imagine there will be — just like you have tea party Republicans, maybe someday you'll have American Dream Democrats and even American Dream Republicans,” he explained.

Yet a large part of the tea tarty’s success can be attributed to a media frenzy — led by Fox News — that was, by all accounts, out of proportion to the actual size and breadth of the movement. To mimic that force will require generating the same if not more interest from the press, a task that has not always been easy for the Left. 

A rally in New York on June 23, introducing the American Dream Movement that featured performances by The Roots and artist Shepard Fairey, got little media attention beyond the alternative press; on the same day, dozens of stories appeared mentioning the tea party.

Timothy Brown, MoveOn’s Regional Organizer for Southeastern PA, attended the rally and takes issue with the lack of media coverage of progressive events.

“I think that what we are doing is, in fact, too controversial — we are challenging the power structure in this country; the very same power structure that owns 80 percent of the media in America,” he said. “They don’t want our movement covered because it might give the rest of America the wrong idea — namely, that you can stand up to power. So, as Gil Scott-Heron famously said, ‘The revolution will not be televised.’”

Brown says the key to success will come from communicating directly to the American people in terms they can relate to.

“These folks don’t have anything left at the end of the day to delve into complicated issues,” he said. “They want simple answers that they can quickly absorb and say, ‘Yeah, that's what I believe!’ And the professional propagandists on the right — the public relations and political professionals that are hired by the Koch brothers and their ilk — know this and pander to that need for simplicity, truth be damned. So, our job is to take a page from the right and combat these lies — not with some thirty-point analysis, but with some simple truths of our own.”

Asked about his time in the administration and if he thinks the president has lost his way, Jones said: “I think the whole country has lost its way. From the White House all the way down. I think that the grassroots movements that got together to elect Obama, we lost our way first in that we did not find a way to keep our movement going. 

“[But] the most important thing that I can communicate is that if you are tired of talking about how the tea party is crazy and Obama has let you down and want to talk about what you can do and what we can do together then this is your movement.”