Blue jeans, big dreams.

• Author: Comp, Nathan J.
• Position: The Blue Jean Nation

Mike McCabe is speaking to about two-dozen mostly gray-haired people in the basement of the Ripon Public Library in Wisconsin, not far from the schoolhouse where a similarly sized group of disaffected voters gathered in 1854 to forge a new political party.

"They were politically homeless for a different reason," McCabe explains, with the gusto of a high school history teacher. "Neither party reflected their wish for the end of slavery, so they created a new identity for themselves. They started calling themselves Republicans."

In fact, McCabe continues, the arc of American history is dotted with moments in which ordinary people have set in motion paradigm-shattering movements in pursuit of a government that works for them. He thinks the time has come again for citizens to rise up and reclaim at least one of America's two major parties, to reinvent it as an instrument for the common good.

"Right now, one party is scary and the other is scared," he tells the group. "The reason the scary party has become scarier is because they've been forced to become more subservient to the Koch brothers."

Heads nod; his message is resonating. Everyone here knows the role played by industrialists David and Charles Koch, who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into backing Republicans who support their vision of an America in which workers are kept in their place and the wholesale reliance on fossil fuels is undiminished. And who have been remarkably successful.

But McCabe, an author and activist, is in Ripon not to bash the Koch brothers or to gripe about Republicans' sweeping electoral victories. His message is one of empowerment. When someone in the audience asks how he expects to overcome the apathy that has taken root among the electorate, he fires back: "Don't confuse apathy with a sense of powerlessness. The question is: How do we empower the disempowered?"

McCabe has an answer for that, as well.

"We've got to do away with old labels that no longer serve us," he says. "It starts by forging a new political identity, coming up with a new vocabulary, and unlearning how we've been conditioned to think about politics." McCabe has an adman's knack for coining catchphrases and witticisms that capture long-intuited, but unarticulated, truths among disaffected voters. But he has his work cut out. Launching a political movement literally from nothing, it turns out, is every bit as difficult as it sounds.

"I've seen people become engaged, but I'm not sure he's reaching beyond the people who are already active politically," says Scott Spector, executive director of Wisconsin Progress, a nonprofit that recruits and trains progressive candidates to run in local elections. "They have a tough row to hoe in organizing the public around a set of issues."

Kathy Cramer Walsh, a political science professor at UW-Madison, is doubtful that a group like Blue Jean Nation can convince enough people the effort is worth their time to achieve the sweeping changes McCabe speaks of.

"There is so much skepticism about everything political these days that for a movement like that to succeed, there has got to be pretty widespread buy-in," she says...