Get Off the Defeatist Cycle.

• Author: Reed, Adolph L. Jr.
• Position: Planning for elections in 2004

Well, the Republicans blatantly stole the White House. Nader didn't get the magic 5 percent, and we on the left are as weak as ever. So where do we go from here? How can we avoid finding ourselves in the same position again in another four years: facing undesirable electoral alternatives, with no solid foundation for opposition, and primed to tilt at windmills with whoever comes riding along?

Only the right wing ever seems to learn anything from electoral outcomes. After Barry Goldwater was swamped by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the right embarked on a strategic, long-term campaign that was largely grassroots-based. They realized that their push had been premature; the Johnson landslide showed them that it was necessary to take a step back and work to create a popular constituency for their political agenda. It's true they have had advantages that progressives can never count on: access to almost unlimited financial resources, the goodwill of the corporate media, institutional strength in the Republican Party at all levels that we could never match with the Democrats, who have always provided an inadequate home for progressive interests. The dominance of the Clintonist neoliberal tendency has made the party only more inhospitable.

The Goldwaterites drew from defeat the lesson that they needed to work from the ground up to alter the political climate, to shift the center of gravity of American politics in their direction. This meant digging in for a protracted effort to change the terms of political debate, to redefine and reframe key issues in ways that would make their interpretations and programs seem reasonable to a potential electoral majority.

The Goldwater conservatives pursued this objective by doing several things we've consistently failed to do since the high period of civil rights and anti-war activism in the 1960s. They mobilized activists at the local level around issue-based campaigns--for school prayer and tax revolt, and against abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, school busing, and affirmative action. They identified and cultivated bases of support around each of these issues and worked to bring them together into a coherent movement.

The right built a cohesive alliance, rooted institutionally in the Republican Party, that joined what often seemed to be disparate, if not incompatible, interest groupings into a singular political force. This is the alliance that Ronald Reagan rode to power. Political scientists and pundits imagined that this alliance was held together only by Reagan's personal magnetism. As Reagan's tenure wound down, there was considerable speculation about his coalition's future; after all, it appeared to be an unstable amalgam of social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, the religious right that...