How the Democrats can win: an interview with Colin Greer

openDemocracy: What role did you play in the United States election of 2004?

Colin Greer: I direct the New World Foundation, based in New York, which has donors who wanted to spend money on public education and voter registration programmes to expand the electorate in the election. I'm also on the board of another fund that put money together for the same purposes. This was tax-exempt money that could only be spent on so-called 501c3 organisations , which are prohibited from any direct partisan activity.

openDemocracy’s United States election discussion in 2004 included:

• “My America: Letters to Americans” – eighteen vivid, personal exchanges between non-Americans and Americans
• “American power and the world” – incisive argument from fleading thinkers, including Tom Nairn, Charles Pena, Anatol Lieven, and Stephen Howe
• “Election 2004” – pro- and anti-Bush views from John Berger and Karim Souaid, and inquests from John Cavanagh, Fred Halliday, Mariano Aguirre, and Susan George
• Todd Gitlin’s weekly column - biting comment from the Columbia University media specialist
• John Hulsman’s “Inside Washington” column – independent views from the Heritage Foundation scholar
• Siva Vaidhyanathan’s “Remote Control” column – from Texas via Ronald Reagan to Heartbreak Hotel, a panorama of American culture in the age of surveillance
• Dave Belden’s column, “What do we have faith in?” – making real the importance of religion in American political life long before the left started listening

If you find openDemocracy’s coverage of the United States valuable, please subscribe for £2/$3/€3 a month and gain access to easy-to-read PDFs of all our articles We funded “public education” and “civic engagement” and targeted communities of colour and low-income people where the registration and turnout is, typically, disproportionately low. The goal was to maximise their participation through community-based organisations (CBOs) or national networks of affiliated CBOs. The money we spent allowed people who otherwise wouldn’t weigh in to do so. It led to some important local victories - their victories, not ours.

openDemocracy: You have thought a lot about the Democratic party, its campaign, and what it could have done differently.

Colin Greer: I have thought a lot about it. In large part because low-income communities and communities of colour rely on the Democratic party for attention to their issues.

The Kerry campaign never became exciting to them. It was never really their goal simply to “get rid of George Bush”. That over-simplified their concerns. They seek a whole new approach to American government. That’s why these communities resisted Kerry for so long, because his major claim to popularity was that he offered an alternative to Bush, and not much beyond that.

The Democratic party isn’t a live political party in most places outside Washington. It’s basically a message and money machine at the national level that organises itself every four years for a presidential election. Without long-term and serious attention to the local and state, it was not ready tactically to do most of the things you need to do to win an election.

By tactical, I mean that you can win elections by winning just enough votes to win the Electoral College, and if you're really careful you can get enough votes to legitimate the victory with a popular vote. The Republicans have been deeply engaged in the tactics of doing that. Democrats haven’t and didn't.

In the Democratic party there’s virtually no relationship between local candidates and the national party, and no relationship between the electoral campaign structure and local multi-issue organisations.

In a traditional party structure, local candidates help develop national policy. If you win local elections, you grow new candidates who can rise to national office. So, winning tactical victories – winning local elections and some national elections – gives you room to build political power over time. And you can have informed discussions on public policy that can be fed back into the system to build a public mandate.

So you need tactical victories, and the Republicans have been having them since 1976, when they started to go after school-board elections, built local bases and membership organisations. Democrats and progressives have not done a very good job at this. They undervalue CBOs and state-level structures; undervalue local leaders and people of colour; and fly in campaigners from out of state for short periods, instead of investing in electoral processes at the local level.

Finally, in this election, Democrats made a decision to only campaign seriously in the so-called “swing states”. They stopped campaigning in many states very early, while Republicans raised their popular vote by continuing to campaign in states they knew they couldn’t win. It ought to have been possible for the Democrats to win the same majority Al Gore won in 2000. But it didn’t happen.

Learning from the Republicans

openDemocracy: In all this you haven't mentioned the word “democracy”. Isn't that what it’s really all about: renewing democratic structures within the Democratic party?

Colin Greer: What we fund is the expansion of democracy. That means each non-citizen believing they can become a citizen, and each citizen actively engaging in the privileges of citizenship.

A party that believes in democracy needs to have real relationships with people through the organisations they express themselves through and focus the issues they care about. That's my vision of a democratic United States, but that's different from winning tactically.

To win tactically you need to have those relationships, but you don’t have to have those relationships because you believe in democracy. But you are then, of course, in a position to encourage, build, and sustain democratic life within and between organisations.

openDemocracy: If you believe the Republican party has been good at building local bonds and strengthening democracy, how come you haven't been funding their sort of issues?

Colin Greer: We do support their kind of issues. We support political participation and economic development; we support people taking care of their local economies and taking responsibility to advance their lives against the special private interests that block them.

openDemocracy: Is the Republican party more democratic than the Democratic party?

Colin Greer: No, no. That’s why you have to distinguish tactical from democratic. It didn’t take democracy to win this election, but I think it takes democracy to win a public mandate long term.

If no one is treating you democratically, you choose power, even if it’s against your own interests. They’re telling you they support your interests and you believe in their power.

It’s not about developing a direct relationship with people whose opinions you care about, it’s about having people believe that your framing of the issues captures what’s most important to them.

A party can create relationships with organisations that have people participating, without people having actual decision-making powers. That’s what happens when national organisations create relationships with local membership organisations.

When my partners fund organisations, we prioritise those trying to create democratic organisational life - defined by the diversity of their leadership, the breadth of their membership, and the governance structures they create. Those are the organisations I would like to see invested in for long-term electoral work.

A long-term conversation

openDemocracy: We recently published an interview with the former Greek foreign minister and current opposition leader, George Papandreou. He says citizens are ready for a new – more direct –relationship with power and is heading quite a significant reform of his Pasok party. He says political parties need to open themselves to more citizen involvement if they want to address the political dilemmas people face in a globalised world.

Colin Greer: He's right. But it’s different for the United States. The normal trend, the nation’s default tendency, is to drift to the right and to be driven to “reaction.” This led Eleanor Roosevelt famously to comment that “without concerted citizen action” there can be no sustained progress to human rights in the US. Periods of progressive sweeps have traditionally been fairly short-lived. Third parties tend to be spoilers. So you're left with the “party within a party” strategy if you want to be more progressive within either party.

A party that recreates itself through a democratic dialogue with the public – and creates structures to promote that – can historically happen here only through the rise of social movements. When you get a movement to flourish, you get a new conversation with the party. The Democratic party of 1968 had to become more democratic to accommodate the civil rights movement, which was locked out of the party by southern senators.

Because of the way elections are funded in the US, the privilege of wealth is so great, that you need a popular force to shift it. If you had the goal of creating a true democratic party, you could only do that if you committed yourself to the political wilderness for quite a long time. The danger here is that a drift to the right in the meantime would lead you to a devastating set of circumstances. The danger of the structures being usurped in the US is so great because of the influence of money, and especially the power of money over the media. So you create popular openings: but what's going to be injected into those openings?

openDemocracy: In this election there were dozens of new resources participating aggressively, or I should say progressively, in the Democratic campaign from the outside – like MoveOn, America Coming Together (Act), and George Soros. What do you think about their efforts?

Colin Greer: The attention to poor and working people’s issues is very welcome. However, I would say they weren’t attentive enough to local issues and local workers. They were beguiled with their own top-down discovery and planning processes. The upshot of that was that they didn’t invest in local leaders, they didn’t invest in the election processes early enough, and they were much too dissuaded by the cult of “message” – that you had to invest a huge proportion of the money raised on TV commercials based on polls of so-called swing voters categories to get anywhere.

I would say they were uncoordinated with local plans, disconnected from local understandings of local media and youth, and way too dominated by field direction from outside communities of colour. It was Beltway strategising.

The candidates and party that low-income people have traditionally believed was theirs, namely the Democratic party, has failed them enormously over the last generation. And many of the people who did the failing, are still the people who call the shots in the campaign.

In today’s America, unlike in Europe, there is no identification of political professionals with opposition politics. The only recent exceptions have been spokespeople for the conservative agenda, like Newt Gingrich, in the 1990s. The day after the election Kerry went home. He didn’t tell you, “The man I’ve been telling you was dangerous for the last seven months, is still dangerous, and I’ll be watching him”. There’s no political figure doing that. For the most part, people believe they lost the election due to “moral values”, and so the new driving question becomes, “How do we package our issues ‘morally’?”

Ahead of all this argument on “messaging”, “framing” and “moralising”, right now – I’d rather put “oppositionalising” as is the key thing that needs to go into political discourse, messaging and sustaining progressive politics.

For there to be a progressive politics there has to be an enduring identity of opposition in defeat. That you have a role as the person who didn’t win, to be in opposition. If you close down after every election, what are people going to feel represented by?

Those of us who don’t operate in the partisan world, know we’re in opposition on the issues because we deal with it everyday. We know the moral issue around gay marriage is not whether or not gays should be married. That’s not a moral issue. The moral issue is: does the state have the right to persecute a minority? But it never got framed that way.

There are anti-free trade, anti-corporate welfare candidates who have won in half a dozen states. In their localities they are oppositional, but they don’t have a national identity and the Democratic party doesn’t embrace them.

So there was no win on “moral issues”. There can’t be a win on moral issues unless you have an oppositional politics, and if you don’t have an oppositional politics, moralising around the message, simply creates an artificial moral discourse. Whether or not big corporations should get tax relief, and 40 million people do not have health care insurance, is not a policy issue – it’s a moral issue but it didn’t get on the agenda of moral issues.

If you try to mobilise the public, around a spit-and-glue approach to morals and values, to find a message overlay for an existing framework, instead of identifying the moral core of what we care about and thereby remaking the agenda, I think it’s a dead end.

To come back to George Papandreou’s idea, we have to democratise the message-building system not just the turn-out-the-vote system - not just “what do you think about public issues, and public policy” but “what moral issues are legitimately political issues?” That discussion needs to happen in the community-based organisations and political professionals need to listen to what and how people experience and consider their conditions. Foundations can fund that, but my fear is we won’t do it, because we undervalue CBOs. We say they’re too weak, but don’t invest in making them strong.

openDemocracy: You seem to be seeking something that can magnify the power of the CBOs – an organisation or structure. Do you envision that overarching structure as the Democratic party?

Colin Greer: No. CBOs are non-partisan organizations built on issues and/or constituencies. They are the infrastructure of an independent political force - alive and growing, I think, if we invest hugely in the CBOs. I am talking about local people who are fighting fights around public capital, health care reform, education reform - they should be participants in making decisions. It’s not a world only of local organisations; it’s a world of national affiliates with local affiliations and chapters. So it’s national and local.

If we invest in that, their work will produce the momentum of movement ignition. You can’t predict how that happens. Remember the story of Rosa Parks and the bus boycott? Well, that story has a corollary that’s crucial. She wasn’t just a lady getting on the bus, refusing to sit at the back. She worked for The National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). And that night 30,000 circulars went out to call a boycott. How do you get 30,000 flyers circulated so quickly? This was before email. They were ready for the moment of strength when they would declare their power. And they did. That moment can’t be predicted. It’s felt when it’s there.

Similarly with the anti-war movement in the 1960s: I think you build a trust when people’s voices are organised and they are in constant conversation about the issues that matter to them, it will erupt, so that one of the parties has to pay attention.

To me, democratising means: A) conversation on the ground; B) structures where people can make there voices heard; C) where the message is getting remade on the ground; D) where local elections are being supported; E) where national leaders realise that their future and responsibility is in their relationship to localities in what the public lives its everyday civic and civil society.

I think you can’t win in a hurry. It takes time. And you need to fund in response to the base. The right attacks the academy for being to the left. What about coordinating faculty members to work with CBOs so they become a think-tank capacity? Why do we need to fund huge think-tanks? It’s only because the right did it, and we are now in the replication model. Well, they are different. We can win victories their way, probably. But if we are going to win democratic victories, that takes an investment in democracy.

The way to achieve a presidency committed to the interest of poor and working people in the short terms is totally compatible with building a long-term democratic conversation with the American public. You wouldn’t just use people to win. The beauty of winning on the ground is you don’t lose even when you lose. If you invest in organisations that get stronger in elections, then they’re there for the next time. When you have a national strategy that’s winner takes all, and you haven’t invested in local organisations, you lose when you lose, and you lose big.