[ The Biden presidency must be greeted with a historic amount of
organizing and agitation. Otherwise, we’re done for. Politics should
never be practiced with the expectation of ideal conditions.]
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THE LEFT MUST HIT THE STREETS AGAIN—RIGHT NOW  
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Osita Nwanevu
November 9, 2020
The New Republic
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_ The Biden presidency must be greeted with a historic amount of
organizing and agitation. Otherwise, we’re done for. Politics should
never be practiced with the expectation of ideal conditions. _

Illustration by Tara Jacoby // The New Republic,

 

Enough about Donald Trump: The opportunity to plan beyond him is among
the most important privileges the Democratic Party and the country won
last week. Unless Democrats sweep the Georgia runoffs in January,
President-elect Joe Biden will take office with a divided Congress and
beset by existential crises on all sides. Having won a general
election dominated almost entirely by matters of character and general
competence, Biden is substantively short of where he ought to be on
the issues that defined the Democratic primary and are likely to
define the next decade or more of American life. After the
celebrations subside, he’ll be met with a public that will be roiled
by the forces of reaction and dismayed by his inability to deliver the
political comity and stability he has promised them. Biden might have
been the man for the moment, but the moment might not last through
spring. It is passing as we speak.

This is the fundamental problem with debates over whether and how to
“push Biden left”: There’s no reason to believe he will be the
central agent of all that’s set to happen over the next four years,
especially if Republicans keep the Senate. Even under the strongest
presidents, the American policy regime is ultimately the handiwork of
a vast constellation of additional actors. Senators, congressmen,
governors, state legislators, mayors, judges, major corporations,
civil servants and administrators, interest and advocacy groups—each
category contains pivotal figures, spheres of influence, and reserves
of independent power. The policy fights ahead will be complex; if the
reasons to expect a wave of sweeping change were strained before the
election, they are entirely broken now. What’s needed is an approach
capable of directing activists and an engaged public toward the right
pressure points on the right issues at the right times.

What’s needed, in short, is a movement. Fortunately, and despite
what the moderates licking their wounds are telling themselves now,
the left has one. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, won nearly 10 million
votes against a field of 29 candidates in this year’s primary; in
state after state, polls established him as the preferred candidate of
not only the very young but all Democrats under the age of 45. The
coalition he crafted wasn’t large enough to win him the nomination.
But it remains a force to be reckoned with, all the same. Two months
ago in Massachusetts, a state whose centrist Republican governor
boasts a nearly 90 percent approval rating among Democrats,
progressive activists torpedoed a Kennedy Senate campaign—proof
positive that the left has muscle to throw around beyond municipal
politics and urban House primaries.

But the next major elections are a while off. Activists need to devise
strategies for shaping the policymaking process in the interim, as
bleak as things seem—to plan not only for the next two to four
years, but the next two to four months. It should be obvious by now
that direct action, on a scale and at a pitch this country hasn’t
seen in half a century, will be absolutely critical. Climate, health
care, inequality, immigration, policing, reproductive freedom, the
American war machine, labor rights, our civil and democratic rights,
the power and perversity of the Republican Party
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Each of these issues should be met with a wave of organizing inspired
by our remarkable past decade
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mass protest, which culminated dramatically with the demonstrations
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the killing of George Floyd earlier this year.

Two campaigns early in the decade—Occupy Wall Street on the left and
the Tea Party on the right—created narrative shifts that would
ultimately lead to transformative presidential campaigns. But we’ve
also seen many others, such as the Fight for $15, Ferguson, Parkland,
and others, that capably illustrate how important policy victories at
multiple levels of government and shifts in the policy discourse might
be achieved outside the auspices of electoral politics. It should not
have been a surprise, particularly to those who remembered or
participated in the demonstrations against the Keystone XL and Dakota
Access pipelines under the Obama administration, that an old-fashioned
sit-in managed to put the Green New Deal on the map politically in
2018. That year also saw nearly half a million Americans participate
in work stoppages, including thousands of teachers who successfully
launched strikes for pay raises in West Virginia
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states whose conservative Democratic senators may hold the fate of
Biden’s legislative agenda in their hands in the event that the
party prevails in Georgia.

It was fascinating, over these last few weeks of the campaign, to see
the concept of resistance solidify into something a touch more
serious: the notion that the election would not or could not be stolen
if a sufficient proportion of the public rose up against the president
to defend American democracy. The fact that this may not have been
true shouldn’t diminish the significance of a substantial segment of
the American public believing it—of millions of people taking it
entirely for granted that our institutions cannot solely be relied
upon to deliver just outcomes and that mass action can bring the
system to heel.

The left, if possessed of the same faith, can become a conduit for
that energy. It would be a mistake to lean instead into a kind of
demographic triumphalism—the hope that the right torchbearer will
arrive in 2024, 2028, or, God forbid, 2032 to lead an ascendant
socialist majority to victory in a presidential election. The climate
crisis, for one, won’t wait for that majority to emerge. Politics
should never be practiced with the expectation of ideal conditions.
There will be no messiah. No one will be capable of doing more for us
than we’ve already made possible by our own hands. We should believe
in no one more than we believe in ourselves.⁠ And our
work—organization, agitation, action—should begin this very
second. There’s no time to lose.

_[OSITA NWANEVU is a staff writer at The New Republic. @OsitaNwanevu
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