Tough Times.

Colleagues.

Tough times we are again in. We’ve had tougher, but yeeesh.

I [try to] keep focus by not leaning in/reacting to every moment, and remembering to step back and observe, focus, and reflect. Here’s what I see.

We are currently enduring a structural asymmetry at the very top of our leadership that explains most of the tension in our politics and frustration among progressives. The Right, a subset of which includes the Republican Party, has cohered into a movement. Their movement's shock and memorialization of the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk makes plain that they are organized around and motivated by stated and, in their view, lived values. The Left has no such coherence right now; we last had it with then-candidate President Obama's "hope and change" election, or, arguably, the worldwide convergence of support around the value of Black lives, after the murder of George Floyd.

We have no such movement now; both “hope and change” and BLM have waned, become diffuse. Our movement is so weak that it has allowed theirs to take a heartbreakingly narrow Trump victory [check the vote totals] and turn it into their manifest destiny. That’s less about their strength than about our weakness.

What we have on the Left now is a Democratic Party, and what we’ve always had — an amalgam of interests — many unions, the environmental NGOs, reproductive rights groups, and a beautiful array of demographics — Black, Latino, Asian American, LGBTQ, people with disabilities, etc. But our whole is not greater than the sum of our parts, from a movement perspective.

At least not right now. 

Back to leadership at the top. When a movement [the Right] is pitted against a Party [the Democrats], well, you see what you get.

The Democratic Party cannot deliver us from this — or through this. They are a trade association of incumbents [that's what Parties are] and they will fight like hell to win the next election, which is awesome. But even that will be insufficient. Does someone believe that if Democrats take the House during this administration, they will care about their subpoena power and appropriations bills? I am fighting for us to win, but with sober insight into the limits of even that victory.

We have two choices with this structural asymmetry. We must grow our own movement, and we must weaken theirs. That’s it. 

I yearn for a new movement on the Left. Multicultural support for democracy and inclusion. The numbers are with us; we are a working majority, and hopefully, our fracture is temporary. I don't know where the next movement leaders will come from, although I have some favorites. But it will come. (And I’d love to hear your ideas.)

And I yearn for more strategy and focus to weaken their movement. Of the many ways to do that — and pointing out their excesses and even mean-ness has been thus far insufficient — my strong belief is that the best way to go is a much more engaged, respectful, and organized effort with people of faith. 

  That cohort — YUGE and diverse and sprawling and intense — is desperately under-and mis-understood by secular leaders on the Left, from the Party to the NGOs that make us up. In a deeply religious country, our lens on the Left for how to engage, hear, and work with people in the pews and their leaders is weak.

In solidarity,

Robert Raben