My thoughts on movement strategy, politics, and the fight ahead.
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Before I get to this week's topic, I want to share a few thoughts about what the Supreme Court did last week. The extremist majority on the Court rendered the Voting Rights Act nearly meaningless in their decision in Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday, making it unconstitutional to build congressional districts around minority communities, even in the face of hostile forces clearly reviving Jim Crow tactics to suppress those votes.
The right wing has now gotten much closer to their long-term goal of turning racial minorities into permanent political minorities. Even in some places where white people have become the minority, they can still maintain a majority-level of power over politics. Just like the Court itself: They want us to live in a permanent 6-3 world, making us permanent dissenters.
We can no longer sue federally to block right-wing legislatures when they create districts that prevent Black, Latino and other voters from having political representation in Congress, even when serving as a counterbalance to legacies of racism in those states. As far as federal law is concerned, legislatures are now free to spread Black voters, for example, in Louisiana across a range of districts in ways that make it impossible for them to gain a majority in any of them. They can break up cities or other concentrations of voters they don't like. It's unclear how many Black members of Congress (or other elected bodies) will quickly lose their seats, but the wave is coming.
And the right wing did it all in the name of preventing racial discrimination: framing equity as a threat to fairness, rather than being a solution to the reign of unchecked privilege.
It turns out that the Constitution isn't always getting better, or moving us toward a more perfect union. It's just a tool that anyone can use to build or destroy the world we want. Whether reproductive freedom or freedom to vote or freedom from authoritarian control, this is how they dismantle the rights and protections that our people bled for. They don't need to silence us if they make our voices irrelevant.
The law and its courts will not save us if we are not organized and force them to. Those who hadn't let go of the idea that the courts in their current configuration would stand up and save us are hopefully able to do so now. Letting go is the only way to rebuild. And fight back.
We need a Supreme Court strategy and we still don't have one, a real one, built for a Court that is hostile, for a moment when the floor of federal protection is being actively lowered, and for working toward the vision of raising up the floor again. In From Presence to Power, I use the Supreme Court as an example of how magical thinking can take over: losing fight after fight, always thinking we'll win the next one, never doing the work it takes to actually do so. We are not going to change how our country works and rewrite its most important rules by using the strategies that delivered the last changes we won. That must be our starting point.
I'll be sharing more thoughts on where we go from here in the coming weeks. Suffice it to say, none of us want to live out the rest of our lives as permanent dissenters. We need a strategy to make sure we won't.
Recently I have been sitting with the news about Eric Swalwell, yet another political figure who had many hopes riding on him and is now exiting the stage. When a political figure exits public life, through scandal or tragedy, or because they couldn't recover from a lost race, or just through the slow fade of relevance that happens to almost everyone in politics eventually, it is a good opportunity to ask what they actually leave behind when they go.
What did they build? What survives them? What is left standing in the room after they walk out of it, and is any of it useful to the people left behind?
There is the legacy that lives and dies with the person: the story, the arc, the wins and losses, the ideas they stood for in the moment they were standing. But there is another legacy that can keep doing real work for us regardless of the person and their personal fate. The voter file. The coalition. The organization. The pipeline. The policy ideas. The effective language people use without remembering where it came from. That legacy can become an essential, load-bearing foundation for others, the stage that remains when the actor leaves it.
Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash in 2002. But the politics he built kept working. Stacey Abrams did not become governor of Georgia, but she built a voter infrastructure that kept working, and is part of why both Ossoff and Warnock are in the Senate today. (I recently discussed this infrastructure and the threats against it with Stacey on Freedom Table Talk. You can watch it here.)
There are lineages we can trace through American political history. You do not get Barack Obama in 2008 without Howard Dean in 2004. Dean's campaign ended when the news media chased him out of the race, but what it left behind, the small-dollar fundraising machinery, the fifty-state strategy, his quieter role as DNC chair, became the ground 2008 was built on.
You simply do not get Bill Clinton in 1992 without Jesse Jackson in 1988. Sure, Jackson didn't win the nomination, much less become president. But he expanded the primary electorate, fused politics and culture, normalized a multiracial coalition, and forced a set of issues into the party's vocabulary that Clinton inherited and ran on (even as he triangulated against the man who built it).
It's hard to deny that the names we remember as winners are often standing on ground that someone else laid down, even someone who failed personally or politically, or both.
Some of the most important things a political figure leaves behind are not institutional at all. They are language and ideas.
When Elizabeth Warren built the CFPB, the institution itself was part of what she left behind. But the deeper part was the idea underneath it: that ordinary consumers deserve protection from predatory financial actors, and people in government who are not doing that work are not really doing their job. That idea is much harder to destroy than an agency. It's now part of the American political vocabulary. Even an administration actively hostile to consumer protection has to reckon with it in some way.
So even if the opposition succeeds in completely demolishing the CFPB itself, it does not follow that everything Warren built is gone. The agency can be gutted and the idea will still be there.
Our opposition is very good at fusing people and ideas on purpose, tying ideas to specific individuals so that when the person stumbles, or fades, or is taken down, the idea can be thrown out with them. It is a deliberate move, and when it works it is because we let it work.
But the idea that consumers deserve protection from predatory financial actors is true regardless of who is carrying it, and regardless of whether the agency built to enforce it is currently standing. The case for a multiracial coalition is true regardless of who built it. A politics actually accountable to working people is right regardless of which senator most recently asserted it.
Remember, too, that we are in a populist era, and populist eras are particularly disorienting on this point. They elevate personalities at speed and discard them at speed. And when those figures fall, or merely fade, the things they built are too often allowed to fade with them. That is not just a choice, it is our choice, and we can make a different one.
When we are weighing whether to lift up a candidate, an organization, or a movement leader, we should ask whether they are working to leave behind more than one of the following:
Data. Voter files, lists, research, the kind of organized information that other people can use long after a particular campaign is over.
Organizing infrastructure. Coalitions, training pipelines, networks of relationships, methods of doing the work that other people can pick up and run.
A new way of talking and framing. Language that gives people words for what they are experiencing, frames that shift what is sayable in our politics, vocabulary that travels.
Clear policy ideas other people can run with. Not just slogans, but actual proposals, written, defended, road-tested, that can be inherited and advanced by the next round of leaders.
If a political figure is building these, our investment will always pay off. If they fade or fall, the work does not. If they are building none of those, however, we should know that too, and adjust our expectations accordingly.
We must refuse to let our opposition decide which of our ideas survive based on which of our people they have managed to take down or which of our institutions they have managed to dismantle. That work does not belong only to the people running for office. It belongs to all of us.
That is also what legacy actually means. Legacy is the thing that keeps doing its work after the story ends, and after the person is no longer the one we are talking about. The part that compounds. The part that is ours to protect, to continue building on.
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