Thanks to: Billy Wimsatt
I found myself really moved reading this long-form piece on Dan Cantor and the roots and growth of the Working Families Party. Although I love WFP, consider Dan a friend, and have heard him rant often and at length about the WFP's strategy, I didn't know half the stuff in this article. It's a good read.
http://prospect.org/article/
The most important part to me is that it took 23 years of diligent, disciplined and incredibly boring and unsexy work to build the WFP to where it is now a powerhouse in a couple of states, and poised to make a real impact in a bunch of other states and nationally… (and make millions of people's lives and the planet a little better and a little less burnt up).
The thing about truly transformational long-term plans (whether the civil rights movement or LGBT equality or building a progressive electoral machine or stopping prisons or saving our climate) is that the first 5 or 10 or 20 or 30 years usually SUCK. You feel like you're losing and you're getting nowhere and no one takes you seriously and you're always broke and no one cares. And then you win.
Phi Beta Iota: Daniel Patrick Moynihan (RIP) understood this better than most. Intelligence reform, governance reform, educational reform, medical reform, energy reform — all in precisely the same spot. 2016 will probably be another wasted two-party tyranny year, but there is an emergent convergence among Occupy, Workers, pissed-off veterans, those small parties that decide to join a TEAM, and the large body of cultural creatives and independents that are fed up with corruption in every aspect of our lives. America the Beautiful is still there for the saving.
See Also:
2012 Reality Sandwich: How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny
We the People Reform Coalition
