The Reality

Rob Stein, a former DNC aide who also worked for the commerce department during the Clinton administration carries a Powerpoint presentation across the country that outlines the anatomy of a vast right-wing conspiracy. His goal: teach progressives that there’s something to be learned from the conservatives.

A short synopsis: In 1971 a Chamber of Commerce official, cranky about the nation’s course, asked a friend in Richmond, Va., to offer some advice on what Republican conservatives could do to loosen liberalism’s grip on the country. The friend, Lewis F. Powell Jr., whipped up a brilliant little memo that called for wealthy conservatives to invest millions over many years to create a collection of think tanks, permanent grassroots groups and media outlets that would dispense similar messages.

Thirty years later, that network has created a world in which Barry Goldwater’s fire-breathing conservative ideology is now considered sane, rational and even normal. This was a man so regressive he lost the Republican nomination to that old liberal, Richard Nixon.

Stein’s argument is that progressives need our own silver bullet memo, though ours will most likely take a new form — and could already exist. Perhaps our memo is within the letters of Paul Wellstone. Letters that inspired Camp Wellstone, a weekend-long training program to teach issue campaigning and election skills to progressives. No doubt, one of the e-mails or blog threads in liberal journals holds some parts of the key.

Most recently, some have said that the magic liberal memo is within the Rob Stein/Simon Rosenberg correspondence that birthed NDN’s “Phoenix Group” — a project to create long-term funding for a progressive movement akin to what the conservatives have built.

This is what worries me, because the “Phoenix Group” could damage our political system more than it fixes it.

Rob Stein calls the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy “perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system.” It’s a Conservative Message Machine.

But imagine if we successfully created his targeted counterbalance — a network of well-funded liberal think tanks and policy action centers that would coordinate, grow a brazenly liberal media empire, spawn a perpetual fieldwork apparatus activating GOTV every election cycle, create hyper-partisan media moles and pundits, etc.

Before you say, “hells yeah,” consider the long-term consequences: The result would be to effectively transform our political system into two distinct and continuously warring societies, complete with billion dollar economies.

Background on Heritage…

When they started Heritage and its spin-offs, Supreme-Court Justice Powell, Paul Weyrich and their fellows believed that they were setting up what they called “mirror organizations” that could match the media and organizational prowess of contemporary liberalism.

Funny thing is, the conservatives built the kind of machinery and infrastructure they thought they were up against … but never were. As that has become clear by the lack of political “fight” (READ: political guerilla warfare) coming from the Democrats in the last four election cycles, the Right Wing machine has moved beyond policy ideas and messaging into the deadly realm of attack, lies and innuendo.

To pit two enormous guerilla armies one against another is suicide for both.

That Rob Stein has taken his Powerpoint Presentation and shared his unmatched knowledge of the Right’s apparatus with party thinkers and, moreover, teamed up with one of the most successful liberal fundraisers in the country in Simon Rosenberg, might suggest that the above doomsday scenario is a possibility.

I hope I’m wrong, but I also think there is a better way.

Any kind of Democratic Phoenix project or Democratic Resurgence movement should not emulate what the Right has done. The larger the political unit, the smaller the significance of the individual member and the greater the controlling power at the center. Likewise, centralized power in any mass organization breeds its own interests, which inevitably conflict with the citizen interest. This is true not only of mass government but of any mass body, be it a political party, a church, a charity or a sports or any social organization.

What the monstrous conservative machine is too big to realize or amend at this point is that a community is a social unit in which the personal relationships of its members constitute the strongest force determining its pattern of life. There can be no politics without community.

The chink in the Right’s armor as I see it would be the network of personal relationships among neighbors and the influence of friends rooted in shared communities. That would be my Powell Memo: We have to build a loose-knit network of local political communities, rooted in personal citizen interests, working on local issues.

We have to build homes for our meetings, our training sessions, spaces aside from work and home. We must invest our time and our work ino nurturing these spaces and the relationships that we form there. And we must do it in this generation. These might be the smooth stones liberals can pull from the stream to win. This might be our one shot.

With control of every branch of government, with centralized control over message, in many ways the right has gone fascist.
We must go local. Populist. Under the rader. For the jugular.

If we really prove that we are the party of the people against the party of oligarchy, then we will get to learn the most important lesson from conservatives, how good it feels to win elections.