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DemocracyFest 2005

Drenched with sweat from the overbearing Texas heat, I just wandered away from DemocracyFest here in Austin, and drove home blasting the AC and sorting out my impressions after a day among an especially partisan group of citizens who are more than a little pissed off at the corporate political machine, and I don't just mean the Republican Party. They're Democrats, but they're populist Democrats, and they're not going to be pushed around by Democratic bosses or Republicans or anybody else who would abstract and commoditize them as mere sources of funds and votes.

The partisan thing makes me uncomfortable somehow, so I often keep it at arm's length. I didn't go to candidate Meetups, preferring to spend my time focusing on communities of progressive activist developers. I should do more of this, though... I was fired up by some of the speeches I heard (e.g. David Van Os and Richard Morrison at a Van Os rally) and I saw a couple of great an inspiring panels, one on the Civic Action Network concept of small group activism, and the other on Religion, Democracy and the Common Good.

Civic Action uses the concept Small Groups – Big Victories. It's about using small, personal groups to do targeted work toward a specific political goal, a strategy that worked well for the right wing, which "was built on small, church-based structures."

Outside of the U.S., we looked at a series of non-violent democratic revolutions - from Poland in the 1980's to Ukraine in 2004 - and realized that they often relied on small "cells" acting independently but toward shared goals. Likewise, during the last election, we witnessed first hand the power Meetup-based organizing to build small, local groups of progressives across the country. Inspired by these examples, we decided that a formal structure for small group organizing could be a useful tool for progressive activists.

This small group approach isn't new, others have used it effectively. The Texas Save Muni Wireless Coalition is one recent, successful project the organization of which closely fits the Civic Action paradigm. However there's real power in the articulation of the process model – those of us who advocate a "small pieces loosely joined" approach can point to Civic Action as a great reference, and I'm always thinking how the CA model fits the Group Relationship Management concept mentioned in my last post.

Religion, Democracy, and the Common Good was a complex, powerful discussion, and I'm not sure I can recount it in a single blog post. Ruth Nakashima Brock was particularly eloquent in her description of the problem liberal religion faces against what she refers to as theofascism, which presents as a war against love (against people who want to marry people they love, i.e. same sex marriages), a war against women (and their right to make decisions about their own bodies), a position that is profetus but anti-children, that sends young adults to war to be killed. She discussed how progressives are particularly vulnerable now because they feel impotent and depressed after the latest presidential election. People are retreating into a tight personal sphere that focuses on consumerism as a way to deal with the depression they're feeling, however a revival of interpersonal values presents an alternative that can lead back to faith, hope, and will.

Unitarian Minister Davidson Loehr said that American liberals have lost their three most powerful vocabularies:

• Nationalism/patriotism, as a result of the opposition to the war in Vietnam and its semiotics.


• Religious – what do you do with a god language when we know that there is not a critter? God talk is a way of speaking, not a description of a critter, and when you "lose" the critter, you lose the speech.


• Morality and personal responsibility.

Meanwhile we have a "perfect storm" forming that is a convergence of plutocracy, imperialism, and fundamentalism. The religious right seeks to control media and the masses, and to have a religion that is about obedience so that the masses are disempowered and continue working for the benefit of the few.

Andy Hernandez noted that 68% of liberals say faith or moral code is relevant to their vote, rejecting the notion that morality is an issue only on the right. He says that people cast their votes based on other factors, and that mobilization is more significant than theology in determining election winners.

Paul Woodruff said that morality is in principle not divisive, nor is justice divisive when it's in a reverent form, it brings us together. Justice is not a zero sum game. In Athenian democracy, the most important value was harmony. It was a government by the people &ndash not by the majority, but by all the people, who cultivated harmonious ways of accommodating their differences.

Because I think too seldom these days about religion, morality, and values, that last panel, moderated by my pal Glenn Smith, had quite an impact. Glenn's been part on the "Freedom and Faith" bus tour and Faith Voices/Building the Beloved Community:

...at every stop we met with people whose faith informed their progressive political stances. We met with local activists, union organizers, pastors, students, young families with children, and even government workers. And each of these people came because they knew they couldn't stay silent any longer. They knew what the media forgets time and again - to be religious does not make one a conservative.

jon posted this at 5:15 PM
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