It’s a serious question because the president is elected so it’s not just “hey you need to step down”.
- Definitely Musk shouldn’t be a part of things.
- Definitely the courts should be listened to (but what that means as a demand I don’t really understand)
- Definitely reign in the presidential orders, reduce their scope or number or SOMETHING
I mean, I’m not the guy to do this. But what exactly kind of things could be done to control this crazy ass situation?
EDIT: I’m taking about how we can restore and reform the United States, not visions for a new entity.
You need a small list of very focused demands. Occupy Wall Street and BLM failed because they started tacking on too many things.
Here are demands that will fix the core issues at the federal level:
- An expansion of the number of seats in the house and senate. At the federal level, each congress person represents far too many constituents. This is not unprecedented; the house has been expanded before.
- We must switch from first-past-the-post to proportional representation.
- The Senate’s role in passing legislation must be reduced to a time-based veto only. Meaning: a bill passed by the House must be vetoed by the Senate within 90 days or it goes to the president’s desk.
- An overturning of the Citizens United decision and publicly funded elections.
- Removal of the presidental pardon.
These five items must be implemented if our democracy is to survive. Everything else can be handled after.
These 5 things would be absolutely AMAZING, but even the biggest optimist in me can’t see this coming to fruition without the idiotic Republican voter understanding them and also coming out for them
“Make Congress Work Again”
This is going to require good branding and simplified explanations.
What we have going for us is that basically everyone agrees that Congress isn’t functional.
OWS and BLM did not fail due to not having a concrete and focused list of demands. That was media spin intended to undermine the movements. There was a widely circulated list (or really very similar lists) of BLM demands, around 5. In cities, a given BLM group would have very specific and actionable demands and would attempt to leverage their occupations and other disruptions to achieve them. Nobody in City Hall would have any difficulty understanding them nor the general public when reading the ubiquitous pamphlets at marches.
But this idea is almost true, because the actual reason for failure was a lack of experience in organizing effectively. Both movements were reactive and massively decentralized. They wasted huge amounts of time and energy trying to figure out what to do via large, open debate spaces without particularly good political education, agreement, nor effective means of organizing like committees and commitments to act on committees’ recommendations. And because their spaces had a low average level of political education, they were easy to coopt by any savvy group of liberals with a bullhorn, e.g. the people that told BLM protesters to talk to cops or get themselves arrested for literally no reason.
They were also vulnerable to tokenization, e.g., “listen to what the black people tell you”. Which ones? Black people aren’t a monolith! The actual reality in these spaces is, again, whoever happens to be present at the time and has a bullhorn. They might have great ideas built on life experience, planning actions, and political education, or they might be someone with a cop uncle saying it’s time to debate whether ACAB is racist or something. White liberals are particularly vulnerable to tokenizing arguments and will listen when told to go home using such arguments, which has been the death of many an occupation. Behind the scenes, POC organizers are pissed and trying to figure out who the person with the bullhorn was and how they can stop that next time - 5-10 years down the road, i.e. there is a feeling that it is essentially too late to “fix” the situation, and those organizers feel bitter.
So if we step back and ask what the core challenges were, they amount to having far too little in the way of mature organizers and other politically educated groups to lead and educate during these kinds of events. The ratio between members of mature organizations, politically educated general public, and non-politically educated general public is incompatible with effective organizing. So all that happens is ad hoc re-learning of the same lessons every organizer has learned for centuries, just too late to be used for the current event. Or worse, most people not even understanding what went wrong or that thete was a failure in the first place.
So, the solution is to build mature left organizations that use effective methodologies and prevent liberal cooption. And to do it now, not just as a reaction to every new major event. This is not an easy task but it is one with historical precedent and a half-decent roadmap. A list of demands is not really directly relevant, it is just a tool for organizers to use and must always be crafted for the conditions and political questions of the moment by such the ground groups.