Negation is not enough

Building a positive movement to create a better world

By now, you’re a lot more familiar with Tim Walz than you were a week ago. I’m not going to talk too much about him today, because you’ve probably seen three interviews, two profiles that are so in-depth you know the formation his high school football players used twenty years ago, and multiple speeches by now. But Walz has one or two things to teach the left – and not because he’s a leftist. He was a Democratic member of Congress from a red district and now governs Minnesota, where Dems have a one-seat majority in the state legislature. Is he the best governor in the country? Quite possibly. Is he a leftist? No, not a single governor in this country is, which is to be expected. But he’s overseen Minnesota as they implement universal free school meals, universal paid family and medical leave, free college tuition for middle and lower-income students, right-to-repair laws, the banning of non-compete clauses and captive audience meetings, and more. And that’s where the lessons come in.

Democrats in Minnesota in the Walz era have been relentlessly positive. By that I don’t just mean upbeat, which also seems to be true, and important, but rather that they’ve been constructive, building and selling an agenda that takes positive action rather than an agenda that is oppositional, negative, telling voters what they’re against or what they hate. Part of this stems from necessity. One Walz quote that’s been going around recently is: “It's not about winning races so you can bank political capital for the next race, you win races so you can burn the hell out of that political capital to improve people’s lives.” And that sentiment, that approach feels relatively novel. Democrats have not acted in this way in my lifetime. The clear, unabashed emphasis on materially improving lives has often felt secondary, at best. Appeasing business interests, which requires limiting good policy in a huge way, has come in first.

There are obvious lessons for Democrats here, if they want to listen. Walz isn’t a socialist, and he’s not really even a big progressive. He’s a pragmatist, and winning and keeping power in a state where the legislature hangs in the balance requires proving yourself, proving to voters that you’re actually fighting for them. This entire country sits precariously in the balance, and if Democrats want to win they’ll embrace Walz’s practical approach of actually helping people.

But those of us on the left need to learn from this approach too. A negative approach just doesn’t work. Telling people why everything is bad again and again doesn’t cut it. You might be right, but you’ll lose, and what we need is power, not just the moral high ground. If you feel relentlessly negative, about the state of the world or U.S. politicians or capitalism, I understand completely. And you are, again, right in many fundamental ways. I rail against capitalism and white supremacy and the state of U.S. politics as often as anyone. These systems are fundamentally harmful, and we need systemic transformation, not just little tweaks. We should express our anger about all of this and more. But, then, we should put forward a positive vision.

We will not win by building a movement solely of critique, a movement that says everything is wrong and nothing is right. We are required to build, we are required to present a positive vision, difficult as that may be. We are required to proclaim what could be, not just denounce what is. There has been a fetishization of critique across much of the left, and while there is so much to criticize about systems of domination and extraction and oppression, that critique must be the beginning, not the end.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

It's my belief that in being out of power for so long, much of the left has a permanent opposition mentality, an idea that our job is calling things out. This is a losing approach, and this piece is as much about winning as anything else. In being out of power it can be easy to forget that progressive policies and ideas are immensely popular. When we look at some of the ideas on the table in the U.S. we see that 71% of Americans want to raise taxes on the rich, 75% want rent control, and 89% want to raise the minimum wage. These aren’t far-left ideas, per se, but that’s exactly the point. They are what currently constitutes the left-leaning edge of mainstream U.S. politics, and they’re more popular than anything else. You can’t get 89% of people to agree on anything. Except raising the minimum wage.

And that is the position of strength we can work from. Relentless critique is not popular. It leads to feelings of burnout, both among those criticizing and those who hear it, often without any matching solution. But if we start by saying the rent is too high, wages are too low, and the rich are too rich, and then present solutions to these issues (and they can and should be solutions that go far beyond what is currently discussed in Congress) we would both be working from a position of strength and showing that the left has real answers and is building something tangible and powerful.

Housing might be the perfect issue to demonstrate how this all works, and can work. Homelessness has reached record levels, rents have hit record highs, and the cost of buying a house is through the roof. There’s so much to criticize that it’s easy to stop there. Some people direct their anger at the government, some at landlords, and an increasing number direct it at the entire capitalist, for-profit housing system. And each of these actors or elements is deserving of criticism. Housing should not be a commodity, but then what? Anger and frustration over a topic so vital, so important to life must be translated into action. And people are doing exactly that. People are organizing like mad around housing. Just this week the Tenant United Federation launched. Over 370 tenant organizers from multiple unions across the country formed this federation to “bargain for tenant protections, to disrupt the flow of capital to those who commodify our homes, to secure alternatives to the current housing market, to guarantee housing as a public good, and to establish tenants as a political and economic class that cannot be ignored.”

This is where it’s at. Did it take anger, did it take critique, did it take people being fed up with evictions and rising rents? Yes. But that righteous rage was paired with disciplined, dedicated, thorough organizing. One of the federation’s members, the Bozeman Tenants Union, has already gotten Airbnbs banned and one of their founders is now mayor. Another member, Kansas City Tenants, got voters to reject giving hundreds of millions to a billionaire stadium owner, got multiple candidates they endorsed onto the city council, and has been a leading voice in getting rent control into the national discussion. So much so that Biden has now proposed a 5% rent increase cap nationwide.

Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash

It’s still to be determined if that national cap will become a real target for Democrats, but we know that tenants across the country have made tremendous strides, and that they’re going to keep organizing. We know that the ranks of renters who are committing to this struggle are only growing. Now, they have a national vessel to gather their assembled strength in one place and push for change. That is just one example of what can happen when critique shifts into building and creating a positive movement.

It’s not always easy, right now, to reorient ourselves towards possibility and away from a solely negative message about the state of the world. One shortcut, potentially, is to de-center the political establishment. During a presidential election it can be especially difficult to make this shift, but viewing the working class, the millions of unorganized, and organized, people as the center of your political orientation rather than just the two parties is an immensely freeing change.

In a world, and a media ecosystem, where binary thinking is constantly rewarded and encouraged, shifting our center is a needed alternative to black and white thinking. For instance, centering the working class at large in your political analysis doesn't mean you ignore or discount the establishment completely. If we understand tenant organizing to be at the center of our approach to housing, for example, we invest heavily in that approach and encourage those around us to join tenant unions and build power for renters. Then, if sufficient power is built there, and our unions choose to use that power to push politicians to enact rent caps or build public housing, we don't ignore that option that will change millions of lives and give people increase time and money to live the lives they want to live, including more time to participate in building a better world.

But our center remains the people, the millions and millions of us. The fact that we are largely unorganized means there is a vast, vast reservoir of untapped power. And in shifting our focus we enable a more constructive and positive vision to emerge on the left. We become less prone to constantly reacting to every development from the two parties and instead can carve out a vision and plan that focuses on what we are collectively building, not just what we're fighting. We are not relegated to the position of perpetual opposition, only able to denounce one bad decision or bad candidate after another. Instead we’re able to welcome people into a movement that is building worker cooperatives, building community land trusts for us to own our housing collectively, building unions at work and in our neighborhoods, and building social movements that welcome in a wide range of people and create a vision for the world we want to live in, not just the systems we want to abolish. Constructing the society we want to see and the power required to get us there is how we’re going to win the world we need.