SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
lyndon johnson
Urgent Message to Progressives: Infiltrate Your Local Democratic Party Before It's Too Late
Take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up.
Jul 28, 2025
What if, lacking an organized resistance to fascism like we have had in previous eras (the civil rights movement, SDS, BLM, the Wobblies), the Democratic Party itself could play the role of producing radical, positive transformation across America?
Sound crazy? It’s actually happened twice.
The first time was in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’ New Deal literally flipped our politics and the American economy upside down, turning us from a raw, harsh capitalist system to a democratic socialist system with Social Security, legalized unions, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, workplace safety rules, massive infrastructure construction, and millions of Americans being employed directly by the government to end poverty.
It happened again in the 1960s, with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, producing Medicare, Medicaid, the civil rights act, the voting rights act, food stamps, low income housing, National Public Radio, a transformation of our educational system for the better, USAID, Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, a major Social Security expansion, The National Endowment for the Arts, and what was essentially free college.
Sunday, I was on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNBC a conversation about protest movements. I pointed out that back in the 60s, when I was in SDS, there were a number of groups that were quite active, particularly on college campuses, but today most of them have been gutted or banned.
Black Lives Matter has disintegrated, the movement against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has led to universities rolling over and capitulating, and the #MeToo and abortion rights movements are essentially leaderless.
Which leaves the Democratic Party, as I mentioned on Ali’s show. Billionaires and racists turned the Republican Party into a neofascist protest party over the past decade; progressives and those of us who want to preserve democracy in America need to similarly says control of and radicalize the Democratic Party in the tradition of FDR and LBJ.
There is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.
If progressives hope to have any shot at influencing today’s Democratic Party and kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party did a decade and a half ago to take power.
And it starts in our own backyards.
Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, a decade ago, was in charge of helping the Tea Party’s Successful effort to take over and radicalize the GOP.
The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”
Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:
“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”
So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?
“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”
As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: true and effective political power flows up from the bottom.
It starts with Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power.
It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees that then go on to hold elected office, and who help draft a party’s platform.
They’re also generally the first people who elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say.
So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party and for primaries.
And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.
That was their pitch: take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked.
Control the primaries — as the Precinct Committee Members do — and you control the ultimate candidate, the election, and ultimately the nation, as we’ve seen repeatedly since the Tea Party era.
This is from a video they posted in January of 2010, with the same Concord Project Representative encouraging people in the Tea Party to do exactly what I just described:
“This video is for all the people out there in the Tea Party movement, the 9/12ers, just good decent people who are really fearful of what’s going on in the country and want to do something to fix things and they’re not sure what to do. Well, I’ve got a solution for you. The best way to ensure that conservatives win that all-important primary election is to become a real ball player in the ball game of politics. And that ball game is called party politics.
“And this is a secret, they don’t want the party establishments, any incumbents don’t want you to know about this and that’s why I’m telling you about it. Only precinct committeemen get to vote for, to elect party leaders. Only precinct committeemen can vote to endorse candidates.”
Again, that was in 2010, 11 months before that year’s elections.
In 2008, half of the Republican Party’s Precinct Committeemen positions around the country were vacant.
But by 2011, motivated by the efforts of people like the Concord Project, the Tea Party (which has now mostly morphed into MAGA) had swept in to fill the gaps: They’d filled up the Republican Party.
And we saw the results of the Precinct Committee takeover first in 2012 and more and more vividly in every election since: the GOP is now being driven largely from the bottom up by activists who’ve taken over the party and are also running for school boards and other local offices.
In 2012, after this campaign to get movement conservatives into the GOP, Tea Party candidates got onto nearly every ballot around the country and picked up 87 new seats in the US House of Representatives and 9 new seats in the Senate.
And even though the Tea Party didn’t then control a majority within the GOP in Congress like MAGA does now, they did control the Republican Party’s platform because they had control of the Precinct Committees.
Progressives and believers in democracy who want to fight Trump’s fascism need to do the same thing, only within the Democratic Party.
The rules about how to become a Precinct Committee Person vary from state to state, so step one is to show up at your local Democratic Party, sign up, and find out who the players are and what the rules are.
Even the names of these positions vary, as former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper notes on his excellent Substack newsletter Pepperspectives:
“In Cincinnati, we call them ‘precinct executives.’ Elsewhere, they are called ‘committeemen’ or ‘committeewomen.’ In other places, ‘ward chairs.’ Whatever they’re called, they are the basic unit of each city or county party structure in the country.”
If we’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that the Democratic Party shifted to the corporate “center” with Clinton and Obama and its establishment has been highly resistant to adopting real progressive change or elevating genuine progressives (like AOC) to senior/leadership positions.
And as we see right now in the Party’s leadership’s apparent inability to call out Trump and his parade of horribles, this unwillingness to stand up and fight is leading to the dismantling of programs that progressives fought so hard for over the entire last century.
We have been too often losing these fights, and to win them takes more than union protests in Wisconsin, a march on Trump’s birthday, or even voting, although those are all important.
But to really take power, like the Tea Party did in one short year, it will take an infiltration of the Democratic Party itself through claiming Precinct Committee positions, as well as simply showing up regularly at the meetings.
If this year, starting now, we execute the same strategy the Tea Party did when the billionaires funding it first set out to take over the GOP, then we can move the Democratic Party back to its progressive roots and finally see the progressive reforms — and election victories — that we’ve been fighting for.
We have 16 months before the 2026 midterm elections and your mission is to show up at your local Democratic Party headquarters and begin the infiltration.
Good luck and get started!
Keep ReadingShow Less
Remembering Bill Moyers, Who Always Strived to Make the Future Work
In the wake of today’s grim Supreme Court decision imperiling American citizenship for millions, he exemplified what a citizen could and should be.
Jun 27, 2025
A point of personal privilege, as they say: I want to take a minute to mark the death and life of Bill Moyers, first because he was a friend and an integral if quiet part of the climate fight, but also because I think—more than almost anyone else—he puts our strange moment in stark relief. In the wake of today’s grim Supreme Court decision imperiling American citizenship for millions, he exemplified what a citizen could and should be.
I knew who Bill Moyers was, of course, my whole conscious life. He’d been an omnipresent figure in the 1960s, coming to D.C. as a key aide to Vice President Lyndon Johnson only to quickly peel off to help found the Peace Corps. When LBJ wound up in the Oval Office, Moyers became one of his core advisors, helping shape the Great Society programs, before he finally broke with his mentor over Vietnam. Then he remade himself into the most important television journalist of his time, with a devoted following at CBS and then PBS.
But he really emerged into my thinking in the early 1990s when I was writing a book called The Age of Missing Information, which was an effort to understand how the mediated lives we were living shaped our minds and world. It was something between an experiment and performance art: I found the largest cable system in the world (a hundred channels in Fairfax,Virginia) and taped everything that came across them for for 24 hours—that meant I had 2,400 hours of tv, which I spent a year watching. A miserable year—there was so little sustenance. Except for Mister Rogers, and for Bill Moyers (who were not unalike, come to think of it). He interviewed a poet, and it was thoughtful and real and human, an oasis in that desert. No wonder he was beloved; no one save perhaps Edward R/ Murrow ever used the impoverished medium that is television with as much grace and skill. (Thirty Emmys, by the way.)
Bill Moyers was the preeminent interviewer of his time because he was so good at listening—that’s what effective interviewing really is. And listening is the thing most out of fashion in the people who rule over us now.
And then, a few years later, still in my 30s, through a series of coincidences, I got to work with him much much more closely; he’d asked me to join the board of the Schumann Foundation, the philanthropy that he ran for many years even as he continued his documentary career. Schumann was an unusual operation—the two brothers (heirs to the IBM fortune) who’d founded it were on the board too, and they were as generous as it was possible to be. When Bill decided an idea was worth, say, $200,000, they would invariably propose $400,000 instead. And so a great deal of important media and progressive work for several decades was funded essentially through his good graces.
I left the board, in fact, to avoid a conflict of interest because they wanted to make the grant that would help found 350.org; without it the first global grassroots climate campaign would not have gotten off the ground. And when the time came to start Third Act, the Schumann Foundation, then in the final throes of “spending down” their assets, made a small but key grant to give us the chance to explore the idea. I was a volunteer in these organizations, but not everyone can be a volunteer; Moyers understood that, and helped make sure that we, and others, had the wherewithal to pay decent wages to people doing hard and important work. He was instinctively generous.
But that’s not what sticks in my mind right now. It’s his other qualities: a deep empathy, a deep curiosity, and a deep commitment to reality as the basis for understanding the world. Those are not to be taken for granted—he’d grown up in the segregated south, for instance. But he cultivated them his whole life, till they were his nature. And they are, I think, the exact and polar opposite of our current political dispensation—the people defunding Black colleges and renaming naval vessels to make sure they don’t honor diversity, the people shutting down satellite feeds so we can’t see the Arctic melting, the people fixated on rounding up the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
Bill Moyers was the preeminent interviewer of his time because he was so good at listening—that’s what effective interviewing really is. And listening is the thing most out of fashion in the people who rule over us now. President Donald Trump, above all, just talks and talks and talks some more, in CAPITAL letters.
Moyers, by contrast, was not just an architect of, but also the exemplar of, the postwar liberal order in America, one of the best reflections of its virtues (and doubts). He represents a literacy now passing, an unpretentious sophistication that marked America at its intellectual best. I know, from many conversations in recent years, just how saddened and alarmed he was by the turn our world has taken, but I also know that he was constantly thinking of ways to make the future work. Which is, after all, our job.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why Isn't the Harris-Trump Election Like the 1964 Johnson Landslide Over Goldwater?
The transformation of the Democratic Party from a working class party to one of prosperous elites can’t be ignored or wished away. It is one reason why this election is so close and why an extremist may capture the electoral college. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Oct 31, 2024
In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican from Arizona, captured his party's presidential nomination and unabashedly conducted an extremist, right-wing campaign. He opposed civil rights legislation and New Deal social welfare programs. He implied a willingness to use nuclear weapons, saying he would give U.S. field commanders and the NATO Supreme Commander the freedom to launch them without presidential approval.
As Goldwater famously said in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
The Johnson campaign exploited Goldwater’s extremism with what may be the most effective and chilling TV ad of all time.
If you watch the famous campaign ad, you’ll see a very young girl standing in a field, pulling petals off a daisy while counting them out one by one. Then, we hear the voice of a military commander (with a strong southern accent) doing a similar countdown that ends in a nuclear explosion which takes over the screen. The ad finishes with a voice-over, Lyndon Johnson offering a few pious words about love and peace. Johnson is never seen. Goldwater is never mentioned.
Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater 61.1 percent to 38.5, winning 486 electoral votes to 52.
This year’s election also features a self-declared extremist. Yet today, the presidential race is a toss-up. Trump’s extremism promotes lies about immigrants eating pets and the poisoning of our blood. Trump calls Democrats the enemy within and he praises those who stormed the capital on January 6th. And in total violation of the history of American electioneering, he continues to argue that the 2020 election was stolen from him. A vast majority of Republicans agree with him. Goldwater and his party of 1964 look like centrists in comparison.
Given Trump’s blatant extremism, how can the election be so close? Why isn’t Harris 20 points ahead? What is so different between now and 1964?
Hillary Clinton, in 2016, provided an explanation, shared by many, that about half of all Trump voters are bigots:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.
Voters are willing to elect Trump, the ultra-extremist, because he voices their fears about the rise of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ communities. More than anything, they and Trump want to make America white again!
If that theory is correct, we’d expect white working-class voters to be very illiberal on those issues and to have become even more so over the last several decades. We tested that theory in my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, tracking 23 divisive social issues questions found in long-term voter surveys. It turns out that in 13 of the questions, the responses shifted in a more liberal direction over the years, and none of the 23 became more illiberal. Here are two stunning examples:
“Should gay or lesbian couples be legally permitted to adopt children?”
Said Yes in 2000: 38.2%
Said Yes in 2020: 76.0%
“Should legal status be granted to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes?”
Said Yes in 2010: 32.1%
Said Yes in 2020: 61.8%
If the deplorable argument is wanting, as our research suggests, what is a better explanation for the enormous support Trump is receiving?
A disclaimer is in order. It’s impossible to address all the factors in one short article. But this question shouldn’t be ignored, so here goes.
Let’s start with trust in government. In 1964, an amazing 77 percent of Americans agreed that “they trust the government to do what is right just about always/most of the time.” In 2024 it was 22 percent.
That means the incumbent President in 1964, Lyndon Johnson, was viewed as the leader of a government that protected it’s people. Kamala Harris, as the current incumbent Vice-President, is mostly viewed as a leader of a government that is not protecting the average person. Harris is perceived as part of the establishment, the elites who have benefited during the years of runaway inequality, while Trump is perceived as its wrecking ball.
But that displeasure with government today suggests another set of explanations, including the collapse of unionization and the rise of job insecurity facing working people over the past four decades. More than 29 percent of the total U.S. workforce were union members in 1964. Add in their families and at last half of all Americans had close union connections. Today, 94 percent of all private sector workers are not in unions.
As a result, nearly all workers have had little or no protection against the mass layoffs that have regularly afflicted the country since the 1970s, even when the economy is prospering. During the Johnson years, the union ecosystem was so dense that Democratic politicians had no choice but to appeal to the interests of working people. They had to be the party of workers whether they liked it or not.
But starting with Bill Clinton, unions became small enough to ignore. Appealing to and appeasing Wall Street and corporate interests became central to the Democratic Party’s path to power. They wrongly believed that workers had no place else to turn.
And white workers, in particular, fled the Democrats. The research for my book strongly suggests that the main culprit was mass layoffs and the failure of the Democrats to address them.
Take Mingo County, West Virginia, with a population 25,000. It had 3,300 coal mining jobs in 1996. In that year Bill Clinton received 69.7 percent of the vote. By 2020, Mingo County had lost 3,000 of those coal mining jobs, and Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent.
Is this cherry-picking one country to make a point? No. For Wall Street’s War on Workers, we tested all the counties in the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Our findings showed that as the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote declined. In short, the Democrats are being blamed for failing to protect working-class people from the destruction of their jobs. While working people may not know all the details about stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts, they know that Wall Street has been walking all over them and the Democrats have done little to stop them.
In discussing with my colleagues why this election is so different than 1964, one noted that the problem may be that Harris didn’t have enough time to mount a full campaign. But another jumped in and said, maybe she had too much time. Say what?
“She’s a corporate Democrat,” my colleague responded, meaning that the more Harris campaigns the more she sends that corporate-friendly signal to working-class voters. When they say she isn’t specific enough about her plans, they’re also saying she isn’t speaking directly enough to them about their issues.
The transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of the working class to the party of prosperous elites can’t be ignored or wished away. It is one reason why this election is so close and why an extremist may capture the electoral college. If Trump wins, he will surely wield his axe against government, and that is certain to negatively impact the most vulnerable among us.
It doesn’t have to be this way. My research and that of the Center for Working Class Politics show that a strong progressive populist message is very attractive to working people, especially in the Blue Wall states. It’s a damn shame that so many Democratic politicians can’t see the writing on the wall.Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular