For years, one of the biggest challenges facing Progressive Democrats in Florida and nationwide has been the inability to unite and work together to accomplish common goals. Too often, liberal organizations and individuals have stayed busy fighting their own chosen battles, or worse, competing with or combating one another without effectively communicating with one another – much less carefully coordinating their endeavors as much as possible.
But the 2008 effort to elect Barack Obama as President and the ability of the campaign’s grassroots organization, Obama For America (OFA, now the White House’s grassroots tool, Organizing For America) to bring together so many different groups and volunteers running the gamut of Democratic/Liberal politics, marked what many hoped would be the beginning of a new era in American progressive political activism – an era of greater cooperation, increased effectiveness, and broader impact.
The extent to which this has actually happened over the last year or so is debatable. Groups like MoveOn, Democracy For America (DFA), Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), to name just a few, are definitely maintaining good momentum on the grassroots online organizing level, and seem most of the time to be pushing hard in the same general directions on issues like health reform, economic reform, climate change, and the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan.
To varying degrees, these and many other organizations have alternated between trying to support the President and the OFA agenda, while pursuing their own more specific, and usually more progressive policy initiatives and reform efforts – which is fine, for that better reflects the will of their respective memberships, for the most part anyway.
Yet the way that the health reform debate has gone, the way that economic reform is unfolding, and the way that climate change legislation is taking shape, all are telling indicators of a continuing lack of coordinated cohesion in the progressive movement, resulting in watered-down, tame versions of the Change so many of us were voting for in 2008.
The good news is that there is a model emerging right here in Palm Beach County, Florida – and in other places around the country – for how to get the different parts of “the movement” to communicate and work together to still greater effect moving forward. This worthy effort, launched in January of this year, is called the Palm Beach County Progressive Round Table (PRT). It was founded by activist Micki Royce, and is hosted by the PBC chapter of the terrific national organization, Democracy For America – an outgrowth of Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign organization, which led the way for the Obama phenomenon of 2008.
As Royce states on the very simple one-page website for the Round Table, “The mission of the Progressive Round Table (PRT) is simply to encourage the sharing of information and ideas in order to foster cooperation and human interaction among the leaders and decision makers of peaceful, progressive organizations.”
Almost fifty different progressive organizations with presence in Palm Beach County are invited to PRT quarterly meetings, where a representative from each group in attendance gets a strictly enforced five minutes of presentation time to update everyone else in attendance on what their current efforts and activities are. Then there’s time for give and take, back and forth, and most hopefully, alliance building.
The evidence so far seems to indicate that there is indeed an enhanced level of mutual cooperation and support between the groups and in particular, better coordination of their more local grassroots efforts and activities in Palm Beach County.
As these organizations continue to communicate and coordinate more regularly and effectively with one another – and with regional and local Democratic Party organizations – an ever-widening population of political activists will be better able to understand what each group does, does differently, and does best.
With that understanding, one can only hope that activists, organizations, the progressive movement and the Democratic Party will be that that much more effective in advancing the sociopolitical causes and reforms that are so important to our county, state, and country.
And this holiday week, that would be something to be truly thankful for.
