Democracy is When Communities Do Stuff while Politicians Talk Platitudes.
But Democracy is Voting for the Next Corrupt Politician. Not to Empower the Citizens!
Is This Small City the Future of Democratic Engagement in America?
Activists in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have embarked on a nonstop campaign to resurrect the practice of progressive politics in the heart of Trump country.
It’s a fine spring Sunday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and most people in this decidedly pious city in the heart of Amish country are at home or at church celebrating the Sabbath. Even the famous Central Market-with its traditionally dressed vendors, its German delicacies, its Muenster cheeses and cured meats -is closed.
When you’re trying to create a populist political movement from scratch, however, you don’t get a lot of down time. And so Michelle Hines and her partner, Daniel Levin, are out knocking on doors and telling their neighbors about the new grassroots group in town.
Hines, a young white woman who works a day job at a local laboratory, ascends the stoop of a gray stone row house and a middle-aged lady in a dressing gown and slippers answers the door.
Hines introduces herself and then asks the crucial question: “What do you think of the political establishment?”
“It sucks!” says the woman at the door, who gives her name as Judy and describes herself as a Republican who didn’t vote in the last election. “It ain’t good, I’ll put it that way.” The woman is open and garrulous, and Hines invites her to the next monthly meeting of the group she represents. It’s called Lancaster Stands Up.
The organization, Hines explains, is a way for people who are sick of the status quo “to come together, to get plugged in.” It’s a polite and strategic description, but there’s plenty more to say.
Founded in the wake of Trump’s victory and led by a 12-person leadership committee, Lancaster Stands Up aims to upend politics-as-usual in this central Pennsylvania city. It wants nothing less than to break the stranglehold of both the Democratic and Republican establishments here and replace them with a progressive multi-racial political force beholden to the people alone. And it is using the tools of long-haul grassroots activism-canvassing, vetting candidates, bird-dogging political foes, forming unlikely alliances, training leaders, convening meetings-to build its constituency.
A crew of young lifelong Lancastrians, some of whom have been organizing together since high school, launched the group on their own, independent of any national organization, last November. Through huge rallies and intimate conversations and more, they are reminding neighbors like Judy that democracy is a practice that must be pursued constantly and in community. There are no off days. There are no off years. When civil society is at stake, it’s campaign time all the time.
After describing her concerns about gentrification and the cost of a movie ticket, after lamenting the fact that “the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer,” Judy, standing on her stoop under the springtime sun, shares her contact information and tells Hines that she’ll try to make the next meeting. She promises to tell her politically active daughter about Lancaster Stands Up, too.
“Nobody cares about anything but themselves anymore,” Judy says, as Hines and Levin prepare to leave. “I am glad you are doing this.”
Judy’s sentiments about the contemporary political climate make sense. Lancaster, after all, is the sort of place that the national Democratic Party has largely surrendered to right-wing control. It is a middle- and working-class city of roughly 60,000, and it is diverse-more than 30 percent of the population is Hispanic, and roughly 16 percent of its residents are black, according to the 2010 census. The city, meanwhile, is situated squarely in an agrarian “red” county, where residents are almost entirely white and where there are tens of thousands more registered Republicans than Democrats. GOP politicians represent the area in the House of Representatives and make up most of its state legislative delegation, too.
Lancaster Stands Up, for its part, is unfazed by such facts. Indeed its members see small cities like Lancaster-situated at the nexus of urban and rural life-as crucial to revitalizing social-democratic values in the American heartland.
“After Trump’s election, I knew I had to do something,” says Eliza Booth, a 39-year-old black woman, lifelong Lancaster resident, and member of the group’s leadership committee. “I needed to get involved and plug in instead of staying at home and being depressed.”
A passionate Bernie Sanders supporter, Booth worked on his campaign during the Democratic primary and says she still believes he would have beat Trump in the general election. But Sanders didn’t make it that far and Trump, whom she describes as “a monster,” made it all the way to the White House. Like so many others, the outcome shocked and dismayed her.
A few days after the election, though, Booth saw a flyer announcing an emergency mass meeting in town. She decided to attend and found a huge turnout. At least 250 people were there. They had come to vent their anger and share their anxieties, to talk to their neighbors and plot a progressive comeback. It was the debut of Lancaster Stands Up, and Booth was smitten. Since then, she has spent 10, sometimes 20 hours a week volunteering for the group on top of her full-time job.
“It makes me feel so inspired every day,” she says. “It makes me feel less alone in the fight.”
Indeed, Lancaster Stands Up is proving that progressive values are alive and vibrant in Booth’s community. Since its first emergency meeting, when outrage motivated people to come together and commiserate, it has seen both rapid growth and significant victories.
In late January, for instance, the group’s immigration committee partnered with church and immigrant-rights organizations in the city to hold a rally against the Trump administration’s first attempted Muslim ban. At least 2,000 people showed up for what organizers describe as the largest local protest in at least half a century. Lancaster Stands Up is now recruiting people for a rapid-response team to document and protest Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids in town.
The group is laboring in the electoral arena too. Its political committee, lovingly dubbed “Hold Them Accountable,” has been particularly adept at hounding recently elected Republican Congressman Lloyd Smucker, who has quickly proved himself a line-toeing party loyalist.
Organizers have staged two raucous rallies outside of his district office, where hundreds gathered to demand that he stand up to Trump. They have denounced his policies on social media and penned op-eds calling on him to hold an in-person town-hall meeting for his constituents (which he has so far failed to do). They have flooded his office with thousands of postcards and phone calls.
Their most aggressive action, though, took place in early March when three Lancaster Stands Up leaders and another supporter paid to attend a Lancaster Chamber of Commerce forum, which featured a question-and-answer session with Representative Smucker. As Smucker prepared to take questions from the crowd, the four infiltrators stood up one by one and interrupted the event.
Becca Rast was one of them. In front of a roomful of Republicans, she denounced Smucker’s support for Trump’s “racist immigration and economic policies.” Michelle Hines stood up immediately afterward-to shouts of “shut up” from old men in the crowd-and told Smucker that she had never seen her neighbors “so fearful for their lives and their families lives since you voted to repeal the ACA.”
“Our representatives have not ever been pressured in the way they are being now,” says Rast, a group founder who grew up in town. “Congressman Smucker was just so freaked out by it. He didn’t know how to respond.”
And while Lancaster Stands Up has mostly been playing defense, its leaders aim for something more.
“I feel like everything we have done up until this point is reactive,” says Nick Martin, the 28-year-old former regional field director for the Bernie Sanders campaign here. Together with Rast and a few other friends outraged by last year’s election, he called the first meeting of Lancaster Stands Up. “Now we are actually going on the offensive and building political power.”
I catch up with Martin-who, like Rast, I first met in 2010 when we were involved in a campaign against mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia-during the organization’s April mass meeting. Wearing a camouflage cap and work boots, he is greeting people, a mostly older white set, as they file into a local bar in downtown Lancaster.
“Our goal,” he explains, “is to use visionary politics to build a long-term mass-scale organization.”
“We also want to scare the shit out of establishment politicians,” adds Rafael Díaz, another member of the leadership team who, alongside Martin, is welcoming the roughly 200 people that have arrived for the meeting. “We want to show them we are not just going to hold signs in the town square. We are going to be a threat when they run for office.”
Lancaster Stands Up hopes, someday soon, to endorse populist politicians in Democratic primaries and eventually run candidates of its own. On April 7, in an initial foray, the group co-hosted a forum in downtown Lancaster during which its leaders questioned five mayoral candidates in front of a crowd of around 200 people. It has yet to make any endorsements for the upcoming municipal election.
With 18 months to prepare, the group also wants to run Congressman Smucker out of office in 2018.
First, though, it must develop more leaders and recruit more supporters. And so, using voter data that Martin learned to analyze during the Sanders campaign, using scripts that the team developed over beers on a recent Friday evening, the group has decided to start sending canvassers out in both the city and the surrounding county to register voters and to tell people about the movement.
With this plan in mind, Lancaster Stands Up has decided to use part of its April mass meeting as a training camp of sorts. As the meeting enters its second hour, 60 or so people still sit in tight rows in the back of the bar. The coffee is flowing freely. A few people are holding beers. It’s a beautiful spring day and the sun is flooding through large glass windows along the wall, but these eager new activists have elected to stay indoors a little longer to learn the art of canvassing.
Going door-to-door is one of “the skills of democracy that have atrophied over the last 40 years,” says Jonathan Smucker, another Lancaster Stands Up founder and a veteran of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Tall and thin and white with salt-and-pepper hair, he paces the room and asks the audience to name the social movements that have used canvassing as a key organizing tool. The civil-rights movement, says one person. The labor movement, chimes in another. The suffragists, says still another.
“We think Trump was able to win because Democrats haven’t fought visibly for working people,” he tells the crowd. “We need a party that knows it has a grassroots force at its back so it doesn’t cower to big money anymore.” Creating that force will require rehabilitating atrophied civic muscles and that, at its core, is what Lancaster Stands Up is all about.
Smucker instructs the meeting attendees to get up from their seats and form two rows facing each other. One row will play the role of progressive canvassers, the other row will pretend to be apathetic though somewhat sympathetic voters. The clamor of voices reverberates through the room as the trainees talk among themselves, as they learn how to approach strangers and pull them into the political process, as they take part in a small simple practice that could go an awful long way toward rebuilding our democracy.
“Cut!” says Smucker, who, as it happens, is the second-cousin-once-removed of the congressman his group hopes to depose. “Cut! Cut! Cut!”
After a quick debrief, the dress rehearsal is over and the attendees are dismissed. With their new skills, with their willingness to experiment and listen and learn, with their populist anti-establishment platform, the Lancaster Stands Up crew is ready to hit the streets and persuade people to take part in a new kind of politics.
Is This Small City the Future of Democratic Engagement in America?
A new project is underway in Barcelona
Translation of an article by Josep Maria Montaner, Councilor for Housing, Barcelona City Hall published in El Periodico on 6 May 2017
The city is rolling out a redistributive urban model based on adaptation and renovation, which prioritizes the right to decent housing
Two years on from the municipal elections, Barcelona is putting together a new urban project. In contrast to previous eras, this new project isn’t hierarchical, nor does it start with preconceived ideas, or consist in megaprojects. It isn’t conceived or represented by any individual. Rather, it’s a project that’s been worked on and shared by a political, social and professional movement; drawn up collectively, dynamically, as a network, based on debates in every neighbourhood and led, for the first time, by a woman.
It’s a redistributive urban model, based on adapting and renovating. It’s a model that, for the first time, doesn’t seek the monumental or the exceptional, but prioritizes the right to decent housing as the pillar of all policy. It’s a model that recovers and consolidates the public sphere, starting with the remunicipalization of the city’s water, the creation of the Metropolitan Energy Agency, and the principle that public land will remain public. It understands housing as a public service, and the city as made up of spaces for living in. That’s why investment in refurbishment, which had fallen to historic lows under the previous government, is at a record high of 46 million Euros in 2017. This budget will go to proactive refurbishments that focus on habitability in the neighbourhoods that need it most.
STRENGTHENING URBAN LIFE
This redistributive ‘post-model’ is expressed differently in each place, strengthening the vibrancy of urban life, just as Jane Jacobs advocated. That’s why we’ve drawn up a Plan for Neighbourhoods. We’ve moved from prioritizing the central avenues of Diagonal, Passeig de Gràcia and the luxury port to the neglected neighbourhoods of North Besós, the Raval and the Marina del Prat Vermell, where we’re remodeling public space between modern housing blocks and reaching every individual and family, either through rent subsidies or information offices on legal rights, all with a significant focus on coordination to improve public health and education.
This new city project has used the Special Urban Plan for Tourist Accommodation to control mass tourism and protect residential housing and the ability of people to stay in their neighbourhoods. The Plan is complemented by the measures in the Plan for the Right to Housing in Barcelona (2016-2025), which will triple the affordable public housing stock over the next ten years. We’ve used all available instruments, as well as creating new ones, including: the Unit against Residential Exclusion, which aims to tackle the housing crisis and promote the social function of housing; the Metropolitan Housing Observatory to provide basic information on housing stock, and the promotion of new forms of ownership such as cooperatives and co-housing.
A GREEN AND HARMONIOUS CITY
In order for this urban system to work as well as possible, we’re ramping up the process to move us towards a green and harmonious city, with sustainable mobility. We’re increasing the number of bike lanes, reorganizing the bus network, and creating more green routes. For the first time, Barcelona has included gender equality in urban planning, an essential tool to improve the quality of daily life.
Barcelona is learning from other contemporary urban models, including positive ecology in Curitiba (Brazil) or the pioneering sustainability work of Seattle (USA), as well exchanging experiences with cities like New York, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Nevertheless, the plan is ultimately the fruit of the DNA of the city and its citizens; creative, critical and innovative, capable of harnessing the best qualities of urbanism.
TACTICAL URBANISM
What is happening in Barcelona is everyday urbanism that prioritizes rights over bricks and mortar; a project that is beginning to build an alternative model to neoliberalism, the name we’ve given to the new face of the capitalist patriarchy. A politics of everyday life that puts people and communities in the centre. A new urban model that is constantly tested through tactical urbanism and that recovers the projects of proximity led by pioneering women who, at the end of the 19th century, defended models of community life and the value of neighbourhoods and taught Patrick Geddes to redo and improve rather than demolish.
It’s an alternative project that is up for continual debate, review and transformation, and which will come from institutions and municipalist movements or not at all. Urban planning in Barcelona is undergoing a process of change that’s the product of hundreds of minds and that is experienced at a small scale, uniquely, in each neighbourhood.
A new project is underway in Barcelona
Rojava: Feeling the spirit of revolution
Daring to imagine a new society and a new world in Rojava and across the globe
Just over three years ago, I returned to the hustle and bustle of capitalist modernity in London after spending a week in what the mainstream press has often coined ‘the most insane place on the planet’ - North Korea. I joked with a close friend of mine about how the first thing I should do with all the photos I took out there was to run them through a filter to make them all black and white. After all, the perception in western society of socialist countries in general - not to mention this ‘hermit kingdom’ - is that they are backward, dreary places. Therefore, why not take it upon myself to give the people just what they expected? In some ways, that would make for a more fascinating story than the one that I actually uncovered, which was of a quite ‘normal’ society, albeit a much more communal one (this doesn’t mean that there aren’t profound contradictions in North Korean society, of course). In this sense, it was a lively place - and certainly anything but dull or grey.
Still, I have to confess that there was a certain feeling missing within me from my experience there that I had hoped I would have found in a socialist society. It was the same hope that I carried with me when I travelled to places like Cuba - with its half a century of transformation that raised it up from a neo-colony of the U.S. to a dignified country - or to Venezuela which has been experiencing a rapid shift from neoliberalism to people-centered governance. Yes, I have been in search of something more than just having my i’s dotted and my t’s crossed (which for many western radicals is unfortunately often just that the classics of Marx and Lenin are somehow being adhered to). I was also after a feeling, a spirit, the life and soul of revolution. This had always remained elusive.
Sensing the collective spirit
Yes, I understand that here I am - a self-proclaimed leftist radical, a materialist - speaking in terms of feelings. Yet, it was exactly this concept that I found not only resonated with other internationalists in Rojava, but with revolutionaries there, in general. After having spent my first week in northern Syria in Qamishlo, one of the hevals (comrades) who I had been with since day one turned to me and asked if I had any reflections on my first several days. I talked of the impressive structures I had seen set up so far, from the communes to the cooperatives, as well as the process of political and ideological education that I was also a part of. I was impressed with that fact that from the very beginning, I hadn’t been treated as a visitor or an outsider, despite the fact that my primary work there was journalistic in nature. From the moment I arrived, I was told ‘welcome to our revolution. This is also your revolution now.’ I was made to feel that I was an integral part of this, even if I struggled linguistically with just a few words of Kurmanji. There was something else, though, something that I couldn’t quite explain - but when trying my best to do so anyway, this heval simply looked at me and laughed. ‘I know what you mean. The comrades here will talk a lot about this with you in the time ahead. We all say the same thing - that this revolution has a certain feeling to it that you just can’t explain. It has a spirit.'
I apologize to my die-hard materialists who are probably full of disappointment at the very thought of such metaphysical conclusions! However, the reality is that for the first time in my political life, I found a struggle that resonated with me on more than just a ‘checking the box’ level. I felt it profoundly. As much as I can talk about the actual societal transformation that is ongoing in the Cizire and Kobane cantons (I wasn’t fortunate enough to be able to witness Afrin), there will always be a part of my experience in these magnificent places that I won’t quite be able to put into words. It’s something that you have to be a part of it, something that draws people together and brings out the very best qualities of what it means to be human. No, this isn’t meant to romanticize or fetishize the revolution that’s now in its sixth year. There are certainly no lack of problems, of contradictions, and of possibilities and dangers that could mean that this process could be rolled back, curtailed, or even defeated. Such is the fluid nature of war, of struggle and of life.
Restoring hope and revolutionary optimism
If I was to explain what my overall thoughts were about having spent limited time in Rojava, it’s that it re-instilled a sense of hope into me that I have to confess that on some level I had lost. When I first embraced radical left-wing political ideas a decade and a half ago in my late teens, it was as if a light had been switched on. If reading The Communist Manifesto was something like the flicker of the lightbulb manifesting, Lenin’s State and Revolution was that light shining exceptionally brightly. However, over the many years of political practice and the coming of age in a capitalist society since then (in which Marxism was still going through a recovery period since the overthrow of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the 1989-91 era), staying the course with consistent revolutionary optimism and faith became no easy task. Some do it quite well, and many do it exceptionally better than I do or have done. Yet, there are also many who after a period of intense political struggle in their younger years in the western metropoles, become reclusive and retire into private life and the drudgery of the 9 to 5 grind. Personal responsibilities become primary responsibilities, and revolution becomes something more for bedtime reading and the occasional demonstration. I didn’t want that to be me - I urgently didn’t want that!
On some level though, I have to admit that the thought of revolution in my lifetime - even with the excitement of the seeming revival of socialist ideas in the U.S and Europe - still seemed quite distant. Perhaps the point was that we have been so long accustomed to losing - or at least to not really gaining - that I couldn’t dare to really imagine the prospect of the kind of radical experiment taking place that I always dreamt could sweep the streets of New York or the neighbourhoods of Berlin. Yet, here it was, in the midst of a war in the Middle East, twenty-six years after the supposed ‘end of history’ and the final victory of capitalism.
The Che Guavara of the United States?
There was a high level of interest in an American internationalist coming to Rojava from the United States. Everywhere I went, there was a keen curiosity in the question of how to characterize where the U.S. is heading under the Trump administration, and when, or if, a revolution is possible in the U.S. What I realized quite early on is that my politically correct answers about subjective conditions not being so favourable were never enough to please my Kurdish comrades (I would say ‘hosts’, but as I have already alluded to the mere idea that I was there as someone truly foreign went out of the window on day one).
For instance, one of the most powerful memories I have of the entire experience in Rojava was on an occasion I had to meet with a number of YPG commanders in Derik (in Arabic known officially as al-Malikiyah). There was one comrade in particular whose facial expression never showed the slightest hint of what he was actually thinking. I would speak, attempting to answer his questions at length and in full, and then a translator would put my words into Kurmanji. I did my best to express the fact that a revolution in the United States would of course take place, but perhaps it wouldn’t happen in the very near future or even in my lifetime. I explained that the sentiment of anti-communism and anti-socialism was still rather strong in the U.S, although it was now beginning to subside and young people were more favourable to these ideas. My five minute explanation of the subjective conditions was met with a simple, ‘well, it seems like you don’t really believe that the revolution will happen.’ I was caught off guard by that answer. I tried to rescue myself from looking foolish, or like an armchair revolutionary, or dare I say someting even worse! I stumbled through my response, and then ended with a paraphrase of quote from Che Guevara’s thoughts on revolution being the process of doing ‘the impossible’. To my frustration, this comrade was relentless. He didn’t look impressed when he hit me back with a simple ‘…and you don’t think you can be the Che Guevara of the U.S.?'
Of course, comparing myself to Che is something I had never dreamt of doing, and I was a bit uneasy at his question that would even put me in the same sentence as the world’s most well-known internationalist of the 20th century. Still, his point was well taken: no matter the odds stacked against you, nothing can hold back those with the willpower to actually succeed. It reminded me of the story of when Che met Fidel in Mexico City when the two planned the logistics of the Granma expedition. Fidel was said to have looked at Che during a conversation, saying ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ to which Che replied ‘Maybe a little’. Fidel was unphased, ‘well, a little bit of craziness is good.’ Of course, both of these late revolutionaries were Marxists and materialists - but they still believed, against all odds and against the most adverse of conditions - that a handful of revolutionaries imbued with the spirit and the feeling of radically changing society, could overcome the most arduous of situations and claim victory. That’s revolutionary faith.
Seven funerals, zero words
The morning after this all too embarrassing conversation, it continued to play in my head. It’s not that I was upset in any way. Truthfully, part of my decision to come to Rojava was to re-invigorate my revolutionary zeal. I just didn’t fully expect it to happen so soon, so quickly, so profoundly -- or even at all, frankly. That’s what caught me off guard about the evening before, and about the entire experience across the region up until this point.
It soon became early afternoon in the city of Derik, and a car affixed with a loudspeaker travelled through the streets making an announcement that I couldn’t understand, but that one of the hevals mentioned was about a funeral that would be taking place in a few hours for 7 shehids (martyrs) who perished fighting on the Raqqa front. There was no question about whether we would or wouldn’t attend - it was our revolutionary duty to be there to see these comrades off.
So a few hours later, there I was -- standing in the middle of a crowd of maybe 500 people on the only rainy and overcast day I had experienced in Rojava thus far (weather, as you can imagine, that was suitable for such a somber occasion). I wished at that moment that my knowledge of Kurdish was at a much higher level, but notwithstanding that, I felt something profound stirring inside of me as I attended the funeral for those young men who fell fighting against the fascist threat of Daesh. Although I wasn’t in the YPG, although I had never met any of the fallen comrades, although I probably would never end up in Raqqa, although my life in the west was completely different to that of a Kurd in Syria, it wasn’t hard for me to feel what was taking place in front of my very eyes. Perhaps I said a word or two to the internationalists with me over the few hours we were there. If I did, I don’t recall. I was in a zone, in a trance, in another world entirely as I watched dozens of men and women shovel enough dirt to be able to place the coffins draped in red, yellow and green six feet deep. I thought once more about the immense sacrifice that the people here were paying in blood, a sacrifice can’t possibly go in vain.
Positivism - and positivity
Maybe three days later, I was back in Qamishlo where I would spend the majority of my time while in Rojava. I was receiving an educational about the history of the Kurdish freedom movement, and I became struck by a passage from Abdullah Ocalan from his ‘Ideological Foundations of the Nation-State’: ‘Positivism can be circumscribed as a philosophical approach that is strictly confined to the appearance of things, which it equates with reality itself. Since in positivism appearance is reality, nothing that has no appearance can be part of reality. We know from quantum physics, astronomy, some fields of biology and even the gist of thought itself that reality occurs in worlds that are beyond observable events. The truth, in the relationship between the observed and the observer, has mystified itself to the extent that it no longer fits any physical scale or definition. Positivism denies this and thus, to an extent, resembles the idol worshipping of ancient times, where the idol constitutes the image of reality.’
Now this was something that I could relate to in light of how I had been feeling for the past week and a half, but even more so in the previous few days. Certainly, it would be a concept that I would have a lot of trouble explaining to many of my western comrades. In fact, I’m almost certain that no matter what I write at this point, there will always be some first world armchair ‘revolutionist’ who will find more than enough to critique in my assessment. So be it. What I will say is that my access to the Rojava revolution, my participation (albeit so far for a short period), was enough to not only re-instil the most intense revolutionary vigour in me, but enough to confirm what was in my gut - that indeed revolution has to on some basic, spiritual level be felt.
Thus, I have to apologize for my writing. Honestly, it will never quite be good enough. I can attempt to say any number of things to get people to look into the Rojava revolution, but short of people actually making the journey there to not only see it for themselves, but to deeply and profoundly feel it, there’s nothing I can really say that will ever do justice to what I now hold deep within me. It’s in part a rekindling of the love for and faith in humanity and for the oppressed that has burned - and flickered - for a decade and a half. But it’s also something more, something that I’m sure I will attempt to explain until I’m no longer alive, but which unfortunately can’t be placed in mere words. It’s not that I’m keeping secrets, but maybe -- just maybe -- Rojava is holding secrets, or rather keys to the future. For that reason, those with an inkling toward social justice and the prospect of a better world coming to fruition should make the journey. I can’t promise anything other than that it will forever change your life.
Rojava: Feeling the spirit of revolution
Is This Small City the Future of Democratic Engagement in America?
Activists in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have embarked on a nonstop campaign to resurrect the practice of progressive politics in the heart of Trump country.
It’s a fine spring Sunday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and most people in this decidedly pious city in the heart of Amish country are at home or at church celebrating the Sabbath. Even the famous Central Market-with its traditionally dressed vendors, its German delicacies, its Muenster cheeses and cured meats -is closed.
When you’re trying to create a populist political movement from scratch, however, you don’t get a lot of down time. And so Michelle Hines and her partner, Daniel Levin, are out knocking on doors and telling their neighbors about the new grassroots group in town.
Hines, a young white woman who works a day job at a local laboratory, ascends the stoop of a gray stone row house and a middle-aged lady in a dressing gown and slippers answers the door.
Hines introduces herself and then asks the crucial question: “What do you think of the political establishment?”
“It sucks!” says the woman at the door, who gives her name as Judy and describes herself as a Republican who didn’t vote in the last election. “It ain’t good, I’ll put it that way.” The woman is open and garrulous, and Hines invites her to the next monthly meeting of the group she represents. It’s called Lancaster Stands Up.
The organization, Hines explains, is a way for people who are sick of the status quo “to come together, to get plugged in.” It’s a polite and strategic description, but there’s plenty more to say.
Founded in the wake of Trump’s victory and led by a 12-person leadership committee, Lancaster Stands Up aims to upend politics-as-usual in this central Pennsylvania city. It wants nothing less than to break the stranglehold of both the Democratic and Republican establishments here and replace them with a progressive multi-racial political force beholden to the people alone. And it is using the tools of long-haul grassroots activism-canvassing, vetting candidates, bird-dogging political foes, forming unlikely alliances, training leaders, convening meetings-to build its constituency.
A crew of young lifelong Lancastrians, some of whom have been organizing together since high school, launched the group on their own, independent of any national organization, last November. Through huge rallies and intimate conversations and more, they are reminding neighbors like Judy that democracy is a practice that must be pursued constantly and in community. There are no off days. There are no off years. When civil society is at stake, it’s campaign time all the time.
After describing her concerns about gentrification and the cost of a movie ticket, after lamenting the fact that “the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer,” Judy, standing on her stoop under the springtime sun, shares her contact information and tells Hines that she’ll try to make the next meeting. She promises to tell her politically active daughter about Lancaster Stands Up, too.
“Nobody cares about anything but themselves anymore,” Judy says, as Hines and Levin prepare to leave. “I am glad you are doing this.”
Judy’s sentiments about the contemporary political climate make sense. Lancaster, after all, is the sort of place that the national Democratic Party has largely surrendered to right-wing control. It is a middle- and working-class city of roughly 60,000, and it is diverse-more than 30 percent of the population is Hispanic, and roughly 16 percent of its residents are black, according to the 2010 census. The city, meanwhile, is situated squarely in an agrarian “red” county, where residents are almost entirely white and where there are tens of thousands more registered Republicans than Democrats. GOP politicians represent the area in the House of Representatives and make up most of its state legislative delegation, too.
Lancaster Stands Up, for its part, is unfazed by such facts. Indeed its members see small cities like Lancaster-situated at the nexus of urban and rural life-as crucial to revitalizing social-democratic values in the American heartland.
“After Trump’s election, I knew I had to do something,” says Eliza Booth, a 39-year-old black woman, lifelong Lancaster resident, and member of the group’s leadership committee. “I needed to get involved and plug in instead of staying at home and being depressed.”
A passionate Bernie Sanders supporter, Booth worked on his campaign during the Democratic primary and says she still believes he would have beat Trump in the general election. But Sanders didn’t make it that far and Trump, whom she describes as “a monster,” made it all the way to the White House. Like so many others, the outcome shocked and dismayed her.
A few days after the election, though, Booth saw a flyer announcing an emergency mass meeting in town. She decided to attend and found a huge turnout. At least 250 people were there. They had come to vent their anger and share their anxieties, to talk to their neighbors and plot a progressive comeback. It was the debut of Lancaster Stands Up, and Booth was smitten. Since then, she has spent 10, sometimes 20 hours a week volunteering for the group on top of her full-time job.
“It makes me feel so inspired every day,” she says. “It makes me feel less alone in the fight.”
Indeed, Lancaster Stands Up is proving that progressive values are alive and vibrant in Booth’s community. Since its first emergency meeting, when outrage motivated people to come together and commiserate, it has seen both rapid growth and significant victories.
In late January, for instance, the group’s immigration committee partnered with church and immigrant-rights organizations in the city to hold a rally against the Trump administration’s first attempted Muslim ban. At least 2,000 people showed up for what organizers describe as the largest local protest in at least half a century. Lancaster Stands Up is now recruiting people for a rapid-response team to document and protest Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids in town.
The group is laboring in the electoral arena too. Its political committee, lovingly dubbed “Hold Them Accountable,” has been particularly adept at hounding recently elected Republican Congressman Lloyd Smucker, who has quickly proved himself a line-toeing party loyalist.
Organizers have staged two raucous rallies outside of his district office, where hundreds gathered to demand that he stand up to Trump. They have denounced his policies on social media and penned op-eds calling on him to hold an in-person town-hall meeting for his constituents (which he has so far failed to do). They have flooded his office with thousands of postcards and phone calls.
Their most aggressive action, though, took place in early March when three Lancaster Stands Up leaders and another supporter paid to attend a Lancaster Chamber of Commerce forum, which featured a question-and-answer session with Representative Smucker. As Smucker prepared to take questions from the crowd, the four infiltrators stood up one by one and interrupted the event.
Becca Rast was one of them. In front of a roomful of Republicans, she denounced Smucker’s support for Trump’s “racist immigration and economic policies.” Michelle Hines stood up immediately afterward-to shouts of “shut up” from old men in the crowd-and told Smucker that she had never seen her neighbors “so fearful for their lives and their families lives since you voted to repeal the ACA.”
“Our representatives have not ever been pressured in the way they are being now,” says Rast, a group founder who grew up in town. “Congressman Smucker was just so freaked out by it. He didn’t know how to respond.”
And while Lancaster Stands Up has mostly been playing defense, its leaders aim for something more.
“I feel like everything we have done up until this point is reactive,” says Nick Martin, the 28-year-old former regional field director for the Bernie Sanders campaign here. Together with Rast and a few other friends outraged by last year’s election, he called the first meeting of Lancaster Stands Up. “Now we are actually going on the offensive and building political power.”
I catch up with Martin-who, like Rast, I first met in 2010 when we were involved in a campaign against mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia-during the organization’s April mass meeting. Wearing a camouflage cap and work boots, he is greeting people, a mostly older white set, as they file into a local bar in downtown Lancaster.
“Our goal,” he explains, “is to use visionary politics to build a long-term mass-scale organization.”
“We also want to scare the shit out of establishment politicians,” adds Rafael Díaz, another member of the leadership team who, alongside Martin, is welcoming the roughly 200 people that have arrived for the meeting. “We want to show them we are not just going to hold signs in the town square. We are going to be a threat when they run for office.”
Lancaster Stands Up hopes, someday soon, to endorse populist politicians in Democratic primaries and eventually run candidates of its own. On April 7, in an initial foray, the group co-hosted a forum in downtown Lancaster during which its leaders questioned five mayoral candidates in front of a crowd of around 200 people. It has yet to make any endorsements for the upcoming municipal election.
With 18 months to prepare, the group also wants to run Congressman Smucker out of office in 2018.
First, though, it must develop more leaders and recruit more supporters. And so, using voter data that Martin learned to analyze during the Sanders campaign, using scripts that the team developed over beers on a recent Friday evening, the group has decided to start sending canvassers out in both the city and the surrounding county to register voters and to tell people about the movement.
With this plan in mind, Lancaster Stands Up has decided to use part of its April mass meeting as a training camp of sorts. As the meeting enters its second hour, 60 or so people still sit in tight rows in the back of the bar. The coffee is flowing freely. A few people are holding beers. It’s a beautiful spring day and the sun is flooding through large glass windows along the wall, but these eager new activists have elected to stay indoors a little longer to learn the art of canvassing.
Going door-to-door is one of “the skills of democracy that have atrophied over the last 40 years,” says Jonathan Smucker, another Lancaster Stands Up founder and a veteran of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Tall and thin and white with salt-and-pepper hair, he paces the room and asks the audience to name the social movements that have used canvassing as a key organizing tool. The civil-rights movement, says one person. The labor movement, chimes in another. The suffragists, says still another.
“We think Trump was able to win because Democrats haven’t fought visibly for working people,” he tells the crowd. “We need a party that knows it has a grassroots force at its back so it doesn’t cower to big money anymore.” Creating that force will require rehabilitating atrophied civic muscles and that, at its core, is what Lancaster Stands Up is all about.
Smucker instructs the meeting attendees to get up from their seats and form two rows facing each other. One row will play the role of progressive canvassers, the other row will pretend to be apathetic though somewhat sympathetic voters. The clamor of voices reverberates through the room as the trainees talk among themselves, as they learn how to approach strangers and pull them into the political process, as they take part in a small simple practice that could go an awful long way toward rebuilding our democracy.
“Cut!” says Smucker, who, as it happens, is the second-cousin-once-removed of the congressman his group hopes to depose. “Cut! Cut! Cut!”
After a quick debrief, the dress rehearsal is over and the attendees are dismissed. With their new skills, with their willingness to experiment and listen and learn, with their populist anti-establishment platform, the Lancaster Stands Up crew is ready to hit the streets and persuade people to take part in a new kind of politics.
Is This Small City the Future of Democratic Engagement in America?
A new project is underway in Barcelona
Translation of an article by Josep Maria Montaner, Councilor for Housing, Barcelona City Hall published in El Periodico on 6 May 2017
The city is rolling out a redistributive urban model based on adaptation and renovation, which prioritizes the right to decent housing
Two years on from the municipal elections, Barcelona is putting together a new urban project. In contrast to previous eras, this new project isn’t hierarchical, nor does it start with preconceived ideas, or consist in megaprojects. It isn’t conceived or represented by any individual. Rather, it’s a project that’s been worked on and shared by a political, social and professional movement; drawn up collectively, dynamically, as a network, based on debates in every neighbourhood and led, for the first time, by a woman.
It’s a redistributive urban model, based on adapting and renovating. It’s a model that, for the first time, doesn’t seek the monumental or the exceptional, but prioritizes the right to decent housing as the pillar of all policy. It’s a model that recovers and consolidates the public sphere, starting with the remunicipalization of the city’s water, the creation of the Metropolitan Energy Agency, and the principle that public land will remain public. It understands housing as a public service, and the city as made up of spaces for living in. That’s why investment in refurbishment, which had fallen to historic lows under the previous government, is at a record high of 46 million Euros in 2017. This budget will go to proactive refurbishments that focus on habitability in the neighbourhoods that need it most.
STRENGTHENING URBAN LIFE
This redistributive ‘post-model’ is expressed differently in each place, strengthening the vibrancy of urban life, just as Jane Jacobs advocated. That’s why we’ve drawn up a Plan for Neighbourhoods. We’ve moved from prioritizing the central avenues of Diagonal, Passeig de Gràcia and the luxury port to the neglected neighbourhoods of North Besós, the Raval and the Marina del Prat Vermell, where we’re remodeling public space between modern housing blocks and reaching every individual and family, either through rent subsidies or information offices on legal rights, all with a significant focus on coordination to improve public health and education.
This new city project has used the Special Urban Plan for Tourist Accommodation to control mass tourism and protect residential housing and the ability of people to stay in their neighbourhoods. The Plan is complemented by the measures in the Plan for the Right to Housing in Barcelona (2016-2025), which will triple the affordable public housing stock over the next ten years. We’ve used all available instruments, as well as creating new ones, including: the Unit against Residential Exclusion, which aims to tackle the housing crisis and promote the social function of housing; the Metropolitan Housing Observatory to provide basic information on housing stock, and the promotion of new forms of ownership such as cooperatives and co-housing.
A GREEN AND HARMONIOUS CITY
In order for this urban system to work as well as possible, we’re ramping up the process to move us towards a green and harmonious city, with sustainable mobility. We’re increasing the number of bike lanes, reorganizing the bus network, and creating more green routes. For the first time, Barcelona has included gender equality in urban planning, an essential tool to improve the quality of daily life.
Barcelona is learning from other contemporary urban models, including positive ecology in Curitiba (Brazil) or the pioneering sustainability work of Seattle (USA), as well exchanging experiences with cities like New York, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Nevertheless, the plan is ultimately the fruit of the DNA of the city and its citizens; creative, critical and innovative, capable of harnessing the best qualities of urbanism.
TACTICAL URBANISM
What is happening in Barcelona is everyday urbanism that prioritizes rights over bricks and mortar; a project that is beginning to build an alternative model to neoliberalism, the name we’ve given to the new face of the capitalist patriarchy. A politics of everyday life that puts people and communities in the centre. A new urban model that is constantly tested through tactical urbanism and that recovers the projects of proximity led by pioneering women who, at the end of the 19th century, defended models of community life and the value of neighbourhoods and taught Patrick Geddes to redo and improve rather than demolish.
It’s an alternative project that is up for continual debate, review and transformation, and which will come from institutions and municipalist movements or not at all. Urban planning in Barcelona is undergoing a process of change that’s the product of hundreds of minds and that is experienced at a small scale, uniquely, in each neighbourhood.
A new project is underway in Barcelona
Rojava: Feeling the spirit of revolution
Daring to imagine a new society and a new world in Rojava and across the globe
Just over three years ago, I returned to the hustle and bustle of capitalist modernity in London after spending a week in what the mainstream press has often coined ‘the most insane place on the planet’ - North Korea. I joked with a close friend of mine about how the first thing I should do with all the photos I took out there was to run them through a filter to make them all black and white. After all, the perception in western society of socialist countries in general - not to mention this ‘hermit kingdom’ - is that they are backward, dreary places. Therefore, why not take it upon myself to give the people just what they expected? In some ways, that would make for a more fascinating story than the one that I actually uncovered, which was of a quite ‘normal’ society, albeit a much more communal one (this doesn’t mean that there aren’t profound contradictions in North Korean society, of course). In this sense, it was a lively place - and certainly anything but dull or grey.
Still, I have to confess that there was a certain feeling missing within me from my experience there that I had hoped I would have found in a socialist society. It was the same hope that I carried with me when I travelled to places like Cuba - with its half a century of transformation that raised it up from a neo-colony of the U.S. to a dignified country - or to Venezuela which has been experiencing a rapid shift from neoliberalism to people-centered governance. Yes, I have been in search of something more than just having my i’s dotted and my t’s crossed (which for many western radicals is unfortunately often just that the classics of Marx and Lenin are somehow being adhered to). I was also after a feeling, a spirit, the life and soul of revolution. This had always remained elusive.
Sensing the collective spirit
Yes, I understand that here I am - a self-proclaimed leftist radical, a materialist - speaking in terms of feelings. Yet, it was exactly this concept that I found not only resonated with other internationalists in Rojava, but with revolutionaries there, in general. After having spent my first week in northern Syria in Qamishlo, one of the hevals (comrades) who I had been with since day one turned to me and asked if I had any reflections on my first several days. I talked of the impressive structures I had seen set up so far, from the communes to the cooperatives, as well as the process of political and ideological education that I was also a part of. I was impressed with that fact that from the very beginning, I hadn’t been treated as a visitor or an outsider, despite the fact that my primary work there was journalistic in nature. From the moment I arrived, I was told ‘welcome to our revolution. This is also your revolution now.’ I was made to feel that I was an integral part of this, even if I struggled linguistically with just a few words of Kurmanji. There was something else, though, something that I couldn’t quite explain - but when trying my best to do so anyway, this heval simply looked at me and laughed. ‘I know what you mean. The comrades here will talk a lot about this with you in the time ahead. We all say the same thing - that this revolution has a certain feeling to it that you just can’t explain. It has a spirit.'
I apologize to my die-hard materialists who are probably full of disappointment at the very thought of such metaphysical conclusions! However, the reality is that for the first time in my political life, I found a struggle that resonated with me on more than just a ‘checking the box’ level. I felt it profoundly. As much as I can talk about the actual societal transformation that is ongoing in the Cizire and Kobane cantons (I wasn’t fortunate enough to be able to witness Afrin), there will always be a part of my experience in these magnificent places that I won’t quite be able to put into words. It’s something that you have to be a part of it, something that draws people together and brings out the very best qualities of what it means to be human. No, this isn’t meant to romanticize or fetishize the revolution that’s now in its sixth year. There are certainly no lack of problems, of contradictions, and of possibilities and dangers that could mean that this process could be rolled back, curtailed, or even defeated. Such is the fluid nature of war, of struggle and of life.
Restoring hope and revolutionary optimism
If I was to explain what my overall thoughts were about having spent limited time in Rojava, it’s that it re-instilled a sense of hope into me that I have to confess that on some level I had lost. When I first embraced radical left-wing political ideas a decade and a half ago in my late teens, it was as if a light had been switched on. If reading The Communist Manifesto was something like the flicker of the lightbulb manifesting, Lenin’s State and Revolution was that light shining exceptionally brightly. However, over the many years of political practice and the coming of age in a capitalist society since then (in which Marxism was still going through a recovery period since the overthrow of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the 1989-91 era), staying the course with consistent revolutionary optimism and faith became no easy task. Some do it quite well, and many do it exceptionally better than I do or have done. Yet, there are also many who after a period of intense political struggle in their younger years in the western metropoles, become reclusive and retire into private life and the drudgery of the 9 to 5 grind. Personal responsibilities become primary responsibilities, and revolution becomes something more for bedtime reading and the occasional demonstration. I didn’t want that to be me - I urgently didn’t want that!
On some level though, I have to admit that the thought of revolution in my lifetime - even with the excitement of the seeming revival of socialist ideas in the U.S and Europe - still seemed quite distant. Perhaps the point was that we have been so long accustomed to losing - or at least to not really gaining - that I couldn’t dare to really imagine the prospect of the kind of radical experiment taking place that I always dreamt could sweep the streets of New York or the neighbourhoods of Berlin. Yet, here it was, in the midst of a war in the Middle East, twenty-six years after the supposed ‘end of history’ and the final victory of capitalism.
The Che Guavara of the United States?
There was a high level of interest in an American internationalist coming to Rojava from the United States. Everywhere I went, there was a keen curiosity in the question of how to characterize where the U.S. is heading under the Trump administration, and when, or if, a revolution is possible in the U.S. What I realized quite early on is that my politically correct answers about subjective conditions not being so favourable were never enough to please my Kurdish comrades (I would say ‘hosts’, but as I have already alluded to the mere idea that I was there as someone truly foreign went out of the window on day one).
For instance, one of the most powerful memories I have of the entire experience in Rojava was on an occasion I had to meet with a number of YPG commanders in Derik (in Arabic known officially as al-Malikiyah). There was one comrade in particular whose facial expression never showed the slightest hint of what he was actually thinking. I would speak, attempting to answer his questions at length and in full, and then a translator would put my words into Kurmanji. I did my best to express the fact that a revolution in the United States would of course take place, but perhaps it wouldn’t happen in the very near future or even in my lifetime. I explained that the sentiment of anti-communism and anti-socialism was still rather strong in the U.S, although it was now beginning to subside and young people were more favourable to these ideas. My five minute explanation of the subjective conditions was met with a simple, ‘well, it seems like you don’t really believe that the revolution will happen.’ I was caught off guard by that answer. I tried to rescue myself from looking foolish, or like an armchair revolutionary, or dare I say someting even worse! I stumbled through my response, and then ended with a paraphrase of quote from Che Guevara’s thoughts on revolution being the process of doing ‘the impossible’. To my frustration, this comrade was relentless. He didn’t look impressed when he hit me back with a simple ‘…and you don’t think you can be the Che Guevara of the U.S.?'
Of course, comparing myself to Che is something I had never dreamt of doing, and I was a bit uneasy at his question that would even put me in the same sentence as the world’s most well-known internationalist of the 20th century. Still, his point was well taken: no matter the odds stacked against you, nothing can hold back those with the willpower to actually succeed. It reminded me of the story of when Che met Fidel in Mexico City when the two planned the logistics of the Granma expedition. Fidel was said to have looked at Che during a conversation, saying ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ to which Che replied ‘Maybe a little’. Fidel was unphased, ‘well, a little bit of craziness is good.’ Of course, both of these late revolutionaries were Marxists and materialists - but they still believed, against all odds and against the most adverse of conditions - that a handful of revolutionaries imbued with the spirit and the feeling of radically changing society, could overcome the most arduous of situations and claim victory. That’s revolutionary faith.
Seven funerals, zero words
The morning after this all too embarrassing conversation, it continued to play in my head. It’s not that I was upset in any way. Truthfully, part of my decision to come to Rojava was to re-invigorate my revolutionary zeal. I just didn’t fully expect it to happen so soon, so quickly, so profoundly -- or even at all, frankly. That’s what caught me off guard about the evening before, and about the entire experience across the region up until this point.
It soon became early afternoon in the city of Derik, and a car affixed with a loudspeaker travelled through the streets making an announcement that I couldn’t understand, but that one of the hevals mentioned was about a funeral that would be taking place in a few hours for 7 shehids (martyrs) who perished fighting on the Raqqa front. There was no question about whether we would or wouldn’t attend - it was our revolutionary duty to be there to see these comrades off.
So a few hours later, there I was -- standing in the middle of a crowd of maybe 500 people on the only rainy and overcast day I had experienced in Rojava thus far (weather, as you can imagine, that was suitable for such a somber occasion). I wished at that moment that my knowledge of Kurdish was at a much higher level, but notwithstanding that, I felt something profound stirring inside of me as I attended the funeral for those young men who fell fighting against the fascist threat of Daesh. Although I wasn’t in the YPG, although I had never met any of the fallen comrades, although I probably would never end up in Raqqa, although my life in the west was completely different to that of a Kurd in Syria, it wasn’t hard for me to feel what was taking place in front of my very eyes. Perhaps I said a word or two to the internationalists with me over the few hours we were there. If I did, I don’t recall. I was in a zone, in a trance, in another world entirely as I watched dozens of men and women shovel enough dirt to be able to place the coffins draped in red, yellow and green six feet deep. I thought once more about the immense sacrifice that the people here were paying in blood, a sacrifice can’t possibly go in vain.
Positivism - and positivity
Maybe three days later, I was back in Qamishlo where I would spend the majority of my time while in Rojava. I was receiving an educational about the history of the Kurdish freedom movement, and I became struck by a passage from Abdullah Ocalan from his ‘Ideological Foundations of the Nation-State’: ‘Positivism can be circumscribed as a philosophical approach that is strictly confined to the appearance of things, which it equates with reality itself. Since in positivism appearance is reality, nothing that has no appearance can be part of reality. We know from quantum physics, astronomy, some fields of biology and even the gist of thought itself that reality occurs in worlds that are beyond observable events. The truth, in the relationship between the observed and the observer, has mystified itself to the extent that it no longer fits any physical scale or definition. Positivism denies this and thus, to an extent, resembles the idol worshipping of ancient times, where the idol constitutes the image of reality.’
Now this was something that I could relate to in light of how I had been feeling for the past week and a half, but even more so in the previous few days. Certainly, it would be a concept that I would have a lot of trouble explaining to many of my western comrades. In fact, I’m almost certain that no matter what I write at this point, there will always be some first world armchair ‘revolutionist’ who will find more than enough to critique in my assessment. So be it. What I will say is that my access to the Rojava revolution, my participation (albeit so far for a short period), was enough to not only re-instil the most intense revolutionary vigour in me, but enough to confirm what was in my gut - that indeed revolution has to on some basic, spiritual level be felt.
Thus, I have to apologize for my writing. Honestly, it will never quite be good enough. I can attempt to say any number of things to get people to look into the Rojava revolution, but short of people actually making the journey there to not only see it for themselves, but to deeply and profoundly feel it, there’s nothing I can really say that will ever do justice to what I now hold deep within me. It’s in part a rekindling of the love for and faith in humanity and for the oppressed that has burned - and flickered - for a decade and a half. But it’s also something more, something that I’m sure I will attempt to explain until I’m no longer alive, but which unfortunately can’t be placed in mere words. It’s not that I’m keeping secrets, but maybe -- just maybe -- Rojava is holding secrets, or rather keys to the future. For that reason, those with an inkling toward social justice and the prospect of a better world coming to fruition should make the journey. I can’t promise anything other than that it will forever change your life.
Rojava: Feeling the spirit of revolution