People like brake lights

I keep coming back to this article Jonathan Swarz wrote back in January. Trump was about to take power and many Americans exhausted by the 2016 were having a dark teatime over it.  What do you do when it's all gone to shit?  This seemed like a good thought to start with.

When and where are the next Democratic and Republican Party meetings in your neighborhood? You don’t know, because neither the Democrats nor Republicans are political parties in the historical sense. Mostly they just demand we send them money and then yell at us about voting every few years.

While it has almost passed out of Americans’ living memory, parties used to have regular, local meetings where everyone got together, yammered about politics for a while, and then drank beer. Elections were the culmination of what parties did, not the starting point.

A healthy political party would foster community and provide people with concrete things to do between elections. Mike McCurry, one of Bill Clinton’s press secretaries, once suggested that Democrats should turn themselves into a pool of neighborhood volunteers “so that when people are trying to accomplish something, they would say: Call the Democrats, they always have people.”

Or they could get members involved in a local fight for a $15 minimum wage. Or helping women get a safe abortion. Or restoring funding cuts to local colleges. Or whatever members decide. That’s politics.

Well we still don't have political party that functions in any way like that.  But we have seen several organizations spring to life in recent months who are trying. One such example is DSA.  Here's your New Orleans chapter at work last week.

How does repairing brake lights aide DSA's mission?

In a few ways: There's the aspect of helping people avoid any kind of interaction with the justice system, so keeping people from getting tickets and everything serves the mission of prison abolition and all that, which we've gotten started with.

Also, there's also an aspect of building power outside of the electoral politics system. In New Orleans, it's really hard to create change through regular electoral politics because it's so closed, and it's hard to break into it. Doing service like this is a way of making that change on the outside, and helping people meet their basic needs in a way the government will not.

Helping people meet basic needs like that helps us build a stronger working-class base. To get a ticket for a brake light can ruin your whole month, it can ruin a few months, it can ruin your life for a longer than that. It's such a small thing we can do to change that for people.

Fixing brake lights is a small thing. But it's a nice small thing. It's a great way to start breaking through the morass of the media horror show and reconnecting the political and the practical. Politics is about bringing people together to help them get the things they need and like. People like brake lights. Why not start there?