The show's over. Now for the serious politics.

The best thing I saw during our recently concluded election season came from the Working Families Party in New York. Like many of us, the people in the WFP are distressed at the state of US politics, dominated as it is by the two legacy parties and their deep-pocketed backers, indifferent as it often is to the needs and interests of ordinary citizens. Like not-quite-as-many of us (though more than one would think), the people in the WFP translate their distress into work aimed at putting us on a better path. The precise path they have in mind is interesting, and I'll say more about it in a moment. More interesting, though, is what the path leads to. The WFP has a serious politics in view, and signaled it with the image below. I ran across the image near the end of the campaign, and immediately recognized it as an emblem for the kind of serious politics that we need, now more than ever in the wake of this presidential race. 

This image signals a commitment to serious politics by foregrounding the WFP's use of New York state's fusion voting rules, which allow different parties to back the same candidate. Look closely and you'll see it: someone has voted for Obama and Biden on the WFP line. Fusion voting may sound wacky, but in our winner-take-all, two-party duopoly system it is an important check on legacy party propaganda about public opinion and an important resource for holding elected officials accountable. New Yorkers can vote for Democrats on the WFP line, which, as they say on their website, means that voters can vote expressively and vote from conscience without wasting a vote (if one thinks of it this way) on a third party candidate who can't win. The WFP website explains clearly why this matters: "Voting for [a] candidate under Working Families counts the same as voting for them under the Democratic party line — but it also lets them know that you expect them to fight for the issues we care about."

This disambiguation of electoral support would give the lie to the still-influential thought, peddled most effectively by DLC types, that Democrats lose only when they don't tack hard enough to the (alleged) center, which is to say, toward Republicans. Once the possibility of support from other precincts becomes quantifiably clear, the democratic wing of the Democratic Party might begin a comeback, or the truly progressive wingtip of the party might stop pretending that it even belongs in a legacy party. And through all this, the real diversity of US political opinion might have another pathway into the daylight of mainstream consideration. As people keep showing, once you go beyond asking people to label their politics - 'are you more liberal or conservative?' - and ask them where they are on real issues and questions of policy, US public opinion is much more complicated than our reliably center-right political establishment would have us think. 

It is important to recognize the overlooked views and unexplored possibilities of US political life because we need for our political practices and institutions to address the needs of ordinary people, not to satisfy the demands of the people who will get theirs anyway. We need to do politics in ways that register and speak to the demands of our actual situations, rather than reflecting the illusions of political mythologies. Fusion voting is a start, or it might be; but it's only one of the many experiments in democratic life that we need to run now.

Conducting these experiments would bring us closer to having a truly serious politics. Serious politics is what comes after the campaign spectacles; it bridges campaign seasons with the hard work of building coalitions and organized publics, and holding elected officials accountable, and creating sustainable mechanisms for holding officials accountable. A serious politics recognizes that politics is a means to an end, not an end in itself; that it is not essentially a game or a path to upward mobility, though it can be regarded as either of these things; that politics is about securing an ethical distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation, about systematically managing the conditions and consequences of a shared form of life; that, in a democratic republic, politics is about the demos, the people, working to hold its representatives accountable to its needs. 

Serious politics is what Fannie Lou Hamer practiced, and what Frederick Douglass had in mind when he said that power concedes nothing without a demand. It is what puts the campaign season into perspective, and reminds us that voter registration drives and phone banks are only part of the story. It is what gives us common cause even with the people who - reasonably, in my view, though I did not join them - refuse to participate in the rituals sponsored by the Democrats and Republicans, and who deny that the sacrifices of previous generations, however noble and laudable, make voting an obligation, no matter how dessicated or distorted the mechanisms by which our votes are meant to translate into real influence and power.

Practically speaking, committing to a serious politics means accepting, as The Other 98% announced soon after Obama's victory seemed assured, that the work is just beginning, not ending. The easiest way to make this point is to pull out A. Philip Randolph's old story about FDR: you tell the President that he should do this or that, and he agrees with you, but then he tells you to go make him do it. That is to say: we have to mobilize and organize outside the election season, to provide our leaders with the political cover, or the kick in the pants, that shifts the possibility space in the policy-making world and in public discourse in the right directions.

There are details to explore here, both in relation to the issues and in connection with the political experiments we need to launch. In order to explore the issues adequately we would have to discuss, at a minimum, Obama's plans for the issues that his supporters tend not to discuss: global trade, the deficit and entitlements, our foreign wars, our domestic 'wars' (on crime, drugs, illegal immigration, and, by extension, the poor), the environment, and the insatiable national security state. In order to take the full measure of the experiments that might empower us to engage Mr. Obama productively, we would have to discuss the kinds of things that Steven Hill suggests in his fine book on repairing American democracy, beginning with ways of getting big money out of politics and reclaiming the airwaves. 

But we don't get to these details until we accept the need for serious politics, and commit to doing the work that it requires. Now is the time to ask whether another politics is possible, and whether we can hold ourselves to a higher standard of citizenship. And to say to ourselves, "yes we can."

from the fb page for the other 98%