User:Woozle/My Left Wing/Revolution 2.0 Outline RFC/strategy

The question is: What can we do now, and what should we be prepared to do next?

I almost hesitate to start talking about this here, because I want this question to be really chewed over, brainstormed on, discussed thoroughly, and all the implications of each idea carried out as far as they'll go -- something which can only happen in The Revolutionary Bar, Grill, and Library.

It seems necessary to suggest a few ideas just to make the problem seem less overwhelming, however, so I'll do that. I'm not wedded to any of these ideas; they're more like Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom -- probably wrong in a lot of important ways, but enough to get the conversation started.

Retake the Democratic Party

This is MSOC's original suggestion. It seems very workable, but it needs a lot of refinement. I posed some of these questions in a comment on MSOC's blog post:

• Can this even happen with a Democrat already in office, or are we strictly looking ahead to 2016?
• Are we sure that a popular vote truly determines who is nominated, or is the decision ultimately made by power-brokers? (If the latter, there are further decisions to make.)
• How do we go about identifying suitable candidates, and then convincing a lot of people to back them?
• Assuming we succeed in getting them nominated, how to we make sure they win?
• Assuming they become President, how do we prevent them from being suborned (as Obama possibly has been)?
• Assuming they are not suborned, what should their strategy be? (A good starting point would probably be (a) a list of positive acts a President could take without Congressional approval, and (b) a list of positive positions a President should take in order to slow down the tsunami of Bad Stuff we seem to be experiencing)
• Should we perhaps be looking at state-level offices to begin with -- go for smaller fry while we're still learning, don't mess with the big fry until we've worked out all the kinks in our operation?
• Are there any existing grassroots orgs who would be willing to work with us on this?

concerns

• Will this be effective soon enough? There are a lot of worrying signs that serious wibbly-wobbly-collapsey things may be happening soon. Of course, that may be just political theatre to keep us scared and voting conservatively.
• How are the oligarchs likely to respond, once they start to see that we're a threat? What is the point where our actions will start to become a threat to their interests?
• How can we prevent "meet the new boss -- same as the old boss"? (See User:Woozle/My Left Wing/Revolution 2.0 Outline RFC/fidelity.)
• Can we make serious change just by putting different people in the same corrupt framework?

advantages

• Of the ideas I've come across that would actually be likely to change anything, this is probably the least radical and most legitimate. It works almost completely within the framework of the existing system, and doesn't require that framework to be stretched or bent in any significant way.

A Citizen's Constitutional Convention (CCC)

The basic plan is to follow the official procedures for calling a Constitutional Convention -- but using our own groups organized at the state level for the vote, since our official governments aren't interested in doing this.

CCC Variation

Instead of starting with the goal of a Constitutional Convention for the whole US, we'll try retaking governments at the state level -- starting with the smallest. Once we have enough states to declare a Constitutional convention, then proceed with Plan A -- but without any iffy legalities over whether we legally represent the people or not.

I think there's already a sort of movement afoot to do this for some small northeast state by moving enough like-minded people into the state that they will be able to elect their self-chosen third-party/independent candidates to the state senate. (Need to find a source on this...) The problem with that is that they'll still be dependent on the same old corruptable systems, still playing on the enemy's field; we need to build our own systems for governance so we can't be undermined by their bugs and backdoors.

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