Observations from the Majority Agenda Project
Printer-friendly version- Today in the U.S. there is an ongoing, deepening and extremely dangerous economic, environmental and global security crisis that is unfolding before our eyes.
- This crisis consists of a number of interrelated issues (war, environment, debt, jobs, health care, energy, etc.) that are of great importance to everyone who sees their work to be part of a U.S. movement for social justice, social equality and peace. The crisis cannot be addressed piecemeal because no one issue defines the crisis.
- On a number of these interrelated issues the majority of the public already supports our position. And yet, due to the virtual invisibility of the solutions we offer in media, academia and government, we have not been able to mobilize the popular support that exists into a basic change in policy on any of these issues.
- Addressing this ongoing and deepening economic, environmental and political crisis in the U.S. head on is the most important task at hand and offers the greatest opening to bring about fundamental change.
- As presently structured, our various single issue social movements (anti-war, environment, health care, housing, worker rights, anti-poverty, etc.) are not adequate to address this crisis.
- We need to create a strategic framework that allows us to seize the moment by highlighting one interrelated issue or another (depending on what is the “hot issue” at a given time) and then, when that issue recedes into the background, to seamlessly move our focus to the new issues that become front and center.
- Such an effort cannot succeed if it is not much broader than the movement itself. It must include some or all of the following social sectors: mainstream African-American and Latino organizations and churches; activist youth in the climate change movement; labor; churches; portions of the Obama campaign and democratic party activists; single payer activists; portions of the business community and key intellectuals and professionals
- Building a strategic “majority agenda” around policies that both have widespread support and which effectively address the interrelated crisis might provide a way for us to work together, collaborate with non-movement sectors of the population, and become a player in the national debate about the direction of the country.
by Paul Shannon, American Friends Service Committee & Majority Agenda Project