John, About the process: I didn’t realize you read in digest form, so I take back my earlier suggestion about your silence. On the main issue, you’ve brought up something important, but I think you’ve taken the wrong lesson from it. The story about the two canvassers is the strongest part of your post. But if you look closely, these two committed members were doing exactly what their organization asked, yet they couldn’t connect ICE deportations to wider democratic rights. You see this as a lack of understanding that can be fixed with warnings and explanations. I see it differently. Their perspective wasn’t smaller than yours by accident or because no one explained it to them. It came from the work they were doing. They were canvassing for a city council seat. Electoral campaigns have their own way of deciding what counts as an issue—what a councilmember can actually deliver, what polls well, and what won’t cost endorsements. A federal effort to suppress voting doesn’t make it through that filter, not because canvassers are narrow-minded, but because the campaign structure leaves it out. They gave you an honest result from the system. That’s why I don’t think more explanation is the answer, even if it’s urgent and correct. Messages that aren’t backed by an organization just become opinions. You could convince those two young members of your analysis completely, and I think you could, since they seem serious. But next Saturday, they’ll still be out canvassing with the same materials, because nothing about their actual work has changed. Awareness that doesn’t have a structure to live in doesn’t last. It just becomes something people used to agree with. You mention raising it in DSA and building opposition caucuses—yes, and I’ve been arguing something similar for a while. But a caucus organized around holding the correct position on democratic rights will be absorbed within two convention cycles, and the absorption will feel like success while it’s happening: your resolution passes, your language goes into the platform, your people get onto committees, and the practice underneath is unaltered. The caucus that survives contact with the apparatus is the one built around commitments that have real consequences. Not just "we believe X," but our elected people are bound by group decisions and report to the group; they stand for recall; they take the median wage of the workers they represent; they vote no on the following specified things no matter what the coalition needs that week. Discipline isn’t just housekeeping after good politics. With the pressure the organization creates, it’s the only thing that keeps the politics from quietly turning into a career. This gives your Oakland candidate something more useful than just a speech. Instead of only raising the issue, he should publicly promise, ahead of time, to take specific actions a councilmember can actually do and that a hostile federal government would notice: no city funds, no city data, no city staff, no jail access, no license-plate reader feeds, no fusion center involvement, and a promise to vote against any funding that would reopen any of these. He should also agree to be recalled if he breaks this promise. This makes your issue a public test for the campaign and gives those two canvassers a clear script to use at the door, because it names something concrete their candidate will do, not just something bad happening far away. It also does the wider work your explanation couldn’t: a worker who understands why the city shouldn’t share its data has understood the democratic rights issue in the only way it currently matters to him. It’s the same in unions, and I think the opportunity here is bigger than you suggest. Non-cooperation language, rules about no entry without a judicial warrant, contract protections for members who are detained or disappear, and a defense committee with a phone tree that actually gets used—these are bargaining demands and commitments you can file complaints about, not just resolutions. They give an opposition caucus a real reason to exist that leadership can’t just absorb by agreeing, because agreeing would actually cost something at the bargaining table. And they create the exact connection to immigrant workers’ organizations that any real resistance will need. On pessimism: It's reasonable to worry concerning the timeline, but I’d suggest making sure you’re measuring the right thing. If you judge success by whether people agree with you at chapter meetings, it will seem hopeless, and you’ll just be tracking short-term moods. But if you look at whether you’ve built anything that limits what your elected people can do under pressure, then two hard years that lead to one binding commitment and a group that enforces it is not a failure. That’s most of what we can actually achieve right now, and it’s the only thing that will still matter if our warnings turn out to be right. Tony -- Tony
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