EXTREME MAKEOVER?

Southern Progressives Stage a Democratic Coup

By Sue Sturgis

Southern Exposure 32 (Winter 2005)

Efforts are underway across the South to give the Democratic Party a populist makeover, with activists in North Carolina, Alabama, and Florida organizing progressive caucuses within their state parties and working to wrest control from Republican wannabes.

South Carolina and Texas Democrats have had progressive party caucuses for several years now, and similar initiatives are taking place in states outside the South, including Arizona, Iowa, Maine, and Utah.

The caucuses are pressing the party to focus not merely on beating Republicans, but to engage a disaffected electorate by promoting core Democratic issues such as economic and social justice and environmental sustainability. Organizers say the party’s rightward drift over the past several decades has created conditions conducive to a progressive renaissance.

“How [Al] Gore ran his campaign in 2000, [Ralph] Nader’s role and the way [President] Bush is running the planet over a cliff has poured fuel on a smoldering fire,” says Brett Bursey, a Columbia resident who serves on the planning committee for the Progressive Caucus of the South Carolina Democratic Party.

Since forming four years ago, the South Carolina organization has made substantial gains. At the state party’s convention this past May, 271 out of the 704 delegates on the floor were progressive caucus members. “We’re on track to have a majority of the voting delegates at the ’06 convention,” says Bursey.

He traces the South Carolina caucus’s roots to 1984, when Rev. Jesse Jackson won the state’s Democratic presidential primary and his supporters came close to capturing the party leadership. The Jackson forces were composed of progressive Democratic activists who focused on precinct-level organizing, demonstrating the possibilities of grassroots change within the party.

After the Christian Coalition employed a similar strategy to win control of South Carolina’s GOP in the mid-1990s — an achievement it leveraged to capture the state House and governorship — economic and social justice activists began organizing their own coalition. That became the South Carolina Progressive Network, which Bursey directs. The group includes about 60 organizations representing more than 100,000 people and serves as the caucus’s base.

The presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich have also played a critical role in the formation of progressive caucuses by drawing energetic and activist-oriented voters into the party fold.

“Lots of Dean and Kucinich folks wanted to do something, so they began organizing these caucuses,” says Kevin Spidel. The former national field director for Kucinich’s campaign, Spidel is now helping organize Arizona’s progressive Democratic caucus. He also directs ProgressiveVote.org, a national organization established earlier this year to help coordinate and provide resources to state-level progressive Democratic efforts.

“We are beginning to organize under the banner of the Democratic Party to bring the party back to the people,” says Spidel.

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Among the new party activists excited about the establishment of ProgressiveVote.org is Brooke Moore, who chairs the Progressive Democratic Alliance of Alabama. Founded earlier this year, the alliance is still in the early stages of development and is not yet seeking official recognition from the party. Moore, a Birmingham resident, got involved in Democratic organizing when she led a Dean meet-up at a local donut shop.

“We’re still very green when it comes to politics,” Moore says of her group. “To have an organization that can give us some direction is a big weight off our shoulders.”

Spidel reports that efforts are also underway to organize Democratic caucuses in Florida and a handful of other states, though he says it’s still too early to offer details.

Further along in their organizing efforts are the Progressive Democrats of North Carolina. The group held its founding convention in June 2004, drawing more than 200 people to Greensboro. Members refer to themselves as the “Green Dogs,” a play on the term “Yellow Dog Democrat,” which denotes party members so loyal they’d vote for an ocherous hound before a Republican.

Like their South Carolina counterparts, the Green Dogs want formal inclusion in the state Democratic Party, like the Young Democrats or the African American Caucus. That would give the caucus seats on the state, congressional district and county executive committees. The state party executive committee will rule on inclusion at a meeting to be held sometime this fall. The Green Dogs are also forming a political action committee to support candidates for state office.

“What has been chronically missing among progressive-issue activists is a way to flex their political muscle in a way that gets candidates elected to the legislature,” says Green Dog organizer Pete MacDowell of Chapel Hill.

But not everyone thinks formal party recognition is necessarily the best route for a progressive caucus to take. The Progressive Populist Caucus of the Texas Democratic Party, for example, has chosen to eschew formal recognition for a more radically reformist approach.

“I see no tangible benefit to being officially recognized,” says Chair Stan Merriman of Houston. “When you put yourself in that situation, you dilute your ability to speak from the outside lovingly but critically about the party leadership and the way the party functions.”

Despite its insurgent status, however, the Texas group won 17 of 62 seats on the state party’s executive committee at the recent convention and captured a third of the platform advisory committee. In addition, about 15 percent of the state party’s delegates to the national convention are progressives. “We have shifted the party’s center of gravity to the left,” says Merriman.

Whether caucus organizing takes place within the official party structure or without, left-leaning lawmakers say they welcome the effort. N.C. Rep. Paul Luebke, a Durham Democrat serving his seventh term in the state House, has often found himself among an isolated minority of lawmakers pushing for progressive legislation on health care, taxes, education, and the environment. By demonstrating that there is significant support among the electorate for such initiatives, he says, the Green Dogs will make his job much easier.

“If they can learn how to work with legislators, it will make a huge difference,” says Luebke. “It’s an idea long overdue.”

Sue Sturgis is a freelance writer living in Raleigh, N.C.