Tag Archives: Progressive

Politics

Are You a Liberal Working in a Red State?  Here Are Five Ways to Stay Politically Active and Keep Your Job

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Sometimes it’s tough if you are a liberal and committed to a progressive political agenda while working in a red state.

The big question: Will I get fired by my conservative boss if I don’t hide my beliefs and political activities?

Having lived and worked in Oklahoma for most of my life, there have been plenty of times when I found myself navigating between the conservative political climate, the conservative political beliefs of my boss, and the conservative politics of clients.

From that experience, here are some ideas about how to keep your job without compromising your core beliefs:

1. Clearly separate your personal political activities and your business/work activities. You cannot be sloppy, lazy, or casual about expressing your political beliefs.

  •  All social media activity must be clearly separated by different accounts in each platform.
  • Claim your associations  in your profile on each personal account claiming that these are your personal ideas and do not represent your employer or clients.
  • Limit times during the work day for personal/political activity to obvious before-work, lunch-time, and after-work time periods.

2. Have a planned discussion with your boss about it.

  • Claim that you have particular political beliefs that are not do not represents the majority of the surrounding society.
  • Acknowledge that there are others who might disagree.
  • Commit to never start any kind of political strife at work. (More on that in number 4 below)

3. If you are in a position where you have clients, simply stay silent about politics unless the client has direct questions about your activities.

  • In most cases clients are focused on what they need you to do for them, not your beliefs about politics.
  • If they do want to know, then ask questions, too. Make sure that you are clear about their questions.
  • Only answer questions that they ask and add nothing more.

4. Do not engage in political activity, research, or reading on company equipment, spaces and time.

  • Remember, that space, equipment, and time belong  to the company.
  • If you do engage in personal use of space/equipment/time, that gives co-workers or a boss who disagree with your political views a pretext for getting you fired without having to claim their true motives.
  • Be easy to get along with on all things, including political statements that you might hear from those who think “everyone” believes their right-wing ideology.
  • Set a goal to make at least two work friends with people who you know disagree with you. It’s good for the company, you, and your sanity to have people who see you as a person and not an ideology.

5. In your personal life, go ahead and openly support particular candidates that reflect your beliefs unless they are openly working against your company. It is actually easier to defend your support of a candidate than general political beliefs.

  • It softens the discussion for co-workers or a boss to ask why you support a candidate rather than why you believe certain abstract concepts.
  • If a boss is worth working for, they will not want to seem vindictive and unfair. Punishing you in any way for working to support a candidate will make them seem to be that way, and so they will be reluctant to do so.

Are you working for a conservative boss? How have you dealt with keeping a good relationship while standing for what you believe? Please do comment.

Did you like this? If so, you might find these previous posts to be helpful:

Five Ways For Liberals to Overcome Those Red State Blues

Three Ways to Sway Your Red State Pastor From Blessing the Radical Right

Five Ways You Can Have a Progressive Influence on Your Red State

 

Politics

The Only “Lost” Vote Is the One That You Don’t Cast

Since I live in the reddest of red states, I hear progressives here say variations of this: “Yeah, I lost my vote in that last election. My candidate lost.”

True? I don’t believe that. Every vote that is cast makes a point, in some way or another, and is “lost” only if it is never cast in the first place.

Your vote is significant on many levels, and should be guarded and exercised as often as possible.  Here’s why:

Back in the day when everything was analog and statistics were done with huge stacks of paper by guys in white shirts/black ties using slide rules, that may have been the case. Sorting out who voted and why was a Herculean task. Not any more.

Today, campaigns have an amazing array of evaluative tools due to the digitizing of polls, surveys, voting records, etc. I still remember hearing in the late 1980s how marketers who set up mailing campaigns could tell what kind of toothpaste I used, and how to target me. Now if that was the case in the 1980s, imagine the tools now.

No, your vote is never “lost” to campaigns and candidates who pay extremely close attention to various statistical cuts in voting during an election, even if the candidate that you wanted to win does not. Even a candidate who loses, but turns in a larger opposition vote than the last election has an effect on the winner.

Case in point: The last Oklahoma City election for mayor was the most active and seriously contested in my memory. Oklahoma City is on a roll, but our 3-term mayor, Mick Cornett, who was going for a fourth, was spending way too much time in increasingly tighter circles of thinking. The crescendo of that process was Cornett’s speech to the Republican National Convention in 2012. It was a rousing speech of right-wing dog whistles and partisan grandstanding that Oklahoma City is not used to hearing from what is, by design, a non-partisan mayor. Those earlier non-partisan days of his leading the city to lose a million pounds were past. But, not quite….

One of our City Council members, Dr. Ed Shadid, mounted an energetic campaign that focused on giving neighborhoods a voice instead of only listening to interests that wanted downtown to grow at the expense of the rest of the city.

20140217_201754Shadid held a series of public forums in different parts of a city whose leaders had conveniently forgotten the welfare of those who were living there.

Shadid’s campaign effectively pointed out the contradiction of the recent growth of Oklahoma City:  Wealthy corporate chieftains who lived in the suburbs were dictating how Oklahoma City would spend millions and give millions more in tax breaks to promote their new headquarters at the expense of neighborhood development.

This campaign  pushed Mayor Cornett to reconsider his direction. We began to see him in more neighborhood meetings. Even though some thought it was a campaign stunt, his Twitter feed started using the word “neighborhood” more, which was a 20140120_141534significant change from last elections. For the first time, I actually saw him actively engaging the crowd of the Martin Luther King Day Parade for a considerable length of time, not just shaking hands, but carrying on conversations.

Mayor Cornett won his fourth term, but not without the wakeup call of the results. This election resulted in a far larger turnout than before. Those who voted for Shadid actually turned in larger numbers for him than those who had voted for Cornett in the last election that was not seriously contested. Yes, Cornett won, but he would be stupid (he’s not) to ignore the fact of the number of voters who cast a vote for the other guy.

That other guy, Dr. Shadid, is still on the City Council and is still asking those questions that need to be asked.

Did those who voted for Shadid “lose” their vote. No way. Just yesterday I saw the mayor’s tweet that he had eaten at a popular locally owned neighborhood restaurant for the first time. By being there, he was meeting new people and learning once again about what common people thought. That’s progress. And it’s because people got out and voted.

The only votes that were “lost” in that election were those that were not cast. Plan to vote!

Politics

Five Ways You Can Have a Progressive Influence on Your Red State

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The pattern of political action for liberals and progressives goes much like this: Get fired up about a particular candidate. Work hard and get emotional about the outcome. If the candidate loses, fade away, never to be heard from again. If the candidate wins, fade away, never to be heard from again.

It’s time for that to end. Too much is at stake in our future.
Campaigns are critical. However, turning over the long-term political discussion to voices on the right produces a political landscape where we only consider a narrow set of options from the right, none of which are good or remotely logical. For politicians on the right, the only logic is how to deliver power to their benefactors whose only logic is, of course, their power.

The irony with progressives loosing heart and relaxing the pressure between campaigns is this: Because of a lack of political muscle developed between campaigns, it is harder to elect the best candidates when the time actually comes to elect them. In Oklahoma we see this behavior repeated with agonizing consistency.

Case in point: Recently, there was a very good, necessary, and spirited campaign for mayor in Oklahoma City between progressive city council member Dr. Ed Shadid and incumbent Mayor Mick Cornett. As a part of Shadid’s campaign to raise awareness of too many shadowy machinations about a convention center idea, a petition was started to get more sunlight onto the studies that had been done. After Shadid lost an uphill battle against the strong incumbent, the petition drive fizzled so that it was never even delivered on the deadline.

It is clear that if progressive thought will have an impact in very red states like Oklahoma, there needs to be a constant commitment to progressive values and thought between campaigns.
How do we achieve that? Here are some ideas:

1. Support the candidates that represent your values and ideals whether you think that they have a chance of winning or not.

I hear too many people talk themselves out of helping with a good campaign just because they think the candidate won’t win. That’s not the issue. The public needs to hear what that candidate has to say, especially if they are challenging an incumbent that has been too much of a gofer for big money donors in the shadows. And, if the points the candidate is making are important now, they are important in between campaigns, too.

2. Support that candidate again if they want to run again.

Look at how many times influential office holders in U.S. history have lost before they won that influential position. Being a good, tough politician is about coming back from defeat. Like a good cage fighter, a politician has to be able to take several hard punches in order to stay in the fight. If your candidate can, they are worth supporting no matter how much of a long-shot others may think they are. One thing for sure, they will never win without your support, and those important ideas will never influence anyone without your being the carrier of them.

3. Learn as much as you can any way that you can about issues that concern you.

A part of influencing others between campaigns is knowing what you are talking about. People can tell if you do or don’t very quickly and will either listen or turn you off accordingly the next time you speak to them. In Oklahoma, a very good progressive think tank is the Oklahoma Policy Institute, which also has a good daily podcast to keep you up to date on legislative matters.

4. Learn from national news sources to compare with local ones.

There is now a large volume of information available to progressive thinkers about a number of issues that may affect your state. In central Oklahoma, The Oklahoman is usually read by we progressives with a side eye. The local TV stations also reflect a corporate media view that fails to ask the biggest, most important questions. Very strong state-wide sources like the Oklahoma Policy Institute and national sources are important tools for calling out local right-wing-influenced media. That activity will have an impact upon newsroom discussions.

5. Act locally.

  • Participate in your neighborhood association.
  • Accept a leadership position in your neighborhood association.
  • Organize your precinct or ward for your party.
  • Run for a school board seat.
  • Run for town/city council.
  • Run for a seat in your state legislature. (Yes, it’s yours.)

Oklahoma and other deep red states are starting to cause great suffering among common people because the political field has been left to right-wing radicals between campaigns which led to unopposed or weak opposition in the next round of campaigns. It’s time for progressives to stand up and join the debate for logical thinking and sunshine on all things public.

Politics

Five Ways in Which Oklahoma Can Move Forward

Populism is not just for the history books. It is a practical way forward for our state that resists the quiet rule of the wealthiest, tiny minority, which in Oklahoma is even smaller than “1%”.

It is necessary to resist, too: Oklahoma has not a better place now for ordinary people since we got the “right to work” or since we went from a one-party, to a two-party, and back into a one-party political system again, just with the other party now as the current single political power in the state.

The following is based on five points (in italics) for developing a Populist agenda nationally that were proposed by Jim Hightower, print and radio commentator from Texas, in a speech at the Strategy Summit held by the Progressive Congress and reported by The Nation Magazine .

These points are just as, if not more, applicable to potential Oklahoma Progressive/Populist influence as they are nationally.

1. Great Progressive movements have advanced not only by good organizing, but by a steady altering of the public’s perception. Cultural shifts produce political change. This truth is born out by how fiercely we see the current controlling conservative minority in Oklahoma working to control the print and broadcast media. If they can keep certain types of information from most of the people, or at least twist it enough, then enough people will believe their narrative and not rise up against a minority-rule system that has been developing for years. Truth published, spoken, aired by many different voices will have its effect over time.

2. Building a people’s movement requires taking the long view. Advancement takes place in decades, not months or years. Impatience is the biggest enemy of those who are progressive. That’s one of the reasons why progressive-minded people show up to vote for a particular candidate and then fade away until the next campaign. It requires little thought or effort to be all for a candidate for the last month of their campaign. In order to actually turn our state government toward that which will benefit a large majority of Oklahomans, progressives need to be a part of a movement year in and year out, not just individual campaigns. The best candidates that did not have enough support in this campaign will stay and return to fight another day if they have a convinced movement of people working for the same causes between campaigns.

3. Expand the movement by reaching out and connecting with other movements that don’t identify as progressive but are in fact populist and also are actually on the move. People who might disagree with a pro-abortion rights stance can be moved to act with others who are concerned about preserving life beyond the womb. People who might self-identify as conservative might be very moved by the ways in which unfettered strip mining and fracking are affecting the land that they love and want to protect and join with more progressive people who are concerned for what that does to our environment.

4. Do less issue-speak and policy dump and more talk about core values such as economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity for all. Van Jones has reminded us that MLK in his historic 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial didn’t say “I have a position paper”. Most people who I know in this state would be hard pressed to argue against those three values. Do we talk specifically about those values that most progressives have in common? I don’t hear it or see it much in print.

5. Get the hell out of Washington! The most productive politics are local, not national. Just look at any recent polls of the approval ratings of the Congress and you will see that most people of either party see Washington political piss fights as in-credible and not worth the time of anyone who lives outside of Washington, D.C. Recently our Republican Governor and Republican dominated legislature have blocked the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act for no other definable reason except that it’s “Obamacare”. Right now, our state is not currently governed by Oklahomans, but by think tanks like ALEC and The Heritage Foundation.

Oklahoma has a great tradition of Populism. Currently, we see more signs of that in the workings of the Tea Party where there is a general appeal to the hard-working Oklahomans who believe that the economic system is rigged in favor of somebody else. They really don’t know who is rigging it, though. They believe it is that black man in the White House. But, they do only because they are hearing one narrative that sounds credible to them and not other counter narratives that more closely hold to the truth rather than racist, anti-abortion fiction.

It is time for people who advocate for common folks in Oklahoma to speak up, and in a constant way right here in our towns, cities, and state. We shouldn’t even worry that much about consistency. The persistence of our message is what will win.

What do you think?