Learning not to depend on the courts

 Niko Bowie explains what to do when the courts ignore reason.

To reverse this week’s court decisions we need national laws. To enact national laws we need political power. To build political power we need to collectively commit not just to the biannual ritual of voting, but also to the day-to-day grit of organizing the people around us.

In contrast with legal liberalism, organizing is a theory of change that doesn’t trust people atop hierarchies to share our values. Rather, we must build our relationships with one another into the disruptive leverage necessary to compel skeptics to follow our lead.

The labor movement is currently perfecting the art of organizing, whether structure-based or momentum-driven. Its tactics aren’t new but modeled after histories of working women, people of color & abolitionists who built political power with strikes & boycotts, not just lawsuits.

Libraries document specific strategies ordinary people have used to change legal structures worse than today’s: books like @rsgexp ’s No Shortcuts, Marshall Ganz’s Why David Sometimes Wins, Frances Fox Piven’s Challenging Authority, and Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker.

This is the “history and tradition” we should cultivate. The major question for the left is not how to persuade Justice Kavanaugh or Senator Manchin to listen, but how to persuade our neighbors and coworkers to commit to collective action.