Author Archive for: Admin

Are political parties still important?

Political parties are still important because they remain – transactionally, but not relationally – the central vehicle through which ideological and political intent is exercised and measured. They exist to find, develop, fund and get elected winnable incumbents and challengers. They raise money and organize conventions, rallies, and various media platforms. The elected leaders who represent the two major political parties in government are the instruments through which legislatively relevant political will is advanced and/or repressed.

In her latest post, Angela Cowser describes some familiar ways that churches and other faith-based networks (hereafter I’ll often refer to those groups collectively as “the church”) have organized and mobilized people to do justice in their communities. She also highlights the reverse: serving a community can be a profound blessing to the church. Community engagement – participating together “at the grassroots” – forms Christians for faithful discipleship, including their motives and dispositions as good democratic citizens. Hence the relationship of the church and the broader community is richly reciprocal. It combines attention to felt needs with a formative spirituality and a public witness to shalom.

In comparison to the church, Cowser invites us to consider political parties as another site for organization, mobilization, and formation. Here the portrait is less flattering. Parties, in Cowser’s view, “do not build democratic practices and good citizens; they develop ideologues, partisans and party operatives and apparatchiks.” She goes on to decry the electoral competition in “gerrymandered districts where outcomes are predetermined,” which “diminishes healthy conversation” and “increase[s] tribalism that stifles democratic practices of deep listening” across lines of difference.  

In this essay I argue that renewing grassroots democracy (not political parties) will also renew the Church. I’ll substantiate this argument by briefly outlining 1/ the purpose of political parties, 2/the purpose of religion and of Christianity; 4/what I mean by grassroots democracy, and 5/end with how the renewal of grassroots democracy can and is renewing (some) congregational life in America.

The Purpose of Political Parties in America
As I understand it, the purpose of political parties in America – Democratic, Republican, Green and Constitution -is 1/to raise money to fund local, regional, state, and national campaigns to elective office; 2/to choose Presidential nominees; 3/to promote winning candidates for elections; 4/to organize and execute voter turnout or voter turnout suppression; 5/to win elections; in 2012, the average cost of a House race was $1.7 million and of a Senate race was $10.5 million, with minimum-maximum costs ranging from $110,000 (American Samoa) to $42 million (Massachusetts).

 Doug Koopman presents a dilemma facing the GOP: “take new steps and adopt quite different trade and infrastructure ideas of the Trump agenda, or try to keep Trump voters attached to the party by more symbolic, and problematic, means.” The first horn of the dilemma entails ideological capitulation, at least in key areas of economic policy (both international and domestic). In recent decades (though not always), Republicans have championed free trade and muscular international engagement abroad and domestic spending cuts, deregulation, and deference to states. The problem for Republicans is that some of those commitments are in tension with President Trump’s asserted goals. The second horn of the dilemma moves from the ideological to the “symbolic,” by which I take Doug to mean the party’s use of cultural cues to distinguish “true” GOP stalwarts from RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). The idea of symbolic politics is that citizens join with others in political groups based on markers of identity (e.g., class, race, gender, religion), rather than substantive agreement over ideology or policy (though the symbolic and substantive may converge).

I write as a middle class, African American female professional scholar and Minister of Word and Sacrament (Presbyterian Church USA) who has devoted her life to the propagation of a Christian gospel that is rooted absolutely in the richness of Hebrew and Greek notions of justice, in Jesus’ call for all people, groups, and nations to repent (metanoia – to turning around, reversing course), and to full financial and educational reparations for the sociopathic, anti-social, evil foundations upon which this nation was founded, and upon whose poisonous roots upon it continues to enrich itself today. I also write as a former community organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) affiliate – Tying Nashville Together – which did its good work from 1991-2009 in Nashville, Tennessee.

This essay is informed by reflection upon racial, gender, and class discriminations which I have suffered through, the (successful) struggle to become an educated, informed citizen of the United States, and most importantly, to respond to the high call on my whole life of discipleship in Jesus Christ – in this life and the next.  I will take each of the leading questions posed, answer them forthrightly as I see things. The vernacular is straightforward, in plain language, in hope of clarity of argument and rich discussion and counterpoints.