2018: The Resistance and Establishment’s date with destiny?

By Amelia Cass

On Thursday a few of us volunteered to help out at a DNC fundraiser featuring Chairman Tom Perez at the Delancey Street Restaurant in San Francisco. The view of the Bay and the appetizers were both lovely. The respectable crowd—of 150 or so—was rather subdued compared to resistance events we tend to frequent. But the chairman was fired up!

In a lot of ways, he seemed to be talking to us. He expressed a suitable level of outrage at the news coming out of the White House and Capitol Hill lately. He mentioned Indivisible by name twice, and one of his biggest applause lines gave credit to women for leading the resistance.

He was talking to us, yes, but he, like much of the Democratic Party seemed to be a little bit confused about who we are. I think they look at the resistance and see what they want to see, the force that’s going to take back Congress in 2018. And they’re not wrong.

But they often conveniently gloss over the part where we hold our democratic and Democratic representatives accountable after we elect them. They don’t just have to win our votes, they have to continue to engage with us and take our input on their votes.

Of course we will volunteer for the Democratic party, and donate to Democrats, and work to elect Democrats. We’ll cheer when the DNC Chairman talks about protecting civil rights, and immigrants, and raising the minimum wage.

But if the Democrats really want to make full use of the power of the resistance, they need to recognize, and embrace, the fact that a major part of what we are about is making constituent voices a more active part of the governing of our country. The Democratic Party should expect Indivisible not just at campaign rallies and phone banks but also when it’s time to draft the party platform and even legislation.

As Perez said Thursday, the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend toward justice on its own. And at Indivisible we are no longer prepared to leave the work of bending it to the politicians. We’re all throwing our weight into it, and all taking an active role in determining in what direction it needs to be bent in order to move towards justice.

That’s how we’ll win against Donald Trump and everything he stands for, and that’s how we’ll protect our liberal multicultural democracy from falling prey to his like ever again.