Although the general election campaign informally started weeks ago, after Senator Clinton's endorsement of Senator Obama last week, it has officially begun.

We are consistently told, from the media and from both campaigns, that this is a "change" election. Obama in particular has been able to mobilize and energize millions of people either disillusioned or newly political, and bring them onboard his campaign.

GOOD 'BRANDING' DOES NOT A MOVEMENT MAKE

As bloggers and authors like David Sirota have noted, Obama is styling his campaign as a social movement in and of itself. But while it looks like a social movement, and quacks like a social movement, it's not a social movement.

As Sirota recently wrote:

without that ideological movement to pressure Obama (or whoever becomes president), the next occupant of the White House could very easily shun the uprising and simply reinforce the status quo - and, as I wrote in The Nation in 2006, Obama is precisely the kind of politician who needs constant pressuring if we are going to get real action from him.

As history has taught us over and over and over again, candidates, parties and elections are not movements - they are vehicles for them. Those who believe otherwise - and I fear that's a lot of people thanks to the media frenzy over this primary - are deluding themselves.

I think it makes sense to look back and see how significant political change really happens - the people organize themselves into a mass movement, achieve victories, and then Congress rushes to catch up. Labor unions weren't legalized because Congressmen were feeling generous one day: it took decades of picket lines, horrible conditions, and spilled blood to build unions to the point that Congress felt it needed to introduce a legal regime around it. The same with the abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights activists: mass movements are the best way to deepen democracy.

These victories also weren't simply the result of electing the right people into office either: hell, Richard Nixon, of all people, signed the EPA. So many political activists (especially new ones activated by Obama) look at the political landscape and take the view that to get to a more progressive society, we need to elect more progressive candidates (and therefore they get sucked into party machine politics and beltway bureaucracy). History shows that the reverse is the case: if we build grassroots, progressive/radical movements (independent of a party or candidate) we will get progressive/radical politicians.

A NOTION OF POWER

It bears repeating the oft-quoted phrase from Lord Acton:

All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If we're progressive and (small 'd') democratic, then we should be worried about how true that saying has turned out to be. I'd add the corollary, which Lord Acton would in all likelihood agree with: those with power tend to seek more of it.

All this means that if we want to be a strong progressive movement, we must stay at least at arms length from politicians who would seek to co-opt our power. We also need to be working toward a politics where it's easier to get things accomplished: the way modern government is run is specifically designed to keep out rabble rousers like us.

We should therefore be willing to admit that concentrated power is a conservatizing force. Just as there is a link between authoritarianism and conservatism, there is a link between decentralism and progressivism/leftism: when people have a democratic say in the institutions most relevant to their lives, they tend to become more progressive politically.

WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS?

This means that:

1. The progressive movement needs to be fighting for more democracy. We should look at democratic, bottom-up organizational models andwork to implement them. Things like getting cities and towns to adopt Participatory Budgeting, and supporting and funding democratically-run worker-owned cooperatives, democratic schooling, and similar institutions.
2. The progressive movement needs to be more democratic internally. Is MoveOn.org democratic? Members can indeed vote on occasion on polls that are sent out, but of course those polls are non-binding. Do we get to elect who is in charge of and staffs MoveOn, an organization that its members fund? Do we even have a way of contacting other MoveOn members that doesn't require the approval of those on the top? Is MoveOn's own workplace democratic? I'm picking on MoveOn not because they're the only one doing this, but because they're the biggest and most emblematic on the left. Students should be questioning how things are run on campus, from the administration, to student government, to your progressive political club: in what ways can you envision a more democratic way of doing things?

An activist can spend her time organizing to effect change in November, or she can spend her time organizing to effect change a generation from now (both are important). It's very hard to figure out a way to do both at the same time, and I'd say that given the disparate amount of attention and resources given to each, we need as many people as possible organizing for the latter.