Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)

• Chapter 1

  • Once you have been organizing for enough years, and seen enough efforts succeed and fail, you realize that there are “movement moments.” These happen when large numbers of people are willing to drop what they are doing, forget that the utility bill won’t be paid on time or that they will miss their favorite TV shows or their daughter’s soccer games or their gym session or whatever, forget about how many hours of sleep they think they need every night, and go do some stuff they would never have imagined they could, like facing down cops or bosses or Aryan Republicans carrying The Christian Militant’s Bible, or talking to TV cameras, or approaching total strangers about their concerns, or rounding up their neighbors to go to an event with something real at stake instead of the weekly bridge game. People get in this unusual state either because they are truly pissed off and there is no other option, or because for some reason the horizon of what they think they are capable of achieving suddenly expands—or, most likely, a combination of both.
    Florida in early November 2000 was a such a moment: People were willing to leave their daily grind and step into history to defend their democracy, on a scale that could be called massive without exaggeration. And what a wonderful and unlikely crazy quilt of people they were.
    But movement moments don’t last forever, and it is much easier to snuff them out than to keep them lit. Everything depends on optimism: the optimism organizers call “raised expectations.” And one key to keeping expectations raised is to respect the passions and desires of people who are not full-time organizers and political junkies, who have complicated and overwhelming lives they are trying to hold together, full of obligations they are putting aside for a moment for the sake of a collective goal.
    The Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO leadership smothered the movement moment in Florida, snuffed it right out. The state was Gore’s to lose, and the absolute determination with which the labor elite and the Democratic Party leadership crushed their own constituents’ desire to express their political passions cost us the election.

    McAlevey, Jane . Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement (p. 11). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

• Chapter 2