Reply #50: Politicians don't pay attention to social movements or run on their issues -until they have gained

[Douglas Carpenter]

strength and credibility on the street. The abolitionist, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement and every other meaningful mass movement did not begin with voter registration drives. Candidates didn't even care about those issues until pressure from the street forced those issues into the mainstream. Only then did electoral politics even became relevant. Besides there are no more than a small handful of economic progressives left in the U.S. Congress anyway. Even if the Democrats won a 75% majority in both houses of Congress it will not undo decades of growing economic inequality...it might slow down the forces of reactions - Most likely it will only produce feel-good platitudes and watered down half measures while the gap between rich and poor grows wider and wider. Only a mass movement can put the issue of economic justice and an equitable wealth distribution back into the mainstream of political debate - after having been only on the fringes of respectable opinion and ignored by both major parties for the last three decades.