The problem is that all this institutional knowledge and these organizing skills have been lost to most people. That process started earlier, but by the 1990s it was gone. Folks who learned how to do retail politics and to do effective organizing were either shoved aside or for whatever other reason chose to leave the scene by the mid-90s, so that when a new movement came along in 2002-03 to rebuild a progressive movement from the bottom up, they had to start from scratch and generally didn't have the skilled old hands around to mentor them. Instead they had the '90s-era consultantocracy which STILL dominates Democratic campaigns and the staffs of elected Democratic officials, people who don't really have a clue what they're doing but managed to build their niche between 1995 and 2005 or so and by default were the folks who held the keys when the big influx of activists came in during the '00s.

It pains me to think of where we might be now had the knowledge of the '30s-era activists, or even the '60s and '70s-era folks, been the dominant skillset among the political class. But it isn't, the '90s saw a huge shift toward corporate neoliberalism, and so we have to reclaim that knowledge from the past and relearn those skills ourselves.

I count myself among the latter group - the influx of activists. Until 2008 I was just a blogger. At that time I saw an opportunity to do more than just write, but to actually try and implement change on the ground. I've been lucky enough to find full-time employment at doing so, but everything we do is still too deeply rooted in the '90s model I just described, and not rooted enough in the successful models you've been articulating here.

As progressives start looking around for solutions after the coming disaster on November 2, what you've laid out here ought to be a central part of the discussion.

And the world will live as one