Radical Pragmatism

The Issue:

Organizers work from a realistic understanding of our current collective power and the power of our opposition. We call this power analysis.

The strategic challenge we face is that the big issues Citizen Action works on, the right to health care and the climate crisis, require system transformations that are beyond our immediate power to achieve. The major industrial actors that dominate each of these sectors, big hospital conglomerates, drug companies, health insurance corporations, and fossil fuel utilities, have too much power in government and politics to immediately achieve our longer term objectives. 

Example: a little more than half of Democrats in the House of Representatives (28% of Representatives) currently supports Medicare for All, with no Republicans supporting it. The movement for guaranteeing health care to every American has made progress, but it will take more power to win.

 

Citizen Action’s Radical Pragmatism:

Radical pragmatism is Citizen’s Action strategy for addressing current power imbalances between average people and big corporate monopolies by building the grassroots people power in stages. It is the strategic sweet spot between idealism (making demands that are impossible to achieve in the short term) and expedience (narrowly focusing on incremental changes that are easily achievable but do not address underlying causes).

We organize to focus the grassroots power we currently have to achieve major stepping stone reforms which build towards our ultimate objectives such as guaranteeing health care as a fundamental right and a rapid conversion to a low carbon and high wage union economy that prevents runaway climate change. Stepping stones are not all incremental reforms. They achieve the far end of the possible within current power constraints, while using every issue and electoral campaign to build the much greater grassroots power we need to transform the system.

 

Not All Compromise is Good

Some compromises are stepping stones towards our ultimate goals, and others set the movement for reform back by making unnecessary concessions, or worse, ceding more power to health care and fossil fuel corporations. Citizen Action leaders assess each possible compromise case-by-case.

Example: Governor Evers settled for a state budget that did not include BadgerCare Expansion, leaving a dangerous coverage gap for working people, but did include a large Medicaid rate increase for hospitals. The Medicaid increase had no strings attached. It did not require hospitals to make care more affordable for patients or keep endangered rural and urban hospitals open. It was a bad compromise because it left profit hungry hospital chains in control of how $100 million in additional public investment will be spent without meaningful public accountability for its use.

 

Citizen Action Standards for Stepping Stone Reforms: 

1. Stretch Goals that are Winnable Now: Such policies represent the far end of the possible in the now (a particular legislative or political context), are messaged as evolutionary steps to radical transformation rather than end points, and can be built upon.
   1. Example: The BadgerCare Public Option bill is a step towards Medicare for All because it dramatically increases the number of Wisconsinites with more affordable public coverage that does not involve abusive health insurance industry practices such as claims denials, and high copays and deductibles. It is a stepping stone and not our ultimate goal because it is not yet universal.
   2. Example: The Climate Accountability Act prevents lawmakers from hiding behind technical policy disagreements or small solutions that do not address the climate crisis at the scale and immediacy of the problem. Supporting a requirement that the Legislature pass a plan that cuts carbon emissions in half by 2030 is a first step to winning enough legislative power to develop and enact such a plan.
2. Structural changes and regulations which shift power away from big corporations and the ultrarich toward popular democratic control. 
   1. Example: The principle reason that the U.S. has the most expensive health care in the world is that we allow private monopolies (hospitals, insurance, drug companies) to set the price. No other advanced industrial country does this.  Citizen Action’s health care stepping stone campaigns, a BadgerCare Public Option and Hospital Accountability, shift control of major decisions such as the fair price of health care services and building new facilities away from hospitals and insurance companies to the public.
3. Reforms that Galvanize Solidary Power. The only way to defeat organized money is more and better organized people. Good policy advances are those that can be used as galvanizing issues to build an ever larger and more capable multiracial and cross-class grassroots army to win revolutionary advances in the future. We will never get to our destination if we do not build strength at each stage of the journey. Every major campaign must result in more organized people and more capacity among leaders because each stage in the journey towards structural reform requires more power. The power to win BadgerCare Expansion is far less than the power needed to win Medicare for All.
   1. Example: During the early Civil Rights Movement, banning discrimination on interstate buses gave organizers new ways to disrupt the Jim Crow system and helped encourage and build momentum for the more powerful movement that ultimately achieved what seemed impossible for centuries before: full civil and voting rights for Black Americans.
   2. Example: Repealing Act 10 in Wisconsin, which would restore the right to organize unions for public employees, unleashing a wave of organizing, building stronger unions, tens of thousands of organized workers, and dramatically increased the grassroots power to elect progressives and achieve further economic reforms, like health care reform or a $20 minimum wage.
4. Reforms that Build Ideological Power. Part of the power of the rich and the most profitable corporations is their ideological hold on the public. Many who are denied affordable health care, can find a job on which they can support their families, or cannot pay for the basics, don’t believe they deserve any better because of the corporate ideology they have been exposed to all their lives. Good stepping stones reforms help grassroots organizations shift the way people see the world towards realizing how they are being exploited by the rich and the powerful.
   1. Example 1: More people having access to public health coverage can help overturn false beliefs that are barriers to transformational reform, such as the myth that Medicare for All will deny individual control of our personal health care decisions. In point of fact, patients have already lost control to big hospitals, insurance corporations, and drug companies, and will be empowered to make their own medical decisions once health care is guaranteed to all.
   2. Example 2: The Climate Accountability Act gets the climate debate out of the weeds of complex energy policy, forcing lawmakers to declare whether they support cutting emissions fast enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. Currently lawmakers can claim to embrace climate science without taking the actual concrete steps necessary to prevent runaway climate change. Others can raise policy objections that obscure their support for fossil fuel interests. A super majority of the public already agree that lawmakers should do all they can to prevent catastrophic climate change. What the attentive public currently lacks is a clear definition of seriousness on this issue to hold elected leaders accountable. The Climate Accountability Act provides this clear litmus test.
5. Reforms which tangibly improve the lives of the multiracial working and middle class in the short term. Winning a small funding increase for already inadequate programs would not qualify.
   1. Example: A $20 minimum wage would immediately give a pay raise to hard pressed working people having trouble making ends meet.
6. Policies that reduce inequality by measurably reducing the disparities between marginalized communities and everyone else. 
   1. Example: capping rates that big for-profit utilities can charge at 2% of income will reduce the discriminatory energy burden imposed on working class and BIPOC communities who pay a much higher proportion of their income for heat and electricity than middle class Wisconsinites.

 

For more on Citizen Action’s Theory of Change see here.