Building a Party: Winning

“Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward and give us victories”
- Abraham Lincoln

Winning is something we obviously value in America. Look at our popular culture’s fascination with competitive sports or our movies. We love winners. We love winning. None of this second place nonsense, we want our favorite athletes to come in first, our favorite movies to win an Oscar. Our politicians want to win office and we the people just want to stop losing.

I think its high time for progressive minded people to sit down and think about what winning is and why it’s important. Since most people seem to get quite excited about winning, myself included, there must be something really there. What is it? Where the place for the competition that winning requires in a society built around a respect for other’s opinions?

First, why is winning even important in the first place? Isn’t competition something we should avoid in the interests of unity and equality? Perhaps, but winning also seems to feed some basic human desires which I think we need to accept exists and therefore need to understand.

For starters, winning gives us a sense of power, sometimes actual power. When politicians win they gain positions of authority and responsibility which often also come with some degree of power and control. Most of us like being in control of our surroundings. It’s comforting to have that power and it makes sense that it would be. If you’re surviving in the wild it would help to have an instinctive drive to take as much control as possible over your surroundings. Winning seems to satiate that instinctive drive to some degree and to create a sense of satisfaction.

That’s right, it just feels good to win. Often winning is the payoff for hard work. When you win it means you’ve succeeded. All those practices you stayed late after suddenly seem worthwhile when you claim victory. There’s a rush in winning something as trivial as a video game. I can’t imagine the feeling of winning something like the Presidency.

One of the reasons it feels good to win is that winning often leads to respect from society. We recognize that much of the time a lot of effort, sweat and devotion goes into winning and so we respect those who cross that ultimate line. We look for things in societies winners that remind us of ourselves and aspire to that same greatness. Ultimately respect may be what we all desire more than anything.

The biggest reason we love winning is because of what winning really is. Winning is achieving goals. It makes perfect sense that there would be a sense of pride in accomplishment. It is the achievement of goals that interests me particularly.

“I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is the moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle — victorious.”
-Vince Lombardi

If we accept that winning is the achievement of goals and can be very rewarding for many reason, we can move on to a consideration of when winning is important. Should we worry about winning battles or wars? What losses can we accept or can we accept any losses?

In competitive sports players work together towards winning. Since this is the primary goal in sports I think it’s an interesting case study.

Even in competitive sports, however, there are many degrees of winning. In football for instance the offense can win a drive by scoring or the defense can win by forcing a three and out. You can be winning after a quarter or after a half of play, but the real victory is in winning the entire game… or is it?

The greater victory is in winning a season. To win a single game you can ignore the long term consequences of decisions and play an injured player for instance. Your strategy doesn’t include a tomorrow.

It would be narrow to judge a victory by only one days’ play, so we have many games in most sports. You want to give that injured player rest so he is healthy for the larger battle, a championship.

This is where the parallels with politics begin to fall apart though. What does that victory in a game mean the day after you win it? Suddenly you start over again with no score the next game. Even after winning a championship, you start over even in the standings the next season. So what is achieved in a victory in sports?

Perhaps it makes more sense to consider what is really lost in sports. Really what stands to be lost in sports is relatively minor, perhaps a slow in financial growth of the team and player salaries. Perhaps fan and player disappointment also could result from losing. Over time the viability of the team could suffer, but really, there is no catastrophic disaster awaiting a team that loses.

Therefore there seems to be equally little to be won. The pleasure of victory and respect are the prizes. Still, it seems sports are a wonderful outlet for our desires to win. What about politics?

“I would rather fail in a cause that will ultimately triumph than to triumph in a cause that will ultimately fail.”

- Woodrow Wilson

On one level, there is no area of our life where winning is more important than in politics. Democratic representation is they system by which we exert our power, after all. The stakes may be much higher than they are in sports but in politics we must consider carefully what we mean by winning.

In politics we can think of winning in a couple basic ways. We can consider winning getting a particular candidate elected or getting a particular party’s candidates elected in general. You can also consider winning to be the long term achievement of policy goals.

If winning is defined as just a particular politician or party getting the most votes in a particular election, then we would want to employ the sorts of strategies you would use in a single championship type game. Unfortunately the best short term strategies can be very bad long term strategies.

More importantly though, politically speaking I don’t think electing a particular politician or party to office is winning in an of itself. Using the same matrix as I did with sports I wonder, what is really won and lost when the ultimate goal is electing a particular politician.

If the politician we support wins their election, then personal power is theirs. Some power may end up in the hands of those who made it happen. Really though, we’re just left to hope that the election of our favorite candidate leads to returns for us. If they lose it’s pretty much the same, they end up not achieving their goal and gaining power and we end up with slightly less influence cause we backed the wrong horse.

So maybe winning in politics is something different than winning an election or elections. What if we instead thought first about the issues that we care about and how they relate. If that understanding is where we begin then we can start to think in terms of a full season strategy.

It is vitally important to win on issues. Winning on issues means not just changing laws but reshaping how we, as a society, think about some of the challenges we face. Unlike electing a politician, the pursuit of a victory on key issues is a long term success without a clear finish. As progress is achieved and popular opinions shift, the politicians will follow their tendencies to back the policies with majority approval to ensure their election.

Real victory can not be measured simply in terms of the ballot box. It isn’t as easy to judge the winners because the goals are long term. The season never ends and a championship trophy is never handed out. The game just goes on.

Real political victories are subtle changes in how we collectively consider issues and what we value. Convincing the people that certain policy positions are correct, election of leaders devoted to those policies and passage of legislation in support of those understandings are the steps toward victory.

If you think about winning in this long term sense you realize that electing politicians is not an end in itself but rather a means to a greater end. We want to elect better politicians because we want to win on policy issues. In this context we can loose one election if we make long term progress towards the policy positions we share.

“The tree that doesn’t bend, breaks.” -Marla Daniels
“Bend too far, you’re already broken.” - Cedric Daniels
- The Wire

If winning on the issues is what’s really important then why not just take an absolutist approach. I know, after all, what I think the correct path for the country should be so why shouldn’t I reject anything shy of that exact vision? The answer is in the potential to lose. Being right is useless if you’ve lost the argument.

Look at Ralph Nader. Nader’s rise began as a something of a populist warrior, fighting for the consumer’s right not to be killed or harmed by the products on the market. On issue after issue I tend to agree with the broad strokes of his political philosophies until it gets to one very important aspect, winning. Nader seems to think having a voice for those issues that never wins is progress towards victory.

As we all know Nader ran for President in 2000 against George W. Bush and Al Gore. He knew he had no chance of winning but ran anyway under the pretense of offering a progressive choice. You will find few who would argue today that a Gore presidency would have been worse for populist issues than Bush has been. There are also many who see that Nader’s candidacy actually took vital votes that might have tipped the election towards Gore. Therefore, we can see that Nader’s personal loss contributed to a loss on the issues as well.

It is possible, however, to run for office holding progressive ideals high. If you’re willing to consider all opinions and you have a genuine desire to affect change in a way that benefits us all as a society, many will cross party lines to support you. This is particularly true if you actually achieve results once elected. Just ask Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont, where I was born.

He struggled early in his political career, unable to win major offices. Being a socialist in late 20th century America isn’t the most popular political position, so it isn’t a big surprise that he only got 2% of the vote in his first major election. After years of running for Senate and Governor without getting much of the vote at all, he took a little time and came back to run for a smaller office, Mayor of Burlington.

He won the four way race for Mayor by just 12 votes and then he began to show results. His successes on the issues led to significant popularity and reelection. He began to prove that he was working for the common good on the issues and was able to use that to springboard him to the US House and now the US Senate. Not only that but on the issues his vision lives on, still winning in Burlington.

“Patience young grasshopper.” -Master Kan
- Kung Fu

There is something to be said for incremental change. Some battles are so important they must be fought now. Others can wait until later. We need a way to decide which is which though, something I will explore in a future edition of Building a Party. Assuming we have made those decisions we need to figure out how to move forward.

Yes, some issues are so important that compromise is difficult to imagine. Those issues are rare though. In most cases there is a sensible middle ground. It is generally better to come half way to your goal than to remain at the beginning. This is particularly true if your policy goals benefit the people. In the cases where there is no room for compromise, there must be a convincing argument made for why that is.

The rest of the time we should be playing to win the season. Small changes build upon one another until massive change is afoot. Though it may take years to get to anything close to victory, we need to consider individual politicians relative to our policy goals. Winning is not taking the most seats in an election, that is but a step towards success. To win in politics is to manifest the policy changes you believe should occur. Now we just need to decide what those changes ought to be. That, and more, in future editions of Building a Party.