by Joel Spector, October 2nd, 2019
Justice Oregon Democrats was formed in Washington DC in January of 2017, with the stated purpose of reforming the Democratic Party by electing progressive candidates without corporate backing. The Oregon chapter was formed that fall by Stephan Leger. The group agreed strongly with the reform goal, and also thought electing progressive noncorporate candidates was independently a good idea, but thought that electing non-corporate candidates was a poor strategy for achieving reform of the party. The group instead thought it would be a good idea to work within the party to achieve both positions of local power and intelligence about how influence is promulgated within the existing system, and with that knowledge and that power create a system of actual democratic representation.
Faced with this apparent conflict between the National organization’s objectives and the group’s desires, Mr. Leger resigned. Due to the new and as-yet undeveloped nature of the organization, the local group were not informed of this decision. When I became aware of it some months later, I volunteered to run the group. At that time, the previous enthusiastic membership had dispersed to other organizations, so the group lay dormant for some months.
I hit on the obvious idea of “do both”, work within the party to reform it, and work to elect noncorporate progressive congress-people to reform congress, both at the same time, as a simple way of satisfying both the local members and the national organization.
So far, it seems to be working. Would you care to join us?