Inspiration of the Week: Jeff Chang

"Electoral politics is episodic, short-term, and transactional. Movement-building must be constant, long-term, and transformative. It is not a cyclical task. It is work that reaches toward the horizon."

I am on of the many young (well, not like young young) people that found themselves pretty uninvolved in Tuesdays elections but depressed by the results. As someone who feels pretty detached from state and national electoral politics, I'm always half concerned about election results because I know they will have direct impacts on me and people who I care about, and half indifferent because I feel I have no real control over their outcome. But reading Jeff Chang's recent interview in Colorlines really made me feel included in "the new cultural majority" and helped provide some location in the national progressive movement building process.

"Cultural change is often the dress-rehearsal for political change. Or put in another way, political change is the final manifestation of cultural shifts that have already occurred.

Sadly most progressives—whether they work in electoral politics or movement politics—have not yet figured culture into their theory of change. Unlike the right, they have no cultural strategy."