Taking Initiative : Ballot Initiatives to Class Struggle (Jacobin)

Strong majorities of Americans support public healthcare, access to abortion, higher minimum wages, workers' rights, and climate action. Polls consistently demonstrate majority agreements on these issues and more, yet we are bombarded with media and political commentary telling us society is starkly divided. National politics is characterized by increasingly irreconcilable polarization between Republicans and Democrats. The record of ballot initiatives in the past decade tells a different story. Ballot initiatives on policies that put people before profit overwhelmingly win in Republican and Democrat states. This is especially true of policies that redistribute wealth from the rich to the rest. When people are allowed to vote directly on policies instead of just on politicians, most Americans vote to the left of both political parties' agendas. As more of these initiatives have won at the ballots, the citizen initiative process itself has come under attack by state legislatures and judiciaries bent on keeping decision-making power away from the majority of working people. The citizen initiative is the only large-scale mechanism we have to directly legislate policies to improve working people's lives, and the Left is only beginning to realize just how useful this tool might be.