Why can’t the good guys get our act together? So many people have been working hard on so many good things. But for 50 years, the progressive movement has been split into “special interests” by single-issue organizations. Environmentalists, social change activists, advocates for economic fairness, or for seniors, or children, or other species – all compete against one another for top billing on political agendas, media attention, and funding.

But if we’re going to build a world humans can survive in, we will need to do a wide spectrum of things. We have to stop fracking and using fossil fuels and nonbiodegradable plastic. We have to house the homeless and feed the hungry. We have to share the wealth to create economic justice. We have to educate our children, and protect our seniors. Most of us care about all these issues. Most nonprofit organizations only care about one.

If we support a single-issue group with our time or money, we should pressure it to work in coalition. This won’t be easy. Paid staff at these organizations have built their careers on “their” issue and will be reluctant to put that issue in context. For them, it’s about keeping such power as they have. In this way, we are poorly organized for survival.

That’s why it’s so important for progressives to take over the Democratic Party. That’s the only place where every issue is part of the agenda. The nonprofit sector in the US does a lot of good things, but it’s not only fractured internally, it’s on too small a scale to deal with huge national or international problems. And it is organized according to the whims of donors, i.e. people with money.

If we overcome all the cheating and manage to get Democrats in power again, poor Biden will have to deal with a mess on every level. No matter what we care about most, the Republicans under Trump (and before him too) have screwed it up. Everything we love is in danger.

We can’t keep fighting over which issue is most important. We have to make progress on all of them. Every single-issue organization has gathered data on that issue and knows how to educate people about it. If they work together – if we insist that they work together in order to win our continued support – they can each add a valuable piece to the puzzle of how to create a sustainable world.

Eventually this puzzle has to be worked out by all countries, not just the US. But if the good guys here manage to get it together, the US can once again offer some moral leadership to the rest of the world. This is not up to Biden, or any politician, my friends. It’s up to the American people.