The Do Nothing Strategy: An Expose of National Progressive Politics

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If you feel frustrated and think Americans are losing ground on issues like the right to choose safe and legal abortion, environmental protection, electing more progressive women to public office and civil rights—you’re right. The reason: The Do Nothing Strategy that infects many national, progressive organizations today. The Do Nothing infection has broader implications for American democracy, liberty and justice because it allows right-wing viewpoints, by default, to dominate public policy.

The year was 1989. The U.S. Supreme Court had just decided the Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, returning the regulation of abortion to state legislatures across the country. At a meeting of the pro-choice coalition, Marylanders for the Right to Choose, the Chair of the group, an employee of Planned Parenthood of Maryland, began presenting The Do Nothing Strategy. She very carefully detailed how, in the face of potentially severe restrictions on abortion rights, those of us whose jobs were to defend reproductive choice, were going to achieve that end by actively doing nothing. Never mind that access to safe and legal abortion is critical to the lives and dignity of women or that limits on abortion could send us hurling backwards to a time when women risked their lives to get abortions.

The Do Nothing Strategy was a detailed plan with very specific strategies and tactics about how we, the pro-choice community, would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and boundless energy—to do nothing. That way none of the Chair’s friends in the State legislature would ever have to make a tough vote on the contentious issue of abortion. The Chair had this strategy elaborately detailed on flip charts and went through it point by excruciating point. I looked around the room several times at my coalition partners and waited for someone to laugh. Surely the Chair must be kidding. No one laughed. No one asked whether our opponents might move to curtail access to safe and legal abortion if we did not move to protect it. No one challenged the perverse logic of The Do Nothing Strategy.

As the Executive Director of the Maryland affiliate of the National Abortion Rights Action League, I wasted half of my day exercising patience and listening to this surreal strategy until I could stand it no longer. Incredulous, and past the end of my patience, I stood up and said, “This is the most absurd idea I have ever heard. I’m going to codify Roe v. Wade for the State of Maryland. You have two choices. You can work with me to codify Roe v. Wade, or you can eat my dust.” I left the meeting.

A broad coalition ultimately came together in Maryland and was successful in passing legislation that put the principles of Roe v. Wade onto our state law books, protecting a woman’s right to choose safe and legal abortion. We worked together in the 1990 election to defeat anti-choice legislators, then passed the codification of Roe v. Wade through the State House and Senate and finally were victorious in a statewide referendum where Maryland voters in 44 out of 47 legislative districts ratified the law making Maryland the fourth state in the nation to put the principles of Roe v. Wade onto our state law books. In fact it was this experience that gave me my understanding and strong appreciation for the effectiveness of grassroots political organizing. The voters of Maryland made this historic victory possible.

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