We have choices about how we respond to being outnumbered. Which previous era is our frame of reference? Is our mental model fascist Europe in the 1930s, in which we are the tiny underground resistance? Or is this the New McCarthyism, as Matt Rothschild put it in The Progressive, and are we enduring the 1950s until the 1960s arrive? Or is this the equivalent of the polarized '60s, and are we hoping to outnumber and overpower the equivalents of the segregationists and the Vietnam hawks? We will win the most societal change if we avoid all those old templates and recognize that the American people are at different stages on different issues, with great potential for progressive change on some, even while there is only basic educational work to do on others.

The bright spot in the picture is economic issues. Even in these times, we do get to enjoy being part of an outraged majority! Americans are angry about the gaping chasm that has opened up between the very wealthy and everyone else. In a Harris poll in December, 69% agreed that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." A 2001 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 85% of Americans support increasing the minimum wage; 80% support increasing tax credits for low-income workers; 85% support expanding subsidized day care; 75% support spending more on medical care and housing for poor people. Even something as radical as guaranteeing everyone a minimum income had 57% support. These popular reforms could build the platform for a movement with ovetwhelming public support.

The era when economic issues united white people only in solidarity with other white people seems to be gradually ending. A Gallup poll last year found that 58% favor affirmative action programs for women and people of color. The percentage who think immigrants contribute more than they cost the American economy has been steadily rising and now exceeds the percentage who think the reverse, according to Pew Research polls. To meet the challenge of speaking out from a minority position on the war while building a majority movement on the economy, activists need some knowledge of movement history and theory. Bill Moyer has developed a model of stages of social movements called the Movement Action Plan, which is very useful in identifying the steps progressive groups can and should take at each stage. Various issues can be at different stages from each other, and savvy activists can tailor their actions on each issue to fit the stage and thus maximize their effectiveness.

Social movements take off when a significant minority of the population sees the issue as violating widely held values; and they effect structural change after they win majority public support. When public opinion is not with us, our task is laying the groundwork with public education to get the issue on the map. On the war in Afghanistan (and beyond), we are probably not going to have a majority or even a substantial minority of Americans with us in the foreseeable future. Our task is to make sure the dissenting voices are heard.

But on some economic justice issues, there is the potential of building a mass movement that could win substantial victories. The first task of awakening the public has been accomplished. But let's not stop there. Most people think it is a violation of basic American values when a fulltime job doesn't support a family. The living wage movement has swept across the country like wildfire and won local ordinances in 79 cities or counties. Students have campaigned against sweatshops, and the globalization movement has spotlighted previously secret trade arrangements that benefit only multinational corporations and financial institutions. What a stunning harvest of successes just in the last half of the '90s! Organization building has been proceeding steadily. with the notable growth of Jobs with Justice, student-labor alliances. globalization groups, and the organization where I work. United for a Fair Economy. All the ingredients for a mass movement are there. This recession could be the moment they come together.

It would be a shame if peace activists didn't seize this opportunity because we felt too alienated from our grass roots base due to our differences over the war or other issues. To build a more powerful movement than we have in the last 40 years, we have to form tactical alliances with the many, many people we only partially agree with. In a CNN poll about abortion last July, 47% described themselves as "more pro-life" than pro-choice. A Gallup Poll on the death penalty last October found 68% in favor of it. Banning handguns was opposed by 62% of those polled by Gallup in 2000. We are likely to live in a polarized country on these social issues for decades to come, and that shouldn't stop us from building a majority movement for economic justice. I believe we can do this without betraying or abandoning our minority-view causes.

Most people in the US who are progressive on economic issues but more conservative on social and military issues are working-class people without college education. They tend to include Catholics of all races; white, rural, low-income people; recent immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere; and senior citizens of all races. The failure of peace activists to form tactical alliances with these people is rooted partially in classism.

Divisions by class and subculture have held back every movement in the last 40 years. At least since the sixties movement defined itself as a "counterculture," polarization against mainstream America has been a recurring theme in the US left. Animosity between many of the young men who went to Vietnam and their "Middle America" supporters, on one side, and draft resisters and their counterculture supporters, on the other, limited the effectiveness of all the '60s movements. Conflicts between environmental concerns and jobs (like the northwest timber issues Fred Rose writes about in Coalitions Across the Class Divide) have allowed corporations to play people against each other to the detriment of both causes. More recentlv, low-income welfare rights activists felt betrayed by the failure of middle-class feminists to defend the safety net against welfare "reform."

And the Republicans have skillfully manipulated the real splits on social issues among the American people-on abortion, gun control, the role of religion in schools and government, the death penalty, and the flag-into the political power to impose economic policies that the majority of Americans oppose. The right wing has done better than the left wing at grassroots recruitment, in part because they have seen ideologically uncommitted Americans as a resource in a way that the left has nor.

Would reaching out across class and ideological lines to build a populist movement for economic fairness mean withdrawing from the peace movement? No. Some of the activists I admire most are simultaneously involved with several groups that form ideological concentric circles around them: a small group with a high degree of shared political values that works to promote those values in a mosrty unreceptive world; a wider group based on an identity or a single issue; and a broadbased, grassroots group, very diverse in ideologies and constituencies, which organizes around a clear violation of widely shared American values. Despair at the war shouldn't lead us to forgetting the hopeful potential of the third concentric circle.

So I'm going to talk with my neighbors with the flags, ask them how the recession is affecting their families, and maybe even work up my courage to ask them what their flag means to them. I bet I'll be surprised by their answers.