Why the Right Attacked Unions, ACORN and Planned Parenthood

The Nation: While it's obvious that the right wing is out to break the back of the progressive movement, it’s easy to miss the strategy that guides their selection of specific targets. Their attacks are all carefully aimed at the same critical juncture: institutions that work for people in their daily lives and in the political arena, those that connect people’s personal struggles across the country to the political struggle in Washington.

Planned Parenthood operates over 800 health clinics across the country. These clinics are often the only option for women who need vital services, including contraception, HIV testing or PAP smears to detect and prevent cancer and other life-threatening illness. Three million Americans go to Planned Parenthood every year, and one in five women in the United States will visit a Planned Parenthood clinic in their lifetime. The personal relationships developed at clinics inform Planned Parenthood’s critical and ongoing advocacy for federal support for reproductive health and freedom. As a trusted brand representing women in DC, Planned Parenthood Action Fund has successfully lobbied for greater access to healthcare, better educational resources for family planning and the preservation of a woman’s right to choose.

The nexus of service and advocacy is a powerful place to stand: simultaneously addressing direct needs and advocating for systemic redress of those needs is a winning equation for progressive power. Yet, we have precious few progressive organizations left in that spot at the national level, and the ones we have are under attack precisely because our opposition understands their power.

For the past two weeks, all eyes have been glued to Madison, Wisconsin. The collective and joyful resistance to Governor Scott Walker’s power-grabbing budget bill has inspired the demoralized progressive base and put the corporate-backed assault on working people front and center in the national conversation.

Once we recognize the critical role these progressive service organizations play in building progressive politics, the right’s broader strategy in Wisconsin and elsewhere becomes clear.

Read the full story at The Nation.