Wealth & Money Quote by Jim Hightower

Hightower’s sentence is built like a counterpunch: it answers the familiar story that progressives are perpetually losing by pointing to the one arena where they can still reliably win - the local fight. The key move is scale. By foregrounding “grassroots,” he implicitly downgrades national politics as a place where money, media, and party machinery smother reform. That contrast is the subtext: if Washington feels frozen, it’s not because people stopped caring; it’s because the battlefield is rigged.

The phrasing “enormous… activism” followed by “more often than not, success” is classic organizer talk - optimism with receipts. He’s not selling hope as mood, but hope as a track record, and the examples are carefully chosen to signal both material and structural change. “Living wage campaigns” evoke immediate, pocketbook victories: the kind that can be felt in paychecks and rents. “Efforts to finance our elections” jumps to the deeper plumbing of democracy, suggesting that the movement isn’t just asking for better outcomes but trying to rewrite the rules that decide outcomes.

Context matters: Hightower has spent decades translating populist anger into practical campaigns, often in red-state terrain where progressive branding can be toxic but progressive policies can still pass when framed as fairness and local control. The boosterish “terrific success” is strategic: it recruits. It tells skeptics, donors, and exhausted volunteers that the action is below the cable-news altitude, and that power is still reachable - not as a fantasy, but as an accumulation of small wins that change what becomes politically normal.