We are six days from the South Carolina Democratic primary. Bernie Sanders took New Hampshire, and Hillary Clinton won Nevada. Both are at a virtual tie in Iowa. Super Tuesday — with 12 primaries in varying southern states, as well as Massachusetts and Minnesota — looms before us.

I still haven’t made a decision on who to vote for. But before we discuss voting preferences on the Democratic side in 2016, I want to go over the last time we faced such a period of social momentum: the 1960s.

I have been lucky enough to witness five Democratic presidents in office. During the last Uranus-Pluto aspect of the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was the social spur in the side of the establishment. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, or LBJ, strong-armed congressmen and senators to yield to vote for legislation creating the Great Society. Under his administration civil rights was signed into law banning racial discrimination in housing, public facilities, interstate commerce and the workplace. Republicans weren’t as rabid as they are now, and Democrats were far more conservative then.

Under Johnson, public broadcasting, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, the arts, urban and rural development, public services, and the “War on Poverty” was started. The Voting Rights Act banned certain requirements in southern states used to disenfranchise African Americans. With passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, immigration was reformed, removing all racial origin quotas and replacing them with national origin quotas.

From today’s lens, it was a miracle that a former senator from Texas (a southern state) was able to move legislation to bring about the Civil Rights Act and Medicare. But the miracle had to have public pressure from below to make the rafters of Congress shake and make progress. Johnson was strongly supported by his own party and was assisted in part by the growing economy fueled by World War II and the Cold War.

The world LBJ created with his legislation became the third rail — an integral fixture of American government along with Social Security. This is the foundation that the Republican Party — slowly and from the ground up — has been working to dismantle. It started with the tax revolt that paved the way for the Reagan Era, the chipping away of voting rights, and even disabling a progressive agency started by the Nixon Administration — the EPA.

At every turn, Republicans took advantage of their time in the White House and Congress to nominate Supreme Court Justices who reflected their conservative aspirations. With each appointment, they achieved greater mainstream viability for their views and agenda — while us poor, dirty hippies and black and brown folks faded into the background, or were sent to prison.

Which brings us to today, 2016, with all of us pushed against the wall. Even with a Democratic President in his last year in office, we have a Republican majority in Congress — and now, with Scalia’s death, a deadlocked Supreme Court. This is a structure not built to last; instability is imminent. If the push is not from the inside, the outside will do the work. Therefore, the use of the word “revolution” as used by the Sanders campaign is something we cannot take lightly.

Not with the forces we are pushing out against. The conservative movement started slowly, assembling after Nixon’s resignation to prevent that from ever happening to a Republican president again. That movement is now a powerful, established base that has not only gerrymandered congressional districts — with the aid of a conservative Supreme Court — but infiltrated school districts, governor’s offices, city councils, libraries, commissions, as well as local and regional courts.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 was a coup d’etat that Republicans hope to repeat again in 2016 with Hillary’s emails and Benghazi brouhaha. With Sanders, all they have to do is touch a filament on this spider web they have woven with the message of “socialist” to keep the whisper campaign against him hot, scaring the bejeezus out of gun-toting, Bible-beating conservatives in small towns across the US.

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There is a reason why the current Democratic leadership — the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — is as wary of Sanders as the nominee as the Republican National Committee is of Donald Trump. Trump has the charisma and money to buy the election and screw the base that Republicans took decades to build. There is a Republican majority in Congress to support him.

Sanders followers are highly wary of the DNC because they represent the corrupt establishment. Yet it is there the foundation of a Democratic agenda and platform, built by Howard Dean, can take place in congressional, senate, regional and local elections. Ground up. It is there that a necessary congressional majority can be built for either Democratic nominee. Will the Democrats be as splintered as the Republicans are becoming? Time will tell.

A revolution needs everything. From sewing needles to yard signs, weekly organizing meetings to coffee, cookies and pizza for phone bankers to make things happen. And not just for presidential elections, but for midterms, governor’s races, city councils, and government commissions. Not just this year but next. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and enthusiasm can get it started; but persistence must sustain it if we want to see the changes we yearn for now.

So my choice today is to see what happens in South Carolina and the rest of the states next Tuesday. My choice is to see who remains standing so that together we can start a long march down the road of sanity to bring this nation and planet to the future we all deserve.