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Grassroots Democratic civic life is a desert that only gets watered for a few months every two or four years, and then only in battleground states or districts.
This article is part of the Prospect’s series on The Future of Organizing.
Organizing people is expensive. Organizing data is cheap. People have minds of their own. Data is malleable. It takes time to build relationships with people. It takes almost no time to glean relationships from data. Getting a decent percentage of a big list of email addresses to click on something and take an action is fairly easy. Getting a large group of people to work cooperatively toward a common goal is hard work. If you are trying to organize people for something long-term, then interaction with them is valuable because it builds trust. If you are trying to organize data for something short-term, then interaction with people is waste.
At its best, the new sphere of digital politics, which political scientist David Karpf terms “analytic activism,” the title of his 2016 book, has enabled millions of people to plug money and time into campaigns and causes at a scale not seen on the left in decades: More than 15 million individuals made a donation through ActBlue in the 2020 cycle (ten million for the first time); more than four million signed up for an action like phone-banking on Mobilize, a new central hub used by thousands of Democratic candidates and organizations to organize volunteers.
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Unfortunately, the rise of this kind of digital politics has done little to remedy the decline of actual membership. As Theda Skocpol laid out convincingly in her 2003 book Diminished Democracy, civic life in America used to be centered on engagement in locally organized, federally structured membership organizations. But starting in the 1970s, those formations have been supplanted by top-down professional managers who advocate on behalf of constituencies, buoyed by direct-mail fundraising rather than local dues.
Counterpoint From Michael Podhorzer: Let’s Organize—and Not Scapegoat Leaders
This hollowing out of civic life has been more pronounced on the left than the right, with evangelical churches and gun clubs sustaining the base of the Republican Party while union halls, long the heart of Democratic politicking, have been ravaged. Grassroots Democratic civic life is a desert that only gets watered for a few months every two or four years, and then only in battleground states or districts.
Like many, I am sympathetic to Skocpol’s argument that we will not see a real revival of the Democratic Party as a political force capable of improving the lives of ordinary people until there are places where the base of the party comes together regularly to organize for power while building the social ties that foster solidarity and sustain activism for the long haul. “Meeting” via sharing the same hashtag will not sustain us.
Like Skocpol and co-author of a recent Prospect article Caroline Tervo, I saw the rise of mass participation in local organizing galvanized by Trump’s 2016 victory as the one silver lining of the last five years. I also thought Indivisible had the potential to help fill the Democratic desert. And in addition to reporting on Indivisible as a longtime observer of political movements, I dove in as a participant, helping to start a group in my own congressional district (NYCD16-Indivisible), exactly as suggested by the Indivisible Guide. That group now has 1,300 email addresses, with a core of several hundred volunteers engaged deeply in local, state, and federal fights.
I have also seen firsthand how Indivisible’s national organization went from playing a helpful role as a rallying point for resistance to the Trump agenda in 2017—co-organizing weekly mass teach-ins on key battles and feeding its newly organized base with timely guidance on how to do things like save Obamacare—to losing the trust of much of its base over the next few years as the organizational choices Skocpol and Tervo ably document played out.
One key breaking point was, as they report, the desire of Indivisible’s national leaders to demonstrate their organization’s influence by making an endorsement early in the 2020 presidential process—even though local leaders wanted no such thing because they knew it would only split and weaken their groups. In New York, the seeds for that break were planted in mid-2018, when Indivisible endorsed actress-activist Cynthia Nixon in her ill-fated primary challenge to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Local Indivisible activists statewide were furious at a process they had little input into; the protest letter Skocpol and Tervo cite was organized by one of my local group’s most active members.
Could Indivisible have traveled a different trajectory than the one Skocpol and Tervo describe? Given what I know of the demands and expectations of major Democratic donors, probably not. Short-termism, a perceived need to put out fires rather than investing in fire brigades; preferences for message-testing and media campaigns; and a devotion to data-driven campaigning and metrics—these are all tendencies driven by big donors. It’s hard to fault Indivisible founders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg for succumbing to them, and one wishes that Skocpol and Tervo were able to shed more light on donor pressure.
That said, Indivisible National didn’t need to ice out local leaders who wanted more input, transparency, and lateral relationship-building from them. As Aram Fischer, a California organizer who saw the potential of Indivisible being squandered from above, said recently on a RootsCamp panel he and I organized on the lessons of Indivisible, “the flow of information is the lifeblood of movements.” Without asking permission, Fischer built a network of more than 600 local leaders called Indivisible Middle Tier, painstakingly reaching them one at a time and weaving them together using Slack, the team coordination tool. That network, and similar alliances of Indivisible chapters across states like Michigan and California, is currently self-sustaining, but it could be much more if the national organization altered course and stopped vacuuming resources upward and hoarding them centrally.
Looking ahead, the key question is what will we do to keep watering the Democratic desert? Will the people now sitting atop those lists of donors and volunteers find better ways to involve and empower the millions of people who in 2020 showed they would work their hearts out to end the Trump years? Or will they keep optimizing for short-term, just-in-time acts of voter engagement? The answer will only change if grassroots Democrats, more aware of the real dynamics shaping their movements thanks to articles like this one, demand it.
