Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo
Miami activist Renita Holmes asks a question during a community meeting to discuss neighborhood concerns about a proposed Major League Soccer stadium, February 2018.
Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change
By Eitan Hersh
Scribner
Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis
By K. Sabeel Rahman and Hollie Russon Gilman
Cambridge University Press
Ten years ago, the late Jake Brewer wrote an essay for The Huffington Post arguing that the advocacy industry was creating a tragedy of the commons. “The very technology that has allowed virtually any citizen to share a message with their representative has also produced paralyzing noise, making Congress far less able to hear what citizens have to say,” he wrote. As a result, congressional staffs were becoming more reliant on lobbyists, making average citizens even more cynical about the system.
Brewer, a rising star of the netroots generation, was speaking from inside the belly of the beast. At the time, he was the chief strategy officer for Fission, a leading digital organizing consultancy. (Full disclosure: Previously, we had been colleagues at the Sunlight Foundation.) He knew that the rise of the internet and social media had only intensified the competition between advocacy groups for attention and relevance.
“Relevance for an advocacy group,” he wrote, “leads to influence, and influence leads to funding so that it can conduct more advocacy. This constant struggle also means that it’s likely an advocacy group will ask you to sign meaningless petitions for the appearance of relevance.” More than half the emails supposedly generated to hit congressional in-boxes were never even received, and faxes to congressional offices were typically just thrown away. So much of what passed for political engagement, Brewer argued, was a sound-and-light show, signifying nothing.
A decade and a half ago, many of us thought that the rise of personal computing and the openness of the web would lead to the democratization of politics. We celebrated how ordinary citizens made use of these tools. We cheered as bloggers challenged powerful politicians and we evangelized for social media, telling everyone we knew that they had to get on Facebook and Twitter. There have been many beneficial outcomes from the rise of the networked age, no doubt. Groups that were previously marginalized by mainstream media, especially women and people of color, now have more voice. Candidates who choose to avoid dependence on big money, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have learned how to amass small donors and run for office with fewer constraints.
But as the authors of two valuable new books, Eitan Hersh of Politics Is for Power, and Sabeel Rahman and Hollie Russon Gilman of Civic Power, make clear, merely opening up the media floodgates and lowering the barriers to participation have not led to the power shifts the early evangelists for tech-enabled democracy expected. Meaningful participation, the kind that ensures that ordinary people can influence the decisions that affect their lives, requires far greater attention to how power is organized and structured.
Hersh, who is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, focuses his book mostly on the role of individuals in politics. Rahman, the president of Demos and an associate professor at Brooklyn Law School, and Gilman, a political scientist with affiliations at Harvard, Columbia, and New America, focus more on the institutions that foster and channel civic engagement. While complementing each other, the two books have different audiences in mind. If you want to convince your political-junkie cousin to stop sharing memes on Twitter and arguing about the election on Facebook, buy him Politics Is for Power. If you want to try to get a foundation program officer to adopt a different strategy for fixing what ails American democracy, send her Civic Power.
Either way, what Hersh, Rahman, and Gilman all argue is that many of us are doing politics wrong.
For all the noise generated by the political process, Americans spend shockingly little time on civic activity, Hersh tells us. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person reports having about five and a half hours of leisure per day. Three-quarters of that time is spent watching TV or on a computer. Americans spend just about nine minutes, averaged across all of us, in civic or volunteer activity.
Even people who are daily news consumers, the so-called “highly informed” part of the electorate, aren’t all that civically engaged. Fewer than 4 percent told the American National Election Studies survey that they did any work at all on behalf of a campaign or party in 2016. Hersh notes, “Even among those who reported that they were afraid of Donald Trump, only 5 percent reported that they did any work to support their side.” Drawing on his own 2018 survey work, he adds that most daily news consumers report belonging to zero organizations. “Sixty-five percent report that in the last year they have done no work with other people to solve a community problem. Sixty-eight percent say they have attended zero meetings in the last year about a community issue.” Most of this data probably skews upward—that is, people tell pollsters they are more active than they actually are.
Meaningful participation, the kind that ensures that ordinary people can influence the decisions that affect their lives, requires far greater attention to how power is organized and structured.
Worst of all, people think that consuming news and sharing on social media equals being politically active. One-third of all Americans say they spend two hours a day on politics, Hersh found in that 2018 survey. But 80 percent of those people report that time is spent spectating, consuming news and social media, and sharing content with others. Hersh calls those people “political hobbyists” and he damns them, pungently. People who sign petitions online do so as a form of “self-gratification,” he writes. “We click and post and share not to take a civic action … [but] to convey an image to our social networks and ourselves.”
In lambasting activists for wasting their time in expressive politics rather than on-the-ground organizing, deriding them as “political hobbyists,” Hersh joins a turn under way among a number of younger progressives who have watched as many on the left have built comfortably pure clubhouses for their ideological soul mates rather than working to convert more people to their causes. I’m thinking of writers such as Astra Taylor and Jonathan Smucker, both of whom cut their teeth in radical left movements like Occupy but who now are, respectively, organizing in places like rural Pennsylvania and among students burdened by college debt.
Hersh shows us several compelling examples of real community organizing, like the Ukrainian ex-pat Naakh Vysoky of Brighton, Massachusetts, who before his death in December built a base in his low-income, immigrant, senior housing complex centered on winning tangible service improvements for his community. Turnout in Vysoky’s ward is off the charts and has been for years.
The challenge of building power for ordinary people is what consumes Rahman and Gilman, though their critique is focused on the upper end of political engagement, where leaders and institutions amass and deploy significant resources. Reformers have been trying for decades to improve the health of American democracy, with a range of strategies including campaign finance reform, greater government transparency, deliberative democracy practices, civic tech, and participatory budgeting. While each of these approaches has made some headway, Rahman and Gilman argue convincingly that they are not enough.
“Too often democracy reform policies emphasize the need to optimize governmental functioning and to improve the civility and rationality of politics, in ways that overlook—and therefore reify and further entrench—the deeper structural disparities of power,” they write. Worse, many democracy reformers embrace a “good governance ethos” that imagines a world somehow insulated from special-interest influence and political conflict and centered solely on expertise and good-faith deliberation.
Not only is that world an unattainable fantasy; Rahman and Gilman say that the push to achieve it neuters authentic citizen engagement and obscures, instead of fixing, the realities of political inequality. That’s why, for example, projects that simply push for greater governmental transparency don’t automatically lead to outcomes holding the powerful to greater account. In my years working with the Sunlight Foundation, we learned this the hard way, as we discovered that making things like campaign finance and lobbying data more accessible was of the greatest interest to … lobbyists. We still need institutions that can translate information into action on the part of those with less power, but as Hersh shows, those institutions—local political party committees, civic organizations, labor unions, and public media—have all withered and need to be rebuilt.
What is to be done? Like Hersh, Rahman and Gilman argue for a different kind of politics. Instead of seeking neutral process reforms like greater government transparency, reformers should build new civic institutions that are expressly engaged in increasing the power of previously disempowered groups. They point to examples like the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston and the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Boston office develops processes and tools aimed at lifting up disadvantaged neighborhoods and giving them greater say in city planning. The CFPB has an office of community affairs that in the Obama years invested significant staff time in building relationships with grassroots organizations and stakeholders such as minorities, indebted students, and homeowners. The agency also employed a mix of public hearings and town halls around the country to leverage public engagement. As of this writing, it still operates an online, searchable database that has generated millions of complaints against bad actors.
Rahman and Gilman are also politely critical of the “bodyless heads” of many advocacy organizations—the people filling our in-boxes with pointless requests for petition signatures and urgent calls for “just $3” to keep the sky from falling. “Building organizational power, in contrast, requires something more than simply transactional mobilizing; it also requires organizing that can build the skills and capacities of individual members over time, while simultaneously strengthening the relationships between them.” Amen to that.
Shifting our personal and collective focus to building political power rather than the empty chase for self-gratification or relevance is a hard but necessary task. The daily distractions delivered by our devices and the constant barrage of negative news only make it harder. But the hole we are in wasn’t dug overnight, and digging out of it will also take time. If people listen to Hersh as well as Rahman and Gilman, maybe at least they will stop digging the hole deeper.
