Quinn Dombrowski/Creative Commons
Indivisible San Francisco marches in San Francisco’s Pride Parade, June 25, 2017.
This article introduces the Prospect’s series on The Future of Organizing.
The Prospect has recently published two feature articles on the challenge of long-term, grassroots organizing as an essential ingredient in the project of rebuilding progressive politics and reclaiming American democracy. In my own article, I interviewed over 60 people across the progressive and Democratic ecosystem to explore the relations between a Democratic administration, the institutional Democratic Party at all levels, and the on-the-ground progressive movement.
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Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo explored the complex and sometimes fraught relationship between the thousands of local Indivisible groups that sprang up after Donald Trump’s election and the national Indivisible built since 2017 by the movement’s founders, Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg.
The connection between the two articles is this: Virtually everyone agrees that while founding a pop-up group in the age of social media is easy, sustaining a durable and democratic grassroots organization is really hard. There are challenges of structure, leadership, accountability, coordination, coalition, and of course funding. On the progressive side, there is plenty of large-donor money for lots of causes, but paying the salaries of organizers is evidently not high on the list.
To shed further light on these questions, we’ve organized a roundtable of comment from people long committed to successful progressive organizing. Our commentators include national leaders and local ones, as well as students of organizing. These pieces will be published over the next several days. The authors are:
Lara Putnam, University of Pittsburgh
Maurice Mitchell, National Director, Working Families Party
Ivonne Wallace Fuentes, Indivisible, Roanoke, Virginia
Leslie Mark, Indivisible Kansas City
George Goehl, Director, People’s Action
Steve Rosenthal, former Political Director, AFL-CIO
Marshall Ganz, Harvard University; former Organizing Director of the United Farm Workers
The co-executive directors of Indivisible were invited to participate. They declined. If they change their minds, they will be welcome to comment. Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo will have a final word.
Let’s Organize—and Not Scapegoat Leaders
By Michael Podhorzer
Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy is one of the most important contributions to our understanding of the demise of the robust local associations upon which real democracy depends. It chronicles the simultaneous hollowing out of authentic local voluntary associations and the creation of a rapidly burgeoning professional progressive advocacy sector.
So I was eager to read the assessment of Indivisible by Skocpol and her co-author, Caroline Tervo. But, at this moment, when we desperately need to understand the causes of our civic lethargy and find remedies to the learned helplessness that characterizes the last several decades in America, I felt this piece missed the mark.
First, when the authors ascribe Democratic down-ballot losses in 2020 to earlier resistance momentum not “carry[ing] over,” they misunderstand the last two elections. The 2018 blue wave was fueled by unprecedented turnout on our side and relatively less enthusiasm on their side. Democratic losses in 2020 were the result of Republicans who had voted in 2016 but sat out 2018. Second, they ignore the enormously successful channeling of that momentum and energy into the variety of extraordinary responses to the threats posed to the election by Trump and COVID, including convincing tens of millions of supporters to vote by mail and recruiting poll workers to replace the sidelined Election Day workforce of mostly retirees. And third, they ignore the organizing and preparation for the campaign to defend the results after the election.
Continue reading “Let’s Organize—and Not Scapegoat Leaders”
Focus on the Grassroots
By Micah L. Sifry
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.
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.
