time to build

This is from a Twitter thread posted yesterday by University of Pittsburgh historian Lara Putnam:

When highly-engaged people who had voted against him came out of their initial shock in wake of Trump’s first election and tried to figure out how to push back on Trump and his GOP majorities, a few templates were offered them:

Guidance # 1: Tea Party in Reverse — or at least those parts of the Tea Party visible from the congressional offices where its anger hit. More or less, the Indivisible playbook. Which included….

A. Hold large protest marches
B. Build local groups or networks, drawing on those who attend
C. Contact incumbent politicians to pressure them to act against Trump policy efforts
D. Conduct targeted actions to drive earned media against Republican incumbents
E. [Run primaries against] Democratic incumbents who were not sufficiently active, oppositional, or ideologically aligned

Guidance # 2: Trust the Professionals; Be Their ‘Grassroots Engagement’

A. Donate to existing Democratic candidates
B. Participate in the “ground game” of anonymous voter contacting for them (doorknocking, textbanking, phonebanking… & the slightly rogue postcards to voters)

Guidance #3: Movement Voter Project & similar

A. Give money to support organizing by paid staff w/in disadvantaged communities, [especially] communities of color, which will empower & mobilize the members of those communities to push progressive policy by voting more & voting Left.

Putnam comments, “I don’t think anyone can look at the last four years of results, culminating in last night’s outcomes, & say that any of these theories of change looks vindicated. & I say this very much as someone who has put mileage in on each route, alongside others who’ve done so much more.”

I wouldn’t make the counterfactual claim that Harris would have won if the organizing had been more effective. Who knows? But I do think we would be in a better position to resist Trump’s policies in 2025 and beyond.

In a 2024 New York Review article and elsewhere, Putnam has advocated building local Democratic Party organizations that consistently engage and involve people, not only during campaigns. Her advice is consistent with research by political scientists like Eitan Hersh, Dan Shea, and others, and it’s valid. But for some of us, it’s not perfectly on point, because our roles and missions are not partisan. We want or are obliged to organize for democracy, not necessarily for Democrats. For us, the same general advice applies, but it implies building effective grassroots organizations outside of parties.

Why did so much of the spontaneous grassroots opposition to Trump in 2016-17 prove evanescent? Why did relatively few groups that formed in 2017 survive, and why didn’t they turn into one more powerful movement? I would offer three reasons:

  1. These grassroots groups never received significant investment. Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion between her nomination and Election Day. I don’t begrudge her that money. I happen to think she ran an excellent campaign against strong headwinds. But her fundraising success reminds us that there is a lot of money on the center-left and left. Paltry sums flow to grassroots organizing efforts between elections. Local groups can’t hire paid staff or pay rent. If there were much more total investment, we wouldn’t have to make painful choices between funding groups that organize vulnerable people of color and those that have suburban and middle-class constituencies (and larger numbers of voters). We could support both and help them to collaborate.
  2. Progressive money flows to apolitical institutions. Amy Binder and Jeffrey Kinder show that wealthy people with progressive objectives often donate to universities. That makes sense if they are trying to support research and development. But often they are trying to educate, inform, and empower students. As a result, college students are drawn into well-funded campus-based programs that are not (and should not be) free to participate in actual politics. Along with the the young staff and faculty who work most closely with them, these students then find themselves in opposition to the very institutions that also purport to serve them–denouncing their own universities for failing to act politically. Meanwhile, conservative donors, who don’t trust universities, tend to fund and employ conservative young people directly to work on state and national issues. This is a much better youth-development strategy, giving students leadership experience and helping them to develop career networks. I mention Binder’s and Kinder’s book on higher education, but I suspect that public broadcasting and other nonpartisan nonprofits are also absorbing funds that should be spent on organizing.
  3. We are not good enough at organizing at scale. When the Civil Rights movement got fully underway in the mid-1950s, people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks had an effective template for building and expanding organizations. They naturally founded new membership groups that used Roberts’ Rules of Order in their face-to-face meetings, elected officers (a president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer), and printed regular newsletters. When they observed similar groups forming in other communities, they federated, sending representatives to regional or statewide or even national meetings, where officers were elected. Today, we don’t act this way because we have lost some experience and skills, but also because the models of the 1950 will not suffice in an era of social media, working parents, multiple simultaneous social movements that compete for attention, and decreased deference to authority. We need new modes of organization, but we can’t function without any structures at all.

For the last year or more, I have been trying to use my own modest venues, such as last summer’s Frontiers of Democracy conference and various classrooms, to explore and train people in the nuts-and-bolts of nonviolent civic action. I never tell people what causes to support or whom to oppose, but only try to develop their skills and offer them templates for effective organizing. Of course, other colleagues do the same and better. But many more people and groups with much deeper resources than mine must invest now in a robust civic infrastructure that can defend and even improve our republic.

See also: strategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy; tools for the #resistance; and the website Civic Theory and Practice.

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About Peter

Associate Dean for Research and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life. Concerned about civic education, civic engagement, and democratic reform in the United States and elsewhere.

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