{"id":16578,"date":"2016-03-16T14:50:36","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T18:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16578"},"modified":"2016-03-17T08:34:27","modified_gmt":"2016-03-17T12:34:27","slug":"is-the-sanders-campaign-a-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16578","title":{"rendered":"is the Sanders campaign a movement?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Micah Sifry has a\u00a0must-read article\u00a0in The Nation<\/em> entitled “How the Sanders Campaign Is Reinventing the Use of Tech in Politics<\/a>.” He interviews two key staffers,\u00a0Zack Exley and Becky Bond, who reveal a lot about the way their campaign has engaged its supporters.<\/p>\n

I’ve written before<\/a> about an oscillation: campaigns go back and forth between using technology to empower volunteers and\u00a0accumulating Big Data to make their centralized\u00a0outreach efforts more precise.\u00a0Bond is explicit about which direction\u00a0the\u00a0Sanders campaign wants to move:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re shifting the focus away from a small number of sophisticated data and technologists engaged in a kind of Election Day arbitrage that ekes out incremental advantages by using micro-targeting algorithms to identify and turn out voters based on a model. Instead, we\u2019re putting hundreds of thousands of volunteers to work, and in some states have literally called every single voter who will pick up the phone to identify everyone who supports Bernie or is undecided. Then we have other volunteers persuade the undecideds and turn out those who indicated support.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article repeatedly describes the campaign as a “movement.” For instance, Exley says, “When Claire and I first arrived at the campaign, we knew that a movement was already way out ahead of the campaign. We believed it was our job to set up structures and tools to …\u00a0help grow the movement.” A\u00a0campaign fueled by volunteer hours and small donations that encourages its activists\u00a0to recruit and lead certainly has a movement “feel.” But what would qualify the Sanders campaign as an actual movement–or as part of one?<\/p>\n

Some would say that it’s already a movement\u00a0because it has engaged a lot of fired-up\u00a0people in unpaid political activity.\u00a0Exley describes “a massive volunteer organization that\u2019s making more than 1 million calls every day right now, knocking on countless doors and doing so much more.” Those accomplishments are\u00a0typical of big, grassroots-based campaigns–not only\u00a0partisan electoral campaigns but also bursts of grassroots energy in civil society. According to the late Charles Tilly and his colleagues, such\u00a0campaigns are components<\/a> or activities of social movements. But\u00a0one\u00a0campaign–even a large one–does\u00a0not itself constitute a social movement.<\/p>\n

Others would say that Sanders is part of a movement because he belongs to a loose, evolving, open\u00a0network of academics, cultural figures,\u00a0union leaders, organizers, and a few politicians that\u00a0originated in the\u00a0New Left and that\u00a0supports democratic socialism in the United States. Not only is that network called a movement, but it is sometimes called The Movement–as in, “I grew up in the movement, you know,” or “I got to know Bernie through the movement back in the ’70s.”<\/p>\n

I personally do not identify with this\u00a0network, in part because I\u00a0haven’t done anything worthy of admission to it and in part because my actual political beliefs are too\u00a0eclectic. (I am not sure you can\u00a0love Hayek and be in The Movement.) But I’ve known and admired bono fide\u00a0participants all my adult life. The questions are … Does this strain of political thought and activism\u00a0really qualify as a movement, even as it has spanned\u00a0multiple decades? Has it shown\u00a0enough signs of motion <\/em>to be a movement? And how much of a movement activist is Senator Sanders? My sense is that he has been\u00a0a solo voice on important issues, but not much of a movement-builder. He is not known for training organizers or\u00a0leading organizations.\u00a0As a voice and a vote in the Senate, he may be\u00a0an asset to the movement–much like a noted author or musician who\u00a0supports the\u00a0cause–but I’m not sure he’s a movement person.<\/p>\n

His campaign could nevertheless\u00a0be an important episode in a movement that spans a longer time horizon and that has many more leaders than Bernie Sanders. It’s too early to say whether that’s the case, because everything depends on what happens after<\/em> the 2016 election.<\/p>\n

Another question is what movement his campaign is part of, if it turns out to be\u00a0part of a movement at all. Sanders’\u00a0own roots are in ’60s-style US-based democratic socialism (see the Port Huron Statement), but other currents are feeding his\u00a0campaign. Bond says, “<\/span>First of all, I want to take this opportunity to say that the movement to defend black lives is fundamentally changing the terrain of social-change organizing. After recognizing that, yes, the young people and working-class folks, many of whom are from communities of color, who are leading the movement behind Bernie Sanders as volunteers on the ground are changing American politics.” That comment sounds somewhat aspirational to me–Sanders would be closer to the nomination if he had engaged the\u00a0Black Lives Matter movement more effectively. But a large\u00a0coalition could still form after his campaign concludes. Influenced in part by Tilly, I’d look for these features as evidence that a\u00a0movement is afoot:<\/p>\n