Big protests are “a tactic in search of a strategy”
Charles Duhigg contrasts political efforts based on mobilizing and on organizing. Mobilizing succeeds at garnering national attention (sometimes through large spectacle), at raising funds, and at building national advocacy capacity. On the downside, it tends to concentrate power at the top of organizations and not grow leadership farther down and locally. The latter focuses on building lasting community among its local members. Organizing works better as a franchise model: give local people basic tools and let them loose to find their way and raise up local leaders:
As the Johns Hopkins political scientist Hahrie Han likes to say, “Mobilizing is about getting people to do a thing, and organizing is about getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.” For a social movement to create real change, it helps to be skilled at both mobilizing and organizing. But that doesn’t mean that both skills are equally important.
The New Yorker article compares the Democratic Party’s and conservative organizing. The latter is less doctrinaire:
Today’s Democratic Party is great at mobilizing: it can propel people into the streets with big marches, raise billions of dollars for national candidates, and get liberals to bombard congressional offices with letters and phone calls. However, it’s less talented at organizing—building the kinds of local infrastructure and disparate leaders that are needed to sustain a large and ideologically diverse coalition. MAGA, on the other hand, is great at organizing—after 2020, the movement launched the so-called Precinct Strategy, which encouraged thousands of people to run for leadership positions within their local Republican Party chapters, and to become poll workers. This is a reason Donald Trump is in the White House again—and liberal and conservative activists alike say that it will be hard for the Democrats to start consistently winning until they mimic some of MAGA’s strategies.
It’s a useful read. Particularly regarding the penchant the left has for giving side-eye to people whose views don’t check enough of the right lefty boxes for acceptance by insiders.
Whereas MAGA welcomes anyone wearing the red hat, Democrats often require people to use new terms on pronouns and race, and they can punish or exclude anyone who strays.
Newcomers come out of curiosity, feel unwelcome, and leave. That’s no way to build a movement.
Duhigg recounts the infighting that broke out among leaders of the 2017 Women’s March. Anand Giridharadas devotes a section of “The Persuaders” to how purity tests undermined that effort. A repeated theme is “Is there room among the woke for the waking?” The issue at hand is whether those on the left edge of the left possess enough critical mass to move the culture in their direction by themselves. They do not. And they need to get over themselves. They need more allies. *
The sociologist Liz McKenna, of Harvard, told me that movements succeed best when people feel welcome. A movement becomes sustainable when members feel empowered and find friends. “The left loves big protests, but protesting is a tactic in search of a strategy,” she said. There must be some shared core values among a movement’s members, of course, but the requirement can’t be that every value is shared. “Making room for difference isn’t a nice-to-have thing—it’s table stakes,” she told me. “The rallies are by-products of the community, not the goal.” Most of all, even though anger can be useful, a movement also needs to provide some joy. “Trump rallies are fun,” McKenna noted. “The Turning Point campus debates are fun.” For a long time, she said, the left was less fun and more angry, “and so the right was out-organizing them at every turn.”
That’s why I’m the fool spinning signs and dancing on the street corner every week, Bluetooth speakers blasting dance music, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. As Anat Shenker-Osorio says, if you want people to join your party, throw a better party.
The successful mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, the Harvard researcher Liz McKenna notes, “was by all accounts joyful, hopeful, creative, and reflected a real sense of collective possibility. And that emotional culture translated into a major electoral upset.”
Duhigg sees The Faith & Freedom Coalition as “one of the most powerful conservative groups in the nation,” yet remains below most people’s radar.
Ralph Reed reminded me that, for Faith & Freedom and many similar conservative organizations, there are no showy national rallies. And there’s little strictness about ideological consistency. But during elections the group turns out millions of voters. When Reed looks at the left today, he said, “a lot of times it feels like they’re trying to hook people with big parades and free Beyoncé concerts.” That’s not how you win, he went on. “You win by offering people a set of values that give them meaning. Celebrities don’t deliver that. Small groups of neighbors do. And, as long as we’re building those groups, we’re gonna win.”
That’s happened in Minneapolis, but it took a paramilitary invasion and neighborhood organizing to give the less-engaged “permission” to join get off their couches and join the fight. Is that what it’s going to take everywhere?
* The pink pussy hat was an instantly recognizable symbol of resistance. A phenomenon. It disappeared as quickly as it came. We do that.
