In the days immediately after last year’s election, there were a few interesting discussions at dKos about how the Republicans had managed to find 10 million new voters. While some argue, with substantial merit, that some combination of voter disenfranchisement and election fraud served to determine the final result in the Presidential election, I doubt any would argue that 10 million false votes were entered into the system. Who were these ten million new Republican voters? Why did such a large proportion of our society, previously politically quiescent, emerge as supporters for an ideologically rabid and morally and intellectually corrupt administration? What are the social bases for this swelling tide of right-wing voters? How do we counter that?
x-posted from Liberal Street Fighter
This discussion served as the primary impetus for writing Talkin’ Organizing. Sadly it was soon eclipsed in the liberal blogosphere, first by the raging debate over possible fraud and certain disenfranchisement in Ohio, and then by the maneuverings of “centrist” Democrats to begin disassociating themselves from the constituencies (gays, feminists, leftists) they blamed for the Democratic defeat. That latter is of course patent nonsense. You aren’t going to overcome 10 million new voters in the other side’s column by jettisoning millions of those who did contribute to the Democratic vote total, and did a large share of the campaign’s work onthe ground as well. But I digress. I regret we lost that early conversation; I believe the original gut instinct of the blogosphere in its reaction to election 2004 was profoundly correct, timely, and substantive.
Stepping back for the big picture… and not saying anything you don’t already know…
In post-World War II America, a profound transformation of American society occurred, as we became a radically mobile population. Where migration, first east to west, then rural to urban, had existed from the very beginning of white colonization, there were stable communities at either end of each individual’s, each family’s relocation. Small towns and urban neighborhoods alike were places in which people settled for life, and became intimately intertwined, not just in the nuclear family, but in a community. To say that small towns and neighborhoods became extended families was often more than a metaphor, through generations of marriage and childraising it was frequently biological fact. Humans emerged as social animals. Stable communities satisfied that need for a web of connection. Of course there were negative aspects. Such communities are almost invariably parochial and at least somewhat xenophobic. Yet they satisfy a basic human need. There remain some older communities that are healthy and dynamic. But even that remnant dwindles.
Where once extended families were scattered up and down the same blocks, now siblings are more often than not separated by time zones. The golden years of the American economy were propelled by the rise of the car culture, and construction of the interstate highway system. Suburbia and a lawn and out of the three-decker forever was moving up. Better housing, better schools, less crime, who doesn’t want those things in their life?
But something happened on the way to suburban paradise. Just as people became mobile, so did companies and jobs. Then entire industries. More and more people had to make the choice of moving with their job or staying put and finding a new one. Then entire industries began leaving the country. Not only your job and your company are transient, now your skill, your field, your career, become transient. The stresses on nuclear families become enormous. Beginning in 1973, the level of real wages began a long-term decline, the pattern where most families need two full-time wage earners set in. Lack of community causes needs like child care that were always shared in the extended family and community to be left entirely to the nuclear family and the arrangements it can make in the marketplace. The rapid flux of industry overwhelmed the ossified labor unions, breaking another element of shared community. In the older suburbs today it’s not about moving up anymore, moving in and out is more like moving around. And as you muddle through, trying to keep your head above water, there’s often no web of relatedness in physical proximity to sustain the spirit. A wearying emptiness gnaws from the inside out. Wanna go to the mall?
Enter the megachurch. It’s the mall for the things you can’t get at the mall, your one stop shopping center for a life. Something for everyone in the stressed nuclear family. God. Usually an elementary school. Child care. Youth sports. Adult sports. Picnics. Outings. Men’s nights. Women’s nights. Married couples nights (with child care of course.) Clubs for a dozen things. Astroturf community, with plenty of free parking. Astroturf community, but community. And a local manifestation of religion as it has gained expression in the other great cultural upheaval since World War II, the dominance of television.
Each megachurch is the fruit of long and painstaking labor, and proof of the organizing effectiveness and business skills of its leaders. They have recognized the hunger for community, and provide God Depot as a shelter for lost spirits. The congregation is called as a central tenet of their faith to be evangelical, and that they are. On the job, at the grocery store, at the Air Force Academy, selling Amway is almost stodgily traditional now, wherever they are, their first duty as an evangelical is to evangelize. Grateful for community, they accept their place as sheep and willingly bleat at others to join the flock. This way an ultraconservative religio-political worldview sinks itself deeply into the consciousness of a community, and provided both the fertile soil and the organized machinery for Republican political exploitation. When Dubya made a comment about OB-GYSs “practicing their love”, the Democratic blogosphere had snickered. Distracted by the OB-GYN part into innuendo, they’d missed the dog-whistle entirely. “Practicing [one’s] love” is a term commonly used among fundies to describe their fellowship and proselytizing activities. Having watched the 700 Club a few times was enough for me to know that.
No doubt the Republicans picked up votes across the country from those fightened out of their wits by 9-11. But in state after state, their greatest growth was in fast-growing suburban sprawl counties with a high proportion of white protestants. Megachurch land. And the Bushies made no effort to conceal their hand, we’ll recall from the campaign that there were a couple of pastors that complained about being solicited for their church lists. A couple pastors complained–out of how many? The Republicans knew where the vote gusher lay for them. In a sense they have found their equivalent of the labor unions, a vast and independently self-organized community that lends that organization to the purposes of a political party. So much worse for the Democrats that this comes as the unions fade in reach. Republican insiders succeeded in accomplishing one of the tasks that has long been preached by Democratic outsiders, to connect with the disconnected, to engage the disengaged. Democrats and progressive activists worked like dogs in their canvass-based operations, and substantially increased the Democratic vote. However much was accomplished, it is clear that the local-based model used by the Republicans worked much more efficiently. The politically defining characteristic of this new Republican vote base is that it is a self-organizing and self-sustaining community with its own purposes that bind people to it separate from its partisan political agenda . It is the American version of what works so well for Hizbullah and Hamas.
This is a broad outline of the analysis that developed in those conversations that were engaged in those first couple of days. But what I thought was potentially particularly fruitful were the responses and suggestions that were beginning to emerge. The ideas began to come forth finding ways for there to be a living progressive presence in communities that is every day part of people’s lives, of creating progressive clubs as community and social centers with a progressive agenda. For a progrssive presence that was continuous. Not just at election time. This was my cue, the spark for putting together Talkin’ Organizing. If building progressive presence at the community level everywhere is a necessary element of regaining the political high ground, Alinsky-style community organizing could provide a piece of that puzzle. As I’ve mentioned in other pieces, I’m not a purist. I like the idea of the community/social center that doubles as the headquarters of a community organizing group. And I’ve seen how community organizations can grow beyond a narrow local agenda. In Springfield, Mass., the center of antiwar organizing is ARISE, which began as a welfare rights organization. I’m open to the widest possible ranges of building a new progressive community.
Unfortunately, before I was even able to kick off TO, that discussion of building a progressive community was washed away in typical hyperkinetic blogosphere fashion in the various post-electoral cleavages and recriminations. The closest element I see present is the Dean/DFA agenda of electing local candidates. This is also a necessary piece of the puzzle, but progressive local candidacies will be of limited effectiveness in communities where there is a strong conservative community presence and the progressive voice is silent. This is why i find the disappearance of that early response to the elections regrettable. I firmly believe there is great good that could be accomplished by a concerted turn toward nurturing a local progressive community. I don’t have any idea whether this concept can generate any sustained interest and enthusiasm, clearly it failed to back in November. Perhaps that was so because it was too soon, no real progress could be made with such gaping wounds among progressive activists.
This is a call for ideas. For a minute, don’t worry about “practical,” we can follow up with that. Think big. What would you like to see in a progressive community? What would progressive community life mean to you? What would it look like in your community–the one you live in, not the college town 20 miles away. Tell me what you see. Anyone? Bueller?
