I do recognize the difference between activism and organizing as Al Giordano defines it. Although, I think you can lump them both together under the name ‘activism’, which I did. I’m not much interested in semantic disagreements, so long as we all know what we’re talking about. What Giordano and I share is a history of community organizing (not that my brief career can compare to Al’s) and the mindset that flows from doing fieldwork. Field workers develop plans and metrics, and measure progress incrementally. A good field worker can tell you when a plan is going to succeed long before the date of fruition because he or she knows that the plan is solid and has reached a point of self-sustainment. They can also tell you when the whole effort is completely hopeless, for the same reasons.
It’s no accident that Al and I spent most of 2008 telling people not to worry because the election was in the bag. Obama had built the team and had the personal discipline not to screw it up. And we could see that it was going to turn out the way it did and even tell you why it was going to turn out that way.
But organizing is a form of activism. And the blogosphere has been put together (organized) by a bunch of very talented activists. Some wrote computer code and developed the blogging platform and video and other bells and whistles. Others created fundraising vehicles or form-submitting software. Others acted as citizen journalists and/or provided free publishing to other citizen journalists. Others developed issue specific blogs that have won important victories. And, when we put it all together into something indefinably known as ‘The Blogosphere’, we have a potent piece of loosely organized activism that has a meaningful presence and positive influence over our political discourse.
If you are like me, you spent 2008 both knocking on doors and doing some blog-activism. Let me be clear. Spending three hours on a Saturday knocking on doors is not an excuse to do nothing else for the rest of year. Spending half your day bitching on political blogs is not an excuse not to go knock on those doors. Effective organizing involves mobilizing other people in numbers. What would be better? To vote? Or to forgo voting in order to bring twenty people to the polls? Everyone should do what they can given their busy schedules and competing interests, but the people that deserve the real credit are the people that actually move people to take actions that they would not have otherwise made.
I don’t agree with Al when he diminishes other people’s activism. The same people he is criticizing have done things like putting together the Advertising Liberally Advertising Network, BlogPAC, and one of the most potent political listservs in the country. I consider that organizing, and I consider it productive activism.
Another point I want to make is that there is value in all kinds of different efforts at activism. Bloggers that struggle to explain congressional procedure as an organizing tool are extremely valuable. Educating people about how to have more bang for the activism buck is an important investment. Even chasing the 24-news cycle as a constant gadfly is an essential piece of the overall effort. We don’t need to horde credit for our successes of deny credit where credit is due.
I see things pretty much the same way Al does when it comes to what really matters and what is really effective and in how to really measure success. But I also think it is important to follow Congress like a hawk as it does its business and to understand how they operate and how they can be influenced on the fly (not just in the big scheme of things). I don’t think one side of this argument has to be 100% right and the other side 100% wrong.
Barack Obama wants the stimulus passed and he told us how to help. That’s the big picture, and he will succeed in the big picture. The small picture is the line-by-line product that is produced in Congress (which does, after all, have real life consequences). The blogosphere’s influence can be debated, but is not insignificant. There is no good reason that the blogosphere should be in the dark about what Obama really wants in the stimulus.
Lastly, I’m glad that Al thinks that organizers can undo any damage in the stimulus by organizing, but I think that’s a bit of an inappropriately sanguine attitude to take. There’s a place for all kinds of activism and organizing. What I don’t like, and I know Al doesn’t like, is impotent whining over chickenshit that doesn’t mean a damn in the long run. And I don’t think Al and I think anything valuable was ever accomplished through better messaging or framing. Framing is for suckers.
Excellent post Boo.
I will take it further. Just standing up to stupid talk is a form of activism. Call it micro-activism. If you refuse to listen or agree with the BS that has become to prevalent these days, you can make a difference.
nalbar
I appreciate all the hard work YOU do Boo (as well as everyone else), whatever form that takes, from posting an article to knocking on a door.
The last sentence however, is that irony? You don’t just say “I disagree with the importance of framing” but actually FRAME all proponents of framing as “suckers”? That’s like meta-irony 😛
Framing IS absolutely critical, not just in the purely political Lakoff mode. It’s like the classic question, “Are you still beating your wife?” That’s framing.
Bernays understood this – that’s how he cracked the women’s market for cigarette smoking. He got women marching for liberty (and the right to vote) to smoke – thereby framing smoking as some kind of “extension” of freedom! Master stroke!
But it had absolutely nothing to do with someone spontaneously making a free choice – those women were all paid cold hard cash and it was a stunt set up ahead of time.
If you run a poll and ask people “Should the United States torture terrorists?” that frames the question automatically as though a) the US has some kind of RIGHT to torture and b) it’s an option that people can have a differing opinion on.
Just to see how obvious this is, imagine if someone ran a poll today “Should the US re-instate slavery of black people?”
Framing is of paramount importance on every level, ESPECIALLY the bailout. Framing the current spending bills as “stimulus” is completely different than saying the word “bailout”. Just as “pro-choice” is different than “pro-abortion”, etc etc ad infinitum.
Or wingnuts referring to all terrorists as “Muslims” whereas the more accurate framing is “apostates of the Muslim faith”. Or pick thousands of things, FRAMING MATTERS.
Pax
well, there is some irony in it because what I’m essentially doing is asking people to respect the value of all activism, even the small stuff, and then turning around and saying ‘but, don’t respect this kind of activism.’
So, I recognize the inconsistency. At the same time, the emphasis on framing has been so misguided over the last four years that I see it as unforgivable. It’s as if people think we lost elections because Frank Luntz beat us. Thinking like that was so counterproductive that it drove me to distraction.
For the field organizer, you can’t lose a framing argument unless you’ve already lost the organizing battle.
Or to put it another way…
…David Plouffe was in charge of building the organization and deploying it. David Axelrod was in charge of the message and staging.
Find me one person that thinks Axelrod won the election and find me one person that thinks Plouffe did not.
And Axelrod is awesome and he was vital. But all his efforts would have been for naught if not for Plouffe. And that is the argument people like me and Al have been making forever.
In other words, you could have Big Ben throwing to Larry Fitzgerald, T.O., and Steve Smith (framing), but if the offensive line consists of five guys weighing a buck fifty (organizing) then all is lost.
Makes sense.
Aligning yourself with Al, as you have been doing, doesn’t seem the wisest move. Sure, he’s on a mission and doesn’t waver, but there’s something deeply unbalanced behind it. Read his encounter with Greenwald over FISA, and his deluded self-primping the day after (Greenwald flesh hanging from his Velociraptor teeth, in his words). It’s always like that with him, self-aggrandizement and drama in the name of the cause, with an unhealthy vicious streak when challenged. Maybe good for power politics, but at what price in the long run?
I looked for a way to edit my comment, but didn’t see one. Sorry for my own tone there, it could have been less harsh. You can delete it, Booman. Your telling us what you and Al don’t like, impotent whining over chicken shit, and what you and Al think about better messaging (it’s for suckers) reminds me of why I stopped reading Al’s blog. The sneering at his ‘Chicken Littles’ reading his blog. Just seems abusive, and I don’t know why you think it’s a good path to take here.
I don’t mind you expressing your opinion.
I read Giordano’s piece. The distinction he makes is a real one. I was what he calls an organizer during the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s, and I recognized among some of the people I dealt with the kinds of patterns he attributes to “activists.” But I agree with you, Boo, in that I was often referred to as an “activist” and even described myself as an activist. I thought of it as a more general term, i.e., an organizer is a type of activist.
But if you look at the thing rather than the words, I don’t know that there’s necessarily a wall between them. As an organizer I could enlist the help of what Giordano calls “activists” if I kept them informed and told them SPECIFICALLY what they could do to help. Call this one. Write this one. Contribute to this one. Tell me what you know about this one. But I think a lot depends on the particular issues you’re working on.
All in all, I incline to Giordano’s view, but I’m surprised that, precisely AS an organizer, he wouldn’t be trying to “organize” the “activists” instead of just trashing them. No doubt he’s frustrated. Anyway, we’re talking about (a) mass communication on (b) a very general, high-profile issue — basically the whole Obama presidency, –which amounts to a lot of ego and a lot of competition. (And in saying that I’m not referring only to Giordano.)
But I don’t really understand, when the have the republicans bowed to public pressure? Their base is crazy.
If I understand your question… The republicans lost seats in 2006 and they lost a lot more seats in 2008. They also lost the executive branch a few weeks ago. In other words, the political balance of power is very different from anything we’ve seen in a long while. Yes, their base is crazy, but what BooMan and others have been pointing out is that the strategy of playing to their base is no longer going to work. I mean, of course it will work WITH THEIR BASE, but that is a dwindling demographic, and it kind of has the opposite effect with independents. Turns them right off.
But the situation is new. It’s like the Roadrunner cartions, where Wiley E. Coyote has run off a cliff, but he doesn’t realize it yet. Repubs had a number of options: basically, become more moderate or die. Their response so far has been — okay, we’ll die. But meanwhile we’ll obstruct the Dems and maybe they won’t be able to meanwhile the spin will all be about how the Dems are screwing up.
But things are too serious. They screwed up totally, the majority don’t give them any credibility. They’re like zombies — walking corpses. So, organizing has two purposes — one to make the Dems understand that we’ve got their backs, that we’re expecting them to support a Democratic agenda and pay no attention to these Republican idiots. The other is to make the Republican idiots realize that their base may like what they’re doing but nobody else does, and their base is not enough to keep them in office.
And I’m sure that in every district where a wingnut holds sway, there are lots and lots of up and coming voters and people who just aren’t sure what’s going on, who need to be educated about how to make their rep or senator take notice. They couldn’t before, they can now. I hope that answers your question.
I don’t know. Obama was in real trouble until the economy collapsed. Had the economy not done that until say, late November, what would the election have looked like? The campaign was on its way to being as trivialized as ever and without economics McCain would not have looked as much like a crazy old man and thus the Palin backlash might have been less.
It’s possible that the VOWEs would not have been enough to give him victory or maybe that victory would certainly have been much smaller than the 7+points.
It’s really hard to say. Palin alone was a gift from God. The bottom line is this. We have become used to seeing campaigns run almost mechanically. Between the early primaries and the press spin narratives, it would almost seem as if it didn’t matter who ran, you could predict the campaign before it started.
Obama’s first great achievement was winning the Iowa primary. Had he not done that he probably would have soon been out. Another great achievement — and I don’t quite know how he did it — was neutralizing the Clinton machine.
But another factor, was his amazing ability to react to changes in the situation — both things that were thrown at him, like the Rev. Wright — and changes in current affairs — like the economy.
The economic collapse was to his advantage of course, because McCain was pathetic and the Republicans were pathetic, they were the cause of it and they had nothing constructive to offer. But I don’t know that you could go so far as to sayhe wouldn’t have won otherwise.
An awful lot of people were sick of the Republicans for so many reasons. Again, McCain and Palin were not a very impressive alternative.