21st Century Organizing

In his victory speech last Tuesday evening, President Barack Obama said: "...[T]hat doesn't mean your work is done. The role of citizens in our democracy does not end with your vote. America's never been about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government. That's the principle we were founded on."

Doing volunteer work in the campaign, following the Facebook postings of friends and reading articles about what comes next have got me thinking once again about organizing. In September I attended a conference in Milwaukee put on by Veteran Feminists of America. Speakers discussed the organizing work done in the 70s and 80s by feminists and the role that's played in where we are today. I realized in listening to them and in talking with other conference attendees that there are still lessons we can learn from the activism of the 60s and 70s and 80s.

Those lessons will be critically important in shaping the future of American politics. In the aftermath of the election there are many initiatives aimed at sustaining the activism of the campaign. These are important initiatives because we know that President Obama can't do it all by himself. During the campaign there were a lot of posts saying 'I've got his back' and many volunteers and supporters did indeed have the President's back. That must remain true as he heads into difficult negotiations with the GOP on the debt and the economy, as the fight for marriage equality continues to move forward, as efforts to regulate the financial industry are pressed, as Obamacare is put into effect, as immigration reform takes center stage.

But Facebook posts saying 'I've got his back' will only take us so far. We must do more. Some 75 years ago Franklin Roosevelt said to Frances Perkins, when she came to him proposing the Social Security program, 'You've convinced me this is the right thing to do. Now go out and make me do it.' We must be the Frances Perkins of today.

We have to be 21st Century organizers using all the tools at our disposal - we must combine the fantastic Internet organizing of groups like MoveOn.org and UltraViolet.org with some of the basic organizing skills that involve actual person-to-person contact. I became involved in politics, like many of my generation, during the anti-Vietnam war movement. Some of the most important lessons I learned were during my experience in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU). While there were certainly many different perspectives within CWLU, the main trends within the organization had some basic agreement on at least one key point: we needed to focus on activism if we wanted to advance the struggle for women’s liberation. That's true today as well, whether we're talking about regulating banks, protecting Medicare or working for reproductive rights.

One of the specific lessons I remember from those days is that we have to 'start from where people are at.' To do that we need to actually talk with people. It's more than posting things on Facebook, or tweeting some important message. Social media certainly have a role, but when we post things on Facebook who are we really talking to? How many of us who are heavily involved in politics have Facebook friends with whom we disagree? We have to be willing to get out there, go door-to-door, talk to people on the phone, have house parties to talk with (not at) people. All those things that were effective in the campaign can be effective in organizing on issues as well.

So what do we do?

1. Build an organization -- doesn't matter if it's Organizing forAmerica, or TheAction, or MoveOn or all of the above, but that organization needs to be in the real world not just in a virtual world. It needs to call on the talents of the volunteers who built the local and state organizations for Obama. For example, MoveOn has MoveOn Councils at the local level. That could be an important way to involve people in everyday activities like letter writing, calling their representatives or supporting a campaign.
2.  Organize - get people out in the field, hire field organizers who can coordinate house parties, petition drives, phone banks. There's a lot of work to do and we need people in every state - yes, even the really red states - to build an ongoing base of support. Organizing means taking those groups and building them together, providing leadership and coordination. Many years ago Jo Freeman wrote an article called 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness' - an article that we would do well to revisit today.
3. Use the 21st and 20th century techniques for involving people  - in her recent NY Times column, Maureen Dowd states 'Some Republicans ...  also acknowledged that Romney’s strategists ran a 20th-century campaign against David Plouffe’s 21st-century one.' In fact David Plouffe and David Axelrod and the others in the Obama campaign ran a campaign that was based on elements from both centuries - tried and true GOTV efforts as well as media and internet campaigns.
1. Set up petition drives at the neighborhood Jewels or Safeways. It's a great way to start a conversation with people whom you might not otherwise talk with. And it's a way to find others who want to invest their energy in moving the country forward.
2. Do phone banking and door-to-door on specific issues - get people to sign a letter to their representative or pledge to make a phone call to their Senator.
3. Write letters to the editor -- maybe the print media is dying, but in a lot of neighborhoods those little neighborhood readers are a great way to reach out to folks.
4.  Hold house parties to talk about the issues. Getting people together is vital to ensuring that we all understand that we're not alone in this struggle. That our voice is critically important to making change happen.
4. There's much more of course -- take a look at the Midwest Academy or other organizing schools to find out what. And of course I'm not suggesting that we forget the Internet - after all I wouldn't be writing this if I did.

A recent example of this kind of work is the Nuns on the Bus - over the summer they've traveled around the country talking with people about the Ryan budget and the harm that it does to those who are in need. In some respects the Nuns on the Bus is reminiscent of the 19th century organizing done by Susan B Anthony and others working for women's suffrage. Anthony traveled around the country talking with people and mobilizing folks to win votes for women.

Not everybody can take the time to travel around, but we can take the time to talk to our neighbors, to the people we see each day on our local buses, to the folks in the stores we shop at.

There are other things that require organizing and planning, so what I've written here is simply an effort to open up the discussion. For example, we need a longer term strategy for taking back the House and the state legislatures. 2014 is not that far off and you can bet that Karl Rove and others of his ilk are already thinking about it. The demographics of the country are changing, but we have to be ready to make sure those demographics are reflected in the country's legislatures. This time more people voted for Democrats than Republicans for the US House, but more Republicans were elected because of the way the Districts were drawn.

I'm not proposing in all of this another organization, but simply a new (or maybe old) way of looking at and building the organizations we've got. In future posts I'll explore these and other issues in more depth. I invite you to join in this discussion - add lessons you've learned from your own organizing and propose ways to make it happen. I was struck at the VFA conference at how far we had come in the last 40 years. Barbara Love put together a book Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975 that describes many of the feminists who ignited the second wave women’s movement - I look back and can see that we really did change America. I think we can do it again.