Good article in the New Yorker about political organizing

-- "What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting" 

Distinguishes between "mobilizing" and "organizing," and grassroots determination of agendas -- "as Mao put it, letting one thousand flowers bloom."  Organizing is about creating leaders that do, while "mobilizing" is about showing up to something.

When I talk about this, I've never made the distinction between mobilizing and organizing, but I always talk about what might be thought of as "long range planning," that for meeting X you already need to be setting up "next steps" and meeting or action Y.

I don't fully buy the comparison between the anti-drug use organization DARE and MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving.  The author argued that by letting people set up chapters in MADD with limited guidance, they had a lot more agency versus a more top-down organization with control of messaging and agenda by people at the top.  

Can a top-down organization work?  DARE didn't because it turned out that research on its curriculum and methods found that it didn't diminish drug use, and that in some cases, even encouraged it.  But what if the agenda and curriculum worked?  Would DARE have been successful with the mobilizing model and top down control.

Protest against ICE after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE agents.  Reddit photo.

The difference too between the two is that a more variegated infrastructure is created with the organizing model, providing the people at the top can be looser with control.

The article contrasts Democratic and Republican Party approaches, says the Republicans work it better because their only litmus test is whether or not you support Trump, not your position on guns, abortion, LGBTQ issues, etc.

It discusses the success of the Obama campaign, and how right wingers studied the model, and adopted and adapted it. 

From the article:

Ben Wikler chaired the Democratic Party of Wisconsin from 2019 to 2025. He recently told me that “Democrats should be learning from the Republicans about how to build small, socially interconnected communities.” Wisconsin had the tiniest swing toward Republicans among battleground states in 2024 because, Wikler believes, the state Party prioritized “neighborhood teams working year-round and socializing with their neighbors, to form real communities”—the same approach that governs Faith & Freedom. For liberals, he said, alternatives to church and the gun club include neighborhood organizations such as gardening groups and community centers. 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. “That doesn’t work,” Wikler said. “A movement needs people who feel safe with each other, who can hang out and talk about things besides politics. People who like each other. The Republicans are finding those people. The Democrats aren’t doing that enough.”

One problem, according to researchers, is that the left’s success in mobilizing large crowds may have caused leaders to misunderstand what spurs someone to become politically active in the first place. In the late nineties, the sociologist Ziad Munson began interviewing pro-life advocates, and he initially assumed that such people had been strongly opposed to abortion for years. “I was completely wrong,” he said. In fact, nearly a quarter of activists told him that they had been pro-choice when they attended their first pro-life event. A majority said that they had not had strong opinions about abortion. “But then something happened, like they moved to a new town or started going to a new church, or they got divorced and started joining singles groups, and the new people they met were pro-life,” Munson explained. “And so they found a community, and a sense of identity, and that’s when they became committed.”

Many leaders of local MADD chapters first sought the group out after their lives had been upended by a drunk driver, and they found that meeting other victims helped them process their anger and grief. Wolfson, the MADD researcher, told me, “They were mainly women who had never thought of themselves as public figures, and now they’re talking to legislators and spending time with people who understand them and making new friends. At that point, you’re all in.” The organization accepted everyone, regardless of ideological background (and drinking habits). “All you needed to join was to care about this issue.”

While not discussed in the article I think this is an element in anti-vaccination forces.  Besides the anti-science etc. people, a lot of people who made "mistakes" during covid, leading to death or serious and long term illness, if not of themselves, of people in the circle, need "someone to blame" other than themselves.

And they bind together over those beliefs.  

That becomes Anthony Fauci, Big Pharma--if ivermectin worked at reducing covid, Eli Lilly would have been marketing the hell out of it, hospitals, doctors, particular medicines and what they call "the protocol" which was remdesivir administered intravenously when hospitalized--they said it killed people.

Consistency and logic aren't part of the equation, such as the ivermectin thing--were the producers of ivermectin and hydroxychoroquine the Good Pharma and Pfizer and Moderna Bad Pharma?

Plus, you had people like DeSantis saying remdesivir was good, but don't get the covid shot.  Crazy.  FWIW, remdesivir helped me during my 8 day stay in the hospital as a result of my third and worst bout of covid.

From the article:

When researchers such as Munson look at today’s leftist movements, they often see the opposite approach. “The left has purity tests,” Munson said. “You have to prove you’re devoted to the cause. But that means that, once you join, you’re spending time with the kind of people you already know, because you already move in the same circles, and you’ve screened out people who might be ideologically ambivalent right now but might have become activists if you had welcomed them.”

Are they purity tests, some are like on trans issues--it killed me during the election to see ads from Trump saying "She cares about they/them.  We care about you."  But maybe at times it is more about logic and facts versus fabulism.  At least it is for me.

From the article:

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.”