Planting Liberally Strengthening the progressive movement through liberal entrepreneurship

A very long while ago, I wrote the first piece in a series on progressive grand strategy, laying out the kinds of questions which a progressive grand strategy would have to address. In that piece I addressed the goals and assessments required of a progressive grand strategy; the goal is to eventually address all six components of a fully-articulated strategic plan (goals, assessments, tactics, resources, dynamics, and evaluation), as described in Finding Strategy, a report published by the Progressive Strategy Studies Project. This series is, taking the very long-term view, a follow-up to my initial review of the Finding Strategy report last summer. (In the interest of full disclosure: one of the authors, Wolfgang Brauner, is a personal friend.)

PSSP responded to my analysis of the goals of progressive strategy on their blog shortly thereafter, and today, (finally!) I'll spend a bit of time responding, and hopefully moving the conversation down the field a bit.

Perhaps the most noteworthy element of my initial post was a distinction between political goals (winning elections and policy battles) and cultural goals (spreading the progressive worldview through ideological institutions like unions, churches, media, schools, etc.) Brauner likens this distinction to the original distinction, in Finding Strategy, between electoral, movement, and movement-electoral strategies, defined respectively as strategies whose primary goal is winning elections, building a movement, and doing the two simultaneously. (Or similarly, to Paul Wellstone's observation that successful political chage requires organizing, policy, and electoral politics.) That is an interesting comparison, and it does indeed work pretty well, so long as the definitions are broadened a bit, to include regulatory, legislative and electoral goals under the broader rubric of "electoral" goals, and to include the growth of institutions like liberal religious congregations and labor unions under the rubric of "movement" goals. There are some ideological institutions in which the language of movement-building doesn't make a lot of sense - schools and media, most importantly - but on the whole it's a good comparison.

In particular, this comparison reminds us that it's possible to pursue political and cultural goals at the same time. That's hardly news, I suppose, since labor unions do that all the time, most clearly in the case of the ongoing effort to enact the Employee Free Choice Act. Along similar lines, there's a fashionable consensus in the progressive blogosphere that campaigns should be about movement-building, in the sense that successful or not, they always leave behind a corps of citizen-activists who know how to run a campaign and are prepared for the next election season; Democracy for America, to name one organization, deliberately embodies that consensus.

Unfortunately, progressive strategic discussion usually looks at movement-building only through the lens of community organizing and labor organizing. Those are two important paths to movement-building, certainly, but we ignore other social movements and cultural institutions - including religion, schools, the family, and media - at our peril. Think about where conservatives have had their greatest success (churches) and respectable if not stunning success (schools and family) - success in establishing the conservative worldview in those institutions is responsible for a large part of the mess we're in now. And remember, these are the institutions that most progressive strategists ignore wholesale.

Brauner also refers to another strategist, Steve Lukes, who categorizes power according to a tri-partite system: decision-making power (control of government); agenda-setting power (including think tanks, pressure groups, and media); and ideological power. That system is much more akin to the distinction I made between political and cultural goals, and in fact I think it's a better one. I disagree with Brauner in his assertion that progressives are weak at every level. Assuming that Obama wins the presidency, and I think that's a reasonably safe bet, then by this time next year, a realistic assessment will be that conservatives hold a large, but not overwhelming, amount of decision-making power; progressives hold a small but growing amount of decision-making power; and moderate Democrats hold the balance of decision-making power. It's also clear that conservatives have a very large advantage in agenda-setting, but progressives are not quite as far behind as we once were. The ideological power struggle is considerably more complex, since there are some institutions where progressives clearly are doing very well (like college campuses), while in others (like the workplace or religion), they are doing very well in some places and poorly in others.

If, as Lukes and I seem to agree, ideological power (or progressive cultural goals, take your pick) is really the most important way to gain power, how is that to be done? Brauner attempts to investigate this question with a constructivist approach to culture, proceeding from a definition of culture that reminds me suspiciously of the theory of recursive computing:

the key idea is to understand culture not only as a structure of cognitive and normative expectations that shape perceptions, communication, and behavior, but also always as a form of observation that not only observes what social actors do, but also observes how they observe, and how the way they observe any phenomenon determines what they observe

I think one could proceed from first principles in that way, but I'm perhaps too untrained in social sciences to really comment usefully. While I think my approach, which approximates "culture" as the collective creation of a set of well-defined ideological institutions, is simpler, I'll also allow that it is too simple - it conveniently sweeps under the rug the question of how ideological transformation happens at the individual level.

While it's great to suppose that growing unions and enlarging the membership rolls of liberal churches will result in progressive ideological change, it's not so easy to do that. An individual's pre-existing ideology, from "me-first" attitudes in the workplace to stuck-in-the-mud religious traditions, inevitably get in the way. Brauner's constructivist approach, I think, gets at this question from first principles, rather than from the position of an in-the-trenches organizer. I can't say that I have any kind of real answer to this question, but I do think that most people whose job it is to chage ideology at the individual level - including union organizers, ministers, professors, and so on - have figured out a variety of tricks that work in their own contexts.

In any case, these are problems at the tactical level, and I'm not enough of a domain expert to write intelligently about them (which isn't to say I am a domain expert on very much else I write about.) There are plenty of other problems to tackle: what are the high-level operations which are needed to achieve ideological transformation? How can these operations be made to work constructively together with decision-making and agenda-setting operations in order to create a smoothly coordinated movement? Perhaps most importantly, what are the institutional and monetary resources needed to support these operations, and how on earth do we gather those resources?

Fortunately, there's more than one part to this series, and I will address those issues in the (hopefully near) future.