Folks, I'd love to keep my voice in this TPM discussion (if only to defend my honor!), but I've been off line since yesterday morning and I'm just online here briefly, and now gone and not back in Web World until Monday afternoon. Sorry! Thanks to Chris for getting the ball rolling with his "exceedingly fair" look at "Move On @ 10", and thanks for TPM Cafe for hosting the discussion on line. I've been disappointed that a rock star like Eli hasn't lived up to advance billing and jumped in early and often, but thanks to other MoveOn staffers for the discussion.

Thanks to Chris for pulling the conversation back to the future, if you will. It's super important.

Chris is quite right about the looming sea-change in context. And let's not forget our role in a member-driven organization: If we want the MoveOn model to succeed, we members cannot just sit back and hope the staff will figure it out for us.

I'll start by agreeing or even extending the challenging premise of Chris's question. Let's say Obama is elected. What then? Well, if the only thing we know how to do is link arms and oppose urgent threats, we may be screwed. The endless fountain of red-alert moments that was Washington in the Gingrich-Bush-Rove era will, thank merciful heaven, have dried up.

Not that there won't be urgent threats! Harry and Louise will look like Barney and Big Bird compared to what the right is going throw at any serious plan for universal health care or carbon reduction. But we know how to deal with that - it probably won't look very different than what we do now.

Read more »

I'm Justin Ruben, MoveOn's organizing director. The fact that there's a conversation happening here about MoveOn's organizing model is pretty damn exciting. I imagine it's kind of like the moment three Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans first encountered each other on the internet--"You mean, there are OTHER people who want to discuss this thing I spend 24hrs a day thinking about?!"

Certainly, for MoveOn, it's a very important discussion.

Put simply, people working together, in the real world, can be powerful.

The purely online actions MoveOn members do together--signing petitions, doing phone calls, raising money to run ads--are great. But they work better when they're paired with things that are harder--organizing a rally, running a voter turnout drive in your neighborhood, meeting with an editorial board, etc. Few people will do these things just because MoveOn asks them to via email.

Read more »

I don't have a whole lot more to add to the discussions about what "real organizing" is and how or why the MoveOn model does or does not fall short of it. As a closing thought, though I wonder about the future of the non-shouters that MoveOn has managed to connect to the political process. Ask anyone who's ever had to write a political fundraising letter (or email) what gets people to give money, and they'll give you a simple answer: outrage. At a panel with Ben at Netroots, he described the rhetorical mode of this kind of organizing: "Oh no you don't!"

Anger, frustration, outrage: they're all powerful motivating forces in politics, and in the face of corruption, criminality, and cruelty, they are justified and necessary.

But let's say Obama wins in November. How does MoveOn in particular and the progressive movement in general sustain the energy that has driven it for these last eight years? Obviously activists will remain engaged, bloggers will keep writing, organizers will keep organizing. But will the non-shouters stay engaged without the steady stream of daily outrages? (There'll be outrages under a Democratic president, lots of 'em. But they'll at least be fewer and farther between). At the Nation, I expect that we'll see a plateauing, even a decline in subscriptions. I wouldn't be suprised if MoveOn experienced the same with its list.

Read more »

I want to throw one last volley into the "what the MoveOn model is and isn't" conversation. (I'll write another post today to try and steer us back to the original questions Chris posed about the future, which I think are really vital as well.)

In his post, Marshall raises an important challenge, essentially arguing that the MoveOn model is great, but falls short of authentic organizing. My counter contention: While there's plenty of room for improvement, MoveOn is absolutely a vehicle for real organizing, and for real movement building.

The organizing methods are often different than those employed by pre-internet groups, but correspondence through email sure looks a lot different than correspondence with quill and parchment -- yet correspondence it is. In fact, that's precisely why this particular conversation is so worth having -it's actually about what traditional organizing principles can or cannot look like when applied in a modern, high tech context. And that questions is at the heart of building progressive power in the 21st century.

Read more »

Matt wants some measurement of organizing?

Here's a simple measure.  Are people who were not previously privileged with the advantages of professional status, wealth or other social capital taking leadership?

While the blogs and Moveon have undoubtedly done a good job of allowing educated, tech-savvy folks who were not active politically to gain important information to take action, those involved in the netroots are overwhelmingly those who were personally empowered in many ways and were mostly looking for coordinated channels to focus their energy-- which Moveon and the blogs provided, which was a good thing.

But what organizing does is move beyond that strata to folks who, for many personal as well as political reasons, have not previously had such socially-advantaged positions and where leadership is an acquired skill.   I had an exchange with Zach Exley a while back on this issue, so I'll cite a few points from there:

Read more »

Here's Marshall Ganz on real organizing.

Across the country, the Obama campaign is doing the work most progressive advocacy organizations gave up on years ago: organizing.

And what is organizing?

Organizing is based on the development of leadership; i.e., people who accept responsibility for engaging others in collective action of behalf of common purposes in the face of uncertainty. They bring people together, build new relationships among them, and create new understanding, especially of common interests. This constituency can then commit the resources to act on these interests. Organizing, then is as much about discerning what needs to be done - and why - as it is about doing it; it is about motivating the unmotivated, as well as deploying resources of the motivated; it is about commitment to horizontal relationships, especially across differences, as it is about commitment of an individual resource of a signature, a dollar, an email, or a phone call.

And how do you measure organizing?

Here's what Ganz says.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. The most he says is that Moveon should commit to the organizing "the Obama campaign has begun to do." Ok, sure. But what does that mean? What kinds of real tangible goals should Moveon commit to? Ganz is a smart guy, and he's had thirty years to think about this problem. So has John Stauber.

Read more »

Across the country, the Obama campaign is doing the work most progressive advocacy organizations gave up on years ago: organizing. Yet it was by organizing that we built the civic infrastructure that fueled the great social movements that have shaped our politics. When Sam Adams' Sons of Liberty launched its "Solemn League and Covenant" pledge drive to commit individuals to a boycott of British goods, its real impact was not on the Brits, but on building a powerful organizational infrastructure that sustained a virtually non-violent revolution across New England. In other words, organizing not only mobilizes individual resources to solve a problem, it creates a collective capacity to shift the power asymmetries responsible for the problem in the first place.

Organizing is based on the development of leadership; i.e., people who accept responsibility for engaging others in collective action on behalf of common purposes in the face of uncertainty. They bring people together, build new relationships among them, and create new understanding, especially of common interests. This constituency can then commit the resources to act on these interests. Organizing, then is as much about discerning what needs to be done - and why - as it is about doing it; it is about motivating the unmotivated, as well as deploying resources of the motivated; it is about commitment to horizontal relationships, especially across differences, as it is about commitment of an individual resource of a signature, a dollar, an email, or a phone call.

In its early years, the founders of MoveOn recognized that in the absence of organizing, a communications vacuum had emerged that left motivated individuals with no strategic way to contribute. Using the Internet, one could contribute their money or their voice to a targeted collective effort on behalf of a particular issue. People self-recruited, MoveOn staff decided strategy, and if "members" didn't like the direction, they could vote with their "feet" (or their mouse). By aggregating individual voices, MoveOn could both enhance their impact and achieve results.

So what was missing?

Read more »

John Stauber raises a number of criticisms of MoveOn that he raised in my interviews with him, and before responding directly to them, I'm curious to see what Eli or Ben or others within or associated with MoveOn have to say.

That said, I want to just stress a few points:

1) Probably because my father was an organizer and my brother is one now and many of my friends work in the trenches, I am, as a writer and observer, a bit circumspect in criticizing people doing the very difficult work of organizing. (Or, "exceedingly fair" as John aptly put it) That's not to say there's no room for what in the olden days used to be called "principled critique," but it does mean that it's a whole lot easier to write a few grafs about the shortcomings of this or that organizing model than it is to actually organize. I try to keep that in perspective.

Read more »

Thanks to Chris for the excellent article and for kicking off this discussion, and to Matt for his thoughtful contributions.

Originally I wanted to focus on the future-focused questions Chris kicked us off with (and hope I can still get a chance to do so before the week is up).

But Mr. Stauber's post raised some important challenges that cut to the heart of what MoveOn is and does and I think they need to be addressed. These questions concern me not just as former MoveOn Advocacy Director, (I left in 2007) but also because I've since worked with various manifestations of the MoveOn model in Australia (getup.org.au) globally (Avaaz.org) and seen the power it holds to empower progressive action at the state, national, and international level - a power that has only begun to be tapped. So I think it's quite important to address the serious misconceptions in John's argument about how this model of collective action actually functions.

Read more »

I'm very glad that Chris Hayes wrote this exceedingly fair cover story for the Nation because it gives all of us an opportunity to examine an important organization that is tremendously successful as a fundraiser, cheerleader and marketer for liberal Democratic causes, MoveOn. I have praise for MoveOn in what they have accomplished, but their limitations are becoming more and more glaring and in the case of the continued Democratic funding of the war in Iraq, problematic.

I criticize MoveOn for what they are not doing, and that is empowering a bottom-up, democratic, progressive movement for fundamental social and political change. I am certainly not trying to reform MoveOn, that would be impossible because they are a tightly controlled organization and there is no access from the outside to change their modus operandi. Rather, I think we all should learn from MoveOn and focus on how we can use the MoveOn style, which has now been copied by thousands of groups and candidates, to actually empower a movement.

Read more »

I really enjoyed Chris Hayes and his article about Moveon. It's useful to think about where that group - which really has seeded nearly all progressive non-blogging internet activism - is going and what lessons their strategy has in store. In general, I see Moveon as one emergent piece in an ecosystem of activism on the 'Open' Left, which is distinguished from the New Left world by its embrace of open systems as organizing vehicles. As such, it's a mistake to see the group as a single issue group that can execute a strategy with a big swinging email list. Moveon is constrained, fundamentally, by what their members click on, and by the demands of relative transparency. It is also constrained by a legacy situation known as 'America'.

Read more »

I'm grateful to TPM for hosting this discussion, and it seems the timing is fortuitous. As is so often the case, MoveOn is in the news this week, first for co-sponsporing, along with Color of Change and the rapper Nas, a protest of Fox News' coverage. And later, for Bill O'Reilly's deranged comment that, "It is not a stretch to say MoveOn is the new Klan."

Whoa.

As I note in my cover-story in the Nation, this kind of crazy, over-heated rhetoric is par for the course. Heck, John McCain even said MoveOn "ought to be thrown out of this country." But understanding MoveOn as some kind of radical vangaurd -- as both the right-wing and MSM generally do -- gets the organization exactly wrong. MoveOn's success (and its limitations) lie in its ability to organize vast swaths of people who aren't radical or even that inclined towards ostentatious acts of protest. Their constituency is, by and large, what Richard Nixon once referred to, in a different context, as "the non shouters"

Read more »

Happy Monday Cafe-ers!

As you may have noticed by glancing at the banners on the right side of TPMCafe, we've got some exciting new things happening this week. Novelist Joseph O'Neill is joining us for a Book Club discussion on his new book Netherland. I'm particularly excited about this because it's the first TPMCafe discussion on a novel (!) and because I found the book particularly beautiful, politically relevant and worthy of further discussion. Joining him will be novelist and critic Dale Peck, New York Magazine writer Kurt Andersen, Mia Carter professor of English at University of Texas at Austin and Will Buckley of The Guardian. Joe's first post will be up in an hour or so, and I'll let him introduce the argument.

Also at Cafe all week, Chris Hayes will be joining us for a discussion on his recent Nation article, "MoveOn at Ten." Discussing with him will be Eli Pariser, director of MoveOn.org, Ben Brandzel, founder of MoveOn Student Action, Matt Stoller, a political consultant and blogger, John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy and Marshall Ganz, public policy lecturer at Harvard University.

We're going to be digging in to some meaty stuff, and I think that both conversations have a real timely relevance as we move towards the election, and think about the direction that American politics, and American communities, are heading in. And the work that needs to be done. Join us!