This is a proposal for a new blog for political organizers. It doesn’t have a name yet. And I’m not sure it’s going to happen. It depends on how the political organizers among you respond to the idea. The idea is based on a conversation I had with Hannah Miller which lead us to the idea of creating an anthology of stories by, for, and about political organizers. But the notion of starting with a blog and then creating an anthology of stories by and for political organizers is my idea. Don’t blame Hannah for it, or for the way I move to it in this post. But, if she likes the idea, she can have half the credit.
I had a chat recently with my friend Hannah Miller, one of the best young political organizers I know (and the best writer among political organizers I know) about how little has been written about political organizing. And, as usual, it generated some interesting ideas. It’s lead me to the idea of starting a blog of stories by and for political organizers and I’d be curious to know what political organizers think of the idea. But let me start by writing a bit about where the idea came from.
This part of our conversation started because I was talking about writing a book about my experience as a political organizer and especially about working on the field campaign for Health Care For America campaign. I know there will be Washington centered books on this campaign, especially if we are successful in enacting the most important social welfare legislation since social security in 2009. But I wondered whether anyone would tell the story of the extraordinary campaign outside of Washington, about our great field organization, and about how a small Washington staff helped those of us out in the states integrate field, media, and lobbying. And, of course, I wondered whether anyone would be interested in reading about this incredible campaign. Are we—the public that reads and thinks about politics—too Washington centered to care? Do we understand too little about how power in Washington is built out in the country to read about how it is done?
It did occur to me that there might be an academic audience for this book. But it would take a bit of a revolution in the sub-field we political scientists call “interest group politics” to make this work interesting to political scientists. This field, too, is Washington centered, with political scientists focused on counting and classifying the various kinds of interest groups in the capitol and talking about how they make decisions and how they engage in lobbying. There is little research—or there was little research when I stopped following the field 15 years ago—about how organizations build an issue movement: how they form coalitions, find and mobilize activists; frame the debate; generate media attention and raise money.
But academic fields can change. Pretty much all by himself, Richard Fenno got political scientists interested in looking more closely at how members of Congress think about and interact with their districts. This revolutionized the field of congressional studies. Maybe this could happen in the field of interest group studies if someone did what Fenno did, that is write a reflective and analytical narrative of how issue campaigns are created.
We were talking about this when Hannah pointed out that a book like the one I was envisioning might have another use, in training political organizers.
Like most trades, in political organizing you learn most of what you know by doing it and by watching people with more experience do what they do. But, unlike some other trades—plumbing or brain surgery—practical training in political organizing can be enhanced by hearing about the stories people tell of campaigns and movements including, of course, both the successes and failures. But there few books of this sort. The list usually begins and ends with the letter A, Alinsky.
There are some theoretical works about how to organize people. But I, for one, have never read them. I’m pretty much allergic to theoretical books about doing practical work. I may be a political theorist, but I know—on both theoretical and experiential grounds—that there most practical skills are not amenable to serious theorizing. As Aristotle pointed out 2500 years ago, while there may be a general rules that people who exercise a skill follow, those rules are few and rather abstract. And being skillful is much more about knowing how to deal with particular circumstances—which sometimes but not always means knowing how to apply one of these general rules—than it is with memorizing a bunch of rules.
That means that what people who want to learn organizing need much more than theory is good stories. You can gain practical knowledge, a sense of how to actually do things, by reading about or listening the stories of people who have succeeded, and failed, in carrying out some task.
I hope my book will be one such story. But Hannah pointed out that it would be really great if we had an anthology of good stories by organizers. Stories about how organizers held a press conference that worked, or failed. Stories about how coalitions came together or fell apart. Stories about how and when we have had productive days and about how and when we frittered away days or weeks of our time. Stories about a successfully lobbying trip to Harrisburg and about one that blew up. Stories about the people who inspire us and the people who drive us crazy.
So how to collect these stories? One good way is to start a blog and ask people to contribute to it and comment on each other’s contributions. So here it is.
And here are the ground rules: This website is not going to be open to everyone. You are going to have to have some minimal experience as an organizer and / or be recommended by a member to read or contribute to it. You are going to have to promise that what happens on this blog stays on this blog. No copying stories or linking to them on Facebook or MySpace. And no nasty stuff, either.
We want to create a safe space for organizers to tell stories and learn from each other.
At some point in the future, Hannah and I might want to take some of these stories and publish them in book form. But we won’t use your stories or your comments on them without asking for permission. And, when the time comes, we’ll figure out some way to spread around fairly the undoubtedly massive royalties we will earn.
Maybe, if our blog helps create the next generation of progressive organizers learn their way around, and that helps create and / or enlarge the broad, inclusive, multi-issue progressive organizations we need in every state in the country, we’ll donate our fortune to them.