Pretty much every day for the last few weeks, I talk to a health care activist last week who is freaking out about the ups and downs in Congressional consideration of health care.
“Relax” I said. “There are always ups and downs whenever Congress is considering any important legislation. There is always a great deal of tension and division and dispute—some of it is real and some of it is posturing. We are going to win, because we are building a real movement for historic reform.”
“But where is that movement?” he said.
It’s a good question. And I have to say that, despite my spending twenty five years as a political scientist who sometimes taught and wrote about political and social movements, I don’t think I ever understood what a political movement was until this moment. I understand what one is now because at this moment I’m kind of blessed to be in an incredibly lucky position, more or less at the center of the health care reform movement in Pennsylvania. From that vantage point, I’m in a position to see something—a political movement that—most of the time is really hard to see.
Why is it hard to see a political movement? Partly it’s because most political scientist let alone lay people have the wrong impression of what a political movement is. We think a political movement is 500,000 people on the mall in Washington calling for civil rights or a huge crowd storming the Bastille. Some movements are like that and that’s especially true when long pent-up resentment fuels an explosion of civic involvement or when some striking event—like the recent swimming pool outside of Philadelphia that excluded blacks—sparks an outpouring of involvement.
But most movements in Democratic political communities don’t involve or even require huge events of this kind. Most of the time, they involve a lot of actions and event carried out by small groups of people. And most of these actions and events would be fairly insignificant by themselves if they were not replicated many times over. It is the replication that makes the movement.
In explaining what I mean, let me tell a funny story from a book of philosophy, The Concept of Mind the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. It’s not a howler by any means, but for a book of philosophy, The Concept of Mind is pretty funny.
Ryle tells of someone who wants to see a university. He is taken to some university and shown the library, the residence halls, the cafeteria, a classroom, and the President’s office. At the end of his tour, he say, “Well, you have shown me the library, the residence halls, the cafeteria, a classroom, and the President’s office. But you haven’t shown me the university. Where is it?”
Well, I said it wasn’t a howler. But this story illustrates two things, first that we sometimes look in the wrong places for something because we don’t know what kind of thing it is—Ryle calls this a category mistake. Thinking that a movement is a huge rally is a category mistake. And, second, sometimes political and social phenomena are composite in nature. They are made up of lots of other phenomena. And that’s what a political movement is like. Just as a university has lots of parts, so does a political movement. But, a political movement is even harder to find than a university because it is spread out over time and space—sometimes over years and the distance of a large continental country.
Take a recent movement that made a difference—the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Sure, there were rallies a plenty. But think of Election Day, that incredibly exciting moment in which we finally embraced the change we wanted to so much. Where was the movement that day? It was in the individual movement of millions of people who went to hundreds of thousands of polling places in every nook and cranny of the country. They were an organized movement, encouraged to go to the polls by tens of thousands of field workers and television advertisements, paid for by thousands of fund raising events large and small and millions of internet transactions. This was a huge movement. But driving down the streets of our city during that day, and on most days of the campaign—on all those days when Barack Obama was not in town—there was little that was different from a normal day except electoral signs and pockets of people at polling places, or earlier, at all the small organizational meetings, rallies, fundraisers, phone banks, and all the other events that made up a growing movement.
There was places in Barack Obama’s campaign where the immensity of the movement was pretty evident—where the campaign contributions were counted, the rally totals computed, the advertisements tabulated, the field organizers entered into spreadsheets. But at the nerve center of the campaign, its strength could only be given numbers, abstract entities that could only capture the how many, not the what of all the different elements of the presidential campaign.
The what was a spirit, a hope, a belief that, with Barack Obama as our standard bearer, we could overcome old prejudices and more recent political setbacks, wrest control over our country and turn it in a new direction. It was this spirit that got so many people to make the donations, man the phones, host the fundraisers, recruit for the house parties, find the block and precinct captains, and knock on the doors. It was those millions of small and gracious acts by millions of men and women in America that created a movement with the power to transform a nation.
The Health Care Campaign is not, yet, the Obama campaign. But I’ve been blessed to be in a position where I can see the movement emerging in Pennsylvania. Not only do I get to do a lot of the counting, but I’m out doing some of the field work as well and talking every day to an incredibly talented staff of organizers. And I can tell you that in the last months and days, I’ve seen an enormous growth in this campaign. Just look at the last two weeks:
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We have been doing constant phone banking into Blue Dog districts in Erie, Reading, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia and have done a few days of phone banking in Williamsport, Bucks County, and Allentown. Hundreds of people have taken part in these phone banks. In addition, about forty people have signed up to do phone banking at home.
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Our list of health care activists reached 19,000 people, with a thousand or two still be entered, and new people signing up every day. Our state-wide email blasts go to over 10,000 people. Yesterday I sent emails to 5608 people in our Blue Dog and some other districts. Over a quarter of the people who received those emails opened them. And almost 15% clicked on the a link that took them to the system from which they could send an email to their member of Congress. I’ve been doing internet advocacy for some time, and these are by far the best numbers I have ever seen.
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We have built local coalitions and allies that can hold events with us in key parts of the state. We are holding rallies and house parties, attending town halls and other events at which we speak about health care every night of the week somewhere in the state, with often two or more meetings such events per day. And, as the health care issue is gaining greater prominence, we are getting press for most of these events In the last two days we did six rallies or press events in cities in four Blue Dog districts: Clarks’ Summit (Carney, newspaper coverage); Williamsport (Carney, newspaper); Aliquippa (Altmire, TV); Xenoblia (Altmire); Pottsville (Holden, newspaper); and Erie (Dahlkemper, TV). We also did other events in the last two weeks most of which received press coverage including a rally in Philadelphia (TV); a press conference with Congresswoman Schwartz in Philadelphia (TV, newspapers); a rally in Norristown in Montgomery County (newspaper articles on three days); a house party in Media, Delaware county; and a town hall in Williamsport followed by an organizational meeting.
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Despite the shrinking of the media, we have been fairly successful in getting attention for our events and in placing op-ed pieces and letters to the editor and in securing favorable editorial support in many newspapers.
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We regularly meet or talk with staff members of our Congressional delegation. In just the last two weeks, we have talked to Congresswomen Schwartz and Dahlkemper and with staff members from those two offices and the offices of Congressmen Altimire, Carney, Murphy, Fattah and Senators Casey and Specter.
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We stay in touch with our activists, inviting them to hold conference calls that discuss upcoming actions and that give them an opportunity to get inside information about the legislative struggle—Congresswoman Schwartz and John Myers of Senator Specter’s office have joined us most recently.
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And, in addition to all these actions, we’ve shown ourselves capable of holding the major events that we usually think of first when we talk about political movements, including a 500 person rally in October of 2008 which Representatives Brady and Schwartz attended along with staff members from Governor Rendell and Senator Casey’s office and a Bridge to Health Care event at which 400 people walked from Philadelphia to meet a New Jersey delegation in the middle of the Benjamin Franklin bridge. And we took 2000 Pennsylvanians to Washington to our national rally and to hold a Pennsylvania Town Hall at which Representatives Schwartz and Sestak spoke along with Senator Specter.
Of course, these are all numbers. And, as such, they don’t begin to describe the passion I hear in living rooms and meeting halls all over the state when people talk about the urgency of reforming health care or the incredible power of a 1000 Pennsylvanians chanting in a Washington bar or the energy with which people do phone banking in groups large or small or the eagerness with which people say they will come to this or that event. As the time for decision gets closer, the spirit of this movement has been growing by leaps and bounds. It is what animates this movement and makes it so effective.
So, after twenty five years as a political scientist, I finally know what a real political movement is. I wish all of you could spend a day with me as I talk and email to people all over the state about events and actions and coalitions and op-eds and letters to the editor and phone banks and all the other small moments that make up this movement. But I hope that what I’ve said has convinced you that there is in fact a health care movement in Pennsylvania and around the country. It is real and strong and growing. And it is why this year, in 2009, we are going to accomplish something progressive have dreamed about for a hundred years, a guarantee of quality, affordable, health care for all.