Pearl River      I’d ripped out an article in the New Yorker six months ago by Charles Duhigg entitled “One Direction:  What MAGA can teach Democrats about organizing – and infighting.”  I’ve carried it around with me, so long that, picking it up now, I have only the first three pages and have to go on the internet to read the rest of it.  There were good solid points in the piece like nuggets of gold pulled out of the dirt, but while I found it exciting to read, I also was somewhat uncomfortable and undecided about it as well.  In short, it’s taken me a while, going back and forth, to try and reckon with the direction and model its promoting, even as the its call to organize is spot on.

The article is really about “distributed organizing” without for some reason ever calling it that exactly.  Partly, that’s what seems off somehow.  Simply put, to draw from a fairly recent piece, “Distributed (or distributive) organizing is a campaign strategy that decentralizes power by empowering local volunteers and regional teams to lead outreach in their own communities. Instead of relying only on a top-down staff, a central team provides tools and training, allowing supporters to autonomously drive local action.”  He agreeably quotes John Hopkins professor Hahrie Han saying, “Mobilizing is about getting people to do a thing, and organizing is about getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.”  Yet, he is still seems interested less in what builds an organization, than how to mobilize voters better for the Democrats.

Duhigg’s theme at base is that MAGA Republicans are organizing and Democrats and the left are mobilizing.  He makes his case on the back of MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, MAGA, Turning Point USA, as well as Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, while later on crediting the Obama 2008 volunteer effort and showing some love to the more progressive Wisconsin-based community organization, Isaih, and Indiana’s Hosier Action, which to their credit are more than simply campaign-based formations.  All of these examples are cases in point for an anti-woke, kumbaya, big tent project that he believes has been more enabled on the right than the left, which in my opinion may or may not be true depending on where you look.  Any successful community organization could have equally served as a good example, because they are all glued together by and within the very community being organized.  He appropriately critiques the role of big shiny events, headquarters-focused staff and resources, but that gun could be shot at lots of targets right and left, Republican and Democrat.

Distributed organizing based on empowering local units of an organization, employing what ACORN has always called “coordinated autonomy,” which focuses on wide discretion on local issues and programs, active and effective local leadership, and a wide variety of tactics and strategy works and is worth supporting.  None of that guarantees that an effective national organization will be built from those efforts.  National Welfare Rights Organizations (NWRO) could also work as a model for distributed organizing in its time in the late 60s and early 70s.  Chapters were formed around the country by local welfare recipients who might receive an organizing packet, some buttons, and membership cards from DC and be encouraged to implement local campaigns for school clothing, against local welfare cutbacks, and for guaranteed annual income, but were all essentially acting on their own maybe with some help by a VISTA volunteer or local community action program. None of that assured after the departure of George Wiley, that NWRO would survive, even if to this day I can still find WRO chapters in some cities fifty years later. As a devil’s advocate, I could argue that his point about MADD and it’s continued work after internal problems could be said about ACORN after external attack, because not all, but a number of local and statewide units were able to survive and thrive, proving the depth of the roots and quality of local staff and leadership.  All fine, but that doesn’t mean the pieces were able to cobble together something to fill ACORN’s gap nationally.

We need more than a model and a big tent, even as Duhigg is right to argue that it all begins with strong community and local work.  As he cites, “neighborhood teams working year-round and socializing with their neighbors, to form real communities…” is what works.  Or he quotes success where people “found a community, and a sense of identity, and…became committed” or states that a “movement becomes sustainable when members feel empowered and find friends.”  We have to nod in agreement with Ralph Reed of all people when he says, “You win by offering people a set of values that give meaning.  Celebrities don’t deliver that.  Small groups of neighbors do.  And, as long as we’re building those groups, we’re gonnna win.”

It takes time, support, and resources to build organization and make change from the bottom up.  That’s what we do, but as long as money buys shortcuts and advocates have the loudest voices and deepest pockets to mobilize, the road won’t get any smoother and journey won’t be shorter.  Building real power is always going to be about more than the next election.