Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:10 I am confident that the democratic party will reunite on the basis of democratic principles and that together we will March toward a democratic victory in 1980. I think the democratic leadership understands that we need to bring those people into the party. We need to transform the party. We need to make the democratic party, the democratic party with a small beat. I think the future of the party is working class. And I think that what I represent and, and perhaps, you know, Senator Sanders also Senator Warren, there's a lot of working class champions in the democratic party. And I do think that that's the future welcome.
Speaker 1 00:00:52 Just talking strategy, making history,
Speaker 0 00:00:57 Activist,
Speaker 1 00:00:58 Retired, professor of sociology and a really,
Speaker 0 00:01:03 And I'm <inaudible> Moore hall, a slightly less old guy and also an activist and political strategist. And this season on talking strategy, making history, we're going to be talking about one of the big questions for progressive strategy here in the United States, in what we're calling a Hitchhiker's guide to the democratic party,
Speaker 1 00:01:26 Welcome folks. And today we have a special privilege and that's the opportunity to have a conversation with feta, scotch poll, Harvard, professor of political science and sociology. One of the most, uh, distinguished living social scientists. I think we have in this country, uh, fate has been doing, as you will hear some very groundbreaking research on the grassroots movements that are reshaping electoral politics from the left and the right we've been doing, uh, for the past several months, this podcast aimed at encouraging strategic thinking among progressive activists, especially this series that we've been doing, focusing on the democratic party and how to think about it as an institution and how to imagine serious efforts to make it into a party of the people people's party with many different people that we, that have been, uh, joining us for these conversations, the striking thing about your work on this matter.
Speaker 1 00:02:40 And there are so many other aspects to your story as a scholar, until a intellectual, uh, figure of much impact over all these decades. Uh, the work you've been doing on is it fair to call it grassroots transformative activity focused on the electoral process and, and, uh, you started with the tea party pioneering work in which I think you introduced some thoughts that hadn't been in the discourse until you focused on them, which is, uh, the absence on a community level, especially on the left side of what used to be there in terms of associations of civic connection of, of community. So talk about that to get us started. What, what has happened on the local level at the community level in American life that might have set the stage for the period we're now in politically?
Speaker 2 00:03:44 Well, it's nice to be here, Dick. Thank you for having me. Um, well, you know, a lot of things have happened, um, in the big picture of course, w w much more polarization and the electoral and governing process. But I think that underpinning that, um, especially since the 1960s, a lot of the organizational innovation and energy on the center left in this country has gone into in professionally run advocacy funding, expert groups of various, um, often headquartered either in Washington DC or major metropolitan centers in the more liberal States where younger educated people who've been the principles in creating these, um, very valuable and impactful endeavors have been clustered. But the downside of that is that, uh, especially I think back when Democrats controlled a lot more of Washington DC, there was a tendency to do politics, politics of expertise and of pressure and of lobbying Congress and running lawsuits.
Speaker 2 00:04:59 I wrote about all of that and diminish democracy, um, that the transformation to that kind of civic life, uh, in contrast to the multilevel federated membership dues based associations that existed at the heart of not just local, but state national, uh, civic life for much of American history from the middle of the 19th century to the 1960s. Um, and, uh, parallel transformation, maybe not as much, but, but a similar transformation of course occurred in the major political parties and, and probably particularly the democratic party after the 1960s and seventies. Um, especially as the trade unions, um, lost membership and lost a presence in local community life in large parts of the country. I have an undergraduate right now, who's working on this transformation in Western Pennsylvania, and she's talking about the unions, not just as dues paying members who can then transfer money to the Democrats or even volunteers, but as organizations and networks that were part of the identity of people's lives and their community.
Speaker 2 00:06:15 And now that's gone. Uh, and at the same time, the democratic party went from being an overlapping set of local committees and County committees sometimes run by good old boys and were monopolizing for sure, but they were a presence. Uh, they overlapped with unions, they overlapped with other kinds of community groups that had a face-to-face presence. Uh, and then they moved toward being something that activated only during election periods only to try to turn out the vote for candidates that were funded and, or were strategizing mainly at the state or national level. So those kinds of coterminous changes at the same time that a lot of the new organizational energy was going into professionally run advocacy on the left, really left. Um, I would say center left people and Progressive's for that matter were vulnerable to a kind of much more popularly in community rooted, right wing politics.
Speaker 1 00:07:19 And the right wing has a community roots through things like evangelical churches. And what else, uh, what else is there
Speaker 2 00:07:27 In the, in the book that, uh, Caroline turbo and I recently put together called up ending American politics. We have a chapter that I did with Michael's Bureau, looking at the surprising organizational roots of Trump's victory in 2016, and everybody, you know, rightly points to the fact that Donald Trump didn't even have to fund much of anything because he got close to $2 billion of free media time. And, uh, this is a guy who probably didn't want to leave as New York towers to do much more than them fly to do rallies in various strategically, located places. The rallies were all in non-metro parts of swing States and that mattered. So they were carefully selected. But what we argue is that he was able to tap into preexisting and newly strengthened, um, federated associations really that had roots right down into the local areas, obviously evangelical Christianity, particularly the brand of it that is bought into Christian nationalism, which is not all of evangelical Protestantism.
Speaker 2 00:08:32 It's a particularly, uh, politically right-wing variant. And you'll see it, uh, preached in the big mega churches that are often one of the anchors of community life and non-metro areas, but gun clubs. I mean, we'll often think of gun politics as a matter of the NRA giving money and running ads. And it's certainly that, but a lot of the best ones, I'll just an anthropologist shows that guns are part of the social fabric. People go to clubs, they go hunting together. They, uh, my student who's studying the changes in Western Pennsylvania says that the, the cars in the parking lots at the remaining industrial plants have amendments to stickers on them and gun club stickers on them, not union stickers. And then there's the police forces who, you know, uh, white police officers are organized into fraternal associations. And those have real roots in a lot of communities.
Speaker 2 00:09:34 And everybody has a cousin or a brother who maybe was in the military for a while, and now as a police officer. So by appealing to the kind of us versus them, increasingly apocalyptic politics, that those community rooted groups and networks have that really gives meaning to the lots of a lot of people. I mean, I hard as it is to, to grasp that if you traveled to these places as I have done, and you talk to people face to face, including the tea partiers that organized along those lines, after Barack Obama came to office, that's how they get their meaning in life. And they're connected to one another. And that makes for a very powerful brand of Republican politics. If the politicians can tap into those moral understandings and social networks, right,
Speaker 1 00:10:24 Was it Trump himself who had the insight that he could base in his campaign around these organizations? Are there other people associated with Trump or who use Trump to make those and built those linkages? How do you, how did that connect?
Speaker 2 00:10:39 Well, somebody sure around him certainly understood because when we went and took a look at the actual ongoing groups that Trump gave talks in front of mostly, he does these big rallies and those are used very cleverly by the political people around him. But when he went in 2016 at least, and spoke at actual groups, they were conventions of Christian, right? People, gun conventions, and police fraternal order of police. So somebody, uh, understood that those were places where he would get a residence. I happen to think he's a politician who is very good at understanding how other people resonate with the anger and frustration and scapegoating that he himself feels viscerally is. So, but I, I don't know who it was. It wasn't the Koch brothers. I can tell you, this is a separate strand of, of, of Republican router.
Speaker 1 00:11:47 Okay. So, and so you've, you wrote a good deal about that. Very, as I said, pathbreaking, because the emphasis understanding, quote unquote, the Trump voter or, or Trumpism has been so much on the ideological level and sort of social, psychological level, um, some extent, uh, efforts at class analysis, but your emphasis on the organizational connections is so important. The contribution, even though sociologists, I'm a sociologist, we don't always pay attention to that. We often do not pay attention to that as a key factor in how people operate on their day to day in their daily lives. So to your credit, as a social scientist, really develop new techniques for yourself about going after that kind of work. Right?
Speaker 2 00:12:43 Well, I, because I'm a big picture, I guess in sociology, we would call it comparatively historical sociology and political science. We call it historical institutionalism, but I am very much a big picture, um, overtime analyst and, and, you know, I haven't stopped being that. I try always to connect things up to the, uh, national and international conflicts, uh, that are going on, but in the tea party work that I started. And then in this most recent round of work that we should talk some more about where we certainly will figure it out that, uh, if you, if you really mean it, I remember cleaned myself down one day and saying, okay, Theda, you and your fellow historical, institutionalists say that the units of analysis should be groups, organizations, and networks. So if you really mean it, stop using survey data about individual characteristics and attitudes, which can have hints about those things, but they're not very helpful and start asking what are the organizations and the networks.
Speaker 2 00:13:52 And, and then in order to understand the tea party, I think Vanessa Williamson and I understood something that I have carried over into this current work on the anti-Trump resistance, which is you really have to get beyond the things that are visible in national media, in nationally bands, even massive marches, like the tea parties, anti-tax protests or the women's March of early, um, 2017. You have to get beyond those and, and go and look at what's happening, actual places that are spread across the American political geography. And, and I'll just say one more thing. I mean, I think for me in a lot of others, the Trump election in 2016 really brought home with new forcefulness. The fact that we live in a federated,
Speaker 1 00:14:45 Can I Chrissy? And that insight is key to when I w you know, what we want to get into, we go forward with you today. So the resistance, uh, tea party seemed like a fairly amazing mobilization of large numbers of people, but, uh, you document that the resistance that was signaled by the women's March was a far greater in terms of the, what sprung up, uh, very quickly after Trump got elected. And one of the striking things that you focus on is the role of, uh, middle-class women at the local level in building that up. So why don't we talk about that? Because that's, again, not something I think people were noticing till you called attention to the,
Speaker 2 00:15:32 And Laura Putnam. She's the other one. Uh huh.
Speaker 1 00:15:35 And this book, upending American politics. We came out about a year, little over a year ago, right.
Speaker 2 00:15:42 Came out at the beginning of 2020.
Speaker 1 00:15:45 Yeah. That is a compendium of studies on both Republican and the democratic side, uh, with this community-based focus. So what's your story in brief about the rise of the resistance?
Speaker 2 00:15:58 Okay. So, you know, after the, uh, November, 2016 election, um, we saw a huge efflorescence of immediate activity from established political groups and from on some newly created national ones. So let me just set that aside, because right after that election, three of us have Harvard female professors. Mary Waters is a sociologist myself. I'm a political scientist, mainly these days. And Cathy Swartz, who is a health economist. It was really the Saturday after the election at the Watertown diner that we decided we would pick eight counties that went for Trump away from the coast and start visiting them regularly to get to know the lay of the land, particularly the groups and the local leaders and how they would experience what we thought would be huge changes in things like healthcare, for example, in the coming period. So my part of that was to map remotely and then get to know in face to face person, local Democrats, local Republicans, business leaders, civic leaders of various kinds.
Speaker 2 00:17:19 So that's spring with my retired physicist husband. We set out on a 1000 mile trip that took us to the two counties in Pennsylvania, was there in County, which is a medium city County and then tiny Jefferson County near Pittsburgh to the two counties in Ohio, um, stark County around Canton, a medium sized city. Once again, these medium city areas had flipped from Obama to Trump, um, and a smaller apart. You got, I got to that later near licking County, near Columbus, and then all the way to Wisconsin, where we visited, uh, Winnebago County, where Ash cautious North of Chicago and almost to the Mississippi river, the beautiful Monroe County, um, area so long and short of it is to my surprise when I got to these places, all of which had voted for Trump and the small ones by overwhelming margins, the AEG 20 that Hillary Clinton lost by in most of non-metro counties, I found there were anti-Trump citizens, resistance groups popping up that in many ways, resembled the local tea parties that had popped up at the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency.
Speaker 2 00:18:42 So of course, I tried to meet those local leaders, um, along with the party leaders and any surviving tea party leaders. Um, and, uh, that's what the launch, the start of that phase of research, because I quickly realized that something was happening outside of areas that could be considered blue on the electoral map. And so, um, I set out to track the groups in these counties. I was visiting then my colleagues and I decided to map all of the state of Pennsylvania because it's so diverse. It has big Metro areas. It has suburban and exurban areas. It has very rural and very conservative areas. And we ended up using online questionnaires to supplement what we could do in face-to-face interviews. And it was out of that research really that we discovered that it was college educated, white women, uh, no matter what the community that's true in Metro and suburban areas, as well as rural conservative areas, teachers, librarians, healthcare professionals, small business women, often in creative businesses who are the ones who often starting within days of Trump's election, started forming networks and groups that met regularly.
Speaker 2 00:20:09 They resembled tea parties in that they tend to meet in the back rooms of restaurants or in library basements, or sometimes a church basement, different kind of church than the deportees parties would meet in. But they don't start with a pledge of allegiance and a prayer like the tea party meetings. Do they start more like a, you know, a sort of citizens or faculty gathering or people just greet each other and then they get down to business, but these brutes were immediately signing themselves up on that indivisible map that had all those dots proliferating. They, um, eventually our research group, we have put together the only named lists of local tea parties and local resistance groups in every state and every community in every County, in every congressional district. And we believe that tea parties were about 2000 to 2,500 and number at their peak, which they reached about two years in. And we believe that resistance groups reached that peak of 2000 to 2,500 within one year. And, uh, reached a higher level of probably three to 4,000. Both sets of groups are volunteer, led citizens groups, both are white and middle-class, but the resistance groups are about 75 to 80% women.
Speaker 1 00:21:38 I think that a preponderance of the resistance was led by women. What was it? They experienced the threat of Trump more viscerally than anybody else.
Speaker 2 00:21:46 Yes, I think that is part of it. I mean, we ask in the questionnaires that we sent out, one of the articles reports this data, we ask people to give us the reasons why they either form to became active participants in the groups. So obviously we're getting the most devoted ones, but we had hundreds of hundreds of answers and the kinds of answers people gave were horror at Trump. And the way he treats vulnerable sets of people ranging from women to immigrants and refugees and racial minorities, and, um, a realization that you had to do a lot more than just vote to sustain American democracy. Now, I want to say that women are the ones who tend to do the work of local voluntary groups. Anyway, he parties were often if not co-lead or led by women, it's often the women in the tea parties that were actually doing the work, but those meetings would be about half and half men and women.
Speaker 2 00:22:51 And the broader ranks of tea party sympathizers are heavily male. Part of the reason why women are so prominent in the resistance is that they're prominent in the democratic party's coalition and in and around the democratic party, either toward the middle or toward the left of it, as well as in it, as voters are disproportionately female and disproportionately these days likely to be college credential. So it's the constituency, but I will say this, I think there was something especially horrifying about Trump's election and it wasn't just that he had said he grabbed women by the pussy. I mean, I think some left commentators have suggested that that part of it was the major thing for these older women. Many of whom are retired. I'm not sure that was the especially horrifying part. It was anger, disappointment that a highly qualified woman was defeated by this, this guy and the sense that he represented something other than the public interest, Vance, what people say again and again, and it may be that women are a little bit more attuned to the idea of what's good for the community as a whole, uh, at least, or more willing to act on that.
Speaker 1 00:24:14 That's an interesting question. It's not the main one. Uh, let's take for granted for the moment that what's important is that this impulse was, was translated into real organizational development at the grass roots and for our purposes on the podcast, the most important, and maybe apart from a podcast in general was a lot of these groups, mostly, uh, most of them seem according to your account to have turned pretty quickly to the electoral process as an arena for action. And the reason that's interesting is because I'm a child of the sixties in which there was a good deal of disillusionment, a stain or a misunderstanding, if you will, of, of the need for elect dual-action, uh, it's taken many years for a lot of us to understand the centrality of that arena, uh, and of the democratic party as an arena. And yet this seemed to be key to certainly the indivisible development, but not only that. Right,
Speaker 2 00:25:17 Right. Well, and, and, and, you know, not all local resistance groups formed by groups of volunteers affiliated with indivisible. Uh, there are other frameworks, but I don't think we, you know, in our survey across the state of Pennsylvania, we found only maybe four out of 80 groups that had not jumped into active electoral outreach activities by the end of the number one, cause for the first year was trying to feel the things the Trump GOP was doing and raise an outcry against them and above all fighting to save the affordable care act. That was the through line, interestingly enough, that was the through line for the tea party at the grassroots too. Right? Yeah. And there's something about that that makes the combination of national and local action work well together because it's a fight in Congress that goes on and on, and yet local action is relevant to shaping perceptions of your neighbors, um, and the, your local institutions about what's at stake.
Speaker 2 00:26:27 But once that was over and really even before it was over. And I would say even before the national groups decided no it's time to pay attention to 2018, everybody seemed to understand. And I, I think this is both the tea party and the resistance are electorally spark movements, widespread electorally sparked movements of people who were horrified and fearful at the installation of a president backed by a party that appeared to allow him to make sweeping changes in what they understood the country to be. And so I don't think it's surprising really that everybody understood almost at once after 2016, that the 2018 midterm elections and any special elections before that would be absolutely vital. And there really were only a few people on the far non electoral left anti electoral, the left, who didn't suspend there. Um, in my experience, I think even where I live, you know, the people who, who said, Oh, those elections don't matter, uh, changed their mind about that, uh, uh, for a while. Um, and so I don't think it's surprising that there was a sort of can do attitude, or we've got to get on with this. We've got to find people to run for office. What is surprising and interesting is that these groups generated people to run for office at the local and the state level as well as nationally. And that is something new on the center left in the United States, which had been too focused on presidential politics.
Speaker 1 00:28:14 Right. And that's one of the big lessons. And one of the reasons we want to talk to you about that, listen. So, uh, I had a question and then I'm going to ask deraco to chime in, but, uh, that isn't in the writing that you've done. I don't think which is, this is a somewhat side issue for us right in here, but the same kind of rapid up springing of local action came about with black lives matter. Uh, and, uh, I wonder whether you have thoughts on that in terms of how that's linked in any way to what we've been talking about so far to the resistance, but people have been struck by this emergence of black lives matter actions in the same kind of communities you're talking about Trump country towns, uh, white people on large numbers participating in this. So what have been your thoughts about that?
Speaker 2 00:29:08 Well, you know, as some of the best social movements, scholars in sociology and political science have taught us movements do have a way of kind of rhyming with each other and, uh, and supporting each other. And we earlier saw a smaller scale version of this March for our lives movement, which emerged, um, among young people with some spark out of the high schoolers in Florida. Right. But when you start looking at who turned out at the marches in many places and who, um, facilitate, um, marches and other public actions by high schoolers in various places, and it's turns out to be these women's networks that were already there. In fact, you know, I visited a couple of my counties again for the second time and, and was told by the women's groups. Oh yeah. You know, they came to us, they got our help. We did it all behind the scenes so that we weren't visible.
Speaker 2 00:30:09 And that is something women find it easier to do. I do think a S uh, not exactly the same thing, but I do think that the fact that the ground had been prepared by the many strands of anti-Trump resistance organizing, including the widespread local, uh, part of it that, um, I've studied and tried to do that. I think that helped to, to plow the ground for people to be prepared, to speak up and, and go to the streets for symbolic purposes in their communities everywhere after the George Floyd killing. Um, it's not that there were black lives matter groups everywhere it tent that tech is to be a more metropolitan movement. But when you add that together with NACP groups and minority groups of various kinds, the locals were perhaps already talking with them. Um, that's one of the things that I think my research has convinced me is that it's just a mistake to treat politics as if it's all driven by individuals, identities.
Speaker 2 00:31:19 I think collective identities who we are and who they are, are very important in politics. I think they're more important in politics than economic self-interest. In many cases, I do think that, um, people who believe that, uh, we for America, that's what the fight is about. Now it's a fight about what America is and is going to be, and those who, who are white and relatively privileged, actually, middle-class people in many of these small communities are not all that privileged, but those who are, can very well have a value of commitment that drives them to really reach out and really cooperate with others. And I don't mean simply defer to others. I mean, in the communities that I study, the white women's networks and the indivisible and other groups, you know, often have to work at it, to relate to the African-American church. Now, the immigrant networks, it's not smooth. Sure. But they had already been doing it. And I think that that prepares the way for a quick response, when something like the Floyd killing happens, it's not as if the ground hadn't been tilled. It had been
Speaker 1 00:32:41 Well, folks, that's the first part of our two-part conversation with feta scotch poll. In our second part, we'll go on with feta, a deep dive into what the left organizing at the grassroots looks like, how it differs from the right and its efforts and what new coalitions can come into being in the next period as a result of the growing commitment to grassroots organizing that she's finding on the left and that we've been talking about here on the podcast, talking strategy, making history, you can support us by going to patrion.com/t S M H patrion.com/t S M H. And it'll tell you there and what you need to do to give us some material support as we go forward. Thanks folks for listening. Thanks to our producer pair hold. Thanks to Riley brings are our Intrepid engineer, and we'll be back next time on the podcast talking strategy, making history
