Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 Hi, everyone. We're going to continue now today, our conversation that we started with our last episode with the very distinguished feta scotch Paul, the renowned sociologist whose recent research has really been a deep dive into the intersection of social policy and civic engagement in American democracy. She's had fascinating insights into the motivations and the dynamics behind right-wing tea party organizing that led up to Trump in power. And now the grassroots movement coming from the left, not only to resist Trump, but now to create a new politics from the left in this country, the first voice you hear will be that of deraco
Speaker 1 00:00:55 Discussion poll. And thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. This is a real treat for me. Um, you know, as an activist and as a student or thinker analyst of the democratic party, your work has been incredibly influential and useful. And one of the questions I have is that there seems to be a, a kind of red thread through a bunch of your work starting a little earlier than the tea party stuff, but with a work then, and, and commentary you made about the occupy movement, then your analysis of the tea party, and then all the way through to, um, your recent piece on, on indivisible, that a difference between the right and the left seems to be the ambivalence about the major parties and that while you know, the tea party right away, as you documented, like in its first, the first gatherings under that brand, we're talking about how do we take over the Republican party?
Speaker 1 00:01:48 In contrast, the, the occupy movement was like having a hundred year old debate about whether electoral politics should work or, or should be a part of the struggle, et cetera. And then all the way through to really your really insightful work on an indivisible, which really by the way, very much dovetailed with my own anecdotal experience of indivisible here in California. Um, but it seems like on the grassroots level, a lot of activists were like, Hey, we should be involved in the party and the democratic party, we should get engaged in the democratic party. But the leadership in Washington had a very much more, uh, nonprofit, industrial complex kind of outlook and so forth. A big touchstone for me has been, you know, watching what happened, uh, in and contrasting the Dean insurgency within the party to the Obama campaign, use a lot of the same methods, similar rhetoric, but one really targeting, you know, saying let's rebuild and re-imagine the democratic party and the Obama campaign and OFA being like, let's ignore it, let it die, do our own thing. So, you know, to meet, in addition to bringing the state back into our thinking, uh, you know, as a macro historical forces, it seems that you've been an important voice for bringing the party back in to thinking about how these networked organizations try to try to find effectiveness and so forth in politics. And I'm wondering if you could, I mean, am I silly for reading that thread through your work or do you, is there some more you'd like to talk about it?
Speaker 2 00:03:21 Well, not at all. I mean, I, well, let me back up and say political parties have not been studied very much by scholars, including in political science, shockingly enough. Um, the way people define political parties is usually by the voters vote for them, which is, you know, kinda misses the point or the legislators who align with them in organizing Congress or a state legislature. Those are both important, but parties as organizations and what it is they do and who they connect to and how that sort of passed out of fashion. And so part research I've been doing, and that has come front and center in this tea party. And this was distance work has been to be aware of parties as local and state organizations. Now, you know, they are there, even if they're hollow shells, right, or they've been taken over by insiders, we're corrupting them.
Speaker 2 00:04:18 So, um, they're there because of the way in which our electoral system works, that it just in the legal system just assign certain things to them, not the same in every state, by the way. And it matters what the rules are. Um, the thing that's so striking to me is that both the tea party and the anti-Trump resistance carried forward, a principle that I actually learned in my work on revolutions, which couldn't be further away, which is that social change and political change often comes from intertwined networks. That parallel one another. Um, that's a structural point. It's not a, you know, it's not a point about the content. Um, but a reform movement that is both organized separately from say the democratic party or the Republican party, but willing to interact with it. And to some degree colonize it, um, can be a very powerful engine for revitalization and change.
Speaker 2 00:05:19 There is absolutely no question that tea party people did that. Uh, and sometimes self-consciously, they would, I remember being in a meeting where they were reading up on the local Republican party rules, and then they just descended meeting one night and kicked out the business people. And they are the kinds of people that we see now. I mean, they're the ones with the colorful costumes and that's crude language. And, uh, they were Trumpers before Trump, there you go. Now I think that the local resistance, not national resistance, but the local resistance is usually full of people who are prepared to deal with their local democratic party. Now I say deal with sometimes it's a hostile standoff. And, and you know, some of these groups, especially in the first year told us in a questionnaires we sent out, they don't even want to pay any attention to us, or they don't like us and, and not liking us was for sure, because a lot of times it was, it was a man who felt very put off by these, uh, you know, teachers and librarians who were telling them what to do.
Speaker 2 00:06:31 Um, or they could even be women. I mean, in one Ohio County, it was a woman who good woman in many ways, but she couldn't understand what these new resistors were doing. And why were, why couldn't you just come to her meetings and not organized separately, but that evolved. And I would say it evolved across, but we have that chapter about Pennsylvania, where we looked at all the variants of this in most places, over the course of fighting for the wins in 2018 wins by more moderate people than the resistors themselves might've wanted to win, uh, or fighting to lose for that matter. In most Pennsylvania counties, they lose, um, they got to know democratic candidates and they ran for democratic committee positions. In some cases, took over the democratic committees entirely more often created a presence that then interacted with the other constituencies that were already there that can bubble up to the state level.
Speaker 2 00:07:37 And I believe has in some States, not all, but it's a process that's ongoing. That is really good for the democratic party because the democratic party just didn't have it. They're there in many of these local areas, especially once the unions went into decline. And once the attacks on the public sector unions, the teacher's unions proved to be so successful. Uh, I mean, I'll just give one example. In one of the Wisconsin counties, I visited the first visit, the local chair to women revitalizing the local democratic party told me that after Scott Walker succeeded in breaking the powers of the teacher's unions in Wisconsin, people were so discouraged that they grabbed out of politics, no came to democratic party meetings anymore. They couldn't get volunteers. People moved out of the state in many cases. So complete was the defeat after the Walker union busting the failed attempt to roll that back.
Speaker 2 00:08:46 But then they said Trump got elected and suddenly the meetings were full. So this, they overlapped with the people, but weren't exactly the same as the people going to the local resistance group meetings. And they were all aware of that. They found a way to cooperate without collapsing one into the other. Right. But many of the teachers who had dropped out before reappeared, as members of the resistance groups back to Alex hurtle, Frank Fernandez, my student and colleague has found in systematic research that unionized not NYSED and formally unionized teachers are often mainstays of the creation of these local groups. That's what you would expect.
Speaker 1 00:09:38 Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, you know, my reading of the history of the democratic party in the last half century or so, right, is that what you described as is actually the norm of, you know, collapse or going into like a band and then a new group of volunteer activists come and revitalize it. And that, you know, since the decline of the machines and the far more like, uh, you know, operational, rational, um, models of the party structure, it's been people that are engaged on the issues or engaged in because they want social change. And that is a very cyclical, boom and bust kind of, you know, social ecology. Um, but what I also seen is that very often people get, you know, that, that takeover moment activists will come in, get power in a, in a defunct or otherwise sleepy democratic organization. And then they have quote unquote control over it.
Speaker 1 00:10:36 And then it's like, well, now what, and how do we, what do we do with this thing? Because the democratic party is so diffuse, sinned and power works in such a, you know, in some ways secretive ways within it. And so another piece of your work that I'd like you to talk about, um, recently, right, as this is setting up the scholar strategy network and doing work that, um, can be digestible and, uh, useful for the work of practitioners, in addition to, um, other analysts and academics and a very specific piece, uh, that the SSN came out with, which is a set of, uh, suggestions for the revitalization of local party organizations. You know, I found I'm like, Hey, I could take this and give this to a newly elected party chair, activists that just took power in wherever, you know, Siskiyou County or Nevada County or something and give this to them. And it would actually be really helpful, um, because the party itself doesn't do any onboarding or training or anything.
Speaker 2 00:11:36 Right. So tell
Speaker 1 00:11:38 Me about SSN and what you're hoping to accomplish with it.
Speaker 2 00:11:42 Okay. Well, let's ask Hannah first has been around for a while. It got going back in 2009, when a group of, um, mainly social scientists, sociologists political scientists, and a couple of donors, we have, we've always had a couple of wealthy donors who are full participants by the way, there, um, we just decided that something needed to be done to build bridges between the hyper specialized worlds of academia and the increasingly separate worlds of policy-making and even movement politics for that matter. And we didn't know what to do, frankly. It took us several years to discover some formats, some organizational ideas and some, and the idea of asking people to write a brief that boils down their work into two pages of plain English. It turns out that even a thousand page book, even a highly statistical study, even God help us a post-modern study can be translated into everyday language.
Speaker 2 00:12:58 Uh, if you work hard enough at it. So we built from that insight and ask people to commit, not to a partisan position, not to policy agreement with a thousand other people. Imagine the meeting that would be too much of leftist politics, by the way, it's about that. We didn't need other people are left us. I mean, the fact is academics tend to be, but the commitment you make by joining SSN, by producing a piece of writing or a way to communicate your everything from ancient history or philosophy to contemporary studies of politics, to contemporary policy relevant work, the commitment you make is to the progressive era, JD Adams type idea that we as academics have a calling, you hear the religious word I'm using to, to share our work with our fellow citizens with in the media policymakers, civic groups, for example, voting research was shared very early on with the league of women voters league of women voters invited people to their conventions to present some of these ideas.
Speaker 2 00:14:17 And that had a galvanizing impact on both the scholars who were invited and the league of women voters itself. So the additional thing comes out of my work about Federation. We decided very early on that we would devote a chunk of our researches resources, a major chunk of our resources to giving predictable small budgets to chapters. Chapters can form in a Metro area. They can form for a whole state. For example, Oklahoma has one, Alabama has one they can form, um, per regions of States. Um, they work differently in different settings and their volunteer leaders get us small honorarium and really quite small for the work they do. And they then decide what kinds of outreach they want to do to legislators or civic groups in their area. And it's very different and very different in different parts of the country. It's not the same in Utah as it is in San Francisco.
Speaker 2 00:15:22 You know, so that is the other part. And we now have about 40 of those chapters. Um, it's still growing and it adjusts its overall sense of what we want to emphasize according to how the political opportunity structure changes when Trump was elected. We, we, we picked a series of priorities that included state level action. Sure. But it's still possible for each group or each member to have our all staff help them with whatever outreach they want to do. So that's the philosophy and does it relate? We have task forces and a group of us who were interested in political parties as organizations set up the task force on what it takes to have a vibrant and effective political party world. That piece that you saw by the way, in a nonpartisan way, you see that it is not framed in potters in terms of first party to circulate. It was the Republican party of Wisconsin. They were more interested. They were more interested than any Democrats
Speaker 0 00:16:38 That's unfortunately unsurprising.
Speaker 2 00:16:41 Yeah. Well, that's the only kind of coalitions that make any sense.
Speaker 0 00:16:46 Well, I'm going to get it circulated quite a bit in the California democratic party, but it'll be among the coalition of the willing let's say, I mean, they buy it just to make a comment we've said over and over again on this podcast here in California, we now have democratic parties, super majorities in the state. And yet the policy outcomes have been disappointing. And by that, so very dry way of saying the needs of working people, of tenants, of the people who really hurting have yet to be met by legislature, because some of the substantial part of the democratic folks who get elected come from with strong corporate ties or corporate, uh, alliances. And, um, so that's like the next stage of the struggle here in the democratic party, that Dirac is a vice chair of the state and party as a non democratic structure in itself. So those are issues. So, so you, um, you must have elected committees. We do. And, and to put, uh, it was just like
Speaker 3 00:17:50 Put an asterisk on what Dick said or to make it nationally relevant. Like the democratic party of California is far more small D democratic and participatory than a lot of state parties, uh, in other parts of the country. But at the same time, given that it is so electorally successful and so rife with grassroots energy, constantly replenished with grassroots activism, that it is so command and control and centralized and, um, kind of a political in a way is problem. Like, it's, it hasn't caught up with itself in that sense, but it's, it's, uh, there are a lot more opportunities, I think for activist input in California than in other States.
Speaker 2 00:18:30 One of the things that my research group visiting the eight counties has done is we've tried to talk to state party chairs on both sides, by the way, and, and, and County party chairs on both sides. And it's just enormous variety out there. I totally, um, and, and it probably has to be to some degree, but you probably saw the piece that, uh, Stacy Abrams and, um, what's the woman's name. Yeah, we did that. They did in the times, and they make a passionate argument for, um, building and revitalizing, uh, local and state party. And, um, you know, I'm working right now as a scholar on a project comparing North Carolina and Georgia and the racial justice movements that both of them had because, you know, he had moral Mondays. You ever more on Mondays in North Carolina and North Carolina looked like it was much more promising for, uh, racial justice and democratic party power.
Speaker 2 00:19:39 And Georgia has proved to be the tortoise that overtakes or at least air. And, you know, I think part of the differences that Stacey Abrams and the groups that network of groups she put together, which I have to understand better in an organizational way, as you can imagine, that's what I'm trying to do. Um, but they focused on, on elections on building party power and, um, reforming the party itself. And I think that really made a difference. Um, it proved to be slow and steady and laid the basis for something that well, I, you know, could really save the day in terms of those victories in the Georgia Senate raisins, that those
Speaker 0 00:20:22 Georgia, our developments in Arizona, even in Texas, Wisconsin, uh, in the same period as your researchers going on are kind of examples of the fruitfulness of what we're talking about here. Uh, and, and evidence, uh, of what I think now that Jamie Harrison has been made chair of the national party, who believes very strongly. I gather in this not only organized, organized, organized, but in the 50 state, uh, uh, idea of strengthening the state parties. We interviewed on the podcast, Jane <inaudible>, who is a strong advocate of this, a leader in the DNC of this. And so one of the things I've learned from the podcast is the most important thing for the progressive efforts to change the party is this very point. This is the point. So your work so contributes powerfully to this, by the way, that little, that paper, that the rock is excited about, it concludes with an appeal to donors to join the same effort, which was a very smart thing to do because the donor class is part of the problem of, of building up the national progressive bureaucracies. Right. Rather than the kind of stuff that we're talking about here,
Speaker 2 00:21:39 Have you seen the research that my group did on, uh, comparing the Koch network democracy Alliance? Oh, no. Uh, well, yes. Yes. Well, I will send that to Derek. It's been published for a while and, um, you know, we don't just study the grassroots. We study the big guys to isle methods are different, but the only other party I would recommend that you take a look at, I think Nevada, and of course the unions are very important there. Um, we all need to understand more about what's happened in Georgia with, I think we know that some very good things have happened there. Maine take a look at Maine, the intertwining of kind of grassroots oriented face-to-face progressive politics with changes in the democratic party's capacities right down to the County level is been central to flipping that state. The state has completely flipped for now.
Speaker 2 00:22:42 And the only other thing I want to say at this point, it's not just that a civic organizing style alongside the party strengthens to the left. In some places it's going to strengthen people who are more moderate. And I think Democrats need to get over it thinking that you have to choose the opportunity structured Democrats face is not the same as the right. We have to bridge very different life worlds, very different kinds of States. We've got to find a way to not get all freaked out. If Connor lamb doesn't sign on to the full range of left progressive wishlists. Um, because we've got to have Pennsylvania along with California and Massachusetts are, we're not going to win and hold national power. Right?
Speaker 0 00:23:46 So suppose I said in sort of tandem to that, that one of the goals in reforming the party is to enable it to be a center of debate on policy issues rather than simply which side is winning. I mean the whole media presentation now is will the left push this and will win and stock the way I would frame it is what is needed in America to save the country and actually the planet. What kind of policies do we need to have? And let's, let's have real debate. The parties, you know, in Europe apparently are more of a debating framework for policy than, uh, you know, our parties have been, but wouldn't that be some way of the focus on a debate rather than simply a battle. I mean, the battles have to happen too, but the debate may be a format or framing, maybe a way of achieving. What you're talking about is recognizing, uh, where and when and what issues constitute the central ones that could be, uh, consensual or help coalitions to build. I don't know if that makes any sense, but,
Speaker 2 00:25:00 Well, I think it does. I mean, I think that we have to be careful that we don't think it's a college seminar because it isn't, uh, it's it's and, and a lot of politics is about, uh, what are the things we should address, not just, what is the policy I'm relatively optimistic right now? I mean, I think there's a lot of working out and working together. We do know from all of social science that doing things together, a common task, um, is the way you bring disparate strands together. So that's what happened. Actually. Trump has been really good at bringing, uh, the center lift together in the United States. And some people say, well, now he's gone. Will they hold together? Well, he's not gone. I mean, anybody who thinks that this, uh, prodo fascist ethno nationalism, and I say that, you know, without being insulting to the bastards people I know on the right, this is a scary, scary movement on the right, and it's going nowhere.
Speaker 2 00:26:08 And it has a lot of built in advantages in the electoral college, in the Senate. And for that matter, the house, it could easily come back to power. And if it does, I mean, my goodness. So I think people do understand that. And so if you can agree that you want to make sure you don't allow healthcare turned into a purely market thing and you want to extend coverage and access to more people. Well, you can probably come up with some compromises between them all and a strong public option in Medicaid expansion, which in fact, I think widen has done and you can get behind that and you can probably take advantage of this moment to actually put it into law. So I, I actually think that finding way to articulate what we're trying to do, talk about what we, ways we prefer to do it, and then find a way to get up both. And rather than an either roar, the media is not helpful. And, you know, just turn off MSNBC. I mean, I know the question every night, but really, I mean, they're going to portray it as Sanders versus
Speaker 3 00:27:16 Yeah. Cause that's a narrative that they latched onto and they can just paint everything with and have it sound clever.
Speaker 2 00:27:25 Isn't even very relevant. I mean, at least in my research, I didn't find much of that at all. Um, I mean, som
Speaker 3 00:27:34 There are differences, right? I mean, I think what, one of the things I like about Dick's emphasis on this, like making debate, normalizing debate more is, you know, can't, we have differences of opinion within the democratic party that are not either portrayed as good and evil battles or life or death or the soul of the democratic party, et cetera. And that's what makes, you know, that's where I really liked the work of people like Nancy Rosenblum and others who are saying like, let's not think about parties only as electoral machines as, as like strategic alliances of politicians to get votes. They are that, but they're also a participatory space and the people want to come and participate. One of the things they want to do is talk about politics, talk about policy,
Speaker 2 00:28:18 Right? They might like to have a forum where you had all different perspectives presented. Now that does mean the left Democrats have to not instantly dismiss people who take capitalism seriously as something that needs to be. I mean, I'm sure we all know this. I mean, I like to talk to people in, in, uh, sports metaphors, because as you probably know, on a big football fan and it's really, um, regulated capitalism versus unregulated capitalism, that's on the table.
Speaker 0 00:28:51 Well, uh Dirac and I, if we, uh, when we conclude the current series of our podcast on the democratic party, our next discussion for the next series will be on what is socialism anyway. Well, I mean, it's an interesting,
Speaker 2 00:29:07 Most of the people talking about it have no idea
Speaker 0 00:29:10 We, in the new left early days abandoned the term. Uh, what's the value of having it? I think it's, it's an interesting question. Anyway. Uh, I just want out of the point, I wanted to make for our, uh, our listeners, which is, uh, Dirac. I mentioned that you've written this a deep analysis very recently now on the American prospect or will be published the American prospect on the anyway it's about indivisible, which we've alluded to a deep analysis. That really is a case study of how to think about going forward in terms of, uh, building up the grassroots and the local and the, and the Federation of the local, rather than the national progressive advocacy bureaucracies that have been at the forefront of defining what the progressive side has been. And, um, they are getting responses from other people in the indivisible and alongside it and so forth.
Speaker 0 00:30:14 So they're, they're aiming at using that article as a real forum for this kind of discussion. Um, I'm finding all of this very exciting. Uh, it goes, it's a new to me, a new way of looking at all of the struggle that we're talking about, uh, that is the new way of being the creation of a party framework that can relate to the grassroots that can relate to the, uh, community-based movements that have developed intertwine. That's your term. Uh, the intertwining movement is what we're talking about here, uh, and how that's not easily defined in, in concrete terms necessarily rock. And I had a big argument with each other about this just the other day, but, uh, in California, but it's, uh, uh, it's a much more fruitful argument than some, some of the ones that we've had to live through. Uh it's uh, of course, an honor, for both of us to have the time with you that you've spent on a Sunday and, uh, we will both be joining the scholars strategy network.
Speaker 2 00:31:23 I'll send you the information about that please.
Speaker 0 00:31:25 And, um, we will be encouraging our friends and listeners to pay much more attention than they may have to, uh, this topic that we're talking about in your work and your leadership in all these matters. Do you have a final word data for America?
Speaker 2 00:31:42 You know, one of the things that's really nice about the indivisible article is that, um, we've already been contacted by sets of local groups that are discussing it and not want to talk about now when that happens. Um, and I'll try to maintain that stance when I get to rejoin to this forum that Bob is putting together, I think the scholars role, and I take my role as a scholar very seriously. I'm a ruthlessly objective researcher. Um, in case you haven't noticed, um, it's
Speaker 0 00:32:21 A frightening thing to think about, right? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:32:24 Well, you know, you can be, I think, I think Dick, you must've read max favor in graduate school
Speaker 0 00:32:33 Because
Speaker 2 00:32:33 You can be a very tough minded objective scholar. And at the same time have value commitments. And, you know, even when I'm doing my field work, I literally explain that to people left and right, that I talked to, I'd say, you know, I, I'm here to hear what you have to say and to understand it, and as active and fair away as I possibly can. And that's why I'm so grateful to you for talking with me. Um, I'm also a citizen. And when I go into the Heartland of America, I described myself as a new deal Democrat, if anybody asks, because people can relate to that, it's, it's a way of saying I'm a social Democrat, but if I don't use terms that are going to cause people to faint. So anyway, back to the point, the point is it's really, I think the role of something like this to say, well, here are some of the considerations you want to think about.
Speaker 2 00:33:32 And if you would like to find a way to build middle tiers, that kind of bridge between the necessary national actors on the necessary local act, then here are some ways to think about doing it that are not just romantic reinventions of the 19th century, but actually speak to our current conditions. And excellent. I find that people will come up with their own ideas and, uh, often quite creatively. So I'm optimistic about that. I, I, I wish the young leaders of indivisible would engage the discussion, the national leaders, and it is discouraging to me that they do not want to. But, um, so what it'll go on anyway, I mean, that's, and that to me is a really great place to end too, because the empiricism of your work, I, I don't want to get stuck in the rabbit hole about objectivity, but you know, the fact that you go out and do this, like rigorous learning about what's actually happening and talking to people is so important. And I think one of the discoveries you've made is how much creativity and democracy and innovation goes on among grassroots activists. And I think we should all be learning from it rather than ignore it.
Speaker 0 00:34:43 Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you. Take care. Thanks so much. I get there and be well you'd. Well folks, thanks for listening to talking strategy, making history. We'd love to have your comments. We'd love to have your support. Go to patrion.com/tsm H if you want to interact with us and to give us a token contribution to keep us going and thanks to the para whole, who's our Intrepid producer and Riley brim ser our excellent engineer and editor. See you next time. It's been a long time coming in, but I know Shane's gone. Oh, yes.
