Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:04 And if the freedom democratic party,
Speaker 1 00:00:11 I am confident that the democratic party will reunite on the basis of democratic principles and that together we will March towards a democratic fixed rate in 1980.
Speaker 2 00:00:23 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, a democratic party with a small D
Speaker 0 00:00:36 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 thing.
Speaker 3 00:00:51 Welcome to talking strategy, making history
Speaker 4 00:00:56 I'm Dick flux activist,
Speaker 3 00:00:59 Retired professor of sociology, and a really,
Speaker 5 00:01:04 And I'm, Dirac Allera more 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. Okay. Friends, and welcome to the final episode of season one of talking strategy, making history, uh, we promised at the start of this, uh, journey into the weeds of the democratic party and progressive strategy around the democratic party that we'd help fill in some of the blanks in the, the underpants gnome problem facing Progressive's thinking about the party and thinking about American politics that we somehow know that we should be doing something in the democratic party and then blah, blah, blah, blah. It's something, something, something. And then we get, you know, social democracy or, uh, progressive happiness or whatever.
Speaker 5 00:02:15 We're calling a luxury fully automated gay space, communism these days. And what we've tried to do is talk to folks out in the field to scholars, to, uh, activists and we each other, uh, between, uh, Dick and I, and, and, and try to fill in those gaps, um, about what's actually happening out there on the ground. What's happened historically. And, uh, in this episode, we want to try to condense all of that together and throw out some ideas about what the underpants gnomes could be getting up to, to move the democratic party in a progressive direction. Is that right? Dick that's
Speaker 3 00:02:54 Right. And, uh, you know, I guess what we've been struggling with, uh, and, and learning lot. I mean, I have to say that I don't know about anyone who's listening or you, but far as I'm concerned, I've learned an enormous amount about that. Very question of how do we get from here to there and, and the, there, you know, I've been using the term w what's our vision of the democratic party, but the term I've been using is the people's party is what we wanted to create. I don't know if that, I, I noticed you were adopting it too, so I thought it was possibly correct.
Speaker 5 00:03:30 Yeah. Um, exactly. That's a slogan I've used as a candidate inside the democratic party for offices, um, as a party activist and an officer myself, I think it's, I think it's a good one. I think it's a good goal. And, and what I like about it is that, uh, in saying that something's the people's party, it, it implies two things. It implies that the politics of the party would put regular folks first working families first, um, the great masses of people and their interests before those of corporations or other elites, but also that kind of possessive of saying it's a people's party would imply that regular people would have power in it power to direct it as an institution. Um, and I think, yeah, so I think it's, that's as good as any I've heard about or read about in the law of the last century and trend to encapsulate what we'd like out of the democratic party. Yeah. And I like
Speaker 3 00:04:26 It better than left-wing or, you know, using those kinds of, uh, ideological labels, it's neither inspiring or clarifying. Um, that's one thing I kind of been feeling all along. So, uh, what are the paths that we have, I think heard about and learned about as we've gone through this toward, uh, moving the party in that direction of being a party for the people and a party of the people of people's party. But one thing that surprised me as very important as a key to strategy is that the democratic party should really be an organization of substance in all 50 states. And that, that was something that, uh, Howard Dean was advocating years ago when he made that run for president. And yet the party leadership or bureaucracy basically rejected that, um, as a, as a central priority. Um, yeah, we've heard from people like, uh, Jane club in Nebraska, uh, and others that we've talked to, that this is a key, not just to strengthening the democratic party, but to actually moving it in the direction of, uh, being a genuine party of the people.
Speaker 3 00:05:56 Because part of the idea of strengthening I gathered was that the party would then have the capacity in each state to connect with people at the grassroots and the assumption that, uh, I think she makes and that, uh, I certainly am willing to endorse Howard Dean was recommending that the party organized in all 50 states. And I think my impression is, uh, that the consultant types who dominated the party strategy at that time said, oh, there is no point in spending resources on these very strongly Republican red state kind of places. That's right. And, um, what they were forgetting, uh, is the fact that many of those states were historically had elected populist figures to Senate and other, um, offices. Uh, there's a long history of that. And I'm thinking of people like, oh, Idaho, which is about as red a state, as you can find elected Frank Church to the Senate, he was a Tribune of, of progressive values when he was in the Senate or Mike Mansfield of, of Montana. Um, I'm just randomly thinking of, of names like that. Um, and I think every single red state in the north, in the west and Midwest, uh, certainly has some of that, that history. I think even now there are examples of people in the Senate from some of those states who are continuing that tradition.
Speaker 5 00:07:36 I don't know about it in the Senate, it's getting harder and harder to have that kind of political profile in the Senate, um, ever or really anywhere, um, you know, because of how successful the right has been in organizing, you know, top to bottom in rural, in states with a lot of rural population. And so you're right. That there were certainly never going to be able to push back on that if we're not actively engaging in those communities.
Speaker 3 00:08:07 Yeah. So that's, that's Jane club's kind of point, which is got to organize at the grassroots, uh, in a, in a progressive populist fashion. And, uh, you know, sometimes you'll hear a consultant types again or pundits say, oh, the party won't appeal to people in the red states because it's too, too far to the left. And yet I think our idea when we talked to her and things she's she's advocated is the idea that populous program, as well as a populist vocabulary, is what will perhaps enable the party to connect with ordinary folks, working class folks in those rural people, uh, in those communities, in those states. Um, and the idea is that you're going to convert Republican Trumpists, but that there's a working class population that historically many of them have voted Democrat or their ancestors have, and maybe that's one basis to appeal to them. But of course it, isn't just the past, it's the possibility of presenting, uh, policy ideas and directions that actually will connect with what people need in those states. But you can't do that without direct organizing at the grassroots.
Speaker 5 00:09:36 That's right. Yeah. And I think that one thing that you highlighted that is kind of the important takeaway for me, the stakes here for party building, for creating a party, that's a people's party, rather than just a kind of franchise company, that if you get the party nomination, your consultants come in and you, you get to operate under the logo and the branding of the democratic party. That's, that's the model of the democratic party over the last 30 years or so, especially at the national level, that it's not an organization with a grassroots, uh, of activists that are committed to doing work in between elections. It's not a place where policy and movement ideas are, are generated. It's a, uh, an umbrella and a, and a brand, um, that you get to capture. Um, if you organize well enough at the elite level, and that we'll spend money strategically, you know, in order to protect incumbents and pick up seats and legislatures at its best, but nothing else. And so to me, uh, you know, the, as a, as a first, uh, sort of set of principles to agree on for making the democratic party at people's party, it has to be that it's not just that widdled down husk of a, of an organization. That's just, uh, a stamp to put on an electoral operation every four years only where it's viable.
Speaker 3 00:11:13 And she, you know, informed us that the budgets that a party like her party in Nebraska gets so little resources from the national party, uh, that she had, she didn't even get paid if she's full, she's a full-time party chair in Nebraska. So is there good news, uh, as we did this podcast, there was a turnover of leadership and the da and the democratic national committee. The new chair is someone that she on this podcast advocated for Jamie Harrison. And he seems to share very much the same perspective that people like her or are advocating. Is that your understanding,
Speaker 5 00:11:56 I think, shares part of it and, and is an ally in the sense of understanding that you've got to be putting resources out there, counter cyclical, so to speak, you know, Harrison is someone who, who watched with interest, the situation in Georgia where, um, you know, consistent, uh, engagement with voters paid off, um, to, to make, uh, new areas, new geographical areas, competitive for the party that weren't before. And he's, he's, you know, interested in doing the kind of, uh, investments I think, nationwide, uh, to make that possible at the same time though. I mean, we, we just have to be Frank about what we're, we're talking about. Those folks who believe in a 50 state strategy still tend to see party organizations as mainly a framework to move resources through, to move money through, to, to hire people into, for, uh, campaign purposes, not as a political home.
Speaker 5 00:13:02 So if we were going to, or, or a year round organization with an agenda, and that's an important distinction because, you know, while Jane would talk about, um, you know, Nebraska and the, and the, just absolutely just incredibly unbelievably small amounts of resources that they're dealing with there as a state party, um, you know, even in California, which is, uh, a nation unto itself, the over 30 million people. And, uh, you know, I think 11 or so million registered Democrats, uh, even in California, the party staff is skeletal is very small. Um, only one of the officer position statewide elected officer positions is paid. Um, it's still very, very volunteeristic. And, um, and, uh, and in terms of the resources that are spent by the democratic party, whether at the local level in a county or, uh, in state elections is just a tiny percentage of the amount of money spent in politics. And that's, uh, that's the structural part of this that I think progressives have a stake in trying to change more of politics should happen in organizations, in things that are participatory and less of it funneled through elites directly to candidates. And that's about strengthening the party and expanding the role that the party actually plays in electoral politics. I think the left has stakes in doing that. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:14:36 And, and it's not just a leads channeling to candidates. It's this class of political consultants, uh, the technologists of campaigning who, uh, we didn't really explore that topic in detail in season, but, uh, there's a way in which that class of people runs against the kind of vision that we're talking about, uh, the party becoming or being well, the second thing that, um, uh, I learned a lot about, and, um, that we heard a lot about is the growth over the last few years of political engagement at the grassroots. And we had the, uh, pleasure really of interviewing feta, scotch poll, leading political sociologist. Uh, who's done a lot of pretty amazing, I think, um, field research on that topic. And also people like Jonathan Smucker out there and a rust belt area of Pennsylvania working at the grassroots, uh, as examples of this very widespread and diverse development.
Speaker 3 00:15:54 And you might trace some of the impetus to this with the election of Trump, the women's March, right after his inauguration was a tremendous spur. One gets the feeling to a particularly women's civic engagement, the me too movement, one of the, uh, maybe offspring of that development black lives matter and all that. It has spawned at the grassroots and then the election of, uh, of Trump creating, uh, national networks like indivisible, which really seemed to have brought into active political, uh, activism, you know, people, I hadn't really been doing that before. Um, and the thing about these, these are well-known examples, but, but what, uh, what, uh, I learned about was that below that radar is a kind of deep organizing process. That's been going on Jonathan, Smucker's just one case of many, many people doing variations on this kind of work. And what makes that particularly different from the past that those, that whole, uh, effort I think is that it's tied to electoral strategy.
Speaker 3 00:17:15 I mean, I'm used to community organizing going back to the sixties. Uh, I was somewhat involved friends of mine, much more involved there wasn't much of an electoral thrust to a lot of what people were doing, uh, beginning in those days, the, the solid Linsky type organizing the community union type organizing. Um, sometimes there was an electoral outcomes, but the strategies of organizing were not so electoral. Well, this has changed. I think that's part of what I think I've, I've been hearing during the weeks and months that we've been doing this, this, uh, this podcast, uh, and that the strategies of grassroots organizing that used to be elected were key to electoral, namely getting out the vote at election time. Instead of that, we're seeing all of this work being called deep canvassing, relational organizing day-to-day presence of organizers, uh, in the neighborhoods, in the community level canvassing, uh, to hear what people have to say, not just to bring them to the polls. You think that's a fair statement about what's happening? Yeah,
Speaker 5 00:18:33 I'm not, I guess the, the movement sociologist in me would, what would want to be really careful about the thinking about the cause and effect or the timelines there? Because my sense is that people that have been doing community organizing for many years have been moving towards the electoral arena. That, and certainly well before Trump, and then the other thing that we've seen, at least since yeah, Howard Dean's run for the presidency is that every time there, when we have a Republican president, then a democratic presidential campaigns become social movement, like because there's there's movement like activity that happens around them. Um, and, and the model has been a much more distributed kind of, uh, voter engagement practices and so forth. So again, at least going back to Howard Dean, if you were an activist who was pissed off about the Republican president and a presidential candidate came on television, who inspired you, you could go on the internet and go instantly, go meet other people who had similar interests, and you could go and start talking to voters.
Speaker 5 00:19:50 And we we've seen that. Um, we saw that with the Obama campaign, we saw that with the Bernie Sanders campaign and it's become even kind of the go-to model, you know, that far, far less exciting and more kind of establishment, he candidates try to replicate my point being just that, what I still see as missing is the translation of, of all of that kind of activity into something directed towards transforming, utilizing, uh, the democratic party as a set of institutions. Um, what they've all done and kind of continue to do all the way through to indivisible is kind of go out and do a lot of, uh, reel of wheel reinvention and kind of redoing things that had fallen by the wayside even just a couple of years ago, um, and so forth. So, and, and, and talking that, you know, hearing from professor scotch, Paul, and, and from Jonathan Smucker really sort of reinforced that lesson to me, that it's still kind of a mess out there, um, in terms of people thinking about the democratic party strategically. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:21:04 And that's part of what we've also learned. Um, but, uh, some of the results though of this phase that, that, uh, we're referring to of, of grassroots organizing with a strong electoral purpose, you know, is, is evidenced in, in certainly in what happened in Georgia. Um, and that, of course, you're right, Stacy Abrams efforts to, to create a grassroots, uh, powerful electoral thrust in that state, predates Trump being elected. Um, and, uh, but it's, it's certainly an inspiration for him to some extent maybe model for, uh, what's been going on. So we have in other states, like with similar beginnings of results in Arizona, or in Pennsylvania, where Smucker is, or in a, you know, in a number of places where, um, it's not only that there's an electoral strategy, but there's actually a new types of candidates being elected, new leaderships emerging. And, uh, it's true.
Speaker 3 00:22:15 What you're saying in general, that community organizers for years have had some hope electorally. I guess what I'm feeling is that what's different may even be qualitatively different is that's not just going to be a by-product of what they're doing. It's actually central set of goals is to, is to, uh, create new candidacies, new, new, uh, new engagement in the electoral process. So in terms of what you were saying about the mess, um, and it's a creative mess, maybe you'll agree with that, but it's, it's definitely a mess it's, uh, is, uh, the way scotch Paul describes it is the complex intertwining between these community-based groups that are autonomous and the party itself. And I don't think she defines what intertwining means because you can't define it in any single way. Uh, it's just a very shorthand phrase for the fact that there's relationships, but they're not well formalized. They're not necessarily, um, structured in the same way in every place, right. There's tensions within these as well as collaborative.
Speaker 5 00:23:34 But see, I think that's the, that's the problem that w w we should be talking about what those tensions are, and, and, and yes, it's absolutely true that electoral law is different from state to state and therefore the precise nature of the relationships between a community organization, a candidate, a political party pack, and a trade union pack are all going, are going to be different from state to state. But they're also very similar from state to state in terms of the larger political dynamics. And as I said before, sort of the stakes, and, and let me be clear that it's like, this is not, I don't mean to blame grassroots activists, many of whom are new to politics for not spontaneously generating the strategic key to unlocking progressive power in America. Um, you know, th this is a real failure of leadership on the part of people in the democratic party, in the, uh, the independent organizations that prop up the democratic party, like the labor movement that kind of everyone lays the lead thinks of the democratic party as yeah.
Speaker 5 00:24:43 A set of bank accounts and instruments to, uh, you know, do campaigning through. And again, not as an organization that people belong to and try to affect change in their community through. And this is a failure of imagination that comes from the elites in the party, but it's also there in the grassroots and among very smart political actors and, and, and where the rubber really meets the road is that so often when there's a strategic or a choice to be made about, should we form an organization that's affiliated to the democratic party, for example, and, uh, vet and recruit and, and, and campaign for activists as some kind of democratic party affiliated body, or should we call ourselves United Progressive's for good things and kittens like the, the impulse is always to be like, let's be United Progressive's for kittens. And I do think that that is a, because we're not very well educated about what that intertwining means and what you really give up, or don't give up by being affiliated to a party and people overthink it.
Speaker 5 00:25:55 And also just a cultural thing in the United States about, you know, of anti partisanship and that sort of fetish of independence, but all of those things in my mind, conspire to us, even our smartest, uh, analysis of what's going on on the ground, we're just keep missing the forest for the trees. I mean, to summarize it, you know, as you know, Dick, because you supervise my, my dissertation that I did all the day, it was like a whole shelf of books. That's about insurgencies of Democrats going back to really the post-war period. And middle-class folks started to join and get involved in the democratic party and were motivated by issues, civil rights and the environment, and, um, you know, uh, neighborhood preservation, all of these things, uh, that got people engaged and, and, and no longer were folks looking for jobs through patronage machine, um, or trying to keep black people from voting as the democratic party was the instrument of in the south for so long.
Speaker 5 00:26:58 But ever since then, you know, the, whether it's, it's, you know, sixties, new politics folks, or, um, eighties folks, uh, engaged around feminism and, you know, so-called identity politics all the way up to the Berniecrats who like crashed the gates, um, starting in 2016, the democratic party, the party hosts these insurgencies, and then everybody kind of like runs off and does everything except stay and change the democratic party. Um, and so, you know, every exciting presidential campaign yields, five new, you know, non-profit organizations out there, you know, doing things and, and raising money and so forth. And meanwhile, that, that work of getting involved in the, the, the, the mess of the intertwined institutions, uh, continues to go undone. Yeah. But
Speaker 3 00:27:56 Maybe what's meeting what would be helpful. And we only scratch the surface in our, our effort on this podcast. I think of, of what might be needed is to give people a sense of what it would look like to, to actually intertwine in a more deliberate fashion in relation to the party. Because what you've just been saying really does summarize a lot of the long history, uh, of, uh, social movements and progressive minded people, socialist, leftist, and this party, sometimes people have made decisions coming out of the movements to be active in the party as such, uh, but often it's more like we have to put pressure on the party regulars and the politicians. We have to lend our support to those candidates that speak for us that, that, uh, you know, that speak our language. But, uh, there's still that arms length, uh, relationship usually, uh, in, in that dynamic, but there something else that's been happening and it relates back to, uh, that past, but also to the more recent past and to the Sanders effort and to some of the, uh, base of support for, for Elizabeth Warren too, I guess, is that those electoral efforts that have been undertaken by democratic socialists of America, DSA by groups, new groups, like the justice Democrats, sunrise, uh, the working families party in certain areas, their efforts, as I understand it, um, have been focused typically on recruiting candidates to challenge, uh, trench politicians, not just endorsing preferred professional politicians, but actually creating new, new candidacies, new pipelines for candidacies in primary elections.
Speaker 3 00:30:04 And of course, AOC, she is the prime model of, of a successful example, but there are quite a few others on many levels of government now, uh, who have emerged. And, um, not only have they elected committed progressives in many of these cases to the Congress and to state legislature and to a local office, but the leadership, the people who are running are, uh, people of color, uh, women of color, other underrepresented groups, um, transsexual people, uh, people, uh, who, uh, very underrepresented historically are now being elected to significant offices through this strategy of shorthand word for it as primary being. Um, and so that's not news that we've created. That's something we've observed of course, on the podcast, but it's something that's been covered a lot in, in the media. Okay. Friends. This is a good moment to take a break from the conversation between myself and Siracha. This is a conversation where we're trying to summarize some of the takeaways from season one of talking strategy, making history and the big theme. How can we make the democratic party a people's party?
