Planting Liberally

Tonight I attended an Organizing for America phonebank. Together with other Massachusetts volunteers, I called voters in Maine to encourage them to call Senators Snowe and Collins and ask them to vote for a public option.

The event had all the trappings of a election-focused phonebank, except that our end goal was a bit different, and our failure rate (measured in refusals, and judging only from my own limited experience) was a bit higher. As I dialed, it occurred to me that effectively, we were learning to do something that the progressive movement knows very little about - lobbying Congress via mass mobilization. I thought I'd put down some notes about the lessons that I hope we'll learn from this effort, and my long-term view for this new style of governance.

Prologue - Progressive electoral campaigns

With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can look back at 2003 - 2008 as a period when the progressive movement learned to do something that no one had ever done before - create a modern, distributed, broad-based, successful electoral campaign infrastructure. The campaign machinery that progressives developed in that period was not the same media-obsessed, telegenic campaign of the Clinton years; nor was it only the product of offline, on-the-ground machine-based organizing that elected Democrats from Roosevelt through Johnson. Instead, progressive electoral campaigns in this era blended together offline organizing, broadcast media, and online organizing and activism.

But as distinctive as the role of online organizing was in progressive electoral campaigns, I think it was overshadowed by the broad-based, one-on-one, ground-game approach of those campaigns, which online organizing enabled. The ground game is nothing new in campaigning, but the degree of stranger-to-stranger contact in this wave of campaigns was unprecedented. Calling strangers on the phone, driving across state borders to knock on doors in a foreign neighborhood, and going to a house party without a familiar face in the crowd were not rare experiences for a lot of progressives. To be sure, there is a lot to criticize in some of these tactics, and friend-to-friend contact is far superior in many cases, but I think this brazen notion that a progressive campaign could just attempt to contact everyone was the defining characteristic of progressive campaigns.

Along the way, the progressive movement learned a lot about how to conduct such a campaign, and a lot of new tools and tactics were developed and perfected. The online house party, friend-to-friend fundraising, and modern voter file database systems were among the most important advances in this style of campaigning.

Learning How to Lobby

Now that we have consolidated power at the federal level, it's time to govern. The lion's share of governance work is lobbying Congress, but we have, essentially, no experience whatsoever in how to do that.

Allow me to qualify that. We have no experience whatsoever in lobbying Congress, from a position of strength, with the benefit of online organizing. Since 2000, our lobbying position has essentially been a defensive crouch, and the years 1995 - 2000 weren't all that hot either. The last time Democrats held so much power at the federal level, Google did not exist and the White House made a splash by giving President Clinton an email address.

Lobbying Congress from a position of strenght means we need to encourage Senators to vote for something, not against something. Lobbying with the benefit of online organizing means that we have the capability to include vast numbers of people in the lobbying process, in a way that is entirely unprecedented. Just as progressives learned how to massively expand the battleground and to engage lots and lots of people in an electoral campaign using web-based technology, I think progressives need to learn how to massively expand the conversation around important pieces of legislation, and to engage lots and lots of people in the effort to lobby Congress.

To be sure, progressives have lobbied Congress in the past. But to date, these efforts have largely been focused on the small lobbying effort that progressive interest groups can afford, and the public pressure we can bring to bear in the media and with rallies. We are, essentially, lobbying Congress like it's 1999.

There have been some very tentative steps taken towards incorporating online activism into lobbying efforts. Some of these, like the endless petition emails, are not particulalry inspiring or effective. Some of the most recent steps are, I think, extremely exciting and signs that we are slowly but surely learning how to lobby in an entirely different way. I'll mention them further on.

I think we are headed towards a new kind of lobbying effort, whose basic approach is to perpetually engage as many people as possible in making their views on important legislation heard, using all the traditional means of contacting Congress - office visits, phone calls, letters, rallies, letter-to-the-editor campaigns, and so on. And to make that effort possible, we will need to learn a few important lessons.

Lobbying vs. Electioneering

Deval Patrick first started talking about converting his volunteer corps into a citizen-lobbyist corps in late 2005. Unfortunately, that effort turned out to be a flop. I don't want to delve into Massachusetts politics circa 2006, but suffice it to say that lobbying is very different than electioneering, and I don't think Patrick or his organization gave enough thought and deference to that problem.

From a mobilization point of view, running an electoral campaign is relatively straightforward. There's a clear objective (get more votes than the opposition); the tactics are well-known and performance is readily tracked (make phone calls, knock on doors); there is a clear deadline; and for high-profile campaigns, there is a built-in supply of volunteers, and, in many cases, there's a physical location where volunteers can actually show up and work. That's not to say that running a campaign is easy, but the structure of an election makes mass mobilization relatively simple.

By contrast, lobbying is devilishly tricky. The substance of the bill is constantly changing; there are a lot of hurdles, in the form of committee and cloture votes, and therefore many objectives; the tactics are rather muddled (even calling a Congressional office can be rather intimidating); the deadline is anything but clear, as floor votes can be delayed for any number of reasons; the media profile of a legislative item is lower than that of an electoral campaign; and there is usually no physical location where supporters of a bill can gather to support it.

What's more, the lobbying strategy is fluid and very tricky to pin down. In an election, the strategy is simple: get a lot of votes. But in a lobbying effort, the strategy is not at all obvious: should we try to persuade Republican senators to switch, as OFA is doing? Or should we try to create a Progressive Block in the Senate?

What we're learning

Luckily, I think we are already learning to adapt to this new terrain.

To begin with, we've learnt that a broad-based progressive lobbying campaign needs a clear goal, or a "line in the sand" beyond which compromise is not acceptable. Moreover, this line in the sand must be clearly grounded in progressive principles, in order to motivate the progressive base to get behind that goal. Because legislative battles have a lower media profile than elections, and because most people are not used to the concept of being called in order to support a piece of legislation, and because it's possible to water down a bill and kill it with a thousand paper cuts, the elevator speech for a piece of legislation is vital. We need to be able to explain to prospective supporters what we want and why we want it, and to have that explanation make perfect sense, in something like thirty seconds.

With regards to health care, we have done a reasonably good job, although improvements are possible. Our line in the sand is the public option, and there is impressive unanimity across progressive groups about that goal, but we could improve our communication about it. To begin with, "public option" is not self-explanatory; it only makes sense to someone who has been following the debate closely. Moreover, the reason we support it is muddled. The script I received tonight from Organizing for America, although not without its merits, claimed that we want a public option in order to provide "competition for the traditional health insurance companies". That's classic conservative framing, and it's not at all inspiring or easy to defend. (Who cares about competition when you just lost your COBRA, or you have a relative in intensive care and have no idea how you'll pay for it?) What we are really talking about is a public health insurance plan, and we want it because it will allow anyone to buy quality, affordable health insurance.

Another lesson learned is that the numbers we are shooting in a lobbying campaign are different than those we need for an electoral campaign. Success in federal elections is measured in the millions of votes. Success in a lobbying campaign is measured in the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of phone calls. Consequently, we probably do not need the same scale of stranger-to-stranger contact that we need in an electoral campaign; a lobbying campaign should start as a base mobilization exercise, garnering phone calls from core progressive supporters and all of their friends and relatives.

On the flip side, the universe for a lobbying campaign is much broader. The only thing required to lobby Congress is a phone line, and preferably an address in the representative's district or senator's state. There is no voter registration deadline or age limit. That means that stranger-to-stranger contact doesn't need to proceed from voterfiles. Instead, it can use targeted commercial mailing lists, or relevant government databases. For example, it might be an interesting exercise to call through the business owners listed in an incorporation list retrieved from a secretary of state's office, in order to get support from small business owners. (Although actually, incorporation lists are rather over-used; other lists might yield better results.) For similar reasons, there are limitless possibilities in online outreach. For example, it wouldn't be too difficult for HCAN to craft a Google Adwords campaign targeted at people looking for information about health insurance plans online, and to encourage those people to call their senator to support a simpler approach to insurance.

Finally, lobbying is, in some ways, a considerably more tangible and concrete effort. An election is a mashup of a cult of personality and a six-degrees-of-separation story about progress ("if you elect me, and we keep our majority, and the speaker allows the bill to come to a vote, and we can convince the Senate to pass the bill, and we get it out of conference...."). But a piece of legislation can have immediate and dramatic effects on someone's life, and the storyline is much simpler and more direct. Such a storyline can become the exposition that comes after the elevator speech for a bill.

The cutting edge

Although we are still taking baby steps in our attempt to facilitate broad-based citizen lobbying, I think there are some very exciting new tools which will be key in making this effort possible:

 

• Advomatic's Click to Call tool, which allows organizations to deploy an easy-to-use "call your senator" web-based widget on their website. The tool allows organizations to track calls, and doesn't require users to look up phone numbers or even make a phone call (Advomatic calls you, and then connects you.) I've used HCAN's Click to Call widget, and it is very, very slick.
• Crowdsourced public whip-counting, like Stand with Dr Dean. The technology behind this application is very simple - it could easily have been written during Dean's presidential campaign - but crowdsourced whip-counting is a great idea which allows the progressive base to lobby while doing something that's actually very important to the overall effort.
• FriendRoots is a new Facebook app developed by Max Gottlieb and announced on Dailykos a few days ago. The application allows you to locate Facebook friends who are constituents of (or whose home towns are represented by) swing senators on ACES and the health care bill, and to email those friends to ask them to email their senators about ACES and the health care bill.
• Tweet Your Senator is an interesting mashup just released by OFA; the idea is to send your senator a tweet about health care reform, and there's a tiny bit of magic which uses your zip code to look up your senator's Twitter username. This kind of tool, together with other Twitter-petition applications, has good promise for making the petition process a bit more public and viral.

The Future of Lobbying

Broad-based participatory lobbying is not easy to do, but I am actually very excited about it. For all the difficulties and challenges posed by this kind of work, it offers us a chance to really govern together, in a manner that is much more interesting than broad-based participatory electioneering. Although I didn't have a lot of success on the phones, some of my fellow callers were doing pretty well, and having some very interesting and valuable conversations with voters.

For the past few months I've watched the health care and energy bill debates with horror, partially because the degree to which Congress is for sale has been so readily apparent, and partially because the conversation has been so frustratingly remote, focused as it is on Washington.  For a long while it seems that there was really very little that could be done, and that we would have to sit back and watch as the lobbyists had a field day.

While I don't think that broad-based lobbying is the silver bullet that will stop corruption dead in its tracks, I do think it is a promising new approach to legislative battles.  And by engaging us in conversation about live, ongoing, tangible policy issues with our neighbors and friends, I think it brings us a little closer to the whole point of self-governance.

As the recession deepened over the last few months, one thing I've worried about (among plenty of other things) is the toll that it would take on the progressive movement.  It's no secret that the movement runs on a shoe-string; a single hacker attack is enough to take out a pretty significant chunk of the infrastructure running the progressive blogosphere.  It seems inevitable that a wallet-emptying recession will slowly drain the spending ability of progressives, and thereby drag down our nascent institutions.

The key weakness within the progressive movement's business plan (forgetting, for a moment, that the progressive movement isn't a single, cohesive organization, and that many organizations within the movement don't have anything like a business plan in any case), is that a large part of our revenue relies on donations.  In a recession, voluntary donations are the easiest things to cut from a household budget.  A further weakness is the massive amount of money that leaves the progressive ecosystem.  In five years, ActBlue has raised $88 million; some of that has gone to necessary expenses in progressive campaigns and is money well-spent, although no doubt a significant part of that money ends up in the pockets of anti-progressive political consultants.  And some of that money does return to the progressive ecosystem, in the form of advertisements in progressive blogs, for example.  But on the whole, the progressive blogosphere leaks donations like a sieve, meaning that even the flush years don't leave us with a lot left over for recessions.

Fortunately, I believe it is possible to address these weaknesses, and to help keep the lights on during the recession.  Conceptually, it's fairly simple: diversify our business plan beyond donations, and design mechanisms to keep recycle more money back through the progressive ecosystem.  The particulars are a bit more tricky, but below I'll outline a few possibilities for implementing these high-level solutions.  Other ideas are certainly welcome; feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Organized affiliate codes for progressive products

Many progressive blogs, and some organizations, already make money from affiliate marketing programs; probably the most well-known program along these lines is the Amazon Associates program.  Affiliate marketing programs like these generally fail to raise a lot of money for any one organization, because they don't generate a lot of sales.  At the same time, the money from sales usually touches only one, or sometimes two, progressive entities along the way - the author of a progressive book, and sometimes, a progressive publisher like Chelsea Green or Ig Publishing.  The retailer (Amazon, typically) is not usually a progressive organization.

If you think of a progressive book sale in terms of a series of monetary exchanges resulting in a customer getting a book, with each exchange yielding profit for the vendor, then the typical progressive affiliate book sale only yields a small bonus to the progressive blogger, and a fraction of royalty sales to the progressive author.  The profits paid to the retailer, the publisher, and the shipping company are all, usually, lost to the progressive ecosystem.  (There are, of course, exceptions: the sale of a Chelsea Green book through Powell's, with delivery handled by UPS or the Postal Service, supports progressive organizations and unionized organizations at almost every step of the way.)

There's a lot of value being left on the table here, and there are many lost opportunities to sell progressive products and support progressive companies.  There are a wide variety of products made by progressive organizations: progressive books, CDs, magazine subscriptions, and movies; Credo mobile service and Working Assets credit cards; and a virtually limitless number of green products.  Heck, you can even create a neighborhood group to buy solar panels in bulk.

There is, I think, ample opportunity for progressive organizations, particularly bloggers and local organizations, to focus a bit more deeply on affiliate sales of these kinds of products.  Some of these products are potentially high-margin, and some of them (like solar panels and energy-efficient light bulbs) could even be net profitable for their consumers.  All of them would help keep more money in the progressive ecosystem, as they would channel more money towards progressive companies.  The reason this opportunity is largely unexploited, I think, is that it's a pain in the neck for companies to maintain affiliate programs, and that it's a pain in the neck for bloggers and local organizations to maintain a dozen different affiliate program memberships.

A well-organized general-purpose affiliate program for progressive products and services could overcome this hurdle.  Such an affiliate program would need to herd cats, to some degree, among progressive companies, and convince them to fit their affiliate programs into a standard one-size-fits-all shape, or to begin to offer affiliate programs in the first place.  It would also face the hurdle of Amazon's entrenched position.  And, it would need to offer a flexible API and embeddable widget architecture, to allow progressive organizations of all shapes and sizes to use the program.

But the benefits of such a program could be significant.  It could boost demand for progressive companies; provide much-needed revenue for bloggers and local organizations; and, in some cases, help progressive consumers save money by becoming more energy efficient.

Green businesses embedded in progressive organizations

Among other things, the stimulus bill included about $5 billion for weatherization efforts for "modest-income homes", according to the summary produced by Nancy Pelosi's office.  That's a massive increase over the previous year's allocation of about $272 million; because the money has to be spent in 18 months, actually spending the money may be a bit of a challenge.  There may not be enough existing weatherization capacity, meaning that there are opportunities to create new weatherization companies.

As Leah Edwards has written, non-profit ownership is one way to bootstrap a small business; there may be some cases in which owning and operating a small business is a logical step for a progressive non-profit.  Weatherization consulting and implementation is one industry where those opportunities are not just available and lucrative, but a good fit for a mission-driven organization.

In particular, I'm thinking of progressive churches, many of which are already active in environmental action and social justice, and have a deep well of talent to draw upon from their membership.  While operating a business is a pretty hefty endeavor, a lot of churches already run small-scale social service agencies - part-time soup kitchens, homeless shelters, etc. - out of their premises.  Why not extend that social justice work while making a profit, too?  On top of the fact that operating a weatherization business could be a meaningful act of bearing witness to core convictions on respect for the natural world and alleviating suffering, such an endeavor could help boost membership (by extending the church's voice into the community) and donations (by keeping church members employed).

Weatherization operations won't be a good fit for many progressive churches, and will certainly not be a good fit for smaller progressive organizations or blogs.  But it's only one kind of opportunity.  The greening of the economy in general, and the signing of the stimulus bill in particular, means that there are now a lot of opportunities to save money through environmental action - and that translates into profitable opportunities for progressive organizations.

Microinvesting and microlending

The progressive movement has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it can raise huge amounts of money with small dollars.  For the most part, as I mentioned above, that money goes to Democratic candidates, and it doesn't return to the progressive ecosystem.  There's no reason that we have to organize our donations this way.  There are ample opportunities to give money to socially beneficial endeavors and in some cases, it's possible to get that money back - even with a good return on investment.

Microlending has become an increasingly popular strategy for alleviating poverty over the past 25 years or so.  Grameen Bank, one of the most well-known microlending banks in the world was founded in 1983, and since then, other organizations have joined the bandwagon.  The idea is to provide impoverished people with small loans which can be used to launch very small business endeavors, which can, in turn, build wealth that helps the entrepreneur rise out of poverty.

There are numerous ways to get involved with microlending online; Kiva is probably the most well-known.  Kiva's lending process is geared towards individuals, but the process could, in principle, be applied to small progressive groups and networks of progressive blog readers.  Earlier this month, Kiva released the Kiva API; while the API doesn't seem to make it possible to group together bundles of loans, Kiva's developer wiki encourages developers to create social applications around lending activity, so it's not hard to imagine that an application along these lines might emerge from their network.  While progressive group microlending would not really make progressives much richer, it would at least cycle money back to the progressive ecosystem, giving lenders a chance to recover their initial loans and thereby seal up some of the leaks within our donor network.

Related to microlending, but not nearly as mature, is the notion of microinvesting: gathering together large pools of individual investors in order to purchase equity in promising companies, preferably with an environmentally or socially responsible flavor.  That is the notion behind GreenFund, a project of the for-profit activism company Virgance.  Due to SEC regulations, it's not particularly easy to create a microinvesting project, but Virgance appears to have made some progress on the idea (although they're not releasing many details, won't commit to any launch date beyond "a while" on their website.)  If that fund does take shape, then it could become possible for progressive groups to organize micro-investing in green companies, and earn new revenues from dividends or equity sales.

What a progressive economy might look like

The ideas I've posted here are meant, for the most part, to prod progressive organizations to think a bit more creatively about their business plan, and to identify financing mechanisms that extend beyond donations.  The list I've posted here is no doubt incomplete, and I hope we get some additional creative thoughts in the comments.

More broadly, these ideas are also meant to encourage us to think of the progressive movement as an ecosystem that is fed by a healthy circulation of money.  A movement which is built on voluntary donations, from its core activists to its institutions and outward to favored politicians, is not sustainable.  A better model involves, as much as possible, a series of transactions that make progressives wealthier at every step of the way, while reinforcing progressive values.  A movement which boosts demand for progressive businesses like Credo Mobile, which provides jobs for members of progressive churches, and which gives progressive groups the opportunity to own equity in profitable and environmentally responsible companies will allow many more progressives to prosper together with their movement.

Last week I wrote a brief series on developing a Drupal-based progressive community blog platform. As a bit of background, Drupal is a leading open source content management system; at work, most of the websites I build use Drupal. In light of the vulnerabilities of the Soapblox platform, which hosts many local and some nationwide progressive blogs, it's become apparent that an open-source software packages, specifically tuned to the needs of progressive bloggers, would be a valuable asset.

The initial series last weekend got a fair amount of interest, but there was one theme that was fairly strong among the comments: Drupal is a great platform, but it's not user-friendly enough for most bloggers. There is, to be sure, some kernel of truth in that critique - Drupal is not that easy to use out-of-the-box. On the other hand, a savvy developer can turn Drupal into one of the most easy-to-use, powerful platforms for blogging around. If you have any doubts, I'd suggest you visit OnSugar and create a free account - the system is a hosted, Drupal-based blogging platform, and in my opinion it is at least as user-friendly as Wordpress, if not more so.

While I don't know if I'll ever be able to put together something as nice as OnSugar, I'd like to give it a shot. In the next few weeks, I hope to release a simple Drupal-based community blogging platform, which will include some (but not quite all) of the features many of us are already familiar with in most progressive community blogs. The platform will be released on drupal.org under the GNU General Public License, like all other Drupal contributions, so that others can download it and try it out. The hope is that this platform will improve over time, with the help of other progressive Drupal developers, progressive bloggers, readers, and anyone else who is interested. Below, I've outlined a prospective, best-case-scenario roadmap for this platform. I'd love to get feedback on this, so if you have critiques for the roadmap, if you'd like to help out - or if you're already working on a similar Drupal-based platform - please let me know!

Stage 1. Basic community platform

In this stage, we will develop a Drupal installation profile which contains the basic features needed for a progressive community blog. In particular, readers will be allowed to create new user accounts, and to comment and post their own blog posts using those accounts. Recent user blog posts will appear in a sidebar. Users will also be able to vote on one another's comments, and administrators will be allowed to front-page a diary or promote users to be front-pagers. One thing we might not include in this release is the ability to recommend diaries, and for recommended diaries to appear in their own sidebar block.

Stage 2. Platform enhancements

In this stage, we will make incremental improvements to the platform, in order to develop features which are similar to (or slightly better than) those of the basic Soapblox platform. These features will include recommended diaries (if they didn't make it into the first stage), user profiles and WYSIWYG editing. We will also include features that give administrators some options for tweaking the look-and-feel of their site, including specifying a color scheme, easily trying out new themes, and managing their sidebar blocks. At this stage, we may also consider adding functionality to allow bloggers to import their blog posts and comments from other platforms - like Blogspot, Soapblox, and Wordress - without much effort.

Stage 3. Hosted platform

Assuming that the platform has gained a toe-hold among progressive bloggers, we will begin to explore deploying the software on a hosted platform. The challenge at this point will be more of a business model challenge than a technical one - the question is how to finance hosting and software maintenance at a cost acceptable to most bloggers. One option is monthly fees, but it's possible that the fees required to maintain the system would be too high to be acceptable. Another option is dedicated advertising space, a percentage of merchandising sales, or some other shared-revenue approach, as I discussed last week. This stage will likely be a crucial one, in terms of making the platform widely accessible, as it will provide bloggers with a turnkey solution that lets them get a Drupal-based progressive community blog up and running with minimal effort.

Stage 4. Turbocharged community

At this stage, it will finally be possible to begin taking advantage of some of Drupal's more powerful community features. These include Open ID login; community calendars; lightweight intranet features that facilitate the work of committees or project teams; libraries of appropriately-licensed embeddable images and videos; polls and anonymized survey/data gathering tools. It would even be possible to add some e-activism features, similar to those at FireDogLake, and, if the appropriate state-level data is available, to create state-based e-activism tools. This stage would likely have several sub-stages; many of these features are uncharted waters for local blogs, and would require careful requirements gathering and testing before rollout.

Stage 5. Built-in financial stability

There are a number of ways in which Drupal can help bloggers earn more money, and this stage would focus on that problem. A DailyKos-like "advertising-free" subscription module would help bloggers earn dedicated revenue from a loyal customer base. Modules which automatically display "buy now" links on book reviews and similar posts could help bloggers earn more commissions from merchandising sales. More exotic possibilities are also available. For example, bloggers could write e-books and sell them directly from their site using Drupal's Ubercart module. Or, the system could integrate with Mochila, and allow bloggers to profit by reselling their work and even (with appropriate permission, profit-sharing, and so forth) their readers' diaries.

Again, if you have thoughts and suggested improvements for this roadmap, please drop a line in the comments! I'd also be interested to hear from developers who might be willing to help out, or who have already started building something similar.

Yesterday's post on the next steps forward, in light of Soapblox's near-meltdown, generated some very interesting suggestions and questions, and even a bit of a good old-fashioned programming language holy war, in the comment thread.  Alert reader Jon Pincus also pointed me to Pam Spaulding's very insightful thoughts about Soapblox.  Pam gets right to the heart of the matter in pointing out that the issue underlying this meltdown is money, or lack thereof.  Progressive bloggers aren't wealthy, and some of them failed to pay even Soapblox's reasonable monthly fees.

I do not think there will ever be a single, ideal blogging platform for all progressive bloggers, for the simple reason that each blogger will make her own decisions about where and when to post.  Soapblox may grow and thrive for a long time to come; I hope it does.  But I would also like to see the development of an alternative system that is every bit as easy to work with, and every bit as cheap, as Soapblox, but with a stronger technological foundation.  Ideally, I would like to see an alternative system that is more feature-rich, and capable of supporting the next wave of progressive organizing that is already beginning.

In particular, I believe that progressive Drupal developers will need to produce a "Dailykos-lite" version of Drupal, which makes it easy and cheap for progressive bloggers to start new blogs whose functionality imitates that of Dailykos.  Moreover, I think we will need to provide a turnkey solution for starting and hosting a Drupal-based Dailykos-lite blog with a reasonable monthly fee, similar to wordpress.com.  Using such a hypothetical solution, a progressive blogger would be able to do the following, at minimum: give front-page access to multiple bloggers, allow readers to post and recommend diaries in a sidebar, promote user diaries on a case-by-case basis, allow readers to rate one anothers comments, ban trolls, and add special sidebar features from time to time.  Such a system should be easy-to-use, and should require no more than a few minutes' setup time in order to get up and running.

The big question is, how will we pay for the development of such a system; even more tricky, how will we pay for the maintenance of the system?  Setting the development question aside, I think the maintenance question is one where there is some room to innovate.  Instead of using the monthly-fees model - reasonable though it may be - it might make sense to develop a hosted system in which a certain portion of advertising space is set aside for the hosting provider, and all revenue from that space is given to the hosting provider.  Other revenue-sharing models - e.g., some percentage of all affiliate or merchandising sales - are also possible, but this kind of model would ensure that, as long as people using the blogging platform, there is a steady stream of revenue available for keeping the platform afloat.

There are, incidentally, other opportunities lurking in the shadows of such agreements.  The hosting system could also provide help for bloggers who meed legal protection, it could develop a library of licensed artwork available for bloggers to use in their graphic designs and individual blog posts.  Or it might be possible for the hosting system to become a full-fledged support agency for bloggers, capable of licensing bloggers' writing for republication; arranging speaking engagements and book deals for popular bloggers; helping bloggers land consulting engagements; providing health insurance and other typical job benefits; and more.  Some of these ideas are a bit exotic or, to be honest, entirely unrealistic, given how little money is available to support blogging.  But I think it's important to remember that creating new opportunities for bloggers means more than just developing fancy software.

I'd love to hear more from progressive bloggers about what kinds of things they want or need out of a blogging platform.  Starting with the very basics, what kind of features - in addition to those listed above - do you need to go about day-to-day blogging?  How much are you willing to pay for those features, or, if you'd rather not pay, what kinds of blog platform business models are palatable to you?  What other forms of support could a robust platform provide?

This week Soapblox, the content management system and hosting platform of choice for many, many local progressive blogs, had a serious meltdown due to a massive hacker attack, and nearly collapsed. The attack on Soapblox immediately took down a huge chunk of the progressive blogosphere's infrastructure, and threatened catastrophe for the progressive movement, just as a new session of Congress and a new administration was getting started. The story was already covered ably at DailyKos, Open Left, and many other progressive blogs. The consensus that appears to have emerged after a fairly short but very wide-ranging discussion is: it may make sense to transition to another system eventually; for now there is no readily available alternative; Soapblox is a shoestring operation run by a good progressive; so progressives should chip in to save Soapblox.

My career is web development, so I naturally have a very keen interest in this story. If the progressive blogosphere was a single organization, if it could have anticipated its current needs a few years ago, and if it had asked me for an ideal platform to meet those needs, I almost certainly would have suggested a system based in Drupal, or perhaps multi-user Wordpress. Both are software packages that are more than capable of handling all of the sundry needs of most progressive bloggers, and actually quite a few more. Of course, the progressive blogosphere isn't a single organization, and even if it was it certainly couldn't have anticipated its current needs a few years ago, so I never had a chance to propose that kind of solution.

Instead of that scenario, Soapblox emerged, through an organic process that ranged over the past several years, as the platform of choice for many leading progressive blogs. Soapblox is a reasonably good technological platform, but I think the key to its success, until this week, was its low barrier to entry. For a low monthly fee and with very little technological expertise, a blogger could launch a full-featured blog that was felt, to readers, a lot like DailyKos. In contrast, Drupal and multi-user Wordpress would require an awful lot of tinkering and monkey-wrenching in order to simulate the Dailykos experience.

With Soapblox hanging by a thread, it's important to develop a new and stronger alternative to the old system. There's very little question, in my mind, that the best foundation for this kind of hosted blogging system will be Drupal, for a wide variety of reasons. First, Drupal's out-of-the-box features include user-specific diaries, moderated comments, and the capability to front-page a diary - those are all key features of Soapblox. What Drupal lacks is the ease-of-use of Soapblox, but as OnSugar demonstrated late last year, it's entirely possible to run a hosted, easy-to-use blogging platform on Drupal. Second, Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems in the world, which means it has an enormous user, developer, and support community; there is no single point of failure in the Drupal community, meaning that a near-meltdown like Soapblox's is nearly unthinkable. Finally, there is already a considerable degree of cooperation between the Drupal and progressive communities. Many local Dean organizing groups, and later DFA chapters, developed websites based in Drupal, thanks largely to the release of a Drupal distribution called Deanspace, (which later changed its name to Civic Space Labs). Today, there are a variety of progressive Drupal development firms, including Development Seed, Chapter Three, Prometheus Labor, ZivTech, and my own company, Lightbulb First Consulting, LLC. Drupal is a community which is strongly based in a number of open source values, including meritocracy, transparency and accountability - the same values that drive the progressive blogosphere.

As with all crises, this one holds an opportunity to rebuild something which is not just as good as, but actually much better than, the old Soapblox platform. Drupal has, for a very long time, had extensions which provide robust, automated search engine automization (via the Pathauto and Global redirect modules); anonymous survey tools (via the Webform module); ecommerce tools (via the Ecommerce or Ubercart module, take your pick); calendaring features (via the Date and Calendar modules); and lightweight intranet features (via the Organic groups module). As of about a year ago, Drupal includes support for OpenID integration, meaning that a Drupal-based progressive blogging platform will lower the barriers of cross-blog cooperation, since it will be possible to allow readers of one blog to comment and post on another blog without creating a new account. Drupal will soon include support for semantic integration, meaning that progressive bloggers will be able to gather data sets and share them with one another easily. In short, the creation of a new Drupal-based blogging platform will make it possible to extend and expand the range of functionality available in progressive blogs in ways that are essentially unimaginable with Soapblox.

Primarily, I think it is the responsibility of the progressive Drupal community (which I count myself a part of), to answer this call-to-arms. We must develop a stronger, better alternative to the Soapblox platform, and we must properly productize and market that solution in order to make it palatable to progressive bloggers. These are busy days for me, and it's not entirely clear that I'll have time to develop such a product on my own, or to organize a larger effort. But I think we need to get the ball rolling very soon, because the days when it made sense to run the progressive blogosphere on a shoestring are long gone.

Full disclosure: My company offers Drupal-based web development services, and therefore is a competitor to Soapblox. We also worked on a small design project for Open Left about a year ago, and we submitted a business plan to the Blogpac entrepreneurship contest.

Tonight I attended one of the "house parties for change" organized by the Obama campaign. The house parties are meant to contribute to an ongoing conversation about what to do with the energy and structure that was the Obama volunteer organization.

If you think you've heard this song before, you're probably right - this was the question faced by Dean volunteers in the aftermath of his 2004 defeat, and there are similar, smaller-scale challenges faced by other candidates at the local level all the time. Dean's campaign operation ultimately became Democracy for America (DFA), and it and its far-flung network of chapters are still kicking. Given the founding conviction s of DFA - that progressives need to show up everywhere, and that voting is just the beginning of civic involvement - it wouldn't be too unreasonable to say that DFA was a prototype for the DNC's 50 State Strategy in spirit, although the mechanics of DFA and the 50 State Strategy are very different.

The problem of what to do with Obama's campaign structure is very different, for a number of reasons. One, Obama's campaign was much, much larger than Dean's. Two, in early 2004 there was a huge overlap between the netroots progressive movement and the Dean campaign, whereas the Obama campaign of necessity includes plenty of moderate and establishment Democrats, and no small number of Obama volunteers were Republicans. Three, and perhaps most importantly, Obama was in fact successful, he now has to govern, and his supporters have reason to expect that their priorities will be represented in the White House.

There are a few basic ideas running around for what to do with the Obama campaign, and they seem to include the following basic options:

• Supporting Obama. The Obama volunteers will become a support network for Obama's legislative priorities in Congress, and will presumably become a group dedicated to pressuring Congress and the media.
• Being active and possibly critical. The Obama volunteers will be called upon to stay active in, and to continue to sound off on, national politics. That could include commentary on change.gov or a successor website, conference calls with a randomly selected subset of Obama volunteers, MoveOn-style house parties, and other activities.
• Becoming active in local politics. Essentially following the DFA model, Obama volunteers will be encouraged to support other politicians in Obama's mold at the local level, thereby keeping the campaign going and turning volunteers attention towards a more local level.
• Service projects. Somewhat like the early version of the Edwards campaign (OneCorps), volunteers will be asked to take on local, mostly apolitical service projects - helping out in food pantries, conservation projects, etc.

There are strengths and weaknesses for each of these options, but I think the main complication is the fact that Obama will soon be president, and there is a limit to the amount of political campaigning he can do. At the same time, the email list is intensely Obama-focused; if it were to grow into an organization that became a hotbed of criticism of the administration, Obama could simply shut down the email list. Contra-wise, Obama can't just hand off the email list to a third party; or rather, he could, but a lot of list subscribers would unsubscribe, or stop paying attention.

This is a serious conundrum, but I think one idea which emerged from our house party tonight was quite interesting, and that was to use the house parties simply as a springboard for further policy-oriented conversations - or salons, if you like.

Here's one way this might play out. Every month, the members of the Obama email list are charged with holding house party conversations about some broad topic. Hosts could receive some basic informational materials about the issue, but attendees would be free to discuss other sources of ideas on the topic as well - articles, movies, books, whatever. Each house party could be charged with answering a set of questions, and the administration could commit to taking that aggregate response into account when crafting and directing policy. What's more, the topics could go on a six-month rotation cycle so that if an issue was discussed in February, it would come up again in August, and house party attendees would have a chance to give feedback on the government's performance on that issue. There could even be a chance for issue task forces to develop, in order to give more focused and frequent feedback on an issue in between the "spotlight" months.

This approach would, I think, neatly sidestep many of the thornier issues involved in keeping the Obama organization alive. It is political without being essentially campaign-oriented. It allows Obama to gather support and feedback, but it is appropriately open to everyone. Most importantly, it gives the Obama volunteer network something to do, and an ongoing set of opportunities for involvement and action.

There is still the not-insignificant problem of how this operation would be managed. Would it be run from within the government, as an essentially non-campaign operation with the White House's official support - and would that mean that emails gathered through the operation could not be used for campaign purposes? Or would it be essentially a shell for the 2012 campaign, and therefore a non-governmental entity which requires its own fundraising arm? This question is a bit thorny, but I actually think either answer would work out fine in practice.

I'm curious to see what becomes of these house parties, although I'm a bit dismayed that the campaign's progress on this question has been so slow, and that the communication about this problem appears to be very top-down. Unfortunately, I've also heard this song before in Massachusetts, when Deval Patrick promised to keep his campaign organization involved in governing post-election. Although there was a lot of hay made about the idea early on, and a few citizen task forces convened, the effort eventually fizzled. Here's hoping that Obama is more successful in this part of the transition.

In full-blown panic about an almost certain loss at the polls, conservatives are now trying to win the post-election narrative - they're trying to claim that, despite the election results, the country is still conservative.  The new watchword for conservatives is "center-right nation" - as in Jon Meacham's absurd piece in Newsweek which claimed that despite what looks like a wholesale rejection of conservatism at the polls on Tuesday, "America remains a center-right nation".  David Sirota has been doing yoeman's work beating back this meme, dedicating his column to Obama's FDR-style mandate, and running a Center-Right Nation Watch at OpenLeft.

The narrative of this county as a center-right one, despite what the polls may say on Tuesday, appears to be an important one in the post-election narrative.  It will be bolstered by exit polls which show something like 28-33% of the electorate identifying as "conservative", and 17-22% of the electorate identifying as "liberal", with the rest of the electorate identifying as "moderate".  According to the Roper archive of exit polls, ideological self-identification numbers have been hovering in that range since 1976, so if the numbers are substantially different than that on Tuesday, then we know that there's been genuine ideological movement.  Even what looks like a near-loss to conservatives - say, a 26-24% conservative-to-liberal self-identification gap - would actually be a huge victory for progressives.  Failing that kind of self-identification parity, progressives usually argue that we are a nation of "operational progressives", never mind the labels we give ourselves.  That is, that on many issues - especially economic issues - polls show that most people support the progressives point of view.  Campaign for America's Future and Media Matters made this argument most recently with an exhaustive review of recent polling in June 2007.

From the point of view of Election Night and the week following it, though, I think it's better not to bicker and parse over in this way.  We are almost certain to lose that game, since the simple numbers (the ideological self-identification numbers) are least in our favor.  Instead, I think the best approach is to promote the Democratic base as the new center of politics.

The basic idea is to promote the Democratic base, its enthusiastic support for Obama, and its incredible electoral power.  Point to Obama's repeated record-smashing small-dollar fundraising numbers.  Point to the historic crowds Obama has drawn in swing states like Missouri and Colorado in the last couple of weeks.  Point to the untold numbers of zany pro-Obama videos flooding YouTube.  Point to the unprecedented Obama ground game, and the dramatic turnaround in early voting, which is emphatically pro-Democratic this year, as compared to an even split with Republicans in 2004.

I've actually chosen these nuggets of evidence fairly carefully, and the common themes among them are: 1) they've already been reported by traditional media in the recent past; and 2) the Obama campaign is, itself, quite likely to refer to some of these nuggets in its post-election messaging.  In other words, these are the nuggets that are most likely to allow us to "close the triangle" on the post-election narrative.  The point is that we should amplify these elements of pre-existing conventional wisdom.

While this isn't exactly a logical counterpoint to the notion that this is a center-right nation, the argument is powerful for its evokation of progressive imagery.  In some way or another, many voters have already seen the proof of the progressive base supporting Obama - the footage of large Obama crowds, the Obama Girl videos, the long lines of early voters, the thirty-minute ad made possible by millions of donors, and even the incessant door-knockers bearing literature.  In addition to being powerful imagery, and imagery capable of closing the triangle on the post-election narrative, a great deal of this imagery "feels" historic, in that it is nothing like what many people have seen before; it matches the theme of an historic election.  If that image of an exuberant, powerful, massive progressive base is indelibly linked to the election results, conservatives will have no chance with the "center-right nation" canard.

The book launch for Dispatches from the Religious Left is coming up on Tuesday, Oct. 14.  In anticipation of the event, I'm running a series this weekend on a few essays from the book.  Yesterday I wrote about PastorDan's essay on the role of the Religious Left (PastorDan responded here), as well as Rev. Debra Haffner and Timothy Palmer's essay on a theology of sexual justice.

The third part of the book is dedicated to "getting from here to there", and is a bit more nuts-and-bolts-oriented than the first two parts.  It includes the essay my wife and I wrote on new media, which focuses on helping religious organizations find their voice online.  However, since that material is probably pretty familiar to many blog readers, I'm instead going to focus on the contribution by Frederick Clarkson (who is also the editor of the book), titled "Three wheels that need not be reinvented".

Fred's main argument is that the Religious Left must get more involved in electoral politics.  By way of contrast he points to the Religious Right, which actively participates in party primaries, registers voters, and maintains high-quality voter lists that persist from one cycle to another.  All of these ingredients help the Right exert power far beyond its numbers, and Clarkson argues that the Left must respond in kind in order to realize its vision.  His chapter profiles three progressive political organizations in Massachusetts, and offers them as organizing models for Religious Leftists.

The first organization is Neighbor-to-Neighbor, a statewide organization whose goal is to register voters in low-income communities in order to boost turnout and elect progressive representative.  The organization has a "Working Families Agenda" which it uses to engage and register voters throughout the year.  At election time, these efforts are reinforced by personal contact.  In this way, Neighbor-to-Neighbor keeps its constituents engaged across election cycles, and is able to build a high-quality voter list which forms the basis for electoral efforts.

The second organization is Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts, an alliance of volunteer-run chapters throughout the state.   PDM was founded in the wake of Robert Reich's unsuccessful bid for governor in 2002.  Reich's run was a rallying point for progressives in a very un-progressive year, and in some ways helped pave the way for Deval Patrick's dramatic upset victory in 2006.  PDM's goal is to elect progressives in Democratic party primaries - which, in many areas in Massachusetts, is really where the election is held, since voters overwhelmingly back Democrats in the general election.

The third organization is MassVote, née BostonVote.  MassVote encourages non-profit social service agencies to register and mobilize their constituents, in order to build support for their programs within state government.  The organization has developed an innovative set of resources to conduct this kind of registration and mobilization at low cost, and within the rules for electioneering by non-profits.  This last point should be emphasized: the organization doesn't encourage its member agencies to engage in partisan activity; instead, agencies do non-partisan voter registration and education work.  That work brings more progressive voters to the polls, and elects progressive representatives; but that's incident to the target voter population, rather than the result of any particularly partisan activity.  (Disclosure: A few years ago MassVote was a prospective client for the company I worked for at the time.)

Clarkson wants the Religious Left to adopt some of these models and integrate it into its own work - while following IRS rules.  As MassVote clearly demonstrates, it is possible to create a progressive electorate without stepping outside the boundaries of 501(c)3 regulations, simply by targeting non-partisan voter registration, mobilization, and non-biased education efforts at progressive voter populations.

Fred's essay is a good starting point for prodding religious organizations to participate in electoral politics.  However, I think the Religious Left will need to build some infrastructure - both theoretical and organizational - in order to realize this vision.

For starters, we will need to create and promote what I call a "theology of participation" - an argument that democratic participation by our congregations is not just ok, but in fact necessary.  Many liberal congregations are already committed to social justice in a variety of ways, so I don't think this will be a particularly hard sell.  On the other hand, some liberal congregations are also instinctively allergic to politics in the pulpit, and congregants might become incensed at anything which appears to violate the spirit of separation of church and state separation.  Religious leaders who want to register and mobilize their congregations should be clear about a few key points: first, that democratic participation is a profound act of bearing witness to one's value system; second, that it is a way to support the church's social justice mission; and finally, that the congregation is not endorsing any party or candidate, and that it is up to individual congregants to decide which candidate or party will best support social justice.

On top of this theology of participation, congregations will need to layer a set of practices to encourge participation.  These practices begin with voter registration drives.  They also include basic education, especially for local elections.  Congregations should ensure that their members know when the election is as well as the meaning of various offices on the ballot is.  Finally, within certain boundaries, congregations can help their members learn about the candidates who are running for office.  This last step will require a great deal of delicacy, as it's entirely easy to cross the line from voter education to candidate endorsement - even without intention.  Some congregations may want to eschew this step entirely, or may want to simply encourage their members to obtain a copy of the ballot a week or two before the election and to educate themselves.  (Or to organize their own ballot parties.)

On top of this level of activity within congregations, the Religious Left should build organizations which can aggregate this activity and harvest the results across election cycles.  Congregation-organized voter registration drives should be harvested into long-lasting and well-maintained voter lists.  Those voters, in turn, should be engaged about important issues year-round, and should be targeted for mobilization at election time.  This kind of work is too far outside the mission of individual congregations.  And it is not particularly well-suited to single-issue groups like the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.  So new, multi-issue issue groups will need to be built.

In some ways, this three-tiered approach to voter registration and mobilization - beginning with theological foundations, proceeding to routine practice, and culminating in aggregation and professional cross-cyclical efforts - is just the beginning.  As a movement with a broad commitment to social justice, the Religious Left can, and should, be heavily involved in building progressive power outside of the voting booth.  In particular, the Religious Left should incubate labor organizing and community organizing efforts; leaders should encourage their congregations to support these organizations in meetings and on picket lines, and should offer meeting space or other resources where necessary.  Not only are these efforts non-partisan, but they are profoundly faithful acts of social justice, which will have a strong foundation in the theological tradition of the vast majority of Religious Left congregations.  (Indeed, many liberal congregations are already doing this kind of work, and have been doing it for a long time, much to their credit.  I'm merely arguing for more of this kind of work, and for liberal congregations to be more pro-active in seeking out and supporting this kind of capcity-building social justice work, where it makes sense.)  In most cases, this kind of work will ultimately result in more power for the progressive movement, but that is just the natural result of empowering marginalized people, rather than an explicit act of partisanship.

Fred Clarkson has been arguing for a more electorally engaged Religious Left for a long time.  He's seen the Religious Right's efforts to build power in Republican Party committees and primaries in person.  The kind of voter registration and mobilization efforts he advocates for - and many others - are long overdue.

Chris Bowers posed a striking historical theory at Open Left this week: compared to Europe and Canada, the US has been a basically progressive country for most of its history, and the past 30-40 years of conservative dominance is a historical abnormality. He also suggests three causes of this conservative dominance: the Cold War and its resulting military-industrial complex, high rates of religiosity, and the American apartheid state. The election of Obama, so goes the theory, will seriously chip away at the apartheid state, and will thus help chip away at the era of conservative dominance.

Bowers's theory directly conflicts with the famous Schlesinger thesis, which argues that we have cycled back and forth between eras of conservative and progressive dominance which have lasted about 20 years each. On balance, I think the Schlesinger thesis is a bit more accurate, for a number of reasons.

• Bowers's thesis doesn't account for the government's policy towards Native Americans and African-Americans. The US was far behind the rest of the Western world in abolishing slavery, and its aggressive and brutal expansion into Native American territories compares similarly to European imperialism in the 19th century. So on these two policies - which were the foundation of the country's existence, remember - the US was no more progressive, and in some ways even more regressive, as its European counterparts.sed in the 19th.
• The culprits Bowers names are not one-sided in creating conservative culture. Many churches, as Chris readily admits, formed the foundation of the abolition and civil rights movements, and supported labor unions. The military, for all its problems and its undoubtedly conservative pull, has a progressive undercurrent, both in its capability (so far vastly underutilized) to protect marginalized people throughout the world, and in its capacity to socially promote marginalized people at home. The apartheid state remains, of course, a massive force of conservatism, but it has been around since the country was founded (with a brief hiatus during Reconstruction, perhaps), and in fact it was slowly receding during the recent period of conservative ascendance.
• On top of that, these culprits aren't unmatched. In the same time that we took a sharp right turn, more and more people graduated high school and went to college, and more and more people delayed marriage or eschewed the traditional heterosexual nuclear family altogether. Both of these trends probably made us more progressive as a culture, on the whole. And if the military-industrial complex made deeper investment in the safety net impossible, Social Security and Medicare demonstrated the feasibility of such grand investments in a very tangible way.

Of course, I don't deny the fact that the country has taken a sharp conservative turn in the past thirty or forty years; that is obvious. My point is that sharp conservative turn isn't so much an anomaly as it is a continuation of a very long historical trend, identified by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

I also think it's plain that there are structural features of the Constitution which virtually guarantee this kind of cyclical ideological history. Lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices, the staggered nature of the election of each third of the Senate, and the capability of dissidents to gather strength in state and local government before running for federal office, are all a part of this cyclical nature of our ideological history. Technology, which can make the governing ideology obsolete overnight and make radical ideas suddenly pragmatic, also plays a part.

I'm been very interested in the Schlesinger thesis over the last years, and particularly in the last few months, as it appears more and more likely that we really are on the verge of another progressive cycle. It's certainly exciting to be able to see that happening, and to be a part of that moment. More than that, if the theory proves true, then we are due for two or three decades of progressive dominance. That's a very long time, and there's a lot we can do with that kind of time and power. The question is, what? What would we do with the country if we knew we had two or three decades to play with? Medicare-for-All? A renewable energy economy? True racial and sexual equality? A dramatically smaller military? A democratic China?

As fun a game as this might be, it's also a bit depressing. After all, if Schlesinger is right, we're due for a countervailing conservative resurgence in 20-30 years. If that's true, then what kind of buffers can we create against that future time? More than that, what can we do to keep our own progressive moment going as long as possible? How will we guarantee that we don't overreach and end up, as JFK put it, inside the tiger?

I have some thoughts on some of these questions, and perhaps I'll write them up separately a bit later on. But if you have anything to chime in, I'd love to hear some thoughts.

Full disclosure: My company worked on a small technical/design project for Chris and Open Left last year.

A very long while ago, I wrote the first piece in a series on progressive grand strategy, laying out the kinds of questions which a progressive grand strategy would have to address. In that piece I addressed the goals and assessments required of a progressive grand strategy; the goal is to eventually address all six components of a fully-articulated strategic plan (goals, assessments, tactics, resources, dynamics, and evaluation), as described in Finding Strategy, a report published by the Progressive Strategy Studies Project. This series is, taking the very long-term view, a follow-up to my initial review of the Finding Strategy report last summer. (In the interest of full disclosure: one of the authors, Wolfgang Brauner, is a personal friend.)

PSSP responded to my analysis of the goals of progressive strategy on their blog shortly thereafter, and today, (finally!) I'll spend a bit of time responding, and hopefully moving the conversation down the field a bit.

Perhaps the most noteworthy element of my initial post was a distinction between political goals (winning elections and policy battles) and cultural goals (spreading the progressive worldview through ideological institutions like unions, churches, media, schools, etc.) Brauner likens this distinction to the original distinction, in Finding Strategy, between electoral, movement, and movement-electoral strategies, defined respectively as strategies whose primary goal is winning elections, building a movement, and doing the two simultaneously. (Or similarly, to Paul Wellstone's observation that successful political chage requires organizing, policy, and electoral politics.) That is an interesting comparison, and it does indeed work pretty well, so long as the definitions are broadened a bit, to include regulatory, legislative and electoral goals under the broader rubric of "electoral" goals, and to include the growth of institutions like liberal religious congregations and labor unions under the rubric of "movement" goals. There are some ideological institutions in which the language of movement-building doesn't make a lot of sense - schools and media, most importantly - but on the whole it's a good comparison.

In particular, this comparison reminds us that it's possible to pursue political and cultural goals at the same time. That's hardly news, I suppose, since labor unions do that all the time, most clearly in the case of the ongoing effort to enact the Employee Free Choice Act. Along similar lines, there's a fashionable consensus in the progressive blogosphere that campaigns should be about movement-building, in the sense that successful or not, they always leave behind a corps of citizen-activists who know how to run a campaign and are prepared for the next election season; Democracy for America, to name one organization, deliberately embodies that consensus.

Unfortunately, progressive strategic discussion usually looks at movement-building only through the lens of community organizing and labor organizing. Those are two important paths to movement-building, certainly, but we ignore other social movements and cultural institutions - including religion, schools, the family, and media - at our peril. Think about where conservatives have had their greatest success (churches) and respectable if not stunning success (schools and family) - success in establishing the conservative worldview in those institutions is responsible for a large part of the mess we're in now. And remember, these are the institutions that most progressive strategists ignore wholesale.

Brauner also refers to another strategist, Steve Lukes, who categorizes power according to a tri-partite system: decision-making power (control of government); agenda-setting power (including think tanks, pressure groups, and media); and ideological power. That system is much more akin to the distinction I made between political and cultural goals, and in fact I think it's a better one. I disagree with Brauner in his assertion that progressives are weak at every level. Assuming that Obama wins the presidency, and I think that's a reasonably safe bet, then by this time next year, a realistic assessment will be that conservatives hold a large, but not overwhelming, amount of decision-making power; progressives hold a small but growing amount of decision-making power; and moderate Democrats hold the balance of decision-making power. It's also clear that conservatives have a very large advantage in agenda-setting, but progressives are not quite as far behind as we once were. The ideological power struggle is considerably more complex, since there are some institutions where progressives clearly are doing very well (like college campuses), while in others (like the workplace or religion), they are doing very well in some places and poorly in others.

If, as Lukes and I seem to agree, ideological power (or progressive cultural goals, take your pick) is really the most important way to gain power, how is that to be done? Brauner attempts to investigate this question with a constructivist approach to culture, proceeding from a definition of culture that reminds me suspiciously of the theory of recursive computing:

the key idea is to understand culture not only as a structure of cognitive and normative expectations that shape perceptions, communication, and behavior, but also always as a form of observation that not only observes what social actors do, but also observes how they observe, and how the way they observe any phenomenon determines what they observe

I think one could proceed from first principles in that way, but I'm perhaps too untrained in social sciences to really comment usefully. While I think my approach, which approximates "culture" as the collective creation of a set of well-defined ideological institutions, is simpler, I'll also allow that it is too simple - it conveniently sweeps under the rug the question of how ideological transformation happens at the individual level.

While it's great to suppose that growing unions and enlarging the membership rolls of liberal churches will result in progressive ideological change, it's not so easy to do that. An individual's pre-existing ideology, from "me-first" attitudes in the workplace to stuck-in-the-mud religious traditions, inevitably get in the way. Brauner's constructivist approach, I think, gets at this question from first principles, rather than from the position of an in-the-trenches organizer. I can't say that I have any kind of real answer to this question, but I do think that most people whose job it is to chage ideology at the individual level - including union organizers, ministers, professors, and so on - have figured out a variety of tricks that work in their own contexts.

In any case, these are problems at the tactical level, and I'm not enough of a domain expert to write intelligently about them (which isn't to say I am a domain expert on very much else I write about.) There are plenty of other problems to tackle: what are the high-level operations which are needed to achieve ideological transformation? How can these operations be made to work constructively together with decision-making and agenda-setting operations in order to create a smoothly coordinated movement? Perhaps most importantly, what are the institutional and monetary resources needed to support these operations, and how on earth do we gather those resources?

Fortunately, there's more than one part to this series, and I will address those issues in the (hopefully near) future.