Planting Liberally

Yesterday's blog post about the Progressive Strategy Brain got me thinking about a problem which the authors of Finding Strategy (PDF) have discussed in the past: what would a grand strategy for progressive power look like?

In addition to giving blog posts like this one a really cool-sounding title, grand strategy is a coherent composition of several different strategies which together address all of the different forms of power relationships in society. It's quite a tall order, which would explain why no one has really developed a grand strategy for progressive power. (Full disclosure: As I mentioned yesterday, one of the authors of Finding Strategy is a personal friend.)

I don't pretend to have the answer to this question, but I'd like to piece together some thoughts on what such a strategy might look like. As Finding Strategy argues, strategy consists of six components: goals, assessment, tactics, resources, dynamics, and evaluation. Today, I'd like to focus on the first two components; I'll delve into the other four in follow-up posts. Follow me across the jump for more.

Cultural and political goals, and decomposition of each

The first key to forming a grand strategy is categorizing various forms of power relationships, in order to get a good picture of the terrain. On the whole I think progressives tend to focus on expressly political power relationships, i.e. power relationships engendered directly by the government, and ignore cultural power relationships.

Political goals

Political goals can be neatly decomposed according to the structure of government, for example: winning the presidency; electing a progressive Congress; stocking the judiciary with progressive judges; watching the bureaucracy and persuading it to enact progressive regulations; electing progressive governors and state legislatures; experimenting with progressive reform in the state houses; etc. When thinking about expressly political forms of power, I would also include the internal machinery of the party apparatuses, even though they're extra-constitutional.

Progressives have strategists who focus on all of these goals, although some goals gain a lot more attention than others; in particular, I would argue that we are far more concerned with the presidency, Congress, and the Democratic Party than we are with the judiciary, the bureaucracy (which I would argue is a different beast than the presidency, though clearly affected by it), and state- and municipal-level goals. There are some great strategists working to change that, like the Progressive States Network, but there is still plenty of uneven focus.

Cultural goals

Cultural goals can't be decomposed quite as easily, because there is no "constitution" for our culture (and thank goodness for that.) I think one useful way of looking at cultural goals is to think about the different kinds of ideological institutions which dominate the interaction between culture and politics. These institutions include religion, the workplace, schools, the media, and family and other personal relationships.

Each of these institutions shapes the worldview of its membership or audience in various ways. Consequently, any strategy which attempts to expand progressive power in a comprehensive way must address the problem of spreading the progressive worldview through these institutions. For example, what kind of efforts are needed to spread the progressive worldview through religious institutions?

Of course, this is a very old problem, and various thinkers have already addressed it in a variety of ways already. The union movement is a massive effort to establish progressive power relationships within the workforce. Religious institutions have undergone a series of transformations which stretch back to well before this country was founded, many of them attempts to establish more progressive theologies and more progressive intra-church relationships. And so on.

A savvy grand strategy would address ongoing efforts in each of these institutions and would attempt to bolster or complement them in some way. Thus, at a minimum, a progressive grand strategy should seek to:

• Strengthen and enlarge the union movement
• Enlarge the membership of progressive religious institutions, and address the religious needs of those who are not being served by the religious landscape as it stands today
• Expand the availability of college education, and bolster the prevalence of the progressive worldview on college and high school campuses
• Create a more progressive media landscape, by reducing the barriers to entry for progressive media makers, and moving conservative and centrist media to the left
• Encourage family dynamics and personal relationships which support a progressive worldview, e.g., progressive parenting models

Moreover, a grand strategy should seek out other forms of power relationships and emerging ideological institutions. For example, is it possible that some online social networks are now taking on the role of forging ideology? Is it possible that the astronomical rates of incarceration has made prison a kind of ideological institution? More than that, is it possible that progressives have overlooked longstanding broad-based institutions, like the military, which might have an important role in ideological formation, yet fly below the progressive radar screen? If that's the case, then what should progressives do to ensure that their worldview is established and nurtured by these institutions? (Or, in the case of prison, what should progressives do to minimize the number of people who get incarcerated?)

This decomposition provides, I think, a good structure for progressive grand strategy. Progressive grand strategy has, on one hand, a goal of winning political victories, in all of their various constitution and extra-constitutional forms; and on the other hand, a goal of spreading the progressive worldview through a variety of cultural ideological institutions.

Assessment

A progressive grand strategy must assess the terrain of power relationships in society in order to transform those relationships. There are a few different pieces to this kind of assessment.

The first is an assessment of the challenges progressives face when they try to spread their worldview through ideological institutions, and the efforts to overcome those challenges. In my description of cultural goals above, I've implicitly identified some of the ongoing efforts. I think a full assessment would have to look at the challenges progressives face in more detail. For example, why is it that conservative religious traditions are not losing adherents as quickly as progressive religious traditions? What are some of the difficulties unions face when they try to recruit new members, or to retain solidarity within their ranks? And so forth. Naturally, many of these assessments have already been undertaken, and perhaps only need to be collated and updated a bit.

The second is an assessment of the challenges progressives face when they try to win political victories. This is hardly untrodden ground for progressives. We spend a lot of time assessing these challenges, and to our credit, we have done a good job of overcoming some of them. There are some pitfalls to beware of, such as our tendency a) to assume that a Democratic victory is a progressive victory (although I do think it's safe to say that almost all progressive victories are Democratic victories) and b) to assess challenges to progressives through the lens of various campaigns, like the 2008 presidential campaign or the 2006 Congressional campaign. Individual candidates can sometimes overcome certain challenges, but that doesn't mean that the structural problems behind those challenges have disappeared. Nevertheless, on the whole I think progressives know quite a lot about what they're up against in the realm of political campaigns. In the past I've tried to compile the assessments I've seen in various progressive publications into one large, master list; see my very old, and perhaps first, post on liberal entrepreneurship (under "So what is liberal entrepreneurship", item 2). That list is probably due for a major update sometime soon, and I'd certainly love to hear about other attempts to synthesize assessments of challenges to progressive political victories along these lines.

The final area of assessment concerns the effects of cultural institutions on our political landscape. For example, what would a major increase in union density do to increase progressive electoral fortunes? How would a gradual demographic trend away from conservative evangelical churches and towards liberal Christian churches or minority religions reshape the framework of our political discourse? And so on. Prorgressives tend to view these questions through the lens of specific campaigns and electoral victories, which means that, except for our efforts in media advocacy, we spend a lot of time worrying about the growth of cultural conservatism, and very little time working to expand cultural progressivism. I believe we need a deeper understanding of cultural progressivism. A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on the cultural dimension of transformational politics, which suggests a simplistic, but I think useful, mathematical formula which expresses the relationship between cultural institutions and politics:

You might think of the ideological landscape designed by cultural institutions as a kind of sum of products. Take the number of members an institution has, multiply by the granularity of its ideological impact, and then multiply again by the emphasis that institution places on ideological transformation. Add that number up for all cultural institutions, and you have the total amount of ideological impact exerted by cultural institutions.

This formulation is entirely too neat, and woefully inadequate to fully capture the nuanced interplay between cultural forces and political life. Any formulation would be. But I think it's a start, and I'd be very interested to hear critiques or alternative formulations.

What's next

In my next post on progressive grand strategy, I'll discuss tactical plans and resources required for progressive cultural transformation and for progressive political victories. That will, I think, give a little more perspective to my nearly obsessive focus on liberal entrepreneurship. I also hope to tie together strands of thought from a variety of disparate realms, including both culturally and politically progressive efforts.

In the meantime, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this emerging outline for progressive grand strategy, and some of the assessments I've compiled above.

Last summer I highlighted a report on the state of progressive strategy called Finding Strategy: A Survey of Contemporary Contributions to Progressive Strategy (PDF). At the time I didn't do much more beyond summarize the report and promise follow-up at a later point, which, I grudgingly admit, I didn't really do.

However, the Progressive Strategy Studies Project (PSSP) has recently released a new companion tool for the report, so I thought I'd revisit this discussion. The tool is called the Progressive Strategy Brain, and it's explained in an introductory blog post at the Progressive Strategy Blog. The brain is a visualization tool which allows users to navigate a library of about 4,100 articles or entries related to progressive strategy. The screen is split in two vertically, with the top half depicting an interconnected web of concepts centered on a single, active concept, and the bottom half providing text and description of that concept. You can click on any concept in the top half to make it active. While some entries have very sparse text and merely exist to depict a relationship between other concepts, others include a full report's worth of HTML. The tool is still evolving, and PSSP hopes to update it every week. The software which runs the whole show is called The Brain. (Full disclosure: Wolfgang Brauner, one of the authors of the original report, and of the Progressive Strategy Brain, is a personal friend.)

Clicking around inside the Progressive Strategy Brain is quite fun, as you can navigate between all sorts of interesting topics, individuals, organizations, and even abstract ideas. There are a few interesting jumping off points, though, such as Finding Strategy (2006) strategists (a list of strategists listed in the original report), Progressive Challenges (challenges which face the prorgressive movement), Progressive Strategy Types, and Progressive Strategy Literature.

I think this is a fascinating tool. PSSP has managed to make a lot of very interesting content available in a very accessible and interesting format. I do have a few quibbles. There are some places where I'm not entirely sure how the relationships between concepts are created. The taxonomist in me would also love a way to impose a little more structure or categorization on top of the web. And I hope that as time goes on, the organization opens up the Brain to outside contributors (although I imagine the constraints of the software might make that difficult.) But on the whole, I think this is a great effort which calls attention to, and helps us organize our thoughts on, our conception of strategy for the progressive movement.

What I'd love to see in the evolution of the progressive strategy brain, and in the larger discourse on progressive strategy generally, is increased attention to non-political goals. Put another way, I'd like to see progressive strategists broaden their horizons, to pursue goals that include transformation of non-political, cultural institutions. After all, transformational politics includes both cultural transformation and political transformation. We need strategies for cultural transformation, and particularly transformation of the ideological institutions which usually regulate the interaction of our culture and our politics - religion, the workplace, schools, personal relationships, and the media. Progressives don't talk much about transforming those institutions (except insofar as doing so can produce electoral results), and that shortage of strategic discussion shows in the PSB's entry on progressive ideological infrastructure.

Eventually, I'd like to see progressives develop a series of strategies for transforming these institutions and creating a more progressive culture. I'd like to think that I've nibbled at the edge of this problem in the past, with a variety of series on creating progressive TV and strengthening the labor movement, and I hope to continue in that vein. I'd love to see others take up the reins and develop strategies for progressive change within other ideological institutions. That kind of strategic development is the first step in the development of a grand strategy of progressive power, which would tie together progressive cultural and political transformation.

I'm tempted to draw up an outline of what such a strategy might look like, especially given the great work which has gone into PSB. In fact, I might take a crack at that a bit later on. For now, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the Progressive Strategy Brain, and the state of progressive strategy generally.

On Thursday Digby wrote a fascinating post at Campaign for America's Future on the difference between transactional and transformational politics. The post pointed out the difference between "transactional" politics (what can I get in the political marketplace?) and "transformational" politics (how can I change the marketplace?). Digby argues that elected officials should be doing two jobs at once - getting the best reforms they can in the current environment, while working to change that environment so that it is more favorable to progressives.

I think it's important that we recognize the difference between these two forms of politics, and also that we push our elected officials to strive for political transformations even as they try to get the best "deal" on each political "transaction" they make. Indeed, that is perhaps the central purpose of the progressive blogosphere.

However, I think we should also think more broadly about political transformation and the other forces, besides the machinations of Democratic politicians, which might create political transformation. In particular, we need to be aware of the cultural institutions which frequently shape our political environment, and we need to push those institutions to create political transformation as well. Follow me across the flip for more details on how, in my opinion, cultural institutions shape our political environment, and what (in somewhat high-level terms) needs to be done about those institutions to create the kind of progressive political transformation we seek.

There are a number of cultural institutions which shape the broad strokes of our political ideology. These include the media (including both news media and entertainment media), educational institutions, the workplace and labor unions, religious institutions, and our familial and other personal relationships. In the past, I've referred to these kinds of institutions as "ideological conversion machines", and that term has its origins in some theories advanced over the past couple of years by Chris Bowers, and originally by Louis Althusser, who coined the term ideological state apparatus. Regardless, all of these institutions shape our ideology in a number of different ways, ranging from overtly political messages (sermons about feeding the poor, say), to more subtle values-based messages (like a steady stream of workshops on diversity at college, say), to experiential learning (like learning the importance of solidarity by participating in a strike), and so forth.

Interaction with these sorts of institutions shapes a person's political ideology. Some institutions tend to make their members more liberal (many labor unions, for instance), while some institutions tend to make their members more conservative (like many evangelical churches.) In fact, this relationship is also somewhat circular, as many people gravitate towards the institutions which tend to reinforce their own ideologies.

The ideological forces at work in any given cultural institution can also be variably granular. That is to say, while some cultural institutions will push their members towards a generally liberal worldview and impart in their members progressive values, others will push their members to take sides and become active in a particular issue or electoral campaign. While it's hard to paint such a large and abstract a group of institutions with a single brush, I think it's fair to say that most cultural institutions have an ideological impact which is less fine-grained but more long-lasting than the impact exerted by politicians, pundits, and others whose job it is to actively participate in political discourse.

Moreover, ideological forces across cultural institutions are not uniformly emphatic. Thus we might imagine two different union locals, both theoretically tied together by the ideology of solidarity, but one considerably more strident in fighting workplace policies and therefore, perhaps more likely to make the notion of solidarity real to its members. Or we might imagine two different colleges, both on paper as supporting diversity, but one considerably more aggressive in recruiting and accepting a diverse student body, pushing its students to socialize across racial and ethnic lines, etc.

In fact, you might think of the ideological landscape designed by cultural institutions as a kind of sum of products. Take the number of members an institution has, multiply by the granularity of its ideological impact, and then multiply again by the emphasis that institution places on ideological transformation. Add that number up for all cultural institutions, and you have the total amount of ideological impact exerted by cultural institutions.

Of course, our political environment is far too complex and nuanced to be expressed by such a clean and crisp mathematical equation. Real life gets messy. Cultural leaders claim to hold certain values, only to undermine them through their actions. Or cultural leaders hold views which don't cleanly fit into any neatly-defined political ideological category (for example, a vast number of clergy.) More than that, many institutions have an internal tension between the "official" ideology of their leaders, and that of their members, and these tensions create countervailing ideological forces. And so on.

But I think this conceptual mathematical formula is valuable to us, because it points us towards pressure points where we can imagine changing the cultural forces which create our political ideological environment. In particular, it suggests that we can do any of the following things to create a more progressive political environment:

• Bring more people into progressive cultural institutions, like the labor movement, liberal religious groups, etc.
• Make progressive cultural institutions more engaged in fine-grained political fights over concrete issues
• Make ideological transformation and higher priority for more progressive cultural institutions

Actually, that's only haf the equation.  The flip side of promoting progressivism is demoting conservatism, by doing some or all of the following:

• "Steal" members from conservative cultural institutions
• Encourage conservative cultural institutions not to engage in fine-grain political debate
• Reduce the emphasis on ideological transformation within conservative cultural institutions

I don't particularly like this second half of the equation, since it can get pretty ugly.  To see what this looks like in practice, consider the conservative movement's long-term effort to bust unions, or consider that nasty little group, the Institue for Religion and Democracy, which works to destabilize mainline Protestant denomination and to "pick off" congregations from denominational bodies.  It's remarkably odious stuff.  There are ways to demote conservatism that are not quite as ugly though - for example, encouraging evangelicals to focus less on political action, or encouraging them to break ties with the Republican party.

Regardless, the larger point is that there's a cultural dimension to political transformation, and that therefore, political transformation requires cultural transformation, including at least some of the steps I've outlined above.  This is not the kind of thing that politicians should be doing, nor do I think they'd do it particularly well. (Although Jimmy Carter has been busily proving me wrong with his pan-Baptist reform group.) Rather, it is the kind of thing which ordinary people, grassroots cultural activists and leaders, must be involved in. I also think (and this has been a central assertion of my blogging and, recently, my paid professional work) that it's the kind of thing entrepreneurs and activist businesspeople can and should take part in, by using market forces to create cultural change.  I also think there is an important role for the blogosphere to play in this project, by cultivating and nurturing ideas for cultural growth and by critiquing cultural institutions and pushing them to be more progressive.

This kind of cultural transformational work is massive, complex, difficult, and not the stuff of overnight revolutions. Conservatives discovered that it took decades to weaken the hand of center-left mainline Protestant denominations and labor unions, to build up an orchestrated massive media machine, and to win the trust of a growing group of religious conservatives. We will no doubt find that organizing religious liberals, rebuilding the labor movement, and increasing the impact of our own nascent media machine will take a very long time. Fortunately, some of this work is already being done; colleges are creating a new generation of very progressive Millenials, labor unions have undertaken a massive program of political mobilization that is very successful, and religious liberals are starting to organize themselves (more on that later.) But we have really just begun, and there's plenty left to do.

On Monday, Chris Bowers at OpenLeft wrote about the importance of a long-term trend of growing racial, ethnic and religious diversity in the demise of the conservative movement.  Chris's main thesis are that identity and ideology are one and the same, in the sense that the cultural institutions which produce one's identity are the same as those which produce one's ideology, and that Democrats should stop thinking about political positioning in terms of classic left/center/right ideological terms.  The upshot: Democrats must eschew Republican tactics, messaging and policies in favor of embracing pluralism and diversity.

There's a lot to agree with in his post, although I do think he misses a few key points.  First and foremost, I believe he's only partially correct in claiming that the ideological self-identification is essentially meaningless.  While it is true that a clever ad campaign can move ideological self-identification numbers tremendously, it's also true that self-identification numbers have been remarkably stable in exit polls for many years: about 20% of voters self-identify as liberals, while about 33% of voters self-identify as conservatives.  It would appear that about half of the country self-identifies ideologically in a very stable way, meaning that ideology is not quite dead - it's just dead for about half of the electorate, and probably a pretty good share of the non-voting adult population.

Second and perhaps more importantly, while it's true that "all of the major institutions that produce someone's cultural identity ... are the same
institutions that produce someone's ideology", each institution pulls the identity and ideology levers in different ways.  For example, while it's almost certainly true that educational institutions play a role in ideological formation, do they really do much for identity creation?  Contra-wise, the role of family life in ideological formation is murky at best, while family life plays a central role in identity creation.

At the end of the day, I think while Chris is largely right, there is a clearer line between ideology and identity than he supposes.  Probably, what this means is that there are many people who vote an identity, a pretty sizable group that votes both an identity and an ideology, and a small number who vote against an identity/ideology.  That obviously has implications for electoral strategy, but I think it also has implications for what I'd call (for lack of a better term) our cultural strategy - our strategy for engaging and shaping cultural institutions in order to keep our base growing and strong.  In particular, this means that our cultural strategy should not only include efforts to strengthen and create cultural institutions which form the progressive ideology/identity, it also means that the strategy should draw clear lines between cultural movements and progressivism.

On Monday, the New Progressive Coalition released its signature product, the Political Mutual Fund.  The mutual fund provides progressives with an easy way to donate intelligently to organizations which are pursuing a sound strategy towards a larger goal identified by NPC.  For starters, NPC has identified three large-scale goals which progressives can "invest" in: Victory in 2008 and Beyond, Health Care, and Energy Independence and the Environment.  To be selected for investment within a mutual fund, an organization must meet a variety of criteria. 
It must have a strategy consistent with NPC's goals; it must be effective; it must fill a gap in the political landscape; it must be innovative; it must provide a good "return", according to quantifiable metrics; it must have potential for growth and for changing the landscape; and it should have a good track record and a high-caliber staff.  Individual investors should not plan on getting their money back, except in progress made towards political goals.

The launch of the political mutual funds has been successful, with coverage at the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, DailyKos, ABC, CBS, Time, USA Today, CNN and Forbes.  In terms of real dollars, the three funds combined have so far pulled in just north of $100,000.  The mutual funds together include 37 progressive organizations, including Energize America, the energy legislation group begun on Daily Kos.  There is a relatively low barrier to entry; to join in the fun, progressive investors should chip in a minimum of $50, plus a 2% administrative fee.

The political mutual funds are the culmination of about two years of organizational soul-searching, market research, and some fairly intense grappling with the progressive political landscape.  When it first began, NPC's mission was to serve both progressive organizations (by providing them with resources, both monetary and otherwise, to help them succeed) and progressive investors (by giving them a chance to invest in effective organizations, and to participate in more meaningful ways as well.)  NPC devoted considerable resources towards studying the progressive political landscape.  It divided the alphabet soup of progressive organizations into six sectors: Advocacy, Electoral, Idea Generation, Infrastructure & Capacity, Leadership Development, and Media.  Inspired by the use of return on investing metrics in the world of financial investments, NPC developed the theoretical framework of a "Political Return on Investment" metric within each sector, measuring things like legislation passed per dollar invested.  Along the way, NPC shifted its focus; instead of creating a marketplace where investors would invest in, partner with, and mentor progressive organizations, NPC decided to create a pseudo-financial instrument for investors to "consume".  The political mutual fund is that instrument.

With the launch of the political mutual fund finally upon us, the progressive movement now has a broad-based mechanism which will allow individual investors of relatively modest means to participate in meaningful and intelligent movement-funding.  But what does the rest of the landscape for funding the progressive movement look like, and what is missing?



The movement-funding landscape
In a way, the political mutual funds are a blend of two radically different donation models.  One model, the ActBlue model, is familiar to most MyDD readers.  This model favors ad hoc social small-dollar giving.  Social networks, blogs, and other groups play a role in recommending candidates and organizations who deserve support via ActBlue, but aside from these sorts of peer-to-peer recommendations, very few donors thoroughly vet the recipients of their donations before making a contribution.  There is a very low barrier to entry - donations can be made for as little as $5, and the average ActBlue donation tends to be around $100.  Donors tend to be focused mostly on supporting candidates, and consequently donations tend to be higher during election years.

Another model, the Democracy Alliance model, is characterized by a very high barrier to entry, and a very thorough vetting process.  The DA expressly bills itself as an effort to build progressive movement organizations, and does not appear to participate in much electoral political work.  Membership in the alliance is on an invite-only basis, and donors must contribute a minimum of $250,000.  The vetting process for organizations funded by the DA, as well as the DA's larger strategic vision for building the progressive movement, have never been made public.

By way of contrast, NPC's barrier of entry is set very low, but not quite as low as ActBlue's; NPC mixes electoral work with movement-building work; and NPC has a rigorous vetting process and movement-building strategy, both of which are clearly outlined on its website.

Along different axes, there are mutual funds which focus on corporate social responsibility of various formats, including recent partisan arrivals like The Blue Fund and more traditional, non-partisan mutual funds, like Domini Social Investments.  These funds are financial instruments which purport to provide a return on investments, but have a secondary goal of supporting socially responsible corporate actors through their investing philosophies.  Furthermore, there are venture philanthropists who seek to invest in non-profit causes but want to see quantifiable results for their donations, and social entrepreneurs, who seek to create sustainable enterprises which create positive social change, and a variety of venture capitalists who invest in social enterprises.

While these various approaches to giving sound very similar, they are each fundamentally different from the other.  Socially responsible mutual funds give money to for-profit companies whose main goal is to sell a product or service, and which operate in socially responsible ways.  Social entrepreneurs seek to create social change through for-profit mechanisms, and are frequently not traded publicly (and are therefore usually incapable of receiving investments from socially responsible mutual funds). Venture philanthropists seek to apply the metric-driven approach of for-profit investment to the non-profit world, but ultimately their money goes to apolitical non-profit groups (rather than the blend of politically relevant non-profits and directly political PACs supported by the Democracy Alliance, NPC, and ActBlue.)

Despite comparisons made in the popular press, the Democracy Alliance, New Progressive Coalition, and ActBlue are not socially responsible investors, nor are they social entrepreneurs, nor are they venture philanthropists.  They are movement-funders, who are concerned with explicitly building a political movement by supporting political actors of various stripes according to a variety of metrics.

What's missing
What the Democracy Alliance, NPC, and ActBlue have achieved in the past four or five years is nothing short of astounding.  While Democracy Alliance (internally) and NPC (transparently) have developed sophisticated models necessary for evaluating the landscape of progressive movement organizations, ActBlue has created a social fundraising mechanism that coincides perfectly with the rise of the progressive blogosphere and participatory progressive political movement.  In terms of dollars raised, last year the Democracy Alliance poured $50 million into progressive politics, and as of today ActBlue is the largest Democratic PAC, with total disbursements of $32 million from small-dollar political donations.

Despite the impressive advances made by these movement-funders in recent years, there are three ways in which the movement-funding world has largely fallen short of the needs of the progressive movement:

• Movement funders are primarily involved with funding existing actors, and do not seek to instigate the creation of new organizations to fill gaps within the movement.
• Movement funders have not drawn up a picture of sustainability for the larger progressive movement.  The implicit model underlying donations made through the Democracy Alliance, NPC, and ActBlue is that political actors will rely on donations long into the future.  There is no concept of a self-sustaining segment of the progressive movement, perhaps started by seed funds but ultimately profitable in an ongoing way.
• Movement funders are largely concerned with the expressly political world.  They are concerned with actors who are pulling primarily political levers, whether they be engaged in making campaigns more effective, pushing ideas and narratives into the expressly political media, or recruiting leaders for political organizations.  They are not concerned with building and supporting progressive cultural institutions which will help construct the progressive cultural identity.

Now, to contradict a bit of what I just wrote, there is one movement-funding organization which I've not discussed very much, but is concerned at least partially with incubating new political organizations, and with creating sustainable political models: Skyline Public Works, which, like the NPC, is funded largely by Deborah and Andy Rappaport.  Skyline is primarily a grantmaking organization, and is largely concerned with mobilizing the remarkably progressive and civic-minded Millenial Generation through its GO! Grants Program.  (Although the organization temporarily suspended future funding of GO! Grants in August 2007, its website claims that applications for winter 2007 were accepted up until Nov. 15.)  While Skyline's list of grant recipients reads like a who's-who of progressive organizations, the group has also funded a few for-profit ventures, including Civic Space, the Huffington Post, and Goodstorm. 

So while my list of critiques of the progressive movement-funding world is not entirely accurate, it is largely true.  Building the progressive movement will require mechanisms for identifying gaps within our machinery; scratching together ideas for filling those gaps; developing sustainable business models for at least some of those ideas; and pulling together the venture and angel capital necessary to seed those ideas.

Moreover, this entire approach to intentional movement building must be under-girded by an understanding that the progressive movement will require not just a political infrastructure, but a cultural infrastructure composed of churches, schools, labor unions, political and cultural media, and other cultural institutions.  In other words, our movement-funders should be willing to incubate sustainable enterprises whose goals include building new cultural institutions, or strengthening existing ones.

This sounds like an incredibly tall order, and in some ways it is.  But of course, the progressive movement is not without cultural allies.  Labor unions, most colleges and universities, and many expressly or informally liberal houses of worship are already acting as organic creators of the progressive base.  In varying degrees, the progressive movement lacks strong connections to these cultural institutions.  Many of these institutions are also facing serious problems - including union-busting for labor unions, competition from charismatic conservative churches for liberal houses of worship, and a concerted effort to install conservative professors on college campuses.  Progressives should be aware of these assaults, and must be working to counteract or mitigate them.  At the same time, progressives should be working to pro-actively build the membership and cultural clout of their cultural allies.  These efforts are just as important as our expressly political work, and they should not be ignored by movement-funders.

The launch of the political mutual funds on Monday was another milestone in the evolution of the modern progressive movement, and in particular of the movement-funding world.  I wish the NPC the best of luck in building a donor base for its political mutual funds, and I look forward to the continued evolution of the funds.  At the same time, I also hope that there is more progress towards the incubation-minded, sustainable, and cultural movement-funding which I believe is necessary to the long-term growth of the progressive movement.

On Monday, Chris Bowers wrote about a fascinating Lear/Zogby study on entertainment choices and ideological orientation. The study is interesting because in addition to asking respondents to self-identify as liberal, conservative, or moderate, the study asks respondents a flurry of questions and then assigns ideological markers ("Blue", "Red", and "Purple") to respondents post-hoc.

Bowers argues that the most significant way to produce political change is to support cultural institutions which produce progressive ideological change will make a much larger difference in electoral and legislative outcomes than anything that is done in the political world. I think it's a very wise point. Clever campaign ads and better voter targeting will only take a progressive candidate so far in a world where progressives are vastly outnumbered by conservatives. Contra-wise, even a very poorly run campaign for a progressive candidate can succeed in a world awash with progressives. That's why labor unions, progressive news and opinion media, and liberal religious organizations are so important: they are cultural institutions which make progressivism real for people who may not be tuned into politics actively, and thereby make people more progressive. The first-order political impacts of these organizations, like church voter registration drives and campaign donations from unions, are just gravy.

For a long time, I've assumed that creating the kind of ideological change that will result in parity between progressives and conservatives is going to be a mammoth task. That's largely because ideological self-identification in exit polls has produced pretty steady results for a long time - about 33% of the electorate identifies as conservative, 20% as liberal, and the remaining 47% as moderate.

However, the new Zogby/Lear survey paints quite a different picture. The survey puts about 39% of the country in the "Blue" team, 37% of the country in the "Red" team, and the remaining 24% in the "Purple" team. That's an astounding result! It means that a large chunk of the progressive base is going to the polls and thinking of themselves as "moderates", rather than as "liberals". Indeed, the survey data bear this out. When asked to self-identify ideologically, Blue team members spread out almost equally between "progressive" (31.1%), "liberal" (36.6%), and "moderate" (31.5%). In contrast, 87% of Red team members described themselves as "conservative" or "very conservative", with another 12% describing themselves as "moderate". (It's important to note that these ideological self-identifications didn't seem to matter for the presidential vote. Despite having many more self-described moderates, the Blue team voted 95.6% for Kerry, as opposed to the 98.6% of the Red team which voted for Bush; the comparable numbers among self-identified liberals and conservatives voting for Kerry and Bush respectively are in the mid-80s in exit polls. It's hard to say whether the Blue team slipped in voting progressively in down-ballot races. Finally, it's worth )

In light of these findings, I think the Center for American Progress's "Progressive and Proud of it" advertising campaign is both timely and wise. If you haven't seen the videos, click over there and check them out. I like them, a lot, although I do have some quibbles with the details. (For example, why put two white guys in the knock-off Mac commercials? Shouldn't progressives be represented by someone who's either not white, or not a guy?)

On the whole, however, this advertising campaign, along with similar efforts like Commonweal Institute's "Promoting Progressive Values" project, are exactly the kind of thing we need. These efforts help people who might not be politically involved understand what progressivism is, and why they should identify with it. At the same time, these efforts lay the groundwork for candidates to self-identify as progressive, and to follow-through on that self-identification with progressive actions while in office. If there's a large group of voters willing to call themselves progressives, candidates and elected officials have an interest in identifying themselves with that group.

In a way, the progressive ads are very similar to liberal cultural institutions. Institutions like unions, liberal churches, schools, and news media make ideology real by connecting the abstract concepts of an ideology with the tangible facts of everyday life. That is why we in the progressive movement should be working diligently to support labor organizing, establish and expand the reach of liberal religious organizations, and create progressive news and opinion media. These are the kinds of activities which are ultimately going to keep our movement growing.