Planting Liberally

Cross-posted on MyDD Every now and again, the progressive netroots wrings its collective hands about the lack of money pouring in to movement organizations. A good example of recent hand-wringing along these lines was Chris Bowers's extended rant about the One-Way Flow of Progressive Movement Money in late January. (In fact, I posted in the comment threads of Bowers's post, and that comment could be considered a sort of pre-cursor to this series on liberal entrepreneurship.) In this post, I will spend a bit of time describing some basic approaches to increasing the flow of money into the progressive movement. I'll describe in more depth one approach, which I call liberal entrepreneurship, and give a loose definition of what it is and identify a few well-known examples. Future posts will elaborate on this concept, by describing potential revenue streams for liberal entrepreneurs, outlining things the progressive netroots can do to facilitate liberal entrepreneurship, and identifying ideas which entrepreneurs can pick up and develop into profitable ventures. Approaches to increasing the flow of money into the movement There are a few basic approaches to increasing the flow of money into the progressive movement, and we can loosely categorize them in increasing order of involvement of netroots activists:

1. Rely on big donors. This approach is most clearly embodied by the Democracy Alliance, a secretive organization (with a website to match) composed primarily of very wealthy institutional and individual donors. The organization was originally formed as the culmination of a series of talks given by Rob Stein which revolved around his much-ballyhooed Powerpoint presentation, "The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix". While the organization started strong with a list of powerful liberal financiers, it appears to have quickly lost its way. Divisions within the Democracy Alliance were well documented in a piece in The Nation last September. (I wrote a rather sick-to-my-stomach rant about the piece back then, and I remain awed at how any group could fail so spectacularly.) It's difficult to say what, exactly, caused this collapse in the organization. I would guess that its over-reliance on wealthy donors and hush-hush code of secrecy, as well as a lack of a guiding set of principles, don't help matters much.
2. Support entrepreneurs. The New Progressive Coalition, which I profiled several months ago (see this summary of the NPC), is the clearest example of supporting liberal entrepreneurs I have yet seen. NPC helps connects builders of progressive organizations with potential funders, and also provides organizations with practical tips and advice. This is a very useful organization, but its membership fees are rather high and tend to lock out a lot of people who can provide a little bit of help. (On the other hand, the fees are fairly low for anyone who's serious about organization building, considering the myriad other costs involved in such a venture.) Unfortunately, there are not many other resources available to liberal entrepreneurs. Sure, there are plenty of resources for people who run non-profits, and there are a handful of resources available to people who run grassroots political organizations. But those resources are insufficient, because they just don't cover the kind of organizations liberal entrepreneurs might want to run. Where are the resources to support a for-profit company which provides consulting to candidates to help them reach religious liberals? As you may have guessed by now, this sort of problem is exactly what I'm looking to solve.
3. Small dollar fundraising. This approach seeks to raise small funds from a large number of donors, and takes many forms. The most prominent form of small dollar fundraising for progressive organizations is the fundraising pages at ActBlue, and of these perhaps the most prominent is the page for Blogpac. But there are other approaches that do not stress philanthropy, such as the eBay auction of Libby-trial mementos to support the Blue America Speakers Bureau and various CafePress stores (e.g. this one, by Mid-Michigan DFA). While this approach is successful in many ways, ultimately it relies on the generosity of netroots activists. While I love my fellow netroots activists dearly, their generosity is certainly limited. It extends mostly to candidates, not organizations; it peaks around election milestones; and, in about three years of ActBlue fundraising, it has raised about $20 million. That's an impressive figure, but it just can't compete with the kind of money undergirding the conservative movement.

I've tipped my hand a bit already. Of these approaches, I believe that supporting entrepreneurs is the approach which holds the most potential for building sustainable organizations to build the progressive movement. The Democracy Alliance approach appears to be an unmitigated disaster. The small dollar approach, while attractive because it is democratic, just doesn't raise enough money, and is subject to the philanthropic biases of netroots activists. So what is liberal entrepreneurship? "Liberal entrepreneurship" is a term I am ripping off of the better known "social entrepreneurship". As defined by Wikipedia, a social entrepreneur is "someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change." By contrast, a liberal entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a problem which faces the progressive movement and builds an organization to solve it. The problems facing the progressive movement can be categorized in a couple of different ways:

1. Cultural problems which create a hostile ideological environment for progressives When I first started blogging on Planting Liberally, this kind of problem was my main focus. I conjectured that progressives could not get a lot of traction in terms of electing candidates and passing laws because various cultural institutions (called "ideological conversion machines") created a conservative ideological environment. Ideological conversion machines take several forms:
   1. Media, including print, broadcast, and online media, as well as news, political opinion, and a-political media. Media of all kinds form our perceptions of the world, particularly with regards to current events that are directly related to politics.
   2. Educational systems, especially high school and college. Teenage and young adult educational experiences are formative for most people, and certain topics, particularly history and government, can profoundly shape the way we understand modern politics. The socialization inherent in education can also be extremely friendly to developing liberal values - indeed, modern education, with its reliance on rational argumentation, respectful discourse, and diverse view points, is founded on liberal values.
   3. The workplace, both as a site of socialization and as a source of serious grievances which must be resolved. The trend toward diversity in the workplace is one of the most emphatic victories of liberalism in the past half-century. On the other hand, the declining power of labor unions means that far fewer people today are internalizing the liberal values of collective action and mutual aid which unions infuse into the workplace. Whereas many workers once turned to collective bargaining as a method of resolving grievances, they are now internalizing and individualizing these same grievances. This change is disastrous for the spread of liberal values.
   4. Religious institutions, primarily houses of worship like churches, temples, synagogues and mosques. These institutions regularly infuse values, worldviews and narratives into their congregants. They are also an important site of socialization which often reinforce those values and make them very concrete. Increasingly the country appears to be bimodally split between those who are fervent church attendants and those who are at most infrequent attendants.
   5. Family life, which I would suggest includes not just blood relatives but also networks of friends. Family is an important part of nearly everyone's life, and the way one interacts with family can have a powerful impact on one's political worldview.
   6. Community life, which can range in scope from the life of a city block or neighborhood to the life of an entire city or even region, but is geographic in any case. Each community has its own mores and customs, and these appear to have a weak impact on its residents' value systems. Moreover, a geographic community is a source of grievances which must be resolved, making it a potential site for community organizing in the tradition of Saul Alinsky. Community organizations can effectively demonstrate to community residents the power of collective action, very similar to the way that labor unions demonstrate the power of collective bargaining for a group of employees.
   The crisis of ideological conversion machines, from the progressive's point of view, is that so many of them are spreading conservative values. The political broadcast media is nearly uniformly conservative; liberal strongholds in higher education are under attack by foundations which endow conservative professorships; employers have discovered myriad legal maneuvers and tactics to undercut labor organizing; and liberal churches' reach is declining while conservative churches are ascendant. It is much harder to get an idea of the kind of values being spread by family and community life, but it is safe to say that there is a well-organized movement for spreading conservative values into family life (mostly via religious institutions), and that community life as an institution has deteriorated dramatically in the past forty years, as documented in Bowling Alone. The progressive has a three-part answer to this crisis: create new conversion machines which spread liberal values, attempt to change "neutral" institutions like most political broadcast media which are now spreading conservative values, and decrease the audience of institutions dedicated to conservative values, like Fox News.
2. Structural problems which make the machinery of the progressive movement ineffective or insufficient Crashing the Gate served as a good synopsis of these kinds of problems, although by now it is a bit out of date. I will summarize some of these problems here.
   1. Problems communicating our message via the media
      1. Political elites, especially Democratic elites, do not understand the threat posed by Fox News and other conservative media outlets, and give it too much credibility
      2. Conservative bias among professional opinion pundits and Democratic elected officials chosen to speak in the media
      3. Editorial bias which does not highlight stories favorable to progressives (or unfavorable to conservatives)
      4. Inability to discuss issues using frames which are friendly to progressives (popularized by George Lakoff)
      5. A dearth of accessible factual resources for use by media in reporting on issues in a way that is favorable to progressives (often considered the consequence of not enough progressive think tanks)
   2. Insufficient funds for progressive organizations
   3. Inability of left-wing organizations to play together nicely. This problem is embodied by "me-first"-ism among issue advocacy groups.
   4. Problems with our candidates
      1. Not enough good progressive candidates "on the bench" (the 50-state strategy is a response to this problem)
      2. Democratic candidates do not do enough to empower activists to take matters into their own hands
      3. Democratic candidates accept conservative frames or tack to the center instead of preaching to the choir to make them sing
      4. Not enough progressive candidates run for higher office
   5. Problems with the way campaign machinery operates
      1. Campaigns focus too much on broadcast ads; the ads themselves are ineffective
      2. Campaigns do not hire effective consultants; the consultancy is a crony network which is more concerned with payoff for a few well-connected people than with results
      3. Campaigns take volunteers for granted, give them tasks which are boring or pointless, and otherwise do not make good use of volunteer time
      4. Campaigns do not effectively target voters using the kind of sophisticated technological tools which Republicans have; while VoterVault is by all accounts a success, DemZilla appears to have flopped
   6. Demographic concerns
      1. The progressive movement doesn't have many minority or female leaders
      2. Discourse within the movement is frequently unfriendly to minorities or women
      3. We do not support enough minority and female candidates, and in some cases we internalize conservative frames about those candidates
      4. Democratic party organizations especially, and some progressive organizations as well, do not do enough to recruit young people
      5. We lack effective machinery to reach out to, register, and get out the vote among increasingly mobile young voters
      6. The mostly conservative generation of baby boomers is slowly becoming a reliable bloc of Republican-voting senior citizens
      7. The "millenial generation" appears to be a solid liberal bloc; some effort is needed to ensure that this bloc retains its current voting habits
   7. Leadership recruitment - We are not doing enough to recruit, train, and retain young activists to become the next generation of progressive leaders
   8. Problems with governance
      1. We lack white-hat lobbyists who can provide elected officials sufficient information to enact progressive reforms
      2. We lack sufficient state-level experimentation with progressive reforms to provide models for federal-level legislation
      3. Conservative Democratic elected officials maintain the press contacts and seniority which make them effective at getting their message out on a particular issue and swaying the votes of more junior progressive Democratic elected officials
      4. As a movement, we are unaccustomed to holding power and using it effectively, which means we are still working out the kinks in determining when to compromise, how much of the legislative process must be conducted openly, etc.
   9. Structural electoral problems
      1. Most districts are non-competitive due to gerrymandering
      2. Felon disenfranchisement and unfair drug laws are thinning the ranks of potential progressive voters. Many reforms, like excessive id requirements, are unfair to low-income voters who are natural progressive allies.
      3. The spread of faulty voting technology makes some corruption of election results possible
      4. The distribution of seats in the Senate and electoral votes in the Electoral College tends to boost the influence of small, conservative states over large, liberal ones.
   This list is incomplete on the one hand and out of date in many ways on the other (for example, the 2006 election replenished the bench in many ways, and featured two prominent progressives running for higher office, Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown.) But it is a decent outline of the kinds of problems that are making the progressive movement ineffective at winning elections and shaping policy. Some of these problems are simply too enormous to overcome in any meaningful way (particularly the distribution of seats in the Senate), while others can be addressed, and are being addressed by various groups (for example, the work on voting technology by the Secretary of State project). There are various approaches to these problems: approaches external to the party (e.g., the ad hoc effort to derail the Fox News/Nevada Democratic Party debate a couple weeks ago); approaches internal to the party (e.g., the 50 state strategy, or the "silent revolution" to fill Democratic party committees with dedicated progressives); and legislative and initiative reforms (especially with regards to structural problems, like gerrymandering.)

In short, there are a wide variety of problems to address, and a few basic strategies for addressing them. It seems to me that most netroots activists tend to look at problems facing the movement through the spectrum of movement machinery (i.e., the second major grouping of problems), rather than through the spectrum of a conservative ideological environment. It's small wonder, too; the second group of problems are much more concrete and can be tackled, sometimes very effectively, by small groups without a lot of funding. I believe that liberal entrepreneurship can address these problems very effectively, and can be a very rewarding avenue for the people involved. In case you don't believe me, consider a few simple examples. Some of these you may have heard of before.

• DailyKos is a blog dedicated to discussing "the state of the nation" from a progressive point of view, and providing progressives an alternative source of commentary to balance the conservative political opinions peddled on broadcast media. It is a very successful media enterprise which thrives on robust ad revenues.
• ActBlue is a PAC whose transactions are carried out by an credit card processing network called Auburn Quad. In about three years, the two together have facilitated over $20 million of contributions to Democratic candidates. Auburn Quad is supported by simple transaction fees on the contributions, and ActBlue subsists on "tips" and individual donations.
• Civic Space Labs is a web development and hosting company. The company develops and maintains an open source distribution of the Drupal content management system, and also provides hosting services for the software. The software is extremely popular among progressive grassroots organizations. While the company was initially founded with seed money from an investor, it now raises money from fees for services related to the software, such as hosting and consulting.

This list is fairly brief, but it could be much longer. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of progressive blogs, and perhaps as many as a couple dozen are sustainable enterprises built on advertising revenues. Similarly, web development for progressive organizations is quickly becoming a cottage industry, with companies like Echo Ditto, Blue State Digital, Chapter Three, and others joining the mix. In this post, I've tried to provide a good bird's eye view of the kinds of problems which liberal entrepreneurs might seek to address. In future posts, I'll discuss other angles on liberal entrepreneurship, including potential funding streams to exploit, and ways in which the progressive movement can facilitate entrepreneurship. This series will eventually grow into an ongoing list of ideas which other entrepreneurs can pick up and develop into profitable ventures, and reviews of existing entrepreneurial ventures which are probably less well-known than the examples cited above. Along the way, I hope you'll provide feedback and criticism. I'd be most particularly tickled if you were to steal some of these ideas and use them in your own work. Finally, I should mention a brief disclaimer: I am myself an entrepreneur, and my hope is to one day, in some form, assist many other entrepreneurs in developing their own ventures. So this series is certainly an effort in self-interest as well as, I hope, the interests of the broader movement.