Zack Exley

Michael Turk is right 3 October, 2006

Michael Turk is right that I should’ve mentioned that the Republicans already do “trust the people” in my article on the topic of trust and organizing from a few days ago.

It’s funny that his main contention is Democrats have to do all these things he lays out in order to win, but gives the GOP no credit for having done them. In fact, he actually discounts our success as a fluke – the lesser of two evils – rather than recognizing in his dissertation exactly what we do better….

[Zack's argument about leadership] isn’t breaking new ground. The idea of the Influentials was put forward by Keller and Berry. For every group, there are people within the group that the rest look to for opinions. The RNC, and the Bush campaign spent a lot of time trying to identify those influentials and make them champions.

I wouldn’t trace the idea of leadership to Keller and Berry — it’s timeless, and has been the root of all good organizing since the beginning of humanity.

But yes, the New Republicans get it, and that has been the key to their success. It’s a cultural difference now. Progressives, coming out of the snobbish/vanguard Left of the 60′s and 70′s, set themselves up in their own minds as separate from and better than “ordinary people.” More importantly, they dramatically misunderestimated the talent, depth and courage of those “1 in 10″ leaders spread throughout every nook and cranny of the people. You can trace the lineage of this attitude to Lenin, on one side, and Saul Alinsky (and his predecessors), on the other. Alinskyites will freak out at me for saying that, but it’s true. Just read the model dialogs with workers and tenants he includes in Rules for Radicals. They’re patronizing as hell. He presents people as naive, clueless children. I know that he was a brilliant and charismatic organizer, and that he had great love and respect for the people he organized. But that fundamental attitude became much more pronounced and problematic as it got passed down to organizers who were…not so brilliant and charismatic.

I don’t know the whole story of how the formerly snobbish, blue-blooded, Northeastern liberal Republicans became the party of the people. Can anyone point me to some sources? It must have had partly to do with so many Southern and Midwestern Democrats switching over. It must have also had to do with the infusion of so many Christian organizers. And it partly just came out of necessity — after being out of power for so long, they just had to figure this out. (This could be starting to happen among Democrats now.)

Turk is also right when he says that Bush presented his voters with something they could really believe in, and that’s why they voted for him.

Bush won because he did exactly what Zack would like to see Democrats do. Bush gave people a reason to elect him. He told them what he wanted to do (almost none of which has been done, but ignore that for now). His campaign spent a lot of time talking to the Influentials in every group they could identify from Albany, NY to Zuzax, NM.

Turk says I’m insulting the American people by not accepting their election of Bush as a wise decision. Actually, what I said was that Bush’s election was not a resounding decisive choice by the American people — after all, only around a quarter of adults voted for him and Kerry was not far from winning.

Think through the implications: Bush really stood for something (a few things, actually). However, he beat Kerry (whose campaign stood for what?) by only a very small margin. Why didn’t Bush trounce Kerry just like, say, Reagan trounced Mondale?

What did Bush give his voters to believe in? 1) He stood strong on a few issues that are very important to a subset of Christians; 2) He presented himself as a born again Christian, which was extremely important to an overlapping subset of Christians; 3) He stood for an aggressive “Let’s kick their ass” foreign policy that is appealing to a very large number of people; 4) He stood for cutting EVERYONE’S taxes — and don’t underestimate the very noticeable tax cuts that most of the middle class received; and 5) He stood (albeit in rhetoric only) for a brand of libertarian economics that has a very committed and significant following.

I accept Turk’s argument that, will all those messages, Bush really did give his people something to believe in. And Bush at least came across as totally sincere and committed on all of those issues. Maybe Democrats will cry, “But he didn’t deliver on most of those messages!” And that’s true, but people will give their leaders the benefit of the doubt and support them as they fight to make change. They understand change doesn’t happen instantly.

But here is what is significant for progressives in all this: Bush did a perfect job appealing to people on all those messages, yet those messages only really mobilized a pretty small minority of the population, and a very slim majority of the 2004 electorate. Yes, voter turnout increased in 2004 among people coming out to vote for Bush, but it increased almost as much among people coming to vote against him.

Even though Bush stood clearly and firmly for all those things I listed, the Democrats still almost won despite standing weakly for vague nothings. Just the faint memory of the Democrats being a “party of the people” — a memory left over literally from the days of FDR — was almost enough to trump Bush’s minority messages.

The moral of the story? The Bush Republicans are doing great organizing — but they are doing it around a minority message. If progressives can find a way back to actually standing for progress (and become good organizers too) — then the whole picture changes, because that is a message that mobilizes the whole of the people. Then progressives stand a chance to win by massive landslides.