shouting loudly

Today Barack Obama sent out a message to their uber-list titled “the future of this movement.”  It redirected to a brief youtube message from the President-elect, where he announced the formation of Organizing for America, “the organization that will build on the movement you started during the campaign.”  The group will have four initial priorities: the Economy, Ending the Iraq War, Health Care, and Repowering America.  He ends by promising that more details will be forthcoming in the next few days.

If anybody tells you that they know where this thing is going to go, they’re full of shit.  This set of circumstances is so unique, and so explosive, that we really have very little theory to build on.  The one thing I can say for sure is that things just got very interesting.

Here are a few questions to ponder moving forward:

-The group is clearly patterning itself off of the successful parts of the Dean for America/Democracy for America playbook.  No surprise there.  DFA’s resilience is a testament to the sizeable organization Dean built and the bottom-up technologies his team employed.  When the Dean campaign fizzled, local volunteers had a next meeting already scheduled, and the hard core of them showed up and asked “what’s next.”  In many cities, they converted this into substantial local progressive organizing capacity.  I’ve got a project brewing that will look at which cities produced strong DFA affiliates and which one’s didn’t.  It’s clearly a critical mass story, but no one has ever seriously looked at the applied factors that produce critical mass for these types of orgs.  I’ve been interested in that question for a long time because I’m peculiarly obsessed with taking federated civic organizations/social movement orgs to scale.  Looks like a whole swath of other academics and advocates just got a good reason to care about it as well.

-Thre are three departures from the Dean playbook that make this substantially different.  First, there’s size.  Preliminary evidence (very preliminary, mind you…) indicates that DFA groups persevered in cities where they were already pretty big.  It makes intuitive sense… if you’ve only got ten volunteers working on the campaign locally, and 70% of them decide it’s time to give up, then you’re left with only three people.  Not much of a group.  If you’ve got 100 volunteers in the same locale, 70% dropout rate would yield 30 people.  That’s a pretty big volunteer meeting.  So if we posit that there’s a minimum participation threshold for citizen-driven organizations formed out of political campaigns (DAMN does this need an acronym or a quality term right quick), then the sheer size and scale of OFA compared to DFA would suggest that they have exponentially more potential groups to work with.

Second is issue agenda.  When local Dean alums gathered, the first thing they had to do was look around and see if there were enough of them to bother (scale question).  The second thing they had to do was answer the question “what’s next.”  I don’t have proper data on this piece, but six years of directing trainings for the Sierra Student Coalition and watching with interest as my students either succeeded or failed to build strong groups taught me the following axiom: every problem is an organizing opportunity, and without good organizing opportunities, groups don’t form.  The most talented organizer in the world can’t snap their fingers and create a ripe campaign issue to galvanize people around.  They can only find those issues (occassionally doing some crafty reframing) and then make the most of them.  So one of the challenges that MUST HAVE faced the initial wave of DFA groups was “is there anything exciting to work on right now.”  Groups that found a good local or national issue had a meaningful next step.  Groups that found no issue, or found a bad one (say, an important topic that was in the midst of a two-year stakeholder process, thus rendering no good opportunity for mass engagement), were more likely to fade away.

OFA not only has a wealth of um, “organizing opportunities” after eight years of apocalyptic mismanagement of the Executive Branch, but they’re also linked to the new Chief Executive himself.  The four issue priorities are also the administration’s priorities, so the time for organizing around them is ripe.

There has NEVER been a grassroots movement that was also able to utilize the bully pulpit to set the national agenda.  The interplay of those dynamics cannot be predicted in advance.  It’s entirely novel.

Third and finally, they’re coming off a win.  Nothing helps nascent organizations more than an early win (again, I’m bridging my academic and activist backgrounds here.  Trust me… participant observation… I’m pretty confident about this one).  An awful lot of DFA’s, Sierra’s, League of Women Voter’s, etc volunteers signed up to take part in the Obama campaign.  They worked long, hard hours and were rewarded with a win.  Wins have been rare things in the past eight years (and before then as well).  Wins that objectively stand as a historic moment in American and, indeed, global history are, well, another thing entirely.  So here’s the question: if OFA asks people to work with them to build a clean energy future, and Sierra asks people the same thing, which meeting do the volunteers show up to?  Who has more sway, more pull?  And add to that mix that this is an internet-mediated organization, meaning they probably will have the ridiculously low overhead costs we see from MoveOn, DailyKos, and DFA, while the traditional interest groups are struggling in this economy to keep staff and pay the bills.

What does this mean for political associations in America?  Will we see consolidation?  What ability will OFA volunteers have to be critical of the Obama administration?  Will there be room for them to self-organize resistance to actions like FISA or the Rick Warren convocation?  If there isn’t, then the niche for progressive interest groups will probably be to galvanize these moments of left-wing outrage, and we’ll probably see a more polarized interest group system.  If there is, how will it be managed?  Obama says this is an organization that will be run by ordinary citizens and the grassroots.  I’m willing to believe him, but there are a thousand ways to give those citizens effective voice.  How much power is OFA willing to push to the edges?  And more to the point, since no one has EVER taken that type of organization to scale, will it work out or collapse under its own weight?

A final point working in the organization’s favor is that 2008 has a lot more mature online technologies than 2004 did.  DFA created their own playbook from scratch, and designed an online communications system as they went.  OFA will be able to upgrade that communications system, and will benefit from various other internet usage patterns that are increasingly permissive of these types of organization.

Bottom line is that this combination of scale, organizing opportunities, and allegiance to the executive branch is unprecedented.  It could be a very good thing or a very, very bad thing (bankrupt the rest of the left, leaving few effective voices as a check on Presidential Power).  I’m personally going to treat the organization with a combination of excitement and healthy skepticism.  All we can say for sure is that things just got plenty interesting.