Politics Is for Power

In many ways, this reads like a book about anxiety. When we are worried, we often fixate on problems about which there is little we can do. We ruminate on the worst things we can imagine, and most of us are good at imagining bad things. Our minds mistake thinking for action, believing that this sort of unproductive obsession is useful. It is not.

The same is true of politics for a certain sort of person. We're mostly white, well-educated, & comfortable, with few if any major problems in our lives. We harbor visions for better worlds (UBI! Healthcare! Housing!), but those visions are theoretical and we lack substantial theories of change for how to get there. At the same time, we are naturally afraid of democratic backsliding, the rise of fascism, hot war involving nuclear powers, and other terrifying threats. We listen to NPR, we read the paper of record, we understand the issues. And we conflate all of this for political action. It is not.

Political power is the group of people who will act with you on politics, accounting for how willing they are to take that action. The things you want people to do are the things which achieve your political aims — those visions for a better world. In a relatively-democratic system, voting with you is a common ask, and hopefully one which is not too onerous. Another more involved political tasks is working with you to build political power. In less-democractic systems, there's a whole lot more that might be needed.

For you, political action should be whatever builds political power. The sole measure of how effective your political actions are is how effectively they build your political power by aligning people with your cause and deepening their investment and willingness to act alongside you. Everything else is at best wasted effort. But many sorts of political hobbyism are worse because they feel like doing something without actually building power.

How do you build power? Many liberal thinky-types believe that you get people on your side by telling them about the issues in the marketplace of ideas and persuading them that your ideas are better. This is not an effective stragtegy. The "marketplace of ideas" doesn't exist, the airwaves are saturated, and few people are persuaded by abstract policy ideas (and those that are have already made up their minds — new evidence rarely persuades). Instead, there is exactly one core strategy for building power: community & mutual aid.

Connecting with and supporting those around you is how you persuade them that you are worthy of their time, attention, and support in return. Support can start as simply as just genuinely listening and connecting with someone's political opinions rather than pushing your own. But the true measure of support is material, much like the party organizations of old. Do you help people with their groceries, take care of their kids when needed, & support them when they get sick? Material mutual aid is what sticks. And real genuine mutual aid is a retail endeavor; there are no shortcuts.

The way to build power is not listening to NPR, it's community service. Community service is a political act, and it's the core of political power. Literally, directly, individually: reaching out to the people around you. Whether they're your neighborhood, your workplace, your school, or your congregation, and whether you speak face to face, call on the phone, write emails, or send letters. Connect with people. Listen to what they have to say. Learn what they need. And do what you can to meet their needs. This is the substrate of political power, now and forever. And it's much more rewarding than sitting on the couch doomscrolling.

I am precisely the target audience for this book, someone who wants to be politically active and pretends that paying attention to the news and the latest polls is doing something. I haven't changed my ways yet, but knowing is half the battle... I hope.

Here is how Hersh defines 'political hobbyism':

a catchall phrase for consuming and participating in politics by obsessive news-following and online “slacktivism,” by feeling the need to offer a hot take for each daily political flare-up, by emoting and arguing and debating, almost all of this from behind screens or with earphones on.

I see myself and I don't like it. I went canvassing for the first time, for Bernie, about six months before reading this book, but it felt empty. I now understand why, and what would work better.

Here are the problems with political hobbyism.

First:

First, we are making politics worse. Our collective treatment of politics as if it were a sport affects how politicians behave. They increasingly believe they benefit from feeding the red meat of outrage to their respective bases, constantly grandstanding for the chance that a video of themselves will go viral. In treating politics like a hobby, we have demanded they act that way.

Second:

Second, hobbyism takes us away from spending time working with others to acquire power. While we sit at home, people who seek political control are out winning over voters.

He goes on to give some great examples of what it means to work with others to acquire power, and how political organizing has changed over the last ~50 years. From changes in laws around patronage to political tribalism:

In 1964, the presidential candidates were Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, who were unquestionably more extreme in their policy differences than Obama and Romney. Yet survey takers did not respond as if the stakes were as high. What changed? In part, what has changed is that Americans have started to treat political parties as they treat sports teams.

What works:

• Listening to your neighbors
• Building trust over the long term
• Community service, e.g., day care and senior care
• Bottom-up organizing

Bottom-up organizing, where the top of an organization provides resources and some guidance but doesn't micromanage each local group, feels the most important to me. The idea that a political campaign should provide canvassers and phone bankers with a script and talking points is intuitively appealing. It makes it easy to get volunteers started and does as much as possible to control the message. It also feels empty for both sides of the conversation, and it makes a real connection and persuasion impossible.

The opposite is 'deep canvassing':

[I]n deep canvassing, volunteers focus on being good listeners and on making a human connection to someone they might disagree with. They are emissaries from one party to another, looking for goodwill.

Which sounds hard, because it is.

A group of volunteers focused on a single mission is the other recommended approach. That has been working well for the right but not for the left:

Political hobbyism on the left also stands in sharp contrast to the most successful recent political movements, which have been on the right—the right-to-life movement, the gun rights movement—which were developed around chapter-based, local organizations with thousands of volunteers willing to roll up their sleeves and, slowly and steadily, achieve modest political goals: taking over political party committees, quietly seeding judicial offices, recruiting state legislative candidates—activities that seem beneath the political hobbyist who is strictly infatuated with national political drama.

I would love to see a progressive organization (and I imagine DSA and probably others are doing some or most of this already) providing emergency day care and senior care and seasonal community support, like a spring bike tune-up meetup. The message is: "We want this for everyone and we want the government to help so that these services are accessible to all. Until then, we are going to use our modest resources to provide as much as we can. And, by the way, here is who you should vote for in local, state, and federal elections so that this happens sooner."

I have a sense that the best way that progressives can create the kind of "chapter-based, local organizations" that make a real difference is through a growth in union membership.

In 2017, while trying to figure out how to get a cannabis company started and do the basics like open a bank account, we found out the UFCW in California would help all new cannabis companies get a bank account at some affiliated credit union if we signed a Neutrality and Card Check Agreement. That agreement stated that we would not oppose or interfere with any organizing effort.

I wanted to do it. I thought that we would run the kind of operation where it wouldn't be a big deal either way, a place that supported its employees regardless of the threat of a strike. I supported unions in a theoretical, political-hobbyist way. Our advisors told us that fundraising would be much more difficult and it would generally make operating the company more difficult for us.

We didn't do it. We never got to the point of operations with our own facility where it mattered (my teammates moved on to operate from within a client's site and organization while I stayed in Seattle). I regret it anyway. I want unions to gain power and am finding reasons for optimism.

– originally written 2021-04-05