This has been a big week for "youth" organizing - a terrible term that applies to any sort of organizing specifically aimed at or run by people under 30. As you may know from
Woodhouse's postings over at MyDD, the Young Democrats of America have been having their own conference and doing some soul-searching out in the Bay area. Some members are looking to shift the direction of YDA from minor-league resume building towards boots-on-the-ground, direct action - an important step toward reforming the many problems of YDA. I wish them well in their task - and I'll probably put considerable thought and effort into changing YDA myself over the next few years (I've already put in
my .02 about it here on MyDD.)
But YDA wasn't the only big gathering of politically active, progressive-liberals under 30, and if you want to talk about direct, local action among the under 30 crowd, San Francisco was the wrong city to be in this week. Another group out there is poised to get the job of local organizing done in the next few years: The League of Independent Voters.
Over the past 4 days, the city of Pittsburgh was host to Smackdown!, the League's annual planning conference. I attended on behalf of
Music for America, and I was incredibly impressed with both the sophistication of the trainings they offered, the strategy they outlined, and (just as importantly) how much damn fun the whole thing was. Here's a rundown on what impressed me so much at the conference, what the League is poised to do, and how it contrasts to YDA.
If you've never worked with the League or seen any of their chapters in action, it can be easy to dismiss them - especially among older voters or in more staid political circles. With funny haircuts, body piercings or tattoos, the occasional communist T-shirt and rhetoric that sometimes made Howard Dean look like Joe Lieberman - to outsiders, the League may seem like a throwback to the tactics of the 60s which failed us so spectacularly in the run-up to war: radical sound and fury signifying nothing.
This is a mistake. The League is just as strategically and tactically minded as the best of the blogosphere or the most real politik of campaigns, and Smackdown! was no touchy-feely get together or marathon Bush-bashing session. While YDA was haggling over Roberts Rules and trying to decide whether or not they even want to be activists, the League members were training themselves to be more effective activists locally and nationally.
During my two, too-brief days at Smackdown! I sat in on panels and training sessions focused on non-traditional and big-donor fundraising, Lobbying 101 (with some graduate sessions after class), Canvassing 101, identifying and exploiting strategic and wedge issues in municipal and state government, non-traditional alliances, mapping precincts, counting votes and influencing city council, county officials and state legislators and using culture to drive participation. Some of these trainings were lead by League members, others by seasoned professionals from the likes of the Villaraigosa campaign in LA, SEIU and professional lobbyists. And these are just the classes I was able to sit-in on (there were three separate tracks to the conference organized loosely around some combination of novice/intermediate/expert and fieldwork/traditional strategic planning/outside the box thinking).
Here on the blogosphere and in the DNC under Dean's leadership, we talk about going local - about reaching into communities and organizing them for political action. The League does this in a way that traditional operations currently do not. They ARE local. They use culture to drive participation, and in their communities cultural participation and political participation are one and the same. They run community centers and they run for local office. They've created their own organizations to fill in the gaps left by the Democratic Party - more than that, they've created new groups because the Democratic Party doesn't have a clue what the needs of these communities are. They are reaching people that YDA, DFA or even a reformed county or city operation like those proposed here on MyDD or at Swing State Project could not reach. Most importantly, their roots are deep in communities that are cut off from all of our blogosphere discussion by the digital divide.
And they are having an effect in a wide range of places. I heard from League groups in rural Maine who lobbied city council and school boards - successfully. I heard about inner-city groups organizing against violence, or for Villaraigosa. The League is reaching and successfully organizing a broad spectrum of progressives that are not being served by the current political infrastrucure.
Observing the myriad groups that comprise the League can offer great lessons to progressive in how to organize locally - particularly in the case of YDA, which suffers from a huge credibility problem among its own generation of constituents - but it can also offer solid advice on how not to organize. There is a huge cultural disconnect between the League and other groups like DFA, ACT, the DNC or congressional committees, but deeper than that, there is also a great deal of distrust. This is not unearned. Many members of the League did double duty last year for the Young Voter Alliance and ACT, and many of them were stiffed by YVA and ACT on their paychecks. One organizer at Smackdown! actually paid the wages of his canvassers out of his own pocket after YVA packed up and ran out of town, and he's now in debt and foregoing grad school.
This is not the way to treat some of the hardest-working activists in the progressive movement, and this will be a barrier on collaboration between local groups for years to come.
The League is now focusing in on specific communities and getting state of the art advice on issues and canididates. They are ready to experience explosive growth in those communities and poised to effectively organize that growth to the advantage of progressives everywhere. They are responsive to member feedback in a way that many traditional operations aren't and have deep connections to their local communities. Their one weakness right now is that their tech-side is somewhat lacking - a natural result of being so completely oriented towards on-the-ground action in communities adversely affected by the digital divide - but something they'll need to remedy if they want to continue to grow and communicate effectively amongst their many chapters.
I'm going to be spending the next couple months working on political strategy at MfA, and a big part of this will be figuring out how best to collaborate with the League. I'll post more reports on the activities of both groups when we get feedback from our members and things come more into focus.