Stop me if you've heard this one before: "We need to invest more money in youth organizing."; "Right wing think tanks have plenty of money to push their ideas into the media, but left wing think tanks are strapped for cash."; "Bloggers should be paid for what they do."
The list goes on, and on, and on: liberals need more money in order to effectively build a movement, liberals need to invest more money in this or that idea, and so on. Wherever I've seen this sort of complaint (and yes, I've been the one complaining more than a few times), the answer almost always seems to be "let the Democracy Alliance take care of it." For those who don't know, the Democracy Alliance is a group of extremely wealthy liberal donors who have committed to investing substantially in infrastructure for the liberal movement.
We've got to stop waiting for the liberal tycoons that will shower cash down on our movement, and we've got to get our act together now. Fortunately, in ActBlue we have a perfect model for how to do that.
Don't get me wrong: I'm glad that there are some tycoons willing to pony up. But I think relying on that group is a very, very bad idea. For one thing, as David Sirota will tell you, letting rich people have an outsized influence in politics is what got us into this mess in the first place. More substantively, by all accounts, the
Alliance is shrouded in secrecy, meaning that its investments are totally unaccountable. I can understand the rationale for that - if I were tossing around millions of dollars for a controversial cause, I wouldn't want a bunch of bloggers second guessing my spending habits.
But unaccountability could easily kill the effectiveness of the Democracy Alliance. I recently learned that Chris Gabrieli, one of the candidates for governor in Massachusetts, was a member of the Democracy Alliance. He is just the sort of person who the Alliance would love to have: he's a smart, very well-off businesspersonwith a great deal of interest in politics, and he's willing to spend the money to serve that interest. Here's the problem: throughout his campaign, Gabrieli used an emphatically centrist message; and in the closing days of his campaign, Gabrieli took some decidedly un-liberal swings at his opponent. Most noxious among these was the whisper campaign that begain, apparently last weekend, accusing the Deval Patrick campaign of being supported by Democracy for America. I suppose the idea was to paint Deval Patrick as a wild-eyed radical, but the secondary implication was that DFA was some fringe group which should be marginalized. What is Gabrieli doing donating to the Democracy Alliance out of one hand, and undermining one of the liberal movements most successful grassroots organizations out of the other? This kind of help, we can do without.
At the end of the day, this example is a long way of saying: we don't know what the Democracy Alliance will be spending money on, and we probably can't rely on it to spend money on the kinds of projects we all want to fund. Instead, I think we have to raise money the other way: small-dollar fundraising spread out over tens of thousands of blog readers and other netroots activists.
What I'd like to see is a website which makes it possible to parcel small-dollar donations and send them to organizations which are dedicated to building infrastructure for the liberal movement, similar in many ways to ActBlue. This effort would have three parts, as I see it:
- The "ActBlue for movement builders" part: Each organization would have its own page, with a link to its website and a form for donating to that organization; and users would be able to create pages which bundle together their favorite organizations, and allow others to make donations to all of those organizations at once.
- A "slush fund for movement builders" part: Users could donate money to a grantmaking fund dedicated to incubating and developing new groups. This fund would have strict requirements for eligibility - for example, it would require that new groups pay their employees generously; it would hold these groups accountable by asking them to measure their success from time to time; and so on. Grantmaking decisions, and the measurements of the success of each group, would be made available publicly.
- An "idea incubator", where liberals could propose their idea for a new project or organization which helps build our movement. Other posters could critique and sharpen their idea, and then donate to help move the idea along, all at the same place. Of course, the idea incubator could include lots of bells and whistles - volunteer signups, wikis, you name it - but the simplest form would be a blog diary with a contribution form attached. The contributions could be held in escrow until the project is ready to get going, or they could be used as leverage for getting more money from the slush fund, or some other arrangement could be made to hold the money until it's ready to be used.
Put together, I think these three pieces could push our movement forward by leaps and bounds. Our movement is absolutely overflowing with great ideas that need just a bit of scratch to get going. The blogosphere is composed largely of moderately wealthy individuals, many of whom can probably afford another $20 per month. With ten thousand people contributing $20 per month, we would have raised $2.4 million - which, if I recall correctly, is enough to fund one-and-a-half Centers for American Progress outright.
Better than that, there is no limit to the amount of money an individual could give through this website: unlike candidates, PACs and parties, non-profit organizations can receive any amount of money from any individual. For similar reasons, this effort would be easily sustainable, since it's legal to take a small transaction fee off of a donation to a non-profit organization. (ActBlue had some trouble raising money early on, because it was not legal for them to take a transaction fee off the top of each donation made through the site. So for a while it was running on a "tip jar" fundraising model.)
The main problem that I see is that our movement does not, by and large, promote building itself. The netroots has been extremely generous to Democratic candidates - sending $7.5 million their way through ActBlue - but it has not, by and large, focused on spending money on building itself. Sure, if you're on DFA's email list, you'll get occasional fundraising letters; or now and again, some blogger will link to Media Matters or Center for American Progress and remember to ask her readers to donate to those groups. But, so far as I know, there's never been a concerted effort on the blogosphere to raise money for pure movement-building by itself.
I believe this idea could help turn that tendency around, by making it very easy to donate to some of these groups. But I think part of the effort would involve a really concerted outreach effort to many, many bloggers, to encourage them to hold movement fundraising days. One way to start would be to find the bloggers who link frequently to groups like Media Matters or Center for American progress, and ask them to include a "donate" button at the bottom of each blog post which includes such a link.
At the end of the day, we need to take responsibility for our own ideas. It's not enough to say "we need more money for this project"; it's certainly not enough to wait for some shadowy group of very rich individuals to start raining cash from above; we need to do it ourselves, the small-dollar way.
Any thoughts, comments, refinements?
(Cross posted from my blog, Planting Liberally)