I think most of us can agree that we need an independent progressive movement in this country. Single-interest groups like unions, LGBT organizations, and environmental advocates are good people that do good work, but without an overarching institution that can argue for progressive ideology in toto, a liberal narrative is dead in its cradle.
Now, I don’t pretend to know what the best way is to construct such a group, or what activities it should undertake to gain influence. I have no experience in those things. However, I would like to spur a discussion on what the structure of such an organization should be. I think new, creative, out-of-the-box thinking is needed on this matter.
On the flip, I'll provide my idea for what such a new structure might look like.
(This was originally a single diary, but it was really long. So I've split it up into at least 2 parts. I'll be posting the second part tomorrow.)
I think a lot of complaints people have about the way contemporary advocacy organizations work is that they aren't democratic enough--they're almost completely top-down, the leaders giving orders and the members following them. One might counter that there isn't a better way of doing things. The point of this diary series is to counter that point: there are better ways of doing things than what we're doing now. My proposal is just one of them.
I. The Original Idea
I’m going to take as a baseline a very interesting political structure I read about recently, devised by Stephen Shalom, called ParPolity.
Wikipedia has a good summary, and you can read the very detailed proposal by the original author here, but the following is all you really need to know for the purposes of this diary (from the Wikipedia article):
In a parpolity, there would be local councils of voting citizens consisting of 25-50 members. These local councils would be able to pass any law that affected only the local council. . . . .
Each local council would send a delegate to a higher level council, until that council fills with 25-50 members. These second level councils would pass laws on matters that effect the 625 to 2500 citizens that it represents. A delegate to a higher level council is bound to communicate the views of her or his sending council, but is not bound to vote as the sending council might wish. . . . .
The second level council sends a delegate to a third level council, the third level councils send delegates to a fourth level and so on until all citizens are represented. Five levels with 50 people on every council would represent 312,500,000 voters.
Even as an ideal, I think there are some serious issues with this as a political system, at least without some major changes to our political culture. However, as a way of structuring a progressive advocacy organization, I think it actually holds a lot of promise.
II. The Basic Structure
How would such an organization work? This is just my opinion, but:
First of all, there would be three "tiers" of membership. One would involve merely being a "member," i.e., just signing up to the organization. Above that would be a "dues-paying member," meaning you’re a member who contributed to the organization at least $5 in the past year. Then, you have a "participatory member" (I’m not attached to these titles, obviously), which gives you the right to participate in forming organization policy. Anyone who’s a due-paying member can become a participatory member, as long as they’re willing to attend the Councils. (the requirement to pay $5 a year isn't essential to the system; I just think it's important for everyone involved to have a little bit of an investment in it. It's not like it's an onerous amount. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.)
So how would the councils work? Under my view, it depends on how many levels there are. For the sake of this structure, I’m going to assume 125,000 participatory members, just because that makes the math easy. That would give us three levels of councils, each with 50 people.
The first level of councils—i.e., the Primary Councils—are where the main action is. Every participatory member is part of one of these councils, and each would correspond to a particular geographical area. Most of the time, this would be a single town or city, but it would probably be multiple towns in sparsely-populated areas, and only part of one of the big cities. All members, as well as non-members, would be strongly encouraged to submit inquiries, complaints, and the like to a Primary Council (this is, IMO, a huge benefit to the structure, and one I’ll talk about in a future Part of this series).
The main goal of the Primary Councils is to decide on their own policies. This would be accomplished during their meetings, which would take place at regular intervals (I think each Council should decide for itself how often to meet, but twice a month might serve as a good baseline). As an advocacy organization, this means deciding which local politicians to endorse, as well as support or opposition to particular local policies. The Primary Councils would not decide state or national-level policy; that would be up to the higher levels.
The other main task of a Primary Council would be determining how to advocate for their particular politician or policy. In this area, though, I think it is counterproductive to hold a vote for each decision (should there be a vote for every decision regarding canvassing and phonebanking? Every decision involving particular wording for scripts?). That’s why an Executive Committee is needed. At regular intervals (every 6 months, maybe?), the Primary Council would elect a certain number of their own to serve on their Executive Committee (again, the exact number should be up to the individual councils, but three might be a baseline). The Executive Committee would be charged with determining how best to advocate for the particular positions the entire Council had previously decided on.
And, of course, the Primary Council would select one of its own to serve on their state’s Secondary Council.
The responsibility of the Secondary Councils would be policies on the state level. This includes endorsing state-level candidates as well as state-level policies. They would also organize Primary Councils to pressure the state legislators of their area.
An issue might arise where some Primary Councils disagree with the Secondary Council on a particular issue. In my opinion, some disagreements are fine and even healthy, but I think it’s very important for the organization in general to speak with one voice most of the time. Exactly where this dividing line is can probably only be found through trial and error--unity is important, but so is the willingness to question one leaders. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to let Secondary Councils decide for themselves whether to take a heavy or light hand with their Primary Councils.
The Secondary Councils would have their own Executive Committees, of course, and among others, their duties would include: Fundraising (it seems better to have the state and national councils focus on this, rather than the local ones), communicating concerns from the Primary Councils to the National Council (and vice versa), and state-level media relations.
They would also obviously elect people to go to the National Council.
There is a concern with how to make the Secondary Councils state-level, considering the wildly divergent populations of the states. This is a serious problem, but I’ll address it in a future Part of this series.
The National Council would be much like the Secondary Councils, the main difference being they would have much more clout. One member of their Executive Committee would be President of the entire organization, and would serve as its public face. They would be the main focus of fundraising, media relations, interacting with other progressive groups, etc.
One major duty of the National Council that I think really does belong to them is what I will call "value forming." I mentioned before that progressives need a major, independent advocacy group so that they can tell a general, progressive narrative. The National Council’s job would be to form this narrative. Essentially, this means listing the values the organization wants policy to have, abstracted from any particular policy. Hence, "value forming."
So, that’s the basic idea. In the next diary, I’ll list either the major benefits of this model or the major issues facing it, or both (depending on how long they get).
Before ending this diary, though, I'd like to just provide one, and in my opinion, the most important benefit to a model like this:
What does it mean to be a progressive? Many things, obviously. But at a basic level, I believe progressives stand for democracy—the belief that everyone should have a share of economic, cultural, and political power. Conservatives stand for the opposite, aristocracy—the belief that a small segment of the population should have the vast majority of its economic, cultural, and political power.
So what does it mean to have a "progressive" organization whose power is concentrated in the hands of a very few? It means that you have a non-progressive organization trying to promote progressive ideals...and I just don’t see that working out very well long-term.
In other words, the army needs to be a hierarchy, but don’t expect it to be a hotbed of liberalism.
Anyway, what do you guys think?