Crashing the Gate Excerpt: Psychic Income

Today's excerpt of Crashing the Gate comes from the chapter Laying the Groundwork, which deals with building a VLWC. While there has been much discussion about building progressive institutions to counter what the Right has built (think tanks, leadership institutes, and media outlets), little is said about the plight of progressional progressive activists. While the Right trains, nurtures, and rewards its best, things are a bit different on our side.

Without a doubt, there is very little mentorship in progressive organizations, because the money and the attitude are both lacking. They treat employees as though they should be happy to work in something "meaningful," even if it means living in poverty. There is an institutional hostility toward paying professionals--activists, writers, researchers, organizers, PR staffers, fundraisers, and so on--market rates for their work.

"Even the sweetest, most progressive family foundations do not want to pay for salaries," said Amy Kiser, development director for the nonprofit Ecology Center in Berkeley, California. "There is a preference for all-volunteer projects, and I'm guessing that speaks to some sort of purity."

The Right has no such attitudes. Many of the leaders come from the business world and understand the power of money to motivate and focus people. Rob Stein estimates that of the top eighty organizations he has studied in the VRWC, there are about 2,000 conservative leaders earning between $75,000 and $200,000. The Leadership Institute's Blackwell made $187,433 in salary in 2004, his top five lieutenants clocked in between $88,066 and $130,744. At Focus on the Family, the top five compensated employees earned between$78,411 and $106,856 in 2004. The pay is good, ensuring they keep their brightest and best, and creates a draw for talent from outside the conservative movement. No one ever failed to pay their rent or gave up eating out because they worked at a conservative organization.

On our side, we face a steady stream of defections to the private sector where the pay is far better. As Napoleon said, an army travels on its stomach, a lesson progressive leaders have yet to learn. We train them young, teach them the ropes, and as they reach the age where they could take a more active leadership role in the movement, they decide they can't live with six roommates, default on their student loans, and eat Ramen noodles for dinner every night. They decide they want things like a car in good working order, they want to own a home, and they want to feel that their efforts are properly compensated. And the low pay also fails to lure committed people from the private sector. "People want to get out of the private sector and do work for them that feels karmically good to them," said Kiser. "But when they see how much it pays they are shocked. It keeps them out."

One of the big ironies is that progressive funders--who bear much of the fault for encouraging slave wages in progressive organizations--often run their own businesses or invest in for-profit ventures. And they would never treat their own employees in that manner. "I think that what's happened is that donors have developed two different brains," [major party donor and venture capitalist] Andy Rappaport explained to us when we met him in Redwood City, California, in August 2005. "There's our business brain, which holds our kind of rational, no-nonsense `This is how I earn my living, this is the way the world works' kind of stuff. And then there's our touchy-feely brain that deals with all of the social and political--and I think this is truer for the left than for the right, obviously. Progressive donors hold nonprofits to different standards and they don't naturally think about the application of things that many of us have learned in our for-profit endeavors to nonprofits.

[...]

Deborah Rappaport doesn't buy the notion of "psychic income"-- that good work is its own reward. "Everybody's looking to try to figure out what the lessons are to learn from the past forty years of the Republican Party, which I think in a lot of senses is a fool's errand at this point," she said. "But one of the things that I think we can learn is the professionalization of the organizations and the workers in those organizations. It's not just `Because you're doing good work, you should get psychic income.' It's `We value it, we respect it, we have high expectations of you and therefore we're going to compensate you appropriately.'"

Still, there is hostility from other progressives when they believe a liberal makes too much money, as if somehow that compromises the substance of his or her work. In reality, people should be properly compensated for their hard work. It's how we'll retain our top talent.

The Right doesn't have those problems, and as a result they have their best activists working on their issues. As long as progressives fail to grasp that simple lesson, we will continue losing our top people to the private sector, leaving the activist corps manned mostly by underappreciated, inexperienced, young liberals.

(Remember, the special edition of the book will only be available for pre-order until January 27. After that, only the regular ol' edition will be avaialble.)