I'm an avid reader who finally got around to checking out Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's book
Crashing the Gate. I foolishly put off reading this book when it first came out because I thought it was just going to be all about the "netroots" and blogging. I had already read David Kline's book
Blog! and so I thought that this book could wait. Let me tell you how wrong I was.
I'm almost through with the book and I got to a section that I am really concerned about because it directly affects me as a young political progressive activist who seeks to stay employed doing what I love to do; which is working within the movement. Coming towards the end of the book (p. 119) is a section titled
No Investment, No Return. This section talks about how the right has funded and molded it's young so that they can become the future leaders of the conservative movement. This is how we got all those Reed's, Coulter's, Hannity's and Rove's.
From the book:
Conservatives have dropped a mint on developing the leaders of the future at places like the Leadership Institute. Young People for the American Way, an offshoot of the People for the American Way Foundation, has tracked eleven conservative leadership, training, and mentoring organizations that operate in high schools, colleges, and law schools with a combined budget of nearly $36 million in 2003 and $45 million in 2004
As you can see that's how it's done. They train them and then funnel them upwards. After college and even during college there is so much opportunity to be gainfully employed within the movement and to rise within that movement. This is absent on the left or it is clearly in it's infancy.
Republicans are taking care of their young stars, funneling them into places where they can have the most impact, be it academia, the punditry, or elected office, while we starve our young.
Those are the exact words from the book. I could not have said it better. Armstrong and Moulitsas continue to point out an example of two women from opposite sides of the political spectrum. The one on the right has been supported and has even written a book. She currently works for the Wall Street Journal as an editor while she continues to write for a plethora of conservative publications. Eventually she'll be on Faux News or whatever else there is.
But what about the woman on the left?
"When I was in college. every door was open. I was regarded as an all-star who chose to attend a black college," Lettman told us in an e-mail exchange. "I had it all--travel, awards, speeches, and national recognition. Many thought I would be an elected official. From 18-23, I could do no wrong. But after 23, it was as if every door shut. There were no upwardly mobile career opportunities in the progressive movement. No support structures to launch me in the social justice arena. So I made my own way and became a successful entrepreneur." That is, until People for the American Way snatched her up following the 2000 election debacle in Florida
This is what Ralph Neas president of PFAW had to say:
"After she graduated from college, no one tried to get her into academia, in grad school, or law school. No one tried to get her placed in a newspaper, at the Washington Times equivalent the way that the right does at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. No one takes care of the young progressives. They're supposed to fend for themselves and eventually they'll come back or be part of us. But the right doesn't do it that way. They are going to Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute and they're being placed and they're being funded. It's night and day. It's just night and day."
The second part of this problem can be summed up in what follows in the book under the heading Real Income vs. Psychic Income .
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
As someone who works in the movement of course I love doing the "meaningful" work. I'm not looking to get rich or even make that much money. I just want enough to pay the bills I have, help my mother out and enjoy the work. Yet I do find it a struggle. Just recently, I finished working on a political campaign and now it's back to searching for something else again. It was like this last year and the year before. It is so hard to get employment in the movement; it's even harder to stay employed. I look at people who are employed on the staff of elected officials on the Hill or even locally and think why can't that be me? I look at people working for the non-profits or PAC's and think the same way. I know there's a lot of competition for so few little jobs because we simply don't have what the right does.
There's another quote in the book that's rather interesting:
"People want to get out of the private sector and do work for them that feels karmically good to them," said Kiser (development director for the Ecology Center in CA). "But when they see how much it pays they are shocked. It keeps them out."
For me it's not so much even the pay it's the lack of jobs in the movement to begin with. It's the lack of support and direction for the young progressives like myself (i'm 27) that is the problem as well. I left the private sector and truthfully I don't want much to do with it. But this is really hard. I've been lucky to build my resume in the movement so far and have been accepted to attend a training of one of the new groups started up to help the left recently, but it's still tough out there for young activists like me.
One more section from the book:
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. I'ts 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."
Sounds like the right way to go. So hear me out i'm not going to give up on this movement. I want to work in this movement. I love this stuff. So i'll keep searching for my next gig. I do hope that eventually we're able to help young people like myself out in this movement and I don't wan't people becoming a part of what Greg Bloom calls the canvassing industry either (on campaigns or for orgs). We're capable of doing more than just that. After all for the movement we are the future.
Jason Gooljar