Membership and the Right

Some very interesting comments and questions raised by my post on the changing nature of membership in political and advocacy organizations, and how the Democratic Party might learn to appreciate it. Tad Brennan wrote:

I find it plausible that the "transactional model" is more common than the traditional "card-carrying" model among contributors to MoveOn and other liberal outfits...But I worry that this is not true among right-wing organizations, and that, in fact, your contrast gives us another way of describing why we were out-organized and out-mobilized last fall.

"Transactional" interactors are fair-weather soldiers. As you said, they participate when they want to, but when the organization asks them to do something they don't feel like doing, they head for the exit.

But effective political organization requires people to do both things they like doing (going to rallies they support) and also things they don't like doing (scutwork of various sorts). ...
Part of the corrupt genius of the modern GOP has been its ability to co-opt the churches for its purposes. And churches, even in this age of transience and relocations, are still bastions of non-transactional membership. You see your fellow church-goers every week, or several times a week, and become enmeshed in a network of expectations and obligations that is far from "transactional". By leveraging off of the membership-structure of the churches, the GOP can rely on something far stronger, and far more reliable, than the "transactional" interactors .

The Dems used to have something comparable in the labor unions; thus the other aspect of corrupt GOP genius, i.e. gutting the unions.

So here's my worry.

You say "the nature of "membership" has changed and political mobilization has to change with it".

But I'm worried that the change you describe may just be a huge systemic failure of *liberal* membership organizations, and *liberal* political mobilization. We're becoming "transactional", and they're not. And if you treat this failure as the wave of the future, as something to be endorsed, you may only be making it worse.

This is a strong argument, and it goes back to a question I wrote about a few months ago: whether it's possible to have any kind of progressive movement without organized labor. As Brennan notes, unions are to the Democratic Party what churches seem to have become for the Republicans -- the non-political expression of solidarity that can often be used for political purposes.

I would argue, though, that the right is ahead on the "transactional" nature of membership and the related need to reach people who in many respects resemble members of organizations but aren't joiners, for one reason or another. As Steven Waldman and John Green argued on beliefnet, the percentage of regular church-goers declined as a proportion of the electorate. Large-scale membership organizations such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition are in decline. As I understand it, Karl Rove didn't find his 3 million evangelicals (if he did) by going to the membership of those organizations, or even of churches, but through classic demographic analysis: he looked for people who looked like like evangelicals, based on where they lived and how they lived and what magazines they read and so forth. And then the party bombarded them with transactions: calls, visits, questionnaires, opportunities to get involved. While non-political membership groups like churches may have played an unusual role (especially Catholic churches, where the level of political co-optation seems to have been very high this year), my point is that mass-membership political institutions like parties and interest groups played very little role.

The Republican Party should be accustomed to this manner of communication. The number of registered Republicans has always lagged behind Democrats, so only by reaching beyond their "joiners" could they have won elections.

A few years ago, environmentalists pioneered a real breakthrough in political communication: "list enhancement." They found that there were plenty of members of environmental groups, both the big political groups like Sierra Club and the "hook and gun" groups like Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited , who were not being encouraged to vote on the basis of environmental issues. Pro-choice groups found the same. List enhancement involves cross-tabulating the lists to match up voters with their interests, and targetting them appropriately. Senator Slade Gorton, one of the meanest, coldest people to serve in that body, was probably defeated for reelection in 1998 thanks to effective list enhancement.

I would argue that that strategy has reached its limits. The era of mass membership has ended, on both the left and the right. Progressives have to be much, much more creative about finding people who might need to hear a progressive message, and giving them opportunities to be involved in small ways.