It seems to me that most “civic organizations” have a number of unavoidably unattractive qualities, including cliquey decision-making, lots of long, boring meetings, and a generally small-c conservative mindset (in the sense of, low openness to new ideas). I’m not sure if there’s an obvious way to fix these characteristics, or if they’re even inherently bad. But a lot of people who join new organizations or clubs want those clubs to feel fresh and dynamic, and without feeling some degree of excitement, or hope upon joining, it’s hard for new people to want to stay involved.
I think the long, boring meeting part is definitely correct. A lot of people join groups thinking it'll be west wing or some great debate or a rally when a lot of stuff comes down to grinding bureaucratic minutia because that's how things are done!
Poring over zoning maps to determine setback requirements, floor-area-ratios, and parking minimums is way less sexy than shouting Housing is a Human Right, but it actually moves the needle!
Mirrors my own attempts in Minnesota; applied and got on the local human rights commission (but the commission had no power or authority to do anything except hold meetings), joined a city working group to set a master plan for a district (just a dog and pony show because the city staff already had consultants lined up who had a plan), tried to join the PTO (people just wanted to pretend everything was great even though the kids are illiterate), engaged with the schools (admins just want to keep the status quo despite budget deficits and low literacy). At this point, I get why people buy into the “run government like a business” messaging. At least with a business you tend have hierarchical decision makers and some accountability (bankruptcy or job loss).
Agree. Sometimes people in volunteer organizations misbehave in ways that they never would at a job, because you can't "fire" them and they know it. It's a kind of rules-free zone. Volunteer organizations need volunteers and have to take what they can get, even if the volunteers are destructive to the organizations.
Kids are illiterate here too. I am tutoring a boy in art who is now a home schooler at age 12 because school was not working out for me. He has been a home schooler for only a few months. A few days ago I asked him to write down the directions for something we were going to do. I was reading the directions aloud, and he was trying to write, but he literally could barely form the letters and had a lot of trouble spelling words like "sugar."
It's not just this child: when I worked at a community college, incoming students had abysmal writing and reading skills.
And here too, everybody pretends it's fine. Parents seem to think they need the babysitting even if one parent is not working, and they don't want to have to get very involved in whether their child is actually learning anything. So schools can get away with teaching very little.
I worked for about twenty-five years as a school counselor, then school social worker in a middle school in the Bronx. I noticed that many of my students lacked some basic reading/writing skills, and one time finally decided to use counseling time with one student to do some phonics (phonics was largely no longer the main deal in teaching reading...it was "balanced literacy " as a "strategy," and it was obviously not working at all. since I'd spent a good part of the '70s teaching Basic Writing in different CUNY branches, I already knew where this kind of thing could lead during a period in which kids were taught to read and write more competently (but with results that were only marginally better than they were in 2001), so I occasionally spoke up for as long as I had an audience that could understand what I was saying (it later developed that the AP for Special Ed. had only previously been licensed as a school bus driver and had no interest in anything but raw power and how often she could fuck over anyone who worked under her).
anyway, at first I was resisted because I wasn't supposed to know anything about pedagogy. then, I became the crying post for teachers who could see that all the extra work getting dumped in their laps would accomplish nothing. I finagled my way into groups of young teachers and we'd occasionally talk, but (also given the fact that teachers are too overworked to give over much extra time for some pie-in-the-sky "philosophical talk" with remuneration) that also went nowhere.
then the administration put in cameras and everyone was getting spied on and a lot of teachers left and the school nurse tracking my blood pressure told me to leave and take early retirement. I did so and lost a significant chunk of my pension and social security.
so yes, I suppose my own experiences back up the notion that the schools actually CAN get away with teaching very little.
charter schools only look like an answer. I'm inclined to think that the adoption of certain curricula CAN be an answer (I specifically believe in the Core Knowlege Curriculum, which has proven to work out very well in the field, but its lack of "test prep classes" alienates a lot of scared NYC administrators). but when I think of the chances of anything genuinely revolutionary in its positive effects happening NOW, when the issues are closer to "where does Noah and the Ark fit in to world history?" I get depressed...
I have seen some suggestions post 2024 election to bring back the union hall/meeting hall but this feels like a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem. One of the reasons the meeting hall worked in the old days was that there was not much else for entertainment. Now we have Playstations and streaming.
I will give you a hint of Fed Soc success at law school. They had food. Good food. My impression from various progressive groups in college and law school is that they felt using food/beer to get people to attend was sullying the cause. People should want to be there for the cause, not because you bribed them with dim sum.
Plus there were always fights over whether having a vegetarian/vegan option was enough or whether you needed to be completely vegetarian/vegan so just easier not to have food
I have had similar experiences, and in the same time period: after 2016. I got involved in a gun violence prevention group in Nashville in 2012, and they started a local chapter in my small town east of Nashville, around 2017. At first it seemed great: the people who joined were energetic and smart (I thought). The local chapter leader was appointed by the state chapter, not chosen by us, and that was the first sign that something might be wrong. She turned out to be incapable or unwilling to do much that didn't involve having her picture made and then posted to Facebook. I was supposed to do all the behind the scenes clerical work, mostly on the organization's website, and mostly about adding more contacts and members. But weirdly, as a low-level grunt, I could not check my work to make sure I had entered all the new names, because I didn't have permission to see my own list! They treated the volunteers with mistrust that way.
There was a lot of Mean Girl bullying in this group too. Eventually it fell apart for that reason. There were some serious personality problems and even addictions going on that I had not known about in the beginning. I also found out that the national organization has some serious problems when I looked at their Glass Door page. The paid employees feel bullied and dismissed by the Mean Girls at the top. That's how I felt as a volunteer.
I was also involved in a musical group. It was a bit more democratic, but there was the same syndrome of expecting one person (me, the manager) to do the lion's share of the unglamorous work, while everybody else just got to show up when they felt like it. Our performances were often pretty bad, and when I resigned as the manager and asked somebody else to take up that job, nobody would. So it fell apart as well. (Now I'm in a better music group with a paid leader who does a great job.)
The group that has worked slightly better is my book club, which I started. But Mean Girl dynamics still intrude sometimes. Bullying and trolling seem endemic now in America. But to be fair, it was a huge problem when I was in high school as well in the 1960s and 1970s. I thought people would outgrow those domination strategies as they get older, but it seems that many old people are fond of behaving pretty much as they did in middle school.
I think the United States has a cultural problem with bullying. I read a book called Bully Nation about this, and it helped me to understand that it's not just me having these experiences and feeling confused about how to handle power abuses and trolling in organizations. It's also endemic in families. It seems that Americans are not really taught anything about pro-social behavior, or even basic manners sometimes. A lot of Americans have serious personality disorders and addictions. The fix may take quite a bit of time, and it probably will have to include better parenting and education.
The irony, though, is that most kids seem pretty nice to me. Maybe kids are forced to be polite and pro-social ("you have to share"), but as they get older, they find out that all that training was just BS and nobody really believes in it. So they start copying the mean adults around them.
The local Democratic party here is a little better. I have never experienced any outright bullying, but participating is often boring as you describe. Partly this is because Democrats have no chance of even electing a school board member here, because we are so outnumbered. A few people ran openly as Democrats here in 2024 and got nowhere.
When I worked in the party booth at a local street fair, I had to work hard to get the other people in the booth to talk to me a little and socialize with me. People seem to have forgotten how to talk with people they don't know well. This is an important skill for political organizing, and when I was growing up, it was a skill that was taught and practiced by the adults.
If you just stare at your phone or sit silently and glumly without engaging people around you, you can't win friends and influence people. Duh.
I had a job a while ago where I had to work with the city council. And it was astonishing to me to observe for the first time how many men and women in their 50s or 60s clearly had experienced no personality growth since they were in high school.
This group's leadership and structure seems pretty similar to that of a mainline Protestant Church. The conflicts and cliquishness you describe here would be completely common there. I think some people, not John in this piece but people generally, hit these kinds of frictions and attach them to some specific weakness in the politics or pathology of the left. But I think this is a much more universal experience, and generally that community friction is something Americans might be getting worse at navigating.
I had not just a similar but almost exactly the same experience as you, following 2016, with [Redacted] progressive Brooklyn Democratic club. My own frustration was also likely a little bit self-involved - I had been showing up for a good long while mostly hanging back, wanted to be helpful, and offered to volunteer my professional skills and time on an internal project where they would be relevant. I got big-footed by a recent arrival and left out of the loop going forward; after that, it didn't seem like my engagement was worth much, so I peaced out.
Then COVID, etc. - what I have involved myself in more recently is becoming a member of my local Friends of the Library group. I'm the youngest person there by a bit, we meet in the basement of an overdue-for-renovation library in my neighborhood, and we raise money in the hundreds of dollars through book sales, and give away books to kids. It's awesome. Everyone looking for a way to be helpful, go join your Friends of the Library.
I'm halfway between "it's a Me problem" and "it's a Them problem."
I've done Friends of the Library (past president). When my HS alma mater had a racist incident, the district formed what was one of only a few in-state Equity Councils, and after a lot of hemming, I joined. Stayed for something like 3 years, hoping, trying, waiting for some sign it would become something.
My grown kids have tried to attend local Dem events (in central Kansas). They show, are love-bombed for being 2-3 generations younger than everyone else in the room (new blood!), but find absolutely everything to be surrealistically detached, off-putting, and paternalistically dismissive of their "radical" ideas (which amount to anything departing from timid, constrained, and out-of-touch). So they gravitated to/formed a DSA chapter. Maybe because we're distant from KS' higher ed enclaves, seems the DSA folks they've attracted aren't PMC signaling posers. While some have degrees, there's a good blue-collar element there, plus the socialization of blue-collar-ness (or just precarity) that comes from living here.
My wife attended a local Dem women's (?) meeting recently and came away appalled at the self-congratulatory leadership cliquishness and insularity of the group. (She's nigh ready to chuck Molotov cocktails right now.)
A few years back, some youngs I know managed to surprise the city commission into reforming the police civilian oversight system, but were shocked and disillusioned at how incredibly copaganda'd the townsfolk are, how dumb the counterarguments were, and how watered-down the final result was, given the strong and brave case and push they made. It was both great to see them shoot their shot, and maybe sad, but necessary to see the paltry result as evidence of how politics acid-washes damn good forays into reform.
My conclusions: most such bodies and processes are not my bag. I'm ill-suited to the politicking required for them. Opportunity-cost. Not my skill-set, and too much work to develop that skill-set at this stage in life. Plus, I'm too old to set the agendas: let the kids do it, and they seem to want to do it their way. I'll try to consult *when asked,* warn them if I see them heading for a known iceberg, pass on local, relevant history and lore, and boost as much as possible. The good news: the ones I know seem pretty damn pro-social, literate and informed.
Meanwhile, as an Old, I'm more likely to be heard by *some* of the establishment Dems and such, so I try to radicalize them in dribs and drabs as much as I can get away with, hoping to erode the inevitable small-c conservatism of their comfy little positions and civic organizational enclaves. Maybe then the kids will have an easier road.
My experience as president of an HOA, board member of a 150 employee company, and office manager is that things don't often get decided in meetings. Meetings are not the place to do work. Meetings are for communication, entertainment, maintaining order, voting, etc. Sometimes it is helpful to let people speak so they can get things out of their system. Sometimes it's better to not have excessive discussion.
Real work is done before and after meetings. It's too difficult to be productive at meetings. Don't be confused if nothing happens at meetings. That is not what they are primarily for.
That doesn't mean that democracy isn't a thing. It just doesn't happen because of meetings.
This is a really interesting insight, and I think applies to a lot of other institutions as well. Lawyers will often say that they try to avoid trials as much as possible, and that the big decisions are made outside of the courtroom. Politicians often say that nothing should come to the floor of Congress until the outcome of the vote is basically known, and that congressional debates are mostly theater. I feel like the general public expects the more performative, camera-facing aspects of life to be life to be more significant than they are.
Like everyone else, I had a similar experience after 2016, and also in graduate school, with our union fight, which actually, genuinely brought material benefits to my own life, and the life of my partner and friends! I feel that the culture of these things is often antithetical to the kind of personal freedom and self-directed flourishing you associate with liberalism--it might also just be a kind of revulsion to the aesthetic of these things, which seem corny, and cringe. It occurs to me that one thing that the right has is, instead of the attempt to build solidarity, is the cash nexus--the idea Thiel bought Vance, and Musk bought Trump, and that's how things work, and should work. It's not surprising that crypto is at the center of all of this, as a pure model of individualistic wealth and self-assertion itself, as something that gives you the power, through cash transfers, to buy influence, rather than have to create it through the self-abnegation that comes with solidarity.
I would agree with your points about the liberal individualism antithetical to group activism, and the further, also antithetical, capitalist-striver individualism associated with Thiel, crypto , etc. But I would add the right also has its own group-emphasizing factions, with their own branding, group-identity formation, etc. (seen, for example, in the very common sorts of Trump-rebel drag visible on J6: camo, long beards, Stars-and-Bars banners, God-guns-and-guts logans on T-shirts and ball caps, etc. It would be interesting to examine the possible ancestry of this aesthetic, back to, e.g,, hippie style, motorcycle gang style, MIA activists, etc.).
Yeah, that's a very good point. There's definitely a strain that comes from what you describe here. It's also very inflected by the internet, and the aesthetics of the ugly, as a slap in the face of public taste, a kind aesthetic analog to the promise of violence, and the worldview of the world as ugly itself.
Like other commenters I absolutely relate to the gist of this piece.
One thought I’ve had since 2016 (have spent the last decade or so bouncing around suburban New England, Boston, and now more rural New England) is whether so much of the aesthetic of organizing is driven from hubs with large populations (NYC, etc.) or online (Twitter at its peak) that folks find themselves despairing when more local forms of activism fail to match the vision provided voices that SEEM closer to the pulse of things.
Perhaps in a way that is silly I’ve thought of this as the “independent films” problem.
I’ve always been a big movie person but especially in the pre-streaming era I recall it being really frustrating that so much publicity and work went into marketing films that played in select markets or were released in formats that were just plain not available in the country more broadly.
I’ve often wondered if civic politics has a similar problem. I would love to go see/take part in [insert form of organizing here ] that I just saw mentioned online but it’s not playing in my town…
This is brilliant. It absolutely exemplifies the kind of micro-description/analysis I think is desperately needed to build a basis for understanding where we are. These sorts of ground-level realities are crucial both as examples of and as contributors to current dilemmas. The class-clannishness (mixing metaphors horribly, I know) of the representative "elite" group comes across as deeply unappealing and misguided, but, as others have commented here, other sorts of groups tend to engage in similar behaviors. (And, as John G. suggests, the rough-cut sorts are hardly more likely to be saviors than the snobbish academic-professional types--as, alas, the Adams mayoral administration has shown). FWIW, Georgi Derluguian's _Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_ showcases in its region very similar dynamics of rival clique formation and credential reverence (both in terms of degrees and more symbolically, whether one says the "right sort of things," what one wears, etc.). I mention the book because it suggests there may be a deep commonality across modern/contemporary societies, even seemingly very different ones, undergoing change and competition among ruling groups, and that commonality may, I think, be important for understanding what's really going on.
Great story. All I could think of reading it is, “this is a society without trade unions.” You put 50 people in a room and ask, “how do we reform democracy?”, you get 50 people arguing. You put 50 union members in a room and ask, “Do we want a 3% increase and better medical and dental benefits?”, you get 50 people speaking with one voice.
I’m wondering if the hollowing out of civic life also creates a vicious circle in which the few civic organisations that are left get overwhelmed when there’s revival of interest (like in 2016). John describes those Democratic Club leaders as being a bit overwhelmed by the numbers of new people, and I’ve been in enough groups to know that they often have basic capacity constraints that hamper their ability to cope with sudden growth. So people fall out of interest with the groups and they are left smaller and weaker until the next revival. ‘Civics education’ gets framed as learning about government processes, formal elections etc. Maybe it should be about things like how to chair meetings, how to engage members of your clubs etc.
We had the loveliest young man live with us for two months, a campus organizer, 24 years old, Asian-American, Stanford grad, bursting with ideas, most of them very good, most of them to be nixed by the machine, who were not half as bright as he was. As he put it delicately, "this job has made me realize my educational privilege." It felt as if all organizing was trickle-down dross from the likes of Axelrod and his ilk who had a once-in-a-lifetime candidate and concluded his triumph was their accomplishment
It seems to me that most “civic organizations” have a number of unavoidably unattractive qualities, including cliquey decision-making, lots of long, boring meetings, and a generally small-c conservative mindset (in the sense of, low openness to new ideas). I’m not sure if there’s an obvious way to fix these characteristics, or if they’re even inherently bad. But a lot of people who join new organizations or clubs want those clubs to feel fresh and dynamic, and without feeling some degree of excitement, or hope upon joining, it’s hard for new people to want to stay involved.
I think the long, boring meeting part is definitely correct. A lot of people join groups thinking it'll be west wing or some great debate or a rally when a lot of stuff comes down to grinding bureaucratic minutia because that's how things are done!
Poring over zoning maps to determine setback requirements, floor-area-ratios, and parking minimums is way less sexy than shouting Housing is a Human Right, but it actually moves the needle!
Mirrors my own attempts in Minnesota; applied and got on the local human rights commission (but the commission had no power or authority to do anything except hold meetings), joined a city working group to set a master plan for a district (just a dog and pony show because the city staff already had consultants lined up who had a plan), tried to join the PTO (people just wanted to pretend everything was great even though the kids are illiterate), engaged with the schools (admins just want to keep the status quo despite budget deficits and low literacy). At this point, I get why people buy into the “run government like a business” messaging. At least with a business you tend have hierarchical decision makers and some accountability (bankruptcy or job loss).
Agree. Sometimes people in volunteer organizations misbehave in ways that they never would at a job, because you can't "fire" them and they know it. It's a kind of rules-free zone. Volunteer organizations need volunteers and have to take what they can get, even if the volunteers are destructive to the organizations.
Kids are illiterate here too. I am tutoring a boy in art who is now a home schooler at age 12 because school was not working out for me. He has been a home schooler for only a few months. A few days ago I asked him to write down the directions for something we were going to do. I was reading the directions aloud, and he was trying to write, but he literally could barely form the letters and had a lot of trouble spelling words like "sugar."
It's not just this child: when I worked at a community college, incoming students had abysmal writing and reading skills.
And here too, everybody pretends it's fine. Parents seem to think they need the babysitting even if one parent is not working, and they don't want to have to get very involved in whether their child is actually learning anything. So schools can get away with teaching very little.
I worked for about twenty-five years as a school counselor, then school social worker in a middle school in the Bronx. I noticed that many of my students lacked some basic reading/writing skills, and one time finally decided to use counseling time with one student to do some phonics (phonics was largely no longer the main deal in teaching reading...it was "balanced literacy " as a "strategy," and it was obviously not working at all. since I'd spent a good part of the '70s teaching Basic Writing in different CUNY branches, I already knew where this kind of thing could lead during a period in which kids were taught to read and write more competently (but with results that were only marginally better than they were in 2001), so I occasionally spoke up for as long as I had an audience that could understand what I was saying (it later developed that the AP for Special Ed. had only previously been licensed as a school bus driver and had no interest in anything but raw power and how often she could fuck over anyone who worked under her).
anyway, at first I was resisted because I wasn't supposed to know anything about pedagogy. then, I became the crying post for teachers who could see that all the extra work getting dumped in their laps would accomplish nothing. I finagled my way into groups of young teachers and we'd occasionally talk, but (also given the fact that teachers are too overworked to give over much extra time for some pie-in-the-sky "philosophical talk" with remuneration) that also went nowhere.
then the administration put in cameras and everyone was getting spied on and a lot of teachers left and the school nurse tracking my blood pressure told me to leave and take early retirement. I did so and lost a significant chunk of my pension and social security.
so yes, I suppose my own experiences back up the notion that the schools actually CAN get away with teaching very little.
charter schools only look like an answer. I'm inclined to think that the adoption of certain curricula CAN be an answer (I specifically believe in the Core Knowlege Curriculum, which has proven to work out very well in the field, but its lack of "test prep classes" alienates a lot of scared NYC administrators). but when I think of the chances of anything genuinely revolutionary in its positive effects happening NOW, when the issues are closer to "where does Noah and the Ark fit in to world history?" I get depressed...
I have seen some suggestions post 2024 election to bring back the union hall/meeting hall but this feels like a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem. One of the reasons the meeting hall worked in the old days was that there was not much else for entertainment. Now we have Playstations and streaming.
I will give you a hint of Fed Soc success at law school. They had food. Good food. My impression from various progressive groups in college and law school is that they felt using food/beer to get people to attend was sullying the cause. People should want to be there for the cause, not because you bribed them with dim sum.
Plus there were always fights over whether having a vegetarian/vegan option was enough or whether you needed to be completely vegetarian/vegan so just easier not to have food
Always have food and childcare. As the old Newark political saying goes “if you can feed them, you can lead them.”
I have had similar experiences, and in the same time period: after 2016. I got involved in a gun violence prevention group in Nashville in 2012, and they started a local chapter in my small town east of Nashville, around 2017. At first it seemed great: the people who joined were energetic and smart (I thought). The local chapter leader was appointed by the state chapter, not chosen by us, and that was the first sign that something might be wrong. She turned out to be incapable or unwilling to do much that didn't involve having her picture made and then posted to Facebook. I was supposed to do all the behind the scenes clerical work, mostly on the organization's website, and mostly about adding more contacts and members. But weirdly, as a low-level grunt, I could not check my work to make sure I had entered all the new names, because I didn't have permission to see my own list! They treated the volunteers with mistrust that way.
There was a lot of Mean Girl bullying in this group too. Eventually it fell apart for that reason. There were some serious personality problems and even addictions going on that I had not known about in the beginning. I also found out that the national organization has some serious problems when I looked at their Glass Door page. The paid employees feel bullied and dismissed by the Mean Girls at the top. That's how I felt as a volunteer.
I was also involved in a musical group. It was a bit more democratic, but there was the same syndrome of expecting one person (me, the manager) to do the lion's share of the unglamorous work, while everybody else just got to show up when they felt like it. Our performances were often pretty bad, and when I resigned as the manager and asked somebody else to take up that job, nobody would. So it fell apart as well. (Now I'm in a better music group with a paid leader who does a great job.)
The group that has worked slightly better is my book club, which I started. But Mean Girl dynamics still intrude sometimes. Bullying and trolling seem endemic now in America. But to be fair, it was a huge problem when I was in high school as well in the 1960s and 1970s. I thought people would outgrow those domination strategies as they get older, but it seems that many old people are fond of behaving pretty much as they did in middle school.
I think the United States has a cultural problem with bullying. I read a book called Bully Nation about this, and it helped me to understand that it's not just me having these experiences and feeling confused about how to handle power abuses and trolling in organizations. It's also endemic in families. It seems that Americans are not really taught anything about pro-social behavior, or even basic manners sometimes. A lot of Americans have serious personality disorders and addictions. The fix may take quite a bit of time, and it probably will have to include better parenting and education.
The irony, though, is that most kids seem pretty nice to me. Maybe kids are forced to be polite and pro-social ("you have to share"), but as they get older, they find out that all that training was just BS and nobody really believes in it. So they start copying the mean adults around them.
The local Democratic party here is a little better. I have never experienced any outright bullying, but participating is often boring as you describe. Partly this is because Democrats have no chance of even electing a school board member here, because we are so outnumbered. A few people ran openly as Democrats here in 2024 and got nowhere.
When I worked in the party booth at a local street fair, I had to work hard to get the other people in the booth to talk to me a little and socialize with me. People seem to have forgotten how to talk with people they don't know well. This is an important skill for political organizing, and when I was growing up, it was a skill that was taught and practiced by the adults.
If you just stare at your phone or sit silently and glumly without engaging people around you, you can't win friends and influence people. Duh.
I had a job a while ago where I had to work with the city council. And it was astonishing to me to observe for the first time how many men and women in their 50s or 60s clearly had experienced no personality growth since they were in high school.
It seems to me that some people actually get worse as they get older.
This group's leadership and structure seems pretty similar to that of a mainline Protestant Church. The conflicts and cliquishness you describe here would be completely common there. I think some people, not John in this piece but people generally, hit these kinds of frictions and attach them to some specific weakness in the politics or pathology of the left. But I think this is a much more universal experience, and generally that community friction is something Americans might be getting worse at navigating.
I had not just a similar but almost exactly the same experience as you, following 2016, with [Redacted] progressive Brooklyn Democratic club. My own frustration was also likely a little bit self-involved - I had been showing up for a good long while mostly hanging back, wanted to be helpful, and offered to volunteer my professional skills and time on an internal project where they would be relevant. I got big-footed by a recent arrival and left out of the loop going forward; after that, it didn't seem like my engagement was worth much, so I peaced out.
Then COVID, etc. - what I have involved myself in more recently is becoming a member of my local Friends of the Library group. I'm the youngest person there by a bit, we meet in the basement of an overdue-for-renovation library in my neighborhood, and we raise money in the hundreds of dollars through book sales, and give away books to kids. It's awesome. Everyone looking for a way to be helpful, go join your Friends of the Library.
I'm halfway between "it's a Me problem" and "it's a Them problem."
I've done Friends of the Library (past president). When my HS alma mater had a racist incident, the district formed what was one of only a few in-state Equity Councils, and after a lot of hemming, I joined. Stayed for something like 3 years, hoping, trying, waiting for some sign it would become something.
My grown kids have tried to attend local Dem events (in central Kansas). They show, are love-bombed for being 2-3 generations younger than everyone else in the room (new blood!), but find absolutely everything to be surrealistically detached, off-putting, and paternalistically dismissive of their "radical" ideas (which amount to anything departing from timid, constrained, and out-of-touch). So they gravitated to/formed a DSA chapter. Maybe because we're distant from KS' higher ed enclaves, seems the DSA folks they've attracted aren't PMC signaling posers. While some have degrees, there's a good blue-collar element there, plus the socialization of blue-collar-ness (or just precarity) that comes from living here.
My wife attended a local Dem women's (?) meeting recently and came away appalled at the self-congratulatory leadership cliquishness and insularity of the group. (She's nigh ready to chuck Molotov cocktails right now.)
A few years back, some youngs I know managed to surprise the city commission into reforming the police civilian oversight system, but were shocked and disillusioned at how incredibly copaganda'd the townsfolk are, how dumb the counterarguments were, and how watered-down the final result was, given the strong and brave case and push they made. It was both great to see them shoot their shot, and maybe sad, but necessary to see the paltry result as evidence of how politics acid-washes damn good forays into reform.
My conclusions: most such bodies and processes are not my bag. I'm ill-suited to the politicking required for them. Opportunity-cost. Not my skill-set, and too much work to develop that skill-set at this stage in life. Plus, I'm too old to set the agendas: let the kids do it, and they seem to want to do it their way. I'll try to consult *when asked,* warn them if I see them heading for a known iceberg, pass on local, relevant history and lore, and boost as much as possible. The good news: the ones I know seem pretty damn pro-social, literate and informed.
Meanwhile, as an Old, I'm more likely to be heard by *some* of the establishment Dems and such, so I try to radicalize them in dribs and drabs as much as I can get away with, hoping to erode the inevitable small-c conservatism of their comfy little positions and civic organizational enclaves. Maybe then the kids will have an easier road.
But Kansas ain't Brooklyn. Good luck everyone.
Stage direction:
Exit voice, left.
My experience as president of an HOA, board member of a 150 employee company, and office manager is that things don't often get decided in meetings. Meetings are not the place to do work. Meetings are for communication, entertainment, maintaining order, voting, etc. Sometimes it is helpful to let people speak so they can get things out of their system. Sometimes it's better to not have excessive discussion.
Real work is done before and after meetings. It's too difficult to be productive at meetings. Don't be confused if nothing happens at meetings. That is not what they are primarily for.
That doesn't mean that democracy isn't a thing. It just doesn't happen because of meetings.
This is a really interesting insight, and I think applies to a lot of other institutions as well. Lawyers will often say that they try to avoid trials as much as possible, and that the big decisions are made outside of the courtroom. Politicians often say that nothing should come to the floor of Congress until the outcome of the vote is basically known, and that congressional debates are mostly theater. I feel like the general public expects the more performative, camera-facing aspects of life to be life to be more significant than they are.
Like everyone else, I had a similar experience after 2016, and also in graduate school, with our union fight, which actually, genuinely brought material benefits to my own life, and the life of my partner and friends! I feel that the culture of these things is often antithetical to the kind of personal freedom and self-directed flourishing you associate with liberalism--it might also just be a kind of revulsion to the aesthetic of these things, which seem corny, and cringe. It occurs to me that one thing that the right has is, instead of the attempt to build solidarity, is the cash nexus--the idea Thiel bought Vance, and Musk bought Trump, and that's how things work, and should work. It's not surprising that crypto is at the center of all of this, as a pure model of individualistic wealth and self-assertion itself, as something that gives you the power, through cash transfers, to buy influence, rather than have to create it through the self-abnegation that comes with solidarity.
I would agree with your points about the liberal individualism antithetical to group activism, and the further, also antithetical, capitalist-striver individualism associated with Thiel, crypto , etc. But I would add the right also has its own group-emphasizing factions, with their own branding, group-identity formation, etc. (seen, for example, in the very common sorts of Trump-rebel drag visible on J6: camo, long beards, Stars-and-Bars banners, God-guns-and-guts logans on T-shirts and ball caps, etc. It would be interesting to examine the possible ancestry of this aesthetic, back to, e.g,, hippie style, motorcycle gang style, MIA activists, etc.).
Yeah, that's a very good point. There's definitely a strain that comes from what you describe here. It's also very inflected by the internet, and the aesthetics of the ugly, as a slap in the face of public taste, a kind aesthetic analog to the promise of violence, and the worldview of the world as ugly itself.
Like other commenters I absolutely relate to the gist of this piece.
One thought I’ve had since 2016 (have spent the last decade or so bouncing around suburban New England, Boston, and now more rural New England) is whether so much of the aesthetic of organizing is driven from hubs with large populations (NYC, etc.) or online (Twitter at its peak) that folks find themselves despairing when more local forms of activism fail to match the vision provided voices that SEEM closer to the pulse of things.
Perhaps in a way that is silly I’ve thought of this as the “independent films” problem.
I’ve always been a big movie person but especially in the pre-streaming era I recall it being really frustrating that so much publicity and work went into marketing films that played in select markets or were released in formats that were just plain not available in the country more broadly.
I’ve often wondered if civic politics has a similar problem. I would love to go see/take part in [insert form of organizing here ] that I just saw mentioned online but it’s not playing in my town…
This is brilliant. It absolutely exemplifies the kind of micro-description/analysis I think is desperately needed to build a basis for understanding where we are. These sorts of ground-level realities are crucial both as examples of and as contributors to current dilemmas. The class-clannishness (mixing metaphors horribly, I know) of the representative "elite" group comes across as deeply unappealing and misguided, but, as others have commented here, other sorts of groups tend to engage in similar behaviors. (And, as John G. suggests, the rough-cut sorts are hardly more likely to be saviors than the snobbish academic-professional types--as, alas, the Adams mayoral administration has shown). FWIW, Georgi Derluguian's _Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus_ showcases in its region very similar dynamics of rival clique formation and credential reverence (both in terms of degrees and more symbolically, whether one says the "right sort of things," what one wears, etc.). I mention the book because it suggests there may be a deep commonality across modern/contemporary societies, even seemingly very different ones, undergoing change and competition among ruling groups, and that commonality may, I think, be important for understanding what's really going on.
This needs to be in NYT.
Great story. All I could think of reading it is, “this is a society without trade unions.” You put 50 people in a room and ask, “how do we reform democracy?”, you get 50 people arguing. You put 50 union members in a room and ask, “Do we want a 3% increase and better medical and dental benefits?”, you get 50 people speaking with one voice.
I’m wondering if the hollowing out of civic life also creates a vicious circle in which the few civic organisations that are left get overwhelmed when there’s revival of interest (like in 2016). John describes those Democratic Club leaders as being a bit overwhelmed by the numbers of new people, and I’ve been in enough groups to know that they often have basic capacity constraints that hamper their ability to cope with sudden growth. So people fall out of interest with the groups and they are left smaller and weaker until the next revival. ‘Civics education’ gets framed as learning about government processes, formal elections etc. Maybe it should be about things like how to chair meetings, how to engage members of your clubs etc.
You should check out Maximum New York. Daniel agrees with you big time!
We had the loveliest young man live with us for two months, a campus organizer, 24 years old, Asian-American, Stanford grad, bursting with ideas, most of them very good, most of them to be nixed by the machine, who were not half as bright as he was. As he put it delicately, "this job has made me realize my educational privilege." It felt as if all organizing was trickle-down dross from the likes of Axelrod and his ilk who had a once-in-a-lifetime candidate and concluded his triumph was their accomplishment