It’s Raining (On) Men?
Let me share my lifelong dream for the left: taking over fraternal organizations (Moose, Oddfellows, Etc.)
They are 501c8s, which is basically impossible to get now. Most of them own property, they often have liquor licenses that are grandfathered in.
We could have clubhouses!
This morning, via Rob Horning, I saw Henry Farrell listing three pieces by himself, Ned Resnikoff, and Pete Davis that happenstantially are in conversation with each other about what the Democratic Party should do now. As suggested by Horning: “countering parasociality with sociality […] may be a better approach”.
In other words, Galvin and Thurston aren’t either deliverists or popularists. They are partyists. They think that what went wrong in the Obama administration (and in other Democratic administrations) is that Democratic leaders did not focus enough on building grassroots organizations that would connect politicians to voters and vice versa.
There isn’t sufficient empirical evidence to say whether they are right or wrong, but their diagnosis highlights different plausible explanatory factors in the intra-Democratic fight. In a world where Democratic party organization is weak, it is more difficult to explain both parties’ positions on popular issues, and their policy successes to voters. Furthermore, the policies that Democrats introduce are more vulnerable to being weakened or subverted, if they do not have active, organized constituencies that are connected to the party. This partyist diagnosis gets less attention than the other two because it does not have an ideological constituency behind it.
This is all easier dreamed than realized. Fostering a culture of membership is a long-haul project—more like the planting of acorns than the planting of sunflower seeds. It will require a years-long commitment to the fits and starts of civic experimentation. But even a partial transformation to a structure based more in membership would help address many of the party’s challenges. Conflicts within the party could have more accessible venues through which they could be deliberated on and resolved. The party’s ideological vision could be more grounded in the interests of the broad populace (rather than of wealthy donors). Organic party leaders could rise more through their skills at organizing local communities than their ability to navigate and fundraise from elite networks. Media silos and cultural divides could have a shot at being broken through via sustained, real-world interactions at a local level. And, most significantly, apathy and cynicism could be combated as more of the civic creativity and energy of members is unleashed as local Democrats are invited to not only donate and vote but actually create the party together.
Any organization that seeks to replace the Democratic-leaning Elks Lodge in American public life needs to look more like an Elks Lodge than a DSA meeting. With that in mind, my proposal is that the Democratic Party, along with other liberal and left-leaning organizations, should fund the creation of community centers in priority voting precincts. These centers would be managed by a combination of local volunteers and paid staff who are hired directly from the surrounding community.
The rough consensus of these three pieces echoes something I said the other day when noting Ben Werdmuller’s idea that the Democratic Party should “become an operating system for local organizing”:
Ben’s pitch basically boils down to the Democrats reconceptualizing what even is a modern political party and it very much resembles countering the “command and control” approach of the caste-driven and nativist GOP with a sort of distributed, asymmetrical political warfare.
Then there’s Dave Winer, who decided to write a man-ifesto claiming that the problem is that “the Dems stink from the blame-men-for-everything politics”, quite falsely arguing right in the lede that “toxic” is “a term they applied to all men”. This literally is #NotAllMen.
Despite that lede, Dave’s new post is relatively anodyne (although he calls it “a third rail piece” that might “ruin my life”), so it’s important that anyone who encounters it understand the vile garbage he’s been linking and what he’s been saying elsewhere in defense of his self-serving #NotAllMen position.
Ironically, this Fairbanksian idea that the left, or, in the specific arguments of Farrell, Davis, and Resnikoff, the Democratic Party should pivot to growing and organizing itself at a distributed and local level in the end arguably would address even Dave’s malformed concerns, in that if we all were organizing in Democratic networks of both mutual aid and party action on the ground where we live, it would be as neighbors with neighbors, and we’d have to work out all of our issues around identity down here in the real world where all of us actually live.
In the meantime, however, I’ll keep repeating it for as long as I have to: #NotAllMen is an open manhole into the sewer of the manosphere, and the answer for the Democratic Party very much is not suddenly to re-center the needs of men who were willing to sell out their friends and loved ones for the promise of five cents off a gallon of gas, or the promise of being made to feel like they still are more important than anyone else.
Resnikoff cites Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin’s Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, for an example of how a party can build from below:
In late 1968, Bobby Seale and David Hilliard shifted the Party’s focus to organizing community programs such as free breakfasts for children. In 1969, every Panther chapter organized community services, and these programs soon became the staple activity for Party members nationwide. By that summer, the Party estimated it was feeding ten thousand children free breakfast every day. The Black Panther Party’s community programs gave members meaningful daily activities, strengthened black community support, burnished Party credibility in the eyes of allies, and vividly exposed the inadequacy of the federal government’s concurrent War on Poverty. Community programs concretely advanced the politics the Panthers stood for: they were feeding hungry children when the vastly wealthier and more powerful U.S. government was allowing children to starve. The more the state sought to repress the Panthers, the more the Party’s allies mobilized in its defense.
If men really want to feel important again, maybe they should stop complaining that they aren’t the center of attention in national political campaigns—in the midst, no less, of a national political environment of bigoted and violent pushback against groups who have never been as historically advantaged as white men—and they should get to work helping rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up starting in their own neighborhoods, with their own neighbors.