Moving beyond resistance

My friend Theo asked a question in the comments on my post reporting interesting trends in the Virginia election results:

The key is to move these voters from resistance to membership - not just reacting to the horror du jour, but committed for the long haul. How do we translate resistance into membership? It is a question Faith in Action is pondering in California.

This is something I might know something about; after all, I spent much of my working life trying to figure out how to translate the energies unleashed by felt and observed injustice into practical political power. I can't say I've got any solutions, but I do have thoughts.

• You are not going to move most voters from resistance to membership. Even in moments of heightened political energy, most people don't want their lives to revolve around political activism. Insofar as they do politics at all, they do it in the hope that activism will enable them to stop having to struggle so hard in a hostile environment.

• This doesn't make the majority bad people or even insignificant political actors. If people do even the bare minimum -- that usually means vote -- that is significant. If they identify with a weakly articulated but real justice consensus, even that is also something, however irritating their inactivity might feel to those of us more active.

• Even people who will engage in activism mostly will only do so inconsistently. Their willingness and enthusiasm for political work waxes and wanes and that is just human. Organizations that want to thrive have to find ways to incorporate people that allow them to come in and out. Political campaigns are actually good for accommodating this reality; they too have their own seasons, much of the work is routine enough not to require much practice, and you know when campaigns are over.

• I take the urgency about "membership" to imply a desire for organizational stability undergirding political activity. And that's totally reasonable.

• Membership becomes attractive when it offers community that didn't previously exist. We want to feel that we're among comrades in belief and struggle. That's a high good.

• But creating a membership through attraction can also mean becoming smaller. It is easy for an organization to become a kind of impermeable club within which members and staff share assumptions and create a sustaining culture -- even a necessary culture of resistance -- but use that community as a defense against engaging with novel threats and events. Perhaps current circumstances are so dire that danger seems remote. But tight-knit organizations find it hard to shift their focus in response to external circumstances. I remember vividly that, in 1994 under the threat of the California anti-immigrant Prop 187, most of the infrastructure groups that had been working to implement the 1986 immigration reform were unable to switch to fighting this immediate danger.

• If organizations are to be of continuing value in political work, they have to remain supple, able to adjust to changing needs and times. And that is hard while maintaining more than a thin facade of internal democracy. However, except in moments of immediate threat, the best disciplined, energized people -- the leaders every organization yearns to attract-- will walk away from any group in which they feel they have little power in setting the agenda.

Moving beyond immediate resistance is tough. Faith in Action seems to have piggy-backed on somebody else's historical organizational momentum and inertia -- the various churches which affiliate -- with impressive and hugely valuable results. But that's not really a membership structure, though it may be a necessary one.

Dear Theo, those few, like you and me, who engage with politics instinctively all the time have to understand that we are mutants. We like to think our focus is valuable; maybe it is, maybe even essential to preservation of a democratic (small "d") society. But we can't forget we're weird! And opinionated. I certainly am.