Planting Liberally

A very long while ago, I wrote the first piece in a series on progressive grand strategy, laying out the kinds of questions which a progressive grand strategy would have to address. In that piece I addressed the goals and assessments required of a progressive grand strategy; the goal is to eventually address all six components of a fully-articulated strategic plan (goals, assessments, tactics, resources, dynamics, and evaluation), as described in Finding Strategy, a report published by the Progressive Strategy Studies Project. This series is, taking the very long-term view, a follow-up to my initial review of the Finding Strategy report last summer. (In the interest of full disclosure: one of the authors, Wolfgang Brauner, is a personal friend.)

PSSP responded to my analysis of the goals of progressive strategy on their blog shortly thereafter, and today, (finally!) I'll spend a bit of time responding, and hopefully moving the conversation down the field a bit.

Perhaps the most noteworthy element of my initial post was a distinction between political goals (winning elections and policy battles) and cultural goals (spreading the progressive worldview through ideological institutions like unions, churches, media, schools, etc.) Brauner likens this distinction to the original distinction, in Finding Strategy, between electoral, movement, and movement-electoral strategies, defined respectively as strategies whose primary goal is winning elections, building a movement, and doing the two simultaneously. (Or similarly, to Paul Wellstone's observation that successful political chage requires organizing, policy, and electoral politics.) That is an interesting comparison, and it does indeed work pretty well, so long as the definitions are broadened a bit, to include regulatory, legislative and electoral goals under the broader rubric of "electoral" goals, and to include the growth of institutions like liberal religious congregations and labor unions under the rubric of "movement" goals. There are some ideological institutions in which the language of movement-building doesn't make a lot of sense - schools and media, most importantly - but on the whole it's a good comparison.

In particular, this comparison reminds us that it's possible to pursue political and cultural goals at the same time. That's hardly news, I suppose, since labor unions do that all the time, most clearly in the case of the ongoing effort to enact the Employee Free Choice Act. Along similar lines, there's a fashionable consensus in the progressive blogosphere that campaigns should be about movement-building, in the sense that successful or not, they always leave behind a corps of citizen-activists who know how to run a campaign and are prepared for the next election season; Democracy for America, to name one organization, deliberately embodies that consensus.

Unfortunately, progressive strategic discussion usually looks at movement-building only through the lens of community organizing and labor organizing. Those are two important paths to movement-building, certainly, but we ignore other social movements and cultural institutions - including religion, schools, the family, and media - at our peril. Think about where conservatives have had their greatest success (churches) and respectable if not stunning success (schools and family) - success in establishing the conservative worldview in those institutions is responsible for a large part of the mess we're in now. And remember, these are the institutions that most progressive strategists ignore wholesale.

Brauner also refers to another strategist, Steve Lukes, who categorizes power according to a tri-partite system: decision-making power (control of government); agenda-setting power (including think tanks, pressure groups, and media); and ideological power. That system is much more akin to the distinction I made between political and cultural goals, and in fact I think it's a better one. I disagree with Brauner in his assertion that progressives are weak at every level. Assuming that Obama wins the presidency, and I think that's a reasonably safe bet, then by this time next year, a realistic assessment will be that conservatives hold a large, but not overwhelming, amount of decision-making power; progressives hold a small but growing amount of decision-making power; and moderate Democrats hold the balance of decision-making power. It's also clear that conservatives have a very large advantage in agenda-setting, but progressives are not quite as far behind as we once were. The ideological power struggle is considerably more complex, since there are some institutions where progressives clearly are doing very well (like college campuses), while in others (like the workplace or religion), they are doing very well in some places and poorly in others.

If, as Lukes and I seem to agree, ideological power (or progressive cultural goals, take your pick) is really the most important way to gain power, how is that to be done? Brauner attempts to investigate this question with a constructivist approach to culture, proceeding from a definition of culture that reminds me suspiciously of the theory of recursive computing:

the key idea is to understand culture not only as a structure of cognitive and normative expectations that shape perceptions, communication, and behavior, but also always as a form of observation that not only observes what social actors do, but also observes how they observe, and how the way they observe any phenomenon determines what they observe

I think one could proceed from first principles in that way, but I'm perhaps too untrained in social sciences to really comment usefully. While I think my approach, which approximates "culture" as the collective creation of a set of well-defined ideological institutions, is simpler, I'll also allow that it is too simple - it conveniently sweeps under the rug the question of how ideological transformation happens at the individual level.

While it's great to suppose that growing unions and enlarging the membership rolls of liberal churches will result in progressive ideological change, it's not so easy to do that. An individual's pre-existing ideology, from "me-first" attitudes in the workplace to stuck-in-the-mud religious traditions, inevitably get in the way. Brauner's constructivist approach, I think, gets at this question from first principles, rather than from the position of an in-the-trenches organizer. I can't say that I have any kind of real answer to this question, but I do think that most people whose job it is to chage ideology at the individual level - including union organizers, ministers, professors, and so on - have figured out a variety of tricks that work in their own contexts.

In any case, these are problems at the tactical level, and I'm not enough of a domain expert to write intelligently about them (which isn't to say I am a domain expert on very much else I write about.) There are plenty of other problems to tackle: what are the high-level operations which are needed to achieve ideological transformation? How can these operations be made to work constructively together with decision-making and agenda-setting operations in order to create a smoothly coordinated movement? Perhaps most importantly, what are the institutional and monetary resources needed to support these operations, and how on earth do we gather those resources?

Fortunately, there's more than one part to this series, and I will address those issues in the (hopefully near) future.

Yesterday's blog post about the Progressive Strategy Brain got me thinking about a problem which the authors of Finding Strategy (PDF) have discussed in the past: what would a grand strategy for progressive power look like?

In addition to giving blog posts like this one a really cool-sounding title, grand strategy is a coherent composition of several different strategies which together address all of the different forms of power relationships in society. It's quite a tall order, which would explain why no one has really developed a grand strategy for progressive power. (Full disclosure: As I mentioned yesterday, one of the authors of Finding Strategy is a personal friend.)

I don't pretend to have the answer to this question, but I'd like to piece together some thoughts on what such a strategy might look like. As Finding Strategy argues, strategy consists of six components: goals, assessment, tactics, resources, dynamics, and evaluation. Today, I'd like to focus on the first two components; I'll delve into the other four in follow-up posts. Follow me across the jump for more.

Cultural and political goals, and decomposition of each

The first key to forming a grand strategy is categorizing various forms of power relationships, in order to get a good picture of the terrain. On the whole I think progressives tend to focus on expressly political power relationships, i.e. power relationships engendered directly by the government, and ignore cultural power relationships.

Political goals

Political goals can be neatly decomposed according to the structure of government, for example: winning the presidency; electing a progressive Congress; stocking the judiciary with progressive judges; watching the bureaucracy and persuading it to enact progressive regulations; electing progressive governors and state legislatures; experimenting with progressive reform in the state houses; etc. When thinking about expressly political forms of power, I would also include the internal machinery of the party apparatuses, even though they're extra-constitutional.

Progressives have strategists who focus on all of these goals, although some goals gain a lot more attention than others; in particular, I would argue that we are far more concerned with the presidency, Congress, and the Democratic Party than we are with the judiciary, the bureaucracy (which I would argue is a different beast than the presidency, though clearly affected by it), and state- and municipal-level goals. There are some great strategists working to change that, like the Progressive States Network, but there is still plenty of uneven focus.

Cultural goals

Cultural goals can't be decomposed quite as easily, because there is no "constitution" for our culture (and thank goodness for that.) I think one useful way of looking at cultural goals is to think about the different kinds of ideological institutions which dominate the interaction between culture and politics. These institutions include religion, the workplace, schools, the media, and family and other personal relationships.

Each of these institutions shapes the worldview of its membership or audience in various ways. Consequently, any strategy which attempts to expand progressive power in a comprehensive way must address the problem of spreading the progressive worldview through these institutions. For example, what kind of efforts are needed to spread the progressive worldview through religious institutions?

Of course, this is a very old problem, and various thinkers have already addressed it in a variety of ways already. The union movement is a massive effort to establish progressive power relationships within the workforce. Religious institutions have undergone a series of transformations which stretch back to well before this country was founded, many of them attempts to establish more progressive theologies and more progressive intra-church relationships. And so on.

A savvy grand strategy would address ongoing efforts in each of these institutions and would attempt to bolster or complement them in some way. Thus, at a minimum, a progressive grand strategy should seek to:

• Strengthen and enlarge the union movement
• Enlarge the membership of progressive religious institutions, and address the religious needs of those who are not being served by the religious landscape as it stands today
• Expand the availability of college education, and bolster the prevalence of the progressive worldview on college and high school campuses
• Create a more progressive media landscape, by reducing the barriers to entry for progressive media makers, and moving conservative and centrist media to the left
• Encourage family dynamics and personal relationships which support a progressive worldview, e.g., progressive parenting models

Moreover, a grand strategy should seek out other forms of power relationships and emerging ideological institutions. For example, is it possible that some online social networks are now taking on the role of forging ideology? Is it possible that the astronomical rates of incarceration has made prison a kind of ideological institution? More than that, is it possible that progressives have overlooked longstanding broad-based institutions, like the military, which might have an important role in ideological formation, yet fly below the progressive radar screen? If that's the case, then what should progressives do to ensure that their worldview is established and nurtured by these institutions? (Or, in the case of prison, what should progressives do to minimize the number of people who get incarcerated?)

This decomposition provides, I think, a good structure for progressive grand strategy. Progressive grand strategy has, on one hand, a goal of winning political victories, in all of their various constitution and extra-constitutional forms; and on the other hand, a goal of spreading the progressive worldview through a variety of cultural ideological institutions.

Assessment

A progressive grand strategy must assess the terrain of power relationships in society in order to transform those relationships. There are a few different pieces to this kind of assessment.

The first is an assessment of the challenges progressives face when they try to spread their worldview through ideological institutions, and the efforts to overcome those challenges. In my description of cultural goals above, I've implicitly identified some of the ongoing efforts. I think a full assessment would have to look at the challenges progressives face in more detail. For example, why is it that conservative religious traditions are not losing adherents as quickly as progressive religious traditions? What are some of the difficulties unions face when they try to recruit new members, or to retain solidarity within their ranks? And so forth. Naturally, many of these assessments have already been undertaken, and perhaps only need to be collated and updated a bit.

The second is an assessment of the challenges progressives face when they try to win political victories. This is hardly untrodden ground for progressives. We spend a lot of time assessing these challenges, and to our credit, we have done a good job of overcoming some of them. There are some pitfalls to beware of, such as our tendency a) to assume that a Democratic victory is a progressive victory (although I do think it's safe to say that almost all progressive victories are Democratic victories) and b) to assess challenges to progressives through the lens of various campaigns, like the 2008 presidential campaign or the 2006 Congressional campaign. Individual candidates can sometimes overcome certain challenges, but that doesn't mean that the structural problems behind those challenges have disappeared. Nevertheless, on the whole I think progressives know quite a lot about what they're up against in the realm of political campaigns. In the past I've tried to compile the assessments I've seen in various progressive publications into one large, master list; see my very old, and perhaps first, post on liberal entrepreneurship (under "So what is liberal entrepreneurship", item 2). That list is probably due for a major update sometime soon, and I'd certainly love to hear about other attempts to synthesize assessments of challenges to progressive political victories along these lines.

The final area of assessment concerns the effects of cultural institutions on our political landscape. For example, what would a major increase in union density do to increase progressive electoral fortunes? How would a gradual demographic trend away from conservative evangelical churches and towards liberal Christian churches or minority religions reshape the framework of our political discourse? And so on. Prorgressives tend to view these questions through the lens of specific campaigns and electoral victories, which means that, except for our efforts in media advocacy, we spend a lot of time worrying about the growth of cultural conservatism, and very little time working to expand cultural progressivism. I believe we need a deeper understanding of cultural progressivism. A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on the cultural dimension of transformational politics, which suggests a simplistic, but I think useful, mathematical formula which expresses the relationship between cultural institutions and politics:

You might think of the ideological landscape designed by cultural institutions as a kind of sum of products. Take the number of members an institution has, multiply by the granularity of its ideological impact, and then multiply again by the emphasis that institution places on ideological transformation. Add that number up for all cultural institutions, and you have the total amount of ideological impact exerted by cultural institutions.

This formulation is entirely too neat, and woefully inadequate to fully capture the nuanced interplay between cultural forces and political life. Any formulation would be. But I think it's a start, and I'd be very interested to hear critiques or alternative formulations.

What's next

In my next post on progressive grand strategy, I'll discuss tactical plans and resources required for progressive cultural transformation and for progressive political victories. That will, I think, give a little more perspective to my nearly obsessive focus on liberal entrepreneurship. I also hope to tie together strands of thought from a variety of disparate realms, including both culturally and politically progressive efforts.

In the meantime, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this emerging outline for progressive grand strategy, and some of the assessments I've compiled above.

Last summer I highlighted a report on the state of progressive strategy called Finding Strategy: A Survey of Contemporary Contributions to Progressive Strategy (PDF). At the time I didn't do much more beyond summarize the report and promise follow-up at a later point, which, I grudgingly admit, I didn't really do.

However, the Progressive Strategy Studies Project (PSSP) has recently released a new companion tool for the report, so I thought I'd revisit this discussion. The tool is called the Progressive Strategy Brain, and it's explained in an introductory blog post at the Progressive Strategy Blog. The brain is a visualization tool which allows users to navigate a library of about 4,100 articles or entries related to progressive strategy. The screen is split in two vertically, with the top half depicting an interconnected web of concepts centered on a single, active concept, and the bottom half providing text and description of that concept. You can click on any concept in the top half to make it active. While some entries have very sparse text and merely exist to depict a relationship between other concepts, others include a full report's worth of HTML. The tool is still evolving, and PSSP hopes to update it every week. The software which runs the whole show is called The Brain. (Full disclosure: Wolfgang Brauner, one of the authors of the original report, and of the Progressive Strategy Brain, is a personal friend.)

Clicking around inside the Progressive Strategy Brain is quite fun, as you can navigate between all sorts of interesting topics, individuals, organizations, and even abstract ideas. There are a few interesting jumping off points, though, such as Finding Strategy (2006) strategists (a list of strategists listed in the original report), Progressive Challenges (challenges which face the prorgressive movement), Progressive Strategy Types, and Progressive Strategy Literature.

I think this is a fascinating tool. PSSP has managed to make a lot of very interesting content available in a very accessible and interesting format. I do have a few quibbles. There are some places where I'm not entirely sure how the relationships between concepts are created. The taxonomist in me would also love a way to impose a little more structure or categorization on top of the web. And I hope that as time goes on, the organization opens up the Brain to outside contributors (although I imagine the constraints of the software might make that difficult.) But on the whole, I think this is a great effort which calls attention to, and helps us organize our thoughts on, our conception of strategy for the progressive movement.

What I'd love to see in the evolution of the progressive strategy brain, and in the larger discourse on progressive strategy generally, is increased attention to non-political goals. Put another way, I'd like to see progressive strategists broaden their horizons, to pursue goals that include transformation of non-political, cultural institutions. After all, transformational politics includes both cultural transformation and political transformation. We need strategies for cultural transformation, and particularly transformation of the ideological institutions which usually regulate the interaction of our culture and our politics - religion, the workplace, schools, personal relationships, and the media. Progressives don't talk much about transforming those institutions (except insofar as doing so can produce electoral results), and that shortage of strategic discussion shows in the PSB's entry on progressive ideological infrastructure.

Eventually, I'd like to see progressives develop a series of strategies for transforming these institutions and creating a more progressive culture. I'd like to think that I've nibbled at the edge of this problem in the past, with a variety of series on creating progressive TV and strengthening the labor movement, and I hope to continue in that vein. I'd love to see others take up the reins and develop strategies for progressive change within other ideological institutions. That kind of strategic development is the first step in the development of a grand strategy of progressive power, which would tie together progressive cultural and political transformation.

I'm tempted to draw up an outline of what such a strategy might look like, especially given the great work which has gone into PSB. In fact, I might take a crack at that a bit later on. For now, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the Progressive Strategy Brain, and the state of progressive strategy generally.

On Thursday Digby wrote a fascinating post at Campaign for America's Future on the difference between transactional and transformational politics. The post pointed out the difference between "transactional" politics (what can I get in the political marketplace?) and "transformational" politics (how can I change the marketplace?). Digby argues that elected officials should be doing two jobs at once - getting the best reforms they can in the current environment, while working to change that environment so that it is more favorable to progressives.

I think it's important that we recognize the difference between these two forms of politics, and also that we push our elected officials to strive for political transformations even as they try to get the best "deal" on each political "transaction" they make. Indeed, that is perhaps the central purpose of the progressive blogosphere.

However, I think we should also think more broadly about political transformation and the other forces, besides the machinations of Democratic politicians, which might create political transformation. In particular, we need to be aware of the cultural institutions which frequently shape our political environment, and we need to push those institutions to create political transformation as well. Follow me across the flip for more details on how, in my opinion, cultural institutions shape our political environment, and what (in somewhat high-level terms) needs to be done about those institutions to create the kind of progressive political transformation we seek.

There are a number of cultural institutions which shape the broad strokes of our political ideology. These include the media (including both news media and entertainment media), educational institutions, the workplace and labor unions, religious institutions, and our familial and other personal relationships. In the past, I've referred to these kinds of institutions as "ideological conversion machines", and that term has its origins in some theories advanced over the past couple of years by Chris Bowers, and originally by Louis Althusser, who coined the term ideological state apparatus. Regardless, all of these institutions shape our ideology in a number of different ways, ranging from overtly political messages (sermons about feeding the poor, say), to more subtle values-based messages (like a steady stream of workshops on diversity at college, say), to experiential learning (like learning the importance of solidarity by participating in a strike), and so forth.

Interaction with these sorts of institutions shapes a person's political ideology. Some institutions tend to make their members more liberal (many labor unions, for instance), while some institutions tend to make their members more conservative (like many evangelical churches.) In fact, this relationship is also somewhat circular, as many people gravitate towards the institutions which tend to reinforce their own ideologies.

The ideological forces at work in any given cultural institution can also be variably granular. That is to say, while some cultural institutions will push their members towards a generally liberal worldview and impart in their members progressive values, others will push their members to take sides and become active in a particular issue or electoral campaign. While it's hard to paint such a large and abstract a group of institutions with a single brush, I think it's fair to say that most cultural institutions have an ideological impact which is less fine-grained but more long-lasting than the impact exerted by politicians, pundits, and others whose job it is to actively participate in political discourse.

Moreover, ideological forces across cultural institutions are not uniformly emphatic. Thus we might imagine two different union locals, both theoretically tied together by the ideology of solidarity, but one considerably more strident in fighting workplace policies and therefore, perhaps more likely to make the notion of solidarity real to its members. Or we might imagine two different colleges, both on paper as supporting diversity, but one considerably more aggressive in recruiting and accepting a diverse student body, pushing its students to socialize across racial and ethnic lines, etc.

In fact, you might think of the ideological landscape designed by cultural institutions as a kind of sum of products. Take the number of members an institution has, multiply by the granularity of its ideological impact, and then multiply again by the emphasis that institution places on ideological transformation. Add that number up for all cultural institutions, and you have the total amount of ideological impact exerted by cultural institutions.

Of course, our political environment is far too complex and nuanced to be expressed by such a clean and crisp mathematical equation. Real life gets messy. Cultural leaders claim to hold certain values, only to undermine them through their actions. Or cultural leaders hold views which don't cleanly fit into any neatly-defined political ideological category (for example, a vast number of clergy.) More than that, many institutions have an internal tension between the "official" ideology of their leaders, and that of their members, and these tensions create countervailing ideological forces. And so on.

But I think this conceptual mathematical formula is valuable to us, because it points us towards pressure points where we can imagine changing the cultural forces which create our political ideological environment. In particular, it suggests that we can do any of the following things to create a more progressive political environment:

• Bring more people into progressive cultural institutions, like the labor movement, liberal religious groups, etc.
• Make progressive cultural institutions more engaged in fine-grained political fights over concrete issues
• Make ideological transformation and higher priority for more progressive cultural institutions

Actually, that's only haf the equation.  The flip side of promoting progressivism is demoting conservatism, by doing some or all of the following:

• "Steal" members from conservative cultural institutions
• Encourage conservative cultural institutions not to engage in fine-grain political debate
• Reduce the emphasis on ideological transformation within conservative cultural institutions

I don't particularly like this second half of the equation, since it can get pretty ugly.  To see what this looks like in practice, consider the conservative movement's long-term effort to bust unions, or consider that nasty little group, the Institue for Religion and Democracy, which works to destabilize mainline Protestant denomination and to "pick off" congregations from denominational bodies.  It's remarkably odious stuff.  There are ways to demote conservatism that are not quite as ugly though - for example, encouraging evangelicals to focus less on political action, or encouraging them to break ties with the Republican party.

Regardless, the larger point is that there's a cultural dimension to political transformation, and that therefore, political transformation requires cultural transformation, including at least some of the steps I've outlined above.  This is not the kind of thing that politicians should be doing, nor do I think they'd do it particularly well. (Although Jimmy Carter has been busily proving me wrong with his pan-Baptist reform group.) Rather, it is the kind of thing which ordinary people, grassroots cultural activists and leaders, must be involved in. I also think (and this has been a central assertion of my blogging and, recently, my paid professional work) that it's the kind of thing entrepreneurs and activist businesspeople can and should take part in, by using market forces to create cultural change.  I also think there is an important role for the blogosphere to play in this project, by cultivating and nurturing ideas for cultural growth and by critiquing cultural institutions and pushing them to be more progressive.

This kind of cultural transformational work is massive, complex, difficult, and not the stuff of overnight revolutions. Conservatives discovered that it took decades to weaken the hand of center-left mainline Protestant denominations and labor unions, to build up an orchestrated massive media machine, and to win the trust of a growing group of religious conservatives. We will no doubt find that organizing religious liberals, rebuilding the labor movement, and increasing the impact of our own nascent media machine will take a very long time. Fortunately, some of this work is already being done; colleges are creating a new generation of very progressive Millenials, labor unions have undertaken a massive program of political mobilization that is very successful, and religious liberals are starting to organize themselves (more on that later.) But we have really just begun, and there's plenty left to do.