Planting Liberally

Over the last few days, I've had a chance to have some really interesting conversations with several different people about movement-building in three separate contexts: the progressive movement; the labor movement, and the liberal religious movement. These are really smart people, and it's been an extraordinarily educational experience for that reason.

What is most interesting to me is the way that similar kinds of things keep popping up in each conversation. Indeed, there are many problems shared by these different movements. For example:

• Labor movement activists, as many of us know, have worked tirelessly to pass the Employee Free Choice Act; they claim that labor law, as currently executed, is deeply unfair to the labor movement, and makes winning organizing campaigns much more difficult than necessary. It's similar to our conversation about the various levers of electoral law - gerrymandering, vote-counting standards, voter registration regulations, etc.
• Several years ago, the labor movement woke up to the fact that it had difficulty attracting young people to become organizers and labor movement leaders. Union Summer and the Organizing Institute grew out of that recognition, in a manner similar to the way that the Young People For/Campus Progress/New Organizing Initiative machine has grew out of the recognition that the progressive movement is falling behind in leadership training and recruitment.
• Young people today are emphatically less religiously conservative than their parents and grandparents, but liberal religious organizations are having a difficult time of enlisting new young members. It's similar to our problem in the progressive movement, though it's a bit less emphatic for us: young people today are, according to their stated values and issue positions, much more progressive than older generations, but they are not joining up with our movement in correspondingly large numbers.
• Liberal religious leaders are unfairly shut out of traditional broadcast, cable and print media. What is more, there are centrist religious leaders, like Jim Wallis, who pass for progressives in media, creating another kind of Alan Colmes problem.

Now, it's possible that these similarities are merely superficial, and not terribly interesting other than that. But I do think that social movements have a tendency to develop similar kinds of problems, which need similar kinds of solutions.

I hope that progressives, union members, and liberal religion-ists start thinking about these similarities, because there is a real lack of movement-building cross-talk among the various social movements. We tend to cooperate at the level of political goals - the labor movement and progressive movement cooperate on EFCA; the progressive and liberal religious movements cooperate on opposition to the war in Iraq; etc. That is great and it should continue. But we would all be better served if we also work collaboratively on the myriad structural problems that we face, and the various strategies we've developed to address them. The labor movement has a lot to teach us about holding politicians' feet to the fire, and I think the progressive movement (especially progressive bloggers) have a lot to share with the labor movement about exploiting information flows using the Internet. The liberal religious movement has a lot to teach us about how to speak to people, even those in extremely dire straits, in a way that gives them hope, and I think the progressive movement has learned some things about recruiting young people which could help liberal religion-ists. These are just a few examples of the potential power of working together at this level; I'm sure that many more will follow.

Another thing which is becoming clear is that progressives are largely focused on problems facing the progressive movement as a political movement, i.e. what I call the "internal" problems of leadership retention, campaign efficacy, idea development, media access, and others. These are important problems, but this focus ignores the problems facing the progressive movement as a cultural movement, i.e. what I call the "external" problems of the dissemination of fundamentalist and conservative theology, the deterioration of the labor movement and with it the idea of workplace solidarity, our failure to make high school a site of liberalization, etc. Progressive movement-builders should be, at a minimum, keenly aware of these external problems and, if possible, working to fix them.

In short, I think we need to start looking beyond the surface of the liberal religious and labor movements as just a source of potential votes or donations. We need to think of them as social movements which are facing challenges very similar to our own, and we (and they) should communicate about, and share solutions for, those problems.