Reimagining the Movement

Democrats should stop fighting about tactics and start fighting over how to build a stronger party.

Photo by Mirah Curzer on Unsplash

Brendan Nyhan, in the context of ongoing debates about messaging and winning elections, tweeted¹ about something he terms the tactical fallacy: 

1. Pundits and reporters closely observe the behavior of candidates and parties, focusing on the tactics they use rather than larger structural factors.

2. The candidates who win appear to have good tactics; conversely, those who tend to lose appear to have bad tactics.

3. The media concludes that candidates won or lost because of their tactical choices.

This is an important concept to understand because our analysis often conflates the efficacy of specific tactics with the general truth that smart tactics work in environments that favor a candidate but aren’t enough to overcome an unfavorable electoral environment.

Brendan Nyhan @BrendanNyhan

Re-upping my 2010 blog post on the tactical fallacy brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2010/09/t… We're revisiting all the same debates from those days

Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy

the persistent feeling that the number, length and vitriol of Twitter arguments over the Correct Messaging is slightly out of proportion with -the electoral effects of messaging -the practical possibility of getting a whole party to adopt one message in sufficient lockstep

The fallacy highlights why most of our current arguments about strategy feel pointless². Democrats are slated to earn somewhere around 46% of the popular vote this November, and given our current district lines, Democrats will probably lose on the order of 40 seats. That’s more than any marginal messaging work can manage to stave off and it calls for innovative politics to avoid being screwed in the future³.

Let’s feed two birds with one scone

So why fight? The midterms can’t be blamed on a single wing of the party. Instead, I’d argue that a root cause is that our elected leaders are also our movement leaders. The way they jostle for power and influence in the movement is by arguing over tactics. 

Legislating is a very different job from advocating – almost diametrically opposed. Movements are emotional, aspirational, uncompromising projects. Legislating is slow, boring, technocratic, and rife with compromise. Both are focused on outcomes, but movements maximize over the long term, and legislating maximizes in the short term.

These two forces interact and intersect but the separation of a movement or activist class from the legislating class would resolve most of the tensions Democrats currently experience. As it stands, Democrats really only have the presidential primary to use as a vehicle for hashing out policy disputes. Activists, and candidates, know and exploit this – cleverly backing Democratic politicians into positions that might be electorally compromising but ideologically maximizing.

The 2020 primaries demonstrated this clearly. Activist groups pushed decriminalizing border crossings and banning private insurance as litmus tests. Steyer and Bennet entered with the explicit goal of elevating climate issues, and Mike Gravel blatantly campaigned to shift the policy debate to the left. 

This is bad! It’s bad because it reduces what should be complex and long-term work to change people’s minds on policy to a series of televised debates. It relies on partisan sorting to do the heavy lifting, and if a policy/cause doesn’t have a charismatic elected leader as champion, it flounders. In the short-term, this (and our primary election structure) produces an election cycle where candidates do the politically costly work of pandering heavily to their base initially (as a form of movement organizing) and then moderating after primaries.

This makes politics a candidate fandom, layered on top of our increasingly partisan and oppositional elections. As an example, because our politics are unmoored from movements and rising American loneliness, some have argued that voters rallied to Trump “out of a yearning for forms of community and solidarity that they sense have been lost.” 

The party then finds itself in a terrible scenario where politics, and importantly, our ability to improve lives, becomes extremely subject to small swings in partisanship and not to fundamental changes in public opinion. Our strategies are reduced to the following (credit where credit is due, these do often work):

• Arbitrage: Using polling to find progressive issues that elected Democrats can embrace without an electoral penalty. Ex: Expanding the Child Tax Credit, infrastructure spending, or student loan forgiveness. 

• Pandering: Catering to the median voter by signaling a move away from partisan preferences to earn marginal votes. Ex: Supporting Title 42 or using anti-China rhetoric.

Because we’ve got no other majority-building strategies to rely on, all of our time and energy is spent on debating the merits and methods of these strategies. Don’t get me wrong, I want Fetterman to do whatever he needs to win in Pennsylvania. I truly believe that any Democrat is better than the best Republican. But we find ourselves in a loop where Democrats consistently optimize for the next election in two years, living largely at the whim of the natural laws of politics⁴.

An understated benefit of a larger movement class is that it would resolve some of the uncomfortable positions candidates find themselves in. We can let movements do the arguing, let them stake out unpopular positions, and thereby freeing candidates to work around that -- if anything, the prized “secret congress” would grow in power if all legislators had to do was legislate. In fact, this could eventually lend itself to a stronger party structure and more machine politics (another thing we need).

The most prominent recent example is the rise in public support of gay rights and gay marriage. In 2004, only Massachusetts recognized same-sex marriages, and federal law outlawed it. While support was slowly rising until it flipped in 2011, most political rhetoric was homophobic – Obama opposed gay marriage in 2008. The movement built support over time, by normalizing the presence of gay couples in culture and building momentum through new laws, referendums, and court decisions at the state level. Not only did this allow the movement to grow “up” from the bottom, but it benefited from more progressive states adopting marriage equality, normalizing it, and demonstrating its viability elsewhere. Those who warned of the societal decay that was sure to follow were easily refuted as more states adopted marriage equality without triggering an apocalypse. Eventually, marriage equality was popular enough that it was easy for presidential candidates to support it – even Trump tried to court LGBTQ votes.

As a long aside, the GOP is free from many of these constraints because they embrace minority rule – they think they’re right, they know they don’t enjoy popular support, so they play a very aggressive and effective tactical game to achieve what they think is morally right – becoming the ref since they don’t like the calls.

We Need a New Discourse

Jake M. Grumbach @JakeMGrumbach

We’ve been distracted by a “too left/right/woke” party debate when the more pressing question is one of party organization

Lara Putnam @lara_putnam

Infrastructure matters. It matters when it's decayed & dysfunctional & powerful actors benefit from keeping it that way... & it matters when a new generation of people find their self-interest aligns with stepping in, fighting for it, investing in it, & using it for purpose https://t.co/A1EfzHdNTc

Instead of arguing about how best to position the marginal Democrat in order to maximize our electoral gains (not because it doesn’t matter, but because we all basically agree), we need to engage in a discourse on how to best foster a new wave of, to use a loaded term, community organizing. Frankly, I don’t have a good answer – but we should probably spend more time fixing tail lights, hosting free social events, and investing heavily in organizing workplaces. This probably means talking more to social scientists and studying previous movements and how they worked. This also probably means a stronger, consistently present, and unified democratic party infrastructure. An even bigger task is that this probably means experimentation and measurement of organizing that last longer than a few months during a cycle.

One idea for seeding cultural change I’ve been toying with is trying to leverage the constraints our imaginations place on ourselves. We can leverage fiction (movies, tv, and games) we consume to posit a positive and optimistic view of the future. It’s been fun to watch modern AI or space travel research find itself constrained by the expectations created by media from the 20th century. X-Men is an example: a wildly popular media property, that translates to cinematic success, while also tackling deep issues of the systematic oppression of people and how they cope. Why not make movies that show an economy powered by green energy or video games that are based on labor organizing. Seed the ideas of progressive change by illustrating that it can be done!

I’m tired of having this debate every time we have an election – pining for Obama’s symbolic moderation, insisting that moderate Democrats make up for their ideological compromise with their ability to win, and being constrained by the current measurements of public opinion. If opinion isn’t on our side, let’s change it. Over the long term, we need to insulate ourselves from the political pendulum and reduce our reliance on short-term electoral strategies.

1. It so happens that Nyahn’s tweet ended up prompting some good discussion that surfaced some good points. David Shor agreed on the need for more political change but it’s not clear if moderation meets that definition, and like Jake Grumbach, Nate Cohn, and Elliott Morris all point out, the politics of 2012 don’t exist anymore.

2. Twitter discourse is too short to give any individual concept its due and can lead readers to lump together different commentators despite ideological differences. Regardless, the prognoses of politics from folks Shor, Yglesias, Chait, Barro, and Carville are very similar, and their prescriptions too, so it’s hard to see the ideological differences actually mattering.

3. While some claim we’ve been “sleepwalking” into this disaster – the numbers only look worse in the Senate – most Democratic campaigns are well aware of this trend. In fact, the party blame game has already begun, with each side pointing fingers at the other and ignoring that the midterm backlash is an inevitable feature of our current politics.

4. The party in power loses in midterms. A party gets a presidency for 8 years max. If the economy is bad your party is screwed.