If Liberals are so smart why do they lose so goddam always?

[crazy canuck]

That explains the South, but what explains farmers in Northern States?

In part industrialization turning farmers into corporations and/or small businessowners, which generally aligned them against low-wage workers such as farm employees.  There are some notes in here regarding California and the Midwest: https://food.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2019_Montenegro-de-Wit-et-al_Agrarian-origins-of-authoritarian-populism-in-the-United-States_-What-canwe-learn-from-20th-century-struggles-in-California-and-the-Midwest_.pdf

Many thanks.  I just had a chance to skim that publication and will give it a deep read on the weekend.  But it looks like it provides an answer to both my question and Berkut's question as well as providing some thoughts on the way out of the right wing madness for the US.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting piece I think I agree with - I think it links to OvB's comment on intermediary organisations as well. But it makes me think my argument on the policy/intellectual infrastructure is possibly wrong - though I still think that's important I think the argument here for intermediary organisations and movements, like parents, say, is strong:

The Democratic Party Is Wasting Its Grassroots Energy
By Sam Adler-Bell

When I was young, my activist friends and I would often speak of something we called the movement. "This will be good for the movement," we'd say." Or, "They do good movement work." He was a "movement lawyer"; she, "an artist dedicated to the movement." I assumed this expression referred to something real: international socialism, maybe, or trade unionism. I wasn't sure. Surely, I thought, there must be a movement out there to which we all belonged, and to whose future victory our meager efforts — as environmentalists, labor organizers, anti-war activists — were contributing. But that wasn't so. Later, I realized the term was more like an incantation, the expression of a wish that all this various activism might one day coalesce into something worthy of the name. For the time being, "the movement" was a linguistic gesture with no referent, a half-ironic shibboleth with which we signaled our belonging and our willingness to nurture each other's precious illusions and beliefs. Playfully we toasted "to the movement," unsure whether our cheeks reddened out of shame at our cynicism or our sincerity.

I'm reminded of these episodes when I contemplate the sorry state of the Democratic Party. No doubt, the Democrats' gruesome midterm prospects are, as the social scientists say, overdetermined. Midterms tend to punish the president's party anyway, and basically every other input is bad: Biden is unpopular, inflation soars, and Putin's war has pushed food and fuel prices even higher. It's a bad hand, and none of the plausible last-ditch, Manchin-approved policy interventions or executive orders seem like aces.

But surveying the landscape from a few hundred feet higher, another striking deficit looms into view: There appears almost no grassroots energy or urgency of any kind on the Democratic side. After four years of fever-pitched marching and movement-building by anti-Trump resistors, antifascists, Democratic Socialists, and Black Lives Matter militants, the sudden quiet from the country's left flank has been deafening. Where, I find myself asking, is the movement?

By contrast, the conservative grassroots are ablaze. The parents, pundits, and propagandists behind the "critical race theory" crackdown, and now, the moral panic over LGBTQ educators, have been startlingly successful — not only at creating media spectacles, but at recruiting activists, electing school board members, and passing laws. Anti-abortion measures, meanwhile, sweep the country in anticipation of a possible repeal of Roe v. Wade. And, all along, one-term president Trump has defied political gravity, attracting crowds to his rallies and playing de facto party boss from his spray-tan Tammany Hall in Palm Beach. The right, in other words, is on the march. The left is nonexistent.

In one sense, there is no mystery here: Most of the recent popular energy in American politics has been oppositional, buoying the party out of power. The Tea Party energized the Obama-era GOP just as the Resistance fueled the Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Trump's elaborately disturbing presidency fertilized a rich movement ecosystem from which several arose. They have dissipated since he left the White House.

It isn't difficult either to provide a more textured tick-tock of their respective dissolutions. In a Twitter thread, Matt Yglesias provided a partly plausible account of the failure of the women-led "Resistance" to consolidate into a durable movement — faulting, at once, overeager progressives for attempting to supercharge its admirably minimalist strategic goals and overcautious moderates for blanching at its "tactical aggression." The socialists, meanwhile, sublimated anger over Bernie's 2016 defeat and despair at Trump's 2016 victory into a wave of org-building, electing comrades down the ballot and providing a clearinghouse for millennial activism in many U.S. cities. But when Sanders lost for a second time — undone by the superior party discipline of the moderate wing — he proceeded to embrace Biden, largely abdicating his role as an insurgent leader. Sanders may have envisioned a future for the socialist movement as a loyal opposition, but his embittered followers wouldn't follow him there.

Democratic efforts to capture the energies of the 2020 BLM uprisings were similarly demoralizing for all involved. Mayors made fitful, largely self-defeating gestures at constraining their police forces, while party leaders gave a pathetic half-hug to the movement and tip-toed around its politically inconvenient slogan. The abolitionist critique — that the problem is not merely police departments, but a social order that requires them — was then metabolized by elite liberalism into a surfeit of yard signs, nonprofit donations, and various Robin DiAngeloisms of the board room. (Not to mention a $6 million house for a few of the BLM movement's most savvy self-promoters.)

Perhaps it couldn't have been otherwise. You get the presidency or you get vital social movements, but you don't get both. Well, that may satisfy the political scientists, but if you, like me, want the Democrats to control government as frequently as possible — overcoming the growing geographic bias against them to do so — and when they have it, to wield power to do a whole hell of a lot more for workers, and to stave off climate catastrophe, than Biden has managed, then you may wonder, as I do, whether we don't need movements that transcend this boom-and-bust cycle. Movements that can mobilize, agitate, and organize even when — especially when! — there's a chance of using that popular energy to get something done.

But wait. Listen. What is that sound? A growing crowd chanting "movement, movement, movement!" Who is that? By God, it's the nonprofits!

Whether one celebrates or laments the fact, it cannot be denied that nonprofits have taken the place of other civic or party institutions as the site of grassroots Democratic politics. And perhaps no single arena of American life is more replete with talk about "social movements" than the nonprofit sector. "Nonprofits have learned to speak like social movements," says Daniel Schlozman, author of When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History. And the foundations that fund them have learned to love "social movements" too. As an example, Schlozman directed me to an April 20 Medium post from Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm founded by Clinton White House alum Eric Kessler, which advises rich liberals about their political giving. It reads in part: "Movements matter ... Donors must be willing to embrace direct-action tactics such as hunger strikes or civil disobedience that bring litigation and reputational risks. They must relax their insistence on measurable outcomes." It concludes with great fanfare: "The dangers we confront will bring a reckoning, one that will be painful but will also create opportunities to imagine and build a more equitable and resilient society."

The Marxist in me cannot help but wince at the idea of wealthy consultants advising wealthier elites to fling their money at whatever NGO promises to get the most college kids zip-tied by the D.C. police. Call me cynical, but I have my doubts that liberal billionaires are going to bring about the reckoning we need.

Reading through this and other self-congratulatory accounts of liberal philanthropy from the past few years, I couldn't help feeling an itch of the old suspicion. When NGOs and their funders invoke "social movements" they seem to do so in the same wistful, self-soothing spirit that I did as a 19-year-old: as a prayer, not a reality. "If you're your average foundation-funded NGO, you now want to say, 'I am a social movement, not just a foundation-funded NGO,'" says Schlozman. But if you press down on this assertion, he says, "it turns out it's all money from Ford and Open Society. And they're not doing much of anything except talking to each other."

Much ink has been spilled — by centrist popularists and socialist radicals alike — about the perverting effects of allowing nonprofits to lead the Democratic Party's left flank. I won't rehearse those arguments here. But what I do want to say is this: American political parties really are capable of transformational change when they are "anchored," in Schlozman's language, by movements. The Democrats and labor did it in the 1930s. The religious right and the GOP have done it since the 1980s. Movements that succeed and grow do so because they are built atop the civic and material association through which communities are already bound. They are not summoned by the wishes of dark money consultants or well-heeled nonprofit executive directors.

And the trouble is, at the moment, the right is doing it better. Movements of the right are reaching deeper into communities, finding them in the places where they already gather, and strengthening the solidarity they already feel for one another — in many cases, channeling it toward cruelty. As Schlozman told me, "the great rediscovery" of people like Christopher Rufo and Ron DeSantis "is that parents know other parents, and right-wing parents know other right-wing parents, and they can talk to each other, and that is a great reservoir of connection to be politicized."

The civic bonds on which Trumpism is built are often the inheritance of past injustice (as Gabriel Winant once provocatively put it, "Whiteness itself is a kind of inchoate associational gel ..."), but they are real. And while the right builds a movement, the Democrats attempt to call one into being — by giving more and more money to insular activist NGOs that speak an alienating language to people in places where they do not frequent, among people they do not already know.

The alternative — and you'll be just shocked to hear me say this — is the only one that has ever worked. That is, the labor movement: a movement of the left that mobilizes and draws us together on the basis of our most basic associations and material interests. As Tammi and Marvin once put it, "Ain't nothing like the real thing."

[Admiral Yi]

Labor is not the only movement that has enacted transformational change.  MLK/Civil Rights, Gay Rights.

The moderates did not beat Bernie through superior discipline.  They beat him because not enough people voted for him.

I have no idea what he's talking about re NGOs leading the movement.

[crazy canuck]

A more inquisitive mind might wonder why not enough people voted for Bernie.

[viper37]

A more inquisitive mind might wonder why not enough people voted for Bernie.

American centrists and leftists being smarter than Canadian ones?  

[Sheilbh]

Labor is not the only movement that has enacted transformational change.  MLK/Civil Rights, Gay Rights.

I agree on civil rights and I think those organisations and black churches may be the last of those intermediary organisations that OvB mentioned. But definitely a movement and probably the last one the Democrats still actively engage with across the party.

On gay rights I'm less sure - in part because of what Republicans are saying now about Obergefell. I'm not sure how long for the world that rulinng is, despite majority support (same goes for Roe). I think if it is overturned  then I'd query the transformational change, though I think it's happened in public attitudes.

I have no idea what he's talking about re NGOs leading the movement.

A large part of the right's success in the US is that they have a mobilising movement to support them, in exchange for helping deliver their agenda politically. That has been, since the Reagan revolution, the religious right.

When the Democrats were dominant they had a similar moblising movement in unions - and civil rights organisations. Since the 80s, however Democrats have generally failed at building/maintaining movements to support them, or has failed in helping deliver their agenda politically (the unions). In addition activists and donors on the Democrat side fund and do busy work talking to each other through foundations and NGOs which talk of themselves as movements - but they're not they're pet projects by philanthropists and it is a displacement activity. Those activists could be better used building links with actual movements or helping them in some other way - and so could the money.

I keep coming back to it but the Democratic consultants advising candidates not to talk about Supreme Court and Roe - despite majority support for it - is mindblowing to me. I've no doubt there will be a movement in response to that and that Democrats will want their votes (and probably win most of them). But I find it crazy that they're being told to focus on pocket book issues. It seems odd when you look at how the GOP have achieved what they have with and by the religious right - but Democrats seem a little chary of doing that with movements that exist like unions and like, sadly I think probably quite soon, women's movement on abortion.

Incidentally the NGO point also annoys me from the other angle in that lots of charities I've previously donated to have basically become NGOs - they're doing less and less actual charity work and more focus on policy work and conferences. I donate to pressure groups that exist purely to do that, I support a political party to do that - but I want to be able to give to charities that are doing charity work. It's probably good but it's made me look for smaller local charities who do stuff that I care about.

[Admiral Yi]

A large part of the right's success in the US is that they have a mobilising movement to support them, in exchange for helping deliver their agenda politically. That has been, since the Reagan revolution, the religious right.

All fine and good, but your boy is saying the only movement leftists are coming right now from NGOs.  That's what I don't see.

[grumbler]

The most significant NGPO in US politics, by far, is the Federalist Society, and it is right-wing Republican.  The entire problem with judicial activism in the current US is the result of the Federalist Society and its successful grooming of far-right candidates for the judiciary (including all six of the current right-wing USSC justices, the Chief Justice among them). No left-wing NGO or community comes close to their sway.

[Sheilbh]

All fine and good, but your boy is saying the only movement leftists are coming right now from NGOs.  That's what I don't see.

That's just not how I read those three paragraphs. I think it's where the activity and energy is but it's broadly a displacement activity that isn't generating a connection between the Democrats as a political party and a movement of people:

Reading through this and other self-congratulatory accounts of liberal philanthropy from the past few years, I couldn't help feeling an itch of the old suspicion. When NGOs and their funders invoke "social movements" they seem to do so in the same wistful, self-soothing spirit that I did as a 19-year-old: as a prayer, not a reality. "If you're your average foundation-funded NGO, you now want to say, 'I am a social movement, not just a foundation-funded NGO,'" says Schlozman. But if you press down on this assertion, he says, "it turns out it's all money from Ford and Open Society. And they're not doing much of anything except talking to each other."

The most significant NGPO in US politics, by far, is the Federalist Society, and it is right-wing Republican.  The entire problem with judicial activism in the current US is the result of the Federalist Society and its successful grooming of far-right candidates for the judiciary (including all six of the current right-wing USSC justices, the Chief Justice among them). No left-wing NGO or community comes close to their sway.

Yes. I think it's the best example but I think there are others that, for example, provide a pipeline of smart, young conservatives into the administrative state. But also I think lots of ideas that Fox and the propaganda wing of the right then talks about are workshopped. I think that infrastructure is missing on the left.

I'm never fully sure how I feel about it because I can see the argument that basically from at least FDR the Supreme Court especially and the administrative organs of the state have been where politics is done by other means. So it makes sense to focus on developing a theory and a framework and a network for future recruits into those areas. On the other hand I'm always a believer on that Bagehot idea that you don't shine light on magic - and I think making those institutions nakedly political (even if they've always been discreetly political) is not great. But if one side is doing it, don't you have to fight back and isn't it just the latest expansion of party politics etc. I don't know basically But I think it's an absence that Democrats are feeling.

As a total aside there a "national conservative" conference for right-wing culture warriors in the UK. It was really striking that their big takeaways for a "Orbanisation" of the UK was not focused on the media or comms. Two of their key recommendations though were - establish a "Federalist society" for officials (because judges matter less here) to have what, to me, sounds like entryists in the civil service and establish an "NRA for culture" to rate MPs and deselect disloyal Tory MPs. As I say I think that side of the GOP is really important and I think it matters more than media and comms.