Summer is upon us once again in Texas and the glorious nuisances of nature are in full bloom. The humidity has increased the insect population around the compost pile, a boon to worm and fruit fly alike, even distracting the squirrels and the neighborhood possum from sweeter fair just on the other side of the fence. The hydrangeas are growing unevenly in both height and shade, a peculiar strand of orange spreading through one plant while the other remains rose red, leaving us contemplating how to shuffle around the soil without upsetting other plants who may have their own unpredictable reactions to changes in the acidity. The habanero crops grow in rapid succession, attracting birds whose presence gives squirrels the all-clear to tag along for the less spicy offerings. (The garden’s security director, being three years old and also a cat, can only do so much)
We take some commonsense measures to organize the chaos to optimize for healthy and plentiful crops, but also a variety that are fun and interesting to grow – pretty plants smartly arranged, with some treats that attract the bluejays and cardinals (truly, we don’t even mind the squirrels). Some things that will last years, some things that we pluck and trim and move and water and protect with the big sheet of sun netting and worry about and give up on and enjoy the second we can. We undergird our progress with an increasingly elaborate, self-sustaining irrigation system, with plant beds, a new row of stones buttressing scattered bags of fertilizer along one fence, a new bag of dormant ladybugs for when the aphids return to the tomatoes. Just this past week we’ve begun hearing the telltale squeaking of bats in the night, leaving us wondering how this impacts the balance of bugs and lizards and, with them, the balance of birds… (and since the first draft of this post, a family of Yellow-crowned Night Herons have shown up to bother even the bats)
Every attempt at central planning breaks something. If we had only one crop, or did not mind a little geometric disorder in our stone arrangements (or did not have an unnatural and only increasing hunger for capsaicin in our diets matched only by a desire to finally crack the tulip beds around the tree) our tasks would be much simpler. But we’d also have a much lower yield, much less to do, and much less to quietly delight in, in the grand scheme of the neighborhood.
The “central” position in “central planning” is often overrated. In The Semisovereign People, E.E. Schattschneider argued that the center of the conflict was the easiest place to go to find the conflict’s losers: they would be the ones reaching out to a side - any side - to draw new participants into the fight, to expand the scope of the conflict. The center immediately moves thusly. This Roadhouse theory of political conflict was in Schattschneider’s time mostly used to understand conflict between interest groups classically-defined, but the original model (blessedly algebra-free – its literally a drawing of some circles) did not really use that term the way we do now. It was just fighting.
While Schattschneider frequently deployed the metaphor of someone at the center of a fight dragging others in to join, in practice the people and groups who enter political conflict generally itching to do so. The “policy demander” is the basic unit of political conflict in much of the scholarship on this subject. The policy demander takes many forms (so many that James Madison basically said not to bother attempting to classify them all – indeed, he warned that any system was doomed if its central leaders assumed all types of policy demanders could be anticipated) but the phrase is helpfully self-explanatory. I enter politics because I want something.
But those already involved in political conflict would prefer to serve alongside fellow happy warriors who they trust were sent to help in some material way. As Abner Mikva famously said, “we don’t want nobody nobody sent” – a commonsense and fully rational appraisal of potential political alliances. What use is an unreliable or numerically insignificant new ally, given they’re naturally going to want something in return for joining your side? Just because you want something does not mean something’s got to give. No one should be expected to show up “just to help” in a fight, and no one should enter a fight expecting they could ever be greeted as such. For many groups, the stakes of conflict are self-evident: power, the ability to align reality with preferences by changing the former. In what form power is desired, as well as how its exercise is measured, remain as profligate as the taxonomy of those who compete for it. Surveying a litany of recent and canonical literature on the subject, Daniel Schlozman in When Movements Anchor Parties characterized the current state of the Roadhouse parking lot:
The parties’ orgaizational hollowing out and ideological separation simultaneously widened the scope for and narrowed the explicitly partisan role in political conflict. Groups both polarized parties, and took advantage of new opportunities. Fights traverse institutional boundaries that once served to separate the presidency, Congress, courts, and agencies. In venues from independent expenditures to confirmation hearings to policy proposals, group allies – including para-organizations such as super PACs, public interest organizations, and business associations, as well as the [social, cultural, and protest] movements here – search for “a piece of the action” in no-holds-barred conflict. As in much of the nineteenth century, the parties stand deeply divided – but where once those parties controlled the electoral process and defined the contours of American political life, the new elite-led, group-oriented coalitions messily strain to match their long-lost forebears as organizers of democratic politics.
And just sitting here, we can all think of yet more forms power can take that can be achieved through political competition. Clout. A party platform. School curricula. Authority to regulate mercury in the water. Nobody wants somebody nobody sent. Any attempt to centralize the distribution of power would first have to confront the full range of power that is desirable to hold in the first place, to say nothing of anticipating who would try to take it for themselves, and how to manage their demands.
One of my favorite illustrations of this type of coalitional jockeying is Eric Schickler’s Racial Realignment which illustrates the political conflicts that eventually brought Black voters into the Democratic party. Disparate andconflicting groups sought to optimize their own political power in ways that eventually had the net effect of bringing more Black voters into the party – but this was far from an “inevitable” outcome and certainly was not the “totalizing” goal of the vast array of organizations whose various efforts ultimately produced it. Organizations like the Congress of Industrial Organizations ceded the demands of some of its own members to exclude Black workers from unionization efforts in exchange for assistance from the NAACP in winning legal battles for workers in state courts. Labor and civil rights organizations “reassessed their traditional animosities” to achieve wins in areas relatively far afield of electoral politics - the courts, and at the bargaining table with industrial management in the south and the northeast. Despite the ubiquitous racism among Democratic politicians and voters at the time, a single union’s marginally more equitable position on questions of race – which its leaders adopted in the explicit interest of achieving political power – helped set in motion events whose supposed “signature legislation” was still fifty years away. That legislation was not the motivating political aim of most people involved in this conflict, at least initially. A civil rights organization had a relatively narrow scope of jurisprudential objectives and a union wanted a marginal edge it could offer workers against competing unions.
Schickler illustrates in great detail how these changes to the Democratic political landscape began to creep in decades before most start paying attention to this period of history. For example, he shows that southern Democratic party platforms were significantly more “racially liberal” than general public opinion as early as the early 1940s, a full generation prior to the most substantive Civil Rights legislation – i.e., with actual Democratic elected politicians generally decades behind. As Chris Baylor writes, unions begrudgingly liberalized on race, and civil rights organizations gradually expanded their portfolio to include a broader array of labor issues. At the same time, many of these unions had their own ongoing conflicts with city Democratic machines and Democratic incumbents up to and including F.D.R. – and civil rights organizations faced constant exisential questions concerning both their utility to, and reputation among, the Black working class. The Democratic party’s transformation arising from its conflict over questions of civil rights and labor rights ended up being one of its most consequential – just in time for the emergence of the environmental lobby…
Much research in this area is more or less explicit that electeds are downstream of this conflict for several reasons. One, many political activists know that legislation is unlikely to succeed until it is supported by not just a legislator, but by a legislative coalition that can advance policy demands onto the President’s desk. Two, contrary to widespread cynicism on the subject, widespread public sentiment is necessary for many types of policy change.
Third – and this often goes unappreciated – once someone wins an election, you’re kinda stuck with them. Once a policy demander has worked to get a candidate through a primary and general election, it is hard to do take-backsies. Much interaction with potential political candidates by policy demanders amounts to a screening and interview process, where the decision to endorse or withhold an endorsement can be acrimonious and costly. In my own fieldwork on the subject, highlighted in the prior link and in some forthcoming work ( and it is forthcoming, I swear ), I encountered a candidate who had worked at a preeminent abortion rights group for years as a means of demonstrating her bona fides to a handful of influential fundraisers in a rural swing district, an Evangelical pastor in West Virginia who was able to divine candidates’ political views from individual words of Scripture, a southern California union leader who chose their primary endorsement in an incredibly powerful safe blue seat by which candidate personally visited with him for the longest overall time, and more. In safe seats or competitive seats, this is a difficult screening procedure with greatly varying and peculiar coalitions of policy demanders jostling for influence, and candidates vying through whatever means possible to reassure the most efficient minimum winning coalition within that district that they’re the right choice.
While some think that high levels of polarization and incumbency re-election have made Congress a very boring place, the reality is these factors have made intra-party competition among competing groups of policy demanders vital and acrimonious. And the stakes of making an error are high – what is a labor coalition to do with a President who endorses, and subsequently reverses public opinion on, free trade? What are libertarians and secular business interests supposed to do when a party’s chief policy demand suddenly becomes reducing the rights of women and attacking their role in the workforce? Decades on, both parties’ coalitions continue to reorient around major internal conflicts. Electeds’ stated preferences are most influential among “normie,” mid- and low-political attention voters who prefer to adopt copartisans’ views rather than build an ideology from scratch. Activists’ ideals lead them to fight for power, usually leading to at least a few substantive disagreements with the very electeds they materially support - with little recourse for activists should an incumbent end up shirking on their end of the deal, who face few credible threats to their power absent the immediate demands of the general election.
(“Pour one out for the gatekeepers” is not the argument anyone wants to hear, but hopefully I’ve already laid out how and why it is impossible to please everyone in politics)
Fulfilling “the immediate demands of the general election” is one way of describing how I spend my days because I am a political operative whose work generally follows the election cycle. Trying to understand what it takes to win a general election – and how those actions may cause friction within the grand coalition in which I dwell – is in my job description. After all, consider how different Democratic politicians and policy demanders are. (And please, don’t buy the hype – consider how different Republican politicians and policy demanders are, too). With the volume and variety of conflicts going on for the volume and variety of political turf in our Republic - with the multiplicity of those who seek to guard their turf, grow their turf, and to let their turf flourish - the notion of observing, much less participating in or even reacting to every conflict within Democratic politics has always struck me as a fool’s errand, a fantasy of control.
The history of the Democratic coalition is often thought of as the history of machines. But the way our coalition evolves, the way its constituent parts adapt and optimize (or fail to optimize) to present conditions has always suggested to me that we are not a machine - we are an ecosystem. There is not a dial marked “unpopular opinions … popular opinions” that one can simply turn to raise your vote share. It is possible to trim, to prune, to plant, to weed, to keep watering or to release unto the care of the compost pile, to use just the right type of bird seed, the good soil, the precise quantity and timing of water (often interrupted by a storm or heatwave completely out of mortal control). But to treat an ecosystem like a machine – to believe that a lever can be pulled, a dial can be turned, “the wrong plant” immediately identified and torn out root and stem with no consequence to its neighbors or to the longterm quality of the soil, “the right plant” allocated whatever resources it takes – is to invite the desert. Tear out the spiciest peppers in the garden and don’t be surprised when the birds don’t return in spring.
There are some in the field of Democratic political operatives who believe we are a machine. I envy their clarity about the lever, but I don’t envy the search for it. There are some in the field who plant haphazardly. I envy their clarity about the vital need to see something grow now, but I do not envy how their root systems fare without careful regard for what has come before, to the seasonality, the rhythms of the lifecycle - the need for a standing quantity of biomass to grow anything.
The task of the political operative is to understand the tools that can help manage an ecosystem but also to understand there is no control panel. There is not a slider you can set from red to green and assert that you have on net improved the quality of the system. Nor is there a perfect organism, a magic sprout that will flourish in all seasons, against all predators, in perfect harmony with its neighbors. Even the weeds can be welcome, perhaps if they provide something to pollinate and a root system that can be easily managed (or if they’re simply too hard to uproot, but that applies to everyone, I suppose).
It seems that every few months we convince ourselves that someone out there has gone and turned a dial from green to red. A bad or unpopular or counterproductive or obnoxious view has emerged, and suddenly we’re all responsible for shutting it down. A flamethrower must be taken to a patch of the garden. We don’t stop to think if the plant will wilt on its own, if it attracts a new type of pollinator, if it can be moved to somewhere it will grow more fruitfully. Contrary to the desires (and self-identity) of those who view politics mechanically, this is generally very bad strategy and a poor application of technical know-how and substantive knowledge. Concretely, there are a few reasons for this:
- The environment is hostile. Thanks to an immoral rightwing information environment and an amoral mainstream information environment, attention will always be drawn to the version of Democrats (or any group that “reads leftwing,” which is close enough for both of the above) that produces the most ragebait. If your goal is to win elections and you find yourself spending a lot of time talking about the version of Democrats that Fox News imagines us to be, you could probably be spending your airtime more wisely directly advocating for what you actually believe. (You could also consider helping grow our own share of the information environment) Building the core is more important than destroying the fringe.
- The deeper roots are stronger. There seems to be a widespread fear that as soon as a new demand (especially a new, bad demand) shows up, that is just our brand now. For some this is sport - they vindictively enjoy crushing something they know they can crush. This also always struck me as a waste of time. If something isn’t catching on, you don’t actually need to fan the flames by legitimizing it with attention (especially attention that palpably drips with fear for your own political power - people are reading your incentives too, you know). Picking a fight legitimizes positions that may be obviously illegitimate.
- No one owes their intellect to the majority. My career rests on being able to tell people with a reasonable level of certainty that one number is bigger than another number. But it seems strange to hope that everyone who dedicates their time to fighting for a cause has automatically chosen one that already has the higher number. I do not relish telling someone their number is bad (as Lord knows I’ve had to do) – but I do relish delivering this estimate with confidence, clarity, and honesty – and then helping them strategize on behalf of their overall goals. Indeed, it is often just as dangerous to be overconfident in a high number – which usually means there just hasn’t been political contestation about your particular policy demand yet – as to be overly pessimistic about a low number rather than to have honest and usually difficult conversations about how to optimize your strategy to get what you want. Politics is a lot of work and the stakes can be very high. Think about what others are optimizing for. Someone who has a demand that is unpopular is usually not going away on that basis and usually can’t be negotiated with under the assumption that the approval of a national majority is their immediate objective.
- The approval of a national majority is plenty of peoples’ immediate objective. Wanting to win 270 electoral votes is an eminently understandable and rational objective. As much as we make about the resistance to new ideas, the caution around dubious or untested policy goals, or the general unfriendliness of “the party” (whoever that is) toward loud newcomers, you do not understand politics if you do not understand the importance of being able to plan, litigate, and implement your policy demands in a legislature with a winning coalition. Over the past few years we have seen a host of protest movements rise and fall without ever producing much in the way of candidates ( a.k.a., credible agents of the principal group who can competently execute a policy agenda in the legislature ), or even really of Big Thinker policy types or persuasive advocates who have been able to make a career of it. Few protest movements lacked a strategy for getting into the legislature and ultimately “succeeded” in any meaningful sense. If a protest is exactly how rightwing detractors portray it - i.e., people show up, yell, then disperse, and that’s it - it neither has the juice to get what its leaders claim they want nor to invite much attention positive or negative from the party.
- Trying to pick winners a priori is generally wasteful and counterproductive. When it comes to the question of what sorts of policy demanders we should welcome into the party coalition, the answer should generally be a begrudging acknowledgment of political efficacy that, in turn, provides incumbents with some form of demonstrable advantage (this is just a different way of saying we don’t want nobody nobody sent – who is the somebody and what actions did you take that sent you?). This puts an enormous amount of pressure on outsiders, which can make them wilt or can make them very tough. The first protests against the Iraq War were widely viewed as unpatriotic and unpopular, yet Barack Obama, then a young Illinois state senator with the foresight to understand how to navigate, unite and, yes, come to speak for many of these protesters owes his political career partially to this chance to demonstrate his abilities. (He also spent years working for much quieter, lesser-known organizing groups that achieved plenty of policy successes in their own right) Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has been underestimated for her entire career by people who do not see her NHI training in service of her considerable political talent in most everything she does. You aren’t as good at separating naifs from rockstars as you think you are – let people prove their mettle under pressure that is proportional to their potential impact.
Ultimately, my view is that we have the same argument every few months that rests on an obnoxiously under-theorized view of how politics works in a Republic, outright ignorance of the history of the Democratic party, willful ignorance of what protests try to achieve and how (and, not to sound cynical, but how the mainstream can benefit from such movements), and the egotistical sense that you, yes you, can manage this conflict just right. Let the movements crash against the wall of the semi-permeable membrane and, if they prove themselves, here they are. On the inside, we broadly spend too much time expecting protests to be popular and too little time managing how to make them productive (and we ain’t wrong to want them to be productive). But if the DNC created a “department of making sure college students stop saying dumb things in public,” it would immediately collapse under the weight of its own mandate (or the DNC would, depending on the budget). It would torch the ecosystem and leave brittle, desiccated claypan in its wake. You’d would never find the lever.
Because there is no lever. There’s just us.