theory of building political power

In 1994, I returned to the United States, after 4 1/2 years of military duty in Asia (one ship homeported in Sasebo, Japan, one ship homeported in Yokosuka, Japan (greater Tokyo area) and the UN peacekeeping mission in Cambodia).

My final tour in the Navy was Navy Recruiting District Chicago (1994-96). Even during that time I was already engaging in activism and political activity. Since getting out of the Navy, I have interfaced with lots of parts of the nonprofit world, media, political organizations and political campaigns.

The best political organization for empowering people where they are at and letting the members set the direction is Northside DFA in Chicago.

While the organizing model used by Northside DFA is excellent at what NDFA does, it needs to be complemented by organizations motivated by the same valued that do other things.

Four organizations necessary to build political power:

• electoral campaigns
• issue advocacy
• fundraising, foundation-ing
• media

I'll explain below the fold.
Electoral campaigns is what NDFA does. NDFA's model is to hold monthly meetings where speakers are book in advance. The speakers are supposed to be interesting enough to help draw an audience. Usually speakers are candidates seeking endorsement. Occasionally they are a) elected officials updating on what's happening in their world, b) experts on campaigning, or c) experts on public policy. NDFA decides whether to endorse a candidate at the next monthly meeting. The endorsement threshold is 75% of Voting Members have to vote to endorse. Voting Members are those people who have attended at least three meetings in the last year and done at least three volunteer activities for endorsed candidates.

I'll write a long post about NDFA, but the big ideas are there are people meeting regularly who volunteer on campaigns and seek to pull the political process in a progressive direction.

Issue advocacy. Progressive electoral activism needs to be complemented by issue advocacy. The official issue advocacy organizations are mostly groups big enough to fundraise to hire staff. The staff then become political insiders, which gets them to accept limits on the possible set by other insiders. And it makes them more remote from regular people, including activists.

We need to create a model for grassroots issue advocacy where the people who are part of the issue advocacy have significant overlap with activists who volunteer on electoral campaigns.

Fundraising/foundation-ing. Every organization needs some money to run. But what I believe is necessary to expand a groups political power is the ability to provide seed money to begin new projects beyond the activism already being done.

The people engaged in fundraising & giving grants are going to be different personality types than people who volunteer on campaigns and people who sit in committee meetings and then do issue advocacy. But there should be strong enough social connections that all these groups feel like they are on a team working toward a larger goal.

Media. The Left faces two challenges, one is part challenge and part opportunity. The one challenge-challenge is that corporate media is designed to be aligned with investors and advertisers. So, even Democratic Party sympathetic media outlets will prefer to ignore the Left or treat the Left as fringe. The opportunity-challenge is that local media outlets are much less numerous than twenty years ago and the outlets that exist have much less capacity.

We need to build our own media outlets. This is part of building political power.

Carl Nyberg, blogger/columnist