Will netroots organizations ever develop ballast?

Part 2 in the "MoveOn Effect at 10" series

NOTE: This is the second post in my “The MoveOn Effect 10 years later” series. Last summer, I reread my first book (published in 2012) and took notes on what has changed in the intervening decade. It generated a few essay-worthy ideas.

The first post, Rethinking Political Innovation, came out in October.

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Democracy for America shut down in December 2022. For digital progressives of a certain, ahem, vintage, this was met with a wistful sigh. DFA was the residual organization spun off from Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. And the Dean campaign was the moment when so many of us first saw that online communities could translate into offline impacts.

What made the Dean campaign so groundbreaking was their use of Meetup.com to let volunteers bootstrap their own local groups. That meant, when the campaign shut down, it was able to seed DFA with a list of 3.5 million supporters that included local chapters in a bunch of towns and cities. In effect, the failed Presidential campaign had just managed to jumpstart a federated political association. (Neat!)

DFA was the centerpiece of chapter 4 of The MoveOn Effect. A big chunk of my dissertation field research was conducted with Philly for Change, the local DFA affiliate. And, particularly because of my Sierra Club background, I was keenly attuned to the mundane ways that digital tools seemed to be reducing the frictions that plagued chapter-based organizations. Of the three netroots organizational models that I described in the book, I believed DFA’s “neo-federated” model held the greatest potential for transformative, long-term political impact.

The organization scrapped its chapter system years before it shut down. Instead, it adopted the same core organizational form as MoveOn.org — what I called a “hub-and-spokes” model in the book, characterized by a small, nimble staff team, and a large, email-based membership list.

And that’s what today’s post is about — not the decline of DFA specifically, but the reasons why the model it represented hasn’t worked out the way I expected. It isn’t that no one else has attempted this model — Organizing for America/Organizing for Action (OFA) took a shot at building a chapter system, but refused to hand over any decision-authority. The Bernie Sanders campaign had a massive field operation that, instead, converted into a DC-based Political Action Committee. Indivisible.org built a chapter system during the Trump era, but has faced staunch criticism for leaving the system underresourced.

It’s been more than ten years, and the very-effective-on-paper organizational model that I sketched in the book has not materialized anywhere. Why is that? What did I miss?

Here’s my TL;DR answer: the neo-federated model faces two practical constraints, and both of them are bigger hurdles than I thought. First, these organizations are difficult to start. It is much easier to seed a nimble, list-based organization than it is to reach critical mass simultaneously across dozens of locations. Second, these organizations are costly to maintain - less costly than chapter-based organizations in the pre-digital era, but still much more costly than contemporary peers. (And, as I discussed in the previous post in this series, political maintenance is constantly overlooked among progressive donors.)

In The MoveOn Effect, I believe I was too focused on comparing the potential of neo-federated organizations like DFA to the reality of established federated groups like the Sierra Club. I did not pay enough attention to how much more costly and cumbersome neo-federated model was in comparison the MoveOn model.

I’m writing this follow-up piece because, perhaps stubbornly, I still believe in the neo-federated model. I think it remains the most promising route for building communities, imparting strategic insights, generating stable political identities, and ultimately holding power. In fact, I think the model has become increasingly valuable in light of how American politics has coarsened in the past decade.

I suspect one of the main reasons why these organizations haven’t taken off is that academics, practitioners, consultants and donors have not been clear enough on what is required to launch and maintain them. This post is intended to help do my part to make these stakes and challenges clear.

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The benefits of being neofederated

I’d like to pause for a moment and spell out why we ought to care about these organizational models. The MoveOn Effect was a book about the changing “organizational layer” of American politics. I believed then, and still believe today, that the power to create sustained political change lies in social movements and in organizations. You have to build and maintain institutions if you are going to challenge and eventually hold power in meaningful ways over time. And so the types of institutions we build — the strategic choices we make when designing them — constitutes a meaningful decision.

Two features distinguish federated (chapter-based) organizations from other types of social movement organization or interest group:

1. In a federated organization, the membership meets and forms relationships with one another. Leadership responsibilities are distributed throughout the organization. This is costly in multiple senses of the word — it demands members’ time (As Francesca Polletta puts it, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting), it requires organizational resources to navigate conflicts, and it requires staff support and funding in order to be maintained.

   The benefits of member-to-member relationship-building are substantial and well-documented. The residual impact of all those meetings is you’re left with a membership with deep commitments, shared identity, and enhanced leadership skills. Particularly if your organization or movement wants to exercise power at the local or state level, you are going to need chapters filled with local leaders who know and trust one another other. (Hahrie Han has done field-defining work in this area, though she has some excellent company. I'm resisting the strong urge to provide a whole syllabus on the topic.).

2. Federated organizations also distribute (at least some) governance authority among those constituent units. This can considerably slow down strategic decision-making. All of those chapter volunteers who develop leadership skills and deep commitments and shared identity are going to become stakeholders. They’re going to expect the organization to at least give them a chance to share their opinions in advance of consequential decisions. This can make it very hard to be a nimble organization.

   This second feature is what separates federated organizations from electoral campaigns. An electoral campaign has a clear victory condition and end date. It establishes a field structure to engage volunteers in the work of electing a candidate. But it does not empower those volunteers to make strategic decisions. (Indeed, as Clay Shirky argued in my favorite post-Dean campaign retrospective, that was one of the fatal mistakes of the original Dean campaign. Volunteers had a ton of strategic authority, and much of it was pointed in directions that were tangential to the goal of winning a contested primary.)

   It’s also what separates federated organizations from centralized organizations that get a chunk of money and decide they’re going to stand up a field program overnight. It’s all well and good to hire organizers whoo recruit volunteers in battleground states to help achieve your top-down objectives. But if you don’t put any governance power in the hands of those volunteers, they aren’t going to remain committed to your organization over time. Shared governance is both a blessing and a curse. You don’t get the full benefits of grassroots power unless you also deal with the headaches that arise from empowering a whole lot of internal stakeholders.

The metaphor that I like to use for this type of membership is ballast. I raised this last month, in my eulogy for the Sierra Student Coalition:

[The Sierra Club] has ballast. The organization is not nimble. It is slow and deliberative, which also means it can be frustrating and bureaucratic. But when it does move, it brings people with it.

No other environmental organization has that deep well of committed volunteer leaders. It is hard to sustain that sort of volunteer capacity. But it is even harder to create from scratch.

The interesting thing about these types of groups is that virtually everyone agrees that they are GOOD. The academic literature celebrates them as an engine of democratic skill-building and civic power. They are good for democratic stability. They are good for power-building. They are more individually rewarding to the people who get involved in them. They fit the model of grassroots organizing that most people intuitively have in mind. And this isn’t some radically new approach. We have heralded its effectiveness since the days of de Tocqueville. It’s an old, deep tradition, and it works.

Theda Skocpol demonstrated in Diminished Democracy how we got away from the tradition of federated/chapter-based civic associations in the 1960s and 1970s, as a new generation of DC-based interest groups started treating their members as little more than small donors to be solicited through direct mail fundraising. Those interest groups instead focused on hiring lawyers, policy experts, and lobbyists to pursue their political goals. When she published her book in 2003, there were only a handful of federated political associations left in the United States. The Sierra Club was one of them.

In The MoveOn Effect, I built on Skocpol’s framework and argued that, just as direct mail fundraising and membership regimes had produced a generation shift among American political associations, the new digital fundraising and membership regimes were leading to another generation shift at the organizational layer of politics. MoveOn had been the pioneer of this change, and their hub-and-spokes model was so prominent that I labeled the entire phenomenon “the MoveOn Effect.” But the model was not a monolith. I also saw evidence that netroots organizations could be chapter-based, deploying online tools to support member-to-member offline activity.

So what the hell? It’s 2023. Everyone agrees in theory that federated organizations are critical to building sustained, powerful movements. Why do so few organizations try to federate, and how come the ones that do end up scrapping the model in favor of some variation on MoveOn’s hub-and-spokes structure?

The simple answer is building and maintaining a federated organization is easier with digital tools than without them, but it is still a lot harder, relatively speaking, than the other models.

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Here’s how you build a neo-federated political organization.

These are, to a first approximation, the minimum conditions that one would need to satisfy:

1. First, you will need a catalyzing event. A chapter-based organization has to reach critical mass in multiple locations. If you want to launch a new, federated, grassroots organization, you’ll need to build around a catalyzing event that tactically lends itself to people coming together, in person, to make and execute a plan.

In today’s media system, catalyzing events that instinctively invite local action are pretty rare. Political controversies are channeled through a hybrid media system that is (a) mostly national in scope and (b) extremely fast-moving. Those characteristics tend to invite rapid-response digital protest actions, not slow-building offline actions.

(As an example: news broke this week that Florida schools will soon need to start teaching the “benefits of slavery.” I think you ought to care about this news even if you don’t live in Florida. But, as a DC resident, I’m going to lean towards registering dissent online rather than bringing it up at the next PTA meeting this September. Politics has nationalized and sped up. Tactical repertoires have adapted accordingly.)

The list of catalyzing events that fit a distributed-local-action tactical repertoire is pretty small. Thinking back across the past couple decades, here’s the complete list that I could come up with:

• Movement-based Presidential campaigns (Dean, Obama, Sanders). The campaign won’t be neo-federated, but it can leave behind a federated structure for you to convert.

• The 2003 anti-war movement.

• The 2017 anti-Trump resistance.

• The movement for gun safety reform (since school shootings have occurred at such a high, regular frequency godfuckingdammit).

• Black Lives Matter (since police murdering black people in America has also occurred at such a high, regular frequency godfuckingdammit).

• Climate activism (since extreme weather events are now occurring at such a high, regular frequency okayIneedtotakeawalkandsettlemyself).

That’s eight potential catalyzing events across two decades. We could arguably relax the definition a bit and come up with a 5-10 more. For the moment, let’s just keep in mind that these are rare circumstances. You don’t just need willpower, good intentions, and seed money from supportive funders to launch a federated organization. You also need immaculate timing.

2. Next, you’ll need sustaining opportunities. The trouble for the anti-war movement was, after you hold simultaneous marches in every city to protest the war, what productive actions should local groups plan next? The trouble for all three post-presidential operations was “okay, let’s say we hand power over to our local groups who were united in their support of Dean/Obama/Sanders. They need to find a reason to keep meeting and building power — something that is both locally relevant and tied to our shared, national identity as an organization. That, again, is pretty hard target to hit.

It seems as though groups like Moms Demand Action and the Sunrise Movement have been particularly adept at this, because their issue profiles include opportunities for meaningful local action that ties into an overarching national/global vision.

3. Then you’ll have to layer on trainings, conflict resolution procedures, and governance elements.

Not everyone who shows up to a local meeting is well-suited to volunteer leadership. I have a great quote from Zack Exley in my book, discussing what he called the “tyranny of the annoying.”

The Tyranny of the annoying stems from the fact that, except in times of extreme crisis, it is just not worth it for mature, serious people to put up with all the indignities that go along with taking and maintaining leadership of any political entity. This principle guarantees that every Elks Club, Union Local, DAR Chapter, or Democratic town committee will tend toward being controlled by annoying people — they are the ones with egos desperate to be fed by winning petty little power plays and plenty of time on their hands.”

If you want to have any hope of avoiding this problem — where the people most likely to show up are also temperamentally unfit to working with a team toward a shared vision — you are going to need to create a layer of human resources, but for volunteers. You’re going to have to create a healthy organizational culture, then establish a bureaucracy that maintains that culture and self-corrects. This is going to be a frustrating mess. And success only makes it harder. Organizational culture is easy when you’re a scrappy group of ten people who no one else has heard of. It becomes much harder once you have a reputation for success and become a venue for enacting petty power plays (or, if your organization has radical politics, starts being infiltrated by undercover federal agents.).

So you are going to need to fund trainings and field organizers and national convenings. You’re going to need a procedures for dispute resolution. It’s going to be expensive to maintain. And the more you succeed — the more you actually manage to build and wield power — the higher the likelihood of having to mediate some serious shit.

There it is, in a nutshell. Neofederated orgs are an ideal way to build power. And they are also difficult to launch and costly to maintain.

But here’s the thing: I could have told you all of this in 2012, when the book was published. And still, I thought neofederated orgs had real potential for the future. That’s because I was watching Philly for Change use digital tools to simplify a lot of nuts-and-bolts activities that created a ton of friction for Sierra Club groups.

And, to be fair, many of those friction points have been reduced. It’s easy to bemoan the state of political organizing in the 2020s. But, folks, let me assure you that we have it so much better than in the 1990s. Suburbia was an absolute wasteland for mass political contestation. How are you supposed to organize a community meeting when you can’t even locate the nascent community? Have you ever tried to manage a phone tree just to remind people of next week’s meeting? The stakes were lower in the 1990s, but the tools we take for granted today were mostly nonexistent. Comparatively speaking, the hurdles to launching a neo-federated organization today are lower than they were 30-40 years ago.

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A note about federated governance structures, and hidden price tags:

In 2002, Marshall Ganz was invited to speak to the Sierra Club Board of Directors. I wasn’t on the board yet. I wasn’t at the meeting. But oh boy did I hear about afterward.

Marshall told the board, in no uncertain terms, that unless you have an annual convention, you aren’t really a grassroots organization. You have to convene your members, let them talk with each other, let them yell at you, or else you’re just a centralized interest group that is pretending at being something more than that.

Marshall was right. The board could tell he was right. It took a few years to put the resulting convention together, but we held the first-ever Sierra Summit in 2005.

The Sierra Summit was huge — 6,000 people, all packed into San Francisco’s Moscone Center. 700 delegates who participated in deliberative exercises to shape the strategic direction of the Club. And it had a material impact on our work. It was during the Sierra Summit that we recognized our membership was collectively ready and waiting to take on the climate crisis as our defining, top-priority issue. It would’ve taken a few extra years to reach that realization otherwise.

I walked away from the Summit convinced that it was absolutely vital to our work. It was too large an undertaking to be an annual event. But clearly it should be biennial or quadrennial. There is so much power in bringing people together.

And then I saw the price tag. I don’t recall the exact number anymore. But it was big. Too big, given everything else we were facing. The Club was going through an extended budget crunch. Some large donors showed interest in supporting our campaign work. But no one was lining up to fund a big annual convention in perpetuity.

In The MoveOn Effect, I wrote about “the loss of beneficial inefficiencies.” One benefit of the direct mail funding model was that it was inherently inefficient. Members gave $25-30 per year, and that was unrestricted money that could be spent on campaigns or HR or trainings or a giant convention. Digital fundraising is more efficient — a group can email online supporters and say “we want to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling General David Petraeus ‘General Betray-Us.” If supporters like the tactic, they donate and it becomes a reality. There is a sense in which this empowers the membership because the tactic only works if supporters chip in. But the downside is that the money is restricted. You have to use it for the purpose it was given. And organizational maintenance doesn’t make for an exciting fundraising ask.

The Summit was a great idea. It played a critical governance function. And we were never going to hold another one, because the money simply wasn’t there. You could fund something like that with inefficient direct mail money in the 1980s or 90s. But not with digital small donations in the 00s, 10s, or today. The Summit fell in the category of progressive infrastructure and, as I discussed in the previous post in this series, such infrastructure has proven incredibly difficult to maintain.

I think back to the Summit a lot, when I see critiques of groups like Indivisible for not investing enough in volunteer infrastructure. Indivisible is the closest I’ve seen a progressive org come to approximating the neo-federated model. But they don’t have a big annual convention. They should. It would be good for them. But they would need some large institutional donors to suddenly start caring an awful lot about governance.

Might as well ask for a pony while you’re at it.

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Now, for comparison’s sake, let’s take a look at a barebones version of how to build a MoveOn-style netroots political organization:

1. Start with a compelling protest action that responds to a controversy dominating the political news cycle. This works best if it does not fall squarely within the zone of expertise of some already-existing, allied political association. You want to be filling a mostly-empty niche. You want to give voice to something that needs to be said, and no one else is already saying.

For MoveOn.org, the original action was a 1998 e-petition asking Congress to “Censure Bill Clinton [for the Lewinsky scandal] and Move On.” The e-petition went viral. A whole lot of people thought Congressional Republicans were being ridiculous. They wanted a means of saying so in unison.

2. The action must leave trace data that you can access. Preferably an email address.

This is a key difference between viral petitions and viral videos and hashtagged campaigns like Kony2012. (I elaborate on this point in Analytic Activism, if you’re interested in learning more.) When Kony2012 went viral, only Google/YouTube had the list of everyone who had viewed the video. Invisible Children, the organization that produced the video, shut down two years later.

3. Treat the list of people who took that initial action as members.

Ben Brandzel refers to this as a “flywheel” model. It’s a metaphor has always stuck with me. You capture the energy of high-engagement movement moments, store it, and redeploy it later. Brandzel’s key insight is that movement energy will just dissipate unless you consciously work to construct an organization that captures it. And you need to build organizations if you want to achieve large-scale, long-term political change. (Every successful hashtagged movement has eventually solidified into one or more organizations.) If you start treating action-takers as members, then you can turn flashes of movement energy into organizational infrastructure.

4. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Groups like MoveOn are issue-generalists. The tactical repertoire emerged during the Bush administration, and it is particularly well-suited to periods of political opposition, when your opponents control the government and have agenda-setting power. MoveOn was fantastic at creating counter-pressure to whatever Bush was up to that week. By comparison, single-issue groups like the Sierra Club tended to stay in their lanes, avoiding outright confrontation with the administration until their issue set was directly targeted.

5. As your list gets big, use analytics tools to listen to the membership.

(Yeah, I wrote a whole second book on this topic. Guess I’ll write a 10-year retrospective of that book in 2026.) This was a main theme in both my books — the benefits and limitations of this type of passive democratic feedback. Organizations like MoveOn know much more about the will and interests of their members than legacy organizations like the Sierra Club. And they are attuned to the revealed preferences of the membership, because their campaigns only succeed if they resonate with the members. But it’s also a one-sided relationship. The staff listen to the membership, but the members do not speak with one another.

Back when The MoveOn Effect first came out, I had a set piece in every book talk: I would ask the audience to raise their hands if they receive MoveOn emails. I would then ask them to keep their hands raised if they were MoveOn members. Nearly all the hands would go down. I would then tell them “congratulations. You are all MoveOn members,” and explain how the organization had redefined organizational membership in a way that was reverberating throughout the organizational layer of American politics.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

MoveOn itself is more complicated than that. It has, over the years, had local “councils,” member-led petition campaigns, etc. But those features come and go. They are not central to the underlying model itself. MoveOn is an organization with a large email list and a small staff. The locus of strategic choice lies entirely among the core staff team. Organizational infrastructure for member-to-member deliberation is minimal. There are no structural veto points where members-as-stakeholders might object, slow down, or reverse a stance the organization takes.

This is a very good model for specific, quite common political scenarios. Its main assets are speed/nimbleness and scale. It is well-tailored to today’s hybrid media system. A group like MoveOn can raise a lot of money or generate large numbers of supporters toward a collective political goal. It can respond to fast-changing crisis moments. (And let me tell you, having come up through the ranks of the Sierra Club volunteer leadership in the ‘90s and ‘00s, nimble, responsive activism is very appealing and effective when you need to cause a big ruckus fast.) And these organizations can also turn large numbers of people out to offline protest actions. It isn’t all just e-petitions.

What the model lacks, though, is ballast. A group like MoveOn doesn’t have the capacity to sit across the table and hammer out a collective bargaining agreement with a major corporation. The city council doesn’t know the names of the local MoveOn leadership, who will make their lives hell in the next election if they abandon a commitment they made at a sparsely-attended community meeting.

That’s not what digital-first, rapid-response organizations are for. These organizations are able to be nimble specifically because they have few stakeholders empowered to weigh in on strategic decisions. But slow, grinding stakeholder consultation is also the way you build organizational identity and a culture of commitment.

Part of the argument of The MoveOn Effect was that these new groups had a lot to offer the broader progressive movement, and it was also a good thing that they were not the only type of group out there. If you had asked me, circa 2012, whether it would’ve been a good thing if DailyKos and Democracy for America and every other netroots organization became structurally more MoveOn-like, I would’ve told you "no that is definitely bad. I don’t think that will happen and I don’t expect it to happen.”

But… That’s kind of what happened. It is simpler to launch a hub-and-spokes digital organization. It is far less costly to maintain one.

Is it any wonder that DFA abandoned the neo-federated model and adopted MoveOn’s core model?

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So there you have it. The neo-federated model offers the greatest potential for building the strategic capacity of progressive movements. It is an old idea. A cherished idea. A good idea. And there are elements of the digital media environment that make it easier to enact.

But the model has never taken off the way I hoped. And that’s because, relative to other digital models, the costs are just too high. These organizations are difficult to launch and pricey to maintain.

For a neo-federated organization to succeed at mass scale, you would need significant, sustained buy-in from the leadership, from the funders, and from the membership. That’s a tall order. It won’t happen unless several people collaborate to make it happen.

And I believe there are real stakes here, because the potential returns from this model (in terms of strategic capacity and power-building) are greater than ever.

The tactical repertoire of hub-and-spokes groups like MoveOn.org was developed in the ‘00s. It is premised on some fraying assumptions about elite responsiveness and democratic norms. (Digital petitions and rapid response civic opposition just ain’t what they used to be.)

But that will be the subject of the third and final post in this series.

If we’re going to repair our democratic institutions and respond to the existential threat of catastrophic climate change, we are going to need political associations that foster leadership skills, build shared identity, and expand strategic capacity. We’re going to need depth. We will need ballast if we are going to change course.

I laid out a picture of how these organizations might work in my 2012 book. That picture was a bit too rosy. If we’re going to see a return to these old traditions of grassroots organization-building, it will be because committed leaders make a plan for navigating a host of complex organizational challenges.

A necessary first step is to identify those challenges for what they are.