The New Yorker ran an article in February that compared "Mobilizing" to "Organizing." The article was authored by Charles Duhigg, and was titled, "What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting." Given The New Yorker's paywall policies, I doubt that non-subscribers will be able to read the entire article, though you can click the link to the title, provided above, and see how it goes. I think the article is well worth reading.
Citing to Johns Hopkins' political scientist Hahrie Han, Duhigg's article says that “Mobilizing is about getting people to do a thing, and Organizing is about getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.” Of course, Duhigg says, "it helps to be skilled at both mobilizing and organizing. But that doesn’t mean that both skills are equally important ... Organizing is more important than Mobilizing."
MAGA, according to Duhigg, has learned this lesson. Various Democratic-leaning and progressive political groups haven't (including, specifically, Indivisible, which has both a national an an impressive local presence, and that is best-known for its leadership in "No Kings" demonstrations held all around the country).
Large, top-down organizations, focused on "protests," and on "demonstrating" what people want, and what they care about, are great - and Indivisible is a prime example of how that has been done extremely well - both here in Santa Cruz County and throughout the nation. In terms of political effectiveness, though, here is what Duhigg's commentary says (with emphasis added). What he says definitely needs to be taken seriously:
Following Trump’s victory in 2016, a group of former congressional staffers inspired by the pugnacity of Tea Party conservatives posted a rousing twenty-three-page online pamphlet titled “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda,” which encouraged such tactics as setting up Google News alerts for local congresspeople and spreading out at town halls to create the perception of broad support. The group also created a Google Doc to help activists across the country find one another.... The initiative was quickly embraced by big donors and national leaders. In its first year, the group raised $2.6 million. Within two months, there were thousands of Indivisible chapters.
But, unlike the Tea Party, which at its founding was a chaotic jumble of anti-government viewpoints and competing leadership claims, Indivisible was tightly guided by its D.C. leaders and their dozens of employees. Tea Party activists often took the initiative to run in local races for school boards or county commissions; Indivisible’s headquarters focussed mostly on national issues and federal elections. The group’s national office scored some successes: it organized demonstrations against Trump’s Cabinet nominees and protested Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare. Yet there were structural problems. Initially, the group was a place for like-minded activists in numerous cities to convene, and various chapters started having success at backing local candidates. But organizational tensions emerged among Indivisible’s headquarters—staffed by young political professionals who pushed for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy for President—and many state volunteers, who, a 2021 study found, were largely “older white women” who didn’t necessarily agree with those stances and “worked very hard to boost Democrats they understood held more moderate views.”
The author of that study, Theda Skocpol, a political scientist at Harvard, told me that Indivisible represents “a tragic lost opportunity.” Local grassroots Indivisible groups were “very impactful on people running for office and winning,” she said, and they “operated pretty much on their own.” But the group’s top leaders, instead of building a sustainable and ideologically diverse membership, focussed on high-profile protests—and on maintaining ideological unity. At one point, the Indivisible headquarters discouraged chapters from endorsing candidates who were pro-life, or didn’t support gender-affirming care, or questioned making it easier for people to register to vote.
In her study, Skocpol wrote that, “since 2017, national Indivisible leaders have raised tens of millions of dollars from major donors, but have not devolved significant resources away from Washington, D.C., to empower democratically accountable state and local leaders. Instead, Indivisible directors have invested most of their resources into running a large, professionally staffed, national advocacy organization.” (Indivisible disputes Skocpol’s assessment and sent me a statement saying that it has “enthusiastically campaigned for Democrats across the political spectrum.”)
Skocpol went on, “If progressive-minded Americans want real change, most of the expertise, money and time we can muster should stop flowing into national advocacy bureaucracies engaged in symbolic maneuvers and purist politics.”
Ben Wikler chaired the Democratic Party of Wisconsin from 2019 to 2025. He recently told me that “Democrats should be learning from the Republicans about how to build small, socially interconnected communities.”
Building "small, socially interconnected communities," sounds a lot like what I have been urging, in my various blog postings. "Find Some Friends," is how I have frequently put it, and I usually add that once you have a group, you need to meet, in person, on a frequent basis, decide things you can do, together, and make "politics," not online entertainment or other pursuits, your first priority, as you decide how to spend your time.
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