Jonathan Klingler's blog

Yesterday, Ralph Benko at the Examiner wrote a very interesting op-ed detailing the extraordinarily low participation that Organizing for America and MoveOn.org have been able to muster for recent petition drives and rallies. In a recent effort to direct members to call Members of Congress in support of the energy tax legislation, only 7,000 MoveOn members made calls out of a list of upwards of 5 million. Even more stark is the fact that Organizing for America, built from one of the largest and most innovative presidential campaign organizations in recent memory, couldn't even get a 1 percent participation rate in an email petition drive for the Obama budget.

Mr. Benko ascribes this to a disconnect between the elite Left and the populist left, mostly in the form of elitist disdain for the rank and file of the leftist base. This very well be true, but I think the failure of these well organized entities to deliver the numbers also has to in part be due to structural weaknesses that governing parties face when trying to mobilize modern-day activists. The Obama campaign was able to mobilize huge numbers of people in 2008 in support of a candidate who sold himself as the living embodiment of a package of vague policies and aspirations which meant something different to each person who supported him.

Most people don't care about politics- they're too busy working to get involved unless they feel threatened. However, according to research from people like Sidney Verba, those who do (on the right and the left) tend to disproportionately have financial security. We also know from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs that when people feel safe and have their basic needs fulfilled, they increasingly turn their attention to building relationships, gaining respect,  and accomplishing something meaningful with their lives. However, everybody has different ideas of what is important and meaningful, and a big part of satisfying the need for self-actualization requires fulfilling a purpose yourself.

This is where the trouble has come from for our leftist friends. Go back to August 2008. Obama's explosive campaign sold him as a vague manifestation of personal meaning to millions of people - this is evident through the creepy cult-like adoration we've seen since 2007 - and built an astoundingly huge organization from these folks. They then used them with great effectiveness by empowering these individuals to do things themselves, largely free from elite direction. Thus, the campaign provided a lot of people with a sense of purpose and meaning that translated into big results. For the left, Candidate Obama served as a package of loose principles that minimized disagreement and the battle was won through a hundred million acts of individual initiative in local communities.

Now, fast forward to August 2009. President Obama is in office with huge majorities- they should be able to muster great excitement in their people because they can pass anything- but that hasn't materialized in their legislative activism. President Obama issues clear executive orders, signs detailed legislation, and actual policies cannot satisfy everyone- even within his own movement. A party in power in government can't survive on loose principles that minimize agreement- it requires detailed policies that draw disagreement out of the woodwork. Furthermore, working just in local communities can't win legislative fights- everything has to go through elites- Representatives and Senators.

Calling a Congressman in support of concrete bills you don't totally understand or agree with simply cannot provide the same degree of personal fufillment and meaning as working on your own initiative to convince your friends and neighbors to support general principles you agree with 100 percent.

This is an unavoidable structural weakness of the party in power. When Republicans ran Washington from 2001-2007, we suffered from this problem. We all remember it, and the degree of debate at the Next Right illustrates that no matter what George W. Bush and Congress actually did, some of us would be unhappy. Furthermore, it was relatively easy for the Democrats to gin up noise against any policy, because they agreed on the loose principle of opposition. Successful public coalitions in favor of legislation require agreement on detailed policy while successful public coalitions in opposition only require agreement on loose principles.

Eventually, conservatives will be back in power in Washington, whether that happens in 2012 or 2112. We will face this structural weakness as a movement and we need to be aware of it and figure out how to work around it to get things done. However, I'm incredibly optimistic about the ability of conservatives versus liberals in accomplishing meaningful social change in the modern activism environment.

The Left requires government to act to address their concerns. It's central to their ideological program. We don't.

Social networking technology is moving at leaps and bounds and movements that organize people around a set of loose principles, let them communicate and unleash their individual talents and initiatives are getting things done. That is what happened with Obama-Biden 2008, and there's a fascinating effort behind the Designers' Accord that is getting things done within the design community for environmentalist causes that their liberal base likes. There's no central control, no elites telling people to do, only agreement on central principles and individual action and innovation.

We seek a vision of American society where people are independent and free to solve problems in their communities by acting together through voluntary action, not government coercion. I firmly believe we can accomplish a lot of positive change in American society by agreeing on a set of loose principles, empowering people to act and getting out of the way. We may even be able to make government irrelevant.

Some day, conservatives and libertarians will create an Accord for Reform consisting of loose principles that we all can agree on, that distinguishes the philosophy of family values, free-markets and individual liberty from the opposition, and gives people the tools to enact these principles in an increasingly effective and decentralized manner.

It may not be today, it may not be a year from now or even ten years from now. However, that day will come, and it will be a new morning for America.

The Democratic Party has liked to style themselves as very bottom up, but their ideology is very top down. Now we will have a chance to see what happens when they govern. -Patrick

Today, the Barack Obama transition team launched its new website, www.change.gov, and I think it would be wise for all of us who are interested in building the Next Right to check it out, as well as www.barackobama.com in case the latter is changed substantially. If you want to see how My.BarackObama.com works without joining, watch the tutorial video. It's impressive.

During the campaign, the Obama folks were able to do three remarkable things to build a people-powered online movement.

1. Create a nationally visible platform for attracting and building a responsive and interactive community
2. Leverage this community to build neighborhood-level teams and provide them with the tools and measurable goals needed to accomplish the task at hand
3. Devolve control over execution to neighborhood team leaders and individuals and let them unleash their own individual strengths to get the job done

If you take a really good look at BarackObama.com, the vast majority of it is nothing extraordinary. It has candidate bios and issue positions and looks generally pretty nice. What sets it apart is the ability to submit policy ideas of your own to the campaign for every issue area, MyBarackObama.com (which is explicitly designed to foster local organizing), and their Organizing Resource Center, which provides detailed tutorials and excellent tools for individuals to act on their own for the campaign. The unique aspects of the Obama online operation all fit into the three bullet points above, and created a truly effective campaign operation and allowed a movement to form.

Now, consider the new site, Change.gov. What sets Change.gov apart from any other government website is that it invites users to interact with the website and submit personal stories and ideas for the new administration. This fits into the first item from above, but the other two are noticeably absent. This is important.

The design of Change.gov is important for one reason. Barack Obama ran on a campaign of fundamentally changing the way Washington works, and to some extent, the innovative aspects of his campaign were sold as glimpses of a new, people-powered government under an Obama administration. If we take Change.gov as the government website of the future, we can look forward to plenty of feedback forms but not much more. We'll see how this works out over the long run, but I think it will prove more difficult than expected to carry the campaign model over to government operations.

Now we begin to see the inherent contradiction of the left's netroots organization. They have created a tremendous capacity to organize people to act voluntarily for the accomplishment of the movement's goals. Philosophically, this goal is to win control of the federal government and use it to fix the ills of society. However, in the end, the federal government runs things from the top-down, and bureaucracies by their very nature are slow and unresponsive. Once the left's open, decentralized and local movement infrastructure wins control of the federal government, it hands the keys over to elected officials and its job is simply to keep those folks in office.

In large part, the Obama campaign built itself on the postmodern shift in American society towards self-actualization, meaning, customization and connectedness which has been explored in the literature on design, by political scientists like Ronald Inglehart, and expressed in the new type of business model featured in magazines like Fast Company. 21st century Americans demand more self-actualization in every aspect of their lives and Barack Obama was able to deliver on this politically through his campaign.

However, the federal government idealized by the Left as the solution to every problem simply is not capable of providing everyday citizens with customized services, active involvement, local solutions and most importantly, meaning. It is the job of bureaucracies to treat everyone equally, and what makes government separate from other entities is that it fundamentally acts through coercion rather than through meaningful individual participation. In the end, the biggest promise of the Obama movement cannot be delivered because of its inherent contradictions.

Now imagine what conservatives and libertarians could do to improve society through voluntary action if we developed our own version of My.BarackObama.com. The possibilities for non-governmental solutions are almost limitless. That's real hope for change.