From a multi-part series: “Benjamin takes several months to get around to responding to all the crazy shit that’s been said about organizing thanks to Sarah Palin.”

One of the reasons that Sarah Palin can claim confusion about what community organizers to is that there’s no agreement, even (especially?) among the many people who call themselves organizers on what organizers do. By my lights, the defenses of “organizing” made since then have obscured more than they have clarified.

I want to write a little bit about the sort of organizing that I do, and that Barack Obama did, which is congregation-based community organizing in the tradition of Saul Alinsky. Whatever 60s-radical patina the word “organizer” has (that appeals to some and repels others), it comes largely from this tradition.

I only know the barest outline of Obama’s organizing career. But I know enough to say with certainty that congregation-based community organizing, as I am learning to practice it, and as Barack Obama did, is not:

Direct Service – Organizers do not provide direct services. So people who put together food banks and homeless shelters, and who build houses with habitat for Humanity – they do good work, but it’s not organizing, because it’s not about power. (Examples of this misunderstanding here.)

“Putting on Events” – A day or two after Palin’s speech, I saw on a comment board a defense of her derisiveness: “I was a Cub Scout master, so I was a community organizer, too, and you only need a high school education to do that.” Unless these Cub Scouts brought the mayor in front of them and asked for a commitment to take action, he wasn’t community organizing.

Advocacy / Activism – Simply being in favor of something does not make you an organizer. In fact, community organizers are, at least in their professional lives, distinguished by not really being in favor of anything except building the power of organized people. Once you’ve built power, then you don’t have to stop at being in favor of things. You can actually get them. Advocacy and activism are about being right. Organizing is about being effective.

Issue / Union Organizing – This is a subtler distinction, maybe, because they are about building power, too, but around a particular set of issues, rather than for its own sake. This probably deserves a discussion of its own, and I don’t feel prepared to start it right now.

What organizers (and direct-action community organizations) do is stuff like this (from a description of my organization):

[The organization] develops its issues through a listening process. Teams are formed in our congregations to meet individually with other members of the congregation to meet and discuss their concerns for the community and congregation. As a result, hundreds of problems surface and are brought to an assembly in the fall. At this assembly, leaders vote on problems they consider to be the most urgent.

We then conduct four months of research on these top-voted problems and take appropriate action to solve them. Members of our congregations then do research about the problems, meet with experts, and look into solutions that have worked well in other places to solve the problems affecting our community.

Members of [the organization]’s member congregations will then meet with public officials to present them with a reasonable, well researched proposal, and invite them to the Direct Action Assembly. At that Assembly, hundreds of people from the member congregations of [the organization] participate in a face-to-face meeting with decision-makers and public officials, who are asked to make specific commitments for action.  [The organization] monitors actions taken after the direct action assembly to assure that the commitments are met. The 2008 [direct action assembly] was attended by almost 1,100 people.

This is what we mean by “direct action”—taking action to hold officials accountable for justice and fairness in our communities—rather than “direct service,” which is what many traditional nonprofits provide. Direct-service organizations deal with helping individuals (mercy); direct-action organizations like ours try to get at the root causes of community problems (justice). The member congregations and clergy of [the organization] take seriously the biblical injunction to “do justice” (Micah 6:8).

For what it’s worth, I think it’s a mistake for organizers to hail Obama as a paragon. As a candidate, he’s talking not about how he built power so people could win what they needed (justice language), but about how he went to “serve people who’d lost their jobs in the steel mills” (charity language). I like Obama, but let’s never forget: He’s a guy who decided he’d rather be in City Hall than fighting it.

Organizers are doing something more important, more basic, and more radical, than what any politician – Obama or Palin – is doing. Organizers build power, because power is the price of admission to a democratic society. Power comes through organized money and organized people. The bulk of people, who don’t have Lehman Brothers-style money to play with, need to organize themselves to get what they want and need.

Let me say at plainly as I know how: If you are building the power of organized people to hold political and economic systems accountable, you are organizing. If you aren’t doing that, you’re not organizing.

For a clear Biblical example of what I mean by prophetic power in this post, see Nehemiah 5 (link to KJV, ’cause it’s prettier).

There are lots of ups and downs being an organizer. Last Tuesday, for example, I counted three ups and four downs, and last Tuesday was pretty typical. Emotional whiplash is an occupational hazard. I don’t think it’s just me: My organizer friends all report the same sort of thing, albeit to different degrees, depending on temperament.

Still, the ups are pretty good. I have lots of leaders who are just phenomenal people, who have incredible stories. And every once in a while, I just think, damn, I really love this guy. (Or this woman, but the leader I’m thinking of as I write this is a man.) They’re just great. They get it, they’re committed to making this work, and you can just go in there with a napkin and a pen and come out with your problems solved. Having leaders like that makes this less lonely, and a lot more fun.

I’ve been pretty prolific in writing here in the last few days. That’s partly because of Sarah Palin, and the commentary thereon. But I had resisted giving my two cents on that for a number of days, and I think the reason that I gave in is more personal: Avoiding work.

This month has been full of events, which has sort of been an obstacle to really building much capacity in the congregations. I have too many congregations; it works out to something like 2 hours per congregation per week, which is too little time to do very many initial 1-1s.

We anticipate hiring someone next month who I will supervise and assign some congregations to, but in the meantime the stress of having to put on event has really been stressful, on me, and on my leaders — not being able to do initial 1-1s means that there’s no new leadership being trained to take on some of that burden.

What’s more, events are not what I like about organizing. One-to-ones are. That’s what gives me energy. Vacation in three weeks, and counting down.

Take a gander at this article, allegedly a defense of organizing, which I think has it wrong in a number of ways. Its thesis is that organizers and Sarah Palin have a lot in common, a conclusion likely to please neither party. Let me focus on this sentence in particular:

“I like organizers, if they sign on to the right causes.”

You have to admire his willingness to go out on a limb. But he’s by no means along in having an unfortunate tendency to focus on issue campaigns, and on the merits of a particular approach to a community problem, and which approach is the right one. Organizers are no more immune to this than anyone.

But of course no policy is objectively right. There are only choices, which we make on the basis of our values and our other self-interests. Experts in economics, in sociology, in science can tell us what the choices are, what the consequences are of a particular policy or procedure. The real trouble has always been figuring out which trade-offs we should make as a society – not whether approaches (do-nothingism among them) are imperfect (they all are), but how they are imperfect, and which imperfect projects we the people will undertake anyway.

Democracy is not measured by the universality of the franchise. It’s measured by how many people have a stake in that process of figuring-out. The price of admission to that process is power, so the power-building work of organizers is what really makes a deeply democratic society – whether you agree with the causes or not.

The Powers-That-Be have been choosing imperfect solutions for many hundreds of years – but the imperfections have been the imperfections that they want.

Organizing is about building power, not about the merits of a particular issue. And people who won’t otherwise have enough power to have a seat at the table getting that power is an unqualified good.

*[There’s also a tendency to focus on the tactical element, mainly because tactics are fun. Who doesn’t smile at the idea of a “shit-in” shutting down O’Hare, a la Rules for Radicals? But tactics are about what you do with your power. They’re not a substitute for it, especially over the longer term.]

I’m as proud as anyone of my work as an organizer. There is nothing more important than building power — the price of admission to a free society – among those who won’t otherwise have it.

But I think it’s a mistake for us to get defensive about what Sarah Palin said. The fact is that she’s not wrong. There are many community organizations that are sort of bullshitty, that are not deliberate, serious, and disciplined about the need to build power. Public officials like her don’t take organizing seriously because we haven’t made them.

Let’s answer her by all renewing our focus on building sustainable power. The power we build is what will hold her and others like her to account, not how loudly we whine about hurt feelings. No matter what she says, we’ve got actual responsibilities, and responding to her insults isn’t one of them. To work!

Like Scott Wells, I’d been reluctant to wade into the discussion about youth and young adult funding within the Unitarian Universalist Association, mainly because I care only slightly more about intradenominational politics than other people do. And most of you who read this aren’t Unitarian Universalists, anyway.

But this whole mess is a nice excuse for me to talk about organizing, which I love. Back to youth and young adults in a bit.

In organizing, we spend a lot of time talking about self-interest. Self-interest is distinct from selfishness (concern exclusively about the self) and selflessness (concern exclusively with others); a working definition might be “concern for the self in relation to others.” I have short-term self-interests: I’m hungry, so getting some food is in my self-interest. I have other, deeper self-interests: I want to have a family. I want to be respected. I want to be right with God.

The only way to relate honestly with other people is by finding common self-interests. Read that sentence again, and then again until you believe it.

A simple example: It’s in my self-interest to eat. It’s in the self-interest of the grocer to sell me food. So we come to an arrangement that satisfies both self-interests (namely, me buying food and paying for it) and then we’ve had an honest interaction. Viola! Our self-interests are different, but they come together in ways that are mutually satisfactory. The same is true of all honest interactions; they’re just more complicated or subtler. With me?

Now, power is just the ability to engage other people’s self-interest. The power that large groups of people have relative to elected officials is that officials have a self-interest in not ticking off people who vote for them. The power that my boss has relative to me depends (in part) on my self-interest in not being fired.

All of that stuff is in the first day of organizer training. So what does that have to do with Unitarian Universalist youth and young adults? If y/ya want to be “empowered” – which I can only assume means to be, well, powerful – they need to stop whining and find ways to engage the self-interest of the rest of the Association. Funding is being cut because y/ya “leaders” have not managed to engage the self-interest of the people who control the UUA.*

So what would a process leading toward real y/ya empowerment look like? Well, off the top of my head, it would involve introspection, one-on-ones, small group meetings, etc. — whatever was necessary to identify the individual and collective self-interests of UU Youth and Young Adults. It would, as Scott said, involve “creat[ing] institutions that create the desired goals.”

Then, with a clear understanding of what they want, they would meet with the key power people in the Association, and try to figure out how they could make what they want be in the self-interest of the power people in the denomination. They would need to be very clear in their own minds that denominational politics, like all politics, is about power. And political power is the ability to induce and/or engage the self-interest of whomever can give you what you want.

* This resolution uses the language of “investment” in y/ya programming, but doesn’t tell the rest of us what the dividends will be. It could be any number of things: Maybe the self-interest they engage is our desire for there to be strong UU institutions after we’re gone. Maybe it’s something else. But to be “empowering” for everyone involved, it will have to be negotiated out of our respective self-interests, not whined into existence.

The chief glory of organizing is the one-on-one. It’s one of the main reasons I like this. I like the “soft arts of organizing,” even though the hard arts probably come more naturally.

Unfortunately, my one-on-ones have sucked lately. I mean, they haven’t flowed, and there must be all sort of obvious opportunities for the exploration of self-interest that I’m just not seeing. It’s never a good sign when you’re twenty minutes in and struggling for directions to go, and hurting for places to share something of yourself in the conversation, turning it into more of an interview and less of a real conversation (which is what I, my organization, and the world really need more of).

Over the summer, I had this down. I shoot for between 30 and 40 minutes for an initial one-on-one with a layperson, and I had them down to 35 minutes almost every time, and was getting everything I needed, building a relationship, and had time for a joke besides. Now they start to struggle after about 20 minutes.

I mainly just need to be doing more of them. I’m averaging under a dozen a week, and I’d like to average something closer to 15, and with the right people.

Tactics, or, An academic exercise in what I would advise other people to do in order to get what they want.

Humor as a tactic has long served a particular purpose in public life. Is there anything as hard to deflect as a well-placed bit of satire? This is only one recent example. Look at the expression on Hillary Clinton’s face when she realized she’d set herself up for that one. This is something that late-night hosts are doing, declaring their solidarity with striking writers.

But for striking WGA writers, humor might also serve another purpose, which has less to do with making fools of production companies and instead, as a good tactic ought to, provides some strategic leverage toward beating them. To start with, here’s a passage from the great Saul Alinsky, from Rules for Radicals.

John L. Lewis, the leader of the C.I.O., told me that at the height of this sit-down strike [against Chevrolet] he heard a rumor that General Motors had met with both Ford and Chrystler, [saying, “If] the C.I.O. beats us, then you’re next in line and there will be no stopping them. Now we are willing to let the C.I.O. sit in at Chevrolet until hell freezes and suffer the loss in our profits if you will hold your production of [competing vehicles]. On the other hand, we can’s hold out against the C.I.O. if you boost production in order to sell to all the potential Chevrolet customers who will buy your products because they can’t get Chevrolets.

…It doesn’t matter whether this is a false rumor or true, [said Lewis], because neither Ford not Chrysler would ever overlook an opportunity for an immediate increase in their profits and power, shortsighted as it might be.

The internecine struggle among the Haves for their individual self-interest is as shortsighted as internecine struggle among the Have-Nots. …I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.

So it was smart of the WGA to make a deal with Worldwide Pants, Inc., which makes the Late Show with David Letterman and Craig Ferguson’s program which follows. Functionally, this puts CBS at an advantage relative to the other networks, since those programs air on CBS’s affiliates. But it defeats the purpose of the tactic if Letterman and Ferguson “battl[e] for second place,” not wanting to be seen “profit[ing] from the walk-out.” If there’s no ratings advantage to be had by having union writers at work, why should production companies and networks make a deal?

With that in mind, here’s an idea for striking writers: You have all these funny, talented folks out on picket lines striking, right? Put all of them to work writing jokes for David Letterman and Craig Ferguson. Or at least all the funny ones. The rest of them, of whom there are many, can continue to picket. The idea here is to give Letterman a huge ratings advantage, to the point where NBC (the main late-night competitor) is forced to make a deal.

Why would that force them to make a deal? Because late night is the only profitable unit at NBC television right now. If it stops being profitable then it’s not even worth it for GE to own a television network. (In other social and political senses, of course, it’s worth owning. But companies, in the end, are responsible to shareholders who would just as soon lose unprofitable divisions, whatever their political or social importance.)

In a similar vein, the SAG, which is not crossing picket lines in solidarity with WGA strikers, should bring out every high-ratings big-name celebrity it can find, and give Letterman and Ferguson the biggest boost they can. The biggest music acts should do the same. If Leno, O’Brien, Stewart, and Colbert want their writers back, they should tell their viewers, on the air, to tune into Letterman and Ferguson instead. They should say it every night until they win the strike.

And everyone – the WGA, the SAG, and everyone else – should make a big, public deal of it. I don’t know if other contractual obligations prevent something like this from actually occurring. But it would sure put a lot of pressure on the other networks, by punishing those who don’t agree to the union’s terms, and by explicitly rewarding those who do.

(Disclaimer: This is not to say that I’m a gung-ho pro-WGA guy, though I do instinctively want to fall more on the union side than on the Big Bad Business side. The whole fun of speculating on tactics is independent of who’s side, if any, I’m on.)