When Advocacy Replaces Membership

The roots of this problem lie in a decades-long transformation of civic institutions. Since the 1960s, there’s been a sharp decline in popular, member-based civil organizations, and a rapid surge of advocacy organizations run and managed by professional staff. Political scientist Theda Skocpol has identified a key force behind this tectonic shift: the departure of college-educated professionals from mass-member groups in the late 1960s.

This was not a simple story of class snobbishness. Among other factors, college-educated whites turned away from the cross-class, fraternal, and women’s organizations because these groups were often racially segregated and limited by gender roles. However, the transformation that followed left progressive civil society stripped of cross-class social ties and attuned only to college-educated sensibilities. Working-class communities have little influence over the agendas — or even the rhetorical styles — of progressive organizations.

The shift has also fostered an unhealthy, codependent relationship with the Democratic Party. Instead of pursuing mass politics, progressive advocates overwhelmingly focus on mobilizing existing subgroups of Democratic voters to pressure Democratic officials for stronger action on issues like climate change, immigration policy, and disability rights.

Such efforts tend to concentrate on already highly-engaged and mostly college-educated constituencies. There are key and admirable exceptions here — some groups have more presence in working-class communities, particularly brown and black ones in large metro areas. Still, progressive political strategy is largely dependent upon mobilizing subgroups of exceptionally engaged Democrats to pull the party left.

This leaves the work of assembling a majoritarian coalition to the Democratic Party. That’s not good.

Even if we can imagine the party getting more politically and rhetorically savvy, political parties themselves are currently too weak to drive meaningful change. As Anton Jäger vividly documents, political parties in North America and Europe are no longer deeply integrated into community life, as they were in the decades following World War II. They don’t have ward-level muscle to be a real force for cultivating loyalties or providing popular education, especially beyond the peak of campaign cycles.

Mobilizing the Already Mobilized Professional Class

So why aren’t progressive civil society groups lining up to engage all sorts of working-class communities to bolster popular support for their causes while cultivating left loyalties generally? The reluctance here is unfortunate but not irrational. Rather, it’s rational within the irrational conditions of our political landscape. While everyone on the Left would benefit from relentless efforts to expand our appeal deep into new territory, for most individual organizations, investing in popular education and persuasion efforts in communities without existing progressive ties appears much less efficient than mobilizing their existing base.

Consider, for instance, a modestly sized advocacy group fighting for bold climate action. Should it focus on building connections in small Midwestern towns to grow popular support? Or should it stage sit-ins at politicians’ houses, organize teach-ins at college campuses, and stir social media fervor among already engaged supporters? The latter tactics are much more likely to yield near-term results — potential political wins, especially when pressuring Democratic officials in solid blue areas, or boosts in visibility, volunteer recruits, and donations from progressives.

It’s not hard to sympathize with the individuals and groups that make these calculated choices. When working on an urgent issue, not placing the most pragmatic short-term bet feels like political malfeasance. But when the vast bulk of progressive advocates follow the same logic, we leave our political commons in tatters. This collective focus on short-term gains further erodes progressives’ connections with working-class communities, leaving those weaker and harder to rebuild.

Advocacy groups prioritize campaigns that most excite donors and funders, narrowing their strategies for engagement and persuasion. As a result, many communities are cast off from our political horizons. And all we can do is hope the Democratic Party has some way to bring enough members of these abandoned communities on board to win majorities.

Yet the Democratic Party itself faces similar pressures. It would be the height of irresponsibility, a Democratic pollster told me last year, for the Democratic National Committee to invest money in a congressional race in Western Virginia — that swings Republican by 20 points — instead of spending that money in a swing district in Arizona. Missing in the calculation here is the longer-term impact of failing to put a vigorous fight to appeal to a region’s voters in election after election.

Such calculations of campaigning efficiency happen at a more granular level too. Writer and organizer Micah Sifry reported what a volunteer had learned from canvassing in politically split neighborhoods in Pennsylvania: “One way I could typically tell how a voter was leaning in 50/50 neighborhoods before even knocking: the nicer homes were with us and the more beat up homes were with him.”

While the Kamala Harris campaign might have had enough idealistic canvassers (most trekking in across a class divide) to keep knocking on those dilapidated doors in a crucial swing state on the eve of an election, such residences are unlikely to be the priority for Democratic campaign efforts when resources are tighter.

Flyover Constituencies

For too long, progressive civil society has been passing over “beat up” homes and downwardly mobile communities. It is perhaps not surprising that these choices, though conditioned by structural incentives, have spawned an ideology to justify them: the belief that the people we’re not speaking to are not worth speaking to.

After Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, progressive pundits quickly embraced the notion that those who voted for him did so because of deep flaws in their character or cultures. According to this prevailing account, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny were the driving forces behind Trump’s victory.

Fortunately, this way of thinking seems to be losing its grip. In 2024, there is still much desire among some to blame this election on sheer stupidity or other flaws supposedly endemic to vast swaths of the American public. But the political conversation appears to be changing.

The stark education divide among voters has come into sharper focus than it did eight years ago. Exit polls from ten key states show that in 2024, noncollege voters favored Trump by 14 more points than college-educated ones. At the extremes of the education divide, those who had never been to college favored him by 25 points more than those with graduate degrees. Chalking up such differences to the unequal distribution of congenital racism or innate stupidity is not only unconvincing; it’s embarrassing.

Parts of the democratic left have also been developing richer understandings of how group political loyalties are won. The passing of the “Sanders moment” has brought plenty of disappointments and challenges for the Left. His 2016 and 2020 campaigns demonstrated the tremendous power of economic populism to attract non-college-educated voters and galvanize tens of millions to support an outsider candidate. But Sanders’s just-shy attempts to win these primaries also suggested that full-throated economic populism, when given broad exposure only during a campaign, is still insufficient to propel a soaring victory.

What Is to Be Done?

Lainey Newman’s and Theda Skocpol’s Rust Belt Union Blues, which has generated much recent conversation on the Left, illustrates how social ties and institutional bonds are crucial for a realignment of political loyalties. Their detailed study of the rightward shift in union-heavy counties in Western Pennsylvania reveals that the issue is not simply declining union membership — many active union members have also moved to the right. What has vanished is the role unions once served as hubs of social life and camaraderie.

Unions in these counties didn’t simply advocate for workers; they organized clubs for hunting, sports, and card-playing. Their halls and lodges hosted weddings and parties. Their newsletters provided essential local news. As Newman and Skocpol found, it was these “dense networks of interpersonal and community-level ties” that intimately touched daily life throughout these communities that gave unions “the capacity to shape member’s political commitments” and influenced the common sense shared throughout their neighborhoods and towns.

As unions’ centrality to Rust Belt social life disintegrated alongside deindustrialization, right-wing civil society filled the vacuum. Right-wing populist news voices, churches, gun clubs, and other organizations, Newman and Skocpol have found, “moved into some of the space vacated by grassroots unionism.”

Progressive civil society cannot afford to sit idly by, hoping a mass wave of unionization will recreate these community ties. Even with some spectacular recent success stories, union membership in the United States remains at a post-WWII low of 10 percent, with only 6 percent of private sector workers unionized. Jared Abbot of the Center for Working Class Politics observes that “the radically different social, political, and economic conditions that obtain today compared to sixty or seventy years ago, when unions first rooted deeply in these [Rust Belt] communities” suggests no easy path to revitalizing unions in the mold Newman and Skocpol describe.

The road to building much stronger ties between progressive politics and working-class communities will surely be arduous. Leftists will need to try a multitude of approaches and take risks. Advocacy organizations, think tanks, writers, and activists of all sorts need to engage more deeply with working-class communities and forge ties that go beyond the traditional progressive base.

This must include not just speaking to working-class people and communities but creating spaces for their direct contributions to a democratic left, ensuring participation in decision-making and shaping agendas. It could also mean contributing to an emerging left media sphere that speaks to working-class tastes, centers working-class voices and experiences, and invites many more people to see themselves as respected members of the democratic left. This would involve working with unions and other existing left-leaning groups that already have meaningful community ties, such as the Working Families Party, Common Defense, and the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative. Leftists might also forge new relations with nonpartisan groups in working-class communities open to partnering on specific causes.

Moralizing for Change Is a Dead End

It could be the case that much of the existing progressive civil infrastructure isn’t up to this task, so new or previously neglected organizations may need to lead the way. Political scientist Peter Levine recently proposed a thought experiment about an alternative past — or potential future: “Imagine if the 350,000 people who gave $24 million to the ACLU in one weekend [near the start of Trump’s first term] had instead (or also) formed 1,000 new local groups with an average startup budget of $24,000.” Such an approach might not have benefited working-class communities — there’s no guarantee these groups would have integrated them. Still, this thinking should open us to imagining new ways of channeling resources beyond the most established progressive groups.

In the postelection finger-pointing, progressive civil society — advocacy groups in particular — has faced a round of criticism for pushing Democrats to take unpopular positions. Much of this criticism misses the mark. It’s not that progressive groups should never push for policies that have less than 50 percent approval; the real problem is we also need to put up a robust fight to make our programs popular. Moralizing alone won’t win sufficient support.

To succeed, we need networks with meaningful ties to working-class communities of every stripe. Only by building such connections can we make the best case for properly social democratic policies across different social contexts. If the general strategy of leftists is to lobby for major social changes without popular persuasion or listening, then we only inflame one of the neoliberal era’s great wounds: the painful sense many have of being asked to step aside from democratic participation and leave things to the credentialed classes and experts. Right-wing populists are ready to offer themselves as the balm for this wound.

Leftists are not largely at fault for the shrinking of meaningful civic and associational life experienced by many working-class communities, but it is still our problem. We are competing with two major forces vying to respond to immense discontent produced by the neoliberal decades: the populist right and the siren song of apathy and resignation. To win, we must have compelling narratives to organize these unshaped feelings of discontent and channel them toward a movement backed by a foundation of social ties. It will take a village — many, many villages.