Winning Back Democracy: A Conversation with Theda Skocpol
The United States has never been so close to authoritarianism, but the successes and failures of the Resistance taught us how to transform politics
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An Indivisible rally in Austin, TX, January 24, 2017. Photo credit: Kingofthedead/Wikimedia Commons.
Historical sociologist Theda Skocpol is a scholar of American politics, social revolutions, and the modern welfare state. Currently Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, for almost two decades, Skocpol and her team of researchers have been studying the transformation of American politics that brought us Trumpism. Skocpol has also been the Director of the Scholars Strategy Network, an organization with dozens of regional chapters across the U.S. that encourages nonpartisan public engagement by university-based scholars, building ties between academics and policymakers, civic groups, and journalists.
Recently, Skocpol and Caroline Tervo published some of their research about the 2020 election in The American Prospect (February 4, 2020), focusing on Indivisible, a grassroots political group on the left that captured many activists’ imaginations with its open-source guide, posted to Google Docs in early 2017, for how to fight Donald Trump.
I asked Professor Skocpol to talk to me about what she and her team have learned about grassroots politics so far, and how the coalition that elected Joe Biden can rebuild democracy in the United States. This is what she said.
Claire Potter: You argue that the liberal-left grassroots groups that emerged after the 2016 election, what we call The Resistance, was bigger than the Tea Party, the conservative coalition which formed to resist the Obama administration’s policies. But was The Resistance more or less transformative?
Theda Skocpol: For our team, they are both complex combinations of top-down organizations and grassroots initiatives. In both movements, bottom-up, volunteer grassroots groups formed all over the country, sparked by the election of a president that the other side was terrified by and very opposed to.
It's a little early to tell the full reverberations of The Resistance: we haven't had as much time for it to play out and infiltrate political party politics and governance. But we have found some surprising similarities and some telling differences so far. The similarity is the grassroots component of both movements; thousands of citizen-created groups that formed all over the country meet--I don't know, monthly usually, in the early stages. And if anything, we think more local Resistance groups formed faster, and in even more places, than the local Tea Party groups.
That's pretty remarkable because we live in a period in which liberals, who usually join and form these groups, tend to be crowded in the big cities and coastal state college towns. So, when we started the research, we thought we might not find very many of them across the land. And then, when I was visiting this conservative pro-Trump town, I discovered ten of them in eight counties.
CP: What are the preconditions for a grassroots movement to transform national politics?
TS: We think in the big picture that the Tea Party, and particularly what I call the ethno-nationalist right, captured and pushed the Republican Party further to the right and faster. It harnessed anger about immigration, resentment of racial and generational changes, and other phenomena that culminated not just in Donald Trump but also in an almost a religious faith in him that pushes beyond the bounds of democracy.
In that sense, the Resistance was not similarly transformative. It hasn't pushed the Democrats as far to the left. And if you think about it for a moment, there's an obvious reason: The Resistance groups formed everywhere, which means they exist in areas that are pretty conservative, swing areas, and liberal areas.
If they're operating in a very conservative place, they know their neighbors are not necessarily ready for Justice Democrats or Bernie Sanders. There are always some Bernie Sanders supporters, but they don't do the actual work on the ground. That work is done by the mothers and grandmothers in these communities.
So we think the Resistance has revitalized liberal politics everywhere. They've increased the margins of votes across almost all Pennsylvania counties, for example, which means Democrats can win. But a lot of times, the Democrats who win are mainstream liberals, not left progressive. I wouldn't say these groups are less transformative. I think they buoyed the Democrats and played a big role in taking back Congress in 2018. Not the only role of course: African-Americans and unionists play a big role too, particularly in Biden's victory in November 2020 and the Senate victories in Georgia.
So the Resistance was transformative, not in the ideological sense, but in the energizing sense, which God knows the Democratic Party needed.
CP: Could this explain how Biden could be elected, but so many down-ballot races went to Republicans?
TS: We don't know that yet. In addition to doing field surveys, my research group has looked very closely at the state of Pennsylvania. We have data from almost all the counties across Pennsylvania that had Resistance groups, and we found out that these women, for the most part, went out weekend after weekend knocking on doors in 2018.
That fit with what people emailed me from all over the country. People tend to read the articles that my colleagues and I write, and then I'll get an email saying, "You're absolutely right. Nobody notices us, but you've figured out what we're doing." And then, they will report in some detail what they're doing in Texas, New York, or different places.
Then, in 2020, the pandemic hit. Now, I don't think that affected people's determination to vote against Donald Trump. We know that a lot of people turned out for Trump, but more turned out for Biden. It was the biggest turnout in a hundred years in terms of eligible voters going to the polls. By mail, in person, early balloting by rowboat, whatever, everybody got out there.
The down-ballot drop-offs might have been partly due to the fact that a lot of these older women, middle-aged to older women, and the Democratic Party in general, did not go door to door very much, did not reach out and talk to people face to face. But we don't know yet. It's going to take precinct-level voting records, so that takes a while.
CP: Indivisible was poised to play a unique civic role, bridging the local and the national: why?
TS: The overall Resistance included a lot of grassroots groups that never did become Indivisible-labeled or Indivisible affiliates. But the young husband and wife team and their peers who formed the Indivisible project did something significant. They put up that guide on a Google Doc that told liberals everywhere: "Don't despair that you don't have anybody to write to in Washington. You can go to your local congressional office and be a presence there." That was an essential and inspiring message at a point where people all over the country were saying: "What in the world can we do when all of Washington is in the hands of these right-wing Republicans and Donald Trump?"
The other thing they did in 2017 was to create an interactive map where people could sign up. People could say: "Here's our group, we're in the middle of Missouri, here's the zip code." Then other people could go in and say, "I want a 25-mile radius from my home," and join. The map itself was an eye-opener. There were 5,000 to 6,000 dots by the end of 2017. And it was great for researchers too: we downloaded the map a bunch of different times.
But the guide played an inspiring role. And because we study civic engagement in America, we thought, wow, this particular part of the Resistance has this ability to link the national and the local: it's already doing it. And once the national founders decided to create an office in Washington and start raising money to hire people, we thought, "Maybe they will be able to make this more permanent, institutionalize the relationship.”
By the end of 2017, state associations were also emerging. If you go back and Google Indivisible and put 2017 in there, you're going to see places like Alabama, Michigan, Pennsylvania, as well as obvious liberal places like California and Massachusetts.
But all over the place, local Indivisibles discovered each other. Other groups, too, that weren't Indivisible were interacting with them. And these state-level associations could have delivered some of this clout to state government because many of the Resisters were starting to run for local, state, and national offices.
CP: And you had data about all these Indivisibles and other organizations?
TS: Yes. If people read the American Prospect article, they'll see that our work is very, very data-rich. As a citizen, I'm a center-left person, a liberal. But in my capacity as a researcher, I'm ruthlessly objective because it doesn't do any good in politics to tell yourself what you wish were true rather than finding out what really is true.
We’re interested in how these groups are nurtured from the center. So it came as a surprise to us to discover that, by 2018 and 2019, the central office of Indivisible had hired 75 to 100 professionals, had created a huge office of people, and were not as much in touch with the local groups as they claimed. Local groups were saying to us: “they send us a whole barrage of emails, and we've started ignoring them. We don't get any resources from them. We get demands from them.”
And then we took a look, and asked: how have other groups grown in the past? And it turns out that 50 to 100 people as a lot of professionals to hire in a short time. And we learned that simultaneously, they were sending out emails saying, "We depend on small donors," when in fact, most of their grants were from big donors and foundations.
Now that's not bad, and that's not surprising. Still, it's relevant to why they had millions of dollars to spend on hiring people rather than, for example, giving modest amounts of money, if not to every local group, then to the state associations that were trying to bolster and magnify the effect of these groups.
CP: Donna Brazile's account of the 2016 election reported something similar about the Clinton organization: the local organizers were starved for basic resources, and the Clinton people were saying, "That’s not how it's done anymore."
TS: It is exactly the same. I visited North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and I swear to you, it was almost the same words. When I would ask about the Clinton campaign--and remember these weren't the big states or the liberal areas—what I heard was: “we were on our own, we didn't get any help. And then, at the last minute, they sent some young man from Brooklyn who didn't know anything about what it was like here, and we just had to work around it.” Democrats cannot win elections without those places.
CP: Indivisible bears a remarkable resemblance to MoveOn.org, a centralized group retaining a grassroots organization's look. But over-centralization is also associated with the need to raise money. So: can we have effective grassroots organizations in a political culture that relies so much on fundraising?
TS: MoveOn.org has evolved into a self-avowedly internet-based operation that contacts people mainly through electronic means to form petitions and move resources around. But we don't need another one: Indivisible shows signs of turning itself into that, which is very sad. MoveOn.org is a very efficient organization. It does not have a large bureaucratic central office, and it doesn't cost as much as Indivisible.
Now, I also think liberals are too hung up on money. In politics and civic life, you need enough money, not the most. And the big issue about money is how you raise it and how you spend it.
There are parts of the Resistance that would involve poor people or people without a lot of resources. But most of the white middle-class women who organized and joined one of these regularly meeting groups that were the basis of the Resistance could afford to pay small dues. Some groups have actually instituted dues. And dues are predictable. ActBlue does this: you give a little, but predictably, and then you've got resources to do things because the major resource of your group is volunteer time.
I know women who actually spend all their time on these activities; they may be retired or in a financial situation where they can do that. The same was true in the Tea Party, by the way. Often it was women who were doing it.
So, it's not as if all of these groups needed a check from the D.C. office. But if that office had devolved even a third of the tens of millions of dollars it raised to creating some part-time staffing for a state-level association, that would have helped that group develop representative and ongoing relationships with dozens of groups in its orbit. It would have magnified their effect and encouraged the smaller groups that existed in less friendly environments.
I don't think we need campaign finance reform to go through Congress, and God knows it won't. We need to get more creative about using bottom-up resources, repeatedly given in small amounts. Then we need a more strategic and responsive way of using resources that big donors give. I don't think the big donors actually thought they were paying for 75 to 100 professionals in an office.
CP: What do the groups that elected Joe Biden need to do to support democracy now?
TS: It's a vitally important question because the threat to American democracy is real. I do a lot of research on the right and on the Republican Party: it is an authoritarian party at this point. It is determined to rule through minority votes and by excluding likely Democratic voters, to the point of threatening violence against election officials if they don't go along with that.
So we've got questionnaires out to the groups we worked with before in Pennsylvania. We want to find out what their plans are for this year and their experience during the pandemic. I think a lot of groups are continuing. There are fewer of them, but they're keeping at it.
What do we need to do? Well, we need to keep an eye out. We need to keep in contact with our elected representatives, support them when they do good things to limit their capacity, and push them. I don't think just yelling at Democrats is a particularly effective form of politics. Still, many of these newly elected office-holders keep in touch with various groups, and I think that's good. And people must run for office, above all at the local and state, as well as the national level.
Nobody should imagine that the 2022 congressional elections and the 2024 presidential election are not just as important as the one that just passed. An authoritarian Republican Party is now playing footsie with violence. I hate to say it, but it’s not just the voters: two-thirds of elected Republicans in the Congress voted to throw this election out. People will have to vote no matter what the rules are, no matter how bad the changes are, and keep this party from getting back into power until it gives up the dream of minority authoritarian rule.
And that's going to take multiple defeats. So we need, more than ever, a style of politics that's grounded in local communities, where people keep in touch with one another, where they are helping people understand what's going on in their states, cities, and towns, and in Congress, and where they are getting out the vote, not just in a presidential election, but for all of them.
CP: There is significant cynicism about government among voters. How do we proceed with politics when citizens are passionate about their political beliefs, but they won't invest in government, or maybe the idea of a state at all?
TS: We've got to persuade people that democracy is a matter of using it, getting good people into government, and helping those people work for the collective good. If we don't do that, things will get much, much, much worse. I actually think this country is much closer to a fascist movement taking over than I would have ever dreamed.
But things are shifting. This last election, pretty much everybody got on board. Right now, my colleagues and I are looking at North Carolina and comparing it to Georgia. I'm really impressed with Georgia. Stacey Abrams ran for office in the state legislature when Democrats were such a small minority they couldn't accomplish anything without compromising.
I know many young people dislike compromise, but there are two kinds of compromises. There are the compromises you make where you just give in. Then, some compromises create wedges to build power so that the next time you compromise, it's more on your terms than it was before and the time after that, and the time after that. The next thing you know, you're a majority.
That's what they did in Georgia over a decade, and they did it by organizing right down to the local level. Take the Affordable Care Act, which many on the left said was a sellout to the insurance companies. Excuse me; it was no such thing. It was perhaps the most redistributive legislation passed in 50 years because it potentially expanded Medicaid, a single-payer program for the near-poor and the middle-class in this country.
Stacey Abrams started her career in the Georgia Democratic Party in alliance with nonprofit groups. She went into counties, discovering what it took to sign people up for the ACA. As she says in her memoir, they often didn't even understand what state government did or what the Affordable Care Act would accomplish. She realized you not only have to register voters who've never voted before, but you also have to talk to people continually and help them understand what the stakes are.
That's what progressive young people need to understand because they play a big role in that.
I think some of that did happen in the last election because people realized that with four more years of Donald Trump, it's over. But it's not just Donald Trump. It's an entire political party at this point, including some of the grassroots people on the right that I have sat face-to-face with. They are frightened. They're organizing, and they are participating. They may have some very bad ideas, but they're not going to stand down. So that means people who care about a responsive democracy and a government that does things for ordinary Americans cannot walk away in cynicism.
Thede Skocpol is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University.
Claire Bond Potter is Professor of Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research and co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020).
What I’m Reading:
J. Brian Charles takes a deep dive into the policy conversation behind Baltimore’s efforts to stop the violence. (The Trace, February 26, 2021)
Jamelle Bouie on an old way of keeping Black people from the polls that still works. (New York Times, March 5, 2021)
Political scientist Alyson Cole asks: is Marjorie Taylor Greene actually Donald Trump in drag? And—can she pull it off? (Fortune, March 4, 2021)
You’re Invited: