Pooh-poohing the grand poohba: progressive social change ended when liberals gave up on the Moose Lodge

Washington Monthly, July-August, 2003 by Gordon Silverstein

So why are so many of these organizations no more than dusty memories or funny skits on black-and-white sitcoms? Here, Skocpol surprises. Given the role these organizations played in the growth of the American welfare state, one might expect conservatives to have played some role in their demise. But it turns out that liberals themselves were the catalysts for the transformation from membership to management in American civic life. Funded by deep-pocketed philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation, liberals began to shift their attention away from national membership organizations and toward professionally managed advocacy groups and public-interest litigators in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And though these groups enjoyed great success, particularly in the arena of civil rights for African Americans and women, it was not without significant costs. One consequence was that though liberals may have invented this new approach to public policy, it was the conservatives who ended up perfecting it, responding to the liberal successes by pouring huge sums of money into their own think tanks, litigation teams, and lobbyists, "setting out in a highly self-conscious way to shape public opinion and counter the influence of liberal grant givers."

But there's hope. Skocpol argues that political elites will eventually return to oiganization-building and cross-class, mass-membership groups when they realize that there is a limit to the power and influence that can be gained by D.C.-based, professionally managed advocacy groups. And if they need an extra incentive, Skocpol notes that the Christian right, frustrated by the plateau of its own power in the 1980s, has already rediscovered the power of building a large, federated organization devoted to political mobilization and the training of future leaders in every state in the Union, under the auspices of the Christian Coalition.

It's not clear, though, whether liberals will take the bait. It takes real fire in the belly to abandon Georgetown and the Kennedy Center to stay in a Motel 6, eat at Luby's Cafeteria, and survive on USA Today. And even if you have that drive, there's no guarantee that your efforts will create a civically engaged, cross-class coalition that supports your cause and your point of view. Though many of the organizations Skocpol discusses were advocates for progressive social reforms in their day, when we think of the VFW or the American Legion, not to mention the Elks or the Moose Lodge, we're thinking classic, establishment, and GOP. Skocpol envisions modern organization-entrepreneurs building entirely new and different organizations, but nevertheless, it's one thing to assemble an army and quite another to lead it where you want it to go.

As long as professionally managed advocacy groups and public-interest litigation firms believe they can at least prevent further erosion in their policies and their political power, one can certainly understand why they might be reluctant to take great risks, even if there is the potential for great reward. This defensive strategy might help to explain why Democratic senators and their web of professional advocates have been willing to hand virtually unfettered control over the war powers to the executive branch, and yet discover their institutional and partisan backbone when it comes to blocking the appointment of activist-conservative nominees to the federal courts. Liberals, it seems, have come to rely almost exclusively on the judges as an ever-grayer last line of defense against the forces of darkness. This suggests that the appeal of more power and greater gains may not be enough to shift many of these groups away from professional advocacy and back to civic engagement.