Blog: Social Capital

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of taking a tour of Hunts Point, a neighborhood in the Bronx with some of the worst rates of poverty, crime, and asthma caused by the enormous quantity of trucks traveling through the neighborhood to the largest food distribution center in the world.

While the area is still very industrial with many brownfield sites, the neighborhood is also experiencing significant improvement, especially two new parks, one on the Bronx River and one on the East River with beautiful views of Queens, Manhattan, and the Hell Gate railroad bridge.

The heart of the community is The Point, which reminds me a great deal of The Tank, except with the addition of after-school arts programs and deep roots in the local community. Both have created communities around the arts, in raw spaces where performers and artists can work at low cost, with a wide variety of performing, visual arts, and public affairs programming. But The Tank draws primarily upper middle class, post-college white people from the far northern end of Manhattan through brownstone Brooklyn and beyond, while The Point's community centers on its neighborhood and the primarily poorer minority residents there, with a strong mission of youth development through after-school activities. Yet both are clear examples of how a space, open to many people and used for many purposes, can become a focal point of a community, which, black or white, rich or poor, we all need.

I have an article in TomPaine.com, the progressive journal of ideas, talking about Drinking Liberally and its many sister projects and how they draw people into greater political activism, in a tradition dating back to George Washington, Sam Adams, John Hancock, and the site's inspiration, Tom Paine.

Amie Loyer, host of Drinking Liberally Nashville, sent this to her chapter's list after the election. It's quite possibly the best articulation of why making politics fun and social is so important.

My friends, we need to have a party tonight.

Whether you realize it or not, you did something big and important when you added your email to this list, or came to see us for the first time. That was the first step in your decision to learn more, to reach out to other people, to challenge the conventional wisdom we all swim in that says politics isn't real life.

We're asked, fairly often, what good a group like DL can do when it's "just" social. We're not party-affiliated. We're prohibited from endorsing or disavowing candidates and ballot initiatives. Wouldn't we be so much more effective, the argument goes, if we just did more?

One flaw in that logic is the presumption that all of us who care about our country and its direction are in a common place in our political journeys, and in our awareness. That's just not true: most of our members say they weren't all that interested in politics before they got involved with DL, and now they can't wait to find out more.

Another flaw is that by being 'social,' we're devaluing direct action. That, too, isn't correct: by bringing together members of disparate groups, people are able to make even more connections and have even more opportunities to volunteer, canvass, support, raise awareness.

But the biggest flaw of all is that the group doesn't do anything. On the contrary, the group does what may be the most important thing of all: it allows ordinary people like us to integrate political awareness into the fabric of our lives. It gets us used to talking and thinking about these issues. It normalizes politics without asking us to drink anybody's Kool-Aid (just beer!). And it does that to such an extent that people who had no political awareness at all a year ago are now convincing their co-workers to change their votes. You're phone-banking. You're registering people to vote. You're volunteering. You're running for office, or considering a run. You're not being silent any more.

So thank you, all of you, for taking that first step. Tuesday didn't get all of us everything we wanted, but we did get change. Congratulations. It can be said that our country started in a bar, and we'll take it back from a bar.

Talk to a Drinking Liberally host around the country, or another progressive leader, about MoveOn.org, and the vast majority will react with loathing. MoveOn may have an enormous mailing list and become a potent force in progressive politics, but it seems to engender a deep dislike among many local leaders.

I was talking with Deb Rappaport about this recently, and she pointed out how her mother loves MoveOn - it gives her a way to be involved, and feel like she is making a difference. So millions of people are clicking on MoveOn actions, but I think the more active local progressive leaders dislike it because there is no way to get more involved. MoveOn holds no national strategy conferences, has no local meetings; you can't email Joan, Wes, Eli, and the others. If you want to do more than just give money or click on a petition, you can't. If you want to shape its direction, you can't. And if you want to build an organization that's doing more, MoveOn doesn't want to work with you.

The MoveOn site does have one place for people to participate, the "Action Forum" software. And they lay out a noble goal: "Every member has a voice in choosing the direction for both MoveOn.org Political Action and MoveOn.org Civic Action. Using our ActionForum software, you can propose priorities and strategies." But you can't do more than propose.

Micah Sifry discusses the shortcomings of Action forum in a recent article on Personal Democracy Forum. Micah writes,

If Wes, Joan, Eli and crew were indeed interested in "strengthening democracy," why aren't they enabling their members to talk to each other directly? You can post something to the ActionForum and use your own name, but there's no lateral linking going on inside the MoveOn membership, other than what may happen on the ground if you go to a MoveOn-sponsored vigil, such as the ones happening today to mark the 2000th American soldier killed in Iraq.

And that's really a huge lost opportunity. It may not matter that much for the purposes of sifting ideas if a MoveOn member only reads and rates the suggestions of, say, ten or fifteen other members. . . . But if your purpose is to actually strengthen democracy and the engagement of your members in that valuable effort, MoveOn's failure to open up its walled garden is a huge disappointment. It's ActionForum system is useful in the same way a giant focus group might be useful to the people sitting behind the one-way mirror watching people talk. But it's not a way to empower anyone else.

Micah concludes buy suggesting, "What if MoveOn were to invite its members to form state-, county- and city-level MoveOn spinoffs, give them a wide tether to self-organize and invent new forms for engaging each other and the issues, and then see what happens?" Good idea, though in fact many of these organizations already exist, as chapters of DFA, Drinking Liberally, or many other local organizations. What if MoveOn started engaging with those groups, and encouraging the many grassroots groups in local areas to work cooperatively with MoveOn actions?

When I suggested local involvement to Deb Rappaport, she pointed out that we shouldn't fall into the trap of expecting MoveOn to do everything. It can be a useful focused tool for solving one problem, and other groups can solve other problems. Where we lose out is when those individual groups don't interact. In New York, we've build tremendous value just by creating a mailing list for the many progressive groups to share ideas, and a calendar for them to share events, leading to more cross-promotion and cosponsorships. Meanwhile, there are millions of people out there clicking on petitions who might want to get more involved, and a national staff looking for input, both completely cut off from the existing local ecosystems.

And that is the tragedy of what Micah calls "MoveOn's walled garden," and the reason most local leaders roll their eyes at the mention of the name, MoveOn. Certainly many groups would love to get their hands on the huge lists, but I'm not advocating a simple one-way benefit from MoveOn to local groups. MoveOn could get the ideas it claims to seek. It could get more energetic regional or local leaders who might plan campaigns under the MoveOn banner. And it could get more information and email addresses through an arrangement similar to the DNC's Datamart, which groups can utilize but also have to give back. Local groups and MoveOn could certainly work out a similarly mutually beneficial arrangement.

Now if only Action Forum were conducive to posting this feedback.

Late last week, Drinking Liberally reached its 100th chapter with York, Pennsylvania - and then moments later its 101st with Jackson, Mississippi - just in time for Drinking Liberally city leaders from Huntsville to Louisville to Brooklyn to gather in New York City for our first annual national conference. We built stronger bonds over late night pitchers at Rudy's and early morning discussions with local elected officials.

It was also a weekend full of special guests, just a few of the many great people in the national and local political establishments who have seen the value of social gatherings bringing progressives together. National bloggers and political organizers Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers of MyDD, Duncan Black of Atrios, and Peter Daou of the Daou Report joined us for a panel on the Emerging Liberal Infrastructure, then stuck around for a little take-out dinner.

That evening, we held a hurricane relief concert featuring the band Second Movement, Laughing Liberally comedians Katie Halper and Negin Farsad, and the great liberal laughmaster, Al Franken, who started off by discussing the importance of social capital and Robert Putnam, and ended by listing the warning signs of alcoholism. Number one was drinking alone - but "you don't drink alone, you drink together, so that's all right." Number three: "you're the President." And a little later in the evening, New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman and soon-to-be-Borough President Scott Stringer came in together, both looking sharp in their dark suits like they'd just come from a night of dancing.

Rounding out the gang of elected friends, City Councilmember Gale Brewer and State Assemblyman Dick Gottfried joined us bright and early the next morning for a stimulating roundtable discussion. All in all, it was a packed weekend, a fitting capstone to a packed year and another one to come.

Political blogs have built enormous communities of engaged individuals who communicate with each other online. People share ideas, debate, and become friends (and enemies) online. But sometimes there's just no substitute for old fashioned, face to face social interaction, and bloggers across America are increasingly supplementing their online conversations with one down at the local pub. In many cities, that means Drinking Liberally.

An informal, non-programmatic, free progressive social gathering is turning out to be the perfect complement to a vibrant local blogosphere. Some of the most successful Drinking Liberally chapters, in fact, are those with close ties to area bloggers. Philadelphia's chapter, instigated by top national blogger Duncan Black (Atrios), has blossomed not only into Drinking Liberally's fifth largest (as measured by mailing list size) but also a regular convocation for Philadelphia's blogging community, from topical conversation to drunken singing.

A blogger in Minneapolis took over the defunct local chapter, brought in other area bloggers, and quickly built it into a thriving community, the organization's tenth largest. And last week, a Milwaukee blogger called for the formation of a local chapter, and was quickly joind by a chorus of other local writers eager to meet and interact in person in addition to online.

The ideas and energy have often flowed in the other direction as well, from drinkosphere to blogosphere; liberal drinkers from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Washington, DC started their own blogs, prompting the drinkingliberally.org Web team (i.e. me) to deploy a blog system on our server for chapters like Louisville and Cambridge, Mass.

Just as we saw - and Steve Gilliard so eloquently described during RNC Week at The Tank - when bloggers meet in person they form friendships which strengthen the blogosphere online, and have the enriching opportunity of talking with readers face to face. The bloggers can in turn utilize their wide online reach to grow and diversify the crowds at the physical get-togethers. Through this virtuous cycle, vibrant, thriving communities develop simultanously and symiotically both online and off, on the blog and in the bar.

Seven progressive organizations formed four softball teams Saturday and went head to head in the Liberall Leage softball tournament, organized by Sharif Corinaldi of Swing the State. Swinging Liberally, a team from Drinking Liberally, Music for America, and a group of Wal-Mart opposers came out on top after two great games, the last against the very talented Billionaires for Bush and their very creative cheering squad.

One woman on our team confessed that she actually does shop at Wal-Mart, but just likes playing softball, and some friends were coming to the game so she joined in.
That's a great example of how social events like this, or meeting at a bar, bring existing activists together but are also great ways to draw in new people. Formerly a left-leaning but politically unengaged Wal-Mart shopper, she won't be converted into a crusader overnight, but now she has more friends who are liberals and who are activists, and maybe when her friends go do phone banking or petitioning, she's more likely to join in after having caught a few fly balls with a group of cool folks.

Unlike most colleges, Harvard has no student center. Very few places exist on campus where all students can congregate. In 1996, Harvard tried to build a social center in the basement of Memorial Hall, called Loker Commons. Loker was just the kind of place a bunch of 40-something administrators might create: it closed early, the few mediocre food vendors closed even earlier, and the whole place sported a sterile, uncomfortable, bright fluorescent interior.

Now, the administration is considering turning the place into a pub, after the success of a series of "Pub Nights". Without knowing many of the details, it seems like a good idea. There was no reason this should have taken ten years, though.

In an article in the Harvard Crimson (which doesn't seem to be posted online), Associate Dean of the College Judith Kidd is quoted as saying, "It appears that students really enjoy having a place where they can go with friends to hang out, hear good music, and have low-cost refreshments."

Wow!

Students like social spaces, music, and drinks? What a shock! I kid about Kidd, but in fairness to her, I'm sure she didn't mean it to come across that way. Actually, she has been doing a lot to facilitate more social interaction on campus through concerts, pub nights, and other events which five years ago were almost impossible to organize. And a student center in Allston may be in the works, while ten years ago, Harvard took away the student center and turned it into faculty offices.

No matter what their age, social interaction is a fundamental human desire. And everyone from colleges to conference organizers to political activists are well advised to take that to heart.

The Great Good Place actually mentions Rudy's (page 26), a "working-class tavern". Some things have changed since 1981, but it will always remain a quintessential third place.

The nostalgia for the small town... is rather a "quest for community"... a nostalgia for a compassable and integral living unit. The critical question is not whether the small town can be rehabilitated in the image of its earlier strength and growth—for clearly it cannot—but whether American life will be able to evolve any other integral community to replace it.
— Max Lerner, 1957

This is the opening quote of The Great Good Place, the book whose concept of a "third place" other than home and work inspired the founders of Starbucks. Since 1957 our societal need for community has only grown more and more acute, and most cynically, the conservative movement has fed on this craving by invoking a nostalgia for community and using it to push a reactionary social agenda - while simultaneously promulgating the very policies that create the lack of community itself. The places that have community today are the cities, those oases of progressivism, while the right-dominated exurbs feel the greatest need and turn to their very oppressors for relief.