Will Obama Inspire a New Generation of Organizers, a piece written by Peter Dreier and originally published in Dissent Magazine, appeared in The Huffington Post on Tuesday evening. Dreier, a professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College (and also teaches a class on community organizing), details the effect Sen. Obama, a former community organizer, is already having on the Millennial Generation:

• “There has not been a candidate since Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy who has inspired so many young people to become involved in public service and grassroots activism.”
• “The number of young people seeking jobs as organizers has spiked in the past year in the wake of Obama’s candidacy.”
• “Obama, through his own example, has already dramatically increased the visibility of grassroots organizing as a career path, as well as a way to give ordinary people a sense of their own collective power to improve their lives and bring about social change.”

Here, Dreier appears to be correct, and not necessarily over-optimistic. Having been an organizer in the past—becoming one quite by accident as I had no idea the job had existed before I had it—I’ve seen that Sen. Obama’s Presidential candidacy has brought to a greater consciousness that there exists a career centered specifically on personal empowerment and mobilizing social change. My parents and peers are now more familiar with what community organization is and entails than when I was an organizer myself.

Dreier also outlines the history of community organizing in America. Obama openly acknowledges the great Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky as an inspiration, which leads right-wing bloggers to loosely draw parallels between the Chicago organizer, the Illinois Senator, and, of course, Communism [see: "Saul Alinsky - yet another Obama mentor from his Marxist past"]. Dreier, however, illustrates the tradition’s more-substantial, three-dimensional history:

• “The roots of community organizing go back to the nation’s founding, starting with the Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party.”
• “Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, was impressed by the outpouring of local voluntary organizations that brought Americans together to solve problems, provide a sense of community and public purpose, and tame the hyper-individualism that Tocqueville considered a threat to democracy.”
• “Historians trace modern community organizing to Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago in the late 1800s and inspired the settlement house movement. These activists—upper-class philanthropists, middle-class reformers, and working-class radicals—organized immigrants to clean up sweatshops and tenement slums, improve sanitation and public health, and battle against child labor and crime.”
• “In the 1930s [...] Saul Alinsky, took community organizing to the next level. He sought to create community-based “people’s organizations” to organize residents the way unions organized workers.”

Finally, Dreier imagines the Organizer-In-Chief, and how this role could be leveraged to better leverage a platform and elicit constituent action:

• “Obama can certainly learn valuable lessons from President Franklin Roosevelt, who recognized that his ability to push New Deal legislation through Congress depended on the pressure generated by protesters and organizers.”
• “Roosevelt became more vocal, using his bully pulpit—in speeches and radio addresses—to promote New Deal ideas.”
• “[Obama] understands that his ability to reform health care, tackle global warming, and restore job security and decent wages will depend, in large measure, on whether he can use his bully pulpit to mobilize public opinion and encourage Americans to battle powerful corporate interests and members of Congress who resist change.”

And finally, Dreier suggests that Obama’s inspiration can be used to put on pressure to reform – even his own platform:

• “But if it appears that he is veering too far to the political center, they will—inspired in part by Obama’s own example, and perhaps with his covert support—mobilize to push him (and Congress) to live up to his progressive promise.”

Again, Dreier is not over-optimistic or too-simplistic in his assessment. Community organizers and anyone generally excited or inspired by seeing a collective of people make something happen have reason to be excited, as their craft is being highlighted by a presidential candidate – specially one that has already inspired a young generation. Throughout my elementary school life, there always seemed to be ploys to make reading look cool via posters featuring endorsements by Spider-Man, Tom Hanks, Patrick Ewing, and others. It seems that now, however, considering how empowered different communities feel resulting from Obama’s candidacy, his is the best enforcement that community organization will get.

It it especially interesting to think of the president-organizational community role Dreier outlines, patented after Franklin Roosevelt and some of his constituents. After nearly three decades of presidencies that have celebrated individualism, imagining the constituent, or organized collectives of constituents as players rather than passive bystanders is exciting. Further, I very much appreciate the suggested interchangeable role of the constituent as an agent for platform change (using the “bully-pulpit” to mobilize collective action in response to climate change issues, war attitudes, gas prices, etc) and keeping the President’s (and Congress’s) platforms in check with reality (as we’re presently seeing Sen. Obama’s netroots supporters do with regard to his stance on FISA).

-Filed in Ideas

“All life is warfare, and it’s the continuing fight against the status quo that revitalizes society, stimulates new values and gives man renewed hope of eventual progress.”

-Saul Alinsky

Since Thursday marks the anniversary of Saul Alinsky’s passing, we’ll be focusing a bit on the grandfather of modern political organization. While it has been 26 years since Alinsky passed, he maintains relevance by being featured in the news nearly once a day. This is especially true in the context of this election, where two of the most talked about candidates worked to exemplify Alinsky’s teachings, and Ron Paul’s campaign is still alive thanks in part to modern applications of Alinsky’s methods.

In addition to pointing out cool, web-based odds and ends online, posting videos, and putting together Alinsky-centered podcasts, we’ll be talking with David Sirota on Wednesday and we’ll be sure to ask him Alinsky-relevant questions in focusing on the modern applications of his teachings. If you have anything you’d like to see go up, please be in touch.

Alinsky:

• Wikipedia entry
• 1970 Time Magazine profile
• Biographical overview
• “The American Radical”
• Comprehensive interview

Alinsky and Sen. Obama:

• Obama learns from team-Alinsky
• Obama, Alinsky, and ’self-interest doctrine’
• Obama, (Bobby) Kennedy, and Alinsky

Alinsky and Sen. Clinton

• “Alinsky’s Daughter” and the Super-Secret Saul-Centered Senior Thesis
• More thesis chatter on Hillary Clinton Quarterly
• And even more on The Boston Globe

Alinsky Miscellany:

• Alinsky quoted to suggest that conservatives are more honest than liberals
• Post-Alinsky organizing?
• Taking Alinsky to the inter-webs
• Alinsky’s core rules for radicals
• Lyrics to Sufjan Stevens’ Sufjan Stevens:The Perpetual Self, Or What Would Saul Alinsky Do?

-Filed in People

Bill McKibben, one of the first people to bring global climate change to the attention of the general public, is one of the most articulate and well-respected voices in the modern environmental movement. His books on localism, environmentalism, and sustainability have sold millions and he presently directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism at Middlebury College in Vermont.

McKibben’s Step It Up Campaign, which took him across the state of Vermont by foot, made his demand for Congress to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 was one of the largest global climate change awareness campaigns to date. In 2006, I had the pleasure of seeing McKibben arrive to the fanfare of thousands of Vermonters in Burlington, Vermont at the end of his statewide walk with Sen. Bernie Sanders—then in the middle of his Congressional campaign—by his side. A follow-up campaign in 2007 stepped up expectations, demanding that the Senate reduce emissions by 10% over the next three years.

Now with the creation of 350.org, McKibben has taken his awareness campaign online. The number makes reference to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (350 per million) that would conceivably cause irreversible damage to the earth (read McKibben’s oped in the Washington Post about the number here). With the help of Internet communication, he plans on using their website to help to spread this message throughout the world. McKibben took some time to answer the following questions about bringing off-line activism online, online activism off-line, how living in Vermont influences his engagement as an activist, and more.

Make Something Happen: What led you to make the transition from informant to organizer?

Bill McKibben: The sense that writing about global warming alone was not getting the job done.

MSH: So why are you bringing your activism to the Internet?

McKibben: [Doing so] allows us to organize cheaply and quickly, which is good since I don’t have much money and we don’t have much time.

MSH: What is 350.org’s game plan for bringing other activists and potentially concerned people on-board? How will you help transition “traditional” activists to participating in netroots activism?

McKibben: We are literally open to anyone—and we want them to be traditional activists. We just use the net to bring actions together; we want those actions taking place in the real world.

If [this campaign remained strictly online] it wouldn’t work. The net is just a tool to organize geographically dispersed real-world action—Step It Up, last year, was 2,000 demonstrations in all 50 states.

MSH: You are an active member of the Methodist Church. How has your involvement there affected your tendencies towards feeling compelled to do this sort of organizing? How has it influenced your community awareness?

McKibben: In the strong sense that the Gospels demand that, above all, we try to show some concern for our neighbors. And at the moment we’re showing none—not for the people around the world who are already drowning, dying of malaria, facing famine because of our unwillingness to moderate our use of fossil fuels. And we’re not showing much concern for all the people that will come after us either.

MSH: Does living in Vermont influence your feelings toward political/community/environmental awareness? Are you influenced to communicate differently with people from an organizational perspective?

McKibben: Vermont is on a scale that makes sense—there’s real possibility of knowing a great many of the people who live near you. That makes politics of all kinds easier. And it’s also easier for us to see our impact on the place we love—both negative and positive.

MSH: Next week marks the 26 year anniversary of the passing of legendary organizer Saul Alinsky, who we will celebrate on Make Something Happen. Were you at all influenced by him?

McKibben: We wrote a little organizing handbook last year, Fight Global Warming Now, that was a kind of take on Alinsky for the internet age. So many great lessons, many of which still apply

-Filed in People