Keys to a Future Majority: Experiencing the Problems of Progressive Politics

After working a few shows in NYC, and getting compliments from the bands and their staff sent through Music for America’s staff, I decided that I would be better off working in my home state, Pennsylvania, which was a much more important state. Unlike New York, PA is still competitive for Republicans, and there was no guarantee that Kerry would carry the state. It just so happened that MfA was sending out their staff on a field trip, and they were going to Philly. I figured this would be a great way to get started in Philly, and also a great way to get to know the MfA staff a little better offline. I offered the three staffers- Mike Connery (who you can find here on this site), Franz Hartl (the Political Director), and Taya Mueller (the Volunteer Coordinator) a place to stay, took a week off from work, and soon all four of us were in Philly checking out the scene, talking to local media types, and trying to get a feel for who in the city could help us get things done.

Almost every time we told someone what were doing and asked them “Who do you think we should be working with in the city?” the answer was the same- Sean Agnew. “Damn,” I said to Taya after the fifth or so person dropped his name. “We gotta find this kid.” We tried unsuccessfully to track Sean down, but it didn’t really matter at the time- we were busy working shows, meeting with activist types, and registering kids on some of the city’s campuses.

At the end of a busy day of working Temple’s campus, I sat on my parents porch with Franz throwing back a few beers. “So,” Franz asked me. “What do you want to do with your life?”

“Oh no,” I thought to myself. “Not one of these drunken conversations.” But I decided to indulge him. “I’m going to try and get into a PHD program for communications. Then maybe I’ll teach or something. I don’t really know what I’ll do after that.”

“No way, man.” He shot back. “You can’t go into academia. I’ve watched you over the past few days, and you’re going to be a politician. You’re really good at this, you’re a natural!”

By this point I had been told by quite a few people that I was good at this. But this was the first time that I really considered that it might be something that I’d do beyond the election. But I didn’t need to consider it for long—it was an epiphanic moment for me. “Damn man,” I said to Franz. “Now why’d you have to go and fuck up my life plans like that?” By the next day I knew firmly, for the first time in my life, what I wanted to be, or at least the general field I’d work in, when I “grew up.”

“I am a politician,” I said to myself as the MfA crew packed up their bags and continued on with their trip, and for the first time I didn’t think of the word in derogatory terms. No, I was probably never going to run for office myself—my skeletons have long since overflown out of my closet- but I was going to be a political practitioner. I was going to work, for the rest of my life, to get people elected and work to make changes happen through the political system.

As the MfA crew packed up their bags and I wondered to myself whether I would have come to this decision on my own, without the intervention of Mike, Franz, and the rest of the MfA crew, and especially without the bonds of friendship that I made with them. Given all of the troubles that I had volunteering with MfA, and that I quickly realized were endemic to the Progressive Movement, I think that there’s a good possibility that I would not have. And since there probably aren’t that many people out there who have the level of motivation I felt on this particular summer and who are physically close enough to people within the movement to create the bonds that pushed me to overlook MfA’s many shortcomings, I think that there’s a real possibility that we are letting many potential converts slip through the cracks of the progressive movement, people who could—with a little engagement, encouragement, and development—become the movement’s core players.

Before I mention the problems that I faced in volunteering, and the problems that I saw in the broader progressive movement, I want to ad one quick disclaimer: this is not meant to as an attack on Music for America or any of the other groups that worked extremely hard during the election, but a critical critique of the problems people face when they attempt to become more involved. If we are to regain majority status in this nation we have to look at ourselves with extremely critical eyes, and I hope that the following can be taken in the constructive spirit in which it was written.

My problems volunteering with MfA started immediately. I mentioned in a previous post that my first successful attempt at volunteering took place at a big festival in New York City, but that wasn’t my first attempt to volunteer with Music for America. Before I was able to actually start volunteering I had attempted to volunteer three times in NYC, with no success at all in any case.

My first volunteering attempt was at a Friday night concert for a well-known jam band, a week before the festival. I arrived an hour before the show, as the automatic form e-mail, the only communications I received, told me to, and waited by the merch table for someone to tell me what I was supposed to do. I asked around for the MfA person who had the material, and nobody knew who that was. I attempted to call the office and see where the materials, which were supposed to be delivered to the venue, were as well as the volunteer coordinator whom the e-mail said would be training me. I reached the office but when I asked the person on the other side of the line what was going on, all I received was“I have no idea,” and I got the phone hung up on me.

My second attempt came the very next night. I was instructed to be at a venue by 8 pm to setup, I arrived on-time and waited at the bar for a half-hour for my contact, the band’s manager, to show up, after which I was told by the club owner that nobody would arrive until 10. I left and came back at 10, and was able to meet the band’s manager, but he had forgotten the materials, so even after waiting around on a Saturday night to volunteer, I couldn’t register a single, solitary voter.

The third failed attempt came on Sunday. There was a huge show for a Mexican band that I had never heard of, but which was, judging by the throngs of fans waiting to get into the club, extremely popular with Mexican-Americans. I made my way to the front of the club and found three women who were waiting to work with MfA. One of the volunteers told me that the band had forgotten the MfA materials on the last leg of their tour, and the tour manager was trying to see if someone from MfA could bring a new crate of materials to the show. We waited around outside for an hour before we were told that the materials wouldn’t arrive, and were offered entrance to the show even though we couldn’t register people to vote and such. I declined, and left wondering whether I was barking up the wrong tree by attempting to work with MfA. But, because I already had a good rapport with Mike, the Communications Director, and especially since we recently met in person, I decided that I would keep on trying. By the next weekend I was able to, finally, volunteer for a show, but I doubt I would have made it past the first three mishaps if I hadn’t made the offline personal connection with MfA’s staff.

Even after I volunteered successfully for the first MfA show, I still faced a lot of problems. Most of the issues seemed to stem from a basic lack of organizational aptitude, experience, and leadership—phone calls that were never returned, volunteers who routinely failed to show up, materials that never materialized, a lack of clearly defined roles within the organization that led to lots of confusion as to who was supposed to be doing what, no real management of the organization’s employees, and the basic sense of inertia that one always seems to find in organizations that lack an inspiring and capable executive. After I made friends with the MfA staff and got administrator privileges on their site, I was able to get around a lot of the problems, either by accessing the area on the site where the information was stored or by calling one of them and having them push enough buttons to get things done. But this only worked some of the time, and so a lot of the time I was not only volunteering, but dealing with issues that really shouldn’t have been faced by someone giving their precious time to an organization.

One of the biggest problems that I faced was that MfA’s paid staff person in Philadelphia went missing, and there no official representative of the organization in the city. I basically had to do her work, unpaid, so that things wouldn’t grind to a halt. I definitely did not mind taking over some of the staff person’s responsibilities, even as a volunteer, but I was splitting my time between NYC and Philly, and so there wasn’t anybody in charge of MfA’s operations in the city for at least half of every week.

Because there was nobody in charge, there was also no real way to figure out who had been doing work with MfA. I had no idea, when I started to work in Philly, who were the “superstar” volunteers and who were the flakes. MfA’s volunteer database didn’t make things any easier; it contained little substantive information on volunteers, and the contact info they did have was usually close to useless (for example it couldn’t differentiate between people who had simply signed up on the mailing list for an MfA show, or those that had worked 20 shows). I even went through MfA’s site, attempting to gather information from the official volunteer list from past Philly shows, but that was only marginally more successful, as many of the people who signed up to volunteer for a show never actually showed up.

There were also technical problems with the volunteer system that made it difficult to do effective outreach. In order to volunteer, all a person had to do was visit the site, look for shows with available spots, and sign up with a name, e-mail and phone number, and then someone on the staff approved them, usually on a first come, first serve basis. There were usually two available volunteer slots for any given show, and once the first two people signed up for the show, nobody else could attempt to sign up. This meant that once one of the volunteers decided not to go to the show there was no way to find out who else might be interested in working, and volunteers were constantly flaking out. Since there was, in most cases, very little information taken from potential and actual volunteers, there was no way to know who was signing up for the shows. The fact that MfA did very little substantive recording of the connections that they were making had another negative long term effect on the organization- it meant that when people left MfA they took all of the connections that they had made with them.

The broken-down state of MfA’s volunteer efforts and systems was a serious impediment to effectively engaging the vital demographic we were reaching out to, since it basically meant that at many shows I was the only volunteer, and on nights that I wasn’t in Philly, or when there was more than one show, there were often no volunteers.

As the summer turned into fall I started to get to know more of the kids who were actually showing up to volunteer at MfA shows, which made my efforts a little bit easier; however I still saw big problems with our efforts. Even when I found a really motivated and capable volunteer—the type that I knew could be converted into a lifelong activist—there really wasn’t anywhere to plug them into. MfA did not have an office in the city, which meant that there wasn’t really a good place to have kids meet me for trainings, strategizing, hanging out, or whatever. As I noted, there also wasn’t a staff person for that matter, and though I could connect personally with the kids I worked with, it didn’t hold the same weight as connecting in person with an actual staff person (someone who could be considered officially part of “the movement”).

But the blame for this does not lie at Music for America’s feet. MfA was not the only group doing work in the city, there were many groups that I could have plugged kids into if they had been better organized and able to work with young people I could have connected them. But, what I found when I tried to work with other organizations was chaos. Nobody knew who was doing what, or where, and there was really nobody in charge of the masses of volunteers that were spread all over the city and region.

Because I worked mostly at night with MfA, and because I had taken time off from my paying job in NYC to come do outreach in Philly, I had days free when I thought I would plug into some other groups, probably through a parent organization that MfA helped to found—America Votes. However, as I had seen in a few attempts to volunteer outside of the auspices of MfA, there really was no coordination at all. Everywhere I went I saw multiple groups, many of them within America Votes, canvassing the same areas, wasting time we didn’t have and annoying the hell out of people that we needed to win over. I heard horror stories of people from places like Allentown, PA of getting chased, stalked, and harassed by canvassers. I’m sure all of the people within and working with these groups had good intentions, but because there was no focus and no broader organizational coordination, we not only wasted a lot of people’s time, we shot ourselves in the foot by pissing people off.

I personally was never able to successfully get in contact with any of the America Votes partner groups or locate most of their volunteer offices, if they had any. I’m sure I could have found something constructive to do if I had tried a lot harder, and had been willing to go through the same bullshit I was going through with MfA with all of these other groups, but I really didn’t have the patience to deal with this type of behavior from a group made up of strangers to me. At this point I felt I was a committed activist, yet I wasn’t willing to walk through fire and brimstone to potentially volunteer for an effort that would hopefully have some effect. If it’s that hard to become engaged and stay involved for someone with my level of motivation, it’s nearly impossible for someone who doesn’t yet share that level of commitment.

The result of all of this is that I would go to a show, get a bunch of kids excited, and then because there was no organization to plug these kids into, and no place to bring them or tell them to go, a good deal of the energy we exerted was squandered. The most that I could do with these kids was give them some information, tell them to get involved and get their names down on MfA’s e-mail list. I’m positive that if I had been able to continue the engagement outside of this venue, if I had been able to make lasting personal connections with some of these kids, that I could have had a much larger and longer lasting effect. We had the opportunity to make huge long-term inroads towards a progressive majority, and we largely blew it.

However, even though I was sure that we could have had a better impact with a better-run organization, I was not dissuaded. First of all, though the overall organization was poorly run and overwhelmed, the staff people were amazing, hardworking, and extremely dedicated. One person in particular who made me extremely hopeful for MfA’s future was cofounder and Music Director, Dan Droller. Unlike the rest of the staff, Dan was not extremely political minded. He was, however, the social and cultural connector of the group, making everything else MfA wanted to do possible. At just about every show that I worked at over the summer and fall of 2004 I would get asked by one of the band members or their tour managers: “Do you know Dan?” And every time that I said yes, the questioner would invariably say something like “Dan is the man!” Though I had less direct contact with Dan than the rest of the staff I’ve mentioned, since he worked out of the San Francisco office, I definitely agreed, Dan was the man. Not only did Dan connect MfA with the artists that were helping us to motivate their crowd, he also held together the organization from an operational standpoint. It didn’t matter what day of the week or hour of the day it was, Dan was always available and reachable if there was a problem, which as I’ve noted, there almost always was. This also meant that Dan was the only person in the organization that had even a somewhat good idea of what was happening with MfA’s operations in many cities. I still wonder whether the rest of MfA understood the extent to which Dan was keeping the ship afloat. Without Dan’s amazing dedication, social connections, and work ethic, I know that neither I nor any of MfA’s other volunteers would have been able to have the effect that we did, even if that effect wasn’t all that it could have been.

The second thing that kept me from becoming pessimistic about MfA’s prospect was that I could see with my own eyes that though the execution was flawed, the concepts that MfA was founded upon were right. Every time that I engaged a kid and could see them ponder politics (maybe for the first time), each time I felt a connection with someone who needed to be reached out to, and with every new voter I registered, I could see that the ideas behind Music for America were spot on. Having friends talk to friends about politics is the most effective and efficient way to enact political change. Embedding your political efforts and message within a cultural context that many identify with and enjoy is the best way to encourage political participation amongst people who aren’t engaged in the political process. Reaching out to kids and empowering them to stand up for themselves is the best way to ensure that we have a chance to win today and build a future progressive majority in this nation. But, without the infrastructure and people to support these ideas and this movement, much of our work was in vain. However, as the election came to an end I could see infrastructure starting to materialize in some areas, mostly on the media front. And after I finally met Philly’s independent music man Sean Agnew, an idea for how to build more started grow in my mind.