Until the Left invests in local orgs that matter in people’s daily lives and scaling that up, it’s likely to keep losing to the Right
Amid the deluge of reporting and commentary on the leak of the Supreme Court’s pending ruling overturning the right to abortion, one number grabbed my attention. The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), which started in 1968 as a group of Catholic bishops opposed to state abortion laws, now says it oversees more than 3,000 local chapters under 50 state affiliates. “We’ve been working towards this goal for many years,” says Carol Tobias, its president.
How many advocacy organizations in America claim to have 3,000 local chapters? The ACLU has 54 state offices and no local chapters. Planned Parenthood says it has 16 million supporters, and through its state affiliates supports hundreds of local clinics. But it has no local chapters. The National Abortion Rights Action League says it has 2.5 million members but lists only three state offices on its website and no local chapters. Outside of the abortion rights arena, some environmental groups have locals, like the Sierra Club, which boasts a mix of about 72 state and local chapters.
Maybe NRLC is exaggerating how many chapters it actually has. I drilled down on their state affiliate pages and found just 21 listed in my home state of New York, and a few of those lacked any contact information. Florida Right to Life lists just 13. Nebraska Right to Life gives no details on its local chapters. Kansans for Life lists just three offices. Without a lot more research, it’s hard to say if NRLC is really as thick on the ground as it claims. But I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, because there’s clearly a powerful grassroots movement pushing for the banning of abortion. Otherwise a cause that is supported by a minority of Americans wouldn’t be this close to winning an unprecedented change in our laws.
Why is the Right more powerful than the Left in America today? One part of the answer is that it has benefited for decades from a relatively small group of wealthy, ideologically motivated donors, who have made huge, long-term investments in building the organizational infrastructure — think-tanks, policy centers, legal centers, leadership training institutes, and media properties — that pump out a constant stream of talking points and opeds and push, in coordinated ways, for goals like tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and “restoring family values.” The left’s big donors are far more likely to fund short-term campaigns for specific policy wins or electoral fights, something I wrote about in detail on The Connector, my newsletter, today.
But the other reason is functional, whether this infrastructure is built on top of organizations that are relevant to people’s daily lives or not. “The right is primarily built on functional organizations that people join in order to get tangible value (economic, information/media, or community) and the left is primarily built on issue-based organizations,” says Peter Murray, a progressive organizer who has long studied social movements. On the right, he points to Christian churches, the NRA and gun clubs/store, right-wing media and business associations, each of which are profitable, multibillion-dollar enterprises in close relationship to tens of millions of Americans. The left used to have a similar infrastructure in labor unions and liberal/Black churches, but both are in steep decline (labor especially due to attacks on organizing).
Murray adds, “We’ve tried to replace functional organizations with issue organizations, but issue organizations never truly scale — in terms of money, depth of engagement, or scale of relationships — because they cater to the tiny fraction of Americans who are activists.”
So in the context of the fight over reproductive freedom, Planned Parenthood’s local clinics are definitely examples of functional organizing infrastructure, but they are constantly under siege and hardly act the same way Christian churches or local gun clubs as foundations for local community organizing or power. And the anti-abortion movement has built its own network of local “pregnancy crisis centers” that attempt to directly interfere with the operation of reproductive health clinics. The playing field is hardly even.
There’s a hard lesson to be learned from the pending Supreme Court decision. Organized minorities beat disorganized majorities. Until the American center-left invests in the kinds of community organizing that Murray is talking about — delivering real services to people at the base with an eye to scaling up towards state and national power — it’s likely to keep losing to its better organized adversaries.