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There’s no question that voting was already being stressed by the time the second Women’s Marches occurred in 2018. You can see, “Grab ‘Em By the Ballot, Grab ‘Em By the Midterms “was another very common theme. And we’ve seen out of both of these movements, the Tea Party and the resistance, a remarkable upsurge of people running for office. These offices are not just the U.S. House but local and state legislative positions as well. For the resistance groups, this is something new, because Democrats had tended to neglect running for office at the local and state level in many of the states I’m visiting. There was an upsurge of people running for office around 2010 on the Republican side, and a comparable upsurge this year on the Democratic side. What’s different is that on the Democratic side it’s overwhelmingly women running for office—not only women, because in many cases it’s men backed by these women going door-to-door, knocking on the doors, like for Anthony Delgado, going door-to-door. So it’s not as if men are excluded or in any way discriminated against; it’s just that there are more women who are organizing and more women saying, “If they won’t do it right, we’ll do it.” I think that’s very much like somebody—one of the articles I read drew an analogy to the housework: if your husband can’t fold the laundry right, you’ll just do it. You’ll roll your eyes and do it instead. And I think this is very similar. It’s a pragmatic upsurge. We’ll see how many of these women win. Many of them are going to lose. But losing is also important as long as there is a presence, and as long as there’s somebody there to organize around and to make the arguments. Hopefully it will persist (I say that speaking in my citizen capacity). The November 2018 midterm elections will be pivotal. They’ll help us begin to answer the question of whether the widespread resistance that has emerged since Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans took over Washington will help the Democrats overcome what for them is a very different problem from what the Republicans faced in 2010, because Democrats usually don’t turn out in midterm elections. It’s a higher mountain to climb to see whether this resistance upsurge will help Democrats overcome their usual midterm turnout decline. And not only will they have to overcome it; they’ll have to overcome it by a lot to take enough seats in the House, and enough seats in state legislatures, and enough governorships, to really make a difference. I’m not sure what the impact of the recent Kavanaugh struggle will be. I do know that most of the women organizing in the local groups I talked about were not doing it mainly around #MeToo issues or mainly around abortion access issues. Like women have throughout American history, they were organizing around the full array of policy issues. And I think it may turn out that the Kavanaugh struggle has less of an immediate impact than we think. Will grassroots voluntary resistance groups remain active if Democrats win the House and make state and local gains? Equally important, will they
remain active if Democrats lose, as they will in many places? We don’t know yet. It remains to be seen. My research group will be continuing to monitor the situation, and we’ll see whether the impact of this round of citizen organizing is comparable to the last round that the Tea Party sparked in 2009 to ’11. The Tea Party persisted, and it remains to be seen whether today’s resistance will too.
HA
Saving America Once Again
Citizenship and Civil Disobedience
Discussion and Audience Q&A Peter Rosenblum: Thank you very much. The ground covered was extraordinary. So many of my questions you answered along the way. I guess I’ll just ask one very quick question, and then turn to the audience. You gave what comes across as what could be seen as an extraordinarily optimistic picture of the capacity in American society for self-organized grassroots groups that continue to operate in a way that is unaffected somehow in their core by the influences of power and money, whether it’s Fox News, or the Kochs, or—you didn’t say Soros, but we’ve been hearing that a lot. And in passing you mentioned someone like Robert Putnam, who told us years ago that this capacity was diminishing, or the sustainable capacity for this was gone. If there aren’t bowling leagues, is it possible to maintain this kind of structure, or will it come and go? What does Robert Putnam say to you? Does he look at you and say, “Oh my God, yes, this is a flash in the pan. We no longer have that capacity and a meaningful ability to sustain it.” Theda Skocpol: Well, actually, he’s come around. But look, both Professor Putnam and I, Bob and I, have documented in different ways and explained in different ways a long-term decline in ongoing civic organizations. In my case, I documented that they were usually multilevel—national, state, and local—where people just, through thick and thin and often not for political purposes as much as social purposes, continued to meet face-to-face. And there’s no question that those classic voluntary federations are mostly gone. I mean, persistent groups are now usually professionalized, usually have a lot of money, or spend a lot of time in fundraisers trying to raise more money. Furthermore, my research group has documented the activities of millionaires and billionaires who are organized on both the left and the right to give a lot of money to some of these professionally run groups. So the Tea Parties and the local resistance groups -- as electorally sparked citizen upsurges—are really pushing against the grain of the way in which organized American civic life has evolved since the late twentieth century; but they’re fascinatingly against the grain. They show that there’s something in America’s DNA that remains there. For one thing, the meetings are remarkably similar. And on the right, the Tea Parties start the way civic associations
Theda Skocpolz
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