Why are Google, Facebook and YouTube three of the biggest brands in the world? Why is community policing so important? Why are personal budgets breaking new ground in health and social care? Why is green politics here to stay? Why is Barack Obama set to become the most powerful person in the world? All these questions have a common answer: people power is becoming one of the defining forces of this century.
Mass production and one-to-many communication are giving way to something more exciting – mass participation. The organizations, governments and political parties that best understand and harness this power are those that belong to the future. That is the lesson of the Obama campaign and of the changing world around us.
Let us be clear. That Obama won an entirely different election to the next one the Labour party has to fight hardly needs saying. British politics operates in a very different context on many levels. But we need to make sure we don’t let our interest in the new politics of America become a mere spectator sport – some new political soap opera to replace The West Wing. There are some very serious lessons that can be learned from the way in which Obama and his team achieved a victory many thought would never happen. Above all, the Labour party must embrace movement politics – returning to its roots as a popular, grassroots movement.
The first prerequisite is that movements need a destination. Consider the civil rights movement. The green movement. The Make Poverty History movement. All these had a clear, positive vision at their heart that people could unite behind. In Britain, Labour is, and must remain, the natural home for anyone impatient with the establishment and ambitious about what can still be achieved in and by society. Our party was born out of trade unionists fighting for workers’ rights; we have been at our best when we govern as one – creating the welfare state in the ashes of the second world war and bringing ‘minority’ campaigns for equality sweeping the Commonwealth into the mainstream. This vision of the good society is the political ground we must stake out. The challenge is not to achieve a progressive consensus – that is too static. We must create a progressive movement.
Meanwhile, we should have nothing to fear from a Conservative party that lost any sense of ambition and idealism with the fall of the Berlin wall. Without the threat of Communism to fight against, the modern Conservatism has little to fight for. If Obama’s campaign motif was ‘yes we can’ then David Cameron’s politics are closer to ‘no we can’t’. For movement politics to work, people need their sights raised by a positive vision of the good society, not a Britain talked down by negative and disingenuous language of a ‘broken society’.
Second, movement politics requires giving people the ownership and the tools to run their own campaigns, shape their own messages, build their own local organisations. It means being more ambitious not just for what we can achieve as a party, but in the local change others can achieve when we empower them to make it. It also means reaping the benefits of spontaneity and idiosyncrasy: if your values are clear enough, individuals in different communities and constituencies can take charge on the ground, just as they did for Obama.
People respond when they are given the tools to do these things. In the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, on the day before the election, over 2,500 volunteers, including some of my own staff, turned out with clipboards, laptops and mobile phones to play their part. Some 45,000 doors were knocked across the city – and a state which George W Bush had won by nine points went Democratic for the first time since 1976. In a world dominated by media grids and careful choreography it is challenging for political parties to let go, but to achieve this kind of enthusiasm that is exactly what is needed. Obama built a huge support base outside the traditional structures of the Democratic party, where others had their hands on the levers of power. Now the Labour party must learn this lesson. A generation of young activists in particular – school governors, mentors, environmental campaigners – risks being disconnected from our party if we do not adapt both our structures and our mindset to involve them.
Third, people need connecting with one another if they are to feel part of something bigger than themselves. Building on Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, the legacy of the 2008 campaign in the States will be a network of organisational structures across the country (‘We’ve got three offices in Boise, Idaho, for goodness sake’, one campaign staffer told me, bemused at the level of grassroots support in even the most traditional Republican bastions). At neighbourhood level the campaign was driven by an almost obsessive drive to register, train, connect and organise volunteers, not just voters – then asking those volunteers each to find 10 more. The results were quite breathtaking. People respond best not just to slick adverts, but to other people like them ringing them who are ready to evangelise for a candidate and a political vision.
Fourth, the internet can help political parties do all of these things – but only when cyberspace connects to the real world. Dean’s campaign was innovative and groundbreaking, but its flaw was that it never grew beyond a relatively small group of highly committed people, many of whom were most excited by the medium itself. Obama’s campaign has used technology, and the internet in particular, as part of an overall campaign strategy. It has been used as a tool not just for getting out votes, but for creating and enabling social action in communities. He has revolutionised campaign finance, creating a genuine ‘small dollar democracy’ and telling the whole Democratic party no longer to fund their campaigns with special interest money. And he used sophisticated data on voting intentions to great effect, speaking to people about what matters to them.
Finally, genuine movements can’t just be about getting elected. Creating and harnessing a movement means connecting to communities beyond the traditional frontiers of our party. During the election, we witnessed Obama mobilise his vast database of volunteers to drop their clipboards and help the victims of the devastating Midwest floods earlier this year, encouraging supporters to send donations not to him but to the Red Cross relief effort. And in his speeches, Obama repeatedly said that this campaign was ‘not about me, but about you’ – urging people to join and volunteer in not-for-profit organisations, campaigns on the environment or in faith groups, and becoming community organisers beyond politics.
There are huge positives for the Labour party to take from what we have witnessed over the last two years. Obama has also showed that the centre-left can campaign as confident, unashamed progressives – and win. Just days later, the people of Glenrothes agreed: the Tories lost their deposit, the Liberal Democrats fell back hugely by failing to offer any clear vision for the future, and the divisiveness of the SNP was rejected utterly. They also rallied round a candidate from outside the political class: someone who they could identify with and believe in. If we can repeat these ingredients, local area by local area, while connecting people to something bigger than themselves, then the Labour party, which began as a popular movement a century ago, can achieve the same again.