Barack Obama’s remarkable victory in last year’s presidential elections should provide inspiration for progressives the world over. Certainly, British activists will rightly be looking across the Atlantic to see what lessons they can learn and apply to their own campaigns.
However, in seeking to understand all the extraordinary things that have happened in the US in the past 12 months, the British left needs to be very careful. It would be all too easy to draw very superficial lessons or to focus too heavily on emulating the actions of Obama’s campaign in a mechanistic sense, without questioning why what his team did worked so well. Effective e-campaigning requires something far more fundamental than setting up a Facebook group or asking supporters for donations in emails. Instead, to maximise the potential of the new communication technology for politics, Labour needs to examine its own institutions and assess how effectively they work in a 21st century context.
American parties seem to have a fundamental advantage in the digital era. Due to the twin doctrines of federalism and the separation of powers, they have long been more pluralistic organisations, lacking a strong sense of hierarchy. Additionally, the primary and caucus systems have preserved a very direct link between those seeking office and the citizenry, who have the option to unseat an incumbent, reject a frontrunner or back an outsider every election cycle. Parties that lack strong centralising institutions and foster internal competition in this way offer much greater space for the development of digital networks, both official and unofficial.
Compare this with British parties. They have highly formal institutional structures and remain very centralised. In part, these structures developed in response to the unitary nature of political authority in the UK. Additionally, changes in the media, including the rise of a more confrontational form of coverage and the development of 24-hour rolling news, only increased the incentive for parties to concentrate their activities in the hands of a small group of professionals. New Labour was perhaps the ultimate expression of such a political organisation.
However, while it was once hugely useful, it seems likely that such an approach will actively disadvantage parties in the future. We are leaving the mass media age, which was defined by collective information consumption, and entering a period of selective and participatory media. Digital television and radio, as well as the internet and user-generated content, means that every citizen is much better able to be their own editor and can tailor their media consumption to their own needs and interests. In order to compete in such an atomised environment, parties must also be decentralised.
This then is not about ‘using the internet’, but a much more fundamental change in attitude. Succeeding on the web is far less about producing content, but instead about creating environments able to spontaneously generate organisation, debate and activism, both online and offline.
Many Labour-supporting projects have not yet made this leap. While supportive sites, such as LabourList, do allow comments, the headline content is still produced in a very top-down fashion. An alternative would be to allow all users to set up their own blog pages where they could write and publish. Readers could then rate these pieces, with high-scoring items appearing on the front page. Such an approach is practised by major American political blogs, such as the Daily Kos and My Daily Democracy. However, as yet, no major Labour-supporting blog has implemented such a system.
Nor, though, has anyone on the right. It is very common to talk about a Conservative lead online, and it is certainly the case that their activist base seems more energised. However, it is also true to say that they have not yet harnessed the awesome potential of opening up their institutions and embracing interactivity. As a result, this is an area where, with the right approach, progressives can still be trailblazers.
I have a deep suspicion of anything which talks of being able to ‘spontaneously generate organisation’ – especially by blogs. At our last branch meeting we counted only one third of the membership with e-mail – how do we contact the others – it can only be by post, foot slogging and personal contact. Most Members of the no longer attend party meetings – very few come as delegates from the TUs. Political discussion is almost entirely absent; there is no longer ‘office’ or secretarial help; the youth and women’s sections are non existent. The organisation is kept alive by a skeleton of devoted – hardly any new young members at all – the brightest have gone off to the universities and will be politicised there mainly about green matters, opposition to wars, social problems but not about labour organisation.
Hi Leslie, thanks for the comment.
I tend to agree with your account, but interpret it in a different way. I would take it as evidence that the structures of political parties generally and Labour in particular are failing to engage people. OK – so young people don’t want to come to branch meetings. Fine, think of another way of engaging them on their terms. The model of organization Labour employs is not divinely ordained, but was created as an effective way to generate collective action in the early 20th century. We shouldn’t be surprised that today, a hundred years later, the same institutions don’t fit the mode of people’s existence.
You said yourself that people are still interested in politics, although this tends to focus on single issues such as the environment. The question is how you achieve a hybrid political movement that can draw people into a range of forms of participation in ways that suit them.
Hi Nick,
Hope you’re well.
Isn’t “allow all users to set up their own blog pages where they could write and publish. Readers could then rate these pieces, with high-scoring items appearing on the front page” what LabourHome does? If so, it doesn’t seem to work very well.
I guess one difference is that DailyKos and MyDD have a core of regular, high quality columnists as well as the user diaries, which LabourHome doesn’t have.
Hey Dan. I’m good. Hope you are doing well. If that is how LabourHome is structued, they certainly don’t make clear in the “About” section, although having a play with it, it might be closer to the model I advocate. However, there are still a couple of problems. It is not very transparent in explaining how things get “recommended” and it also doesn’t link up comment with organization/mobilization very effectively (another characteristic of US blogs). That is in part cultural thing (you need people who want to organize, that is certainly correct) but you also need to give them the tools to do it.
Even in terms of comment, as you suggest, the ideal scenerio is a blending of senior politicians and grassroots activists – essentially a flattening of hierarchy.