Mobilizing vs. Organizing revelation

Over the course of planning our PA conference this year, I had the pleasure of having dinner with the father of the PA movement, Dennis Donovan, who is currently a professor and organizer extraordinaire at Augsburg College. He opened my eyes to the international scope of the PA movement, and it's potential to change the institution of democracy both here and abroad.
(He also inspired me to blog about PA, based on the awesome Augsburg blog, Democracy U, which you should check out!).

At the PA conference, I presented a talk on the role of politics and media on community organizing, and how they can be used as resources. While speaking with him about it, we talked about what's wrong with democracy. I know, don't get started, right? From raging intellectuals convinced that democracy is an ethnocentric excuse to impose some sort of American imperialism on the world, to the regular blue-collar American that can see his vote squashed by the 1-percenter trash-talking politicians that are supposed to represent him, democracy is a tricky issue. I must admit that I, myself, have often felt that the use of the words "politics" and "democracy"  in PA reeked of the kind of WWII propaganda that brought young men to the front lines in the 40s and the picket lines during Vietnam.

I used to be really involved in politics - while a liberal moderate, I used to scoff at people who "weren't interested" in politics. How could you not be interested in the policies that shape and affect your every societal interaction? I really believed that good policies were like science - that if you were really smart, you could create a fix-all and change the whole system in one fell swoop.

Around the same time I became disenchanted with politics, community organizing really started to "click" for me. I think Dennis Donovan framed it nicely in his discussion of tangible democracy: its a difference of mobilizing vs. organizing.

As Donovan pointed out, political mobilizers give you a ready-made cause to subscribe to. They appeal to your self-interest, and encourage you to insert it into their agenda, without allowing you to shape it. (Although, the Obama campaign frequently calls me and asks for "advice" on the direction of the campaign. I love you and your community organizing background, my man Barack, but I ain't fooled.)

By the middle of May, I realized that I'm no longer interested in policies. They are based on mobilizing tactics, and ultimately, they mop up the water without turning off the tap - they treat the symptoms of a disease that plagues our institutions, but is rooted in the structure of our society itself. I truly believe that top-down changes don't work, and that systemic change must originate organically in the community.

This may seem obvious, but I have always been interested in politics (the traditional use of the word, not the PA use), and further, believed that organizing and mobilizing were not mutually exclusive. I never considered politics something to "believe" in, just something to be "involved in." That is, until I didn't believe it any more.

Also, did you catch that use of passive voice up there? Notice how "believe" is active and "to be involved" is passive? Yeah, I'm an editor. But I think it reinforces my point.

While I think that organizers are fighting the good fight (never going back!), I still take issue with some of the PA pillars. I think mobilizers have one point - people need something concrete to believe in before they can believe in themselves.

I do truly think that although the idea of building a project from a foundation of relationships is great, PA projects are not houses. They do not form linearly. I think that projects need to be a core of the process all along. I know it's doesn't tickle the teleological corners of the soul. But it works, and a good coach could implement the PA concepts throughout a project. The project mobilizes students, yes, but in a way that allows them an actionable piece of it along the way.

While I think that changes should come from an organizing perspective, I do think that mobilizing is a talent that has a place in PA. What that place is, I don't know. Maybe I'm jaded, but I would definitely add "mobilizing" to my list of doubts that need to be explored within the PA model.