Jo Freeman and Political Culture
Jason Oakes Guest Post
Hi all it’s Alex. We will be publishing more when 2024 is over — myself especially, as I’ve had a reasonably involved health journey over the past year. Today’s free post is a guest post from Known CVAR Associate Jason Oakes, a systems biology and philosophy of science friend. If you would like to become a Known CVAR Associate in the new year, just let me know.
In 2019, Jacobin magazine republished Jo Freeman’s famous 1972 article “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”. That article, which grew out of Freeman’s experiences as an organizer and activist in the Civil Rights and Women’s movements in the late ‘60s had quickly become a cult classic in the social movements, particularly within left-anarchism. It gave a clear account of the limitations of ultra decentralized and informal organizational models popular in that milieu, and connected those limitations to broader patterns of success and failure. It’s a great article and everyone should read it, but it is not the one we are going to look at today. Instead, we are going to look at Freeman’s “The Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican Parties”, on American electoral politics since 1972, rather than up to 1972.
So why cover this bit of 80s cheese instead of the 70s classic? Simple: because Jo Freeman is a great political mind, and her work deserves attention beyond “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”. Her analysis of the deeper institutional aspects of social movements could be so useful for many Americans in our current political situation, and yet her voice is largely ignored.
“The Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican Parties” is specifically about domestic US politics in the 1970s and 1980s and starts by asserting, straightforwardly, that the Republican and Democratic parties differ primarily in their political culture. Freeman defines political culture from International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences as
...the set of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments which give order and meaning to a political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behavior in the political system…
Freeman is talking about institutions here: the regularized but flexible ways the party does things in a local situation. Looking at institutions in this manner is a methodological view which is very close to my own, so I am sympathetic. Freeman then lays out her basic argument, which has two points:
There are two fundamental differences between the parties in which all others are rooted. The first one is structural: In the Democratic Party power flows upward and in the Republican Party power flows downward. The second is attitudinal: Republicans perceive themselves as insiders even when they are out of power and Democrats perceive themselves as outsiders even when they are in power.
The “attitudinal” point is simple. Democratic operatives here see themselves as permanent outsiders even within their own party, no matter their status. On the other hand, Republican operatives here think of themselves as being rightfully and permanently insiders, regardless of whether they are in power or not. These micro-level differences add up to some significantly different macro-level dynamics. The representative Democratic operator here is an individual forcing their way up the stream of the party, but the representative Republican operator is one who signs on to advance a party consensus. As a consequence of this, power in the Democratic party is the power to say No to a policy or platform, while power in the Republican party is the power to say Yes.
With this essential argument in mind, I’m going to paraphrase and comment. In paraphrasing, my goal is to explicate Freeman’s argument as it relates to the political landscape of the US in the 1970s and ‘80s. The comments are to relate Freeman’s argument to what has been changing in US politics since the 1980s, especially since the first Trump campaign. We will see if Freeman’s evaluation of the centrality of political culture and descriptions of those cultures are still accurate, and if the evaluation can be remediated if things have changed. The first part of this essay, the paraphrase/explication of Freeman’s argument, will follow the structure of her article. Finally, I’ll comment/evaluate the status of the argument in our current situation as best as I can.
Party Structure and Political Power, or Constituencies vs. Big Men
Freeman references Ronald Reagan’s 1984 nomination acceptance speech to draw out a truism that Democrats might want to deny, but which actually reflects something in American political culture: the Democratic party deals with people as members of constituencies (or, disparagingly, “special interest groups”) while the Republicans treat people “as individuals” (or, disparagingly, “cash cows”). This truism describes something essential about how both parties do business.
As mentioned above, power in the Democratic Party flows upwards from the membership towards the leadership. Therefore membership must organize and use some mechanism for transmitting power. That mechanism is the organized constituency. Patronage gets divvied up by the organized constituency. Complaints and agitation for change get made by and through the organized constituency. The New Deal coalition of labor, African Americans, progressives, intellectuals, and the white ethnic urban machines set the pattern for this kind of constituency management. Since the 1970s some of those constituencies have declined in power, namely labor and urban interests. Meanwhile, new social movements have grown up and joined the scene. The women’s movement, gay rights, environmentalists, immigrants, Asian Americans, and so on. But through it all at its root the post-war Democratic Party is a party of constituencies.
The Republican Party, by contrast, is a party of Big Men. The Mitt Romney Company, the Trump Mafia, the Bush Family, et cetera. These groups tend to cohere around a specific man who can command loyalty to his particular project and who can distribute patronage personally. The Republicans do have caucuses and organized constituencies, but they are much less important than geographical, ideological, and personality-based organizations. Republican constituency groups will also tend to have, from a Democratic perspective, an “astroturf” feel, rather than a feeling of genuine grassroots energy. Compare the Log Cabin Republicans (the organization for Republicans who are gay) with the National Organization of Women (the main liberal feminist organization in the US, officially non-partisan but closely aligned in practice with the Democratic party) or the Congressional Black Caucus (the official caucus for African-American congressman, officially non-partisan but no Black Republican has joined in five years). Where the Democrats are constituted as a coalition of interest groups, the Republicans act as a collection of local notables.
This split in political culture is important because it determines the crucial direction of the flow of knowledge: how the parties get information about the intensity and distribution of problems, how they find innovative solutions, how they connect those solutions to coalition members, and so forth. For example, The National Organization of Women is constantly trying to squeeze information and ideas about its demographic (women) and its solutions (liberal feminism) into the Democratic leadership.
The role of constituency groups and organized caucuses in the Republican Party, however, is not primarily to bring ideas to the attention of the leadership. Rather, the role of constituency groups and organized caucuses in the Republican Party is to distribute information from the leadership to the entourage. The postwar history of the Republican party, from this perspective, is not told in terms of competing constituencies, but rather in grand top down national strategies: Eisenhower’s grudging official alliance with New Deal bureaucracy, Nixonian Hooverism & the Southern Strategy, Reagan’s extremist neoliberalism & alliance with religious fundamentalism - no group really called for any of these.
This all leads to a question of power and legitimacy within each party. How do you get it and how is it demonstrated? In Freeman's analysis, legitimacy for Democrats derives from the answer to the question of who you represent. For Republicans, it is based on who you know and who you are. The different ways legitimacy is acquired and wielded internal to each party has significant effects on how overall policy platforms get constructed and how political careers progress.
World View
These different ways of interacting with the government and wielding power internal to each party flow from their different institutional cultures, as well as their differing self-conceptions. Democrats feel that a strong central government is “necessary in order to counterbalance private economic domination” but they also feel themselves to be on the periphery of society, and therefore feel more vulnerable to abuse by the government. Republicans also feel ambivalent about state power, but for inverse reasons. The power centers of the party are generally established men who own property, so they are not big fans of redistribution or regulation, for obvious reasons. On the other hand Republican political culture sees itself as being at home in power, as representing the real America, and therefore belonging in charge. They feel like insiders.
The insider/outsider distinction helps explain the different weight the parties put on their political virtues, and how those virtues relate to the parties’ different visions of the national interest. What Freeman means by this is that Republicans strive to promote “individual success” as synonymous with national greatness, but Democrats equate it with “fairness.”
What makes a country great? Republicans say: when everyone has a chance to succeed as an individual. Democrats say: no, it is when everyone is treated fairly. Finally, Freeman observes that the combination of the importance of group identity for Democrats plus their feeling of perennial outsider status leads to a situation where
Democratic outsiders for whom a group identity is important are quite ambivalent about exactly what they do want. In its own way, each different group experiences a great deal of tension between a desire for self-affirmation and one for assimilation.
This is an important point that we’ll return to in a moment.
Organizational Style & Dissent vs. Disloyalty
Party constituencies organize themselves as separate caucuses within the party and use those caucuses as platforms to get their policy preferences onto the agenda of the larger party. Freeman quotes a description of an internal Democratic Party fight in Massachusetts over who got to be the State Party Chair.
In the Democratic party the affair could best be called a brawl all the way -- at least as the press reported it, no doubt with some gleeful exaggeration. Statements and counter-statements to the press, accusations of falsehood mutually tossed back and forth, gave the dispute most of the elements of an Irish donnybrook, minus only the swinging of fists. There were threats of that too.”
Note well this scene occurred in 1954! The Dems have been like this for a while. It’s not some scary new ideology that makes the inner organizational fights feel so intense! Meanwhile the Republican conventions of this period look and feel like country club meetings: closed, private, quiet, consensus-building exercises.
Freeman then notes in a paragraph so important I’ll just quote it as a block: in the Democratic Party you get on the agenda by picking a fight.
In the Democratic Party, keeping quiet is the cause of atrophy and speaking out is a means of access. Although the Party continues to be one of multiple power centers with multiple access points, both the type and importance of powerful groups within it has changed over time. State and local parties have weakened in the last few decades and the influence of national constituency groups has grown. The process of change has resulted in a great deal of conflict as former participants resist declining influence (e.g. the South, Chicago's Mayor Daley) while newer ones jocky for position (women and blacks). Successfully picking fights is the primary way by which groups acquire clout within the Party.
This is, I reiterate, so important to understanding not just the politics of the Democratic party but also to understanding the perennial tumult and discontent within progressive 501(c)3 social service and cultural organizations. It’s not new, folks!
Furthermore, picking a fight can be a smart move for your career even if you don’t win the actual fight. Willingness to enter into conflict in the Democratic Party can serve as a way of demonstrating power through successful representation of one of the party’s group constituencies. Freeman gives the examples of the fight over “equal division” in 1976, the National Organization of Women’s threats to not endorse Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH campaign in 1984. None of those challenges were successful within the Democratic party but they did establish a new generation of party activists as contenders inside the party. This finding about conflict and its purpose and results relates to the next point Freeman illustrates: how the parties differ with respect to the display of loyalty and party discipline.
Maybe not surprisingly, the role that open conflict plays in each party also affects how conflicts are ended and their repercussions. Freeman says that while Republican political players do fight, they usually do it in private, and are much more likely to hold grudges than Democrats. Similarly, Democrats may pick fights to get on the agenda, but they don’t expect to be shunned afterwards. Republicans, by contrast, tended to place a greater emphasis on public conformity and tended to punish breaking the public conduct rules much more harshly. Freeman references the famous 11th Commandment: thou shalt not criticize a fellow Republican (at least until recently).
The Future
What sticks with me when I re-read The Political Cultures of the Democratic and Republican Parties is actually not anything about the political parties themselves, but rather something about the political culture of the Democratic Party. I would argue that Freeman’s characterization also characterizes progressive cultural projects as well as the non-profit system, the so-called Non Profit Industrial Complex or NPIC. There’s been a lot of soul-searching and complaining about how badly a lot of these organizations seem to be run, and some of that may actually be correct.
But the very fact of social conflict and petty fight-picking in these organizations does not, in itself, seem to me dysfunctional in the way it appears to others. It just seems like the political culture of the Democratic party has “won,” so to speak, and its features are now shared very widely in the worlds of the NPIC.
There is a political (or I guess organizational) culture that emphasizes bottom-up flows of power and information. There is a relatively flat organizational structure that mistrusts hierarchy in word if not in deed. There are a number of strong norms about group membership and group representation as the basis for allocating organizational power. There is an ambivalent relationship to the central government that combines an agenda of restraining local and private power while simultaneously fearing government repression due to the vulnerable status of many groups in the organizational coalition. And most importantly we can see the convention of picking fights to get on the agenda and internal campaigns as a means for lower status activists to oppose incumbents and raise their own standing.
The tendency is to see these fractious and sure yes maybe sometimes dysfunctional institutions as some kind of novelty, but one of the things Freeman’s essay shows is that ethnic ward politicking is a fairly old American way of organizing things. “Irish donnybrooks” at the level of the state party and local committee were just understood as normal and the price of doing business.
The existence of this tendency also suggests that the means to amend or improve organizations in the nonprofit sector or the universities could go a couple of different ways. The first would be to just accept the system as-is and accede to the agenda setting demands of the internal organizational challengers, but then be willing to “kiss and make up” (Freeman’s characterization) and get on with it. The other approach would be to initiate a “good government” movement aimed at improving the internal processes and controls of the non-profit sector. That seems like a much heavier lift but also one that might be worth thinking about.
But regarding the major US political parties, what has changed? With the Dems it seems like there has been an exodus of the most conservative members of the party, especially Southerners who previously had strong generational aversion to the Republicans as much as loyalty to the Democrats. But from a structural perspective, this situation is totally consistent with how the party has functioned for a long time. One interest group falls from the center of the party, or even falls out of it entirely. Others rise. It’s business as usual from that perspective.
In some ways there is more grassroots energy in the Republican Party since the election of Barack Obama and the Great Financial Crisis. The Tea Party, Birthers, the whole Trump rally phenomenon, Qanon. Not to mention the extra-parliamentary “Alt Right” fascists. But some things remain the same. The Tea Party was notoriously astro turfed, not that it was unpopular, just that it was not the manifestation of an agenda emerging from the populace. Some of the more hard right wing organizations do seem to have a mind of their own, so maybe one way to put it is the Republicans do have at least one organized interest group now that exerts its own grassroots political power. It’s just that that group is, in a word, nativists.
This might be bad for Republican performance going forwards, but on the other hand the patrimonial structure of the GOP means their tendency to drive away other voter blocs may be constrained by the siloed patronage streams. On the other other hand, the old “11th Commandment” (thou shalt not criticize a fellow Republican) has clearly been violated by the Trump campaign and administration. Trump wrecked the country club aura of the Republicans and the party, despite being one of the most country clubby of Republicans. It remains to be seen if Trump as a phenomenon has totally reworked how the Republican Party does business, or if he was just another in a series of Big Men who was owed loyalty and deference. In other words: more of the same, but more so.
John Ganz’s recent book When the Clock Broke on conservative political culture in the 1990s is good on this. This is probably also bad news for national political culture going forward, but you didn’t need me to tell you that.