Like Dana R. Fisher, I make my living as an academic. And so I know where Activism, Inc. came from. It came from the relentless pressure all scholars face to produce original arguments. What is sad, though, is that in her desperation to say something new, Fisher forgot that true originality comes only from relentlessly testing provocative arguments against the data. Instead she adopted the lazy version of originality, which is simply to say something bizarre.
Fisher’s topic is the increasing professionalization of the women’s, environmental, and social justice movements—their growing determination not just to be right but to win. Her thesis, if you can believe it, is that this professionalization is a bad thing.
Fisher’s contention is so strange—so redolent of just what the oil and chemical companies, the gay bashers, and the right-wing religious zealous want us lefties to believe — that I confess that I would not bother trying to refute it if I did not feel a sentimental attachment to the progressive movements. You see, I spent seven years as an environmental activist before joining Fisher in the considerably easier and better-compensated world of academia. As late as 2004 I escaped from the archives for a few hours to help train the young activists who produced the heavy Democratic turnout that would have turned George Bush out of office had he not received the bin Laden bump.
In Activism, Inc., Fisher asks how door-to-door and curbside canvassing by progressive groups contributes to or detracts from the progressive movement as a whole.
The most interesting and original chapters of Fisher’s book are the ones based on interviews of young canvassers (largely college students on summer break) with the “People’s Project” – a pseudonym for an actual national organization that conducts fundraising and membership-building canvasses for a variety of progressive groups (and for which I worked during the summer of 1982 and then full-time from 1985 to 1988).
If Fisher had been transparent about the results of her interactions with People’s Project canvassers, she could have presented a methodologically solid and interesting account of why canvassers do what they do, how the experience changes them, and how it affects their future political involvement. But Fisher seems intent instead on a different goal – solving the problems of “the left” in America – for which her data collection is inadequate and her arguments flawed. Ultimately, Fisher’s efforts to paint canvassing operations like the People’s Project as the source of those problems strain both common sense and logic and are ill-supported by her own data. As a result, Activism, Inc. fails on two counts: as an honest, accurate and complete depiction of the attitudes of progressive youth doing challenging political work and as a critique of the organizing strategies of the left in America.
Fisher’s thesis is that the People’s Project and organizations like it damage progressive causes by burning out the young people who staff the canvasses, thus presumably turning them off from future political involvement, by increasing the “distance” between national progressive groups and their members, and by substituting themselves for more authentic forms of grassroots organizing.
Of her three central arguments, Fisher’s interviews with canvassers are truly sufficient to address only the first. And Fisher is emphatic about what she found:
"[M]any, perhaps too many, young people are being chewed up and spit out by this standardized model of activism that treats idealistic young people as interchangeable cogs in the machine of grassroots politics in America. The fact that it quickly burns out and turns off so many of its recruits adds to its negative effect on progressive politics."
What is the support for this statement? Fisher isn’t clear, but there are a few possibilities.
First, Fisher presents excerpts of her interviews with canvassers, which she knits together into a composite narrative of a typical canvasser’s journey through the People’s Project. In those excerpts, Fisher quotes several canvassers who did not enjoy the experience, including one who specifically describes having “burned out,” and several who had issues with particular aspects of the job or the Project. Yet, she also quotes several canvassers who enjoyed the job, who returned to do it again, and who felt themselves to be making a genuine and important contribution to social change. She gives us no indication of which group is in the majority, other than to note that “a number” of the canvassers she spoke to had decided to work outside of politics by the time she followed up with them a year later. And she provides no assessment of how many disillusioned canvassers she found or of how many, in her judgment, might be “too many.”
Fisher’s opacity about the results of her interviews is odd, since she appears to have collected the data in such a way that would make a quantitative analysis possible. In the Appendix, Fisher notes that she coded the responses from her semi-structured interviews with canvassers in order to draw patterns among the cases. Yet, detailed results of her analysis of the data are rarely to be found in Activism, Inc.
Where Fisher does share her data, the results generally undercut rather than support her assertion that “many” canvassers are so burnt out by the experience that they eschew political activism. For example:
"I asked all of the canvassers how they intended to continue their political and environmental activities after the summer. Almost 100 percent of them told me that canvassing had given them a chance to participate in the political process on a regular basis … and that they intended to stay involved in politics after the summer. And most of them followed through: within the year 95 percent of them had written or telephoned an editor or a public official, or had signed a petition about issues that concerned them; 79 percent had attended a public meeting; 77 percent had voted in a national or state election; and 72 percent had participated in a protest or boycott."
Indeed, Fisher presents a statistical analysis (referenced only in a footnote and in the Appendix) showing that these rates of participation are significantly higher than a national sample. The lack of a control group of similarly situated young people with similar politics who choose not to canvass prevents one from coming to any defensible conclusions about the future political activity of canvassers versus their peers. But the strength of Fisher’s data suggests that young people who canvass may be more, and not less, likely to engage in progressive political activity as a result of their experience. Why Fisher does not make a bigger deal of these findings that undermine her central thesis – even if only to explain them away – is a mystery. Instead, she simply seems content to bury them.
The only other possible source of support for Fisher’s assertion is a model she constructs describing the percentage of canvassers who make it through the various stages of the People’s Project recruitment and training process. Indeed, the vast majority of those who initially apply for a job with the People’s Project, according to Fisher’s data, ultimately find it too difficult, too strenuous or too ill-suited to their personality to achieve success. (Fisher notes that the Project enforces fairly rigorous standards for fundraising and that canvassing, in and of itself, is a challenging job.) But Fisher does not know how these would-be canvassers felt about their experience or what they did after their canvass experience was over because she never asked them. (Fisher’s data collection agreement with the People’s Project included only canvassers who had made it through the initial training.)
Fisher’s own take on the People’s Project seeps into her model of canvasser retention and promotion, in which she defines key steps as follows:
On Staff: Is the canvasser comfortable with the long hours and low pay, and does he/she consistently make [the fundraising] quota?
Promotion to Leadership Role: Is the canvasser willing to train for a job that requires even more time and pays a lower wage?
Put that way, Fisher insinuates that a canvasser would have to be a dupe or a fool to stick with the job or to try out for a leadership role. The questions in her model do not suggest that there might be benefits to canvassing – whether they be feelings of fulfillment from being involved in important work or the acquisition of skills – even though canvassers cited these and other factors as reasons to continue their work.
Fisher’s own data suggest that, for many canvassers, these benefits are sufficient to outweigh the challenges of the job. Of those she interviewed during the course of their canvassing experience, 65 percent said they would canvass again the following summer if they had the chance. While only 14 percent of those she followed up with a year later were actually canvassing, Fisher does not tell us whether those who opted not to return had changed their minds about canvassing, had changed their personal priorities, or had other life circumstances intervene.
So, from Fisher’s detailed interviews with 115 canvassers across the country, we learn the following: some canvassers enjoy their experience and some don’t. And most of those who canvass stay involved in politics in some way and are more likely to stay involved than their peers. The legions of “chewed up,” “spit out” young activists, if they exist, are nowhere to be found in the data Fisher presents to us.
(To be fair, we also learn a great deal about canvassers’ initial motivations for taking the job, their family histories, and their thoughts on various aspects of how the People’s Project is run, among other things. But none of these data points are directly tied to Fisher’s central thesis that the People’s Project is systematically burning out and turning off young progressives, and most are backed only by selective quotations from canvassers and vague “some,” “many,” “most”-type quantification.)
For all the weakness in Fisher’s case that the People’s Project is sapping the energy from the next generation of progressive activists, the case for Fisher’s other major arguments is even weaker. Fisher argues that what she calls the “outsourcing” of grassroots outreach to organizations like the People’s Project increases the “distance” between progressive groups and their members. The author seems to recognize, rightly, that her interviews with canvassers can shed only limited light on this question, and so Fisher augments her research with interviews with several representatives of groups that had contracted with the People’s Project to run their canvass operations.
To support her argument, Fisher also cites research showing that national organizations whose members largely participate by sending checks do not have a particularly tight bond with their members. This is not an original insight. But what Fisher is trying to tell us is that the act of “outsourcing,” of hiring another organization to run a grassroots canvass, increases this “distance.” Not only can she not support this argument, but she actually suggests the opposite, stating at one point that “[e]ven when these organizations ran their own canvasses, their members were not necessarily any more engaged.”
According to Fisher’s research, therefore, there does not seem to be any inherent difference in the strength of affiliation between members and progressive organizations based on whether canvasses are run by the organizations themselves or are outsourced to the People’s Project. But even this conclusion – which, again, is contrary to the argument she intends to make – cannot be taken too seriously since it appears to be based only on conversations with a few high-ranking staff of groups that had hired the People’s Project to run their canvasses and not surveys or interviews with the groups’ members.
Such illogic and self-contradiction are common in Activism, Inc. At one point, shortly after claiming that the People’s Project “has become one of the very few paid channels into left-leaning national groups from the local level,” Fisher notes that she could identify only one former People’s Project canvasser now working for an organization that had outsourced its canvassing to the Project. This leads Fisher to suggest that “it is not clear that the People’s Project is doing such a great job of training the future leaders of the progressive movement.” Either the People’s Project is the all-powerful “gatekeeper” she claims it to be, holding the key to a future in progressive politics for young people, or it is a failure in moving young people into jobs in progressive politics. It cannot logically be both.
The final, and most poorly cobbled together argument in Activism, Inc. is Fisher’s contention that paid canvasses of the type run by the People’s Project substitute themselves for other, more authentic forms of grassroots activism. To illustrate her point, Fisher compares the voter mobilization strategies of the Democrats and Republicans (and like-minded “527” organizations) in the 2004 election. The Republican strategy, which Fisher describes as relying on networks of volunteer Republican activists embedded in local communities, was, she suggests, more successful than the Democratic strategy, which she describes as reliant on a hastily patched together network of paid activists and volunteers imported from other states.
There are multiple problems with Fisher’s analysis. First, it is completely divorced from the analysis of “outsourcing” and the operation of canvasses for fundraising and membership development that form the core of the rest of the book. The only connection with outsourcing is the fact that the Democratic voter mobilization apparatus was centralized in 527 groups like Americans Coming Together. Some of these 527 groups also canvassed. But there is no serious analysis of whether a Democratic Party-run (as opposed to “outsourced”) voter mobilization would have worked any better than that put together by the 527 groups; of what, if any, the differences might be between fundraising canvasses run by the People’s Project and election-time get-out-the-vote efforts; or of whether the mobilization effort used by the Republicans, a good portion of which relied upon data-mining and direct mail was even a replicable or wise option for the Democratic Party.
Moreover, Fisher neither undertakes nor cites any systematic study or evidence that the Republican voter identification and mobilization model actually performed any better than the Democrats’ model in the field. Fisher’s entire analysis apparently hangs on the fact that Bush won the election and Kerry lost. (The Democratic consultants Fisher interviewed were split in their views of the effectiveness of the party’s 2004 mobilization strategy and the Republican “72 hour” plan.) Candidates win or lose elections for many reasons, and Fisher does not appear even to consider the possibility that Bush’s margin of victory might not have been greater were it not for the Democrats’ voter mobilization efforts. There are significant volumes of social science research that could have helped to form Fisher’s analysis, but once again she does not seem inclined to consult the available data before drawing her conclusion.
Such oversimplification is endemic to Fisher’s analysis of the 2004 campaign. To read Fisher’s description, one might conclude that Republicans had no paid operatives or imported volunteers on the ground in the battlefield states prior to Election Day or that Democrats had no networks of indigenous volunteers. (In fact, as Fisher acknowledges, both parties bused in volunteers from elsewhere; Democrats just boasted of busing in more of them.) Democrats may have failed to build the extensive volunteer networks that the Bush-Cheney campaign used in its “72 hour” plan for voter mobilization, but, as Fisher describes, the roots of that failure likely run to the long-term neglect of grassroots infrastructure by the Democratic Party and the after-effects of a bruising Democratic primary. Fisher’s interviews with Democratic Party officials suggest that paid canvassing and the use of imported volunteers may simply have been the best strategies available at the time to compensate for a long-standing failure by Democrats to “water the grassroots.”
The core of Fisher’s argument – which she never articulates as such – appears to be that the development of a vigorous, locally rooted, grassroots movement on “the left” and the existence of a structured, paid canvass operation designed to identify and activate members for progressive causes are somehow mutually exclusive. That is, she seems to argue that the left’s choice of grassroots organizing strategies is an all-or-nothing decision in which only one ideal style of political mobilization can survive. Fisher stretches reality early on in Activism, Inc. by approvingly quoting one canvasser’s statement that the People’s Project has “a monopoly on political organizing” on the left. This, of course, is absurd. There are many entities on the left who organize at the grassroots, using a myriad of tactics and strategies, including unions, feminists, peace advocates, low-income advocates and others. Some canvass and some don’t, but all engage in “political organizing.”
The American right, whose organizing prowess Fisher describes reverently, is proof positive that multiple organizing strategies can live in harmony within the same movement. Indeed, the modern right is largely built on the bones of the primarily “outsourced” direct mail fundraising juggernaut it constructed during the 1980s. The rise of the right in America provides no evidence that direct mail fundraising (which could be expected to create about as much “distance” as possible between a member and a national organization) is fundamentally incompatible with other, more locally based means of grassroots organizing. Activism, Inc. gives us no reason to think that things are any different with canvassing, or on the left.
After reading Activism, Inc., one is left with the impression that the same set of data could more logically be interpreted to reach an opposite set of conclusions:
- Canvassers, Fisher’s data demonstrate, are more likely to be politically involved after their canvass experience than a national sample, and yet Fisher asserts in Activism, Inc. that “many” (“perhaps too many”) are burned out and turned off by that experience.
- People’s Project canvassers give the members they recruit the opportunity to volunteer and participate in on-line actions in ways that one might imagine would be difficult for comparable methods of mass membership recruitment (like direct mail). Yet Fisher blames the Project, with no discernable evidence, for increasing the “distance” between progressive groups and their members.
- Outsourced canvasses, as even Fisher admits, have “successfully raised money and increased membership for the progressive groups so that they can continue their work,” and yet Fisher does not evaluate in any serious way how these organizations have benefited from the additional funds and supporters, how they have used those resources, and what might be lost if outsourced canvassing were foreclosed as a tool.
- Canvasses apparently provide thousands of young people with an opportunity to engage in progressive politics for the first time, an entry point to political work that might not exist were the People’s Project were to simply shrivel up and go away. Yet all Fisher can do is excoriate the Project for acting as a nefarious “gatekeeper” to progressive political jobs.
When data can support two opposing conclusions – and yet are consistently and vehemently interpreted to support one point of view – one is left to question the author’s motivations. In Activism, Inc., Dana Fisher does not simply conclude that canvassing (or the outsourcing of canvassing) has tradeoffs for the progressive community as it, like all organizing strategies, surely does. Rather, she tells us that the outsourcing of canvassing is “strangling progressive politics in America,” that it “chews up” and “spits out” young progressive activists, and that it “sometimes … hands victory to the other side.”
Such hyperbolic rhetoric puts Fisher way out on a limb that her data and arguments simply cannot support. Those who might have turned to Activism, Inc. for a sober, well-supported analysis of grassroots organizing strategies and their implications for the American “left” are destined to be disappointed.
What Fisher finally wants activists to be is more like her: pure, perhaps, but also harmless. Funny, that’s just what the oil companies and the televangelists want us to be. I wish Fisher had been willing to linger in the field long enough to come up with the truly useful suggestions that would help activists accelerate the process of turning defeats into victory. Since she obviously has decided that the role of pundit is a more productive and rewarding one for herself, perhaps she should at least afford the organizers who endeavor in this work a level of honest and fair inquiry instead of sniping at them. Certainly she should not be running to Bill O’Reilly every time some harried young activist in Annapolis or Sacramento—desperate to expose a midnight power, land, or money grab—neglects to print her flyers on recycled paper.
NOTE: Tony Dutzik assisted with the research for this essay.