I frequently get asked what people can do to get involved or play some role in fighting for the future of their country — where to donate, what kind of activism has a real impact. Some people have always been activists. But many others aren’t and haven’t particularly wanted to be but now feel they have no choice. And yet the scale of the problem is overwhelming, and the range of organizations and movements calling on your time and money are almost equally so. Critically, if you’re semi-new to these things, you don’t want to find out you were wasting your time or at least not using that or your money most efficiently.
TPM is a news and commentary site, not an activism site. But at least here in the Editors’ Blog we’re not so finicky about that that we feel we can’t share our opinions, hopefully reasonably well informed and perhaps with additional reporting, about what is a good use of your time or money. So with that in mind, and after a friend suggested it, I wanted to do a series of posts on the idea of “What Can I Do?” And here I would love your participation, your suggestions via email. I have my own views of the matter but I certainly don’t have all the answers and, by design, I don’t get directly involved myself. So give me your ideas, and I will try to share my thoughts on practical ways we individually can try to save our country and, as I will explain in a moment, build a new one. What actually makes a difference and what is more like scattering seeds on the wind?
I want to start with an email I wrote a couple days ago. I didn’t write it for publication. But after I sent it, I thought others might be interested. I wrote it in response to a query from a TPM reader. This is an affluent individual considering how and where to put their money in advance of the midterms, which groups are effective, which aren’t. This TPM reader listed some groups he was considering donating to and also what I referred to a few months ago as the need for “wartime voting rights” groups, picking up on the old Godfather reference. That’s what the first part of the note is about, just to give you context for what I was responding to.
So a few thoughts on this and sorry again for the delay. I’m familiar with each of these groups and they’re all solid and good. I need to poke around give it some more thought to consider precisely what they’re doing now. On wartime voting rights groups, that’s definitely some of it. A lot of what I’m thinking is on the one hand the groups that are focusing largely in a litigation context, trying to knock down the bad laws, operating under the basic and basically right concept of fighting arbitrary and suppressive laws, litigating them, etc. That’s important work. But it’s no longer sufficient. I was just having a very different conversation which turned to Ukraine’s great success in drone and anti-drone tech. And there’s nothing special about Ukraine in that respect. If anything it has problems with entrenched corruption, which generally hollows out militaries. But being under constant aerial bombardment has a way of focusing the attention. So does having very little cash. You have to really think from the ground up and zero in on the things that seem to be confronting the immediate problem. And really we’re under constant aerial bombardment. So who is thinking way outside the box right now, obsessively and even a bit paranoid-ly thinking through what we’re going to see in November and how to counter it without a lot of preconceived ideas. That’s the wartime voting rights orgs we need.
More broadly I think there are two buckets to think in terms of. The big party committees have lots of problems. But you go to war with the army you have. And they are going to be the ones pumping money into the front line districts. And you can’t do anything if you don’t win enough seats. And that’s the pipeline to get the resources where they need to go, shortcomings not withstanding. So I think there’s one bucket, which is fairly conventional seat winning. And just which committees or outside groups is important. But that requires a lot of cash.
Then there are other groups that are more focused on what are we going to do with that power and how do we build effectively a new state on the rubble of the one Trump destroyed. And I think ‘destroyed’ is the right conceptual framework. We’ve lived mostly in the system created by people from 1935 to 1955, the post war state. It rocked. But it’s gone. And before Trump it had grown long in the tooth. That’s why Trump was able to destroy it. That requires the kind of novel and aggressive thinking that older generation brought to things. Because those folks in that 20 year period did create a new state. The people who build the one now among many things truly need to understand political power and how to use it. They also need to come to the matter with a deep understanding that we are under constant aerial bombardment. We’re not in the 90s or the aughts. We’re in a very different period. In a general way it’s the groups who will take us beyond what is still mostly the guiding sentiment of incumbent federal officeholders, that we’re in normal times or at least need to use the toolbox that we inherited from normal times. Call it the Schumer problem, though I don’t say that to pick on him. Everyone’s learning as they go and I think he is more than people may realize too. I just use that shorthand as a way to capture what we need to move past.
I realize the above doesn’t answer who to write the check to. But this is my first response. And I think it’s the best way to think about the problem of what to do and where to put our resources.