THE POLITICAL organizations of citizen politics can be divided roughly into three sorts, according to the location of power within them. It is possible to make moral claims about the superiority of one or another of the three, and such claims form a large part of movement debate. But I am inclined to think that each has its appropriate time and place. To argue about how this decision should be made makes sense and is often necessary. To argue about decision-making in general usually doesn’t make sense and isn’t necessary.
The most common organizational structure is that of the front group. Here power is firmly held by a central staff or by the group of men (sometimes a party or sect) that puts the staff together and pays its members. The wider membership has no power at all and rarely any active role to play. It is made up of people who allow themselves to be used. They lend their names and money, and sometimes their physical presence, to a cause. They presumably approve the cause, though they are sometimes deceived or deluded about its precise character. Or they trust some set of sponsors who have previously approved the cause, but who accept no responsibility for its day-to-day working out. Nor do the members (or more loosely, contributors, petition signers, demonstrators, and so forth) accept responsibility. They are not committed to any ongoing activity or involved in the internal politics of the organization. In the front group all politics is staff work.
The front group is correctly called an elitist structure. It tends steadily toward professional routine as staff members learn that from this sort of work they can make a living (more often, a living of sorts). It opens the way to manipulation and deceit whenever the staff decides that it can acquire a sufficiently large and impressive front only by disguising the nature of its activities. Nevertheless, citizens are not wrong to lend their names, make their contributions, attend rallies and demonstrations—sometimes—at the behest of this or that elite group. For there are important political victories most readily won by a competent staff that is relatively free to maneuver and at the same time to demonstrate mass support. I should add that such a staff is never entirely free; it is bound to the cause by the implicit threat of mass desertion.
Pressure politics is often organized on the model of the front group: the massive civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of the 1960’s were essentially staff operations. In such cases, members of the central staff represent the interests or values of the participants to the rest of the world. They petition public officials, lobby in Congress, appeal to the country through the mass media, plan and publicize the march or rally itself. But the staff activists are by no means elected representatives. They begin, more likely, with interests and values of their own, then search out and put together the constituency for which they speak. The front group is ideal for the focusing and magnification of opinion. It is able to generate large-scale support, or the appearance of large-scale support, for this or that political position, precisely because such support does not require time-consuming or difficult work.
The work is done by the staff, which may also provide specialized services not otherwise available; thus the legal defense committee, publicizing some outrage of the judicial system in order to raise money for an appeal or to lobby for political intervention—while at the same time, perhaps, building sympathy for the politics of the defendants. The last of these is the least serious: the sympathy won is suitable only for instant display; it is unlikely to be deep-rooted or long-lasting. Staff work does not go very far in creating political consciousness, even when its other victories are impressive.
This is especially clear in election campaigns, which are run most often on the front-group model. The candidate is not chosen by the men and women who come to his aid; nor are strategic or even tactical decisions made by the volunteer workers. They do not determine (though they may affect) the candidate’s position; they do not always know what that position is, or how serious or firm it is. They trust the candidate, and the work they do for him tends to intensify, even as it capitalizes on, that trust. Partly for this reason, it does not always intensify their commitment to the issue or program of the movement—unless they come into the campaign as members of movement groups structured very differently from the campaign organization itself.
The front group is not an instrument for sustained popular mobilization. Its staff can collect large numbers of signatures or even turn out thousands of people for an occasional demonstration or an election canvass. But ongoing activity requires a structure within which significant powers rest, at least formally, with the mass of activists. The second model, then, is centralized democracy, where the leadership is directly or indirectly elected by the members and responsible to them. Some degree of participation in internal politics by the members is here presupposed. The strength of the movement derives from the legitimacy that this participation confers on the center. The center can issue commands that are widely accepted; it can order a strike, demonstration, or election campaign with the assurance that men and women in large numbers will act together and do as they are told for as long as necessary. That, at any rate, is the ideal: a democratic movement can achieve an extraordinary discipline because it is founded on the consent of the disciplined (though also, sometimes, on class or ethnic solidarity).
It is rarely the case, however, that a large number of activists participate in the internal politics of the movement they support, and so the organization often assumes a dual character. The supporters are, in effect, a front, not, or not merely, for the central staff, but rather for a core of activists who rely on them for financial, moral, and occasionally physical support. Behind the front, there is cadre democracy, the self-government of the activists. This dual structure is one of the most useful for citizen politics, since it permits an easy movement between the wider following and the core. It is especially common among those local groups (in the anti-war movement, for example) that often provide the mass support necessary for national staff operations. Their cadres decide to participate, and call on their followers to participate, in demonstrations and elections they don’t themselves plan or control. But they do plan and control their own participation and sustain a strong commitment to the cause. In such groups, both the demands that can be made on the followers and the freedom of the cadres are limited, but these limitations roughly fit the needs of citizen activism.
Centralized democracy without the dual structure is most suitable to parties, sects, and unions that need strong and stable leadership and sometimes make severe demands on their members. This is only possible if there is general agreement on policy and program. The democratic movement, in contrast to the democratic state, relies on a fairly tight consensus which most often takes the form of closely shared economic interests or a common ideology. Given this consensus, however, democratic controls on the leadership are often relaxed or even entirely surrendered, with results not very different from those that follow the same surrender in the state. Sects and unions are often formally democratic but in practice are run as autocracies. Then citizen activism is relevant only to the occasional rebellions that challenge the autocrats.
When no consensus at all exists, the best model for political activity is federalism. Here power rests with a number of centers, most often distributed geographically, each perhaps organized somewhat differently—as autocratic sects, cadre democracies, staff fronts, and so forth—all of them only loosely and informally coordinated. Every new proposal must be debated by each local. This project will be pressed by one, something quite different by another. Local option is the rule. The coordinating committee accumulates power only by convincing each local separately, and its power endures only for the length of whatever project is agreed upon. Federalism is a way of reflecting and coping with disagreements, but it has another feature often valued by citizen activists: it increases the number of people involved in decision-making; it decreases the possibilities of elitist manipulation (or, it multiplies and disperses the elite groups).
Unless there are significant victories to be won at the local level, federalism is the least effective pattern for political action. Local option deprives the national leadership of both authority and initiative; it virtually precludes negotiation or alliance with other political forces; it makes even short-term planning extremely difficult. It is probably best seen as an early stage in the development of citizen politics, when new groups are springing up and no “government” has yet emerged. But it often survives for a long time, even after many activists have despaired of its effectiveness, simply because no one can figure out how to weld together or overcome the local power centers.
If the original group of activists hopes to retain control of the growing movement, they obviously cannot choose a federal structure. They may simply maintain the façade they first raised and work out of an office behind it, or they may try to win mass support as a reward for their initiative. The last of these is the most interesting, since the activists will certainly encounter opposition. Conflict is inherent in a democratic organization. This is not necessarily divisive; it can have energizing effects, stimulating internal debate, generating a kind of competition in effectiveness. But it also raises, often in dramatic fashion, the question of leadership. For the best political organization may turn out to be not the one that is best organized but the one that is most ably run.