You are right that I'm not familiar with the body of literature you're talking about. I am always interested to learn new things and will try to explore some of it in the future.
However, I still remain unconvinced by the overall thesis that Republicans do better with these sorts of "local institutions" than Democrats do through some sort of long-term plan to build infrastructure. You say this:
You also say people live increasingly online, but they still vote where they live. They still send their kids to a school board-run school. Their local hospital is still closing. Their water bill still goes up. The right knows this. That’s why they contest library boards and county commissions in places Democrats have long written off. Why don’t we?
And whether you mean to or not, you are attributing the right's success to some sort of intentional ground-up grassroots movement; some sort of grand design to contest local institutions that Democrats ignore. Again, I don't think this is really an accurate depiction of how things have worked. The right doesn't contest "library boards and county commissions, or school boards, or whatever else, to some greater extent than Democrats. Are there areas where no Democrat candidate runs for things like this because they (the local people, not national Dems) see it as a lost cause? Sure. But the inverse is true as well - there are urban neighborhoods where no Republicans contest these sort of local races either. That isn't some major strategic difference between the left and the right. And most people who run for these sorts of organizations are doing so on their own initiative, not because of some carefully and strategically cultivated "pipeline" created by Republicans.
Also, with respect to this:
Reducing this to “church picnics” isn’t serious engagement. Republicans invested in building community-level leadership pipelines. That’s what the Tea Party did. That’s what Moms for Liberty is doing now. That’s what Skocpol calls “organized disinformation,” a fusion of local leadership and national propaganda. Pastors echo Fox News. Gun shop owners hand out GOP flyers. It’s not either-or. It’s synergy. That synergy is missing on the Democratic side.
To be clear, I am not "reducing" anything to "church picnics" - that was a literal example that you gave that I was responding to. You talked about church picnics and rotary clubs as key to Republican relationship-building and coalition-building while accusing Dems of abandoning those things, which again I think is not really accurate. But as to the broader point, I'm not sure groups like Moms for Liberty and the Tea Party really stand for the proposition that local organizing is what's important. I don't see those groups as having bonded and spread via local grassroots, in-person organizing. They spread online and across the country. They are not a "fusion" of local leadership and national propaganda; they are simply showing that networking and relationship-building of that type isn't local anymore. I mean, obviously all of the people in those groups live somewhere, where they are physically present. But I don't think those groups are spreading their membership through, like, Thursday night gatherings at the local bar or country club or community center or whatever. They are doing so virtually and digitally. That's the world we live in now.
You say that I "rarely offer a forward strategy of my own" and it's a fair critique, though from my perspective your strategy of "organize locally and expand that to a national movement that is disconnected from and/or cuts out the current Dem political infrastructure (which you obviously dislike) via unspecified means" is not much more specific or fully formed than anything I've said. It is certainly easier to poke holes in someone else's ideas than to offer some of your own. But as far as a master plan, I certainly would not agree that this is my big-picture position:
local organizing is obsolete, rural outreach is mostly pointless, and we should focus on elite messaging and national vibes. If that’s your theory of change, say so. But don’t pretend it’s neutral
I do believe that trying to build local networks on the ground in rural areas should not be much of a focus at the present; I do believe it is pretty unlikely to bear any identifiable fruit in the short or medium-term, and is a poor investment given that rural areas are the most strongly conservative at the moment and that the rural population is such a small percentage of the population as a whole. I not think that organizing is obsolete, but I do think we need to recognize that today's "local institutions" are largely not going to be nearly as local or in-person as they were in the past. Even if we accept the thesis that you, and apparently some of that literature, has espoused - that the modern Republican media/political machine was built on tireless ground work through civic institutions in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that provided the foundation for what talk radio, Fox News, and then social media did in the last 25-30 years, even as those same civic institutions withered and died - I'm not convinced that the future lies in on-the-ground local organizing, other than maybe in the densest urban areas where population density is highest. (Those sorts of major urban areas are where things like "community mutual aid groups, housing coalitions, canvassing hubs, tenant unions, and labor locals" can possible be effective - not so much in suburban areas.) I think there needs to be more attention to competing with conservatives in digital spaces (podcasting, social media, whatever even newer "New Media" is coming next) with more approachable, less "intellectual-coded" messaging. I think the phrase "we need a liberal Joe Rogan" is overused - I don't think liberals need to be emulating the "political know-nothing, everyone doe their own research" format generally - but it's probably something closer to that than, say, Pod Save America. The left needs to forget about radio and cable news and political debate panels and start realizing that you have to blend politics and culture to get people (especially young people) to pay any attention to it now.
I also do not advocate for anything approaching "elite messaging" but I also think that leftists now leaning into an "anti-elite" formulation that seems to accept Republicans' framing that anyone who is highly educated is an "elite" is deeply problematic. I do not think the left should be steering away from a coalition built around the educated, and further undermining societal trust in supposed "elite" institutions like public health agencies and large public universities. What we need to do is find a way to push back on the narrative that the interests of college-educated people and those of the working class are opposed; indeed many working-class people today are college educated. The left needs to find a way to stand up for education and science and public institutions in a way that doesn't make working-class people or rural Americans feel entirely alienated. Of both sides of the political spectrum start trending towards an anti-intellectual know-nothing strain then we will be well and truly fucked in both the short term and the long term.
We've talked about the policies I think Dems should be advocating for at the state and national level, and I don't feel the need to re-hash most of that.
But I do honestly continue to believe that large-scale change is not going to be possible unless and until there is a true national crisis, and/or Republicans really badly screw everything up the way they did in the 1920s and the early 2000s. That does not mean I am advocating doing nothing until then. What we need to do until then is do our best to compete in the short-term in state and national elections and to advocate for the structural things that can help steer the government backed towards being more representative of the nation as a whole - congressional reform (elimination of the modern filibuster, etc), supreme court expansion, PR and DC statehood, etc - while expressing clear-eyed, principled messaging about why such things are necessary. But we can't do those things without winning the elections that are most immediately in front of us. One of the problems with a view like yours that seems far more focused on the long-term than the short-term is that if you ignore immediate elections in favor of trying to build a base for 30 years from now you give up a lot of erosion that takes decades to recover in the meantime. I fully understand why progressives didn't like Hillary Clinton or what she stood for or how she campaigned in 2016, and I would acknowledge many of those critiques as valid, but losing that presidential election in 2016 was perhaps the most consequential electoral loss in decades because what it meant for the Supreme Court specifically and the federal judiciary more broadly. We would not be sitting here talking about the lawless Supreme Court and the blows it has dealt to the left if we had simply understood how important it was to win the 2016 election, which probably would have smothered MAGA (or at least the Trumpist brand of MAGA) in the cradle. Instead we delivered the Federalist Society - another group with massive influence on our current situation, influence I I notice you don't acknowledge because it doesn't seem to fit in the idea that local organizing is what got Republicans where they are - one free Supreme Court seat that then turned into three, plus a staggering number of federal judgeships.
