Coopting Tea Party tactics, former
Democratic Congressional staffers provide the Trump resistance with a
step-by-step lobbying guide.
BY Kate Aronoff
Can progressives have their
own Tea Party? Many have floated the idea over the last several years, hoping
to recreate the electoral success of that movement. But an upstart new
organization called Indivisible is pulling another lesson from insurgent
Republicans: how to obstruct a president’s agenda and change the debate in
Congress from the grassroots up—starting with a 24-page Google Doc.
In the days after the
election, former congressional staffer Sarah Dohl “saw an uptick in people
joining [anti-Trump] Facebook groups,” she says, and “a lot of
well-meaning people giving pretty bad advice.” Some suggested signing massive
online petitions; others urged progressives to call the offices of high-ranking
members of Congress, rather than their own representatives. Dohl’s experience
told her these tactics were unlikely to work.
Her former colleague Ezra
Levin was having similar concerns, and around Thanksgiving, he reached out to
Dohl with an idea. Levin, his wife, Leah Greenberg, and their friend, Sara
Clough, had met at a bar in Austin and decided to start working on a strategy
of their own. They put together a loose group of some 30 former congressional,
union and nonprofit staffers, and, on Dec. 14, 2016, made their work public.
The “Indivisible Guide” Google Doc—a no-nonsense, step-by-step handbook for
constituents to become a thorn in the side of their representatives in
Congress—went viral.
The guide lays out what motivates
politicians (“reelection, reelection, reelection”) and how to get under their
skin, all the way down to which events are worth attending and how to get
people to show up. Granular might be too broad a word to describe the level of
detail: “Sit by yourself or in groups of 2,” a section on town halls advises,
“and spread out throughout the room. This will help reinforce the impres-sion
of broad consensus.”
Dohl began her stint as the
communications director for Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) in 2009, when
Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. “It should have been the
best time in the world to be a congressional staffer,” she says. She and her
Democratic colleagues felt a progressive agenda was within reach. But after the
Tea Party’s April 15, 2009, Taxpayer March on Washington, everything changed.
When Doggett arrived back in
his home district for the August recess, Tea Partiers showed up at
meet-and-greets with cardboard tombstones bearing his name and pictures of him
on which they’d scrawled devil horns. Similar scenes played out around the
country.
“The Tea Party followed us
anywhere we went,” Dohl recalls. “Everything that had been on the table at the
beginning of 2009—with our incredibly popular president and supermajority—was
suddenly at risk,” due to renewed Republican intransigence and fear of backlash
among Democrats. Doggett survived his re-election campaign, but the ambitious
plans he and his staff entered with—from immigration reform to tougher campaign
finance law—did not. The Tea Party also “made sure that if we did get a
legislative win, like the Affordable Care Act, that it was unpopular from the
start,” Dohl adds. “They hijacked the entire narrative.”
Consciously taking a page from
Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the Tea Party deployed tried-and-true
community organizing tactics to put targets on both the White House and the
establishment Republicans who had, in their view, been responsible for losing
the Oval Office and enabling a leftward policy drift. The result was what can
only be described as a wholesale transformation of the GOP.
Now, the tactics coopted by
the Tea Party are being reclaimed by the Left. While Indivisible is not
emphasizing the 2018 election, they are already turning up the heat on current
representatives—in both parties. “One of the reasons we believe the Tea Party
was successful was because they targeted members of their own party to reject
bipartisan compromise, and move a little bit further to the Right,” Dohl says.
“You may have a Democratic member of Congress, but there’s no guarantee of how
progressive that member is going to be. We want Democrats not just to be blue,
but to be bold.”
In late January, Indivisible
called on its chapters to target the 14 Democrats who voted to confirm Mike
Pompeo as CIA director, and the group has supported local chapters putting
pressure on Sen. Diane Feinstein (Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), who
have voted for several Trump nominees.
“We believe that we must
embolden Democrats to stand up and speak out on any policy or proposal that
could threaten our values,” Dohl says.
Indivisible now has its own
website, where progressives can download toolkits for how to get started, and
find and join local groups that organize using the guide’s strategies. So far,
more than 4,500 chapters—representing every state—have sprouted up.
Ivonne Wallace Fuentes, an
associate professor of history at Roanoke College in Virginia, finished reading
Indivisible’s guide shortly before the New Year. “I had a lot of academic
experience with leftist politics, but it’s totally different from, ‘How do I
then try to do something in my own community?’ ” she says. “This was a recipe.”
On January 2, her
representative, Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), introduced an amendment to the House
Rules package that would have put the Office of Congressional Ethics, an
independent entity that reviews congressional misconduct allegations, under the
oversight of a Republican-led committee.
Wallace Fuentes was appalled.
She posted on social media and emailed the members of the newly formed Roanoke
Progressive Rapid Action Task Force—a group she then decided to register as a
chapter of Indivisible. On January 4, a delegation of 12 went
to Goodlatte’s Roanoke office to deliver New Year’s cards, one bearing the
message, “We Expect Better!”
By the time the cards were
delivered, Republicans had already withdrawn the amendment after vocal
nationwide backlash—but the demonstration provided Goodlatte a warning for what
to expect over the next four years.
While Roanoke has long been a
Democratic stronghold in a traditionally red district, “This is not Brooklyn or
San Francisco,” Wallace Fuentes tells In These Times. “Many people here feel
isolated, and most everybody either knows or is a family member or a friend of
someone who voted the other way.” Indivisible Roanoke, she hopes, can be “a
community … where what’s bringing you together is this shared sense of civic
responsibility toward this system that’s going off the rails.”
The Indivisible Roanoke
Facebook group quickly ballooned to more than 200 members. “We’re not asking
anybody to build a barricade, or do anything that isn’t celebrated in our
system. We’re asking people to be more engaged,” says Wallace Fuentes.
They also aren’t asking people
to do it alone. More than 60 thousand people joined a January 22 call co-hosted by
Indivisible, the Working Families Party and MoveOn.org to seize on the
momentum of the post-inauguration Women’s March. More than 10,000 pledged to
visit their senator’s office, Democratic or Republican, on Tuesday, January 24,
to pressure them to oppose Trump’s cabinet nominations.
On January 30, tens of
thousands joined an emergency Indivisible call to fight the Muslim ban. And
Indivisible is just getting started, says Dohl. “This work … isn’t a
sprint—it’s a marathon.”
If the momentum keeps up,
Republicans and Democrats alike may be forced to start representing more than
just their corporate donors and Beltway advisers. They may have to answer to
the people who elect them.
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