When politics becomes people powered….
Peoples’ primary conventions seem to be taking place online
While many people ended up disliking Zoom during the pandemic, something fascinating has been happening with it during the US election campaign. And it seems to me that it is pointing to a paradigm shift in politics - making it participatory rather than controlled by party organizations.
Last night, I watched the special town hall that Oprah hosted in Michigan. It brought together people from across the US who took to a series of Zoom calls right after President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy in July and supported Kamala Harris - Black and white, men and women, and a whole range of individual interest groups.
As Oprah explained, the town hall grew from the Black Women for Harris call held three hours after Biden’s announcement. The collective had been hosting such calls every Sunday for four years, but its regular Sunday evening call quickly ballooned to more than 90,000 participants – between the 44,000 on the Zoom and the 50,000 tuning in through other means. As well as raising $1.6 million in three hours, 10,000 women signed up to work for Harris.
This is the back story, as told by The 19th
Four years ago, Jotaka Eaddy was in her childhood home in South Carolina, fuming at how women like Harris, Stacey Abrams, Karen Bass, Val Demings and other 2020 potential vice presidential picks were being treated.
She emailed about 50 Black women from her various networks in politics, entertainment, Silicon Valley and activism. “We know that we carry elections on our backs — we have always done so and still are doing it today,” she wrote. “Now that we are demanding our rightful place at the table, this narrative that ‘we are too much,’ ‘too ambitious,’ ‘rub people the wrong way’ is BS … We all know what is happening here and I am compelled to do whatever I can to speak out, organize and help stop it … If not us, then who. If not now, then when.”
Five months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the group gathered on Zoom. Women on the first call invited other women to join. Eaddy stayed up all night with other Black women writing an open letter, and sent the letter to the same email chain. Within 48 hours, 3,000 women signed on.
Harris’ candidacy energized Black men, too. On July 23rd, the men had their own six-hour call.
“I got lots of texts [on Sunday night] and was seeing online a lot of Black men saying, ‘I want to click this link, but I want to respect your space,’” said Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, an independent Black-led grassroots organization that works to engage Black voters.
The July 21, 2024 call set off a whole other series of Zooms, which raised $20 million for Harris’ campaign. Some of those organizations, including White Dudes for Harris (200,000 people raised almost $4.5 million), Win With Black Men (more than 53,000 people raised $1.3 million, and Swifties for Kamala (more than 34,000 people raised more than $122,000), joined Thursday’s virtual rally.
Those calls seemed to me, at the time, much more than just a series of Zoom calls. It seemed to me as if a peoples’ primary convention was taking place. It all was, as Oprah said explicitly Thursday, visibly “people-powered”. In political terms, it was as if people had created a whole series of caucuses, by interest.
They all came together in the massive Unite for America rally that Oprah hosted with the Win With Black Women collective this week. It had both 400 studio participants and thousands of virtual participants, many of whom had participated in those earlier calls. The Harris campaign said nearly 200,000 people had signed up to watch, and the virtual rally took place across several platforms.
The rally did something that was very powerful. It personalized the issues in the election campaign, from the cost of living, to women who have died because abortion bans mean they can’t get proper reproductive healthcare, to those affected by school shootings.
“Winfrey was in talk-show mode, calling on members of the audience, introducing cameos by celebrities and shepherding a live audience between joyous bouts of applause and somber moments of reflection,” said the Washington Post. “As Winfrey and Harris sat down on twin couches for a conversation, members of the audience were prompted to ask the vice president about issues including immigration, inflation, gun violence and election security.”
Watching the audience, I could see how these stories affected people - in the studio audience and on the screens high up on the wall. These were not just typical campaign speeches. These were the stories of people who had experienced these things themselves, as they might have told the story on Winfrey’s talk show..
When I said earlier that these Zooms and gatherings in peoples’ homes are in effect a kind of peoples’ primary, it reflects something that many other people may well be thinking to themselves, too. That often, political parties are not fit for purpose in an era of participatory thinking and action.
There was a time when political parties controlled and managed the election process. Now we have moved from the industrial era to the information era, so much of society’s organization has changed, too. Party machines don’t control the conversation as they used to, just as we stay at Airbnb instead of hotels and we call Ubers rather than taxis.
Increasingly, we see how proportional representation is making it possible for a diversity of views to be heard in state governance, and how this is (as in Alaska) making for much less belligerent and divisive candidates to be elected
Ireland has shown the way to consult all of us about complex issues, with its citizens assemblies, which bring together a diverse selection of Irish citizens to consider difficult issues and make recommendations to the government.
Unsurprisingly to me, the right wing does not seem to have grasped the paradigm change. “Oprah Winfrey’s glitzy hour-long special with Vice President Kamala Harris Thursday night was not a feature of a serious presidential campaign, but instead a celebrity-obsessed public relations program intended to win what’s become a popularity contest,” said the Federalist.
We live in such interesting times….
Authentic participation is so longed for and necessary these days!