by Ben Brandzel

I spent several months in the UK in 2008 before I shipped back to North Carolina to work on Obama’s campaign. I was struck how at some point the British press stopped bothering to contextualise US election stories as being about another country. The candidates were named and discussed in shorthand just as if they were running for Parliament – and usually given much more coverage than the latest row in Westminster.

Yet at the same time, I kept hearing the rueful opinion that none of this would be possible over here. The British people, I was told, were far too apathetic, far too disengaged, far too convinced that their voice – no matter how loud – would fall on the deaf ears of politicians who couldn’t be bothered. Plus, as I was frequently reminded, “there is no British Obama”.

All of this casts a rather sad tinge to the cathartic obsession with the America election – it’s as if many Brits gave up looking for vibrant democracy in their own lives and resolved to experience it vicariously in ours.



Well, in response to all of this self-depreciating civic gloom I have only one of my favourite British aphorisms: rubbish. Why? Because the ‘there is no British Obama’ claim fundamentally misunderstands what just happened in America – and is in fact fatally counter- productive to replicating it here. It’s obviously true that Obama’s sensational talent as a campaigner and the outstanding accomplishments of his campaign cannot be underestimated. But they were able to succeed in a particular context, and that context was a long fought, hard won victory in and of itself.

Here’s the first point to remember: only a few short years before last months’ triumphant inauguration, George W Bush had stolen an election and was peddling grave falsehoods to the American people, yet was basking in the highest approval ratings of any sitting president in American history. Instead of “yes we can” we had “you’re either with us or against us” and “bring it on.” Critiquing the administration’s foreign policy was loudly called treason. Civic duty was reduced to shopping. Global warming was officially denied. And those of us who felt differently about any of it were quite fearful that either we, or everyone else around us, had gone stark raving mad.

And you know who changed all of this? It was not an obscure state legislator from Illinois. It was the people ourselves. I was lucky enough to have a front row seat for this transformation through my work with MoveOn.org. MoveOn began as a simple plea for sanity when a modest California couple put up an online petition to oppose the impeachment of President Clinton and sent it to 60 of their friends. In a few months, half a million people had signed.

It grew bigger when a young nonprofit worker and his roommate put out a simple request that America and her allies treat 9/11 as a crime and punish the guilty – not seize it as a pretext for war. He sent their petition to his friends, and within days several hundred thousand people from every state and dozens of nations had added their name. Of course, President Clinton was impeached and Iraq was invaded. But people who knew it was wrong were linked together – and so the seeds of change were sewn.

Over the next seven years, MoveOn grew to more than five million members and its volunteers organised over 130,000 local events in every corner of the country. A teacher in Boise, Idaho gathered friends from church to protest the nomination of an extreme conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice, and minds were changed. An accountant from Albany, New York went with his wife and brother to hand their Congressman letters from constituents defending the food stamp program – and a vote was switched. A librarian from Atlanta, Georgia got on the local news for her efforts to defend social security from privatisation, and a generation was saved. What are the characteristics of this type of politics?

The groups that practice it have a different organisational model to more traditional institutions. They are driven by the grassroots, and energised by the collective action of regular people. They do have a leadership, but these people are ‘stewards’. As a result, those managing the organisation act on behalf of the membership, not the other way around.

Crucially, while such movements exist to articulate a deeply held political worldview, they remain independent of political parties, and are willing to express the views of their members to both friends and opponents. The power of this model of organizing was illustrated by the electoral potency of our movement.

The Bush era did not end in 2008. It ended in 2006, when voters delivered his party in Congress the greatest rout in a generation. There was no single Barack Obama to anchor or inspire that campaign, but MoveOn members used online tools to make seven million phone calls to swing congressional districts driving key voters to the polls.

There have been several other major online movement organisations very like MoveOn, and countless other organisations of every shape and size operating at a local, state and national level whose members played a vital role in moving the country towards that moment we all witnessed on January 20th.

And to be clear, none of this background in any way diminishes the obvious skill and magnetic power of Obama as a candidate, or the stupendous organizing feat of the Obama campaign. But Obama himself is quite aware of his context.

I was sitting in the stadium that starry night in Denver when Obama looked up and told 75,000 people, “this campaign has never been about me. It’s about you.” That oft repeated line wasn’t just rhetoric, and he wasn’t only talking about his election supporters. He was talking about everything a nation of stubborn believers did to pave the way. So if you want to find the next Obama movement, don’t wait for the next Obama – start the next movement.

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This is an extract from one of the chapters of a new Fabian Society book The Change We Need: How Britain Can Learn From Obama’s Victory out on Monday 23rd.

More on the Fabian’s Next Left blog today.