In The Nation, Christopher Hayes writes an excellent overview of the history of MoveOn, outlining its considerable strength and its limitations.
The organization comes across in this article as an ideologically low-key group, very mainstream, political activism for “non-shouters,” “a service organization that helps people who are busy advocate in politics,” according to Eli Pariser. “We’re providing something that’s valuable to people and using technology to amplify the quality of the service you can get. It’s not unlike Netflix or Flickr.”
A few highlights:
Before MoveOn pioneered the online petition, just the simple act of gathering 100,000 signatures would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of labor. Now MoveOn sends out e-mail petitions several times a month. Or consider this: to manage its lobbying efforts and programs for its more than 4 million members, the NRA has a staff exceeding 500 and a $15 million, 390,000-square-foot office building in Virginia. MoveOn has a staff of… twenty-three. And no headquarters. Twice a week, a dozen of MoveOn’s staffers call in from around the country for a strategy session. The organization is so committed to the ethos of the virtual office, it has an internal policy that even when staffers are living in the same city they’re prohibited from sharing office space.
And this:
Over ten years the organization has developed a reliably confrontational posture toward the Republicans in power. It’s a necessary feature of an organization that needs to raise money constantly, a rational reaction to the GOP’s debased leadership and the expression of a deep and genuine sentiment among its silent majority members, who have simply had enough. But the frustrations of the past two years with a Democratic Congress struggling to deliver any of the things MoveOn members want have served as a teachable moment. In interviews with nearly two dozen of MoveOn’s regional coordinators, when I asked what they saw as MoveOn’s role in a future Democrat-dominated Washington, they gave without exception the same answer: hold the politicians accountable. “One of their mottoes that really resonates with me is that democracy is not a spectator sport,” says Sandy Tracy, the retired schoolteacher. “Average people have elected their officials and sent them off and let them be. We’re now paying the price for that.”
Indeed, MoveOn members seem much more politically militant than the group’s staff. MoveOn may thus face a challenge from its own membership if it doesn’t log more victories (on Iraq and other pressing issues) after the Democrats increase their Congressional majority and Obama takes the White House in November, as seems increasingly likely to happen.
More importantly, though, when someone uses “MoveOn” as a term of abuse or disrespect, insinuating that it’s a radical leftists shrill hysterical terrorist-loving America-hating communo-anarcho-fascist organization, you should either laugh at the profound ignorance of that person or politely direct him or her to this article, depending on your mood.