Why This Book Matters
In 2018, Eitan Hersh surveyed Americans and found that a third of them spend two hours or more a day on politics, and that four out of five of those people spend none of that time on anything that could be called political work. How do they—and how do we—spend all of time engaged in politics? You already know the answer: we gobble up news, podcasts, social media, and then spend a lot of time complaining about the state affairs.
Hersh himself was guilty of this behaviour he calls political hobbyism. Politics Is for Power is the book he wrote to work out what the alternative looks like.
Hersh makes the case that political power is built by serving people before you ask anything of them, in units small enough to repeat, inside an organization that exists before the fight arrives.
The book is written for citizens and parties, and the translation to corporate public affairs is not automatic. Most of what a company does for people is already a transaction, and Hersh's model of service runs on help that comes free.
But the question the book puts to a citizen — how much of your political time goes to building power, and how much to consuming politics — applies to a corporate affairs function without any adjustment at all.
What We Cover in the Episode
- The arithmetic of power. One vote out of 130 million changes nothing, but a person who can move ten neighbours is worth something a politician can count, and the book's stories are all about how that person gets made.
- Naakh Vysoky, a retired doctor in his seventies, who helped three hundred elderly Soviet immigrants pass the citizenship test after welfare reform threatened their income, and then turned that trust into a precinct with double the turnout of every precinct around it.
- Dave Fleischer, the organizer behind deep canvassing, and why he listens to the people who voted against his marriage. The empathy has a purpose, and the purpose is collect votes.
- A county Democratic party in the Portland suburbs that couldn't get thirteen people to a meeting, and the first thing it did when it decided to rebuild: pay one person's salary. What that person built was a program where every volunteer is responsible for thirty-five households, and why thirty-five is the number that makes it work.
- Angela Aldous, a nurse who watched a million recall signatures in Wisconsin turn into nobody on the doors, and who built a group in Pennsylvania on the assumption that it would lose for years. When the local congressman resigned in a scandal, her group had been organizing for ten months, and the Democrat won by 755 votes.
- How $9,000 raised by a college-town precinct committee unlocked $680,000 in state party money for a candidate the party had written off, and why it only worked because the committee existed before she needed it.
- Why almost nobody does any of this anymore: the fifty-year history of how local parties gave up the ballot, the nominations, and the patronage, and were left with a chair, a treasurer, and no reason to exist. Hersh tests it on his own town's Democratic committee, and the annual buffet is better attended than the phone bank.
- Three mental models: the Control Trade, the Bounded Unit, and the Hollow Party.
- Three ways the book gets misread, including the one I struggled with myself: that Naakh's model is just the old ward-boss machine with better manners.
- What this looks like when the organization is a company, and the mastery lesson: the willingness to want power at all, and a specific kind of patience.
Bonus: ideas that didn't make the episode
Donors aren't buying influence either
The money goes where the donor's feelings are rather than where influence lives, which is what makes it a hobby.
The obvious objection to filing political donations under hobbyism is that donors, at least, are buying something. In truth, ninety-eight per cent of donors give to one party only; if they wanted influence over whoever holds power, they'd give to both sides, the way large corporations do.
Logging off doesn't produce organizers
This is why mobilizing voters takes significant work; it's not automatic, and it's certainly never guaranteed.
If hobbyism is mostly screen time, the fix would seem to be less screen time, right? Yet, Hersh cites the experiments on people who abstained from social media for a few weeks and filled the hours with browsing, work, sleep, and household chores. None of them joined anything. The absence of the hobby doesn't create automatic participation in civic activity.
A public token can satisfy the conscience
Hersh reports a study from the University of British Columbia in which students were given a Remembrance Day poppy and then asked for a donation. The ones who got the poppy to wear in public gave about the same as students who got no poppy at all. The ones who got a poppy in an envelope, a private token nobody would see, gave more. The public display did the moral work: having been seen to support the cause, the student felt free to move on.
If you run advocacy campaigns that count petition signatures, shares, and profile-frame changes as progress, the count may include a lot of people whose involvement ended at the click.
A companion experiment with a Vancouver Canucks pin found the boundary. For committed fans, the public pin made them more likely to take the next step. Public tokens replace effort among the lukewarm and reinforce it among the already committed.