Liberal Organizations

Images of liberal activists organizing workers or agitating for environmental awareness are commonly summoned in discussions about the relationship between social networks and political organizations. Whether in the labor actions of the 1920s and 1930s, the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 1970s, or the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) protests and anti–Iraq War demonstrations of the 1990s and early 21st century, all are associated with what are often called “grassroots” social networks as the condition enabling the often short-lived liberal organizations to succeed in their efforts. In contrast, conservative organizations are often associated with top-down, long-standing state, family, or economic institutions deriving more from a closed social context than an open-ended social network. What has made liberal organizations more conducive to leveraging social networks is not only their typically more horizontal, democratic governance structures but also their emphasis on equality across differences, as opposed to conservatives' emphasis on liberty for established groups as well as personal responsibility. Because the degree to which such social cleavages can be crossed is one primary basis from which the reach and complexity of social networks is increased, this has produced two major tendencies through which liberal organizations engage in the process: the electoral, for those deriving from or concerned [Page 492]with more established populations, and the nonelectoral, for those deriving from or concerned with the less established.

Antiwar protest has long been a mainstay of liberal, left-leaning organizations. Liberal organizations quickly embraced the Internet's capabilities, and by the time the Iraq war began in 2003, online networking for antiwar and other liberal causes was fully engaged.

In many ways, this division has become more pronounced in recent years, as the class-based organizations of the prewar years as well as the identity politics of the postwar period have each declined in influence. In the vacuum that was left, rather than economic or cultural groups asserting the mutually exclusive, central importance of their own issues, which led many to seek state power on its behalf, a newly networked politics has emerged. Whereas the former emphasized single issues, such that networks could only branch out in a limited number of directions, the latter began to function in a multi-issue frame that enabled the emergence of what John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt refer to as “all-channel networks.” Within this mode, liberal organizations became more capable not only of interlocking with one another in order to form a greater whole when doing so would prove useful but also sharing members with multiple affiliations as well as breaking off into smaller groups when that would be more advantageous.

For this reason, there has been less emphasis among liberal organizations on an engagement with parliamentary activity in the traditional sense of the term, given the uneven access to such processes across cultural differences. At the same time, however, President Barack Obama's unprecedented horizontal campaign blurred this distinction as well, so that electoral and nonelectoral politics alike could also converge into all-channel networks. But while this linked liberal organizations in a new way, such that they might engage with the state as necessary, it did not change the fact that the parliamentary and extraparliamentary had become a more tenuous distinction than before.

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