The Mass Party of the Future

On August 9, a group named Median Strategies released a poll showing Francesca Hong with a 20-point lead over David Crowley in the Democratic primary race for Wisconsin governor. She seemed on track to add her name to a roster of insurgent victories and weight to the narrative of an ascendant DSA, and the poll only confirmed the growing excitement behind her radical campaign. Or did it? 

On August 11, Crowley narrowly defeated Hong. Median Strategies promptly announced that its poll was actually not "genuine polling data," and indeed that "Median Strategies" itself was "a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem"—though of course not before releasing another fake poll concerning the Los Angeles mayoral race.

We live in an age of unreality. We are at war with Iran, unless we aren't. The election was fake, unless I won, in which case the people spoke with one unified voice. Mass movements appear out of nothing, put millions of furious citizens in the streets, and then evaporate seemingly overnight. Maybe they won, maybe they didn’t; either way “it sure was a spectacle.”

Anton Jäger calls this the hyperpolitical age, in which even the most mundane details of ordinary life have become intensely politicized—from what brand of coffee or beer you drink to what sports you watch to what car you drive. This has been achieved without any of the totalitarian state apparatuses that once aspired to such thoroughgoing cultural penetration. Indeed, it has occurred in their negation, in an age where formal structures of political organizing are utterly atrophied.

Jäger memorably compares the experience of living in our hyperpolitical age to the free surface effect (p. 84), an anodyne name for a phenomenon responsible for multiple horrific maritime disasters. Water accumulates in a large compartment, such as the car deck of a roll-on-roll-off ferry; as the ship rolls, the water begins to slosh back and forth, amplifying the ship's own roll; the back-and-forth rolling becomes more radical until the ship totally capsizes, killing most of the passengers. Without the structures of political institutions—of genuine mass parties—to transmute the (evident!) mass discontent of our age into productive action, disaster is inevitable.

Or so Jäger argues. The trouble is that Jäger remains trapped in the nostalgia mind-prison. He flees from the sociological conditions of modernity into an imagined past, the "ideal type" of mass politics retrieved from a hazy history of (largely failed) early-20th-century labor parties. To understand what is necessary for our time, a clearer view of the past is needed.

The mass party of yestercentury

From the deliverists to the popularists, the horizontalists to the Marxists, there is one great question we are all wrestling with: how do we break out of the contemporary logjam, create genuine positive change, and arrive at a new equilibrium, less prone to capsizing? One answer, much longed for by every faction of the commentariat, is the mass party. If we want to rebuild such a thing, it therefore behooves us to study its actual historical instantiation.

On Jäger's telling, the traditional mass party grows in a soil of tight-knit community organizations. He quotes a sociological study of interwar Austrian village life (p. 29):

There has long been a great number of organizations and institutions run by the different political parties. On the Social Democratic side are the party organization, a trade union with an affiliated theatre club, the child welfare committee called Children’s Friends, the Society of Free Thinkers, the Flame (a cremation society), a cycling club, the Workers’ Radio Club, the Workers’ Athletic Club, the Wrestling Club, the Young Socialist Workers, the Republican Home Guard, the Workers’ Library, the Rabbit Breeders’ Association, and the Allotment Owners’ Association.

The party's local chapters exist alongside these other local organizations, but are knitted together into a national (or international) network which provides centralized direction (p. 31). These local chapters provide identity and sociality to their members: a social organization of friends and comrades that is not merely a political party, but an actual human community. Alongside community, the party provides a coherent ideological framework which can organize its members' intellectual lives (p. 33). At the same time, the party is democratic: at the top, it is staffed by people who emerge from these local chapters, and who remain democratically accountable to the votes of the membership (p. 37).

Instead of social media's furious and soundful mobs, a mass party may signify something: it may organize the energy of its members. It builds on that social and intellectual foundation and, when necessary, mobilizes its members to mass action, organized action, disciplined action, which produces real social change.

It's a pretty picture. Of course, it is perhaps here worth noting that the labor parties of the early 20th century mostly got their shit wrecked.

Why? We should ask ourselves a simple historical question: which mass parties were most effective at mobilizing masses of people to produce durable political change? This is a question with a simple but unnerving answer: the National Socialist German Workers' Party, better known as the Nazis, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Just as in Jäger's ideal type, these parties provided comprehensive ideological frameworks, communities and ways of living, and could effectively mobilize millions of people to produce real social change.

But neither of these parties were at all democratic, in Jäger's sense. Indeed, what made each of them tick, on a fundamental level, was precisely the opposite. Rather than the base disciplining the center, the center disciplined the base. It was the capacity of the party center to distribute rewards and punishments to its own members that gave them the ability to organize and mobilize those members on a mass scale. 

Consider, for instance, Horst Wessel, who Goebbels made into a martyr of the cause. Wessel was killed by communists because of, of all things, a rent dispute with his landlord. In the violent terrain of interwar Germany, membership in either the SA or the Communist Party was a route to securing yourself against endemic political violence. The reason these parties worked, at all, is that they were providing a very real financial or material benefit in return for membership—which benefits might of course be revoked. 

Indeed, in both cases, the first thing that both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks pursued on achieving power was a greater ability to discipline their own base. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union organized themselves as a “Leninist party-state,” in which all institutions of power, from military divisions to farms and factories to collective dormitories, were pervaded by Communist Party activism and oversight. Advancing in society required approval of and ultimately membership in the Communist Party. The Nazis pursued "Gleichshaltung," which was the same thing but with fewer red banners and more eagles and swastikas. By expanding the center's ability to discipline its own base, to dole out success and failure at life, the party increased its own ability to organize and mobilize that base.

One might dismiss this all as authoritarian evil and therefore not part of our study, which concerns parties in a democratic society. Ah, but here's the thing: the parties that Jäger idealizes, such as the communist parties of France and Italy, or the Social Democrats in Austria, engaged in similar programs on a smaller scale. He notes that these were "prebendal" parties, which is another way of saying "clientelistic" (p. 40). Part of the reason for party membership were the real material benefits one expected to receive. In America, we call this "machine" politics, as made most famous by Tammany Hall, which mobilized and organized the Irish immigrants to New York City in a fantastically effective political machine. By controlling government, one controlled government monies, which might then be doled out to favored party bosses, and then the community, and then their friends in a fractal and hierarchical way. The clientelism and the mobilization are not two separate features: they are linked. This isn't particularly complicated. The organization commands adherence because it delivers benefits, and because it can punish defectors.

So there is a certain unsavoriness to these mass parties, one which we should not sweep under the rug. But the idea that we should emulate them is not merely unsavory: it is unworkable. Clientelistic organizations have declined in general because they are no longer necessary. The expansion and improvement of impersonal institutions that provide basic goods—that is to say, an effective state, bound by the rule of law, which provides for the general welfare—has undercut the fundamental material basis of clientelistic organizations. Our age is not their age.

Voting alone

Jäger suggests that mass parties grew out of the soil of tight-knit community organizations. He writes, "It may be that only a specific sociological context offered the requisite conditions for effective collective action, made possible by the density of interpersonal bonds" (p. 91). It may be more accurate to say that both local political machines and local community organizations responded to the same needs: access to information, access to community, access to welfare and security, and so on. This time period was characterized by nonexistent welfare states, indeed weak states in general, shaky rule of law, often conditioned on membership in the right ethnic group, stratified and exclusionary social worlds, and so on. These organizations flourished because they provided something their members could not get elsewhere. Now? Ned Resnikoff writes in his Build or Die (p. 105), citing Theda Skocpol's Diminished Democracy, and as Jäger himself is well aware:

Between 1955 and 1995, (male) membership in the Freemasons plunged by 70 percent. The Elks saw a less drastic but still marked decline of 37 percent. The General Federation of Women's Clubs saw its membership collapse by no less than 83 percent over the same period.

Mass parties did not grow out of the soil of community organizations. Both grew out of the soil of dysfunctional societies.

It is sometimes alleged that there must somehow nevertheless remain enormous latent demand for these kinds of organizations and this kind of community. Yet if that is so, why is the market not providing? The American services sector remains strong. I can walk down a commercial street and see bars, restaurants, bookstores, art galleries, tchotchke shops, tattoo parlors, Italian bakeries, party stores, dog ice cream stores, and on and on and on. I don't see very many social clubs. Not far from me is an old Elks Lodge, now host to a hipster music venue with a big mural of a gothy elk skeleton on the side. People will even pay recurring fees to membership organizations—like climbing gyms, fitness centers, and co-working spaces. Money is not the issue here.

The market delivers gesellschaft because nobody's buying gemeinschaft. In my beloved Pittsburgh, the Teutonia Männerchor hangs on, but it is the exception, not the rule. If people wanted such clubs in abundance the market would be providing them. It isn't.

It's normal at this point to get a little weepy and depressive about the loss of such conditions and organizations. We're all bowling alone, we're atomized and isolated and depressed, we've lost our gemeinschaft and are trapped in the prison of gesellschaft, blah blah blah.

Personally I kind of like it. It's nice actually that my employment doesn't depend on what gossip is going around the Irish Club this weekend. It's nice that I can look up how to deal with scale insects in five minutes on YouTube rather than having to join the local Garden Society. It's good that I can settle rent disputes with my landlord without calling a couple thugs from my local party. This very publication you are now reading, Liberal Currents, could only exist in a world of easy and cheap and impersonal access to the means of communication and publication.

Jäger worries that this age of social media is one that structurally favors right-wing politics (p. 70). Commentator Adam Elkus suggests that we are returning to premodern forms of politics, in which mass politics degenerates into carnival and jacquerie. A. G. Schwarz says, "a riot is a moving commune" (“The Riot or the Attack?” p. 25). What unites all these visions is the idea that politics no longer has real change as a goal. Frenetic political activity becomes the goal in itself, satisfying needs of self-entertainment and self-fulfillment under the mere trappings of "politics." Even voting ceases to be understood as practical action for the sake of a goal, but becomes assimilated to mass consumption, expressing one’s identity with as much thought and as much impact as a Che t-shirt. Such "politics" seems more apt to satisfy the momentary passions of the mob, and this inclined to supporting reactionary politics: paranoiac, vengeful, kind of stupid.

Don't post—organize?

Yet let us return to that snippet of unreality with which we began. That Francesca Hong—a former line cook—came within 0.5% of beating David Crowley, a lifetime Democratic Party operative, in a gubernatorial primary is a sign (one might argue) that traditional mass-political organizing of the kind the Democratic Socialists of America are engaging in can still work. The DSA's recent successes are a result of their return to old-school gemeinschaft politics: local organizing, party meetings, party clubs.

Does this represent a return to traditional mass politics? No.

Consider Donovan McKinney, a DSA-endorsed candidate who recently defeated incumbent Shri Thanedar in the Democratic primary for Michigan's 13th Congressional District, which is primarily composed of Detroit. McKinney won 52%-48%, receiving 57,714 votes. The Detroit DSA chapter boasts "1500+" members. Assuming perfect member turnout, that is perhaps 3% of McKinney's total votes in the primary. Thanedar won with 220,788 votes in the 2024 general election; assuming similar turnout, this means that McKinney's party faction will compose a mere 0.7% of his total popular support, and I would guess approximately none of them expect sweet government graft as a reward for their support. This is not, by any standard whatsoever, mass mobilization through clientelistic means. Nostalgia is a prison of the mind: let us see clearly instead.

The single most famous DSA member in America, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has occasionally had a rocky relationship with her own organization, precisely because the organization simply lacks the ability to discipline her in any way beyond the performative. This has nothing to do with her or with the DSA: it is a structural feature of politics in America. In practical terms, DSA is just what the Democratic Party is: a loose collection of brand affiliates—as any DSA partisan will tell you, when they encourage you to ignore this or that bit of nonsense emanating from the DSA national organization.

DSA has not escaped from hyperpolitics. They are riding the same wave as all the rest of us. That doesn’t mean there is nothing to learn from them.

The insurgent DSA has won not by mass mobilization in the classic sense, but by delivering to the Democratic Party faithful something they were not getting from the Party's incumbent leaders. Policy differences are overstated: primary voters have not jumped to the DSA because they're excited about, let alone even familiar with, the national organization's policy platform. So if it is not policy and not organization, what is it? "Vibes," one might say, but that is not a satisfying analysis.

To understand what that ephemeral something is, allow me an excursus.

Topping from the bottom

A core feature of hyperpolitics is not merely the absence of institutional politics, but the active rejection of institutions. The people demand to be led but reject all leaders. The people demand to be taught but refuse all teachers. In this respect, hyperpolitics, like BookTok, illustrates the dysfunctions of "topping from the bottom."

Topping from the bottom is a sex term, but nonetheless it may offer us some clarity. Certain subcultures are willing to explicitly theorize the operations of power, dominance, and submission that while operative in ordinary and political life it is often somewhat taboo to speak of.

"Topping from the bottom" thus refers to a situation in which one party, despite being in a nominally subordinate position, insists on dictating the exact course of the encounter. It becomes dysfunctional when they nevertheless refuse to take responsibility for the power they have in fact demanded. They wish to both lead and be led and in exchange achieve neither.

So it is with BookTok. In its most dysfunctional form, BookTok is an ecosystem of highly-engaged readers surrounding certain genres who produce what amount to checklists that a book must meet to receive their favor. If a book doesn't satisfy the checklist, onto the heap with it! The application of such a formulaic litmus test is why the favored books are so lifeless, so empty, so disposable. And “this is what our readers demand.”

Yet how can you call yourself a reader if you do not trust your author? And how can you say you trust an author if you are not willing to follow them through discomfort and surprise?

I kind of say this in my hifalutin-lecturer voice, but let's be real: reading a book, genuinely reading it, is an act of tremendous personal vulnerability. You invest your self—your thoughts, your emotions, your obsessions that catch you in surprising moments even when you are away from your latest love—in a book, in mere words on paper that some author you will never meet set down years ago, and you trust that the tempest you are now experiencing—the fear, the love, the hope, the heartbreak—will all come out to be worth it in the end. That they aren't just fucking with you. You hate this plot point, and you trust that the author knows better, knows your self better than you do. It's a frightening thing.

The same is true of a good teacher, as Plato might have told you. A good teacher demands more of you than you thought you had to give. A good teacher doesn't just tell you when you are right, but when you are wrong, and it is your responsibility to sit with that judgment and figure out what you messed up. A good teacher points your mind in directions you haven't considered, and the text might be a slog, but you trust it'll be worth it in the end: and it is.

A political party is not unlike all of the above rolled into one. A leader, a teacher, a father or mother. These relationships are reciprocal but not equal. 

Skill issue

Ah, but here's the thing: no one is entitled to trust. The thing any competent top—or teacher—understands: trust is earned and maintained. This is all the more true in a time when our options for exit have never been greater: put down the book, unfollow the channel, unfriend the mutual, and pick up another with no more than a click. The ties that bound us evaporate, all that is solid melts into air...

...and that's good, actually. Subordination on the basis of mere power is an ugly thing. The impersonal institutions of state and market and society that we have built with such great labors are, on balance, enormously good, once we recognize that the alternatives are mere power, mere patrimonialism, “community” that is as much prison as garden. It's good actually that I can buy groceries without anyone asking what my religion is.

So whence trust? Whence leadership?

Earn it.

Contra what I have just said, people do in fact want to be taught. People do in fact want to be led. People do in fact want a public figure they know and trust who can be a moral bellwether across the years.

Instead we are subjected to what one might call "bottoming from the top," the paranoiac mood of certain Democratic electeds, forever looking over their shoulder at the (focus) groups, refusing to take any stand not pre-approved by A/B polling. Voters can smell it on them and do not like it.

Or, put another way: people are so hungry for leadership. They are hungry for meaning. They are hungry for purpose. And they find what we have offered them thin gruel. The answer is to serve a true meal, not whine about the unfairness of hunger.

This is not the only problem.

People incessantly talk as if "posting" is no substitute for politics, and then "real" politics is going to a protest…the whole point of which is of course to be photographed and then posted about. As Will Stancil today emphasizes—and as Walter Lippman pointed out a century ago—the mass public's understanding of the world is, inevitably, mediated by media. No one experiences "the economy." Very few Americans have experienced the war against Iran. We have opinions of these things because we are connected to a media system, and these days that means phones, and that means video.

So yeah. You gotta pick up your fucking phone and talk to people. You have to explain the world to them. You have to understand that parasociality is inevitable, and lean into it. A teacher doesn't have a personal relationship with every student in their lecture, but every student feels as if the teacher is talking to them personally.

You need to tell people a story they want to keep on reading. You need to make them feel like they are a part of that story. If the story is good enough, they will act on your behalf. This cannot be coerced. It cannot be disciplined, because you have no tools of discipline beyond your voice. That story needs to be compelling to the faithful and legible to the many. Ultimately, this means making yourself a part of that story: a leader worth following voluntarily.

And I have seen and felt how this can generate genuine real-world mobilization. Liberal Currents is a small outfit, but if I want to meet fellow libs in D.C. and talk turkey, I could do that in eight hours. The hit rate of making friends online is, in my experience, a lot higher than my parents told me it would be. It is a mistake to think there is a sharp distinction between online and offline organizing: they complement each other, much as print culture (the literal etymological origin of “posting”) was an inextricable part of the mass politics of days past.

Maybe this style of politics depresses you. But the mass party of yestercentury is not coming back. Romantic fantasies of the organic union of party and people are just that—fantasies. We must learn to harvest the intense politicization of our new era via new means, ones suited to the sociological conditions we find ourselves in, not ones we imagine to be the "ideal type" which answers to what politics ought to be. Wake up and smell the 21st century: it's already a quarter over. No reason to dwell forever in the revolutions that weren't, imagining that if we simply dream hard enough the lathe of heaven will turn and let the Spartacists win and get history back on its "correct" course.

Liberalism's problem isn't structural. Liberalism's problem is that we got out-hustled. We were comfortable in our traditional citadels of power—our traditional institutional power. But technological change created new possibilities for counter-organizing, and we got lazy, and other factions on the left and the right just out-hustled us.

Skill issue.

—Ah, but this wouldn't be Liberal Currents if I didn't leave you with one last caveat.

To lead and be led are reciprocal relationships. Our leaders must deliver better, but so must we. As my colleague Katherine Cross puts it, “In the realm of the Last Men, we must strive to be Final Girls.” We must loosen up on the method of paranoia, where we trawl social media looking for reasons to feel betrayed, because—paradoxically—betrayal, rage, and black depression somehow appeal more to us than purpose and positive action. And of course various social entrepreneurs are happy enough to provide, hunting for clicks by "exposing!!" whatever transient nonsense they can use to confirm our own expectation of betrayal, no matter how spurious or stupid.

Take some responsibility for yourself. What else is there to say?

Featured Image is Crowd at the American Labor Party rally to re-elect Roosevelt