Shared Identity -- Not T-Shirts -- Makes a Movement

You could be forgiven for thinking it was Fashion Week in Washington the way media covering the liberal One Nation rally on October 2, 2010 continually referenced attendees' clothing.

"Many wore the bright T-shirts of their unions," noted the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "They were all wearing union shirts," said Glenn Beck, presenting an Us Magazine-worthy photo spread comparing One Nation fashion with his "Restoring Honor" rally a month earlier. Even progressive commentary emphasized the Ts in unity, as when Facing South wrote about a group of autoworkers at One Nation "who were easily identified by their Navy blue T-shirts. Other workers joined their respective seas of purple (Service Employees International Union), green (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees) and red (Communications Workers of America)."

If only starting a social movement were as easy as spreading swag.

The most important difference between the Tea Party and progressives is not that the Tea Party is an honest-to-goodness grassroots movement while the centralized and stultified progressive sentiment is not. The difference is that the Tea Party understands the need for a shared sense of identity --- essential to creating a spirit and appearance of movement --- while the progressive field is too focused on branding. In the case of movement building, not only is branding not the same as identity but organizational branding actually undermines movement identity.

Of course, we know the Tea Party isn't entirely a movement. Powerful funders and organizations, as well as top-down communication channels like Fox News, were integral all along to the Tea Party's formation and framing. Yet the very fact that progressives continue to marvel with jealousy at the Tea Party's hold on politics and the public imagination reflects how successfully the Tea Party has attained movement status. In that sense, it doesn't even matter if it's true or not. The mainstream media talks about the Tea Party as a movement, the mainstream Republican party responds to the Tea Party as a movement, and perhaps most importantly, ordinary people across the country identity themselves as part of the Tea Party movement, whether or not they belong to any specific, "official" organization.

Manufactured though it might be, we have to give the Tea Party masterminds credit for understanding that the appearance of self-generated, spontaneous movement is not only more powerful than organization-generated action but, potentially, self-fulfilling. If something feels like a movement, people may start to act like it's a movement, and then it may actually become a movement.

The great irony here is that lessons about the importance of shared identity in movement construction are taken directly from the liberal identity politics movements of the '60s, '70s and '80s. "Gay" wasn't even a social identity, let alone a political one, through the 1950s. Women certainly knew they were women before Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, but feminist activists created a sense of shared experience and thus an identity from which political struggle could emerge. Even today, the extent to which women or gay folks or black folks, etc., see themselves as linked to a shared community through their racial, sexual and/or gender identity is a reasonable proxy for engagement with the community's political agenda. For instance, those who proclaimed themselves "post-gay" in the late 1990s distanced themselves from the social label as well as the political cause.

Democrats and progressives need an overarching identity that feels deeply shared and organic --- not a simple, top-down brand (with uniform T-shirt).