Drinking Liberally: A New Strategy for Progressive Politics

If you want to know what the future of the American Left looks like, the answer may be no further away than your local dive bar.

Every week, in cities and towns all over the country, thousands of the nation's progressives are coming together to drink beer. But far from drowning their despair in drink, these progressives are building networks that could form the underpinning of a new renaissance for the American Left. What do they call this movement? Drinking Liberally, naturally.

Three years after it was founded in a Hell's Kitchen dive bar, the Drinking Liberally organization has grown to include 174 chapters. And they're not just in predictable cities like New York, Washington D.C., and San Francisco, but also scattered in seemingly unlikely places like Salt Lake City, Utah; Moscow, Idaho; Amarillo, Texas; and South Bend, Indiana.

In September, the Drinking Liberally regulars gathered in Denver for their second annual national convention, and under the umbrella name of "Living Liberally," the organization is developing a national comedy tour, networks of reading groups and movie clubs, and perhaps even a dating service.

The organization's central leadership spends more of its time supporting local chapters than planning a national agenda. Local chapters don't make political endorsements, tend not to engage in issue activism, don't take attendance and don't have meeting agendas.

By and large, they just get together for some drinks once a week. But through some sort of social jujitsu, Drinking Liberally's decentralized, open-ended structure -- the fact that it doesn't require its members to do anything -- has proven to be its greatest strength. The result: Its members are doing more than anyone expected.

Drinking Liberally had its origins in 2002, when its two founders Justin Krebs and Matt O'Neill were working together on a non-partisan project called Speak-Up New York. With some funding from PBS, Krebs and O'Neill drove around the state trying to get young people engaged in politics by helping them ask questions of the gubernatorial candidates. The project was a relative success, registering a lot of young voters. But the two men, both in their mid-20s, found themselves talking about their shared frustrations with their effort.

"We found that it's really hard to connect to people by talking about non-partisan issues," O'Neill says. "When you're not taking a point of view and you're not giving people a chance to express their point of view -- especially in a partisan way -- it's difficult to get them really excited. Especially young people."

Krebs and O'Neill agreed that part of the problem was that there wasn't really any space where people could discuss politics and the issues of the day in a relaxed atmosphere that was as much about social life and fun as it was about politics.

"It was also just a strange time," Krebs remembers. "The country was about to go to war in Iraq. The people seemed powerless. The press seemed asleep. There was this sense among those of us in New York who didn't like where the country was going that there was a surplus of progressive energy but it wasn't obvious where to put it."

Both fans of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, which documents the decline of civic institutions in America, O'Neill and Krebs began to talk about creating a drinking club loosely organized around progressive politics.

On a Thursday night in May of 2003, after e-mailing an invitation to some friends, Krebs and O'Neill held the first session of Drinking Liberally at Rudy's, a popular Hell's Kitchen bar known for its hot dogs and cheap pitchers.

The group grew slowly over the summer, with some Thursday nights finding only Krebs and O'Neill holding down the Drinking Liberally fort. A west-coast chapter opened when a regular attendee at Rudy's moved to San Francisco, and the group's profile rose somewhat when it hosted some events during the 2004 Republican National Convention. But what really catapulted the group into the national awareness was a photograph in a Newsweek article about young people's political engagement that showed someone wearing one of the group's buttons, which read, "I only drink liberally."