They talk among themselves on the Internet but cannot translate that latent energy into a real-life political impact. Facade politics is the mindset developed in the 1970s whereby crusading public interest organizations claim to represent citizens, and may even have large paying memberships which occasionally send letters to Congress. Undeterred by a grassroots opposition, retrograde politicians are free to ignore public interest advocates and pay no political price. But too often, these players have prior political debts that trump enlightened policy. Without a constituency to protest and stand behind a sovereign vision, the public interest community can be rolled and have no recourse beyond press denunciations, and, on rare occasions, lawsuits.
Progressives have no where else to go, and the politicians know it.
It is critical to see that progressive policy aspirations are directly linked to the organized potency of their constituencies. Ultimately, advocacy without credible grassroots support is destined to stall. Developing Better Internal Networking to Coordinate, Recruit and Mobilize Conceive of an organization as a set of relationships among people, and one can begin to see how the networking technologies can fortify its advocacy capacity. Indeed, this is the transformation that major corporations have achieved through information technologies. It is time for the nonprofit world to re-invent itself in a similar manner.