When You Have a Magnifying Glass, Everything Looks Bigger

How exaggerating the size and scope of the campus protest wave is playing into the right's hands; plus an update on the challenge facing the field of progressive movement technology.

This week’s edition is a hybrid. First, an important addendum to last week’s report on VANxiety and the current state and future of progressive movement technology. Then, a discussion of the pro-Palestine protest wave now underway on dozens of campuses, where I’ll explore whether lots of people on all sides of this tempest are over-stating what’s going on.

Regarding the state of movement tech

I owe Betsy Hoover and Higher Ground Labs, the incubator/accelerator that she founded in 2017, an apology for leaving them out of “Living With VANxiety.” In fact, we had talked months ago, but as I was pulling together my notes from dozens of interviews to write my report, I forgot about my conversation with her. I’ve corrected that by making two additions to the report, and also updating last week’s Substack post with the abridged version.

Here's the key point that I’ve added: Well before NGP VAN was rolled up along with several other key tech tools and bought by Bonterra, Hoover and Higher Ground Labs was already hard at work building an alternative development path for progressive tech. Since 2017, they’ve marshaled more than $50 million in several investment rounds to back some 70 start-ups serving the broad political organizing ecosystem. Several of them, like OpenField and including Universe, Winnable, and Sosha, offer the same services now offered by Bonterra’s suite of tools, but often in ways that are more flexible and up-to-date. “Entrepreneurs have been building alternatives to pieces of the Bonterra infrastructure for years,” Hoover points out. “Their work puts us in a better position to manage this transition if we need to.  Technology has changed so much in the last 20 years that Bonterra has been our system of record – it is ok for us to trust these new solutions.”

It's also important to note that HGL’s investor base extends far beyond the “robin-hooding from billionaires” network of Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective. Hoover and her colleagues have built a pool of 150 limited partners who have collectively put in about $50 million to invest into early-stage startups over several rounds. So, to a partial extent, there’s already a path beyond the one paved by Stu Trevelyan as he packaged NGP VAN up to sell to Bonterra. (I’ve also added this to the report.)

But a little more on that: Back in 2021, a blog post by HGL co-founder Shomik Dutta and principal Teddy Gold summed up their approach well. Recognizing the problematic nature of the political tech marketplace, where “venture-scale returns are an unobtainable fantasy,” and where in many instances start-ups have sold for less than the total invested in them, leaving founders and employees with nothing, they suggested a different approach to start-ups: “stay disciplined, stay lean, and race to profitability.” They argued the way to “protect the progressive ecosystem from the whiplash of boom/bust that has doomed overly ambitious startups that chase new markets and artificial growth” is to “Raise ‘Minimum Viable Capital’, not ‘Maximum Available Capital’.” Under this model, HGL takes a stake in a start-up, but as the company earns revenue its founders buy back some of that equity, leaving HGL with a healthy return on investment while founders and employees still maintain control. Arguably, this offers start-ups critical capital during their early years without forcing them to blitzscale to satisfy their VC board members, and may produce profitable, sustainable companies comfortably serving the political sector without the pressure to grow to a big exit.

Only time will tell if this approach is sustainable, or if it solves the other problems with the political tech marketplace that I described in my report. Many of the start-ups HGL is backing have traditional ownership structures, so their founders and investors may still be tempted by the same economic forces that sent NGP VAN into the arms of Apax Partners. And while it’s great that HGL has set up a funnel with a lot of well-intentioned limited partners offering seed money, it’s still not clear how that addresses the needs of infrastructure providers who need some way of sticking around year after year.

One reader of the report, Kassia DeVorsey, wrote me with some smart commentary that she agreed to let me share here. Her main points are 1) that it’s challenging for  donors or investors to figure out what tools or infrastructure to prioritize from a complex landscape, and 2) that there is a real lack of clarity around how much (or even if) our current tech ecosystem truly helps achieve the real-world outcomes we all strive towards. As someone who cut her teeth as a VAN manager in New Hampshire in 2008, DeVorsey has been consulting in political tech and data for a long time, with organizations like The Movement Cooperative and also as a donor advisor.

She writes, “Given the plethora of tools, platforms, etc., in our decentralized political tech space, it can be difficult for anyone to understand the significance of any one particular piece of tech, and by extension why it might be worth funding over another thing. Moreover, not all the tech that is currently extant should continue to exist at all, or exist anywhere near its current budget levels, and furthermore its mere presence probably causes confusion and misallocation of resources.” 

Here's her key point:

“Many of the more sophisticated and deep-pocketed funders in the political space make spending decisions based on rigorous analyses of cost-per-vote-gained expected from a given program.  And virtually all donors are interested in SOME understanding of the impact from their investments, whether or not their motivations are electoral. Now the supporting role played by any one platform or tool in facilitating an impactful program of any kind is quite difficult to quantify - and frankly many of us aren’t even experienced in trying to make that argument.  As you point out, a lot of money was flowing towards tech in the 2012-2020 era, so people could perhaps get by with less than crisp pitches - especially with tech industry donors who were excited about supporting tech for its own sake if it could be even vaguely related to ‘stopping Trump,’ addressing the (largely imaginary) Dem ‘data deficit,’ and so on.”

“But even if you want to come up with a strong data-backed argument for how tech is driving impact, you wind up in a thorny Emperor’s New Clothes situation because so much of the tech we talk about is actually going to facilitate organizational programs that are at best cost-inefficient for electoral work…  If GOTV canvassing costs MULTIPLE orders of magnitude more to gain a vote as compared with mail or TV advertising (as some research suggests), how much is an app that facilitates said canvassing worth…?  If your volunteers are not exactly helping your program, to what extent should a volunteer management tool be prioritized for investment?”

I think this larger point deserves emphasis. It’s definitely true that campaigns and organizations need a set of basic tools for engaging voters or their supporters. Helping to reduce the cost of those tools and services is absolutely valuable—as a buyer’s cooperative TMC definitely helps its member organizations save several hundred thousand dollars that they can then use for their core missions, be that racial justice or women’s rights or whatever. But the question remains: what is the marginal return on investment in terms of real-world outcomes from a slightly different tool for, say, relational organizing? Is getting people to text their friends using an app really that much more effective than just asking them to use SMS? 

DeVorsey’s point is humbling. Indeed, we talked further and agreed that a real cost-benefit analysis of political tech’s value would also have to take into account other places where donor money can be directed, like investing in media or narrative strategy. Considering how well Republicans root their political work in a larger worldview that is constantly reinforced by rightwing media and persuasive narrative frames, an extra million spent on a new media start-up in an underserved area vs new voter file management software tools may make a lot more sense.

At the end of the day, though, every campaign and advocacy organization across the Democratic and progressive ecosystem relies on tech and data like never before. Those tools and systems need to work and be affordable and sustainable. And right now, it’s far from clear how that will continue to happen as 2024 plays out.

Pro-Palestine protestors on their way to demonstrate outside President Biden’s April 25 fundraiser in Irvington, NY (Photo by Micah L. Sifry)

“A magnifying glass makes things look bigger”

These days, one thing that everyone participating in or commenting on the Israel-Palestine conflict here in the United States appears to agree on is the campus protest movement of the last month is A BIG DEAL. It’s HUGE!!!

On the left, NYU political historian Tom Sugrue writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “we are living in the most intense period of student protest since the 1960s.” The Guardian agrees, calling it “perhaps the most significant student movement since the Vietnam campus protests of the late 1960s.” Rabble-rouser and filmmaker Michael Moore takes to his Substack to herald “The Great 2024 Nonviolent Student Uprising.” Macklemore releases a new rap video declaring “The people are in the streets.” On a building, students at the George Washington University encampment project the words “Gaza lights the spark that will set the empire ablaze” with the American flag ablaze.

On the right, Rep. Virginia Foxx, the chair of the lead House committee investigating campus antisemitism, who has been pummeling universities with letters demanding they do more to suppress what she sees as antisemitic speech, now is decrying the “outbreak of campus riots.” Tablet Magazine publishes an “investigation” into “the witches’ brew of billionaires, Islamists and leftists behind the campus protests” that starts out, “over the past several weeks, Americans have witnessed what has seemed like a mass outpouring of support for terror on elite college campuses.” And Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League defames the students as “campus proxies” of Iran.

Even the normally sensible Israeli political commentator Anshel Pfeffer, writing in Ha’aretz to critique Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incendiary claim that the students are like the Nazis who expelled Jews from German universities in the 1930s, falls for the “campus riots” frame. But at least he notices, unlike just about everyone else, that “their numbers are small, even when compared to the student bodies of the universities they claim to belong to.”

Here's one example, from the University of Virginia, which has an enrollment of 22,000. According to this in-depth report by Jonathan Katz of The Racket, a “few dozen” students set up an encampment there fairly late in the season, on Tuesday April 30—the same night as the police crackdown at Columbia University. Four days later, heavily armored state and local police who, by his estimate “outnumbered the protesters at least three to one — bodyslammed, pointed guns at, and blasted mace into the eyes of unarmed protesters. They arrested at least 25 people and destroyed the encampment before driving thousands of onlookers from campus and the surrounding community onto the adjoining streets.”

Katz notes in passing that this all took place in roughly the same place as the May Day protests of 1970s, “when thousands of Virginia undergrads shut down the university to protest the war in Vietnam and Cambodia.” [Emphasis added.] More recently, UVA was also where, in 2017, the local authorities allowed white supremacists who were nearly all outsiders to the community to openly harass, threaten and intimidate students without any police response. Katz notes that, “It wasn’t until the Nazis started beating and macing a small group of antiracist counter-protesters that the relative handful of police on hand intervened; and even then, they arrested just one marcher.”

That’s the thing: the actual scale of the student protest movement now underway is pretty small—while the police response is way over the top. And everyone who keeps feeding the notion that these protests are “setting America on fire,” as Tablet magazine headlined its so-called investigation, is just goading more gullible kids to put themselves at risk while also inviting the militarized police crackdowns we’re seeing in many places.

According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, an ongoing academic project that tracks public protest activity by collecting and coding news reports of local protest events, the total number of protests at universities and other schools since mid-April is just over 1,200. About 90,000 people have participated across 193 localities, though many of those are multi-day encampments actually just numbering dozens or maybe a few hundred. (The number of participants is probably an undercount, since CCC only uses press accounts where numbers are mentioned.) There have been a flurry of places where pro-Palestine protests hadn’t occurred earlier, which is a reflection of how the first crackdown at Columbia led to a wave of solidarity encampments at other schools. What’s happening isn’t a mass movement, though because at some campuses students are choosing to be genuinely disruptive to physical spaces, they’re punching above their weight in terms of how much stress they’re putting on the guardians of the status quo.

From “Pro-Palestine Protests in the US” https://nonviolentactionlab.shinyapps.io/palestine-protest-dashboard/

Compared to the big rallies that took place during the first months after October 7, though, these campus protests are pretty small. Ninety thousand is a pittance compared to the hundreds of thousands who marched in the first three months after the war began. The people are NOT in the streets. And if you look at a list of all the campuses with encampments, like the one below, you can either hyper-ventilate or recognize that 120 is a fraction of the nearly 4,000 accredited colleges and universities in America.

In June 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, we saw something much closer to a real uprising against police brutality, with protests in more than 4,000 locations and between ten and fifteen million people in the streets. People on the left who are bragging about today’s campus “uprising” are doing these college kids no favors, especially as the right, which now includes a hyper-politicized faction of the American Jewish community, bays for a crackdown. And while the first wedge of that is the police pummeling college students for in some cases little more than violating curfew orders, what’s looming on the horizon is a wholesale attack on the nonprofit sector, judging from the rising attention to liberal foundations and funding networks that are supposedly puppeteering the current protest wave.

So what’s going on? In part, blame our media system. As a very smart friend of mine who is a historian of protest movements said to me this morning, “A magnifying glass makes things look bigger.” But we should also recognize who holds the biggest magnifying glasses and where they are focusing. As Edward Morgan, author of What Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy, once told me, back then, “the mass media culture tended to exclude (not take seriously) any system-critical arguments from the antiwar, new Left, or black movements of the 60s while at the same time the media's cameras were widely drawn to the most inflammatory, militant, or extreme behaviors exhibited by individuals in the various movements (thus inviting more of the same).  Quite clearly a significant focus of the establishment's backlash against the movements zeroed in on these behavioral manifestations, equating them ("violent," "anti-American" etc) with the movements themselves.” So, he concluded, in an unwitting way, “those in the antiwar movement who believed their inflammatory or militant actions were ‘getting the message through the media’ […] in fact, […] were providing the forces of backlash with fodder for their ultimately successful propaganda campaigns.”

And here we are, with the wrong kind of history repeating itself.

—Bonus link: In the same vein, but far better said, see Rick Perlstein’s piece in the American Prospect on The New Anti-Anti-Semitism.