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- [00:00]
Joe Freeman
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Santi Ruiz
I'm Santi Ruiz and this is Statecraft. We interview top political appointees and civil servants about how they achieved a specific policy goal. You can find the transcript for this conversation and many others at www.statecraft.pub.
- [00:23]
Tanner Greer
Today I'm talking with Joe Freeman. Joe was a founding member of the women's Liberation movement in the 1960s, a civil rights campaigner, and later a political scientist. She's not the most typical Statecraft guest we've had, but I was reading a blog post by my friend Tanner Greer. I'll link it in the show notes, and in it he discusses two papers she wrote about the structure of America's political parties. Both papers are really fascinating. Jo looks at how the two parties actually work, not just what they believe, but how they operate as organizations. I found her approach incredibly useful for understanding the 2024 presidential race and for understanding why the parties are the way they are now. In this conversation, we dig into why the two parties fight so differently, what makes someone powerful in each party, how the women's movement transformed the Democratic Party, what happened to convention caucuses, how they've changed over time, and what it means when a movement starts trashing its own leaders. Joe's been to every Democratic party convention since 1964, and almost every Republican convention as well. Without further ado, Joe Freeman.
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Santi Ruiz
Joe, thanks for joining. It's very good to have you on.
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Joe Freeman
Glad to be here.
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Santi Ruiz
I want to start by talking about the political organization of the two parties. In 1986 and 1987, you wrote two papers. One is called who you know versus who youo Feminist Influence in the Democratic and Republican Parties. And the other one is the political culture of the Democratic and Republican parties. What were you up to in the late 80s when you wrote those two papers?
- [01:59]
Joe Freeman
Well, I had been thinking about political culture and the two parties for a very long time. I have been to both parties conventions. I've been to every Democratic convention since 64 and every Republican convention since 76. And I had been particularly focused on what women were doing within the two parties. Although I'll admit that in 64 they weren't really doing very much. But in 76 they both were doing a lot, but they were doing it differently. And because I could watch feminists do things differently, I began to ask myself why. And the answer I came up with is because the environments they were working in were in fact, very, very different. You know, we tend to think of seeing one political party. You've seen them all. But that's simply not true. Parties differ in their culture, just as societies differ in their culture. And if you're going to be active in one, it helps to know what the culture is.
- [02:57]
Santi Ruiz
Let me read a quote from that second paper on the political culture of the Democratic Republican parties, and then I want to ask you to flesh it out for me. So this is you in 1987. There are two fundamental differences between the parties in which all others are rooted. The first one is structural, and in the Democratic Party, power flows upward, and in the Republican Party, power flows downward. The second is attitudinal. Republicans perceive themselves as insiders even when they are out of power, and Democrats perceive themselves as outsiders even when they are in power. Tell me a little bit more about what you meant by those two fundamental differences.
- [03:33]
Joe Freeman
Okay. Well, the Democratic Party is composed of constituent groups, and it's pretty much always been that way long before feminism or anything else. Therefore, exercising power within the Democratic Party involves being able to say that you accurately reflect the interests of a particular group. Now, those groups can be organized, or they can just be sort of ideational groups. Usually they're organized or they become organized, but they don't have to be. But to be listened to, you need to be able to say, I represent X, I represent black women, I represent Jews. I'm speaking for the people of South Carolina. It can be a geographic unit, but it has to be some sort of a unit. In the Republican Party, it's more a matter of party flows downward, and therefore it's having personal connections that count. You could see that very well in the last year, those who claim to have a personal connection to Donald Trump were paid more attention to than those who didn't have a personal connection to Donald Trump, he having become the leader of the Republican Party. Now, in previous years, it would have been a different set of connections to a different person or people. Right now, it's Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump wants to say bad things about you, all of a sudden your influence just disappears. So it's your personal connections that count. And that's because people in the party listen to what the top is saying, rather than people at the top of the party listening to what the bottom is saying.
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Santi Ruiz
I'm curious about that second difference as well, that Republicans perceive themselves as insiders even when they're out, and Democrats vice versa.
- [05:25]
Joe Freeman
This has a lot to do with the social basis of the parties. And I will freely admit that the social basis does change over time. The social basis today is not entirely the same as it was 60, 70, 80 years ago. It changes gradually. It doesn't change all at once. But the Democratic Party has generally been composed of those elements who do not view themselves as elites. Now, again, I'll admit that as the party more and more becomes the party of the educated middle and upper classes, it looks less and less like that. But traditionally, the party has been composed of people who do not view themselves as elites. Republican Party, on the other hand, does view themselves as a party composed of elites. Today, to one some extent, it's aspirational elites, people they want to be like rather than people they actually are. But traditionally, it's also been people who they actually were, and they tended to be the people of the upper middle class and the upper classes. Now, Republican Party still has an awful lot of upper class people in it. I don't have to tell you that. Whereas the Democrats tend to be more composed to people who are socially upwardly mobile, but not already at the top of the social hierarchy. Again, social basis is changing. So what I'm saying is not 100% true. It was more true 50 years ago than it is now. Now. But it's not untrue either.
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Santi Ruiz
On the first point, about personal connections mattering more in the Republican Party, from my experience, almost everybody would agree that that's true in the Donald Trump era, that seems straightforwardly true, that the party is dominated by a particular person. What's an example of that orientation around a particular person from a previous era of American politics? Because I think we tend to take Trump as like a sui generis case.
- [07:20]
Joe Freeman
Yeah, well, Trump's an unusual extreme. What you have now is almost a cult of personality. And that's a bit unusual that you have this much of a cult of personality. Well, let me actually give you an example from the 60s. Goldwater won the Republican nomination in 1964. Now, I will tell you that he was not favored by everyone in the party, but he won the nomination. Phyllis Schlafly, whom we often think of as the organizer of the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, gained her influence because of her relationship with Goldwater. If she had not had that relationship, it's highly likely she never would have risen to the front of her own group. Now, she organized a Stop ERA movement, but people listened to her because of a relationship with Goldwater.
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Santi Ruiz
In one of these papers, you talk about the makeup of the Democratic coalition, that some groups have been recognized parts of the coalition since the New Deal, black people, labor interests, while others, like women and gays, were relatively new participants. I'd love to hear about how in your experience. The women's liberation movement went from being not a recognized part of the Democratic coalition to a central part of it.
- [08:41]
Joe Freeman
The key event was the 1976 Democratic convention. Now, it's not that women hadn't been a recognized part. There had long since been a women's division of the Democratic Party, just like there was a women's division of the Republican Party. But the women's division of the Democratic party saw as its primary goal organizing women into the Democratic Party. And it was part of the Democratic Party. You can trace it Back to the 1930s, the women's division. The women's liberation movement emerged in the late 1960s, early 1970s. And while it recognized that it was more likely to find compatible ideas in people in the Democratic Party, it didn't see it as necessarily reflecting its interests. At the 1976 Democratic convention, feminists organized a women's caucus. And the purpose of the caucus was to compel Carter. Everyone knew he was going to be the nominee to support the Equal Rights Amendment. It's also wanted to change the rules within the Democratic Party to require that all the delegates be equally split between men and women. And for that purpose, they had a major meeting that went on for parts of the entire convention. Now, the conventions generally meet at night. The meetings take place during the day. Officially, they lost. Unofficially, they displayed clout. They displayed the fact that they represented a significant number of Democrats, mostly women Democrats, but a few men, and that therefore, given the culture of the Democratic Party, they needed to be listened to. Now, Carter never really supported the Equal Rights Amendment, but in 1980, when the convention reconvened again, they did have equal division. So the rules had been changed informally, or should I say out of the public eye, even though it had been officially rejected when it was in the public eye. 1976 was probably the peak of, of the women's liberation or feminist movement in this country at that time. So it wasn't quite as strong in 1980 as it had been earlier. Nonetheless, its influence was greater simply because it demonstrated its ability to mobilize people and to articulate issues and to get attention. That influence continued. Indeed, the convention became composed of multiple caucuses over a period of time. The two biggest caucuses were generally the women's caucus and the black caucus. Those in subsequent conventions. Those often met in the morning of every convention day. One time they both. They both met at the same time. Then they alternated it. One would meet Monday, Wednesday, the other would meet Tuesday, Thursday. By last summer, the 2024 conventions, they had multiplied there were 33 caucuses. Some of them were called councils, but there were 33 individual identifiable groups which met during the day separately from the convention that was going on at night. These 33 groups included a women's caucus and a black caucus, but they also included a climate caucus and a senior caucus and a rural caucus. They had literally multiplied. They were no longer as popular as they had once been. Whereas the early caucuses commanded attendance in the hundreds, the caucuses that were held last summer commanded attendance in the dozens. Two digits rather than three digits, but they were still there. You go to the Republic convention, you can find no equivalent to that. There are a couple women's groups that were there, the National Federation of Republican Women being the most obvious. But they weren't holding meetings. They weren't inviting people to debate. They weren't inviting people to talk. They held receptions. You could go to a reception, you could be recruited and joined. You could pay money and join. It was not an arena for debate. They also had a group called Concerned Women of America. Now, Concerned Women of America's primary interest was evangelical Christianity, and what they wanted was to get women to vote. To vote Republican, admittedly, but to vote again. They were not debating issues. There were no issue concerns.
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Santi Ruiz
What were those caucuses doing at conventions in your early career? And what were they doing in 2024.
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Joe Freeman
In the early period, or should I say in the 70s and 80s, they heard speakers and they debated. They passed resolutions and they debated. They talked about what they wanted the Democratic Party to do or not do. Last summer, they heard speakers, they didn't debate. There was very little coming from the floor. They heard important speakers, and the speakers basically talked about what they wanted to talk about. The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Jamie Harrison, probably talked at five or six different caucuses and councils. When he went to the senior council, he talked about being raised by his grandparents. When he went to the rural council, he talked about being raised in rural South Carolina. But no one was saying, jaime Harrison, you're chair of the Democratic Committee. We want the committee to do X. None of that. Whereas back in the 70s and 80s, there was debate.
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Santi Ruiz
So then what was the purpose in this summer's convention of those caucuses existing and meeting at the convention?
- [14:43]
Joe Freeman
Well, I don't know. I really don't know. You'll have to ask the Democratic Committee. It just had become a tradition. And it had become a tradition in part because the Democratic Party is composed of constituent groups. So to give space to those constituent groups, it simply was the way things were Done, just as at the Republican convention, it wasn't the way things were done, so they didn't do it. But I would say the content had changed because originally they were debating issues. They were talking about what they wanted the party to do. Last summer, they were merely hearing speeches. Now, admittedly, by last summer, the candidates had already been chosen. The platform had already been written. You could argue what did they want to debate. Nonetheless, in some previous conventions, even when the candidates were already chosen, like 1976, they still had debate. What do we want Carter to do? What do we want the Democratic Party to do? So it sort of. It faded over time. They went from being caucuses to caucuses and councils. I'm not sure I can tell you the distinction between the two beyond having read it in their literature. But suffice to say they expanded in number. They went from basically being two of them, women and blacks, to there being 33 of them. And they. They moderated their content down to something quiet. They listened to speeches rather than gave speeches. They've changed over time. There may be another, shall we say, revolutionary moment, major change moment coming up in the future. I don't know. I'm just simply saying there may be. Just like what we saw in 1960 didn't replicate itself in 1964 or 68. Things change. They change in response to what's going on in the country. But as of 24, caucuses expanded and muted.
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Santi Ruiz
Let me go back to something you said a little earlier about the role of picking fights within the two parties.
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Joe Freeman
Yeah.
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Santi Ruiz
The example that you gave, and I'll quote from one of your pieces here, you talk about how the National Organization of Women led a floor fight for a plank that then President Carter strongly disliked. They picked a fight that basically they knew they would lose and that that strengthened the National Organization of Women long term within the party because it had demonstrated clout. And you also mentioned that similarly, Jesse Jackson's thinly veiled threats not to support the 1984 ticket appear to have strengthened his hand within the Democratic Party. Can you explain that dynamic a little bit more for us?
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Joe Freeman
Okay, well, first of all, it's nationalization for women. That was a big debate when they named the organization. So now is very sensitive about that. But it's not all it's for anyway. Both parties fight. Let's just be clear about that, okay? Democratic fights are loud, open in public. Republican fights are behind the scenes and quieter. Take the recent Speaker's elections in the House. Now, we all know from lots of leaked sources the viciousness that went on behind the scenes, but on the surface, you didn't see it. This was the Republicans fighting. If it had been Democrats, you'd have seen it on the surface. In the case of the Women's caucus Back in 1976, again, the fights were loud, open and public. And the fact that women's caucus came forth with resolutions and it looked like they were going to command a majority of those resolutions gave them clout because they say they spoke for a major percentage of the Democrats, mostly women Democrats, but they could say they spoke for a major percentage of Democrats. Republicans have a harder time doing that, so they have certainly done it. But it's more behind the scenes, but still just as vicious behind the scenes.
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Santi Ruiz
It's funny that you highlight this difference in styles of conflict, kinds of internal party politics. I think there's a quote from you here that Democratic Party politics are open, loud and confrontational, while those of the Republican Party are closed, quiet and consensual. Because I think for many folks of my generation, the perception would be reversed.
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Joe Freeman
Yeah. No, the Republican Parties are certainly less consensual than they used to be. Okay. Remember I wrote that in the 80s.
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Santi Ruiz
Sure.
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Joe Freeman
Are certainly less consensual than they used to be. Yes. That the speaker race, that's a good example of it.
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Santi Ruiz
Yeah. I guess I would add it's not just that the Republican Party has changed, but that when there was an opportunity to nominate a new candidate, for instance, last summer for the Democratic presidential nomination, that entire debate played out basically behind closed doors. It seems from public reporting that there were a few key players in the Democratic Party who weighed in. And instead of a mini primary, as some were calling for, or some kind of, you know, convention battle, it all happened, you know, sotto voce. And then we had a new nominee. So it seems like there's some, maybe some inversion there from the politics of the 80s.
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Joe Freeman
Yes and no. The problem was time. You remember the date of the Trump.
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Santi Ruiz
Biden debate, Remember the date within 120.
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Joe Freeman
Days of the election that the problem was time. There just wasn't enough time to do anything else. That's really what it was all about.
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Santi Ruiz
Okay, one more question for you on the parties, and then we'll switch.
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Joe Freeman
Okay.
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Santi Ruiz
I was interested also in pieces from the late 80s of yours about how you describe ideological factions in the Republican Party. I'll quote you a little bit here. Unlike Democratic caucuses, ideological factions in the Republican Party are not power centers independent of their relationship to party leaders. The purpose of ideological factions. And here you're talking about organized ideological factions in the Republican Party. You say the purpose of ideological factions is to generate new ideas and test their appeal. Initially, these new ideas are for internal consumption. Their concept of success is not winning benefits, symbolic or otherwise, for their group so much as being able to provide overall direction to the party. If successful in attracting adherence, these ideas will be adopted by the party for external appeal. Why do you say that ideological factions in the Republican Party operate differently than they do in the Democratic Party? Why aren't all ideological fights the same?
- [20:59]
Joe Freeman
Democratic Party is heavily on the basis of constituency groups. They're looking for what can they get for my group or do for my group? Ideological factions are not group oriented in that sense. They are talking about the larger society. Central Republican line is saying lower taxes will benefit larger society. In the 80s we had what were called the supply siders. The idea was that if you lower taxes, more money will be spent by private parties and if more money is spent by private parties, then it will enhance the economy. In fact, that didn't happen. The data shows that didn't happen at all. But that was the supply sideline, was that it will enhance the economy and therefore be good for the entire country. You see a similar thing happening now on the whole tax issue.
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Santi Ruiz
I guess my follow up is how do ideological battles play out structurally in the Democratic Party? If you have much clearer ideological factions in the Republican Party and ideology in the Democratic Party is more a function of constituency groups, how do those fights play out?
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Joe Freeman
They actually play out by passing laws in the states. If the state can pass, say a progressive law and it improves the situations in that state, then other states get the same idea and begin to do it in those states. And that eventually it might be done nationally. I say might because not everything can be done nationally. So that a state like New York or California will in effect provide more benefits for its residents than a state like Wyoming or Arizona, let's say state college tuition. In the 19th and early 20th century, there was a general belief that state colleges should not charge tuition. Now that idea has gone out of style. Virtually all state colleges charge tuition. So they invented student loans in order that people who weren't rich or whose parents weren't rich could afford to go to college. And then Biden tried to abolish the debt that was incurred by people getting student loans and running into a wall on that, shall we say? But that's sort of how it manifested itself. And it wasn't that the federal government said state colleges shall now charge tuition. They didn't it was the states that did that individually. When I went to college, state colleges didn't charge residents tuition. Now they do. In New York, the cune SUNY system didn't charge residents tuition. Now they do. What the federal government did was provide money for loans so that students could pay that tuition, and now it's trying to forgive the loans. So that's an ideological position on how to use money. But it gets started in the states.
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Santi Ruiz
Sure. Let me change gears. Joe, I want to ask you about trashing. You wrote an article in Ms. Magazine 10 years before these political theory pieces that we're talking about. This is 1976. I read it was the most widely read piece in Ms. Magazine at that time. You talk about getting trashed, quote, unquote, in the women's liberation movement. Will you explain for readers who are not familiar with this term what trashing was and what your experience was?
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Joe Freeman
Well, I'll start off by saying I don't think that trashing was invented by the women's liberation movement or by anything else individually. I think it's been going on forever. It takes different forms and manifests itself in different ways. Today it's going on on the Internet, and because it is so widespread and destructive, its consequences are far worse. But in my day, pre Internet crashing often went on with people talking to other people about how bad a person was. And it wasn't that they did things wrong or said things that were wrong, just that they were a bad person. Now they didn't say so and so is a bad person. They would come up with various terms. Yeah, she's male, identified, she doesn't understand what it's like to be a sister. You know, that kind of stuff. And much worse. They talk about people behind their backs, occasionally to their face, mostly behind their backs. If they did talk to their face, they would never say, I think you're a bad person. They would say, so and so and so and so and so and so thinks you're a bad person. And it was always very, very personal. There would be a certain amount of shunning. People wouldn't be invited to meetings. They would be taken off the mailing list. Now it's an emailing list. They would essentially be ignored as though they didn't exist. There was an awful lot of that going on. And it tended to fall on two types of women. One was women who had high rates of achievement. They were very articulate. They got interviewed by the press. They wrote articles. The other was the women who were very, I'm going To say, put themselves out. There was a slogan in the day. Everyone wants an aggressive young man. An aggressive young woman is a bitch. And in those days, bitch was a very bad thing. So in some ways, it operated as a method of social control for keeping women in their place, even when it was done. My feminist. That was the irony of the whole thing.
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Santi Ruiz
How should one set up a social movement or a political movement so that these kinds of problems don't arise? The constant backbiting or trashing, as you put it. What would you do to avoid that?
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Joe Freeman
Well, first of all, I'm not sure that you can. Let's just be clear about that. Social movements to a certain extent, are spontaneous, and they come together, reflecting in part, but only in part, the culture and the people that they come out of. To make another analogy, let's talk about the civil rights movement for a little bit. There are actually two parts to the civil rights movement, one of which came out of the black church. Now, the structure of the black church is you have a minister, you have a single leader. That was Dr. King. That's why the movement could produce a Dr. King. The other part of the civil rights movement came out of the black college. That portion of the civil rights movement did not produce a single leader. So the fact that two organizations out of the civil rights movement had such very different structures reflects the culture and experiences of the people that formed them. First of all, all social movements are unstable. There's no such thing as a permanent social movement. Labor movement can call itself the labor movement for decades. It's still not a social movement. Not anymore. It was once, but it's not anymore. They're all unstable. But a social movement needs to have a combination of structure and spontaneity to allow it to progress as much as it can. And you certainly can have some say in how much structure and to a lesser extent, how much spontaneity. So I would say that if you're trying to form a movement organization, have some structure, have some accountability, have some way of designating leaders, or at least policymakers and transparency and taking them out of power as well as putting them in power, because if you don't, it's going to happen anyway. As I said, in tyranny of structuredness, you just won't be able to have any say in it. But don't expect it to be a permanent organization. It may become a permanent organization, but then it's something else. It's an interest group. That's what happened with the labor movement. It's no longer a social movement. It's labor unions who are permanent organizations. Some of them do some fine work, but that's not the leader. Self is not thinking. There is social movement. Feminist movement has long since ceased to be a movement. It became several things. But a social movement itself has a combination of structure and spontaneity. And it's keeping those things going at the same time. That's the challenge. Ra.