Speaking as a 31-year-old, semi-establishment type, I think Mark Schmitt is really hitting on something when he speaks of “The Progressive Generation Gap, which Markos “DailyKos” Moulitsas riffed on a few days back.

I’m gonna plaigairize and rephrase Mark at length here, because it speaks so powerfully to what I’ve experienced over my 10 (amazing) years in the Northwest environmental movement:

Mark identifies two ways in which the “policy literalism” of traditional advocacy misses the boat:

1) Generational gap and “missing 40-year olds”

>I’ve recently noticed a… dynamic, especially in the kind of smaller, more grass-rootsy and more truly left-wing groups…. Such groups tend to have an executive director. Usually a white guy, often somewhat over 50, who’s put a lifetime into his cause. Never made a dime, the car he drives is still called a Datsun, he’s entirely admirable….. He’s probably a lawyer, started off thinking the courts could solve all problems but has since learned otherwise…. He’s entitled to be burnt-out, but isn’t.

>And then there’s the rest of the staff. They typically range in age from 25-32, they’re more racially diverse or biracial, extremely energetic, imaginative. [T]hey are more into community and organizing constituencies than promoting an issue, and they can be more collaborative, less turf-conscious…. They have seen political success not so much in the liberal movements that the boomers are nostalgic for, but in the unity and motivate-the-base strategy of the current Republican party, and in the exciting communion of the Dean campaign.

>…But the political experience of this generation is much narrower, and for all the excitement of organizing communities, they don’t yet have much to show for it. There’s a lot to be learned from the people who now have a couple decades of activism and learning….

>[O]ne reason that these two groups often seem to be talking past each other is that there aren’t very many people in between…. there are relatively few of us in our late-30s/early-40s in these organizations. That’s a bridge generation that can be very useful. When you’re 23, and your boss is 53, that’s a big gap, literally a generation gap.

I’m not sure the situation is as bad at the state/local scale, but one thing I can tell you for sure is that the most dynamic environmental groups I see at the state and local level are those led by these 40-something types who can relate both to their 50 and 60-something major donors and their 20- and 30-something hot-shit staffers.

The second gap is one between folks who are policy- or issue-oriented and those who are organizing-oriented:

>This is another familiar distinction to me from the foundation world. The distinction between “organizing” and “policy” often seems much starker than it is. “Organizers” are devoted to street-level democracy, to helping people define problems for themselves and find their own solutions, and bringing voice to the political process. “Policy people” are devoted to understanding the issues, developing new approaches or critiquing conservative ones, and enlisting people to support those strategies. “Organizers” sometimes think “policy people” are arrogant, white, older, over-educated, trying to set people’s agendas for them. Policy people think organizers are naive, sloppy, disconnected from real politcal power, and miss opportunities for change. Again, these are exaggerated stereotypes, but I’ve heard them from both sides. But it’s yet another matter where people have different functions within a larger progressive system. Everyone’s got their own strengths. And again, one needs bridges….

>The most important task for the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, if there is one, is to find ways across the very real internal divides, which are divides of culture and attitude, not simple matters like different opinions about abortion, toward a common purpose.

Ding ding ding! Mark cites the Center for Community Change as the best example of a bridge-building organization he can think of. Here in the West, I think that the Western Organization of Resource Councils does something pretty similar, but at a much smaller scale. Overall, though, I think the environmental movement is tipped way too far towards policy and not enough is going into nuts-and-bolts organizing and that all-important bridge building work that lets each role leverage the other.