Political friends

In 1965 a political scientist named Mancur Olson wrote a guide to group recruitment and maintenance.  The book was entitled The Logic of Collective Action.  Olson said that there were three reasons people joined groups or continued to support group activity.  

Purposive reasons were when you believed in the goals of a group and wished to support the group’s ideology.  If you liked history, you might join a preservation society.  An environmentalist could join Nature Conservancy; a civil libertarian would join the ACLU.

Material reasons are obvious.  People form labor unions for higher wages or better pensions.  Some groups formed for non-material purposes will also give their members material incentives–calendars or discounts on certain products as a reward for joining.

Olson noted that sometimes people who joined a group stayed active for what he called solidary reasons, or what I would call friendship.  Their associations turned into something more than membership for material gains or ideological goals.  They got along with each other, liked each other, formed close friendships.  

Political party activists at one time may have registered and became active for material motives.  This is no doubt why Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg suck up to Republican Party leaders like Trump.  Most activists, however, don’t expect to gain employment or favors.  Civil service certainly has cut down on that aspect.

I would guess that most party activists, certainly the ones I know, become active in Democratic Party politics because they believe in health care for all, or they support a woman’s right to control her reproductive decisions, or they are worried about global warming, or they dislike the brutality of ICE.  

An interesting aspect of this activism is that they become friends with one another.  At least that is the case for me.  I don’t have a huge number of friends, but those that I have tend to be political cohorts.  I obviously know some people who are MAGA types, and I might even be able to think of one who I consider a friend (give me some time on that), but most of my friends are on the left (or far left) end of the political spectrum.