In the 1760s, after the Seven Years’ War (called the French and Indian War here), Parliament sought to reassert and consolidate power over British colonies in North America. Parliament instituted new taxes to fund British military units stationed in the colonies and to free British colonial officers to govern without pressure from the colonial legislatures that otherwise supplied their budgets.
Leaders among the colonists saw these actions as a threat. They also came to see that creating and organizing political resistance is, in part, an information problem. Francis Cogliano says that colonial leaders needed to gather and disseminate information reflecting colonial perspectives, to communicate grievances to a much wider population, to cultivate widespread support for resistance, to catalyze formation of citizens’ groups throughout the colonies, and to prepare for rapid communication in a new crisis. To have a chance for successful resistance to British actions, they needed to create the possibility of unified colonial response. They had an information problem on their hands.
The solution was a network of local groups called committees of correspondence:
After nearly six years of tension and conflict between Parliament and the colonies, a superficial calm characterized their relations by late 1770. Patriot leaders took advantage of the quietude to organize for what they believed would be an inevitable return to conflict. In September 1771, the Boston Town Meeting, at the behest of Samuel Adams, formally created a committee of correspondence which was to communicate colonial grievances to all the towns of Massachusetts as well as to people throughout the mainland colonies and in the West Indies and Britain and Ireland and to serve as the catalyst for the creation of similar committees throughout the colonies. More than half the towns in Massachusetts responded positively to the call to create their own committees of correspondence. The spread of the committees ensured that the Patriots, whose resistance had been concentrated in the cities, could now cultivate support in the countryside where the majority of colonists lived. The movement was so successful that in March 1773, the Virginia House of Burgesses recommended that each colony establish a committee of correspondence to ensure the rapid dissemination of information and a unified response in the event of another transatlantic crisis. The committees served as the propaganda and information-gathering counterparts of the Sons of Liberty. —Francis D. Cogliano, Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History
Political leaders in a time of crisis like the one — the ones — we face today have the same need for creating and organizing political resistance. If they don’t understand their work as, in part, an information problem, they don’t stand a chance, do they?
They say that five million people rallied and protested on No Kings Day. Is that a one-off or are structures that integrate that passion with information flow and organizational skill now being put in place for more activism, wider and deeper activism, going forward? I’m guessing that the Democratic Party doesn’t think very clearly, even now, about the information/organizing problem it’s facing. What’s the evidence that they do?