As so often happens, I come across something and think, wow, I should write about that, and I find out that Cara at The Curvature has already done so eloquently. This one merits many commentaries though, so I’m going to dive into what I hope is a throng.

If you haven’t heard, last night both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin mocked Barack Obama’s community organizing experience. And the crowd apparently roared along with laughter and boos. I have to admit, my first reaction is utter bafflement. Community organizing as a target for ridicule from the Right? Um, hasn’t that been a huge part of the Christian Right’s rise to power in the last two decades? Isn’t the big story that they banded together in church groups and worked for local change, which then lead to state level change, which then led to the big national takeover that has been the last eight years? Do you call it something different when you mobilize people in your community on the Right? What else do they think it is when their church group gets together to picket an abortion clinic or write letters to an elected official or hold a community meeting to put that elected official on the spot or arrange a big demonstration to demand change or volunteer on the campaign of someone they’d like to see elected?

I’m assuming the difference is that community organizing implies poor and/or non-white people working together? So that mocking community organizing is just mocking the fight for political power by those who have been denied their fair share? Because really, knowing something about economic and racial injustice in this country has nothing to do with being a good representative of the people.

I definitely call what SAFER does community organizing, and I’d been thinking before last night’s speeches about writing an election season post about the value of SAFER training for anyone who wants to be involved in politics in the future, as community organizing is a good 50% or more of the skills needed for campaigning. Apparently though, these new-fangled Republican politicians can get elected without organizing community support, or so Guiliani and Palin and the crowd seem to believe.

My second reaction, as a historian whose specialty is United States history, was mingled amusement and outrage. To imply that community organizing is somehow outside “real American” government or ineffective, when it is in fact the basic approach through which this country started its succession from Great Britain, is deserving of both ridicule and anger. What exactly, besides community organizing, was the Boston Tea Party? The Ride of Paul Revere (which wasn’t actually only, or even primarily, by Paul Revere, but that’s not really the point here)? Who were Sam Adams and the other Sons of Liberty if not community organizers?

Were Palin and Giuliani and audience really mocking the Civil Rights Movement, given the criticism this convention has received for its stunning lack of racial diversity? Were they attacking the Populists, whose mantle they seem to be trying so hard to claim for Palin, which developed out of farmers’ co-operatives and specialized in community-mobilizing parades and rallies, among other grassroots organizing tactics? What, in fact, would a populist (small or big P) without any actual organized community support be? A front for anti-community interests?

All I hear in Giuliani and Palin’s attacks on community organizing is contempt for the democratic process and for ordinary Americans who work to change things. And as someone who gets to see on regular basis how ordinary students do change their communities, that contempt seems misplaced as well as elitist.

So my thanks and deep, deep respect to every, by definition, very American (perhaps most particularly American when they are questioning the limits of what our U.S. identity means) community organizer, past and present, left and right, whose hard work has been one of the strongest forces shaping our country over the last 232 years. You keep our democracy alive.