Interest Groups, Movements, Factions, and Rackets

Yep, the NFL is an interest group.

So is the NCAA.

Social movements and religion

• Abolitionism and slave revolts
• March on Washington 1963
• Suffrage and women's rights
• Temperance/control of substance abuse
• Peace movements
• Alinsky and Obama
• Social Gospel/Progressivism  -- movements overlap, as we see with MLK & Social Gospel

The fate of social movements: "What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult or a corporation." -- Eric Hoffer

• Spawning permanent interest groups
• Spawning trade and professional associations
• Environmental business:  major corporations and other enterprises

Online organizing

Madison on faction

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. 

Factions and the Tea Party

• In the electorate
• See Hoffer's statement on rackets
• More on scam PACs