accidentally shipped this before I had a chance to edit and actually finish. The interesting path is that there was a conscious effort to take lessons learned from New Left organizing and improve it.
Some lessons are the ones Polletta explores in the book: using informal mechanisms upon which to model consensus democracy: friendship, brotherhood, beloved community, religious notions of bearing witness. Using these models contributed to the failures of New Left mobilizations, Polletta says, because they allowed for decision making to happen in the background, for contention to errupt when people felt excluded from friendship circules, or to break out when people felt that organizers were relinquishing authority in the name of "letting the people speak".
Over the years, these failures have been met with scrutiny and attempts to learn and theorize - at the organizational level at any rate - what can be done to mitigate against using informal mechanisms to build solidarity, to create a sense of collective purpose, and trust - informal mechanisms which proved disastrous in the past. The answer has been to formalize processes designed to build solidarity and trust without relying on the idea that, for instance, if we all treated one another as friends, we'd all get along. Or, if we all just used models of tutelage, then we'd all get along - let the people decide (I'm guessing this is getting at Friere's methods.)
What's interesting is that, at least internally, when it came to the demise of Clamshell Alliance, people saw its failures as due, in part, to the obstructionism of anarchists who'd joined. In other words, what everyone here and elsewhere has been calling "anarchism" is actually better thought of as "direct action" (probably why Graeber calls his book, Direct Action?) for it is via direct action networks that these methods were formalized so much that they've become a shared language and signify a shared culture: hand signals, stacking, vibe watchers, standing aside, facilitators, fishbowls, "consense-ing," etc. That's not to say there's no anarchism there or liberalism for that matter. It's not to say that they completely made them up and there's no tradition of using them elsewhere. Polletta's argument is that these methods of have been formalized by DAN.
The "niceness" that you see isn't a mistake, it isn't peculiar to individuals, it is something inculcated in the culture of DAN activism. It works, according to Polletta, because it helps people from wildly different backgrounds, countries, ideologies, etc. work together in fairly short order. It's easier to build trust among strangers if they know there's a shared language and process through which their concerns, criticisms, etc. can be raised. She talks about people from one state in the u.s. can go to another state across the country and feel they can trust that, for instance, someone won't dominate the floor with useless jabbering, because everyone knows there's aprocess for dealing with that, and if there's isn't, as Michael says, there's a process for creating one to deal with it.
The problem some DAN activists worry about is that the shared language is like any language - it can be alienating just as the shared language and ritual interactions on this list alienate noobz/
It just occurred to me but I supposed the influence of smooshy feminism has irritated the manly male orientation to politics. One thing POlletta relates is the development of rituals like dancing and drumming after meetings to get rid of negative energy and to forge bonds in spite of rancorous disagreement. This works, says Polletta, but DAN activists are aware that it is off-putting to folks, some of whom think it's a lot of bullshit that can't possibly be important to building political organization.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)