Category: Movement Building

Organizing Tools in the Digital Genealogy

Micah Sifry is one of the political commentators whose writing about technology, organizing of the Resistance (or, in his preferred parlance, the Defiance) in Trump 2.0, and how organizations are alternatively finding footing and struggling this moment has been most informative and grounding for me in since the 2024 election. Micah was kind enough to link to my piece on the genealogy of digital teams and tools in his excellent Substack. He included this challenge:

My only addition would be to discuss how in the move from grassroots to the cloud, whether we’ve undervalued the power of self-organizing communities. In the earlier days of this field, campaigners often tapped “the power of the crowd” to get things done. We still have lots of distributed campaigning (as well as some negative experiences with the challenge of scaling between national leadership and local autonomy) but in addition to looking at how campaigns use staff and tools, which Browner Hamlin covers very well, I’d love to see more on how ordinary people as well as super-volunteers are either empowered, or entasked.

This is an excellent point and something that I have pretty strong opinions about. I’d like to dig into at greater length in the future, but for now will offer some quick thoughts.

I should say at the start that this is a place where my work in a global advocacy organisation is likely highly divergent from a US-based campaign or a community organisation. As always, I have perspectives on these differences but what I see on a daily basis in the global Greenpeace network is quite different from someone working an electoral campaign or doing community-based housing justice work, for example.

The organizing aspects of digital work has indeed become underserved in recent years. Instead there has been a significant emphasis on mobilization – which requires less effort on the part of people, is often quite time bound, and is more conducive to low bar asks like signing petitions or making donations. Organizing, by contrast, is hard, slow and messy.

From an institutional perspective, my sense is that there are a few key drivers. First, as I already wrote, organizing people is hard and slow. Second, most campaign strategies in my context have the role of volunteers in an organized state as an end-of-process outcome – not an essential part at the start of the campaign design or theory of change. Third, is a structural reality – in my context, organizing tends to sit in smaller, less resourced teams and the technologies for organizing don’t receive the same degree of investment as a CRM or website (due to the smaller staff constituency and smaller budgetary impacts).

But to model some of my previous writing on the genealogy of teams, this is an endpoint and not where things began. 

Thinking back tools for organizing people (or better still, tools for people to organize themselves) was a central part of the digital suite in the most successful campaigns and organizations. In fact the early days of digital saw some of the greatest potential as a domain of work through the tools made available to volunteers (and often built by volunteers) in the Dean campaign in 2004 – some of which were subsequently productized by Blue State Digital and other firms. Whether it was at Democracy for America or later the Obama campaign, internal social networks that enabled volunteers to start affinity groups or local groups, organize house parties and participate in field canvassing, while inviting family, friends and neighbors to join was a key part of the digital infrastructure.

I must again refer readers to Daniel Kreiss’s excellent book on the Dean, Kerry and Obama campaigns, “Taking Our Country Back.” It charts the emergence of digital teams and tools through those campaigns. If you’re interested in how they first started showing up, what their challenges were and how they grew – go read Kreiss. 

Whether it was the Dean or Obama campaigns or MoveOn.org – the 2000s were in many ways defined by digital campaigns trying to figure out how to build large groups of people who showed up not just online with petitions and donations but offline and in person as well. The heavily electoral nature of the technological innovations – with US presidential campaigns being a primary, but not exclusive, driver for new tools and new consultancies – meant that there was always a strong linkage between the purpose of offline organizing (the field functions of voter registration, persuasion and turnout) with the distributed qualities of digital. That is, online tools for organizing often closely mirrored the traditional functions of a political campaign.

After the success of the Obama campaign and the well documented popularity of My.BarackObama.com (aka MyBO), many nonprofit and labor leaders wanted to see the same power of digital organizing tools brought to bear in their own contexts. Many groups tried and failed to get the same results. A key learning for practitioners like myself was that expecting to get the same results as a dynamic presidential campaign in almost any context that wasn’t also a dynamic presidential campaign was going to be incredibly challenging. Learning that this is hard and it’s unlikely that an organization can get the same traction with an internal social network or organizing platform was key. But the lesson was not that organizing online was a bad investment. 

Moving forward we see the popularity of distributed online petitioning as a step towards democratized digital engagement. Change.org did this in more cynical ways, but technologist Nathan Woodhull launched ControlShift Labs as a more movement-oriented distributed organizing platform. He originated it with GetUp in Australia (an Open Network organization that was one of the first groups using the MoveOn.org model outside of the US). CSL was then incubated by Citizen Engagement Lab (CEL), at the same time I was also launching an anti foreclosure and eviction project incubated at CEL that eventually became OccupyOurHomes.org. I was the first organization using ControlShift in the US because of this connection. We used the distributed petition and events platform as a vehicle to empower people facing foreclosure and eviction to tell their story and build support – both in their community and online. 

ControlShift was and is used by the Greenpeace network and is still a tool I love. While it’s very much a distributed petitioning tool, Nathan has always valued petitions as a starting point of engagement and campaigning – not an end point. The features that were added to CSL over time speak to this – from facilitating easy petition delivery to targets, to organizing offline events as a part of the campaign. When we were using CSL in Occupy Our Homes, we held weekly training calls for people who started petitions – helping them sharpen their campaign, think through who they can be asking for support and what steps they can be taking to move forward. 

An additional benefit of the ControlShift platform is it allowed for federation. So while I had resources to spend on digital organizing at Occupy Our Homes, many of the community based organisations I was working in network with – or even local Occupy encampments – did not have the technology infrastructure to take their offline work and promote it online. CSL allowed me to make this platform available to local groups for their own organizing purposes, a form of movement generosity that engendered stronger collaboration.

At its best, this sort of distributed petitioning platform can provide incredibly empowering opportunities for regular people and volunteers, not just paid activists.

As we look towards 2016, peer-to-peer SMS tools had a moment of popularity. I’d need to dig deeper to recall the exact products and when they were introduced…but writing from memory makes me think of that campaign cycle as the one where organizations and campaigns began to ask supporters to use distributed peer-to-peer text messaging as a key way to get people to attend events, make donations, and turn out to vote. 


Unlike an internal social network, peer-to-peer SMS has a lower barrier to participation and can be effectively run with smaller volunteer bases. So it is both more ubiquitous today but also more prone to high volume and low ethics implementations that can approach unwanted spam. Is that a good use of volunteer time? Probably not – but doing it with good data, for opted-in recipients can be a valuable connection, even as the spammers have made this less successful for everyone else. 

Similarly – virtual phonebank tools have been an effective form of volunteer participation from this mid-teens era for electoral campaigns. They remain a key pathway for how people can give their time in support of a campaign or organisation, talking directly to people that may be like them. For my context, it is not a common nor important tool. But to me the potential for value to be derived from good data and authentic forms of communication are high. Humans talking to humans, provided someone picks up the phone, feels anachronistically powerful at a time of AI slop and predatory spam.

The last point that comes to mind is the impressive implementation of Slack as a volunteer engagement and communications platform. In “Rules for Revolutionaries,” Becky Bond and Zack Exley tell the story of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and how they built an impressive volunteer apparatus supported heavily by consumer communications technologies. Though still riding the volumes of a dynamic presidential campaign, the principles they developed for trusting volunteers, opening lines of communication, connecting people, developing relational organizing models – all of this feels more replicable at smaller scales than the social network level tooling of the Obama campaigns. 

Micah is likely more familiar than I am around the recent history of digital distributed organizing, so I want to pull the camera back a bit on my thinking on “the power of the crowd” to get things done.”

There is a philosophical aspect to this and there is an organizational one. 

Organizations need to believe as a core part of their theory of change that people power is the critical force on the left for creating a better world. If you believe that, it should be reflected in your budgets, your staffing, your tools procurement. 

But if you believe people are just there to send in donations in the mail and not do much else, then it is unlikely that your organization will design campaigns that build a meaningful role for volunteers in your work.

Similarly, if you haven’t internalized an approach to people power that values volunteer/offline participation, it is very unlikely that you will be designing campaigns that benefit from what digital organizing tools or digital volunteer spaces can offer. And so over time – again, in my context at an international campaigning NGO – I have seen budget cuts and tools turned off for platforms that orient towards the volunteer experience or distributed organizing functionality because our campaigns are less and less oriented towards these activities as being essential to campaign success. 

Connecting to my previous essay on team evolutions over time, volunteer organizing was once a part of a generalist digital campaigner’s job description. But as digital teams grew, this became a more specialized function – either in a digital team or in a role housed in a volunteer or field team. They had tools to go with them – oftentimes tools that were separate from the rest of the digital marketing or CRM stack, but sometimes still integrated. 

What was relevant (again, in my experience, which will be very different to what we see in larger US orgs or political campaigns!) was that when budgets needed tightening, the freestanding ‘volunteer organizer’ technologies were easy line items to cut. They usually didn’t have a big staff allocation. Turning off a low volume tool and single role in the staff was an easier cut to make than someone writing emails to fundraise or a tool that generated a huge portion of the organization’s budget.

These have been painful evolutions to watch. 

In a time of global political upheaval and intense dissatisfaction with what major political parties are offering, with rising right wing nationalism in many parts of the world – the importance of tools and trained professionals to support regular people coming together, building trust and affinity, and having the technological options to take responsibility for making their communities or their country or the world a better please feels more important than ever. 

The technology itself isn’t the issue for me. There are some purpose built distributed organizing tools and plenty of larger digital community platforms (Discord, Slack, Facebook) that are fully capable of enabling people to come together to organize. The gaps stem more from a lack of commitment to real organizing within organizations (and outside of the political campaign context especially), as well as a lack of people who are trained as organizers capable of approaching technologies as a means to the end of organizing people together. 

I think the progressive movement has suffered from being so reliant on presidential campaigns as a vector for innovation. If the labor movement had been the primary source of digital technology funding, I imagine organizing technology and trained organizers would be more prevalent. Hell – if ACORN hadn’t been destroyed by Republicans (while most Democrats stood by in silence), I imagine organizing technology and trained organizers would be more prevalent. 

Ultimately, organizing is hard. It takes time. It takes money. It requires relating to people as complex beings. And building technology that supports this sort of work requires technologists who have a deep understanding of how organizing works. No doubt some of what we have exists because of people who have spent time working to build this understanding. But we don’t have enough. 

The two things I would hope for more of is organizations that commit to people power and show this by investing in tools and training for both volunteers and staff to support this as a fundamental building block for all strategic work. And that we all pay closer attention to the theories of change being advanced by politicians and by organizations – if people power isn’t central to how they are committed to making change, then we should be skeptical about committing to them with our money or our time. 

Direct mail and deepening relationships

Jason Lewis recently wrote a piece in The Giving Review, which offers a strongly critical analysis of how progressive non-profit organizations in the US have become over reliant on direct mail and the ways in which it shifted the relationship between advocacy organizations and their base. 

[D]irect mail wasn’t born out of malice. It was a clever solution to a real problem: how do you raise money at scale? In its early days, it felt like a democratizing force—a way to reach ordinary people, invite them into causes, and build broad-based support. But over time, what started as a savvy way to raise money turned into something far more powerful.

Lewis makes a compelling case as to the negative impacts of direct mail success on non-profit organizing.

Instead of building relationships, organizations collected addresses. Instead of organizing members, they segmented audiences. The mailing list replaced the meeting hall. Participation became a product: a compelling story, a crisp ask, a promised outcome. What it delivered, more often than not, was a passive supporter expected to back someone else’s agenda. It didn’t just reshape how nonprofits raised money. It rewrote what participation even meant. Over time, the logic of the mailing list became the logic of the movement.

The point wasn’t to organize people—it was to acquire them. And, just as movements were becoming more data-driven and donor-centric, private foundations were stepping into their modern role: gatekeepers of what counts as legitimate change.

Direct mail shaped how organizations talked to donors. Foundations decided which organizations were worth listening to. And they didn’t just bring cash. They brought a checklist. They funded the groups that looked most like them: strategic, professional, low-risk. Logic models? Check. Slide decks? Check. Predictable outcomes? Even better. Organizing? Too messy. Lived experience? Too emotional. Foundations didn’t ban movements. They just stopped funding them.

Much of this resonates for me. Organizing has been commodified and shifted downwards. The diction of membership based organizations was sanded down as groups treated the possession of an email address as equal to having a member with deep, sustained ties. And funders prioritised the groups that followed best practices, built big lists and focused on certain deliverables as opposed to organic power building. 

What I do not really buy is that this is a byproduct of an overreliance on direct mail as a fundraising tactic. While direct mail certainly presaged a professionalisation of nonprofit fundraising and while it offered models that would be copied in the digital age, at the end of the day it is simply a channel of giving. Most big progressive advocacy organizations do not have direct mail as their primary income channel. Even if it’s significant, it does not strike me as one that is determinative of organizational approaches in 2025.

I don’t agree with Lewis’s blaming direct mail fundraising for being a fundamental cause of where we are now nor the idea that organizations should walk away from this channel. But I do think he’s right that there are hallmarks of heavy direct mail fundraising reliance that lead organizations away from building real, deep memberships and a belief in people power. Organizing with people can be icky, because people are not spreadsheets. They have warts and hair, bumps and bruises. Lewis writes:

We’ve spent decades teaching everyday donors to stay out of the important conversations; to give when asked; to trust someone richer, more polished, and more “in the know” to make the big decisions. And now we’re left with a culture of disconnection and confusion. We act surprised when people pull back, when communities stop engaging, when democracy starts to shake. But maybe the real surprise is that we thought this setup could last.

The willingness to challenge our current assumptions of how organizations relate to people and how they ask for their time, energy, and, yes, money is going to be essential for navigating through and out of the Trump era. For some people, the only way they will be able to contribute to this work is through giving. For those people, it still behooves organizations to find them and reach them with opportunities to give. Giving itself is not bad, nor disempowering, nor even neoliberal. It’s what some people have to offer. 

But treating donors, especially small dollar donors, as something other than cash machines is essential. The act of giving needs to be put alongside digital and offline activism, community building and relationship development, training and volunteering. It’s one behavior out of many that organizations need to be successful. Regardless of channel of gift, if someone’s first engagement with an organization is to make a donation, it is on the organization to find other forms of meaningful participation for that new donor. A donation should be the start of a deep relationship, not the end of a shallow one.

Reevaluating non-profit best practices and mechanisms of funding is essential. Reimagining what it means to be a member of an organization has to be a part of that. I don’t think it’s a story of any one fundraising channel, but rather the overall posture organizations take to engaging their base and building multidimensional relationships with them. 

The organizations that spend the time investing in multidirectional, multichannel relationships with their supporters will be the ones that have the best chance to grow and build power with and through their base. When that is happening, people will donate with joy, and what channel they’re giving will be completely irrelevant. 

Big Meetings Beyond the Post-It Note

I’ve reached a point where I am feeling incredibly limited by the common strategic planning processes and large meeting design methodologies I find in the international NGO space. And I am not sure what the better alternatives are. I am looking for help and feedback from the community here.

In the Greenpeace world – but also in most other progressive movement and technology spaces I’ve traveled in – the way big meetings are done involve limited plenary discussion, lots of small breakout groups. Post-it notes and butcher paper is used to gather and collate ideas. Individuals write quietly. They share in their small group. The group seeks to identify commonalities and cluster similar topics. Those are then reported at the high level in the room and further clustering and alignment building takes place. The outcome usually looks like a summary of key themes and topics for further discussion.

There are clear positives to this approach. It allows everyone to contribute in the idea and discussion process. At least in the first phase, it does not privilege extroverts and native English speakers, nor people from cultures where being proactive is normal (or, in the inverse, it doesn’t disadvantage introverts, non-native English speakers and people from high context communications cultures). It lowers the barriers to participation and prevents a few individuals from dominating the discussion based on their personal comfort in the meeting context. Theoretically, allowing everyone to participate in this way will produce an outcome that is more reflective of the people in the room.

Additionally, a highly consultative and inclusive approach can be essential to building consensus and buy-in for meeting (or strategy) outcomes. The process in itself is one that moves a room together towards the conclusion. Ideally it creates space for disagreements but closes them in the same phase.

But there are flaws in this model. As anyone who’s sat in a small breakout group with a pile of Post-It notes on their lap has experienced, the contributions in these moments are a mixed bag. Forcing big concepts or complex problems into a few words on a tiny sheet of paper is hard. Nuance and detail are lost. People relate to concepts that fit onto a Post-It in different ways. It’s not clear to people outside the group what the full idea was – only survived on the note.

Clustering as an activity further levels down nuance and complexity. A “Improve data quality” cluster might include topics as diverse as “improving our analytics engineering capabilities,” “automating deduplication with AI,” “building better governance policies for our federated network,” and “unclear KPIs for our social channels due to frequently changing Meta metric definitions.” Which of these did the group think was a strategic focus? No one can say.

Additionally, the small group cluster and report back methodology still creates process artefacts that confuse design for strategy. For example, let’s say one group has a loud discussion on a niche topic that the rest of the room has already dismissed in the other groups. Does that mean it must be included moving forward, as a reflection of the process design? Conversely, in a room with 100 people and 1,000 Post-it notes, how do we ensure that an idea that is only mentioned once and not advanced as fitting well into a clustered outcome is not lost in the process? We cannot reliably ensure that unique insights and complex experiences are adequately captured in this process.

While this is mostly about meeting design, similar practices of large scale consultation, note capturing, clustering and distillation show up as common tools for strategy design. The flaws are fundamentally the same.

My problem is that I don’t know what a better alternative is. I’d love to hear what other large meeting methodologies you’re using and finding effective.

How to you balance the requirement of building inclusive spaces against an information gathering process that doesn’t end up being over-simplified and without nuance or complexity?

How do you ensure everyone has space to share their ideas and perspectives, while still building towards strategic outcomes?

How do you leverage the rare opportunities to have a diverse group of people, with a wide range of skills and perspectives to build something greater than would be possible without having those people together in one place, at one time?

Who is designing interesting meetings? Who do you see innovating in consultative strategy development processes? What pieces do you recommend I read to advance my thinking on this?

My worst professional feeling is sitting in a room and thinking, “This time, with these people, could have been so much better used.” I look forward to feedback and inputs to help me avoid feeling that into the future.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

The Hard Work of Change

In Jacobin, Alex Gourevitch has an interesting article challenging the resistance movements that are emerging in response to Trump to be sure to include a positive vision for the world we want to see.

I’m seeing frequent references on the Left to the need to do real politics; to build power through slow, hard work; to organize in impacted communities; to not attempt to take shortcuts to achieving mass actions. All of this is correct and worth noting. That’s why the start of Gourevitch’s article is frustrating to me:

Under Obama, Occupy squandered the initial hopefulness and general appeal when it let procedural squabbles sap its energy and undermine its potential for a real political intervention. No wonder there was little public support when the police showed up. The resurgence of activism associated with the Black Lives Matter movement marked another significant moment for the American left but, despite three years of protest and consciousness-raising, public attitudes towards the police have improved and there are few balancing accomplishments to point to.

These are valid objections to make, yet they miss that many of the things which have grown out of Occupy still exist. Mutual aid projects like Occupy Sandy, Occupy Our Homes (especially in Atlanta and Minneapolis), and Strike Debt did just the hard work we see demanded of now – and it paid off with sustained engagement and local presence.

Elements of grassroots political power that formed in the crucible of Occupy were there supporting and accelerating Black Lives Matter. Dream Defenders and the Wildfire Project immediately comes to mind, as does the persistent community-based organizing from Occupy Our Homes in Minneapolis and Atlanta. Local groups from BLM and OWS are out front in organizing the response to Trump, including through the Indivisibles and the Women’s March.

None of this necessarily amounts to sea-change in the political landscape, but it does speak to the ongoing hard work by people committed to create change through organizing in impacted communities. You can’t look at Occupy or Black Lives Matter and say that they failed to build power simply because they didn’t succeed in achieving all of their goals full-stop. It’s an unfair and unrealistic expectation that every movement that emerges in response to a major disruption be immediately capable of delivering lasting transformative change, especially when so few organic popular outbursts, let alone well resourced strategic ones, have reached this level of success in the US. This is and was what the hard work of organizing is about, these movements did it and there’s something to learn from them, and why they didn’t achieve their goals even while doing the sort of organizing that many from the Left want to see today.

I’m starting from a somewhat negative stance on Gourevitch’s piece simply because I feel these are comments worth making, not to disqualify where he goes with his evaluation of what we’ve seen from the Trump resistance so far. He writes:

The point here isn’t to bash the Left; it’s to take a sober look at the opportunities and limits we face. The truth is, this should be our moment. The Trump administration and Republican Congress are a fragile entity, whose control of the state rests less on mass support and more on the undemocratic features of our institutions.

Trump received a minority of the popular vote, the fifty-two Republican senators in Congress represent 44 percent of the population, and the eight-soon-to-be-nine ghouls in Supreme Court robes are even more insulated from actual majorities. Moreover, there are all kinds of internal divisions among Republicans on how to handle everything from health care to immigration. To the degree that Trump and the Republicans look like an unflinching, reactionary juggernaut it is because there is so little organized power to stand in their way.

This is exactly right. Admitting that moments that have felt transformative, but failed to be so, isn’t an attack, it’s the truth. There’s plenty that we should be encouraged by right now. And as I noted above, I still see much from OWS and BLM that indicates a positive direction of travel, if not outright victory.

Gourevitch raises a critical point regarding how the Left has actually tended to sit outside of the political realm, using only direct action tactics to have impact, while avoiding more traditional mechanisms.

[T]he downside of direct action is that it has often served as a tacit admission of the Left’s inability to translate social power into political control. The Left has generally been on the outside looking in and its celebration of direct action put it in static rather than dynamic opposition to the corruption and opportunism of existing parties.

Direct action is critical in terms of forcing people to think about the crises before them and respond beyond business as usual. But the whole point is that it occurs in a place of harm, at a moment when politics have failed. He goes on:

We can field thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, even occasionally hundreds of thousands, and then be safely ignored. We call it resistance, but any exercise of our agency that isn’t total cooperation with the status quo looks like resistance. It contains no internal measure of success or failure, which is why it is compatible with retreat or even resignation. And while it is “mass” politics in the sense of many people, protests do not require anything like the ongoing commitment to principle and organization that something like party politics does.

Our unwillingness to admit our own weakness is the flip side of not having a clear set of principles that can serve as the basis for a mass movement. Instead, we give ourselves the appearance of unity and purpose by resisting evil and by taking our collective “No” out into the streets. We find comfort in knowing that we are not them, that at least we are doing something. Trump is immediate and present, the evils are right in front of us, numerous, and ready-to-hand.

Being for something is the key counterpart to resistance and mass mobilization against Trump (or his corporate backers). The prescription is freedom:

The better principle is freedom. It is the interest everyone has in being free from the myriad forms of domination and oppression that most people face, and it is expressed by being part of a movement that seeks to transform society. Freedom is something everyone wants, but can only be achieved if we demand it and pursue it jointly. It is a principle that naturally bridges all those aspects of left politics that otherwise separate us. We are divided by the varieties of oppression and the proliferation of identities that are born out of that oppression, but we can be united by the desire for freedom.

Less abstractly, freedom is the principle that explains and unifies what we are for. We are more than being against Trump, racism, sexism, inequality, etc. We are also more than a list of demands, like universal health care, cheap and legal abortion, open immigration. We are only for those things to the degree that they are all the same thing: freedoms that everyone ought to enjoy.

The positive vision for society, through the lens of freedom, creates a powerful way to connect to those who are in the streets resisting, just as much as it does to those who didn’t feel energized to go out and vote in November, just as much as it does to those who felt attracted to Trump.It has a strong grounding in basic human needs and desires. It’s a strong organizing principle, one that can safely nurture and grow our intersectional values of equality, fairness, safety, and health. It’s a clear lens that can be used to condemn and resist against Trump’s agenda.

What’s more, while it may not sit as an articulated list of demands on many organizational websites, I’d hazard that you can ask most people who are resisting Trump what freedom means to them and you’d find it’s strongly oriented around similar real-world applications on a range of issues.

Gourvetich’s whole piece is worth reading in full. We’ve seen a lot of criticism of mass mobilizations under Trump so far and while he does make some fundamental critiques of where past disruptive movements failed to achieve lasting change, he provides a pathway towards hope in this moment. It’s certainly a start.

Supporting resistance

resist

I’ve been an activist for half my life at this point. When I was in high school and college, going to marches and protests really fired me up. It was the realization of grassroots, campus-based organizing I was doing. It felt awesome and empowering. But once I because a full-time activist and organizer, I got over it. It got old. I don’t get excited about protests. I don’t go to them unless I really have to, it just doesn’t do it for me. I get enough from my day to day organizing work to feel like I’m making a contribution without having to be physically present at a protest or rally.

But marches and protests aren’t actually for me, not the me of today. They’re for the high school and college me, the one who may only have one afternoon a week or one day a month to be able to make a full political statement with my body, my time, my voice. I get it if you are cynical about mass mobilizations. I get it if you don’t see the value of marches from your perspective as a professional activist or organizer, as this is often a hub of cynicism when it comes to physical action. But they’re not for you, they’re for the people who don’t have jobs dedicated to change-making in a full time way (which is to say, they’re for almost everyone else in the country).

Last weekend’s women’s marches were big and bold and inspiring. People came out because they care about what is happening in America and want to resist against it. It was a loud statement of our values and such a needed one. These marches are helping people struggle through dark times. They are creating a vibrant, visual resistance to Trump. They are bringing millions of people into political engagement. They are 100% exactly what we need right now, because they will make so much of what comes next possible.

Senate Democrats aren’t going to save us. House Democrats aren’t going to save us. MSNBC isn’t going to save us. None of our tweets are going to save us. We are going to save us and the people showing up at these marches and protests are the “we” I’m talking about.

Let’s find was to build, inspire, grow these marches. For professionals like me, let’s lend our professional talents and tools to empower and enable the people in the streets. Let’s do that even more as people move from attending marches and protests towards building new organizations, local organizations dedicated to resisting against Trump and defending our values.

Bill de Blasio and political multitudes

Over at Jacobin, Samuel Stein has a review of Eric Alterman’s new book on Bill de Blasio’s first year as mayor. The whole piece by Stein is worth a read, in no small part because de Blasio has been held up as a populist progressive icon of the highest calibre, with little scrutiny on his whole body of work or how well his actual policies reflect on a rising left populist movement in America. But Stein’s closing line strikes me as critically important, not just for how the left thinks of de Blasio, but any Democratic politician.

Praising the mayor for his genuinely progressive accomplishments while discounting or disregarding his conservatism isn’t merely a cop-out. It’s a lie. It dances around the perils of his programs. And it puts the Left in the position of defending a figure it should be fighting.

To put it differently, politicians contain multitudes. Just because someone is good on one set of issues – rhetorically or in practice – doesn’t mean that they’re good on all issues. Elizabeth Warren is a brilliant advocate for the middle class, for breaking up Wall Street banks, and fighting rampant corporate power. But she’s pretty milquetoast on, say, foreign policy and has adopted some very establishment positions as a sitting senator that many on the left would disagree with. Likewise Howard Dean’s vocal opposition to the war in Iraq was critically important for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2003-2004, while today he lobbies for Big Pharma and is squarely in Hillary Clinton’s corner. I say this not as a reflexive discount of Clinton, who will certainly be good on some issues and bad on others, but as a recognition that Dean is a fairly centrist Democrat who happened to be right on the Iraq War.

Politicians serve the public. They serve as ciphers for the political ideologies ascribed to them. It does no political movement any good to let politicians get away with behaviors that reflect negatively or are diametrically opposed to the movements they are presumed to represent. Celebrate a politician when it is deserved and criticize when it is deserved – that’s the role of a movement.

The Importance of Utopian Demands

Sarah Jaffe, in her newsletter (I highly recommend you subscribe), makes a really important point about the ways in which progressive movement organizations are trying and maybe failing to act on par with the sentiments of grassroots left activists that ostensibly would constitute their base. She writes:

I was chatting with a friend this morning, apropos of a meeting I attended yesterday, about the disconnect between the existing liberal/progressive infrastructure, political organizations and labor unions mostly, and where what I’d broadly call “the people” are politically. There’s the “Beltway Bubble” effect, certainly, but there’s also something more.

It’s no secret that I think the financial crisis was a turning point for a lot of people and for American politics. But that’s been hard for existing institutions to grapple with–even if they share that analysis, it seems, turning the ship around (so to speak) is not an easy task. And so we see people chaining themselves to barrels and shutting down highways and demanding not just the firing of a police officer but that we actually examine a system of white supremacy, and the response from the groups that exist to push policy is…what? Body cameras? The $15 minimum wage was a good demand in that it seemed almost utopian when the first fast food workers walked off the job and yet very quickly became achievable, at least in some cities. But what beyond that? It seems like a lot of groups are coalescing around the idea that Elizabeth Warren should run for president, but if there’s one thing we should have learned by now it’s that electing one person to office isn’t going to solve our problems, and it’s a little hard for me to figure out how throwing an endorsement to a person who doesn’t appear to want it builds institutional power for big changes.

Utopian demands don’t necessarily become policy, but they give us something to work towards, and maybe more importantly, they serve as a statement of values that, alongside a system analysis, is actually a basis for a politics.

I’m not an organizer, just a reporter. But the reporting I’ve done in recent years has told me that people are ready for big demands and big changes. I just finished a conversation with a group of workers who’ve been fighting for a union since 2011, and they’re connecting their struggle with all the other struggles happening right now, from other labor actions to Black Lives Matter. They’ve got big ideas. We can make some bigger demands. [Emphasis added]

The US is obviously a different political system than Greece or Spain or Ireland. But there’s a reason that Syriza, Podemos and Sinn Fein are gaining political traction – by offering people “big demands and big changes,” particular as what they are campaigning on is following from popular protest movements espousing similar utopian demands. These demands are a direct response to the economic collapse of 2007 and 2008, and the political response which fundamentally failed to hold the perpetrators of economic fraud accountable. Worse, the imposition of austerity that broke these countries’ economies, kept people out of work and in varying degrees crippled a generation’s economic progress.

We don’t know what will happen with Syriza in charge of Greece, nor do we know what will happen in Spain (or Ireland, Portugal, or Italy). But for people here in the US who are interested in creating progressive political change, the model of presenting ideas that approach the scale of the problem we face is likely one that needs to be followed here in America.

This is what it’s about

At the tail end of an outstanding dismantling of Jonathan Chait’s recent hippy punching, anti-speech-that-makes-him-feel-uncomfortable screed against the so-called “pc movement,” Jessica Valenti offers up an excellent description of why it is so important to give space for historically marginalized people to voice their opinions and raise their objections to the policies, assumptions, and behaviors of the powerful and privileged. Valenti writes:

We are finally approaching a critical mass of interest in ending racism, misogyny and transphobia and the ways they are ingrained into our institutions. Instead of rolling our eyes at the intensity of the feelings people have over these issues, we should be grateful that they care so much, because racism, misogyny and transphobia can and do kill people. If the price we all pay for progress for the less privileged is that someone who is more privileged gets their feelings hurt sometimes – or that they might have to think twice before opening their mouths or putting their fingers to keyboards – that’s a small damn price to pay. That’s not stopping free speech; it’s making our speech better.

When I look around, I see tremendous progress being made not necessarily in policy (though sometimes things get better) but in sentiment and public culture. There is widespread, multi-racial support online for ending racism and fighting police brutality. There is pushback against misogyny, not just from feminists but from anti-racist and pro-worker activists. There is open support and love for transgender people who are helping to shed light on what it is to be trans, from Wikileaker Chelsea Manning to punk rocker Laura Jane Grace to former Navy SEAL Kristen Beck.

The rise of vibrant, vocal support for “ending racism, misogyny and transphobia” has meant things like the sports blog Deadspin and the celebrity(ish) blog Gawker are consistent sources of bleeding edge thinking on how to wage these fights and call out problematic moments. Which is to say, as Jessica does, that this is not a marginal movement, it’s cultural progress on a transformative scale. It might mean that white dudes (like, say, me or Jonathan Chait) are forced to feel uncomfortable sometimes, but that’s a miniscule price to pay for the elevation of dignity and equality to all people, especially those who have historically not been granted it by straight white dudes. It doesn’t just make speech better, but it creates space for more speech by more people. I’m pretty excited about these developments and if you’re threatened by them, you probably need to check your privilege settings.