Zack Exley

An Organizer’s Guide to Trusting the People (repost) 4 February, 2007

Often, we progressives fall back on blaming the American people for our failure to win elections or grow our movement. This is not only a self-defeating bad habit, it’s also based on a totally inaccurate understanding of The People. I frequently find myself trying to squeeze this argument into a single paragraph in posts and articles. It never fits. Therefore, I’m going to flesh it out here, and then perhaps I can just link over whenever I want to give people an option to hear me out.

For most of the 90′s I worked as a union organizer all over America, from big cities to far flung small towns — organizing workers at hospitals, nursing homes, factories, meat processing plants, big box stores, and working at many of those facilities myself.

I sat in the living rooms of probably a thousand families altogether. Visiting workers at home was the only way to talk safely about the union. But conversations frequently strayed from the revolution they were trying to make at work to what they thought of the problems facing the country too. People have a lot of ways of making sense of the world. They grab at straws and whatever is available to them, whether that’s Rush Limbaugh, shortwave survivalists, the History Channel, or the Bible. It’s easy to dismiss people because they’ve put together a world view from an entirely different set of building blocks from your own. And that’s exactly what I did for at least my first year as an organizer.

Like most of my fellow upper-middleclass, college-educated colleagues, I threw workers into a narrow stereotype of apolitical, apathetic “middle America.” We had grown up with it for so long, we didn’t even know we had it. This is why so much of our time as organizers was spent trying to change the way people thought before we got to the nuts and bolts of organizing the union. In the tradition of Saul Alinsky, we were trained to “dialog” with workers to help them reveal for themselves the fact of their oppression, and the one sure thing they could do about it: take collective action. (If you go to Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals or look into the work of Paulo Friere, who also greatly influenced the current generations of organizers, you’ll find the intellectual foundation for this kind of organizing.) Our job, as we were taught it, was to facilitate a self-awakening into political consciousness among the workers.

A complete change in psychology was a lot to pull off in a six week union campaign, and so we almost always lost when it came down to a vote by the workers. Afterwards, I’d hear many a young organizer lament, “What’s wrong with these people? Why are they voting against their own interests? How can they be so brainwashed?” And I was thinking the exact same thing. (And this is, of course, the same lament we hear after political elections as people curse entire ‘red’ states.)

But eventually, I started listening — really listening. My own awakening really started when I went to work inside a factory where a union campaign was taking place. There, I was able to see and hear the real reasons workers were rejecting the union. It wasn’t because they were scared or apathetic. It was usually because either (A) they saw real flaws with the union’s strategy (which suddenly, from the inside looked a lot more valid than when I was outside); or (B) technical glitches in timing and execution on the part of the union simply flummoxed the campaign in ways I hadn’t been able to see on the outside.

My awakening continued while back working as a staff organizer, when I was lucky enough to be confronted by a few groups of workers who asserted themselves in ways that made a mockery of the stereotypes I was still trying to hang on to.

To give an example, at the beginning of one campaign, a group of nursing home workers presented me with a fully laid-out, worker-written newsletter on a floppy disk — and demanded 800 copies by the next day to distribute to their coworkers. Writing “campaign lit” was the job of the organizer. So I felt immediately threatened. My next reaction was to want to edit the newsletter to make it more “on message” for the union. It was filled with short and long articles on everything from simple explanations of why they wanted a union (I wanted to bring those more in line with the official talking points) to emotional essays on why life as a care giver was so satisfying (I worried those would make people forget about the grievances that had sparked the union campaign).

The workers said, “No edits! Just print this out and we’ll distribute it.” The newsletter was an incredible hit. Workers were hiding in closets to read them. People came to the office for extra copies to give to family members. The newsletter turned out to be an incredibly powerful organizing tool because it showed people being a union, not just talking about one. It allowed the workers who were leading the union campaign to express a fully-formed tone and attitude of what the union was all about. For example, the article about pride in care giving showed people that the union was not only about grievances, but about also about care giving, the thing the workers cared about the most.

It was not a fluke. In every campaign after that, we always asked workers for articles and they wrote them in droves. The worker-written newsletter became the cornerstone of every campaign I ran from that point on.

Those and other experiences like them gradually woke me up. I started approaching groups of workers with the assumption that they were, taken as a whole, savvy and strategic, not apolitical and apathetic. That opened the door to all kinds of great collaborations. I started assuming these groups of people were strong, deep, strategic and concerned — “even if they were” made up of Evangelical Christians, survivalists, muscle car drivers, trailer park dwellers, pit bull breeders, and anything else my Northeastern Liberal upbringing had taught me to ridicule.

Suddenly, I was finding evidence everywhere of that strength and depth. Not only did I have more interesting conversations with people, but I also started winning union campaigns — usually by overwhelming margins. As a — I’ll admit it — snot nosed lefty kid fresh from the suburbs, it was shocking (and exciting!) for me find that every rural route and city block had its Mother Jones, and every single hospital ward or factory assembly line had its Joe Hill. I wanted to run back to college and tell my labor history professors, “Guess what! Nothing’s changed since 1934 after all!”

There has NOT been a radical change in the spirit of the people since the days of romantic, revolutionary mass organizing in America. What’s changed is that the middle-class, university-educated segment within the struggle (i.e. US) stopped playing our vital role (not THE vital role, just A vital role) because somehow we got our heads filled with all this nonsense about the people being apathetic jackasses.

After I finally left the unions, and wound up moving to the beltway, I found the same cynicism I had grown up with still alive and well among progressives there. I’d frequently trot out my evidence from the front lines. Mostly, people would just look back at me incredulously. I was working for MoveOn at the time and acquiring more evidence by the day — thanks to MoveOn’s trusting its members to run their own local events across the country. Enormous numbers of activists were taking part all the time, even in the smallest towns in the reddest states. But none of my arguments seemed to get me anywhere with people at parties cursing the “fly over states”.

For a little while I thought the Dean campaign and the massive surge of grassroots activism everywhere in 2004 might finally change progressives’ minds about the people.

But then came November 2, and the near-universal response among progressives: Blame Jesusland!

To be fair, there are actually many very good reasons why progressives find it hard to trust The People. For example, one thing that makes many progressive believe that the American people are apathetic and weak is that…well…so many people are in fact apathetic and weak. But, as it happens, groups of people are not equal to their lowest common denominators — or even to their means. Groups are much greater than the aggregate of their individual members. Someone canvassing voters in a campaign can quickly become depressed by the apathy of 9/10th of the people she talks to. But part of the art of organizing is to be able to look through that optical illusion and to see the group as a whole. It’s the same kind of complex vision one must have in any field. But somehow it’s been lost in the field of organizing.

Therefore, it’s time to relearn some of the important principles that have enabled organizers over the centuries and all around the world see the forest through the trees — or The People in the population.

1) All groups of people — even very small ones — are strong and brilliant. Sometimes that can be hard to see because the same is not true of all individuals.

Not everyone is always going to be a leader, an organizer, a strategist, a fighter. Fact is, a whole lot of people spend most of their lives behaving downright cowardly and apathetic. The whole point of this article, though, is that you make a big mistake when you use that fact to dismiss The People as a whole — or even any small group of people. That’s not how it works. “The People” (as in “We, the…”) is a structure of individuals working together in a complex way.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not putting some people above others as people. Just as organizers. Every individual is a deep and amazing person in the sense of having lives just as full of passion, need, joy and pain as yours. And that, by the way, is the key to grasping the principle of equal worth of all people (in case you were having trouble with that!).

In fact, it is that commitment to equal worth that drives Alinskyite and Frierian organizers to want so badly to raise up every single broken soul. Yes, those people will need to go through a transformation before they become leaders in any movement. However, the mistake those organizers make, is to misunderestimate the leadership that already exists in every nook and cranny of every group. It just so happens that even when you get down to 10 people who work in a nursing home wing or live on a cul-de-sac together, you find that one or two of them are very good at running meetings, another is a great writer, another is an astute strategist, and so on in overlapping and random fashion.

Leadership is what makes even tiny groups of people strong and brilliant — but just to be doubly clear: by leadership, I’m not talking about politicians and head of big organization. (Though that’s important too!) Rather, I’m talking about the leaders on every assembly line, every hospital ward, every classroom, every apartment building floor, every stretch of rural route, etc, etc….

2) Leadership is not a role played only by “leaders,” but equally by “followers” in the act of temporarily and voluntarily granting to leaders their special role. Also: leadership is ephemeral in individuals and is sometimes expressed by the most unlikely people.

Organizers today tend not to recognize and respect the strength and dignity that “non-leaders” exercise through their conscious, voluntary and temporary allegiance to those possessed by the property of leadership at a given moment. That bias is part of what explains the general anti-leadership attitude among progressives these days — there is a widespread sense that leadership implies a lack of democracy or egalitarianism. In fact, organic grassroots leadership is what makes democracy possible.

It might help if I was more concrete. When I was working in factories during campaigns, I saw that when the union came around, immediately workers began to look to certain individuals to get their opinion on the matter. Sometimes the leaders supported the union, sometimes they rejected it, and sometimes they abstained. Those leaders therefore had the power to come together and make the union — but only because the rest of the folks were giving them that power at that moment. Those leaders didn’t “run the workplace.” They weren’t power-hungry gang leaders. Many of them actually had very small social foot prints at work. But, for all different kinds of reasons, these leaders had built up credibility and respect among the workers with regards to this particular kind of turbulent political situation.

Furthermore, the leadership of a group is not a static list. In campaigns, if you’re open to the possibility, you find that leadership is something that pops up in the most unexpected people at the most unexpected times. I remember one day when the whole future of a campaign relied on one worker reading a statement confidently and clearly to the boss in front of an assembly of workers. So who did we choose? Of course, the most confident and articulate worker on the organizing committee. When the time came, he froze and couldn’t open his mouth. He stood there with the paper shaking in his hands. The woman standing next to him took the paper from his hands and read it just as clearly and confidently as could be. What was shocking about this was that, while very respected for being a hard worker with seniority, she was known for anything but her way with words or confidence in front of other people.

3) Groups will fight for a cause only if (A) it is worth of fighting for and (B) they can see a winning plan.

When I was organizing nursing home workers, and asking them to vote for the union so that they could merely “have respect and a say on the job,” the leaders usually rejected us. But when we laid out a long term plan for organizing the whole industry in the state, and for using that power to transform the lives of care givers and patients — then the leaders chose to fight, and supported the union every time.

Think about that: In the first case, we were asking them to do almost nothing, but they wouldn’t do it; In the second case, we were asking them to commit to a 10-year ordeal, and they were all for it. The small campaign wasn’t worth their time or the risks involved; the big campaign was.

This principle also holds the answer to the inevitable question, “If the people are so strong and brilliant, then why did they vote for Bush?” First of all, they didn’t. Only about a quarter of U.S. adults voted for Bush. A lot of them were just flipping coins in their heads. Some were voting on just a few issues — the ones where the difference could be gleaned from the moments of news people catch between 11-hour work days, dinner and putting the kids to bed: Bush was going to kill the terrorists, Kerry was not so sure; Bush was anti-abortion, Kerry was pro-choice; Bush supposedly believed in Jesus, Kerry supposedly believed only in going to Church in an election season; Bush cut everyone’s taxes, Kerry was going to raise some people’s taxes.

The People didn’t make a dumb decision. Half abstained. And most of the other half chose the lesser of two evils based on the issues they cared about and the information that was available to them.

The way for a Democrat to win with a sweeping majority is to lay out a sweeping plan for real change, with a good strategy, and ask the people to fight for it. It’s been forever since anybody’s tried that. (But it is worth noting that when Howard Dean merely hinted at something like that, he ignited a revolution among the Democratic base.) Third party efforts haven’t been any different: can anyone remember the big plan to change America from Labor Party Advocates, the New Party or the Green Party/Ralph Nader 2000 campaign? Unfortunately, the world of progressive grassroots organizations is in the same boat.

Coming out with a big revolutionary plan is unthinkable for us because we don’t trust the people to fight for it. We believe in “starting small.” It’s become an explicit methodological dogma of the progressive movement: The idea is that people must first be given “small, winnable battles” and gradually, after they’ve tasted a little success, can be encouraged to bite off bigger and bigger campaigns.

But that thinking has lead us down a self-defeating spiral of un-inspiration. Here’s how it works: We lose campaigns because the people can’t be bothered to take on the “small battles” we give them. But our backwards thinking leads us to conclude that we should go back to them with even smaller battles. And as we travel this downward spiral, we find that fewer and fewer people want to participate, and that the quality of the leaders who join us diminishes too.

Because of our (false) understanding of what’s happening, it appears to us that The People are getting more and more timid and becoming worse and worse leaders. We blame TV, bad schools, religion and rampant consumerism. We actually believe that the soul of the people is changing over time. Think about how widespread and rock solid that assumption is: is there any question in our minds that people are more timid and bought-off now than they were in the days when millions of workers comprising several whole industries struck in unison for entrance into the middle class?

Because of our perception of this dumbing-down of the people, we focus more and more intensively on on “consciousness raising” and “leadership development” — to the exclusion of working with leaders who are already plenty conscious and already amazing leaders. We’ve been shrinking down our expectations until they’re practically non-existent. We been doing this for decades.

To start to get out of this trap, we’ve just got to open our minds to the possibility that the people are just as radical as they were when millions took part in sit-down strikes and the Unemployed Councils. We’ve got to recognize the possibility that the wisest, boldest leaders have been consciously refusing to participate in our campaigns because our goals have been too modest and our strategies shaky as hell.

When I look back at all the organizing that I did under the assumption that The People were weak and apathetic, I remember that, by and large, the people I was able to recruit tended to be…well…kind of weak and apathetic. But when I started organizing with the assumption that people would rise to the task of a big campaign, then amazing leaders came out of the woodwork.

Consider the possibility that the reason the leaders you’re used to need so much “development” is that only non-leaders are interested in your short-term, bite-sized campaigns. In other words, people who are un-strategic, people who have no credibility among their peers to loose, people who perhaps just have a lot of time on their hands and are bored — those are the people who are willing to risk everything for nothing, and who can’t tell the difference between a good strategy and a bad one. (Again, none of that makes them less-valuable as people, just as organizers.)

When I first saw a union campaign from inside of a facility where I was a worker, I was shocked by how differently the true workplace leaders appeared to the union organizers from how I knew them to be. I had been working in the factory for months, and I knew who the leaders were. I had seen them defend their coworkers against management attacks (risking their jobs in the process), resolve conflicts among coworkers, and welcome and train new workers. They were already running what was effectively an informal union that they had built themselves.

But when union organizers knocked on their doors, almost all these leaders said, “Everything at work is fine. I don’t want any trouble. I don’t want to lose my job. Go away.” At work I saw the conversations among those leaders that lead to the anti-union consensus. Their logic was reasonable and correct: They were concerned that the union was only organizing their one factory, out of many owned by the same company. “How,” they asked, “will we have any power when they can just move all our work to the other factories?” And they were turned off by the fact that, in the first couple days of the campaign, the union had already embraced as leaders a few people who were extremely bad news — i.e. those people who had no credibility to lose and too much time on their hands.

There. I’ve done my best to justify the leap of faith I’m asking you to take. I know there are a whole lot of organizers who didn’t grow up with my same set of deficiencies and who didn’t need to read this article at all — to you folks I apologize for the time you’ve wasted here. But it’s clear that the progressive movement overall is still suffering from a lack of trust and faith in The People. Take a leap of faith, trust The People, and I guarantee that as long as you combine that with good organizing, you won’t be disappointed.

An Organizer’s Guide to Trusting the People 27 September, 2006

Often, we progressives fall back on blaming the American people for our failure to win elections or grow our movement. This is not only a self-defeating bad habit, it’s also based on a totally inaccurate understanding of The People. I frequently find myself trying to squeeze this argument into a single paragraph in posts and articles. It never fits. Therefore, I’m going to flesh it out here, and then perhaps I can just link over whenever I want to give people an option to hear me out.

For most of the 90′s I worked as a union organizer all over America, from big cities to far flung small towns — organizing workers at hospitals, nursing homes, factories, meat processing plants, big box stores, and working at many of those facilities myself.

I sat in the living rooms of probably a thousand families altogether. Visiting workers at home was the only way to talk safely about the union. But conversations frequently strayed from the revolution they were trying to make at work to what they thought of the problems facing the country too. People have a lot of ways of making sense of the world. They grab at straws and whatever is available to them, whether that’s Rush Limbaugh, shortwave survivalists, the History Channel, or the Bible. It’s easy to dismiss people because they’ve put together a world view from an entirely different set of building blocks from your own. And that’s exactly what I did for at least my first year as an organizer.

Like most of my fellow upper-middleclass, college-educated colleagues, I threw workers into a narrow stereotype of apolitical, apathetic “middle America.” We had grown up with it for so long, we didn’t even know we had it. This is why so much of our time as organizers was spent trying to change the way people thought before we got to the nuts and bolts of organizing the union. In the tradition of Saul Alinsky, we were trained to “dialog” with workers to help them reveal for themselves the fact of their oppression, and the one sure thing they could do about it: take collective action. (If you go to Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals or look into the work of Paulo Friere, who also greatly influenced the current generations of organizers, you’ll find the intellectual foundation for this kind of organizing.) Our job, as we were taught it, was to facilitate a self-awakening into political consciousness among the workers.

A complete change in psychology was a lot to pull off in a six week union campaign, and so we almost always lost when it came down to a vote by the workers. Afterwards, I’d hear many a young organizer lament, “What’s wrong with these people? Why are they voting against their own interests? How can they be so brainwashed?” And I was thinking the exact same thing. (And this is, of course, the same lament we hear after political elections as people curse entire ‘red’ states.)

But eventually, I started listening — really listening. My own awakening really started when I went to work inside a factory where a union campaign was taking place. There, I was able to see and hear the real reasons workers were rejecting the union. It wasn’t because they were scared or apathetic. It was usually because either (A) they saw real flaws with the union’s strategy (which suddenly, from the inside looked a lot more valid than when I was outside); or (B) technical glitches in timing and execution on the part of the union simply flummoxed the campaign in ways I hadn’t been able to see on the outside.

My awakening continued while back working as a staff organizer, when I was lucky enough to be confronted by a few groups of workers who asserted themselves in ways that made a mockery of the stereotypes I was still trying to hang on to.

To give an example, at the beginning of one campaign, a group of nursing home workers presented me with a fully laid-out, worker-written newsletter on a floppy disk — and demanded 800 copies by the next day to distribute to their coworkers. Writing “campaign lit” was the job of the organizer. So I felt immediately threatened. My next reaction was to want to edit the newsletter to make it more “on message” for the union. It was filled with short and long articles on everything from simple explanations of why they wanted a union (I wanted to bring those more in line with the official talking points) to emotional essays on why life as a care giver was so satisfying (I worried those would make people forget about the grievances that had sparked the union campaign).

The workers said, “No edits! Just print this out and we’ll distribute it.” The newsletter was an incredible hit. Workers were hiding in closets to read them. People came to the office for extra copies to give to family members. The newsletter turned out to be an incredibly powerful organizing tool because it showed people being a union, not just talking about one. It allowed the workers who were leading the union campaign to express a fully-formed tone and attitude of what the union was all about. For example, the article about pride in care giving showed people that the union was not only about grievances, but about also about care giving, the thing the workers cared about the most.

It was not a fluke. In every campaign after that, we always asked workers for articles and they wrote them in droves. The worker-written newsletter became the cornerstone of every campaign I ran from that point on.

Those and other experiences like them gradually woke me up. I started approaching groups of workers with the assumption that they were, taken as a whole, savvy and strategic, not apolitical and apathetic. That opened the door to all kinds of great collaborations. I started assuming these groups of people were strong, deep, strategic and concerned — “even if they were” made up of Evangelical Christians, survivalists, muscle car drivers, trailer park dwellers, pit bull breeders, and anything else my Northeastern Liberal upbringing had taught me to ridicule.

Suddenly, I was finding evidence everywhere of that strength and depth. Not only did I have more interesting conversations with people, but I also started winning union campaigns — usually by overwhelming margins. As a — I’ll admit it — snot nosed lefty kid fresh from the suburbs, it was shocking (and exciting!) for me find that every rural route and city block had its Mother Jones, and every single hospital ward or factory assembly line had its Joe Hill. I wanted to run back to college and tell my labor history professors, “Guess what! Nothing’s changed since 1934 after all!”

There has NOT been a radical change in the spirit of the people since the days of romantic, revolutionary mass organizing in America. What’s changed is that the middle-class, university-educated segment within the struggle (i.e. US) stopped playing our vital role (not THE vital role, just A vital role) because somehow we got our heads filled with all this nonsense about the people being apathetic jackasses.

After I finally left the unions, and wound up moving to the beltway, I found the same cynicism I had grown up with still alive and well among progressives there. I’d frequently trot out my evidence from the front lines. Mostly, people would just look back at me incredulously. I was working for MoveOn at the time and acquiring more evidence by the day — thanks to MoveOn’s trusting its members to run their own local events across the country. Enormous numbers of activists were taking part all the time, even in the smallest towns in the reddest states. But none of my arguments seemed to get me anywhere with people at parties cursing the “fly over states”.

For a little while I thought the Dean campaign and the massive surge of grassroots activism everywhere in 2004 might finally change progressives’ minds about the people.

But then came November 2, and the near-universal response among progressives: Blame Jesusland!

To be fair, there are actually many very good reasons why progressives find it hard to trust The People. For example, one thing that makes many progressive believe that the American people are apathetic and weak is that…well…so many people are in fact apathetic and weak. But, as it happens, groups of people are not equal to their lowest common denominators — or even to their means. Groups are much greater than the aggregate of their individual members. Someone canvassing voters in a campaign can quickly become depressed by the apathy of 9/10th of the people she talks to. But part of the art of organizing is to be able to look through that optical illusion and to see the group as a whole. It’s the same kind of complex vision one must have in any field. But somehow it’s been lost in the field of organizing.

Therefore, it’s time to relearn some of the important principles that have enabled organizers over the centuries and all around the world see the forest through the trees — or The People in the population.

1) All groups of people — even very small ones — are strong and brilliant. Sometimes that can be hard to see because the same is not true of all individuals.

Not everyone is always going to be a leader, an organizer, a strategist, a fighter. Fact is, a whole lot of people spend most of their lives behaving downright cowardly and apathetic. The whole point of this article, though, is that you make a big mistake when you use that fact to dismiss The People as a whole — or even any small group of people. That’s not how it works. “The People” (as in “We, the…”) is a structure of individuals working together in a complex way.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not putting some people above others as people. Just as organizers. Every individual is a deep and amazing person in the sense of having lives just as full of passion, need, joy and pain as yours. And that, by the way, is the key to grasping the principle of equal worth of all people (in case you were having trouble with that!).

In fact, it is that commitment to equal worth that drives Alinskyite and Frierian organizers to want so badly to raise up every single broken soul. Yes, those people will need to go through a transformation before they become leaders in any movement. However, the mistake those organizers make, is to misunderestimate the leadership that already exists in every nook and cranny of every group. It just so happens that even when you get down to 10 people who work in a nursing home wing or live on a cul-de-sac together, you find that one or two of them are very good at running meetings, another is a great writer, another is an astute strategist, and so on in overlapping and random fashion.

Leadership is what makes even tiny groups of people strong and brilliant — but just to be doubly clear: by leadership, I’m not talking about politicians and head of big organization. (Though that’s important too!) Rather, I’m talking about the leaders on every assembly line, every hospital ward, every classroom, every apartment building floor, every stretch of rural route, etc, etc….

2) Leadership is not a role played only by “leaders,” but equally by “followers” in the act of temporarily and voluntarily granting to leaders their special role. Also: leadership is ephemeral in individuals and is sometimes expressed by the most unlikely people.

Organizers today tend not to recognize and respect the strength and dignity that “non-leaders” exercise through their conscious, voluntary and temporary allegiance to those possessed by the property of leadership at a given moment. That bias is part of what explains the general anti-leadership attitude among progressives these days — there is a widespread sense that leadership implies a lack of democracy or egalitarianism. In fact, organic grassroots leadership is what makes democracy possible.

It might help if I was more concrete. When I was working in factories during campaigns, I saw that when the union came around, immediately workers began to look to certain individuals to get their opinion on the matter. Sometimes the leaders supported the union, sometimes they rejected it, and sometimes they abstained. Those leaders therefore had the power to come together and make the union — but only because the rest of the folks were giving them that power at that moment. Those leaders didn’t “run the workplace.” They weren’t power-hungry gang leaders. Many of them actually had very small social foot prints at work. But, for all different kinds of reasons, these leaders had built up credibility and respect among the workers with regards to this particular kind of turbulent political situation.

Furthermore, the leadership of a group is not a static list. In campaigns, if you’re open to the possibility, you find that leadership is something that pops up in the most unexpected people at the most unexpected times. I remember one day when the whole future of a campaign relied on one worker reading a statement confidently and clearly to the boss in front of an assembly of workers. So who did we choose? Of course, the most confident and articulate worker on the organizing committee. When the time came, he froze and couldn’t open his mouth. He stood there with the paper shaking in his hands. The woman standing next to him took the paper from his hands and read it just as clearly and confidently as could be. What was shocking about this was that, while very respected for being a hard worker with seniority, she was known for anything but her way with words or confidence in front of other people.

3) Groups will fight for a cause only if (A) it is worth of fighting for and (B) they can see a winning plan.

When I was organizing nursing home workers, and asking them to vote for the union so that they could merely “have respect and a say on the job,” the leaders usually rejected us. But when we laid out a long term plan for organizing the whole industry in the state, and for using that power to transform the lives of care givers and patients — then the leaders chose to fight, and supported the union every time.

Think about that: In the first case, we were asking them to do almost nothing, but they wouldn’t do it; In the second case, we were asking them to commit to a 10-year ordeal, and they were all for it. The small campaign wasn’t worth their time or the risks involved; the big campaign was.

This principle also holds the answer to the inevitable question, “If the people are so strong and brilliant, then why did they vote for Bush?” First of all, they didn’t. Only about a quarter of U.S. adults voted for Bush. A lot of them were just flipping coins in their heads. Some were voting on just a few issues — the ones where the difference could be gleaned from the moments of news people catch between 11-hour work days, dinner and putting the kids to bed: Bush was going to kill the terrorists, Kerry was not so sure; Bush was anti-abortion, Kerry was pro-choice; Bush supposedly believed in Jesus, Kerry supposedly believed only in going to Church in an election season; Bush cut everyone’s taxes, Kerry was going to raise some people’s taxes.

The People didn’t make a dumb decision. Half abstained. And most of the other half chose the lesser of two evils based on the issues they cared about and the information that was available to them.

The way for a Democrat to win with a sweeping majority is to lay out a sweeping plan for real change, with a good strategy, and ask the people to fight for it. It’s been forever since anybody’s tried that. (But it is worth noting that when Howard Dean merely hinted at something like that, he ignited a revolution among the Democratic base.) Third party efforts haven’t been any different: can anyone remember the big plan to change America from Labor Party Advocates, the New Party or the Green Party/Ralph Nader 2000 campaign? Unfortunately, the world of progressive grassroots organizations is in the same boat.

Coming out with a big revolutionary plan is unthinkable for us because we don’t trust the people to fight for it. We believe in “starting small.” It’s become an explicit methodological dogma of the progressive movement: The idea is that people must first be given “small, winnable battles” and gradually, after they’ve tasted a little success, can be encouraged to bite off bigger and bigger campaigns.

But that thinking has lead us down a self-defeating spiral of un-inspiration. Here’s how it works: We lose campaigns because the people can’t be bothered to take on the “small battles” we give them. But our backwards thinking leads us to conclude that we should go back to them with even smaller battles. And as we travel this downward spiral, we find that fewer and fewer people want to participate, and that the quality of the leaders who join us diminishes too.

Because of our (false) understanding of what’s happening, it appears to us that The People are getting more and more timid and becoming worse and worse leaders. We blame TV, bad schools, religion and rampant consumerism. We actually believe that the soul of the people is changing over time. Think about how widespread and rock solid that assumption is: is there any question in our minds that people are more timid and bought-off now than they were in the days when millions of workers comprising several whole industries struck in unison for entrance into the middle class?

Because of our perception of this dumbing-down of the people, we focus more and more intensively on on “consciousness raising” and “leadership development” — to the exclusion of working with leaders who are already plenty conscious and already amazing leaders. We’ve been shrinking down our expectations until they’re practically non-existent. We been doing this for decades.

To start to get out of this trap, we’ve just got to open our minds to the possibility that the people are just as radical as they were when millions took part in sit-down strikes and the Unemployed Councils. We’ve got to recognize the possibility that the wisest, boldest leaders have been consciously refusing to participate in our campaigns because our goals have been too modest and our strategies shaky as hell.

When I look back at all the organizing that I did under the assumption that The People were weak and apathetic, I remember that, by and large, the people I was able to recruit tended to be…well…kind of weak and apathetic. But when I started organizing with the assumption that people would rise to the task of a big campaign, then amazing leaders came out of the woodwork.

Consider the possibility that the reason the leaders you’re used to need so much “development” is that only non-leaders are interested in your short-term, bite-sized campaigns. In other words, people who are un-strategic, people who have no credibility among their peers to loose, people who perhaps just have a lot of time on their hands and are bored — those are the people who are willing to risk everything for nothing, and who can’t tell the difference between a good strategy and a bad one. (Again, none of that makes them less-valuable as people, just as organizers.)

When I first saw a union campaign from inside of a facility where I was a worker, I was shocked by how differently the true workplace leaders appeared to the union organizers from how I knew them to be. I had been working in the factory for months, and I knew who the leaders were. I had seen them defend their coworkers against management attacks (risking their jobs in the process), resolve conflicts among coworkers, and welcome and train new workers. They were already running what was effectively an informal union that they had built themselves.

But when union organizers knocked on their doors, almost all these leaders said, “Everything at work is fine. I don’t want any trouble. I don’t want to lose my job. Go away.” At work I saw the conversations among those leaders that lead to the anti-union consensus. Their logic was reasonable and correct: They were concerned that the union was only organizing their one factory, out of many owned by the same company. “How,” they asked, “will we have any power when they can just move all our work to the other factories?” And they were turned off by the fact that, in the first couple days of the campaign, the union had already embraced as leaders a few people who were extremely bad news — i.e. those people who had no credibility to lose and too much time on their hands.

There. I’ve done my best to justify the leap of faith I’m asking you to take. I know there are a whole lot of organizers who didn’t grow up with my same set of deficiencies and who didn’t need to read this article at all — to you folks I apologize for the time you’ve wasted here. But it’s clear that the progressive movement overall is still suffering from a lack of trust and faith in The People. Take a leap of faith, trust The People, and I guarantee that as long as you combine that with good organizing, you won’t be disappointed.

Ask America Out 24 September, 2006

Like a lot of other writers here at HuffPo I’ve be asking, “Where the heck are the Democrats in this election on Iraq?” I can’t hear them, but I hear President Bush loud and clear every day. A friend on the Hill, exasperated by my complaining, finally exploded at me the other day, “We’ve been having full leadership press conferences or high-profile hearings every single day on Iraq!”

So what is to be done? We have to give them credit for trying, but clearly the Dems’ current method isn’t working.

I read a lot of blogs in depth, but my mainstream news intake is probably the same as the majority of Americans. In other words, I’m not a beltway news junkie with cable news on all the time. So, like most of America, I haven’t seen anything from those Hill press conferences or hearings.

I get a few minutes of radio news in the morning, and maybe another few in the car later in the day. Each day Bush’s message on Iraq comes through loud and clear — usually in his own voice. It’s always the same: “Stay the course; We need to fight them there so we won’t have to fight them here; We will prevail.”

Usually, there is no audible Democratic response — maybe just the reporter reading a line from some Senator’s press release of the day. The statement is usually just a complaint or condemnation of the current policies, and is never an invitation to, “Vote for us this November to make it all better!” Therefore it comes off sounding a little whiney and pointless. You know, like: “Bush is out there trying to protect us, and the Dems are just hanging around second guessing with no solutions of their own.” As unfair as it is, it really rings true just based on the news bites I get each day.

Recently, the reporters, in those few minutes of news roundup, have been skipping the Democratic message altogether, saying, “Democrats have been content to sit back and watch the Republicans fight it out among themselves.” At that, I usually reach for my cell phone, irate, to call my friends on the Hill. But like I said, they explain that Democrats are being extremely vocal, and the news media just isn’t giving their voices equal weight with the President’s.

One obvious problem is that in a midterm election there is no single, national leader for the party that doesn’t have the White House. But why should that be? Is it simply a matter of Dean, Reid and Pelosi (or more likely the staffers and advisors who surround them) not being able to agree on who among them should take the lead in this election season? Why not designate a third…er…fourth party? Say, Murtha.

Republicans rose to power in Congress under a Democratic president only when they had a single, visible national leader in Newt Gingrich. It didn’t even matter that he was in fact weird, overly-academic and abstract and that his Contract with America was wonky and mostly irrelevant to the average American. (Viva “zero base-line budgeting”!) At the time, it just happened to be enough to lead, however poorly.

But perhaps even without designating a single national leader for this election, Democrats could still lead by at least talking about the election and asking for America’s vote. Is it just me, or do Dems seem embarrassed to talk directly about the Congressional elections and why America should vote for them? They’re hoping the voters’ dissatisfaction with the Republicans will automatically translate into a vote for the Democrats. This didn’t work for the Kerry campaign and it won’t work now.

Don’t be shy Democrats! We’ve been having elections for three centuries in this country. The people won’t think you’re being forward or creepy if you come out and say, “Vote for us to make it all better.” That’s how Democracy is supposed to work.

When I asked my friend about the content of those Hill press conferences, the answer was, “No, they haven’t been about the election.” They’ve been about GOP corruption, contractor mishaps, gloomy intel reports, etc…

In other words, the Democratic party can’t get past nervous small talk with the American people. Dems, take a deep breath. It’s time to make your move: Ask America out on a two-year date.

(Cross posted at HuffPo)

Fluorescent bulbs and the Revolution 22 June, 2006

Thanks to Al Gore, now everyone knows the planet is doomed if we don’t take IMMEDIATE ACTION. What kind of action? Start using fluorescent light bulbs. Drive a Prius. Encourage your mayor to put solar panels on city hall. Yeah, right.

Al’s a hero for what he’s accomplished over the last several weeks. And it’s not his fault that there are no credible solutions to global warming on the table. I blame academia. Rare leaders like Gore, who are willing to address the biggest problems, have been left solutionless by a two-generation moratorium on big-picture, long-term thinking among our greatest economists and social thinkers.

I saw Barack Obama hit the same brick wall a few weeks ago speaking on global warming. He started out saying, “We need a mobilization of resources on the scale of WWII.” I was ready to enlist in the Obama army. But when it came to specifics, he too had to default to fluorescent bulbs, Priuses, etc….

This problem spans virtually all big issues: in John Edwards’ search for real solutions to poverty, academia offers him little more than higher education subsidies and mixed income housing. On health care, it’s just as bad. I once witnessed a room full of U.S. Senators alternately beg and berate a panel of top health care policy experts for solutions they could tell their constituents about. After 45 minutes the experts had said nothing convincing, or even intelligible.

This affliction is not limited to mainstream Democratic politicians. On global warming, the Left’s biggest, boldest idea is the Apollo Alliance. It calls for $30 billion in new investment each year for ten years for renewable energy and industrial retooling. Can $30 billion per year fundamentally transform our society? No. Thirty billion dollars is 0.0024% of U.S. GDP — or, to put it another way, about 70 seconds of the national workday. Think about that on a personal level: you can’t keep your house clean in 70 seconds a day, let alone transform your life.

But let’s go back to Obama’s WWII reference. World War II truly was transformational for our society. From 1942 to 1945 the U.S. devoted a full third of GDP to the war. Domestic car production ground to a halt as the auto industry was retooled to produce jeeps and tanks. Hundreds of thousands volunteered to give their lives. People at home sacrificed by conserving materials and fuel. The wealthy paid far higher taxes. And millions of women joined the workforce for the first time in their lives. In other words, America did whatever it took. We certainly didn’t win World War II by taking a few minutes out of the day — in one way or another the war was the primary economic activity of virtually every American.

The economics of the war effort looked a lot like central planning at times, but private capital was rewarded lavishly for its cooperation, and big business emerged healthy, free and more profitable than ever on the other side of the war. Furthermore, the massive infusion of capital modernized the American economy as a whole and laid the foundation for 50 years of exceptional growth.

So why aren’t we talking about a mobilization of that scale to save the planet? Or to end extreme poverty? Or to carry out a Marshal Plan for the 4/5ths of the Earth that needs one? I can guess the primary response: “Americans will pay for war, but not for all that good stuff.” But go back and look at the history: Americans didn’t want to join World War II either. There was fierce grassroots opposition by right-wingers who didn’t see fascism as entirely negative, and broad and deep hesitance among Americans who felt Europe should sort out its own messes. (Put Arthur Miller’s “Focus” on your Netflix list to see a graphic depiction.)

It took extraordinary leadership to convince America to accept that extraordinary mission. But once we did, there was no stopping us. It could be the same with global warming and the other potentially show-stopping threats of this new century. But FDR had something on his side that our current leaders do not. There was an intellectual and institutional consensus about what it meant to fight a world war — about the scale and scope of it. It was accepted that economic rules could be changed, industries rearranged, and people asked to make huge sacrifices.

Today, however, we are bound by an “Inaction Consensus” that is shared by virtually every political, business and academic leader — a consensus that would see the oceans boil before allowing society to intervene structurally in private economic affairs. This consensus is shared by conservative and liberal thinkers alike — at least all the “respectable” ones.

It should come as no surprise that conservative thinkers oppose any kind of rearranging of economic interests by society. But this is just as true of the liberal members of the global Inaction Consensus. Liberals believe it’s OK for society to create the conditions for economic change, but even progressive heroes such as Krugman and Riech agree with their conservative colleagues that society should not try to intentionally direct change. The difference between liberals and conservatives in economic thinking is a matter of emphasis, not fundamental principles. The term “liberal” began as a label for free market economic thinking and has never shifted from that foundation. Go back and read one of Conservatism’s canonical texts, F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. You’ll find that Milton Friedman’s favorite author favored a strong welfare state, socialized medicine, universal public education and heavy regulation of industry. The only thing he disallowed was tampering with private economic activity on a structural level.

But as the polar ice caps plop off like ice cubes into a drink on a summer day, shouldn’t we reexamine that economic orthodoxy?

We need a real plan to save the planet: one that will replace all oil burning engines; one that will retool the world’s entire industrial infrastructure; one that will achieve all that in ten years; and one that is impossible within the confines of the Inaction Consensus.

Is there anyone, anywhere working on that kind of plan? An economics professor of mine, who comes from a tradition of economic thought (fringe in the U.S.) that thinks big picture, says even his grad students have shied away from the big-picture and long-term for decades. Why? Because they can’t get funding to work on those kinds of topics, and even worry that working on such topics will make it hard for them to find teaching positions.

What’s the solution? Well, I hear that a bunch of big donors are pouring millions into liberal think tanks. They are trying to catch up to their conservative counterparts who decades ago set up paradigm-shifting engines such as the Cato, Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes. These donors are currently putting their dollars into fairly middle-of-the-road liberal institutions. And they should absolutely continue to fund those. But they need to fund some radical efforts as well. The donors need to notice that the conservative think tanks they so admire changed the terms of the national debate by rejecting the terms as they found them.

What we need are high-paying, resource-rich homes for talented, serious economists and other thinkers who want to work outside the Inaction Consensus — who want to work on truly Big Plans to save humanity. If the oceans really do start to rise — or some other global catastrophe comes true — then those plans will turn out be a lot less politically unacceptable than they appear today. And Obama 2016 will have something better to talk about than fluorescent bulbs.

(PS: Any of you donors out there who want to work on something like this, here’s where to find me: zackexley@gmail.com.)

(Cross posted from HuffPo.)

Come on Paul! 16 May, 2006

“Yes, he’s in trouble, in that campaign managers, candidates, are really angry with him. He has raised $74 million and spent $64 million. He says it’s a long-term strategy. But what he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose. That’s not how you build a party. You win elections. That’s how you build a party.”
- Paul Begala on Howard Dean and the DNC’s 50 State Strategy,
CNN – May 11 2006

Yes, Paul, we have to win elections. But a myopic obsession with squeaking through in a few high-profile races is not party building, it’s suicide.

I’ve read your books and I know you’ve been fighting the good fight up there on TV every day. And so it was with complete dismay that I listened to you on CNN savaging the DNC’s “50 State” program organizers.

Your comments came as part of a series of attacks on Dean and the DNC from big-name members of your Clinton Class of ’92. A whole generation of new Democratic activists finds these attacks totally bewildering and appalling.

You should be up there on TV celebrating that we finally have a DNC who understands that winning means building real power and standing for something. Your entire career has been about teaching Democrats to “stand for something.” But, coming from a communications background, maybe you just don’t understand the “building real power” part of the equation. So let me try to reach you on that point.

Starting with George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, the Republican Party slowly built a powerful grassroots machine, county by county, year by year, across the whole country. That “50 State” grassroots machine trounced us, achieving the highest voter turnout of any candidate ever. On our side, the combined efforts of fifteen separate swing state “Coordinated Campaigns,” the national Kerry campaign, and all the 527′s put together couldn’t match the work of one unified, well-organized political party.

I spent the last couple months of the campaign in the field, in almost every one of the targeted swing states. On our side it was utter chaos on the ground. Both the party organizations and the 527 organizations had been slapped together in a few hurried months. Operations varied in quality from state to state, and even county to county, but overall it was a disorganized mess — a disservice to the record hundreds of thousands of passionate volunteers who threw themselves into the campaign. On the Republican side, their organizations had been formed years before the election, and scaled up during the campaign under the tested and stable leadership of organizers rooted in their home states and local communities. (It is worth noting that the AFL-CIO’s voter contact program ran very smoothly and effectively, having been built slowly and consistently over several cycles.)

I’ve heard some of you Clinton ’92ers say, “We built a great field program, and we didn’t get started until May!” Well, I hate to be this blunt, but: you guys didn’t get that many votes. In fact, you won with almost the lowest percentage of the vote of any victor in the 20th Century. Yours was not an election that needed a strong field program. Every election for the rest of our lives, however, will be.

So please, before you insult the 50 State program organizers any more, go down to DNC headquarters and see who these people are and what they’re actually accomplishing. I’ve been there frequently over the past year, and that big meeting room on the first floor is almost always filled with organizers from all over the country being trained in how to win elections. The program has trained more than 190 organizers from 40 states, in areas such as:

- Building strong precinct programs.
- Voter contact.
- Targeting and using voter files.
- Communicating a unified Democratic message, tailored to states and local communities.
- Internet organizing and communications and use of other new technologies to expand the base.
- Reaching out to all constituencies, including seniors, veterans, rural voters and faith-based voters.
- Leadership skills, leadership development and organization building.

Most exciting to me, these organizers are being hired at the local level and are rooted in their own communities — these are not the typical kids on an adventure between college and grad school that you’ll find flocking to your beloved high-profile Senate races this year. These organizers are in it for the long haul.

Singling out Utah and Mississippi is particularly sad because of the great gains organizers have made in those states. In Mississippi, for example, the state party has been transformed from being essentially a one-man operation into a real organization. Democrats have won four special elections in a row in 2005-2006 thanks to the State Party’s ability to support those candidates.

Not everything is perfect with the 50 State program. There are criticisms you could make that would actually help things get better. But you’re not close enough to the action to see what those are. For example, I’m sure there are states where the new organizers are being held back by the old guard. If someone like you were publicly cheering on the organizers and the DNC’s program, then just think how that could help them blow past those obstacles. The director of training at the DNC right now is actually a young guy from your own home state who, caught up and inspired by the 2004 elections, led a mini revolution in his county party and threw out the do-nothing old guard. The folks behind the 50 State strategy are a new generation of organizers who learned their stuff in the most intense election in decades. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it well.

I’ll tell you what this onslaught by Clinton ’92ers looks like. It looks like you guys are stuck forever thinking about that one big election you won. And it looks like you haven’t noticed that, ever since then, your way of approaching elections has kepts Democrats in a tailspin. I know the way you see it: candidates aren’t getting exactly the right spin, aren’t making exactly the right ads. But it’s time to take a deeper look and understand the consequences of your generations’ total neglect of the grassroots.

You guys are still held in high esteem by this massive, new generation of Democratic activists. Keep it that way: Go to DNC headquarters, go to Utah, go to Mississippi — go see what they’re building and be a part of it.

(Cross posted at HuffPo.)