OPINION
A Guide to Organizing
Liberals everywhere, please take notes.
By Phillip | 3/18/20
A central goal of this website is to inspire young people (and all people) to action. This article is full of practical information and concrete steps on how to create change and gain political power. It is based on an interview from the Ezra Klein show with union organizer Jane McAlevey. I strongly encourage listening to the podcast if you have the time (it's 2 hours long).
First let's define the terms. According to Jane McAlevey, there are four things that people can do to create positive change: charity, advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing. Charity is simply giving money away directly to someone. Advocacy is supporting organizations who will do the work for you. Mobilizing is spurring people who already agree with you into action (rallies, canvassing, protests). Organizing “is the process by which people come to change their opinions” through deep conversations and utilizing existing trusted organizations. Much of the left is confused about the last two, but what makes organizing so much more powerful is that it finds the shared commonality (not necessarily political) in a group of people, who might be very different, and expands the base (with which you can access to mobilize) to reach 90% solidarity.
McAlevey believes that the failure of the left is a failure to have a strategy in using our big advantage (a large 90% against an elite 10%) to create social change. The Democratic party’s current strategy is to throw millions of dollars at ads and frenzied outreach every two years in order to simply convince voters to vote this one time (pretty please), and then we don’t engage them for four years (and break most of the promises we made to get elected). This is because campaigns are extremely short sighted and only care about their candidates’ success in one race, as opposed to the future of the Democratic party. Politics starts with voting every two to four years, but does not end there.
So how do we have a conversation with people in an effort to organize as opposed to mobilize? A central part of this is treating every person as an intelligent human with dignity (this has caused me to stop referring to Trump voters, a good 63 million Americans, as morons), because people will immediately see through any attempt at connection if you think they are despicable based on their politics. Most people want the same thing--self-respect, “clean water, a safe planet, a decent job, nice neighbors, and fairness”— we just sometimes disagree on how to get there (of course, there are always money grubbing, tax cutting, turtle looking people like Mitch McConnell). Here are the steps:
McAlevey believes that “structure based organizing” is the key to organizing. Instead of recruiting people through canvassing, she advocates for finding structures (church, workplace, PTA, unions) that exist in people’s lives and “building supermajority support within structures.” Following this line of belief, she states that the black church in South Carolina was what powered Biden to victory and how he managed to win on Super Tuesday with little or no ground “mobilization” and ad buys. People place their trust in structures like churches or unions, and when the structure tells them to do something, they reciprocate this trust. People also place their trust in certain people or “natural leaders,” whom we can find by asking their peers who they trust (rather than finding leaders based on commitment). Through structure based organizing, we can persuade large groups of voters who trust us (though aren’t necessarily “politically” aligned) to support our causes.
An important part of structure based organizing is unions. All the big progressive legislative wins in the past (New Deal), have come from crises manufactured by workers walking off the job. “The demographics in Nevada and Texas are not that different but their politics are” and this is because of the growing rise of unions in Nevada (which has been trending strongly blue). Unions are not inherently Democrats, which means that good politics and policy would be to make it easier for unions to form and show that we support them and their goals.
So where do we go from here? People on the left should learn the differences between mobilizing and organizing. We should take a longer view of politics and use the around 700 million we raise every cycle to knock on every door in America, not just the Democratic ones. Let’s create a new theory of change that cares about everyday Americans every day, not every two years. If you say beating Donald Trump is your most important goal— help create a new Democratic party that organizes.
First let's define the terms. According to Jane McAlevey, there are four things that people can do to create positive change: charity, advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing. Charity is simply giving money away directly to someone. Advocacy is supporting organizations who will do the work for you. Mobilizing is spurring people who already agree with you into action (rallies, canvassing, protests). Organizing “is the process by which people come to change their opinions” through deep conversations and utilizing existing trusted organizations. Much of the left is confused about the last two, but what makes organizing so much more powerful is that it finds the shared commonality (not necessarily political) in a group of people, who might be very different, and expands the base (with which you can access to mobilize) to reach 90% solidarity.
McAlevey believes that the failure of the left is a failure to have a strategy in using our big advantage (a large 90% against an elite 10%) to create social change. The Democratic party’s current strategy is to throw millions of dollars at ads and frenzied outreach every two years in order to simply convince voters to vote this one time (pretty please), and then we don’t engage them for four years (and break most of the promises we made to get elected). This is because campaigns are extremely short sighted and only care about their candidates’ success in one race, as opposed to the future of the Democratic party. Politics starts with voting every two to four years, but does not end there.
So how do we have a conversation with people in an effort to organize as opposed to mobilize? A central part of this is treating every person as an intelligent human with dignity (this has caused me to stop referring to Trump voters, a good 63 million Americans, as morons), because people will immediately see through any attempt at connection if you think they are despicable based on their politics. Most people want the same thing--self-respect, “clean water, a safe planet, a decent job, nice neighbors, and fairness”— we just sometimes disagree on how to get there (of course, there are always money grubbing, tax cutting, turtle looking people like Mitch McConnell). Here are the steps:
- Fundamental to the definition of organizing, we have to be talking to all types of voters enthusiastically: Republican, independents, moderates, libertarian, Democrats, progressives, socialists.
- McAlevey opens every conversation with a question: “If you could change three things tomorrow about your ____, what would they be?” This will give you an understanding of a person's priorities that is entirely independent of the polarized political space we live in.
- Keep asking questions in an attempt to guide the person into discovering who causes their problems and who can fix them (70% listening, 30% talking): “The whole point of organizing is I’m never going to tell her what the answer is.” A good organizer “agitates” and raises the expectations of people by letting them know that they deserve better in their lives from the government (or from anything), and this “more” that they deserve can be respect and freedom or actual material gain.
- “When you are able to connect this issue with a credible plan to win, that is crucial to people deciding to take all sorts of action.” Most people know right away whether a plan is credible or not. Though we have to work to separate our biases (“morally good” idea does not always equal good politics) before judging the plan.
- Use inoculation in order to make it harder for opposition to convince the person. This means saying what the opposition will say, and having arguments against.
- Finally, we have to continually make hard assessments, which means that we need to have a series of structured tests in order to see if a person is actually bought into our base (with each test becoming more public and higher risk).
McAlevey believes that “structure based organizing” is the key to organizing. Instead of recruiting people through canvassing, she advocates for finding structures (church, workplace, PTA, unions) that exist in people’s lives and “building supermajority support within structures.” Following this line of belief, she states that the black church in South Carolina was what powered Biden to victory and how he managed to win on Super Tuesday with little or no ground “mobilization” and ad buys. People place their trust in structures like churches or unions, and when the structure tells them to do something, they reciprocate this trust. People also place their trust in certain people or “natural leaders,” whom we can find by asking their peers who they trust (rather than finding leaders based on commitment). Through structure based organizing, we can persuade large groups of voters who trust us (though aren’t necessarily “politically” aligned) to support our causes.
An important part of structure based organizing is unions. All the big progressive legislative wins in the past (New Deal), have come from crises manufactured by workers walking off the job. “The demographics in Nevada and Texas are not that different but their politics are” and this is because of the growing rise of unions in Nevada (which has been trending strongly blue). Unions are not inherently Democrats, which means that good politics and policy would be to make it easier for unions to form and show that we support them and their goals.
So where do we go from here? People on the left should learn the differences between mobilizing and organizing. We should take a longer view of politics and use the around 700 million we raise every cycle to knock on every door in America, not just the Democratic ones. Let’s create a new theory of change that cares about everyday Americans every day, not every two years. If you say beating Donald Trump is your most important goal— help create a new Democratic party that organizes.