Practical Radicals Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce

In this, our final episode of the Practical Radicals Podcast, we hear from over a dozen progressive leaders, including several former students, and reflect with them about what we’ve learned since the book Practical Radicals came out last November and what we make of the path ahead — as the U.S. and the world face a daunting and overlapping set of crises.

We offer thoughts on the seven strategy models, looking at exciting developments in the field as well as areas that could improve. Base-building in community organizing faces major challenges. Sulma Arias has reoriented her organization, People’s Action, to spark a “revival of community organizing,” a field whose crisis became more acute and widely acknowledged during the COVID pandemic. The labor movement, by contrast, is experiencing its most exciting resurgence in decades. Stephen Lerner — whose organization, Bargaining for the Common Good, brings together unions and community groups to work on joint strategies — sees tremendous promise in labor’s upsurge, pointing especially to the prospect of organizing entire sectors and taking on “the giant corporations that are driving the whole economy.”  Thomas Walker of the Communications Workers of America explains why he thinks building on labor’s momentum calls for unions to spend more of their assets on base-building and to support new ways of organizing. 

Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party argues that movements need to get serious about governing power, which requires treating progressives elected to office as co-conspirators rather than targets. Lydia Avila describes her work with California Calls, which hopes to build a grassroots leadership development pipeline and combine the best principles of community organizing with electoral politics. 

A key strategy in the years ahead will be disruption, which Lisa Fithian, author of Shut it Down, argues is a “transformational process” that can give people a greater sense of agency over their own lives and the world. Lissy Romanow, who used to run the training institute called Momentum, points to hopeful examples where momentum as a strategy is being combined with more long-term base-building work. 

We then offer thoughts on the ways movements and organizations need to adapt to get sharper on strategy. Texas activist Asha Dane’el addresses the importance of developing a long-term vision and investing in leadership development that combines “rigor and compassion.” Alex Tom tells us how the Chinese Progressive Association hit upon a hugely successful new approach to fostering organizational alignment and preventing unnecessary internal conflict by writing a “culture operations document,” which is given to all new staff and explains the organization’s vision and leadership philosophy as well as key terminology. Doran Schrantz describes the commitment to leadership and other factors that have allowed ISAIAH, a church-based organization, and labor and community partners in Minnesota to transform the state. 

We conclude with some thoughts on our current historical conjuncture. Overdogs have never wanted a true democracy, and right now, they see an opening for autocracy. As Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy explains, by objective scholarly measures, “US democracy has been declining faster [in recent years] than almost any other country on the planet.” Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, argues that it’s crucial to form not only a “united front,” which brings together different elements of the left, but also a “popular front,” which unites the left with the center and even pro-democracy elements of the right. As the recent victories in France, India, and Brazil illustrate, there is nothing inevitable about the slide to authoritarianism — if we can achieve the unity and will to fight it.

Links: 

Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice

Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Po

Most famous guides to strategy are written for overdogs. (Think of Machiavelli’s The Prince or Sun Tzu’s Art of War.) And overdogs today invest in strategic education at a scale that dwarfs anything on the left. Their commitment is captured in the slogan of the right-wing Leadership Institute, which has trained over 200,000 people: “You owe it to your philosophy to learn how to win.” 



In researching Practical Radicals, Stephanie and Deepak found that overdogs rely mainly on three strategies to gain and keep power: 1) weakening underdogs’ sources of power; 2) employing what’s known in the military as psychological operations, or PSYOPS; and 3) dividing their opponents to conquer them. 



The good news is that underdogs can use these same strategies against more powerful opponents. In this episode, Deepak and Stephanie discuss some great examples of how to counter corporate power, use PSYOPS against white supremacists, and drive wedges in elite coalitions. They also explore other lessons progressives can take from the overdogs’ playbook: crafting long-term plans, recruiting based on belonging rather than belief, and using data-driven evaluation paired with the lean startup model for organizing. 



Our guest has made a career out of researching overdogs in innovative ways. Munira Lokhandwala is Director of Tech and Training at LittleSis.org, the “nonprofit public interest research organization focused on corporate and government accountability.”  As the answer to Big Brother, LittleSis conducts research on the power elite, offers trainings for social change movements, and provides resources like Oligrapher, a tool that allows organizers to map power networks and pinpoint where to drive wedges. The secretive and overlapping networks of the powerful can seem “daunting” says Lokhandwala, “but actually, every one of those connections is a relationship that has to be maintained for them to maintain their power.” She encourages progressives to “think about[the overdogs’] large networks as an opportunity to come at their power, their reputation, their profits from many different angles. Then we can imagine building long-term, intersectional issue campaigns” that “turn the very source of their power against them.”



Episode 12 transcript

Links: 

LittleSis’s Oligrapher for Beginners

LittleSis 2024 Research Tools for Organizers Training Series

Choose Democracy’s scenario planning tool https://whatiftrumpwins.org/

In the struggle to abolish slavery — the social movement that arguably set the template for all that followed — organizers used all seven strategies we identify in Practical Radicals. According to our guest, historian Manisha Sinha, the abolitionists were “radical in their goals . . . but pragmatic in implementation” — the quintessential practical radicals. Stephanie and Deepak begin this episode by talking about the concepts of movement cycles and movement ecosystems and how conflict within movements can be generative. Then Stephanie and Professor Sinha explore some themes from Sinha’s award-winning 2016 book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. As Sinha explains, the conventional wisdom about the abolitionists is wrong in many ways: contrary to depictions of the abolitionists as mostly white, bourgeois, defenders of capitalism, Sinha highlights the crucial role of Black abolitionists (including enslaved people who resisted from the earliest days of the slave trade), and the pervasive and “overlapping radicalisms” of the abolitionists, many of whom were utopian socialists and attended international conferences, not just against slavery but also for peace and women’s rights. Where previous historians have focused on the abolition movement that peaked in the 19th century, Sinha draws attention to an earlier wave of multiracial abolitionism in the late 18th century. And where others have viewed the movement as riven by differences and infighting, Sinha sees the abolitionists’ diversity as a source of strength, applauding their sensitivity to movement cycles and their political acumen in shifting strategies (e.g., at a key juncture, away from boycotts and toward party politics). She contends that the abolitionists served as “a prototype for racial social movements” in America and that radicals have been as “American as apple pie.” Sinha also suggests that the key lesson the abolitionists offer movements today is to “realize who the real enemy is . . . when you have at stake the future of American democracy.” Sinha’s new book, published in March of 2024, is entitled The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, Reconstruction 1860-1920, and it promises to be no less audacious and groundbreaking than her previous work, framing Reconstruction as a continuation of aspirations born in abolitionism and an attempt to fundamentally reground American democracy.

Underdogs often respond to systemic oppression through collective care – acts of mutual aid and cooperation with the goal of meeting people’s basic survival needs when the state fails to do so. Some people feel collective care is just what we should do as decent human beings, but that it isn’t a strategy for systemic social change. Others are more critical, noting that collective care can turn people away from strategies to change systems through organizing and political action. But when we (Stephanie and Deepak) taught our graduate class on Power & Strategy, one of our students, Walter Barrientos, an experienced organizer in the immigrant rights movement, argued that collective care is a strategy that movements have used effectively for centuries around the world. The more we read and discussed the topic, the more we became convinced, and we included collective care as the 7th of our “Seven Strategies to Change the World” in our book, Practical Radicals.

In this episode, we look at collective care through the lens of the AIDS crisis and the remarkable work of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). Our guest, Tim Sweeney joined and later ran that essential, underappreciated organization during some of the worst years when AIDS ravaged the LGBTQ+ community. After queer communities gained unprecedented visibility in the 1970s and early ’80s, AIDS brought despair and decimation. (By 1995, one gay man in nine between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four in the United States had been diagnosed with AIDS, and nearly 7 percent had died. By comparison, COVID-19 has killed 0.3 percent of the U.S. population.) GMHC encouraged gay men and their allies to turn their grief and anger into action to help the sick and dying (with their buddy program), fight bigotry and misinformation (with their hotline and safer sex education projects), and advocate for better policies at every level of government. Although the better-known ACT UP is sometimes seen as a more radical alternative to GMHC, Tim explains that the two organizations actually complemented each other — with the care and community building of GMHC providing a ladder of engagement that helped foster self-confidence and led many to take part in ACT UP’s headline-grabbing direct actions. In fact, as we discuss in the book, the first ACT UP meetings were co-facilitated by Tim Sweeney, and GMHC provided financial support to ACT UP at key points.

We conclude that collective care done well is a strategy that can make all other strategies, such as base-building and disruption, more effective. When opportunities for systemic change seem to be foreclosed, collective care provides a path for people to achieve tangible change – and often discover new ways to achieve social transformation.

Episode 10 transcript 

Sometimes social movements can spread like wildfire. From the sit-ins of the Civil Rights movement to the sea change in support for marriage equality, from the divestment campaign to end apartheid in South Africa to the climate justice movement winning the largest climate bill in history (2022’s Inflation Reduction Act) — the strategy model known as Momentum has proven powerful time and time again. Although Momentum has helped movements succeed for centuries, the framework has gained increased attention in recent years as the internet has made it possible to organize action at a larger and larger scale.  In 2014, a new institute called Momentum began training movement leaders in this strategy. And in 2016, Mark and Paul Engler formalized the momentum approach in their valuable book This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the 21st Century. 

In this episode, Deepak interviews May Boeve, Executive Director of the climate justice group 350.org. Founded in 2008, by Bill McKibben and a small group of college students, including May, 350.org is now active in 26 countries and works with a volunteer network of 500 organizations. May and organizers at 350.org used the model before the framework had been written down. They believe that the breakthrough social transformation promised by Momentum makes it an essential strategy to confront the existential threat posed by global warming. 

May describes how 350.org’s momentum-driven campaign to stop the Keystone XL pipeline in 2011 provided a crucial morale boost after the stinging legislative defeat of climate legislation in the Obama years — and marked, in the words of one observer, “the first time the environmental and climate movement [got] serious about power.” 350.org’s subsequent divestment campaign against fossil fuels illustrated the power of “distributed action” and putting pressure on key institutions like foundations, banks, and local governments. It also provided an onramp for ordinary people to get involved and become leaders. 

Early in her organizing career, May had been a proponent of “horizontalism,” the philosophy that movements should be leaderless, but she now rejects that notion and explains how momentum-driven movements can combine mass engagement with effective leadership. May and Deepak conclude by considering the promise and peril of online organizing, how to deal with pathologies in movement culture, and 350.org’s shift from simply “saying no” to fossil fuels to also “saying yes” to climate change solutions.

Links:May mentions Maurice Mitchell’s highly influential 2022 essay “Building Resilient Organizations,” a must-read for everyone in progressive politics. And now, there’s a workbook, too.

In the right circumstances, progressive groups can work with progressive insiders in government to win big policy changes. In this episode, we consider “inside-outside campaigns,” including what makes them possible and some of the inevitable tensions that they create, for example about when and how to compromise when a coalition doesn’t have enough power to win all its demands. Stephanie and Deepak reflect on their own experiences with living wage campaigns and federal policy, including the campaign to pass the Affordable Care Act in the Obama years. Deepak then talks to Felicia Wong, who played a key role in making the Biden economic agenda much more progressive than most observers expected. Felicia runs the Roosevelt Institute, which has worked to overturn the dominant neoliberal consensus in Washington. Felicia was also among the most progressive members on the Biden transition team and oversaw the appointment of over a hundred officials in key government positions. In a wide-ranging conversation, she explains how Occupy Wall Street, the Fight for $15, and coalitions pushing for a Green New Deal and expanded investments in childcare and home care reshaped the terrain, and how work at the level of ideas, narrative, and organizing came together to shift the parameters of the possible on economic policy. Deepak and Felicia also explore the concept of “policy feedback loops” – how policy can be a vehicle for altering power relations in society, and why the right has been better at this in recent years than progressives.



Episode 8 transcript