After Donald J. Trump was elected president in 2016, informal groups popped up almost everywhere. They often attracted people who had not been involved in politics before. Stereotyped in the media as suburban white women, these citizens were informally named “The Resistance.” About a half million of them attended the Women’s March in Washington on January 21, 2017, with another five million marching in their home communities.

But the #resistance in 2017 proved evanescent because the nascent groups mainly encouraged their members to support other organizations.

Inboxes filled with urgent fundraising appeals for national organizations. For example, 350,000 people donated to the ACLU in just one weekend during Trump’s first month as president. People also shared and encouraged each other to follow news from national outlets, and digital subscriptions for The New York Times and The Washington Post tripled under Trump. Finally, many people gave money and time to Democratic candidates in 2022.

None of this generosity built power for the new groups themselves, and most–although not all–have faded away. For instance, donations to the ACLU funded essential legal advocacy but didn’t support much grassroots engagement. According to the Tufts Equity in America survey (which I co-led), just 1.5 percent of Americans “identified with” or “actively supported” the ACLU in 2020.

As Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks observe, many committed and skilled activists emerged, yet we have “no established, organizational infrastructure that can facilitate sustained collective action across a multiracial, multiclass constituency.”

How to Build Power

Imagine if the 350,000 people who gave $24 million to the ACLU in one weekend had instead (or also) formed 1,000 new local groups with an average startup budget of $24,000 and had set about raising enough additional funds and recruiting enough additional members to put 1,000 paid organizers at the service of half a million active volunteers in 1,000 American neighborhoods and towns. Our situation would be totally different today.

I am not saying that Kamala Harris would have won the election, but no president would be able to trample over a robust civil society.

Last summer, the Brennan Center and partners organized simulations to test how established institutions, such as state governments and the military, might resist if a US president used authoritarian methods. By all accounts, the results were unpromising. According to Ed Pilkington and Kira Lerner, “the consensus among many policy experts was that the … response felt weak and inadequate.” To me, this experiment reinforces the need for broad-based, nonviolent grassroots resistance.

In 2020, while 9.2 percent of survey respondents in the Tufts Equity in America survey said they had donated money to any advocacy organization, just 3.6 percent said they had “volunteered or worked for a political party, issue, or cause.” We need that last number to grow. Local groups must raise and control resources to recruit, train, and deploy volunteers, so that many more people work for issues and causes.

I would not exactly define the present cause as resistance to Trump. He was legitimately elected, and we don’t know how he will act. It will be an enormous relief if his administration turns out to be feckless. In that case, announcing a movement to save America from Trump would sound overwrought. What we certainly need is a movement to protect democracy and civil rights from anyone who might threaten those values, now or later.

The Structures We Need

This movement must be based on durable, self-sufficient, democratic organizations that work together effectively. They need financial autonomy, accountable leaders, paid staff, and federated structures.

When friends or neighbors are alarmed, they should decide whether they already have an organization that can join the #resistance or whether they need a new structure. A relevant existing organization could be a religious congregation, an activist group, or a union local, among others. It may need a new steering committee for its #resistance work.

However, most people do not belong to any entity that could seriously commit to politics, and they will have to consider incorporating new 501(c)4 organizations. This process starts with an online IRS form. A new group also needs by-laws so that it is clear who is responsible for what. There are free sample by-law documents that anyone can download.

Although structures can vary, some people should be elected to offices with limited terms so that the rest of the group can decide whether to reelect them. Someone’s job should be to develop agendas, facilitate discussions, and clarify the decisions that have been reached. Someone else should keep and share notes so that conversations can proceed from one meeting to another instead of cycling through the same issues. Someone should keep the accounts. Someone is responsible for the membership list.

These groups should raise money from their own members or through bake-sales and the like. They should not seek grants or large gifts from non-members, because they need autonomy.

If a group can grow to 100 or so members who donate or raise an average of $8,000/year, they can hire a full-time organizer with a budget. Even if these amounts are unrealistic, every member should be required to contribute money or specific amounts of volunteer time–with the requirements set low enough that anyone can join. Failure to contribute should cost you a seat at the table, but people should be encouraged to contribute in different ways.

Hiring organizers is crucial because we need some people to be organizing full-time, and because paid employment allows individuals to develop skills and networks that are essential in the longer term.

Growing to Scale

If a group gets much bigger than 100, it should consider splitting. The Black women who formed the Women’s Political Caucus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s launched a new chapter every time one of their existing groups breached the 100-person limit, so as to keep all members fully engaged in their own chapters. Depending on their economic resources, a group of 100 may be able to employ, or at least share, paid staff; and affluent groups should support needier ones.

It’s fine for groups to work “in coalition,” as people use that phrase nowadays–i.e., communicating with each other and periodically coming together for events. But loose coalitions will not really suffice for building power. Aligned groups should consider federating. This means incorporating a new entity for a region or state, with its own bylaws and budget, that has formal relationships with its affiliated groups.

For instance, each participating local group might get one seat on the larger organization’s board, might be expected to contribute some money to the umbrella organization for state-level work, and might be able to claim a portion of funds raised by the larger organization. Again, it may be possible to redirect an existing organization rather than forming a new nonprofit for a region or a state, but that will still require written agreements and bylaws.

Unity and Disagreement

Since groups and alliances need as much support as possible, they should avoid purity tests. A basic tip for anyone who drafts a statement of principles is to keep it short and simple, because unnecessary details offer individuals reasons to opt out. In fact, groups should generally avoid issuing statements, which have relatively little impact. They should affirmatively welcome internal dissent and hold robust discussions for their own members.

Nevertheless, their charters should clearly communicate their mission, and they should look for opportunities to speak in a single voice when that can make a difference. In short, the movement should aim for both unity and pluralism.

For those who are prone to reject broad-based movements as too moderate, I commend Bayard Rustin’s prophetic 1965 article,  “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement” (Commentary, 2/39, Feb. 1965):

[The] effectiveness of a swing vote depends solely on ‘other’ votes. It derives its power from them. … Thus coalitions are inescapable, no matter how tentative they may be. … The issue is which coalition to join and how to make it responsive to your program. Necessarily there will be compromise. But the difference between expediency and morality in politics is the difference between selling out a principle and making smaller concessions to win larger ones. The leader who shrinks from this task reveals not his purity but his lack of political sense.

What Should People Do?

Protests are appropriate, but the #resistance is not a set of protest actions. In fact, seasoned organizers often view a public protest mainly as an opportunity to identify supporters who can then be recruited for more consequential tasks. So what should people actually do?

• One-to-one interviews with residents who may or may not share the principles of the movement. These conversations may persuade some neutral or even hostile people and can help to recruit new active volunteers and potential leaders. In 2000, 2.2 percent of our respondents told us that they had “worked as a canvasser–having gone door to door for a political or social group” within the past year. That represents a substantial number, especially during a pandemic, but it needs to grow; and we need genuine conversations rather than quick pitches for political candidates.
• Filling the vacuum created by the collapse of local professional journalism and combatting propaganda. This means collecting reliable information from published sources, conducting original research, and monitoring institutions and sharing the results with the public in credible forms–social media channels, email lists, teach-ins, and the like.
• Forming relationships with established institutional leaders (elected officials, corporate CEOs, small-business owners, clergy, college presidents, philanthropists, celebrities) and asking them to take steps that are appropriate for their roles. For example, a university cannot and should not take a partisan position, but it must protect its own undocumented students, the intellectual freedom of its students and employees, and its own projects that address contested issues, such as climate change. It may need a nudge to do those things. Similarly, a Republican Member of the House will not vote to impeach Trump but might privately bury a terrible bill.
• Registering and educating voters, including people who turn 18 or who naturalize as US citizens.
• Endorsing candidates in primaries and general elections. A 501(c)4 organization is allowed to endorse, but its primary activity may not be assessing and endorsing politicians. In any case, political endorsements are more meaningful when they come from civic groups that mainly work independently. Their members can choose to volunteer for candidates or parties if they want to.
• To a limited extent, fundraising for other entities, such as organizations that can mount legal strategies. However, there is a risk of sharing so much of a group’s own resources that it becomes a mere conduit.
• Periodically organizing confrontational actions, such as boycotts, sit-ins and occupations, sheltering fugitives, and strikes. These methods must be used sparingly and strategically or else they will wear people out. But they certainly belong in the repertoire of any social movement.

A Broad-Based Civic Movement

We need a pro-democracy movement for the kind of people who are “normies” in the eyes of deeply committed activists. This will not be a movement that requires the modes of organizing that are favored (and perhaps necessary) on the radical left. For example, some long-term antiracist organizers keep their groups highly decentralized and avoid uplifting prominent leaders because so many high-profile leaders of color have been prosecuted or murdered in the past. And some pacifists, deep environmentalists (and others) repudiate ordinary bourgeois American lifestyles.

I honor these people as contributors to our overall political culture, but they alone will not protect the republic as it currently stands. For that purpose, we need many millions of much less committed and much less radical people to operate effectively in response to each new threat.

Building civic organizations is a deep American tradition. The urgent task is to revive it.

Source: Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks (2022), Pro-democracy Organizing against Autocracy in the United States: A Strategic Assessment & Recommendations, HKS Working Paper No. RWP22-017.

See also: the tide will turn; strategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy; time for civil courage; time to build; tools for the #resistance; preparing for a possible Trump victory; etc.

The post building power for resisting authoritarianism appeared first on Peter Levine.

This is from a Twitter thread posted yesterday by University of Pittsburgh historian Lara Putnam:

When highly-engaged people who had voted against him came out of their initial shock in wake of Trump’s first election and tried to figure out how to push back on Trump and his GOP majorities, a few templates were offered them:

Guidance # 1: Tea Party in Reverse — or at least those parts of the Tea Party visible from the congressional offices where its anger hit. More or less, the Indivisible playbook. Which included….

A. Hold large protest marches
B. Build local groups or networks, drawing on those who attend
C. Contact incumbent politicians to pressure them to act against Trump policy efforts
D. Conduct targeted actions to drive earned media against Republican incumbents
E. [Run primaries against] Democratic incumbents who were not sufficiently active, oppositional, or ideologically aligned

Guidance # 2: Trust the Professionals; Be Their ‘Grassroots Engagement’

A. Donate to existing Democratic candidates
B. Participate in the “ground game” of anonymous voter contacting for them (doorknocking, textbanking, phonebanking… & the slightly rogue postcards to voters)

Guidance #3: Movement Voter Project & similar

A. Give money to support organizing by paid staff w/in disadvantaged communities, [especially] communities of color, which will empower & mobilize the members of those communities to push progressive policy by voting more & voting Left.

Putnam comments, “I don’t think anyone can look at the last four years of results, culminating in last night’s outcomes, & say that any of these theories of change looks vindicated. & I say this very much as someone who has put mileage in on each route, alongside others who’ve done so much more.”

I wouldn’t make the counterfactual claim that Harris would have won if the organizing had been more effective. Who knows? But I do think we would be in a better position to resist Trump’s policies in 2025 and beyond.

In a 2024 New York Review article and elsewhere, Putnam has advocated building local Democratic Party organizations that consistently engage and involve people, not only during campaigns. Her advice is consistent with research by political scientists like Eitan Hersh, Dan Shea, and others, and it’s valid. But for some of us, it’s not perfectly on point, because our roles and missions are not partisan. We want or are obliged to organize for democracy, not necessarily for Democrats. For us, the same general advice applies, but it implies building effective grassroots organizations outside of parties.

Why did so much of the spontaneous grassroots opposition to Trump in 2016-17 prove evanescent? Why did relatively few groups that formed in 2017 survive, and why didn’t they turn into one more powerful movement? I would offer three reasons:

1. These grassroots groups never received significant investment. Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion between her nomination and Election Day. I don’t begrudge her that money. I happen to think she ran an excellent campaign against strong headwinds. But her fundraising success reminds us that there is a lot of money on the center-left and left. Paltry sums flow to grassroots organizing efforts between elections. Local groups can’t hire paid staff or pay rent. If there were much more total investment, we wouldn’t have to make painful choices between funding groups that organize vulnerable people of color and those that have suburban and middle-class constituencies (and larger numbers of voters). We could support both and help them to collaborate.
2. Progressive money flows to apolitical institutions. Amy Binder and Jeffrey Kinder show that wealthy people with progressive objectives often donate to universities. That makes sense if they are trying to support research and development. But often they are trying to educate, inform, and empower students. As a result, college students are drawn into well-funded campus-based programs that are not (and should not be) free to participate in actual politics. Along with the the young staff and faculty who work most closely with them, these students then find themselves in opposition to the very institutions that also purport to serve them–denouncing their own universities for failing to act politically. Meanwhile, conservative donors, who don’t trust universities, tend to fund and employ conservative young people directly to work on state and national issues. This is a much better youth-development strategy, giving students leadership experience and helping them to develop career networks. I mention Binder’s and Kinder’s book on higher education, but I suspect that public broadcasting and other nonpartisan nonprofits are also absorbing funds that should be spent on organizing.
3. We are not good enough at organizing at scale. When the Civil Rights movement got fully underway in the mid-1950s, people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks had an effective template for building and expanding organizations. They naturally founded new membership groups that used Roberts’ Rules of Order in their face-to-face meetings, elected officers (a president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer), and printed regular newsletters. When they observed similar groups forming in other communities, they federated, sending representatives to regional or statewide or even national meetings, where officers were elected. Today, we don’t act this way because we have lost some experience and skills, but also because the models of the 1950 will not suffice in an era of social media, working parents, multiple simultaneous social movements that compete for attention, and decreased deference to authority. We need new modes of organization, but we can’t function without any structures at all.

For the last year or more, I have been trying to use my own modest venues, such as last summer’s Frontiers of Democracy conference and various classrooms, to explore and train people in the nuts-and-bolts of nonviolent civic action. I never tell people what causes to support or whom to oppose, but only try to develop their skills and offer them templates for effective organizing. Of course, other colleagues do the same and better. But many more people and groups with much deeper resources than mine must invest now in a robust civic infrastructure that can defend and even improve our republic.

See also: strategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy; tools for the #resistance; and the website Civic Theory and Practice.

The post time to build appeared first on Peter Levine.

Last week, my 50 undergraduate students and I visited the exhibition “Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe” at the Tufts University Art Gallery. They looked carefully and derived many insights from the work of this important artist. I highly recommend the show, which is open until Dec. 8 and free.

I illustrate this post with a photograph of Jackson’ 2020 work entitled “Time and Space (1948 End of Voter Registration Line)(1965 LBJ Signs the Voting Rights Act).” The photo does little justice to the original object, which is monumental (more than seven feet high) and structural, a multi-media painting mounted on a tilted wooden frame. In the photo with this post, you can see the shadows that the object casts on the gallery wall.

The materials listed on the gallery’s label are: “Acrylic, Pentelic marble, Ohio Underground Railroad site soil, American electoral ephemera, and paper bags on canvas and fabric.” Jackson collected the marble dust near the Acropolis in Athens, birthplace of democracy. The whole work is overlaid with red-white-and-blue stripes that are slightly askew.

We discussed the composition: Black citizens waiting to register to vote in Atlanta in the 1940s (at the top); recent election flyers (at the bottom); and in the middle, LBJ signing the Voting Rights Act. The President is larger than anyone else. Does that mean that he played a pivotal role? Or that his importance is overplayed in conventional accounts of American history? Is he responsible for the law, or was that really an outcome of a process that began with the people at the top of the picture?

The post Tomashi Jackson, Time and Space appeared first on Peter Levine.