Forks in the Road

Today's pivotal elections; my own pivot to follow the power curve; and a bit more on Bernie Sanders organizing strategy.

Big news: I’ve gotten a very, very generous offer for this newsletter from my friends Phil T. Rich and Hugh Munguswelth, so we’re going to be pivoting. The Connector will continue to cover movements, organizing, and tech, but all our posts going forward will be behind a paywall. I’ll also continue to be available to give talks; click here to learn more about my speaking fees. It’s not easy to make such a big change at this stage in my career, but when you see the writing on the wall, at some point you have to recognize which way things are going and get with the power curve.

Phil and Hugh are generous patrons, and as co-founders of Trillionaires for Trump (T4T) along with Jen Trification and Phillip DeValt, they’ve decided to start sharing their plans more openly. I think they’re right that while every American hopes to be as rich as a billionaire, today’s billionaires can sense the possibility of becoming the world’s first trillionaires. And so the name of their group, aspirational as it is, makes sense. By the time Trump is done with all the changes he’s making, the Pareto curve for US wealth distribution will have shifted even further to the right. Or as T4T likes to say, “Big money, united, shall never be defeated!”

Trillionaires for Trump is a real thing, by the way, brought to you by some of the same people last seen gallivanting as Billionaires for Bush. It’s easy to join. And apparently they are planning to counter-protest at some of the April 5 “Hands Off” events under the banner of “Fingers In.” I believe they may be thanking the “little people” for doing their taxes at post offices on April 15th, as well.

OK, back to our regular programming. By sometime tonight (Tuesday, April 1), we will know a bit more clearly which side of the Earth One vs Earth Two dichotomy (that I spelled out here two weeks ago) we’re living in. That is, if voters in Wisconsin elect Susan Crawford, the candidate backed by Democrats, to the state Supreme Court, then we’ll know that Elon Musk’s money is more toxic than it is powerful, and an electoral backlash is possible. If Brad Schimel, the candidate Musk wants, wins, then it’s full-speed ahead towards Earth Two, a world where Big Money + TechnoFascists = Big Corruption and Democracy Endgame. (The Florida House special election today to replace Rep. Michael Waltz might also provide a similar check on Trump’s first 100-day honeymoon if Democat Josh Weil pulls off an upset.)

I’m getting on a plane Wednesday for a quick trip to Los Angeles for a conference, so writing on the cusp of the first electoral test of Trump’s second term is awkward. This isn’t the only fork in the road that we are going to face, of course. But rather than try to produce one of my usual long(ish) essays on where we are, let me just offer a few semi-connected observations on a couple of the themes that The Connector regularly covers. For free. I insist. No paywall!

1: The Defiance Can Get Much Bigger

“Resistance says no. Defiance says HELL NO!”

I recently saw an internal poll that found while just over half of likely voters oppose Trump’s actions, three-quarters of those people said they had not been asked to demonstrate that sentiment in any way. This really should be encouraging news. It means there is a lot of potential growth possible. But it also suggests that we’ve got to get past our own echo chambers—and maybe we haven’t even exhausted those! I live in a Blue county that just weeks ago went two-to-one Democrat in a special election for out county executive, but evidence of opposition to Trump is not prevalent if you go looking for bumper-stickers or lawn signs.

As of now there are more than 1000 locations for “Hands Off” protest events this Saturday April 5. While there is a big demonstration in Washington, DC that will be livestreamed, the wide dispersion of these events is a good sign. If it were up to me, anyone who wants to could find a crowd within a half hour of where they live. We can all have the greatest impact on the people nearest us. So if you have a choice between shlepping into a city center or going to a local town or neighborhood event, do the latter.

Hands Off rallies on https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/

There are other important nodes in The Defiance’s organizing network. Late on Sunday afternoon, FUN, the Federal Unionists Network, held an “emergency organizing call” to discuss the Trump administration’s executive order attacking their collective bargaining agreements. More than 2,500 people stayed on for the full hour, which included impassioned remarks from AFT President Randy Weingarten and AFL-CIO President Liz Schuler along with several government employee local union leaders. While the unions plan to fight Trump in the courts, the most interesting thing I heard people say was that even without a CBA, unions could continue to function as advocates for their members. Chris Dols, one of the leaders of FUN, called this “unilateral unionism—whether or not they recognize the union, we will continue to act like one.” Other speakers echoed this, noting that many government unions existed for decades before being formally recognized.

Today there’s a bloodbath happening at the Department of Health and Human Services, with thousands of workers, many with years of service and sterling performance evaluations, being summarily axed. This Reddit thread makes for brutal reading. According to The Washington Post, some top staff are being offered reassignment from the DC area to a number of locations, “including Alaska; Billings, Montana; the Navajo Nation; and Oklahoma,” with responses and preferences required by Wednesday at 5 p.m. Eastern. These reassignments are described by HHS as “part of a broader effort to strengthen the Department and more effectively promote the health of the American people.” George Orwell lives.

Another important development was Sunday’s online launch of Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Resistance Lab, which is focusing on training people in the principles of nonviolent resistance. According to Joan Walsh of The Nation, whose report is the cause of some blushing in these quarters, at least 1300 people attended. “We want to help you seed and coordinate these nonviolent resistance actions,” Jayapal told her audience, “And to be able to understand your risk tolerance,” as the risk of Trump cracking down on other forms of protest escalates.

Walsh writes, “You can find Chenoweth and Jayapal’s talks and slide presentations here; they’re incredibly useful whether you want to just watch, to read through, or to get organized. To me, the most important stuff came out of the small focus groups. People began planning ‘die-ins’ at their local Social Security offices, posting billboards in red areas educating people about Social Security and Medicare cuts… and expanding messaging to convince Americans that ‘this is about all of us,’ as in almost every American except the super-wealthy will be hurt by the Trump-Musk autocracy.”

Final note: Set aside May 1 (MayDay) on your calendar. It’s just a month away and I’m hearing it will be another important day for The Defiance.

Bonus link: Mehran Khalili, who writes Subvrt.org, has a fascinating post up describing how students in Serbia organized a mass movement to fight the ruling party’s political corruption.

2: Bernie’s Hollow Base-Building

I got a note from a reader who read my piece in the American Prospect about how Bernie Sanders campaign team is trying to build some ongoing organizing muscle as an outgrowth of the big rallies he’s done in the last few weeks. He wrote:

“Bernie has been really good at list- and social media follower-growing for a long time, but I've never seen them really convert that to empowering local organizing in a meaningful way. I'm a Bernie fan … but his power-building model has always seemed to me more inspirational speaker-oriented as opposed to enabling/empowering local organizing and power building. Am I misreading your American Prospect piece and you really are saying that Bernie and AOC really are helping to fuel an independent grassroots infrastructure? I don't want to be overly critical ... he seems to be one of the few credible progressive voices trying to generate inspiration at scale ... but I also don't want to overlook the gaps.”

This is a valuable question. And it gives me a chance to add some details that I couldn’t get into my article. My impression from talking to Sanders’ lieutenants Faiz Shakir and Jeremy Slevin is that while they genuinely want to help build more local political power as a byproduct of these rallies, their approach is by necessity somewhat “triage-y,” if that’s a word. It reminded me of the way big political campaigns tend to work with local volunteers; the priority of the campaign is to pull off a successful event. To the extent that it does more base-building, it’s just in pursuit of a short-term goal: an election victory. Finding the local groups that can benefit the most from a national fly-by, or ensuring that something more solid than a campaign sandcastle is built, isn’t really a priority.

Here's how Shakir described their process of figuring out who to work with. “We basically use the opportunity of an event to work with some local actors.” He described a hypothetical process of testing the waters. “Okay, how are you responsive to emails? Okay, now we're going to give you some tasks to do--you fill those out. Okay, if I'm going to ask you some key questions about the area, can you give me a sense of the congressman and what the issues are going on. [That’s] going to give me a sense, at least, what kind of competencies are we dealing with here?” He noted that as Sanders’ organizers, they also needed to make sure potential local partners were interested in being associated with Bernie and his politics. But the main question was, “Are you kind of competent?” One concern, Shakir added, was that because Sanders can draw huge crowds, smaller local groups might not be able to handle the scale. “We want to make sure we’re not overloading the system.”

He also admitted that progressives like Sanders often had to build their local partner network on the fly. “Often, Jeremy and other people on our staff here are having to go hunt and identify [folks]. Are we going to miss some people, for sure, but we are hunting. You're not going to Greeley [and have a list of] the 10 people in Greeley. You actually have to do word of mouth and contact local union leaders. [He mentions a labor leader who is a Sanders ally.] ‘You know anybody in Greeley?’ ‘Yeah, there's a meat packing worker.’ Okay, ‘hey, you're a meat packing worker.’ ‘Do you know any like other people around here?’ That is how that process has gone. It is not the same process that you would have on the right, because every place they would go, boom, boom, boom. Here's the list.”

Why isn’t someone like Sanders, who has run two presidential campaigns, raising nearly half a billion dollars and earning millions of votes, sitting on such a list of great local groups and organizers? I didn’t get to ask Shakir and Slevin that question, but part of the answer is that the presidential campaign assets went to Our Revolution, a separate PAC that they don’t do much work with. Part of the answer is that, as I said above, electoral campaigns and candidates don’t need to build such infrastructure and sustaining it is costly. (Steve Cobble, who was Reverend Jesse Jackson’s political director for many years, told me not long before his untimely death in 2021 that the reason Jackson didn’t try to sustain the Rainbow Coalition groups that had grown up around his 1988 presidential bid is that he didn’t have any way of raising enough money to do so and therefore spurned the idea of keeping the Rainbow going.)

While kludging your local organizing list together by calling union organizers for suggestions isn’t a bad idea, if we thought about this problem more holistically the solutions would be obvious. One is for the two main digital organizing hubs—Action Network and Mobilize—to enable their users to earn and display their activist histories. Someone who has already hosted and run local actions could then be found through search. To go a step further, these platforms could also give individual users a way to recommend each other for particular skills, the way that LinkedIn enables people to build up reputational credibility on their pages.

In the meantime, we probably have to operate under the “no one else is coming to save us” rubric and lift up efforts to build and maintain directories of grassroots groups. The Grassroots Directory, a project of the Grassroots Connector newsletter crew, is here. If you know of others, please put the info in a comment!

3: Tesla and Trump’s Complacent Base

While there were more than 250 #TeslaTakedown protests last Saturday, including a few that drew more than 1,000 participants, according to Teddy Wilson of Radical Reports, who tracks the far right closely, there were only a smattering of counter-protests by Trump supporters. The same seems to be the case for congressional townhalls in Republican-held districts, which—when they’ve taken place—have mostly been dominated by anti-Trump voters. Why aren’t the Trumpers showing up? In the same way many Democrats took a break from political activism after Joe Biden won in 2020, Trumpers are enjoying their moment in the sun. Personally, I hope they enjoy a long siesta.

Best chant: “We don’t want your Nazi cars, take a one-way trip to Mars.”

—Bonus link: I’m doing a webinar conversation on “The Future of Freedom” with Susan Lerner and Common Cause on April 10 at 6:30. RSVP here. (No speaking fee!)

Google Calendar Update

Taking the slogan “Don’t. Be Evil” to new heights, Google has updated its calendar product again. First they removed events like the first day of Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Indigenous Peoples Month and LGBTQ+ Pride Month. It claimed then that the reason was it would only show public holidays and national observances. Now it’s renaming them to meet the Trump administration’s policy priorities. Earth Day is now Energy Dominance Day, for example (in tune with EPA director Lee Zeldin’s new list of the agency’s priorities). Memorial Day is now Warriors Day. Labor Day is Freedom to Work Day.

Talk about obeying in advance!

Deep Thoughts

My friend David Callahan, who has been thinking about, reporting on and writing critically about the field of philanthropy since the 1990s, has a must read essay on his site InsidePhilanthropy.com titled, “How We Got Here: Six Reasons Liberal Philanthropy is Losing the Battle for America’s Future.” His essay may roil some feathers, in part because he argues that in addition to not taking the rise of conservative extremism seriously and sticking to outdated strategies that “that failed to account for deep shifts in the nation’s economy, information environment and political landscape, “In some cases, out-of-touch grantmakers on the left have made things worse as they backed progressive activists who failed to connect with — or actively alienated — working-class people, including many Latino, Black and Asian American voters, who swung toward Trump last fall.” He also blames a “pollyannish” reading of history (which has no arc bending anywhere), a failure to take rising resentment against elites (economic and cultural) seriously, and underinvestment in liberal media and civic participation. His essay is peppered with anonymous quotes from foundation CEOs, many of them backing up his main theses.

And he’s not afraid to name names. For example, he notes how much money has been flowing from rightwing funders to anti-democracy efforts while many left-of-center funders did little:

According to a recent study, more than 3,500 foundations and high-net-worth donors gave more than $1 billion to about 150 nonprofits in 2020, 2021 and 2022 to erect barriers to voting that tend to disproportionately affect young people, as well as those with lower incomes and less information. Still, the majority of big, left-of-center foundations steer clear of significant grantmaking in this space. Apart from a few well-known progressive funders like Ford and Open Society Foundations, most of the 501c3 giving for civic participation work has come from smaller foundations and individual major donors.

Many foundations with monumental stakes in the outcome of the 2024 election — like Robert Wood Johnson, Rockefeller, Mellon, Hewlett, MacArthur and Packard, along with hundreds of other grantmakers — directed limited or no funding to ensure that citizens who shared their values understood what was at stake in the election and were encouraged to cast a ballot. To be sure, some provided support to groups helping to secure the integrity of vote counting and other election tasks, which was critically important. But by neglecting to fund the most effective civic participation groups, foundations were either fighting with one hand tied behind their back or, more commonly, not fighting at all.

Well-worth bookmarking and studying.

End Times:

The English win this week’s competition.