Hope is Not a Strategy
While the GOP legitimizes January 6th, Democrats need to do more to frame the fight ahead. Plus, are the "Freedom Convoys" now besieging Ottawa coming to a city near you?
Welcome back to another weekly edition of The Connector, where I focus on news and analysis at the intersection of politics, movements, organizing and tech and try to connect the dots (and people) on what it will take to keep democracy alive. This is completely free newsletter—nothing is behind a paywall—but if you value it and can afford a paid subscription at any level, please hit the subscribe button and choose that option. Feel free to forward widely; and if you are reading this because someone forwarded it to you, please sign up!
Friday, February 4th, the Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger and “to no longer support them as members of the Republican Party” because, as part of the January 6th Select Committee, they are “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate public discourse.” On the same day, former Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech to a conservative legal group where he declared “I had no right to overturn the election” and that the Former Guy was “wrong.”
In response, President Biden…
In response, Vice President Harris…
In response, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…
In response, the Democratic National Committee…
Crickets, as they say. (Brian Beutler heard the same silence.)
OK, in fairness, DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison did post a few tweets denouncing the RNC resolution and calling January 6th an insurrection and a criminal act against our government. But the Democratic Party’s most visible messengers had nothing to say about either the RNC’s dangerous decision to formally act as if January 6th was an ordinary day of political “discourse” or the split in Republican ranks registered by Pence’s unexpected dissent. Former President Obama, who has 130 million Twitter followers, was also silent. In the following days, there’s been 50 to 100 times more interest in Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan than to the RNC, January 6th, or Pence, according to Google Trends. Attention is already drifting to other topics, like Ukraine, the Olympics and the debate over masks in public schools.
Sometime in the next few months, the January 6th committee is expected to begin public hearings rolling out its findings. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a leading member of the committee, said last month that he expected the hearings will “blow the roof off the House in terms of explaining to America what happened in the attack on our democracy.” He predicted the committee’s report will be “a game changer in American history.”
A lot of people are hoping that he will be proven right, and that next November, the same center-left coalition of voters who gave Biden his 2020 margin of victory will rouse themselves again to keep Congress out of the hands of people the RNC just embraced. But hope is not a strategy. And the way that leading Democrats have so far failed to jump on the RNC and Pence statements of last Friday is not a good sign. As I noted here a few weeks ago, most Americans don’t instinctively care about abstract concepts like “democracy.” Jobs, the cost of living and the pandemic all rate much higher on voters minds. Even Black voters, who are historically one of the most politically sensitive groups on issues of democracy, rate “voting rights” as a much lower priority than those bread-and-butter issues, and that’s after a few months where major legislation on that issue was front and center.
If January 6th and all the danger represented by Republican Party’s embrace of insurrectionism is to become a dominant concern, it will only happen via a concerted campaign to consistently amplify attention. And this can be done. A little over a year ago, I wrote here about a post-mortem on the 2020 election written by Jen Soriano, Hermelinda Cortes and Joseph Phelan of Organizing Upgrade called “What the Elections Have Taught Us About Disinformation.” In it, they argued that, “Disinformation now travels at the speed of the internet, and with governments, corporations, and new generations of digitally skilled chaos agents jumping on the bandwagon of data and information manipulation, we have to face disinformation as a rising form of social control. The pandemic has put more and more people across the globe online for more hours in the day, and has limited our access to trusted community sources of information that relied on in-person connections, such as church gatherings and neighborhood meetings. In this context, disinformation is becoming more effective at generating chaos and seeding doubt in reality.”
To combat this, they called for new tools to monitor and understand the “narrative weather”—the conversations and concepts that are resonating with various audiences over time—along with coordinated strategies to change that weather. A decade ago, an innovative outfit called Upwell set out to do that for attention to ocean issues, with striking results that I wrote about for techPresident at the time. What was path-breaking about Upwell’s work wasn’t just how it used social media monitoring tools to track how public attention flowed to issues affecting the ocean, like over-fishing, acidification, climate change and the like. It also figured out how to discover and connect a small armada of people who were already passionately engaged on those topics and then to deliver them a daily stream of useful tips and shareable content, the better to help them reach the audiences that they had organically built. And it worked: over time, Upwell was able to demonstrably raise the baseline level of attention around ocean issues and also to make the spikes that occasionally occurred get bigger and happen more often.
Upwell’s work was impressive enough that a group of liberal funders who had long been engaged in trying to advance campaign finance reform and voting rights hired Rachel Weidinger, the founder of Upwell, to study how the same analytical approach and techniques could be applied to the democracy sector. (I played a role in helping pull that together.) Her team looked at how public attention flowed to topics related voting rights, money in politics, and government openness from January 2012 through May 2014, building a set of keywords and keyword sets and looking at how they surfaced across a wide range of public forums, including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, videos and mainstream news. Then they examined when and why attention spiked.
Many of their findings are still relevant today. For example, they found that too much of the content generated by advocacy organizations working on issues of voting rights emphasized abstract harms like images of voters waiting on long lines rather than more relatable stories of individual characters. Most of the conversation generated by campaign finance reform was centered on things of greatest interest to political insiders, like which super PACs were raising money and court cases with obscure names like McCutcheon v FEC. In terms of organic attention to anything in the broad arena of government responsiveness and accountability, one topic dominated attention in those years: government spying, with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks driving the conversation. But the advocacy groups working on democracy tended to shy away from engaging with those streams.
They also found that much of the pro-democracy sector’s organizations were too focused on short-term communications about campaign wins and on stewarding their own brands, inhibiting natural behaviors that social network activity thrives on. In response, they urged that groups find ways to connect and relate their issues to the ones that the public was organically attracted to, and to shift resources towards building a diverse and distributed network of influencer/communicators rather than relying mainly on their own professional (and over-stretched) communications staff. These findings largely fell on reluctant, if not, deaf ears. Too many professional reputations and organizational resources were already tied up in strategic plans that kept the pro-democracy sector from breaking out of its own comfortable siloes. Our plan for a Project Upvote went nowhere.
A year after the Organizing Upgrade post-mortem on 2020, I see few signs of a changed approach to the current war to define the battle for the future of our democracy. We have a small army of monitoring programs that track public opinion, as well as some sophisticated efforts to track and expose disinformation campaigns. But to my knowledge no one has built the kind of brand-agnostic distributed network of messengers that Upwell did for the ocean. There is no war room. There is only the daily drumbeat of distraction, which—even if the January 6th committee hearings blow the roof off—will inevitably wash away their impact, unless we make a very different effort, like the one proposed by Organizing Upgrade, to change the underlying narrative weather.
Here’s a stab at how that could work. The January 6th Select Committee hearings, which Raskin says are probably not going to start until April or May because of the lack of cooperation from a number of Trump officials and associates, offer a moment of national catharsis. If the lead testimony is anything like the hearing the committee held last summer, when four Capitol Police officers testified, it will capture attention. Research into the effects of watching political debates has shown that when people watch alone, their opinions on what they saw are quite malleable and often get shaped by whatever TV commentators they see afterwards. People who watch together, like students gathered on a college campus, and then who digest what they saw together, with the help of expert commentators, form more solid opinions. (David Birdsell of Baruch College’s school of public affairs, has been doing this with his students for years.)
In anticipation of the select committee hearings, we should start organizing local watch groups—people who plan ahead to watch the hearings together, even if they are all just in a Zoom room with each other while their TV is on. In a spirit of popular-frontism, we could call them Raskin-Cheney Democracy Watch parties, as the two congressmembers from opposite ends of the political spectrum have found common cause in their defense of the rule of law. And then those groups could continue to function as local organizing hubs for when the hearings end.
The January 6th committee hearings are bound to be scary. I can see many people turning away, or intimidated by the kinds of displays the MAGA movement has gotten good at (see more on that below). With a few months until they arrive, we need a plan for how to win them.
Trucked Up
Speaking of disinformation and its effects, is the US on the verge of a wave of “Freedom Convoys” like the anti-vaccine cavalcade that has flooded into downtown Ottawa and other cities in Canada in recent days? A few days ago, my friend Lara Putnam shared a Twitter thread noting how several new Facebook groups had suddenly mushroomed in size: A public group called Freedom Convoy 2022 had 148,000 members; a three-day-old group called Freedom Convoy to DC – Northeast Route had nearly 20,000 (it’s now nearly double that); Truckers for Freedom 2020 had 43,000. (The Convoy to Ottawa 2022 Restart group, which was apparently a follow-on to an earlier group banned by Facebook, had 642,000—it’s now up to 696,000.)
If these are real numbers, they are cause for alarm (especially as the Former Guy has recently also been making noises about sending his supporters to attack cities like New York and Atlanta where government prosecutors are investigating him). The Canadian truckers claim that their protests are peaceful, but many Ottawa residents, particularly women, minorities and queer folk, have been reporting an upsurge in street harassment from truckers shouting at them to stop wearing masks and worse. Some of the truckers have been spotted waving Confederate flags and swastikas. And they came prepared for a long stay, bringing cranes and porta-potties and blocking intersections.
But this also could be a giant, mostly fake echo chamber built by troll accounts in the employ of any number of possible bad actors hoping to foster more social division. Writer Karen Piper dug into some of these Facebook groups, including one promoted by Trump coup plotter Michael Flynn, and found a number of oddities, including the fact that one of the group’s administrators was a fan of a clothing store in the Ukraine and another admin claimed to work at “Facebook marketplace.” A third group admin was using an account that said they lived in Morocco. Even if the numbers are being artificially inflated by troll armies or foreign actors, the “Freedom Convoy” phenomenon looks and feels like a direct extension of the Trump/MAGA caravans that flowered the fall of 2020 across the United States. The Former Guy, his son Eric Trump, Franklin Graham, Glenn Beck, and Mike Huckabee along with white supremacist channels on platforms like Telegram have all declared their support for the truckers, who are busy organizing a spring assault on Washington. As Politico’s Mark Scott reports, there are signs that the phenomenon is spreading in Europe as well.
Odds and Ends
—Good news: The IRS has dropped its plan to require taxpayers to submit a facial recognition check through ID.me, a private company, after an onslaught of criticism from privacy advocates and members of Congress.
—Less good news: NYC Mayor Eric Adams says he wants to expand the use of facial recognition technology by police, disregarding evidence that it is deeply flawed and racially biased.
—More good news: Expanding the unionization wave in civic tech, a large group of employees of Nava PBC, one of the biggest companies to emerge from the effort to fix Healthcare.gov, have petitioned to join the Office and Professional Employees International Union. Nava United has launched with 171 of Nava’s 250 employees, and so far management has indicated a willingness to negotiate in good faith through a voluntary recognition process.
—Say hello to Third Act, a new group organizing people over the age of 60 to fight for progressive change. Founders Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood write, “If our first act was pretty fascinating, the second act for too many of our generations focused harder on consumerism than on citizenship; we drifted into an individualism that fit easily with the Reagan ethos of looking out for oneself. But if it worked for us, it clearly isn’t working for the planet or the society as a whole.” Basically, Baby Boomers coming back to their 60s roots. My favorite lines from their organizing plan: “We will be organized by where we live, and also by what we’ve done in our lifetimes— Floridians or New Yorkers, but also lawyers or cooks or musicians. We call these working groups and these will be a place to connect with like-minded experienced Americans. Each working group will be supported by the national leadership of Third Act. We will define overall campaign goals — with your input — but members have the freedom to decide how to make them work on the ground where they are. This allows our members to play to their strengths.”
—When it comes to Jeff Zucker’s ousting as CNN’s president, Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post says all there is to say.
—Sign up: How to Raise Money: Strategic Leadership for Change is a new offering from Aspiration Tech led by my friend Geoffrey MacDougall that is getting rave reviews from early participants. It’s ideal for social change organizations at the early stages of their development.
I am now writing twice a week for Medium as part of their contributing author program. If you enjoy the mix of topics that I cover here, then please sign up to be a Medium member. Here’s a “friend link” to a recent post about how Democratic donors need to stop setting their money on fire.