Welcome to Movement Time
The big question: Are we still on Earth One, where American representative democracy can still function? Or are we on Earth Two, where the Constitution no longer applies?
Chances are, if you did anything political last year, you did it because an organization asked you to do it. You canvassed because a candidate’s campaign asked you for help; you donated to a cause because you got a letter or text message asking for your money; you wrote postcards because a group invited you to their monthly letter-writing event; you called or wrote your elected representative because an advocacy group nudged you to do so. Behind all those actions were organizers, who set up the canvass or the fundraising ask or the list of people to mail to or the call to action for the politician. And underlying all of that was planning and pacing, since organizers make plans based on goals and strategies, whether they are to win an election or build a list or meet a budget.
That was life in organization-time. Now, if you are in any way involved in The Defiance (my stab at a new word to describe everyone trying to respond to the Trump regime’s wholesale assault on the postwar political order), you are experiencing life in movement-time. That is, there are now more people in motion than our organizational containers can hold on their own. The demand for action is greater than what organizers-in-place can supply, so people have started to do their own thing(s). The result can be confusing, whether you’re someone inside an organization with structure, roles, and pre-existing rhythms or if you’re someone new to activism trying to get your bearings.
But messiness is a feature, not a bug, of real movements, which exist when very large numbers of people move autonomously in a common direction. Organizations, especially those that exist because movements of the past birthed them and who think of themselves as the midwives of the movements of the future, can try to keep up with movement-time, but it’s hard.
To pull off, say, a national mobilization to protest Trump/Musk’s power-grab, groups must set a date weeks or months ahead, so people can plan. So national groups that currently anchor The Defiance like Indivisible, MoveOn and the Working Families Party, have called April 5 as “Hands Off” everything from Social Security to veterans services to NATO and cancer research. Same with the diligent planning that national education unions are bringing to the battle to protect public education which is being focused on “Walk-Ins” to schools on March 19, the second round of rallies being organized by park rangers across the whole national system on March 22, the equally critical organizing being done by unions and social service organizations to protect Medicaid from cuts, the Trans Justice DC rally on March 31 (on the annual Trans Day of Visibility) and the also vital work that a variety of actors from the Black church on down are marshaling via the Black Wall Street Ticker to defend DEI via consumer boycotts and other corporate pressure campaigns. But as attacks on pro-Palestinian activists and higher education have escalated, by April we may all be feeling that the bigger emergency is the clampdown on free speech. Which is the underpinning for all this work!
Such is life in movement-time.
Is any of this working?
Well, one way to know is if the targets of these actions respond. Trump’s decision to set up a Tesla showroom on the White House lawn last week to prop up his pal’s sagging company, and Musk’s decision to attack an organizer of Tesla protests by name using his X account both show that the mushrooming #TeslaTakedown effort is now living rent-free in their heads. Good! And there’s no question the number and frequency of these protests is continuing to rise; I’ve been watching the map and calendar on TeslaTakedown get thicker with every day.
These days remind me a lot of the period in early 2017 when the number of “resistance” groups, tools and actions proliferated so quickly that a bunch of us took to building unwieldy spreadsheets to keep track of the plethora. I’m not going to do that again! But here are the main channels I’m seeing right now for the anti-Trump defiance: Federal workers unions, veterans, park rangers, scientists, teachers, women’s groups, civil and immigrants’ rights groups, and localists (like Indivisible, 50501 and the TeslaTakedown network).
Though many academics, professionals and their associations are speaking out, so far there seems to be no coordinated pushback by the pillars of higher education. The elite universities of the Ivy League seem willing to let Columbia be their sacrificial lamb, even as other major institutions like Johns Hopkins and the University of California also suffer from politicized cuts to their research budgets. Perhaps that will change soon.
But are we living on Earth One or Earth Two?
Strategy must be informed by understanding the conditions we are operating in. And the main question is whether the normal rules of politics still hold in America. On what I like to shorthand as “Earth One,” the place we hope we still live in, representative democracy—flawed and tilted as it may be—still works. The media is still free. Elections are fair. Dissent is allowed. On Earth One, the reactionary assault on everything from DEI to NATO to USAID will most likely produce an electoral backlash and Democrats shellack incumbent Republicans in next year’s midterm elections. This is basically what happened in 2017-18, when the GOP’s attempt to repeal Obamacare was turned back.
Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in that chamber, clearly is operating on the assumption that we are still on Earth One. As he explained his decision (gift link) to support the continuing spending resolution that prevented a government shutdown:
The last time he was president, which is the closest experience we have with him — and admittedly, the world has changed some, particularly on the media side, how it works — we kept pushing and pushing and pushing and chipping away. And when he went below 40 percent in the polls, the Republican legislators started working with us. He was at 51. He’s now at 48. We’re gonna keep at it until he goes below 40. Look, I talk to a lot of these Republican legislators. I’ve worked with them. Some of them are Trump devotees. But many of them don’t like him, don’t respect him and worry about what he’s doing to our country. Right now he’s so popular they can’t resist him. I mean, so many of them came to me and said: “I don’t think Hegseth should be defense secretary or R.F.K. should be H.H.S. But Trump wants him. He won.” The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.
But are we living in this reality anymore? On “Earth Two,” the "thermostatic" principle of American politics no longer works because of a combination of things -- the courts don't deliver clear rebuffs to Trump, or he ignores the courts, and when we the people go out to protest, Trump declares a national emergency and calls on the military and National Guard to enforce his decrees. Or local actors, official or unofficial, take matters into their own hands, shoot some protestors, and Trump pardons them.
We can all write our own variations of that scenario, but however we reach Earth Two, by the time 2028 rolls around we will not having a free and fair election. Instead, it will be an election to ratify Trumpian law and order and many of us aren't able to do much because we're either in jail or too intimidated to speak out.
I think we can avoid Earth Two, but it’s going to take more widespread and concerted action that involves many more people than now in nonviolent forms of protest. As longtime readers know, the benchmark for successful movements against authoritarianism, according to Harvard researcher Erica Chenoweth, is when at least 3.5% of the population gets involved in regular, public, nonviolent acts of opposition. In the US that would mean at least 11.5 million people turning out on a daily to weekly basis. We are just baby steps towards that benchmark.
Most important, we have to start looking at forms of mass non-cooperation that go beyond rallying for a few hours each week. Ben Wittes made a good list two weeks ago on the Lawfare blog of what this could look like:
“Large numbers of people driving very slowly to work in a coordinated fashion. Very slowly. At, say, the minimum lawful speed.
Trans activists releasing thousands of crickets at a conference in London; I know of no law against the release of crickets in this country, though I’m obviously not giving anyone legal advice.
Die-ins in strategic locations at strategic moments.
Support for people in government who are subject to purges or oppressive working conditions or who are doing the right thing.
Unscheduled marches in locations where marches may cause inconvenience and can be lawful depending on precisely where and how one conducts them.
Large numbers of people choosing to file their taxes by mail, instead of electronically. Specifically, having folks to whom the government owes money file electronically and folks who owe the government money file on paper—and maybe in lousy handwriting.
Federal workers working just a little bit less hard at scheduled times—doing the minimum their job descriptions require.”
Wittes’ term for Earth Two is “The Full-Scale Situation.” We are thinking along similar lines. (And Garrett Graff, who is no leftie either, says we’re in a “Constitutional Crash” already.)
The Earth Two problem is why prognostication about the best path back to an electoral majority for Democrats in 2026 is so useless right now. Veteran political analyst Tom Edsall uncorked another bottle of this babble in his New York Times column last week (gift link). Given the gigantic shocks that Trump is generating, with more to come as they pass a budget and do god knows what else to the economy and foreign policy, it seems premature to be debating, yet again, whether Democrats need to move more to the center. A topic which Edsall has been raising since his 1992 book Chain Reaction. Are there no other subjects worth discussing, Tom?
On town halls, protests and power
It’s a good thing that the Democratic National Committee has launched its “People’s Town Hall” initiative. It’s a good thing that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Governor Tim Walz have started barnstorming the country with their own events (some of which the DNC is cross-promoting). Heck, maybe they can even get Bruce Springsteen to open for them.
But I want to lift up the critique that Corbin Trent, a former Bernie organizer and AOC staffer, just published: “The Right Builds Power. The Left Hosts Rallies. That’s Why We Lose.” He speaks important truths about Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez: they are not institution builders. He writes:
Bernie has spent his entire career fighting the right fights—pushing for Medicare for All, labor rights, and an economy that works for working people. But his theory of change is wrong. He believes if you get enough people mobilized, enough pressure applied, enough public support, then eventually, politicians will have no choice but to bend. But the right doesn't just pressure the system. They take it over. They don't just inspire. They build. They build institutions, candidate pipelines, think tanks, and enforcement mechanisms that ensure power flows toward them, no matter who wins the next election. That's why, even though the majority of Americans support progressive policies, those policies never get passed. That's why Bernie—despite changing the conversation—never changed the power structure.
Those of us who have known Sanders since his rise to prominence in Vermont aren’t surprised, because despite getting elected mayor of Burlington and then to Congress as an independent self-described socialist, he never built anything there beyond his personal brand. So when he started running for president, I didn’t climb aboard. And sure enough, despite raising $230 million for his 2016 run and $211 million for his 2020 run, he left little behind. Our Revolution, the nonprofit PAC he set up after 2016, has run through about $17 million in donations since then with little to show for its efforts.
As for AOC, the die isn’t fully cast, but it sure looks like she’s following the same template of building her brand and her list in pursuit of higher office. Who can blame her? Assuming we still live on Earth One, lots of young ambitious politicos are sensing their moment, and local rallies and townhalls will undoubtedly be one of their proving grounds. I saw New York Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado fire up a crowd of 600 “Stop the Cuts” protestors in Tarrytown, NY last Saturday and was awed by his raw political talent. (He’s detached himself from Governor Kathy Hochul, but it’s unclear what office he will be running for next.)
But it’s high time, dear readers, that we stopped investing our time, money and hopes on personalism. Yes, we need more charismatic leaders who can communicate more effectively than a 78-year-old man who recycles (!) pat lines about how he builds relationships with Republicans at the House gym (yes, Jon Stewart caught him doing exactly that). As Corbin Trent argues, we need to be building year-round muscles, including a candidate recruitment and training pipeline, a media arm, a fundraising apparatus that can rival AIPAC, the Koch network, or the crypto bros; policy shops that pump out model legislation and ideas; legal orgs that back up this network and leadership development programs for the next generation. Bits and pieces of this infrastructure exist – see for example Run for Something (for candidate recruitment) or projects like the High Road Strategy Center and its Government Performance Action & Learning project. The money for all of these long-term projects exists; but we’ve been misdirecting nearly all of it into short-term electoral campaigns (and the pockets of highly-paid political consultants) to build sandcastles instead.
Rallies and protests are the bandaid; building new institutions and changing the rules of the game are the cure.
—Bonus link: Laura Rose, a longtime Indivisible organizer in Bucks County, PA, has some useful advice for newcomers to established groups.
End Times
Required cleanse for exposure to Earth Two.
It makes sense that Dem electeds don't want permanent institutions. If they helped build them, they'd then be accountable to them. The way things are now, they're only accountable to their donors. It's pressure enough. They don't want to enable anybody else who can create countervailing pressure against their patrons.
The way we fight this is to stop donating to candidates directly. Instead, send your funds to the groups working in the spaces you care about. If candidates want money, they will need to form relationships with those groups -- whose PACs can, in turn, hold them accountable if they drift off-course.
Your $50 check is not going to sway them to do anything. But combine it with $50 checks from 10000 other people, and have that mega check coming from, say, Reproductive Freedom for All, or your union, or your favorite climate change group -- and suddenly, you have their full attention.
Predictably, I fully agree with you. I look back at the experience of the Vietnam era protests. In their initial stage they were scattered and incohate. But within a few years a couple of real coordinating institutions took root. Like the student mobe and others. But they only lasted a few years as the draft was lifted and peace talks got serious and ultimately the true lunatic in the Weathermen finished it all off. But a resounding YES to your speculations and affirmations. To dig up an old cliche, we need a streets and suites strategy. I agree that the personalism of Sanders and AOC are NOT the solution but they are still of some importance as many millions, no matter what we say, will look to the Democrats for succor. There is a place for the suites part of the equation. we can hope that if we build an independent ORGANIZED mass democracy movement -- as you said last week-- from the center out and if it becomes robust enough, enough elected Democrats will join in (late) and translate this street energy into the electoral and legislative arena. I also like what Ben Wittes wrote as ir comes very close to what I have been thinking about. Namely, mass civil disobedience to the point of making the country ungovernable. We're a LONG way from prepping for that let alone organizing it. A sit in off 200 people in some office is OK. But a mass shutdown of DC by 150,00 is a different animal. I am convinced, however, that we will reach that stage as I think ultimately that is where we are going to go and is probably the most effective type of organized protest and defeat of Trump. I think the Filipinos called it People Power. Tnx again for another well thought out and serious take.