What Margaret Mead Left Out
If your activism isn't building power in numbers and forms that you (and others) can count, maybe it's time to stop believing in the magic of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens alone.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
That quote, from the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, is one of the best-known statements in the English language about social change. There’s one big problem with Mead’s quote: she doesn’t say how. And how small groups organize to become bigger and powerful enough to make change is the essential question. It’s easy to form a small group, but most of the time they flail away and barely make a scratch, let alone a dent, in how the world works.
This quote is on my mind at the moment for a whole variety of reasons. One is because I’ve been listening to Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s Reith Lectures on the BBC, which are focused on how to build a mass moral movement against fascism, and he keeps citing Mead. To wit, from his second lecture:
“The past, after all, is not just a graveyard of disasters. It is also a reservoir of hope. I have always been fascinated by those small groups of stubborn people who change the course of history. Sometimes for the worse, think of the Bolsheviks, but also, gloriously, for the better. Florence Nightingale and the nurses who pioneered evidence-based medicine. Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragettes who won the vote for women. Norman Borlaug and the inventors whose Green Revolution saved millions from famine. What all these people had in common was a clear vision, a scalable strategy, and the unflagging persistence to pursue their goals. In the immortal words of Margaret Mead, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” [ital in the original]
Or, from his third: “…as a historian, I’m well aware that conspiracies do exist. In fact, I’m quite obsessed with them. Not the paranoid fantasies of QAnon or 9/11 truthers but the real conspiracies of small groups with big ideas. History is full of examples. A dozen apostles spreading Christianity across an empire. A debating club of Jacobins, toppling the French monarchy. An obscure think tank engineering the rise of neoliberal capitalism.”
Bregman says he’s been studying the phenomenon for many years, but somehow he never answers the most obvious question of how some small groups manage to succeed while many others do not. Instead, he points to their fierce “moral ambition” and their ability to somehow make that moral ambition “fashionable.” He adds:
“Ideas only matter if they are organised, institutionalised, and carried through the storms of history. That means more than a few good speeches. It means building durable networks of people and institutions, deep-pocketed donors who are willing to think in decades rather than election cycles, policy shops that can translate ideals into legislation, movements that can win over diverse constituencies, and cultural platforms that can shape public opinion, from the courthouse to the classroom, from the op-ed page to the dinner table. Above all, it requires perseverance. History shows what small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens can achieve if they play the long game.”
But how? If you squint, you can see where Bregman offered a tiny clue: “A scalable strategy.” Gosh, that seems easy, right? No need for the famous historian to look more closely.
Well, no.
Hope Springs Eternal
Twenty-one years ago, a little after I caught the blogging bug, I attended the Digital Democracy Teach-In in San Diego that took place a few weeks after Howard Dean’s presidential campaign had imploded, and had my mind blown as I watched 300+ attendees listen to an array of stellar speakers while simultaneously using their laptops to participate in a live back-channel that was as smart as the people on stage. At the same time, I was also struck by how so many Deaniacs, including many from the open-source tech world, thought that it would be possible to convert mass participation into political power as easily as clicking on Amazon to buy a book. (“One-click politics” was even a phrase some were using.) In response, I wrote a post citing America’s great historian of populism, Lawrence Goodwyn, drawing from the introduction to his masterwork on the Solidarity movement in Poland, Breaking the Barrier.
I wrote: “How do people move from thought to action? Goodwyn’s answer is deceptively simple. ‘Protest moves from idea to action when it becomes social--that is, when it is organized so that people are acting rather than writing or talking about acting.’ [hello, fellow bloggers!] But, Goodwyn points out, large-scale social movements for change are extremely rare beasts.” Then I quoted him:
“Societies are not routinely afflicted with ‘movements.’ Things are usually ‘normal’ and people behave in conventional ways. A relatively small number of citizens possessing high sanction move about in an authoritative manner and a much larger number of people without such sanction move about more softly. Some among the multitude may be seen energetically to be doing all they can to acquire a measure of status, but in the meantime, they join their less-energetic neighbors in behaving with conventional deference.
Movements disrupt this normal order. A considerable number of unsanctioned people appear publicly in a new guise; they present petitions or voice demands; they suddenly arrogate to themselves the right to criticize inherited customs and may even issue manifestos proclaiming the precise way they intend to rearrange received habits. Moreover, they have a pronounced tendency to conduct activity out-of-doors where everything is visible. People march, they strike, they demonstrate, and they may even suddenly riot and burn down or otherwise dismantle certain physical signs of established tradition.”
I went on:
How do we get large-scale protest?--what Goodwyn calls “unusual acts of unsanctioned assertion by previously little-known persons.” This is where our ignorance begins. We have been trained by decades of received historical tradition to not understand this crucial issue. Our observers--journalists, academics, etc--rarely explain how social movements are created and sustained. As Goodwyn notes, they borrow heavily from the weather school of writing. “Movements ‘flare up’ and ‘gather steam.’ They ‘boil.’ They can then ‘burst into flame’ and ‘burn like a prairie fire’ before, in time, ‘flickering’ out. A social movement can also be understood as a ‘gathering storm’ that when gathered ‘sweeps like a cyclone’ through vulnerable regions.” This, he says, is “a view from afar.” It is, for all the talk of “granularity,” the primary view we’ve been taking of the DeanforAmerica phenomenon.
“Large scale democratic movements do not happen in any of these easily characterized ways,” Goodwyn writes. “Democratic forms are ordered. To function well, they must be experientially tested. Their construction requires overcoming many culturally based hierarchical impediments. They happen, then, when they are organized. They happen in no other way.”
The process of experimentation and learning from mistakes is experiential, Goodwyn emphasizes. And it seems we are fated to constantly be starting over and not learning from those who have come before—even when answers are available!
The Antidote to Feeling Ineffective
Rutger Bregman’s handwaving at small groups’ magical power is just another manifestation of this same lack of literacy about what it takes to build power. But I’m also feeling spurred to return to this basic point about organizing, as opposed to advocacy or mobilizing, for a few more reasons. The first is a meeting that my Indivisible group, NYCD16/15-Indivisible, had this past Sunday with our NY state senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins. For the past eight years, Stewart-Cousins has been the majority leader of the state senate, something that she readily credits our group with having helped achieve. That’s because in 2018, we — along with many other local Indivisible groups, the Working Families Party, and others — successfully challenged and defeated seven of the eight members of the so-called Independent Democratic Caucus, a cabal of Democratic senators who had chosen to caucus with the state Republicans for a corrupt share of power in Albany. So Stewart-Cousins often comes to our monthly meetings, making herself accessible in an intimate way. Since she is one of the three most powerful office-holders in New York State, you’d think this kind of access would mean something.
But as some organizer friends like to say, proximity to power is not power. In fact, what we get for the access Stewart-Cousins provides is an education in how power works—if we pay attention. This past week, our group’s various committee leads each asked her a tough, well-prepared question: Why aren’t you choosing to use your majority to override Governor Kathy Hochul’s many vetos of bills that both chambers in Albany have passed with overwhelming support (including often with many Republicans)? Why aren’t you doing more to protect immigrant communities under assault by ICE? Why aren’t you pushing through critical prison reforms, like parole for seniors who have been serving for decades, especially when more than a hundred prisoners in state penitentiaries have died this past year due to prison guard abuse?
In each case, her answer was some version of “we’re doing as much as we can.” Noting that her conference of 41 Democratic senators (out of 67) had passed a much more fulsome sweep of bills aimed at climate change, she noted that the assembly, which is 103-47 Democrat, had passed much less. Her senators, she said, tended to be newer and younger, compared to Democratic assemblymembers, who tended to move more slowly. Huh? Likewise, she said that calling the legislators back to Albany to override a gubernatorial veto would present a big burden on them — what, a few hours away from their second jobs as attorneys, real estate professionals, business owners or consultants? — and therefore wasn’t something she thought possible. Her facial expression on the photos above is indicative.
I’m not doubting Stewart-Cousins’ personal commitment to racial, economic or environmental justice, by the way. But she is a creature of the Empire State, not the Decolonized State. And well-written and well-asked questions are a very weak form of power. The tens of millions of dollars that Wall Street and real estate interests give to Albany politicians and spend on media campaigns to influence them are much stronger. Politicians can all count; they know who can deliver them votes or money. The rest get good government.
Related to this episode was a conversation I had with a friend Saturday who apologized for not being very active lately in local activism, despite feeling strongly about everything going on. She said she just didn’t feel like anything was working. I suggested that she not be too hard on herself, since the onslaught of bad news is overwhelming; that she not try to pay attention to everything; and that she pick just one issue to work on. But, to be honest, when you see little changing for the better and the leaders of the so-called opposition party mostly making excuses and claiming that they’re doing “what they can,” resignation is a normal response. And too many of lack a political home base where our individual acts of dissent or solidarity or door-knocking add into a larger strategy for winning the power to change that.
But Wait, There’s More
The other reason Mead’s false promise is on my mind is because I’m thinking about an amazing event that happened this past Saturday in Minneapolis that has completely escaped the attention of just about the entire political ecosystem. More than five thousand people from across Minnesota – of all races and religions, mostly but not entirely working class – gathered for a day under the dome of the Minneapolis Convention Center to celebrate their joint accomplishments and plan for the challenges ahead. Two groups, ISAIAH-MN and Faith in Minnesota, co-hosted the meeting, which was both the culmination of months of base-building and meant to be the launching pad for a “People’s Agenda” aimed at bringing “dignity, affordability, and hope to every one of us – no exceptions.”
As is typical for ISAIAH-style organizing, there’s almost no public trace of this event, beyond a nifty Instagram video (see below) showing a handful of the civic leaders who came along with a fast montage of the crowd. No Bernie Sanders-type celebrity or influencer drew the attendees to the arena; they were largely all part of local churches, mosques, synagogues and organizing communities among child care workers and residents of manufactured homes. But as the fight against authoritarianism intensifies over the coming year, I will bet dollars to donuts that a key backbone for it in Minnesota was strengthened at this mass meeting.
It’s critical to understand that the type of organizing these groups do is highly structured. They don’t simply count their members based on how many email addresses they’ve collected. They don’t just hold meetings or push people to go door-knock or call their legislators. They have paid organizers who focus on developing volunteer leaders who themselves are rooted in organic communities like barber shops and churches, and they keep track of everything. Here’s a little of what Joy Cushman and Elizabeth McKenna write about ISAIAH in their 2023 report for the Democracy & Power Innovation Fund on “Power Metrics.”
ISAIAH is an institution-based organizing group in Minnesota, working with faith congregations, childcare centers, barber shops, and other community institutions to drive local and statewide campaigns. ISAIAH programs have two types of events: mobilizing and organizing. Mobilizing events are rallies, public actions, legislative visits, and so on. Relational organizing events are one- to-one meetings with an organizer or member leader, small group house meetings, trainings, or team meetings where public leadership is developed.
To determine which sequence of events helped onboard and retain ISAIAH superleaders, we first downloaded the event history data for all members and supporters. Next, we used ISAIAH’s own coding (“Event Type”) and our qualitative knowledge of the organization’s programs to collapse event categories into mobilizing (red) or organizing (blue) events. We looked at the first five events of ISAIAH’s “super leaders.” [These are volunteer leaders with their own followings who consciously work as member organizers.] On average these super leaders had participated in 21 events with the organization.
The results: ISAIAH’s organizing events were “stickier” than mobilizing events. Organizing events led to more sustained participation and the development of ISAIAH “super leaders.” These super leaders were the members who agreed to be “faith delegates” to Minnesota caucuses in 2018 when ISAIAH’s partner organization, Faith in Minnesota, ran a sophisticated political program to elevate their bases’ agenda during the gubernatorial primary.<<
This chart, from “Power Metrics,” illustrates the “stickiness” of organizing. Note how recruiting people from mobilizing events into organizing meetings and trainings served to successfully pull them into seeing ISAIAH as their political home base. Most critically, people in these groups aren’t only asked to show up at a rally or knock on doors to produce a win on Election Day. They are part of an organized base that keeps working to translate the power they can produce through voter mobilization into power to get a government that is responsive to their interests. The larger story of what this kind of well-structured organizing can produce in one state is told in this video on the “Minnesota Miracle Playbook,” which describes all the significant policy wins that were passed into law in 2023 as a result of this work. If you don’t live in Minnesota, I highly recommend taking the time to watch it.
Getting back to my friend who is feeling like nothing is working. The problem, I think, is that she – like the vast majority of grassroots activists – isn’t part of an organization with a clear strategy for building the power that we need to get the things that we want. And much as I appreciate all that groups like Indivisible, 50501, and #TeslaTakedown have done this past year to make Defiance visible and contagious, they are not that. Indivisible is a network of autonomous, volunteer-driven local groups with gifted national leaders who do their best to cheerlead and corral those groups toward common actions like “No Kings” and boycotts, but it is only barely a power-building group. It is a great container for local activists who want to “do something” and taking action together with others is much better than doing nothing. But unless I’m sorely mistaken, there are few if any Indivisible groups, or 50501 groups, or #TeslaTakedown groups, or VisibilityBrigade groups, doing structured organizing the way ISAIAH does.
The good news is whether this happens is largely in our hands. Ten years ago, none of the groups featured in Cushman and McKenna’s Power Metrics report existed, or had the kind of structure and heft that they marshal now. Small groups of thoughtful, committed people made that happen — but they did it because they took organizing seriously.
Glad you wrote this, Micah! I've always disliked that quote for exactly the reasons you say - omitting the hard work of organizing and base-building. It's like celebrating seeds and not what it takes them to grow into a tree.
- from Betsy Leondar-Wright
I invite you to the GNAD, Global Nonviolent Action Database, and the list of 199 ways that groups can take direct action to bring change.
I further invite everyone to read George Lakey's book, How We Win, on his research and life experiences on the subject of nonviolent direct action. As a professor, he built that database with his students at Swarthmore.