The Mind and Heart of an Organizer

For me, online social media places have turned into an excruciating space right now. Whatever your identity group might be, you will be personally blamed for the Democratic Party's showing on Nov. 5. Whether any of this makes any sense, people are looking for someone to blame. Especially as someone who tries to read a variety of viewpoints, I’ve been absorbing a lot of that, until I just decided to put the phone down. I still don’t have a direct hotline to the DNC, nor do I want one. I have volunteered and given money, as have a lot of people I know, and many of us have done more than ever before. You really can’t know the politics of the average person motivated to support the Harris campaign; those politics might be conservative or liberal or progressive or radical politics. I believe many, many of us left it all on the field. And we lost.

I’ve been most helped by a few posts online that simply say a version of “It’s the fascism.” And I believe that to be true.

Could Harris have said more, said different, said better? Sure. But anyone, including a candidate, can examine these multiple options. The real question is, if she had, whether it would have even made news or moved the needle among vast swathes of people who clearly want Trump., because his message is so simple as to be non-existent, a blank space that screams “power” onto which voters can project their hopes and fear.

As Rebecca Solnit said, a vote is a chess move, not a valentine, and many of us of a wide swathe of political orientations chose what we could do to prevent what is now going to happen. Other folks pressed from the outside to change Harris’s position, and there’s clear evidence that she did shift, but the narrative did not shift with her. So we both didn’t get what we wanted. And that’s the way things go. There are always factions pushing from inside and outside.

The question is the goal. And I know that for my next four years, I am committed to talking about what it means to think like an organizer. It’s a mindset that both helps us choose political actions and will help us survive what comes next. So let’s talk about a few terms. This is not something I invented. The vast majority of this comes from the Black activists, especially Black women, who built the Civil Rights Movement, in the face of enormous odds. I’ll be listing good biographies to read in a future post, and other resources, and I’ll be sharing a list of books that you can read to understand what it means to build movements.

GOAL: The goal in a campaign is not your final goal of how you want to change the world. No, the goal in a specific campaign is an understanding that if you push in X direction, Y or Z might happen. Sometimes you might push in X direction, and get Y, and that Y will actually put you much farther from your ultimate goal than where you started. So a goal of a campaign is based on an analysis of power and what it will do when pushed, and what the likely repercussions will be.

COMMUNITY: When you’re organizing, you also end up thinking a lot about who you are organizing and what you want them to do. You are thinking about people inside the campaign, about how to build and strengthen bonds and connections as well as skills. This is a vastly different approach than wading into the discourse at every turn, reacting and telling people who they are, what they are and are not, and how bad they are for not supporting your specific strategic analysis. This is basically a version of the discourse that is going to be on full blast for the next four years, and that’s not going to do much for your heart or mind.

As we all know acutely, it’s much easier to build a group of people through sheer adrenaline and rage who get juiced up on hating other people. Hate is powerful. But then you have this army of haters who want more of that. And yes, that totally works. But that mass of people who want to find who to hate will always find a target.

The reason why an organizer often doesn’t lean heavily into pejorative language (why does that word not have an “r” after “pe”?) is because when you go negative, you are strengthening that muscle, increasing suspicion. Instead, the goal is to bring people into your campaign, not by giving them a list of things that they must hate along with you, but by starting with where they are and attempting to move them and educate them toward your goal while also seeing them as a whole person. This takes a lot longer, but it builds power that can change the world in positive ways. I still believe that. And bringing people in also means that your test for who you’re in community with is wider and flexible, as opposed to narrow and based on tests of who you hate.

The idea is to connect people with bonds of trust and build skills for the long haul in functional groups that can weather all kinds of pressure. And I think we’re gonna need that. This was actually a project I started for myself in 2016, to have a space for hope, and I wrote most of a book that was never published, so what the hell, I’ll put it on Substack!

And this idea, by the way, is the ultimate inspiration for the Nuts and Bolts in the title of this newsletter. I like practical and what next. That grounds me, and we need ground beneath our feet. I’m going to be mentioning a few of mine, and gathering a book list, and pulling out key pieces and quotes that have inspired me.

What’s your favorite book or approach on the topic of community organizing?