Back in 2023, we wrote about one model for doing this, called “co-enforcement.” In an interview with Janice Fine, the Rutgers labor professor who coined the term, we explored how the state can empower groups of workers and their organizations to have a formal role in making sure that bosses respect the law. In one respect, it’s a mechanism for expanding grassroots power to enforce labor protections (especially relevant for the majority of workers who do not have unions). But more than that, “co-enforcement” is a way of thinking about what it would mean to have a government that is unafraid to embrace movements as partners in promoting justice.

In our latest article from the Whirlwind Institute, senior research associate Raina Lipsitz profiles some co-enforcement programs that could be enacted in New York City under the administration of new mayor Zohran Mamdani. The article was first published in Jacobin and is copied below.

We hope you enjoy it, and we welcome your thoughts!

Mark and Paul

Mamdani Can Empower Workers Themselves to Enforce Labor Law

Zohran Mamdani can take labor law enforcement beyond traditional mechanisms by empowering workers themselves to enforce the law on the job, building peer education and empowering shop-floor workplace rights monitors.

by Raina Lipsitz

(This article was first published in Jacobin.)

Since Zohran Mamdani took office in New York City at the start of the year, an important question has hung over his administration: Will the new mayor be able to use the power of city government to uphold and advance workers’ rights? Mamdani was elected after taking strongly pro-labor stances, vowing, in the words of his campaign platform, to defend “the right to collective bargaining” while “requiring high-road labor standards” for all workers doing business with the city. At the same time, with state and federal governments possessing most jurisdiction over labor and employment issues, the city’s mandate is limited.

Budgetary constraints are likely the biggest obstacle to the mayor expanding labor law enforcement. During his campaign, Mamdani promised to double the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection’s budget to roughly $135 million. While that vow was at least temporarily walked back due to budget woes, it appears the administration is still trying to follow through on its initial commitment. But regardless of what progress Mamdani makes on that front, his ability to navigate budget limitations should not be his only standard of success.

Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic policy think tank, acknowledged that the mayor’s hands are “somewhat tied” by restrictions on how he can raise revenue, but he added that the administration could create “more visibility, more awareness from the business community, from employers, that the mayor is prioritizing [enforcement]” — and that heightened scrutiny alone could have a “deterrence effect” on violators.

As important as steering adequate resources toward labor law enforcement will be the mayor’s ability to break new ground in pursuing initiatives that bring working people themselves into the process of defending their rights on the job. Indeed, if Mamdani is to become a champion of workers’ rights, this should be a second standard by which he is judged. The idea that workers should have a formal role in shaping and upholding the laws designed to protect them is known as “co-enforcement,” and this represents an expanding field within progressive policymaking, including at the city level.

In recent years, advocates have put forward a variety of suggestions of how New York City could advance on this front and work to establish itself as a laboratory of co-enforcement experiments. Two ideas that Mamdani could pursue are the empowerment of shop-floor workplace monitors and the use of worker leaders as peer educators who uphold labor rights.

* * * * *

Workers as Monitors

In a 2023 article written for the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs entitled “Three Ways New York City Can Prevent Wage Theft,” public policy researcher Nikko Bilitza argued that, while New York State could and should do more to enforce its own labor laws, there was no reason for New York City to wait for the state to act.

One thing the city could do right away, with or without state support, Bilitza wrote, is create a system of workplace monitors composed not only of city labor inspectors but also community allies. Particularly in workplaces not already represented by unions, the involvement of workers’ rights leaders as part of the system would help establish an “on-the-ground presence” to monitor compliance across industries in which violations are rampant.

“If there are workers who are able to stand up and put forward their own solutions and appoint a workplace monitor for themselves,” the city would not necessarily need to pass municipal legislation or spend a great deal of money, Jacquez told me. That may be a sensible route in a place like New York City, he added, “where you already have dense union penetration and some of these more pro-worker organizations and organizers in place.”

Whether monitors operate outside or inside of a particular workplace, he noted, “there’s a lot of different kinds of models this could take, and without legislating a specific one. The biggest obstacle, of course, is the power of employers, and their knee-jerk and reflexive opposition to anything that looks like more scrutiny from their workforce against managers.”

Even in a heavily unionized town like New York City, most workers are not represented by a union. A major advantage of workplace monitors is that they can improve conditions even in nonunion workforces. Lindsay Owens, Groundwork Collaborative’s executive director, argued in a 2021 report that workers should elect monitors who would be trained to identify labor violations, access internal records to check for compliance, and assist workers in identifying and reporting violations.

These monitors would act as a bridge between the relevant labor agency and their specific workplace, freeing up resources for government inspectors, protecting vulnerable workers from retaliation, and leveling the playing field for law-abiding employers. Though Groundwork acknowledges that monitors are no substitute for unions, monitors have the potential to improve working conditions for large groups of workers who currently lack formal representation.

There are successful precedents for workplace monitor programs. In the early 2000s, the New York State attorney general established a Greengrocer Code of Conduct under which employers could secure limited liability for past violations in exchange for submitting to regular third-party monitoring of compliance with labor law. Another example Bilitza cited is that of a construction-sector monitoring system implemented by the city of Austin, Texas, in partnership with the Workers Defense project. Austin developers were offered an expedited building-permit review process in exchange for creating good jobs and submitting to regular monitoring of compliance with applicable labor laws.

Advocates argue that New York City could implement a workplace monitoring system in industries with higher rates of violations, such as construction and the food service sector. The city could require monitors as part of its public contracting or permitting processes, or as a remedial measure to bring high-violation companies and industries into compliance. Monitors trained by workers’ centers could be among those eligible to serve. And empowering workers to elect monitors directly would ensure their independence from management.

Of course, monitoring programs can only be effective if problems are taken seriously once uncovered. Janice Fine, a professor of labor studies who leads the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University, argues that, ideally, worker monitors themselves should be given power to initiate processes that result in immediate remedies. In cases involving just a few workers, Fine recommends that “workers would raise violations directly with their employer supported by a written letter from the trainer or training organization. The letter would state the relevant legal requirements, the alleged violations, and the steps required to come into compliance.” In more severe cases of labor violations that involve many workers, Fine argues that a system should be put in place whereby abuses identified by monitors trigger expedited action by the city’s Office of Labor Policy and Standards for Workers or relevant state agencies.

* * * * *

“We Are the Best People to Render Solutions”

A second idea is to use worker-leaders as peer educators to spread awareness of labor laws and enforce a higher level of compliance. In a February 2026 paper entitled “Mass Worker Education: Governing from the Shopfloor,” Nantina Vgontzas, assistant professor of labor studies at the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies, and sociologist Sanjay Pinto, who studies strategies for building worker power, proposed institutionalizing the role of peer educators in implementing worker protections.

Because peer educators are “uniquely positioned” to share insights about employers’ exploitative practices, Vgontzas and Pinto argued, they could have a distinctive and valuable role to play in lifting labor standards in New York City. In particular, the two authors laid out possibilities for peer education to build training capacity among warehouse workers and parcel delivery drivers. Administered in partnership with unions and community groups, such a program would strengthen the role of people with firsthand knowledge of workplace practices in enforcing new laws that address industry abuses.

As with workplace monitors, the peer-educator proposal addresses the challenges of organizing workplaces in a country with historically low union density. “There are multiple sectors where peer education has been this linchpin,” Vgontzas said.

For example, the peer-educator model has served New York City–based domestic workers well, she argued. The We Rise nanny training program, launched in 2017, uses peer education to heighten awareness of working conditions for New York’s nannies. As Vgontzas and Pinto write, the training has “expanded the program to cover other sectors, training hundreds of nannies, cleaners, and home health aides, as well as day laborers and farmworkers.”

In terms of further workplaces that could be prioritized in New York City, Vgontzas noted that the use of exploitative algorithmic management practices has helped fuel organizing efforts in warehousing and parcel shipping — including among Amazon Labor Union-International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1 and Teamsters Local 804 — and that these developments make this industry an apt target for a peer education program. The Warehouse Workers Protection Act, a state law that was passed in 2022 but subsequently weakened, established limited labor protections for workers in certain warehouse distribution centers. Vgontzas believes that formal peer-educator programs in warehouses across New York City could build on these initial steps forward.

Pinto said that his and Vgontzas’s call for peer-educator programs in New York City was partly inspired by the success of a program led by “promotoras” in combatting sexual harassment and violence in California’s janitorial industry. Promotoras were conceived of as a type of peer educator with direct knowledge of workplace conditions.

Indeed, many workers in the program had experienced sexual harassment or assault firsthand. As the Guardian reported in 2019, “Nearly 100 janitors are currently trained as promotoras, ready to start going into workplaces to conduct trainings with fellow workers.” The report quoted worker-leaders who contended that the program was an essential means of making employers take a preventative approach to these issues and argued, “We are the best people to render solutions.”

Vgontzas and Pinto report that they are currently working with the New York City Council to draft legislation to support mass worker education. Pinto contends that expanding peer-educator programs could help spread awareness of the law and “how people can effectively avail themselves of their rights,” adding that it is “not necessarily addressing all aspects of enforcement” but laying important foundations to build “an effective environment for enforcement.”

Rutgers’s Professor Fine argues that the key to strengthening such programs is ensuring that peer education programs explicitly emphasize the importance of organizing and collective action. “If you really want to stop the violations, then any training needs to talk with workers about how they can get together to go to their employer and request a change,” Fine says. Peer education that does not link to organizing efforts being pursued by unions and workers’ centers, she believes, is a huge missed opportunity, given that the rights to organize and collectively bargain for change are key legal protections enshrined in labor law.

* * * * *

Expanding Workers’ Role in Public Policy

Beyond specific enforcement measures, Pinto says he has also been pondering a broader question: “How do you build different kinds of governing models so that actors in civil society feel more empowered to participate in the governing process, and how do you build the infrastructure so that [it’s more durable], so it’s not just dependent on having someone who’s progressive in power?”

He is not the only person considering these questions. Experiments in co-enforcement are part of the wider set of practices known as “co-governance,” through which grassroots and social movement groups are looking to play larger roles in the governing process, rather than just relying on elected champions to act on their behalf. In recent months, Mamdani made the novel move of appointing a director of co-governance to serve in his administration, under his newly founded Office of Mass Engagement. The position is tasked with “transforming relationships with the community moving from engagement to empowering communities to govern with the Administration” and with “establishing formal structures that bring base-building organizations into the inception and implementation of co-governance initiatives.”

Among other personnel choices that suggest that Mamdani is looking to expand grassroots involvement in the protection of workers’ rights is the appointment of Julie Su as his Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice. As labor commissioner for the state of California, Su had endorsed the idea of working together with community groups on enforcement, lending credibility to a number of pioneering initiatives being developed in the state.

In the realm of workers’ rights, labor scholars argue that there is room for substantive involvement of workers themselves at multiple points in the process of upholding labor standards. This is what Fine calls “thick” co-enforcement.

“Some state agencies will give grants to community organizations to do education with workers, to do ‘Know Your Rights’ trainings,” Fine has explained. “That’s all well and good, but it’s not nearly enough. We’re arguing that at every stage of an investigation into workplace abuses, workers’ organizations have a significant role to play.”

This ranges from providing strategic research and on-the-ground reporting about conditions at companies that are violating the law, to helping inspectors access workers who might otherwise be hesitant to talk to government representatives who appear at a workplace, to making sure that remedies for labor law violations are actually carried out after they are ordered.

Amid tight city budgets, it remains to be seen what the Mamdani administration will be able to accomplish in terms of prioritizing workers’ rights. But the extent to which it is able to meaningfully enlist working people and their organizations in the process of labor enforcement will form a critical part of its legacy.

Raina Lipsitz is a senior research associate at the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. She is the author of The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics.

(This article was first published in Dissent.)

Stroll down a street in New York City and you are likely to see Zohran Mamdani’s face beaming from a window. Campaign posters still decorate bodegas, coffee shops, and apartments six months after the mayoral election, a reminder of the energy that propelled the young democratic socialist to victory back in November.

Mamdani now wants to harness his campaign’s grassroots energy to help fulfill his governing agenda. On election night, the incoming mayor alluded to Governor Mario Cuomo’s adage that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. “If that must be true,” Mamdani countered, “let the prose we write still rhyme.” For many politicians, campaigning in poetry means inviting widespread participation and inspiring volunteers to get involved in building a vigorous electoral push. In contrast, governing in prose means demobilization. Those once-fired-up volunteers are invited to sit back and take a breather while the professionals handle the dirty details of public policy and administration.

Of course, there is a big problem with this conventional approach, which the new mayor is seeking to disown. Absent the broad-based engagement that can fuel improbable campaigns like Mamdani’s, insurgent politicians can find themselves with limited tools at their disposal once they take office—tools that would provide the leverage needed to combat the power of entrenched interests and moneyed lobbies working to prevent change. With their army of supporters put to rest, or possibly even disbanded, politicians’ capacity to deliver on past promises is often greatly diminished. The post-election fate of Barack Obama’s Organizing for America—an impressively robust mobilization that fueled the president’s 2008 campaign but then was unceremoniously put to pasture—should come to mind here, although it is hardly the only cautionary precedent.

In seeking to “rhyme” his governing with his grassroots campaign, Mamdani instead is aiming to keep New Yorkers engaged in fighting for the type of left politics of affordability he spoke movingly about during his remarkable candidacy. The internal discord and uncertain future of Our Time, an independent organization which was meant to keep Zohran’s large network of campaign volunteers active but which has experienced staff shakeups over the last few weeks, suggests that the mayor and his supporters have not fully cracked the code on how to avoid demobilization. And yet they have hardly given up.

Speaking in front of a crowd of tenant organizers in the Bronx on April 29, Mamdani announced a new city initiative called Organize NYC, designed to bring a grassroots base into the guts of the governing process. “We want the voices of working class New Yorkers,” the mayor said, “to be the driving forces behind the decisions that shape their lives.”

As Mamdani explained at the event, the first mission of Organize NYC will be to turn out thousands of New Yorkers to testify at the public hearings of the Rent Guidelines Board ahead of its June meeting to vote on whether or not to increase the cost of rent-stabilized apartments. “Freeze the rent” became a memorable call-and-response chant at Mamdani’s rallies, and this vote represents a clear chance Mamdani has to fulfill one of his signature campaign promises. With roughly 69 percent of New Yorkers renting their homes—more than half of whom qualify as rent-burdened—there is deep hunger for relief in a city that is quickly becoming unaffordable for working-class New Yorkers. Organize NYC can be a vehicle for giving greater voice to demands for action around affordability.

* * * * *

A new office takes shape

Organize NYC is the first major project to come out of the city’s new Office of Mass Engagement, created by executive order on Mamdani’s second day as mayor. The office promised to “serve as a constant drumbeat within City government to ensure that New Yorkers’ needs and perspectives are integrated into all elements of New York City government.”

The office was a statement that the Mamdani administration’s approach to governance might differ from those of his predecessors: Instead of “I know what I’m doing,” Mayor Mamdani seemed to say, “I need your help.” In particular, the office was tasked with leading campaigns that “organize New Yorkers to participate in City decision-making,” creating new channels through which residents could provide feedback to government, and reaching “communities that have historically been excluded from policymaking.”

Crucial to this reimagining of participation in city affairs is Tascha Van Auken, the architect of Mamdani’s massive field program that knocked on an estimated 3 million doors during the 2025 election. Van Auken is taking an organizer’s approach to her new role as commissioner of the Office of Mass Engagement. She cites Marshall Ganz, the storied organizer of both farmworkers and Obama’s 2008 volunteers, as a major influence on her theory for how to get people involved in the political process: “Treating people like smart people who have agency, who can be there or not,” she told the New Yorker, “asking people to step up and lead, so it’s not about me, it’s not about one person being a leader.” Not coincidentally, Van Auken’s language mirrors a central slogan from Bernie Sanders, for whom she was a volunteer during his 2016 presidential campaign: “Not me, us.”

In the months since it was first unveiled, the Office of Mass Engagement has been fairly quiet about how its planned projects would go further than pre-existing city outreach programs. The New Yorker profile of Van Auken in early April explored her path to political activism, but it was light on details about what precisely she aimed to accomplish in her new position. Likewise, a story published in Hell Gate noted that the office has intentionally taken its time to find its bearings, with Mamdani expressing his desire to give Van Auken “more than five minutes before she gets into the position to have to answer some of the specifics around budget and personnel.”

Organize NYC, which will run neighborhood canvasses in five areas of the city with high concentrations of rent-stabilized housing, offers a first clarifying glimpse into what types of campaigns Van Auken’s office will undertake. However, it also raises questions of its own about the purpose of such mobilization.

* * * * *

A theory of mass engagement

Having won the election, Mamdani was able to appoint six members to the Rent Guidelines Board in February, giving his supporters a majority. Presumably, the Mayor has his votes lined up. If Zohran wants a rent freeze, there is good reason to believe he would win it without much of a struggle.

Why, then, mobilize renters en masse to testify ahead of the board’s final vote in June?

The first answer is that people feel more committed to public policies that they have actively fought for and won than those they may have received passively. As professor and labor strategist Eric Blanc recently argued, if Mamdani focuses merely on “delivering” for his base without building power, he risks limiting his ability to secure greater gains.

This has consequences for the wider left. “Even the most principled, charismatic, and competent leftist politicians on their own can only deliver so much as long as working people stay on the sidelines,” Blanc wrote. “And since most of our candidates elsewhere won’t be able to rely on Zohran’s astronomic charm, nor the same level of media attention. . . . We need all anti-corporate officials, Zohran included, to use their platforms and positions to directly encourage and funnel ordinary people into mass democratic organizations and wide-scale campaigns for change.”

A second answer is related but distinct: Not only does an activated base make it possible to win more, it makes it more likely that those gains can be defended against future rollback. As Sumathy Kumar, managing director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, and Gianpaolo Baiocchi, director of the Urban Democracy Lab, contended in a January article in Jacobin, people feeling genuinely invested in the process of governance allows us to “weather serious attacks from hostile federal, state, and city politicians, as well as a panicking capitalist class who will use every lever imaginable” to thwart progress.

We already know what happens when politicians don’t ask much of their grassroots base. Under President Biden, Democrats passed some substantially redistributive policy measures, a key example being the expanded child tax credit. Described by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein as “the single best policy of the Biden era,” the credit pulled millions of children out of poverty during the Covid pandemic and put thousands of dollars back into the pockets of working families. Democrats assumed—indeed, were banking on—the idea that the policy would prove so popular among voters that large constituencies would continue voting blue in order to make the tax credit permanent. Instead, the measure died along with much of the Biden agenda when Senator Joe Manchin refused to vote for the Build Back Better Act. Some observers even speculated that voters ended up blaming Democrats for letting the credit expire and punished the party at the polls in 2024.

Mamdani’s approach with the Office of Mass Engagement embodies the idea that it is not enough to win elections, or even to successfully implement discrete policies. In order to create change that endures, the government needs the ongoing, organized support of the public.

* * * * *

The limits of government directing movements

There is a certain respect in which the Organize NYC initiative might be described as curiously depoliticized. While the first initiative is working to get people to attend public hearings, it is not giving them talking points on what to say. And the Mamdani administration is inviting participation from landlords as well as tenants. Clearly, there is fear that if the City Hall is perceived as using public funds to influence the result of the Rent Guidelines Board’s decision, it could open itself to legal challenges from the real estate lobby.

Then again, the fact that Zohran made his announcement of the project amidst a gaggle of progressive organizers suggests that the initiative is not entirely impartial. This is a point that the conservative New York Post latched onto in its predictably scathing assessment of the Mayor’s announcement. The paper quoted a “real estate source” who labelled Mamdani’s approach as “disingenuous” at best. “You are standing with Cea Weaver, one of the most notable tenants’ rights activists who has called for rent freezes for years, but yeah, we aren’t advocating for anything,” the anonymous source quipped.

Pushing against the limits of what is perceived as acceptably “political” within the confines of city government will be one continuing challenge for the Office of Mass Engagement. Another will be what to do when movements become unruly or even adversarial with their erstwhile allies in government.

Activist mobilizations are notoriously bad at taking marching orders from centralized political structures, such as parties and government administrations. Politicians like having a cheering section to support their preferred policies. But a mobilized base that might challenge their priorities or reject as inadequate the compromises that they painstakingly craft is another matter. The idea that powerful elected officials might secretly welcome having outside agitators “make them do it” is a myth. The historical record shows politicians are more often irked and offended by rowdy movements that they cannot control than pleased at the prospect of being made to do anything. For this reason, tensions may be inevitable. As an “insider” body established to encourage outside pressure, the Office of Mass Engagement faces a contradiction that it will need to reckon with in a continued way as it expands and builds its activities.

Nevertheless, in launching Organize NYC as a flagship initiative, the office is furthering an important new model of how to incorporate a vocal citizenry into the process of governance. And the success of its experiment will have implications for the left that resonate far outside the borders of the five boroughs.

—Mark Engler, an editorial board member of Dissent, is co-director of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center.

—Matthew Miles Goodrich is a senior research analyst at the Whirlwind Institute and a board director of Sunrise Movement. His writing can be found at The Nation, Dissent, and his blog, Completely Different.

Dear friends and readers,

With this e-mail, we offer a formal welcome to the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center! Over the past year, my brother Paul and I have started a slow rollout of our new think tank (I’m told this is called a “soft launch”). The creation of this Substack was part of that process. We’ve also been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to create infrastructure and formally establish a nonprofit organization. But because most of this was not public-facing, things haven’t felt very official… until now.

Today, we are pleased to announce that our full website is live and accessible to the public. You can check it out here!

We hope that the site gives a good sense of the work we’re doing and the strategy research we’re pursuing to help social movements win. For the first time, we’ve compiled dozens of articles spanning many years into seven project areas: social movement ecology, momentum and mass protest, inside-outside strategy, impact tracking, ideology, movement history, and alternatives.

Within each project area we discuss the key debates, questions, and challenges that social movements face. For example, in our mass protest section, you can read about the power and perils of polarization, the characteristics that define moments of the whirlwind, the uses of symbolic and instrumental demands in protests, the importance of incubation in seeding new movements, and much more. In our section on inside-outside politics, you can read about ideas such as non-reformist reforms, dissensus, realignment, and the Overton Window, as well as how to stop politicians from selling out.

In addition to long-form articles and in-depth reports, we are also writing pieces relevant to breaking news events, like our latest article in The Guardian about civil resistance against ICE in Minneapolis.

What you see now on the website is just a start. Our hope is to expand and make available more practical movement theory – analysis that both helps to illuminate how social movements combat injustice and offers organizers useful frameworks for thinking about their work. We look forward to adding more webinars and podcasts to the site, as well as additional handouts for use in group discussions and trainings.

Even though the Whirlwind Institute is a brand new initiative, the content on the site reflects almost two decades of writing, advising, and intellectual work. It is very satisfying for us to house all of these ideas under one roof and to be in ongoing dialogue with people who are experimenting with putting them into practice. In this sense, the Whirlwind Institute is both a culmination of years of effort as well as a new beginning.

We hope you will click through the site and explore the pages. If you would like to support our work, you can sign up to be a paid subscriber to our Substack. Donations by paid subscribers allow us to freely offer our content so that anyone, anywhere in the world, can learn more about strategies for social change.

We look forward to hearing your comments, feedback, and ideas for what we should do next!

Yours,

Mark and Paul

In conjunction with the release of our new Tenth Anniversary Edition of This Is An Uprising, we are pleased to report that The Guardian has just published a commentary we wrote about the power of mass non-cooperation and its importance in the defense of democracy! The essay draws from our new preface to the book, and we are pleased to share an excerpt below.

Check out the full article at this link:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/15/defeat-trump-mass-non-cooperation

In the essay, we write:

The article also includes wise words from Frances Fox Piven, who reminds us: “Agitation and rising up from people at the bottom are good for democracy. They nourish democracy.”

To get your copy of the Tenth Anniversary Edition of This Is An Uprising, visit Amazon here, or Bookshop.org here, or Barnes & Noble here.

We hope you enjoy the commentary, and we look forward to hearing from you!

Mark and Paul

The Key to Defeating Trump? Mass Non-Cooperation

Studying the field of civil resistance gives insight into the level of popular organizing needed to repel assaults on democracy

By Mark Engler and Paul Engler

(Full article available at The Guardian.)

In the wake of two horrifying killings of legal observers in Minnesota, on top of the abduction of countless immigrant community members, the country has reached a turning point. Backlash against ICE’s lawlessness and aggression has reverberated so loudly that even Trump has heard it. But the effects on ordinary Americans contemplating what they would do if they lived in Minneapolis or St Paul is perhaps even more profound.

The extraordinary level of grassroots solidarity and creative resistance in anti-ICE protests in Minnesota has given people a new appreciation for the power that mass non-cooperation can have in resisting the Trump administration’s drive toward authoritarianism. And it has created an awareness of why such action is clearly needed.

Early in Trump’s second term, an array of mainstream critics expressed skepticism about the value of continued protests in the streets. They invested their faith in institutions such as Congress and the courts. But as these institutions – along with law firms, universities and the business community – have each caved in to the administration’s demands and proven themselves unwilling to catalyze an ardent defense of democracy, it has been left to the people themselves to do this essential work.

The Twin Cities were not the first to stand up. We have seen robust resistance in Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, Washington DC, and other metropolitan areas previously targeted by ICE or occupied by federal troops. In the past year, there have been huge No Kings marches and coordinated consumer actions such as Tesla Takedown. But Minnesota has raised the stakes and expanded public awareness of what a community-wide refusal to submit can look like.

As more people consider joining in such acts of refusal, it is important to recognize that they can build on a rich history of past action. While popular revolt is often treated as wholly spontaneous and emotional, there is a whole body of study exploring how mass protest can be deployed in a deliberate and strategic manner – a field with rich insights that new participants can draw from today.

A decade ago, we wrote a book called This Is An Uprising, about the evolution of the theory and practice of nonviolent direct action over the past 100 years. More recently, in preparing a new and expanded 10th anniversary edition, we reflected on how the field known as “civil resistance” has changed since the Barack Obama era. This meant examining how the craft of mass mobilization has become ever more important in the face of growing tyranny, in the US and beyond.

Today, we need democratic uprisings that are bold enough to confront the scale of the crisis we now face and strategic enough to outmaneuver the systems that created it. For this reason, looking at lessons from the field of civil resistance is vital….

Continue reading here at The Guardian!

—Mark and Paul Engler are co-directors of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. A new and expanded 10th anniversary edition of their book This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century has just been released.

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Dear friends and readers,

This is an exciting week for us because it marks the official release of the Tenth Anniversary Edition of This Is An Uprising! We are pleased to announce that this new and expanded version is now out in the world and available for purchase. (You can order a copy on Bookshop.org here, on Barnes & Noble here, or on Amazon here.)

If you’ve always wanted to read the book but never got around to it, now is a fine occasion to correct that grievous oversight!! Alternately, if you’ve enjoyed This Is An Uprising in the past, this is a great chance to buy it as a gift or recommend to others. In the Tenth Anniversary Edition, we’ve added a new preface and afterward where we address our current political moment and also discuss some key developments in the field of civil resistance over the past ten years. The edition also includes a kind introduction by Bill McKibben.

It has been a great honor over the past decade to hear from readers who have benefitted from the book and to be in dialogue with organizers who have experimented with and expanded on the ideas that we write about. For the new edition, we reflect on some of these conversations and we write about how our own histories as activists led us to think about momentum-driven organizing in the first place.

As we write in the preface:

“This Is an Uprising was born from the belief that the dynamism of explosive mass protests could be fused with the strategic discipline of long-term organizing—and that the result could be a wave of revitalized social movements equal to the grave challenges we face in our country and our world.

“In the ten years since the book was first published, we have been overwhelmed with the response it has received and by the number of people who have been moved to participate in the pursuit of this vision. Even in dark times, this project gives hope that a better future can be won, not through the intervention of elites but through the dedicated and collective efforts of a mobilized citizenry insistent on social and economic justice….

“As an opening to this new edition, we wanted to take the opportunity to comment on the personal and historical origins of this book, as well as on how it speaks to the challenges of the present day. At a moment when free speech, democratic governance, and the social safety net in the United States have all come under fearsome assault by the second Trump administration, we believe the book is more relevant than ever—and that the organizing strategies it describes are urgently needed in the fight against growing authoritarianism….

“Today we need democratic uprisings that are bold enough to confront the scale of the crisis we now face and strategic enough to outmaneuver the systems that created it. To promote this, we need resources that can guide those building outside of mainstream channels dominated by lawyers, lobbyists, and electoral consultants. We are honored to offer the tenth anniversary edition of This Is an Uprising as one such resource. If its readers are moved to act, rooting their hope in the craft and artistry of movement building, we will have achieved an important goal.”

In the coming weeks, we hope to send out some tie-in articles and additional material related to the tenth anniversary release. In the meantime, you can find below the official book description and a link to the website we set up for the book.

We hope you’ll check out the new edition, and we look forward to hearing from you!

Mark and Paul

https://thisisanuprising.org/about/

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

In a book that has become a modern classic of social movement organizing, Mark and Paul Engler explain that there is a craft to uprising—and that this craft can change the world.

From protests around climate change and immigrant rights, to #BlackLivesMatter and movements to defend democracy, a new generation is unleashing strategic nonviolent action to shape public debate and force political change. While mass movements are often portrayed as spontaneous and unpredictable, Mark and Paul Engler explore the hidden art behind such outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest.

Now updated with new material discussing the major mobilizations of the past decade—including #MeToo, protests for racial and climate justice, and anti-Trump resistance—This Is an Uprising shows how new protest movements can be essential in fighting authoritarianism and advancing social and economic justice today.

Available here, here, and here!

Last year, we wrote about the five key traits that characterize peak surges in social movements, or what we refer to as “moments of the whirlwind”: They are set off by trigger events that polarize the public. They draw in new participants from outside established organizational structures. They give rise to a rash of viral and decentralized action. They come in waves. And they leave behind an altered political terrain when they subside.

We have repeatedly argued that these moments are critical because they are vital in shaping political identities and mobilizing public opinion. During these whirlwinds, it often seems that the ordinary rules of social engagement are suspended and new possibilities instead come to the fore. We are seeing that now in Minneapolis.

In a widely circulated “Call to Action from Minnesota Organizers,” local leader Doran Schrantz writes: “I have learned as much or more about organizing in the past 10 days as I have learned in the past 10 years. I have learned that people will take great, great risks to defend themselves, their neighbors and one another. I have learned that our job as ‘architects’ is to build the larger containers for people to act and, when the moment calls for it, they absolutely will. I have learned so much about courage in the face of great fear, real threat and extreme uncertainty.”

Today, we are pleased to be able to share the following on-the-ground account from Minneapolis, written by our friend, the poet and activist Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs. Aaron describes the experience of living through this intense moment, the palpable fear and terror that Trump’s assault has created, but also the remarkable sense of community and solidarity that has emerged: “[A]ll of the organizations seem to be overwhelmed by the numbers of people wanting to volunteer,” he writes, “and I have heard and seen countless examples of everyday folks acting and speaking with love and moral clarity.”

We hope you enjoy this first-person report. For more, make sure to subscribe to Aaron’s substack here.

In solidarity,

Mark and Paul

Report from Minneapolis -- Friday, January 16th

“We have whistles, they have guns.”

by Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs

(published on Substack)

I’ve connected with a group here that is organizing volunteers around mutual aid/material support: buying and delivering groceries, rent support, giving people rides (in Palestine we would have called this “protective accompaniment”). They’ve been overwhelmed with volunteers, an explosion of support in just a few days, and I’ve joined the team that is reviewing applications and interviewing applicants. Although this slows down the expansion of our work, it’s a necessity, for reasons of safety. We have to be very clear about the environment in which we’re working. It’s a scary and sad reality we face, and we have to protect ourselves in the ways that we can. It’s unsettling, to say the least, to have to take into account that someone who approaches as a volunteer might in actual fact be someone with harmful intentions — but that’s the reality we’re living in.

In this process of getting connected and learning how to participate, I’ve been teaming up with a neighbor and fellow Zen student, who is also named Aaron. This is one of the big lessons — that there is safety in numbers, and our strength resides in building relationships founded on trust…

Today we’ve been co-working at a Somali cafe not far from my apartment. This morning I met someone who has been working to organize people who do their jobs remotely (like me) to work from establishments like this, in the most impacted neighborhoods — to be a presence, to pay attention, and be prepared to witness and document (to be a human rights/legal observer). This was the core of the work that we did with International Solidarity Movement, Community Peacemaker Teams, and others in Palestine in 2014 — witnessing, documenting, maintaining a visible presence.

Doing this work is so uplifting. In spite of everything, I’m surprised to find myself mostly feeling hopeful and inspired. In this regard, two big things in my mind and heart:

1) The outpouring of support, love, and courage here in the Twin Cities — all of the organizations seem to be overwhelmed by the numbers of people wanting to volunteer, and I have heard and seen countless examples of everyday folks acting and speaking with love and moral clarity. Not to mention the creativity and ingenuity of this culture of nonviolent resistance that has emerged here. To quote Becca Good (Renee Good’s wife): “We have whistles, they have guns.” Last night we hosted a sharing session at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. The room was packed, with another two dozen joining online — and mostly new faces! In the midst of this war zone, I am surrounded by people like myself — unwilling to be frightened into submission, denial and despair, to turn away. Instead, we are becoming stronger. Our resolve is growing deeper, taking root. We are becoming empowered, learning how to make use of our privileges and resources to protect each other, to organize, to witness and document and communicate the reality of what is happening here, to resist and impede our government’s capacity to harm our communities.

2) I realized something important yesterday, as I was reading perspective from some of my favorite, trusted communicators (Rebecca Solnit, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich) — as scary, dangerous, and harmful as this moment is, what the violence and lawlessness of this administration represents is not strength, but weakness. I see that it’s still true, what we were taught — strength in governance comes from our consent, our participation. And consent is founded on trust. We trust our leaders when we see that they are truthful, that they act in good faith to carry out the work that we have entrusted them with — that they are in fact what they have promised to be: public servants.

Realize: this administration, and the MAGA movement that empowers it, is smaller than we are, in every respect — in numbers, in vision, and in means. The vision of a world ruled by violence, designed to protect the interests of a few, is a small vision, with few resources and no foundation. It has no foundation in law, or in modern democratic norms and values, is unconstitutional and antithetical to the foundational principles of our country. It has no intellectual substance — its ideas and arguments are spurious, incoherent, dissonant in every way with its own professed values. It has no empathy, no capacity for awareness of the interdependent reality of human society, or the ecosystem of life on our planet. It has no science, no philosophy, no insight, no art, no poetry, no spirituality. While this makes it dangerous and harmful, it also reveals weakness, an essential and inevitable fragility. This is a terrible time we are navigating, but the vision that drives it has no real future. It is self-defeating and self-destructive.

Witness how the tide of public opinion is rapidly shifting, gathering momentum. Recent polling is striking. As of Jan. 12, polling by The Economist/YouGov reveals that more Americans now oppose ICE than support it. Only 34% now believe that ICE is making us more safe. 46% support abolishing ICE altogether, versus 43% who oppose abolition. While it is true that support for ICE is still far, far greater than it should be, in our modern political environment, the age of “alternative facts” and razor-thin margins in every election, these numbers are very significant, and trending — truth is trending, reality is trending.

73% of Americans oppose invading Greenland. 62% of Americans heard and believed Trump the many times he said he wants to take Venezuela’s oil, and a majority oppose it (a majority of us oppose U.S. military intervention in Venezuela in general, and rightly believe that such actions require Congressional approval). More Americans disapprove of the administration’s actions on every specific issued polled, and a majority believe that the country’s international standing has been damaged since Trump took office. More Americans than not view Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and JFK Jr. unfavorably. Americans’ biggest concerns are around the economy, inflation, jobs, and health care, and more believe the economy is getting worse. Americans oppose Trump’s tariffs.

Returning to ICE, the poll shows that more Americans view the killing of Renee Good as unjustified. More Americans believe that Minnesota’s state government should not have been excluded from the investigation. 73% of those polled believe that ICE agents should be required to be uniformed when making arrests, and a majority believe that they should not be allowed to wear masks. The poll asked people to rate their confidence in a variety of institutions. 49% registered the lowest possible confidence (“very little”) in ICE (second only to the news media, at 52%). Americans currently trust the CIA more than we trust ICE.

The ICE insurgency is a performance of strength, a desperate raising of the stakes by a ruling cabal that knows how tenuous its position is, and has only one tool in its toolbox. But it isn’t working. Instead, it is rapidly destroying the support and legitimacy that strong governance requires. More and more Americans are seeing this administration for what it is — lawless, reckless, amoral, selfish, cruel, and stupid — a complete and obvious betrayal of every principle and value of democracy, the U.S. Constitution, international law, and every value that MAGA culture has claimed for itself, not to mention promise after broken promise.

The mask has slipped, the curtain has blown open, revealing nothing more than a bully — a small, frightened creature frantically groping at all the levers and pulleys of the State — turning it into a clumsy, violent machine thundering blindly across the country and the rest of the world, capable only of chaos, violence, and insatiable greed — it destroys and it devours. It creates nothing.

But this machine is fueled by trust, by consent, by legitimacy — by us. And we are depriving it. And it will run out.

Please witness what is happening in Minnesota. Please connect with us, share and amplify our voices, all the photos and videos, the firsthand accounts, the reality of this moment — listen to the people who are here. Drown the Big Lie in the light of truth. In this regard, I’ve been thinking a lot about the U.S. Civil Rights movement — it’s one of my touchstones for understanding what is happening now, and how we need to respond. Remember how the Civil Rights movement created change — by withdrawing consent from injustice, enduring the violent reaction by the powers that be, in their effort to create submission — and holding that up for the whole world to see. By doing that, they deprived denial of its fuel, they made injustice impossible to ignore. So the whole country saw, and each person had to confront what was seen, in heart, mind, and conscience — and in seeing, in seeing the faces and voices of the real people who are being hurt, and seeing the agents of that violence in action, the reality of our situation confronts us, and forces us to choose.

In the midst of writing this, I heard the sound of whistles and car horns outside, close by — the sound of caring neighbors raising the alarm: Protect yourself, ICE is here, and also Come and witness, and document, and protect. This happens all over the city now, all the time. I wear my boots indoors now, all the time — it takes too long to put them on. I wear a whistle around my neck.

Even so, by the time we got outside, they were gone. I spoke with a pair of young women who had also come out of the cafe. They said they had some whistles they wanted to donate. I explained that the cafe’s owner had asked for some — their supply had run out a couple of days ago. The women told me they were headed to a high school in the neighborhood — the school day would be ending soon, and they were going to join the group that had organized to watch and protect the kids. I’ve been looking for a chance to get started with this, to learn how to help in this way.

And help is urgently needed because, on January 7, Border Patrol agents (it is not just ICE now) attacked the school at dismissal time, just a few hours after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good.

Picture it. School is getting out. Kids are beginning to trickle outside. Suddenly, men in camo that says Border Patrol are here, jumping out of SUVs with assault rifles. Now people are yelling. A lot of people are outside now. Nobody knows why they are here, they’re not saying anything. There’s a lot of shouting but it doesn’t make any sense. You see them smash the window of a car. You see them pushing people, you see them tackle one of the teachers. Now there is tear gas in the air and its hard to see and you try to wipe your eyes but it makes it worse and snot’s all over your face — later on cbsnews.com you read that “a chemical irritant was deployed.” You see them put the teacher in a van and drive away. They shot and killed a woman earlier, over by Powderhorn Park, a lot of people were talking about it. Later you read Homeland Security saying they didn’t do anything wrong, they were chasing somebody and they didn’t target any kids or teachers but somebody assaulted them and people were throwing stuff. One of your friends shares a video on YouTube later — somebody threw a snowball at an agent, so he shoots tear gas at everybody. You read in the news where DHS says they did not use tear gas. They said they used “targeted crowd control” but they didn’t say what that meant. Then school was cancelled for the rest of the week, for the whole city, because that was they only thing they could do to try to keep us safe.

* * * * *

Driving to the school, I suddenly notice a change in the atmosphere — I see one, and then another, and then more police cars, parked here and there on the road. I habitually use GPS, and at the moment I don’t know the name of the street I’m on, or my direction of travel. Traffic is getting thick, and slow. I see a man standing in the street, a few feet out from the curb, holding up his camera, filming. I stop my car, roll down the window. “Hi, what’s happening?” I ask him. He pauses, looks me in the eye for a moment, starts to speak, then stops. He tries again: “This is where Renee Good was killed.” I nod, understanding. “Take care,” he says, and means it. In half a block, I am passing the site I have seen over and over on my computer screen, a memorial now, the street covered in flowers, messages of grief, images of Renee. A few people are there, standing quietly, one lights a votive candle.

I park my car a block from the school. Everything looks fine, the street feels calm. It almost feels normal. But I don’t feel normal — whenever I’m outside I’m on high alert now, head on a swivel. Looking at people, assessing people, trying to quickly figure out who they are, what they’re doing. Sometimes I think I see people looking at me this way. I see some people in reflective vests on the corner, and I think maybe that’s who I’m here to find, so I head that way. A huge, khaki-colored vehicle turns the corner and I feel a rush of adrenaline but it turns out just to be somebody’s truck — at least I think so, and I’m not exactly sure why. ICE and Border Patrol drive around the city in unmarked vehicles. There’s a growing database online with photos of known ICE vehicles and license plates.

I was right — the reflective vests are my people. I introduce myself and explain why I’m here, how I got here. Several other people are also new to this. I listen as they get organized. One petite young woman has a lead role today. It’s her first time. I listen and watch and wait, ready to be useful, glad to be here, wanting instructions. She gets on the phone and I hear talk of names and locations — one of the volunteers goes by “Thumper,” I hear a street name, something about a bakery. Nothing I recognize; I’m new to this part of town. Volunteers come and go, heading this way and that way, asking questions, giving information, pointing, explaining. Names and places. A journalist from Public Radio approaches, asks for an interview.

I spend the next hour on that corner, with a young father of two, and an older, awkwardly enthusiastic, childless guy with geeky hobbies (like me). It’s easy to connect with people in this environment, it happens fast. Driven by the urgency of our situation, it feels like people are more open, more aware; trust is established quickly — and accurately, it seems. It feels as though, maybe, deeper instincts have been engaged (engendering a new thought in the back of my mind — Could it always be like this? Without the danger, without the tragedy?).

It stays quiet. The time passes without incident, and now I’ve got to get back to my day job. I shake hands, say goodbye to new friends. I look each one in the eye, and each gives me the same in return — we see each other.

I have to close now, because I’m out of time. Managing time is never my strong suit, but in this moment the feeling of triage, of choices, is exponential. I have to get back to work — my normal work, my paid work. I am far behind schedule, and I see the weekend in front of me, like a frame, and the the things I need to do like pieces of a puzzle that looks impossibly too big to force inside it. But I feel ok about this. It could be that I’m not worried because I’m more aware right now — that I’m not just one person, alone, and isolated, tasked with figuring everything out, making all the right choices, always knowing what to do, and when to do it — today I feel myself taking part in something, a larger flow that is carrying me, and I trust it.

Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs is a Minneapolis-based poet, fiction writer, and activist. His recently launched Substack, Hat on a Hat, explores language and storytelling at the intersection of culture and politics.

Just days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, members of Congress sympathetic to the civil rights hero proposed a federal holiday in his honor. It would take another 15 years and a failed floor vote, however, for Congress to pass the legislation that finally codified a day to commemorate King’s legacy. President Reagan signed the bill into law in 1983 and the first nation-wide MLK Day was celebrated in 1986.

Every third Monday in January since then gives us reason to revisit the life, deeds, and words of Dr. King. As a millennial growing up in the Northeast, I learned about the civil rights champion—and, by proxy, the civil rights movement as a whole—via his speech at the March on Washington in 1963. The famous “I have a dream” refrain served as a staple of my grade school education. But it wasn’t until much later that I learned about the King whose politics extended far beyond the image of the man in popular imagination. In years past, I’ve used MLK Day to re-read his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—where he takes to task the “white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice”—as well as his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, where he reckoned with the achievements and the limits of the movement he led. In 2018, as I was helping to launch the Sunrise Movement, I published an article about King’s commitment to economic justice and his sympathies to democratic socialism.

But one thing that is so valuable about MLK Day is that it provides an opportunity to reflect not only on the legacy of King himself, but also to hold up other heroes of the civil rights movement. There are countless leaders in the movement who helped bend the moral arc of the universe a bit closer towards justice, and this holiday is theirs, too. Here at the Whirlwind Institute, Mark and I have each written about movement leaders who, though less widely known as King, are icons in their own right. Two that we would like to shine light on today are Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer.

* * * * *

In 2020, Mark wrote a piece for The Nation arguing, “It’s Time We Celebrate Ella Baker Day.” As a woman in a chauvinistic society and as a leader who preferred two-way conversations to soaring speeches, Baker was a remarkable figure in the civil rights movement. As Mark writes, “While King is justly remembered as a powerful preacher and rousing orator, a political strategist and practitioner of nonviolent direct action, Baker calls attention to a more specific role: that of the organizer.”

Mark noted:

“[T]he sociologist Charles Payne has argued that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s actually contained two distinct traditions. One he labels ‘the community-mobilizing tradition,’ which was ‘focused on large-scale, relatively short-term public events.’ Payne sees this lineage as ‘best symbolized by the work of Martin Luther King,’ and he includes in it such well-remembered events as the March on Washington and the famous campaigns in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. The second is a tradition of community organizing. This is a lineage, Payne writes, ‘with a different sense of what freedom means and therefore a greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women,’ and it is a tradition best epitomized ‘by the teaching and example of Ella Baker.’”

Baker was indeed a major proponent of what she called the “spadework” of social change, the unglamorous but vital labor an organizer commits to in order to build the leadership of a community. As Mark writes, “Her organizing was about building relationships—about forming deep ties with people who had not necessarily considered themselves part of a political movement before. She instilled in people a belief in their self-worth and ability to lead, and she cultivated their capacities for independent action.”

As a field secretary for the NAACP, Mark writes, Baker hosted training conferences for dozens of young activists throughout the South. One of Baker’s trainees, an Alabamian named Rosa Parks, ended up igniting a key skirmish of the civil rights movement when she refused to cede her seat on a bus to a white man in 1955, an act that became the impetus for an intricately organized community-wide bus boycott. When another protest movement emerged in 1960—this time, among black students sitting in at lunch counters across the South—Baker invited the leaders to a conference at her alma mater, Shaw University. The meeting led to the birth of the storied Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

While Baker can be seen as a great practitioner of the relationship building and leadership development that are the hallmarks of structure-based community organizing, Mark argues that she also had a keen appreciation for mass mobilization as a tool for social change. It is this flexibility that makes Baker a stellar example of an organizer with a sophisticated understanding of what we might today call social movement ecology.

Mark describes a methodological divide that threatened to derail SNCC early on in its existence and the role that Baker played in keeping the movement united:

“Over the course of its first year, SNCC members debated whether to continue to focus on nonviolent direct action or move toward long-term community organizing, and the group threatened to split over the issue. Baker counseled against the divide, and SNCC came to embody both traditions. Its young organizers contributed to confrontational mobilizations such as the 1961 Freedom Rides—in which interracial groups boarded buses to challenge segregation in interstate travel—and the appearance of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City, where the group challenged the legitimacy of its state’s all-white official delegation. At the same time, many of SNCC’s organizers moved to small towns in the South to engage in base-building efforts and found participatory Freedom Schools that would foster local activism for years to come.”

“Today, Baker’s example challenges us, as [biographer Barbara] Ransby puts it, ‘to strike the balance between mass mobilizing and organization-building; between inclusivity and accountability; and between strategic actions and spontaneous ones.’”

It is no easy feat to navigate the pros and cons of different strategies at different inflection points, and Baker’s ability to do so made her an irreplaceable leader in the civil right movement. But just as importantly, she trained others in the same strategic judgment. It is this twin commitment to movement strategy and to leadership development that makes her a legendary organizer.

* * * * *

In 2017, I wrote for Dissent about another of the civil rights movement’s most iconic leaders: Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer. Known within the movement for her generosity of spirit, her love of song, and her common sense witticisms—“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” is etched on her gravestone in Ruleville, Mississippi—she introduced herself to the nation at the Democratic National Convention in 1964 with a story of the violence she faced when she tried to register to vote. As I wrote in 2017, on the 100th anniversary of her birth:

“The youngest of twenty children, Hamer began picking cotton on a sharecropper plantation at the age of six. In 1961, she was involuntarily sterilized when a white doctor surgically excised her uterus. The next year, when the civil rights movement came to Mississippi, Hamer was personally recruited by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s field secretary, Bob Moses, to build a mass base of autonomous local organizers that would become the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party [MFDP]. While returning from a voter registration workshop in 1963, she was arrested in a bus station, thrown in jail, and cudgeled, leaving her with permanent kidney damage. And [at the national convention] in Atlantic City—out of the Delta, out of prison, out of poverty—Hamer led a delegation of poor, rural African-Americans to the DNC to realign America’s political parties.”

That summer, Hamer had come all the way from the Mississippi Delta to New Jersey as a delegate of the Freedom Democratic Party, an alternate slate of civil rights delegates that challenged the legitimacy of the white supremacist Southern Democrats who ruled Mississippi through racial terror. Hamer detailed this terror in front of television cameras at the DNC: “Is this America?” she asked to the committee of Democratic officials who were tasked with adjudicating the challenge, “the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

President Lyndon B. Johnson was so unnerved by the power of her testimony and what it meant for the Democratic Party’s national coalition that he called an impromptu press conference to knock Hamer off the air. The move backfired. Instead of being broadcast live, replays of Hamer’s speech appeared on television sets across the nation during primetime.

I love the story of Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party because of its power as an example of a movement group forcing a key target—in this case, the president of the United States—into a “decision dilemma.” As I wrote:

“The MFDP forced the question: If white supremacists could not be counted upon to support their party’s nominee, what were they doing in the party in the first place?

The Democratic National Convention was the perfect stage to gouge open this rift in the party. ‘If you seat those black buggers,’ Texas governor John Connally warned President Johnson, ‘the whole South will walk out.’ That was, of course, the point.”

Hamer’s response to the compromise that the president offered at the convention—two seats for the MFDP, reserved for a white minister and a middle-class businessmen—was clear and resolute: “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats!”

The outcome of the convention fight was a complex moment for civil rights activists. To this day, various participants and historians debate whether the MFDP should have accepted a brokered deal or did better by sticking with their uncompromising defiance. In the long run, the impact of the delegation’s challenge in Atlantic City is clear: Never again would an all-white Dixiecrat bloc from the South be seated as legitimate representatives of the party. At the time, civil rights organizers were torn about whether they had won enough. Bob Moses, the architect of SNCC’s organizing efforts in Mississippi, later explained to an interviewer that many of the activists, while disgusted with Democratic officialdom, were proud of the statement they had made: “The delegation didn’t feel defeated…how could they? They didn’t get the seats but they ran out the white delegation.”

Last year, I followed up my 2017 article on Hamer with a master’s thesis that explored, in part, the civil rights movement’s quest to realign the Democratic Party by expelling white southern racists. While completing my research, I encountered a story about Hamer that spoke to her straight-talking character. A few months before Atlantic City, the movement in Mississippi was organizing a Freedom Summer to register the state’s poor black population to vote. One of the major questions the organizers debated was whether or not to allow white activists from outside the South to join them. I wrote:

“Inviting white students down to the Delta at all was a controversial decision. The state SNCC chapter refused to integrate its staff in 1962 when urged by the national headquarters. Hanging around white people made them look suspicious, field workers argued. The whites who found their way into the movement in Mississippi were few. Some, like Michael Schwerner and his wife Rita, came in 1963 through different organizations like the Congress for Racial Equality [rather than SNCC itself]. When a SNCC straw poll went against bringing in a flood of white volunteers to support Freedom Summer, it revealed a split within the movement: most of SNCC’s field staff [made up largely of black college students from out of state, many of whom had been active in the sit-ins] opposed bringing on white Northerners, while the local Mississippians welcomed any help they could get. The locals won the argument on the strength of Hamer’s moral clarity: ‘If we’re trying to break the barrier of segregation, we can’t segregate ourselves.’”

Celebrations on MLK Day have a tendency to cast the past in a triumphant light, with each step of the movement leading the country closer to justice. But history shows that those taking action at the time had to deal with difficult—often, life or death—choices. Organizers second guessed their decisions, politicians worked behind the scenes to frustrate the movement’s aims, the leaders themselves frequently felt they were coming up short. Popular history tends to forget the agonizing moments of strategic dispute that threatened to divide the movement: Should SNCC split into different organizations based on theory of change? Should the Mississippi movement welcome white students? Which compromises are worthwhile and which are too much to stomach?

Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer were each present at many such critical moments of strategic decision-making, and their stances influenced the outcome of the movement as a whole. But as important as the specific decisions they made is the example that they set for how to engage in respectful debate, reject the idea of self-isolation in the service of purity, and remain committed to the struggle to win. The standards they demanded of others were ones they held themselves to, with the belief that all could make a worthwhile contribution—not merely those nominated to speak from the podium. As Baker put it, “people have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but themselves.”

—Matthew Miles Goodrich is a Senior Research Analyst at the Whirlwind Institute. A founding member and board director of Sunrise Movement, he is a writer, strategist, and institution builder. His writing can be found at The Nation, Dissent, and his blog, Completely Different.

Here at the Whirlwind Institute, we are looking forward to an exciting 2026 with the launch of several new projects. In February, our publisher Bold Type Books will be releasing a 10th anniversary edition of This Is An Uprising. This edition contains a new forward and afterward addressing our current political moment and discussing some of the developments in the field of civil resistance over the past decade. We’ll be sending updates in the coming weeks about this release!

Soon after, we hope to be sharing the new website for the Whirlwind Institute—the development of which is well under way and which should be officially launched in the next couple of months. The website will contain a wealth of resources on each of the core areas of our work—movement ecology and mass protest, inside-outside strategy, impact tracking, ideology, movement history, and alternatives.

2025 marked the first year of operation for Whirlwind, and we’re proud of the work we have completed so far. Below are some highlights of the articles on social movement strategy we’ve produced—as well as links to some podcasts we’ve done that you might enjoy!

Subscribe now

* * * * *

Understanding the Political Moment

Trump’s first year has been truly horrible but it also prompted a historic wave of protest. In covering this surge of revolt, we wrote about why, “There’s no need to wait for resistance. It is happening now.”

The importance of “moments of the whirlwind” is one of the central arguments of This Is An Uprising, and indeed it’s where we got the name for the Whirlwind Institute. We’ve long wanted to say more about what makes these periods of mass mobilization distinctive and valuable, and so we were excited to write an article that delves deep into the concepts of trigger events, decentralized action, and movement cycles. The essay, entitled “Could We Be Entering a Movement Moment Against Trump?” details how to recognize the five key characteristics that make for movement moments, and it explains why they are critical in propelling forward drives against tyranny and injustice.

Separately, we each took on some individual projects. Paul wrote about what social movements can learn from the “Innovator’s Dilemma”—a business-world concept that he believes has genuine value for those trying to create new projects on the left. In essence, the article is an argument about why we should be creating a culture of experimentation and why “incubation” of new groups is essential. You can read the article here: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/11/innovators-dilemma-social-movements/

Meanwhile, Mark wrote about lessons from the legendary career of popular educator Myles Horton. A founder of the renowned Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, Horton offered profound lessons on living through the ups and downs of social movements, and he entered into fascinating debates with figures such as Paulo Freire about inside-outside strategy. Check out Mark’s essay here: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/12/myles-horton-highlander-folk-school/

Whirlwind Institute Research Analyst Celeste Pepitone-Nahas wrote a great overview on the progress that has been made toward implementing “Maximum Wage” ordinances in the U.S. and abroad. The concept of a Maximum Wage is something that Mark has written about repeatedly over the years, and Celeste’s article provides an important update on how the idea is being put into practice. A leading expert described the essay as “an ace survey on who’s accomplishing what at the income-capping cutting edge.” You can read it here: https://inthesetimes.com/article/maximum-wage-billionaire-ceos-economy-trump-inequality

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Everyone’s Got A Part to Play — A Podcast on Movement Ecology

Last summer, we were honored to join in dialogue with Shane Murphy Goldsmith of the Liberty Hill Foundation for an episode of their “Conversations From The Frontlines: Real Talk, Real Change” podcast. The chat gave us a chance to share about our personal stories of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, being influenced by the peace and justice tradition of the Catholic Church, gaining a deep appreciation of structure-based organizing through unions such as UNITE HERE, and participating in the mass protests movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s—including the global justice movement that erupted into public view after demonstrations in Seattle, as well as the huge actions against the Iraq War.

Talking with Shane, we focused on how a movement ecology perspective helps us to understand different organizing models and how they can work together to force change. We also dive into topics such as polarization as movement strategy, challenging the monolithic view of power that most Americans hold, and how movements can shift the Overton window and alter the terrain of the politically possible.

You can listen to the full podcast here: https://www.libertyhill.org/news/podcast/

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Uruguay’s People’s President and Japan’s Marxist Innovator

In a final highlight of the past year, we’ve been excited to bring aboard Senior Research Associate Guille Bervejillo, who wrote a wonderful essay on the “The Radical Legacy of the ‘Poorest President in the World.’” In it, he explored what we can learn from the life of Uruguay’s former guerrilla and leftist president Pepe Mujica, sharing stories from his personal meetings with Mujica as well as insights about the country’s innovative progressive party formations. Needless to say, it is a stark contrast with Trump, who (as we wrote in June) has spent his time co-governing with the billionaire class.

Guille’s article is well worth a read, and you can find it here: https://whirlwinddispatches.substack.com/p/the-radical-legacy-of-the-poorest

Earlier in the year, Guille spoke on an episode of the Process This podcast with host Tripp Fuller about some of his other interests and research areas. In particular, they discussed the ideas of the innovative theorist and Japanese Marxist Kojin Karatani, a thinker Guille studied in depth while earning his PhD in economic geography at Ohio State University.

Discussion between Tripp and Guille focused on how Karatani’s ideas might be applicable to activists coming out of the mobilizations of the 2010s—such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter—and who are now facing the global rise of far-right governments internationally. In addition to sharing some of his personal story, Guille describes Karatani’s The Structure of World History, a text which offers a novel account of the forces animating world history and of the characteristics of emancipatory movements. Though Karatani is not well known in the west, in Japan he is widely read as a leading public intellectual, literary critic, and major figure in Marxist theory. As Guille says, Karatani is “not just another academic. He’s writing for popular audiences in something akin to the New York Times commentary or The New Yorker. So he’s an intellectual, an academic, but he’s very much writing for a popular audience.”

Karatani’s writing explores how reciprocity and mutual aid might replace structures of exploitation. Guille argues that the theorist’s readings of Marx and his thinking on “modes of exchange” may be useful to all those thinking about alternatives to global hyper-capitalism.

Check out the wide-ranging discussion here:

Process This

Guillermo Bervejillo: Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History

Listen now

a year ago · 6 likes

For a more compact introduction to Karatani, you can also check out the Ayni Institute’s videos on the “Modes of Exchange” framework, available here: https://ayni.institute/modesofexchange/

We welcome your thoughts and comments, and we are excited to be in conversion with you in the new year!

In solidarity,

Mark and Paul

(This article was first published in Waging Nonviolence)

Over a career that spanned more than 50 years and touched on some of the major American social movements of the 20th century, Myles Horton established himself as one of our country’s most renowned popular educators.

Horton was a key founder of the Highlander Folk School, later reformed as the Highlander Research and Education Center after it was shut down by Jim Crow officials in Tennessee in 1961. The adult education program maintained deep ties to working people in the South and played an important role in the labor upheavals of the New Deal era in the 1930s. Furthermore, by the 1940s, it had emerged as one of the few integrated institutions in the region, a place where white activists and people of color could learn and strategize together for their common liberation.

Rosa Parks famously attended Highlander before returning home and declining to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Among the other prominent names in the civil rights movement who walked its grounds were Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Andrew Young, John Lewis and Dorothy Cotton. But Highlander’s impact is properly measured less by the luminaries it influenced than by the countless unheralded union shop stewards and local community leaders who were enriched by coming together to study and struggle with others who faced similar challenges in their lives, and who left inspired to make greater contributions to creating change.

Sometimes referred to as a “hillbilly radical” or “hillbilly intellectual,” Horton is best known as a pioneer of progressive pedagogy. But as someone who spent his life navigating the ups and downs of social movements, he also developed important insights into the cycles of mass mobilization and patient preparation that often characterize organizing life. Horton at once built a lasting movement institution and grew skeptical of organizations that became overly bureaucratic and outlived their usefulness. Understanding how he balanced these tensions, and how he believed organizers could effectively intervene at different moments in a movement’s life cycle, remains valuable for those continuing the fight for social justice today.

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A people’s pedagogy

Myles Horton was born in 1905 in Savannah, Tennessee. His grandfather was illiterate but had a keen mind and a healthy disrespect for the habits of the area’s wealthy powerbrokers. Raised by schoolteacher parents, Horton grew up in a religious atmosphere of hard work and devotion. At age 15, he left home and supported himself by working to build crates in a tomato packing plant and taking on other odd jobs.

Always working in and among communities of people in Appalachia, he knew early on that education was a calling, and in 1924 he entered Cumberland University to pursue a degree, while continuing to spend his summers teaching Presbyterian Bible classes in the Tennessee mountains. Around 1929, Horton managed to get a spot at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a place that he would later claim greatly enlarged his perspective. Horton jokes that he was accepted not because he was academically prepared but as a kind of “token hillbilly” — one of the few students from the rural South. At Union he studied with renowned socialist and pacifist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, with whom he began to wrestle with ideas of the social gospel, a Protestant movement that used Christian ideals to argue for a committed progressive assault on poverty and other social problems.

Over time, Horton became more secular in his worldview, but these early lessons would remain. He would come to agree with Che Guevara’s famous statement: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.” But for Horton, this idea was an outgrowth of his religious roots: “Love people, that’s right out of the Bible,” he explained. “You can’t be a revolutionary, you can’t want to change society if you don’t love people, there’s no point in it.”

Horton continued his education at the University of Chicago, where he studied with sociologist Robert E. Park and developed his earliest notions of forming a school. His greater influence, however, came from visiting Denmark in 1931, where he studied the country’s folk school movement. Launched in the mid-19th century by poet, philosopher and pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig, the Danish folk schools emphasized communal, experiential learning which integrated music and folk knowledge. On his last night in Denmark, Horton wrote: “I can’t sleep, but there are dreams. … You can go to school all your life, you’ll never figure it out because you are trying to get an answer that can only come from the people in the life situation.”

He left Denmark determined to start a similar school in the Southern Highlands of the United States, and he jotted a list of lessons he would bring with him:

“Students and teachers living together
Peer learning
Group singing
Freedom from state regulation
Nonvocational education
Freedom from examinations
Social interaction in nonformal setting
A highly motivating purpose
Clarity in what for and what against.”

When Highlander was founded in 1932, it would be for the training of “effective labor leadership and action” and for using “education as one of the instruments for bringing about a new social order.” This mission would soon bear fruit with the explosion of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, after 1935. Working with these unions, Highlander spearheaded a program for preparing shop stewards and labor educators. “Within two years Highlander became the official CIO educational training center for the entire south,” Horton wrote. In 1937, Horton himself helped to organize one of the first CIO locals of textile industry workers, including white and Black workers alike, in the region.

In the 1950s, after the labor insurgency lost steam, Highlander became a key support system and training ground for the growing civil rights movement. Horton worked with local activists in South Carolina to develop programs that could prepare African Americans to pass literacy tests and vote. They then brought the lessons back to Highlander and, under the leadership of Septima Poinsette Clark and Bernice Robinson, developed them into a program for spreading Citizenship Schools across the South. These initiatives became a major mechanism for recruitment and personal development in the burgeoning movement, creating a base of volunteers for activist campaigns. Highlander also played a pivotal role in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, having served as the location of early meetings for student leaders who organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Moreover, singers at Highlander were instrumental in adapting and popularizing “We Shall Overcome,” which became a central movement anthem.

Officially, Horton retired in the early 1970s, handing off the management of Highlander to younger colleagues. Yet he remained an active participant in the center’s programs, and he was an important voice in international discussions about popular education until his death in 1990.

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Living through movement cycles

Many social movement theorists and practitioners — Sidney Tarrow and Bill Moyer notable among them — have written on how movements progress through up-and-down cycles. What is distinctive about Myles Horton is how he lived through several major movement cycles during his long career, worked to adapt Highlander’s role amidst them and later reflected thoughtfully on his experience.

“Highlander’s always been in the mountainous part of the United States,” the educator once stated, “and our history at Highlander has been an up and down history, peaks and valleys and hills and hollers.” Horton believed that the course of social movements mirrored this hilly topography. And he used the metaphor of peaks and valleys to describe these different movement periods.

At the peak were what Horton called “movement times,” or periods of intensive social movement mobilization. He contrasted these with the valleys in between, slower and less dynamic times which he called “organizational periods.” Knowing which type of time period they are living through helps social movement participants determine what avenues for productive activity are open to them.

Horton wrote, “The best educational work at Highlander has always taken place when there is social movement. We’ve guessed right on two social movements — the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. During movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go from one community to the next, start a conversation in one place and finish it in another.”

These periods do not last forever, though. After the disbanding of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which amassed in Washington, D.C. for several months in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Horton saw Highlander as primarily working in valleys. He wrote in the late 1980s about how this was distinct from a movement peak: “Now we’re in what I call an organizational period, which has limited objectives, doesn’t spread very rapidly and has a lot of paid people and bureaucracy. It’s completely different from what takes place when there is a social movement.”

Horton did not believe you could do much to spark a new movement upsurge. But you could try to prepare for them. “During organization times you try to anticipate a social movement, and if it turns out that you’ve guessed right, then you’ll be on the inside of a movement helping with the mobilization and strategies, instead of on the outside jumping on the bandwagon and never being an important part of it,” he argued. The essence of this work is preparing “the groundwork for a larger movement. That way, you’re built into it when the momentum begins.”

Although he did not elaborate extensively on his vision for the “spadework” — as Ella Baker called it — necessary in organizational periods, he suggested that these slower times were critical for developing the consciousness and capabilities of movement participants. “The valley periods can be used just to kill time and survive, or they can be used to lay the groundwork of being inside when a movement occurs,” he said. “That’s what makes it possible for us to have peak periods.”

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The unique properties of peak mobilizations

For those of us who study movement cycles, and particularly those who have worked to map dynamics of peak mobilizations, a number of interesting observations by Horton stand out.

Periods of intensive movement activity — what my brother Paul and I describe in our book “This Is an Uprising” as “moments of the whirlwind” — are often unpredictable and generally poorly understood. Many people tend to downplay their significance, including political observers outside of movements, who regard outbreaks of mass protest as fluke occurrences. But it includes many organizers as well, who see whirlwinds as unreliable and therefore unimportant.

Myles Horton did not downplay peak periods. Instead, he highlighted a variety of their distinctive characteristics.

First, he identified how mass mobilizations promote autonomous action among movement participants and members of the public. Horton saw movement times as unique periods in which ideas spread quickly and participation expands rapidly. He wrote, “It’s only in a movement that an idea is often made simple enough and direct enough that it can spread rapidly. Then your leadership multiplies very rapidly, because there’s something explosive going on.”

Horton told the story of an older community member in a Southern town who told him about creating her own Citizenship School, teaching people to read as a means of preparing them to vote and increasing their political engagement. She was not aware that an extensive network of such schools had been developed by movement groups including Highlander and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC. Horton speculated that “She’d probably been to a conference where somebody was talking about Citizenship Schools,” and the concept was intuitive enough that “she could pick it up and make it her own.” Far from being an isolated example, it is common in mass mobilizations that tactical repertoires disseminate rapidly and are reproduced organically.

Acts of courage become contagious. “People see that other people not so different from themselves do things that they thought could never be done,” Horton explained. “They’re emboldened and challenged by that to step into the water, and once they get in the water, it’s as if they’ve never not been there.”

Second, Horton notes that, by their nature, movements are polarizing. They elicit mass participation not by creating great unity in society, but rather by highlighting controversies potent enough that people are motivated to throw down. “A large social movement forces people to take a stand for or against it, so that there are no longer any neutrals,” he wrote. “You’ve got to be on one side or the other.”

While polarization can provide powerful benefits to movements, it also has downsides. “It’s true that it forces some people to be worse than they would be, more violent than they would be,” Horton noted, “but it also forces some people to get behind the cause and work for it and even die for it.”

We have argued elsewhere that this balance of polarization’s positive and negative potentials must be carefully managed. That said, the conflictual nature of movement challenges is not an unfortunate development that can be avoided through better social dialogue. Instead, it is an inherent part of the process of change. As Frederick Douglass stated long ago, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground.”

Horton echoed this sentiment, writing: “People have to understand that you can’t make progress without pain, because you can’t make progress without provoking violent opposition. If enough people want change and others stand in their way, they’re going to force them out of the way.”

Third, Horton observed that movement surges rely on a type of momentum that is not generated by ordinary organizational activity. During organizational periods, “which is most of the time,” he stated, groups will work to achieve limited short-term goals. But this does not propel significant participation by the general public, even if many groups are working toward common aims. Organization, in this way, does not make a movement moment. But once a whirlwind period starts, members of existing groups respond to the polarizing call of mass mobilizations, and the leaders of these groups can choose to feed into the energy.

Horton wrote that: “During the civil rights movement, for instance, people came out of the labor movement, the Black churches, the pacifist movement; people came who wanted social equality, and once the movement got under way, people who wanted to be where the excitement was were in it, people who wanted to get rid of their guilt were in it — it was so big that there was room for everybody.”

Among mass protest trainers we work with in the U.S., there is a saying that: “Alignment does not create momentum. Momentum creates alignment.” As much as we might like it to be, putting together a perfect coalition of groups that agree on a common set of demands is not a recipe for revolt. Instead, it tends to produce a lowest-common-denominator form of unity. On the other hand, a movement in motion has a way of joining a wide range of forces in pursuit of a common vision, often one more ambitious than many would have selected themselves.

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The problem of bureaucracy

In Highlander, Horton helped establish an organization that has endured for generations. He titled his memoir “The Long Haul,” upholding the value of persistent struggle. And yet he also voiced a critique of the bureaucratizing tendencies of institutions — even progressive ones. This combination made him a very interesting observer of organizational life.

Because their prescriptions fly in the face of much common organizing practice, some of the leading theorists of disruptive mobilization, such as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, have been accused of being “anti-organization” or of skewing anarchistic in their analysis of the role of institutions in creating progressive change. Horton recognized the importance of organizations. Without them, people acting merely as individuals would be limited in their effectiveness. At the same time, he was skeptical of how institutions had a tendency to ossify and lose their vitality over time.

In “The Long Haul” Horton wrote, “I came to realize that things had to be done through organizations. I knew that people as individuals would remain powerless, but if they could get together in organizations, they could have power, provided they used their organizations instead of being used by them.” He added, “I once wrote something about organizations, saying that they end up in structures and structures become permanent and most of them outlive their usefulness.”

Having witnessed the labor movement go from a disempowered low in the early 1930s to becoming part of the American Cold War political establishment by the end of the 1950s, Horton developed a critique shared by much of the New Left, which looked skeptically on the new power brokers: “I came to the conclusion that the bureaucratic system is an inevitable disease that afflicts all organizations and governments,” he wrote. “Often it is spread by good people who are made to do bad things — or less than good things — because of their separation from the people who were the original source of their power.”

Wary of such bureaucratic institutionalization, Highlander remained an outsider group. Horton contended that “Highlander’s chief interest is in starting up programs.” The school looked to intervene in drives for change by finding needs that others were not meeting and remaining experimental. “We avoided implementing programs that other less cutting-edge organizations or institutions were doing,” Horton wrote, “[and] tried to find ways of working that did not duplicate what was already being done. To be true to our vision, it was necessary to stay small and not get involved in mass education or in activities that required large amounts of money (which would make it tempting to do the kinds of programs that money was available for).”

Horton considered Highlander to be an incubator of new social movement projects, which he was willing to spin off and pass on to others once they were established. When the center’s interventions were developed enough to scale, they would hand them off to other institutions. “We solved the problem of staying small by spinning off programs that were already established and were willingly taken over by organizations less interested in creating new programs,” he explained.

Highlander carried out this process in the 1940s by allowing the CIO to take over its programs for training labor education directors and shop stewards. Later, in the 1960s, it handed off its program to create Citizenship Schools to the SCLC. “The Citizenship School project eventually became too big for us; in fact, it became bigger than all the rest of Highlander put together,” Horton argued. “When it gets to that stage, other people can take it over and operate it.”

“These spin-offs enabled Highlander to concentrate on cutting-edge programs that no one else in the region was undertaking,” he later added.

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“One battle, many fronts”

The lens of social movement ecology helps us to understand how Horton settled into a particular niche within progressive movements in the 20th century. This framework contends that distinct organizing approaches and theories of change can each play valuable roles in movement drives. Mass protest, structure-based organizing, inside-game politics, alternative institutions, and programs of personal transformation all make important contributions — although their relative importance can rise or fall at different moments in the cycle of change.

Viewed through this lens, it becomes clear that Horton primarily operated from the place of building an alternative institution and promoting education as a means of personal transformation. While he supported mass protest and structure building, he saw his main role as something different, and he tended to avoid insider politics altogether.

Late in his life, Horton undertook a series of fascinating dialogues with Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and other writings have become cornerstone texts for many progressive teachers. Their discussions revealed some interesting differences between the two thinkers. Two prominent differences relate to how Horton situated himself within the movement ecosystem.

Freire had at times been appointed to important educational roles in different levels of Brazilian government. He explained that he favored taking on the system from “two fronts,” developing independent projects from the outside while also burrowing into state institutions. This process might be described today as “contentious co-governance,” and it has been pursued by Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, as it has worked to get its ambitious programs of rural, adult education adopted as state-sanctioned programs.

Horton, on the other hand, believed in operating as an outsider. He eschewed the mechanisms of the state and expressed wariness of unions, nonprofits or membership organizations if they grew too bureaucratic or professionalized. This pushed him away from inside-game interventions or structure building, and it kept him primarily rooted in alternatives.

Another difference is that Horton insisted on a difference between education and organizing. The purpose of education, he believed, was to develop people as independent thinkers, able to analyze society and make decisions for themselves about how to change it. Organizing, in contrast, is about bringing people together around a specific goal. “[E]ducation makes possible organization, but there is a different interest, different emphasis,” Horton stated. In contrast, Freire saw education as “a permanent process” that takes place prior to organizing but also afterwards. “[U]ndoubtedly there is a different kind of education in mobilization before taking power, and there is also the continuity of that,” even after movements make gains, he believed.

Once again, Horton’s stance reinforced the idea that his contribution to social movements might be complementary to structure-based organizing, but would remain distinct from it.

In his important 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” sociologist Aldon Morris characterized Highlander as a “movement halfway house,” or “an established group or organization that is only partially integrated into the larger society because its participants are actively involved in efforts to bring about a desired change in society.”

“What is distinctive about movement halfway houses is their relative isolation from the larger society and the absence of a mass base,” Morris wrote. This isolation means that halfway houses, by themselves, can not effectively leverage change or garner widespread support in the public. But, as alternative spaces, they can cultivate a variety of resources that become very valuable to movements. Among these, Morris lists “skilled activists, tactical knowledge, media contacts, workshops, knowledge of past movements, and a vision of a future society.”

Serving as a halfway house, Highlander did not seek to directly intervene to reform dominant bodies in the way that a political campaign or a protest movement making demands on specific politicians or business leaders might. But, like other alternative institutions, the school modeled alternate ways of being in the world. And it increased the capacity of groups in other segments of the ecology to function effectively. As Horton explained: “I’ve always taken the position that Highlander was not in the business of organizing, or even of training organizers, but in education for action, and in helping to develop social leadership.”

A slogan that Horton adopted from a well-known folksinger might be seen as his articulation of a movement ecology perspective: “A few years ago the singer and activist ‘Utah’ Phillips gave me a little pin that says, ‘One Battle, Many Fronts,’” Horton wrote. “The one battle is to rebuild this country, but there are many fronts for dealing with revolutionary change.”

Ultimately, Highlander became an influential institution during Horton’s lifetime, and it continues to do valuable training and support for movements, particularly in the South. But it did not scale in the way he had initially envisioned: “When we established Highlander, [co-founder] Don West and I were sure there would be Highlanders in every state. A dozen or more attempts to start Highlanders were made in this country, but none succeeded.”

In spite of this, Horton’s work offers a compelling model of how popular education can contribute to progressive change, fostering critical thinking in slow times and accelerating the spread of radical ideas during movement peaks. “The nature of my visions are to keep on growing beyond my conception,” he explained near the end of his autobiography. “I think there always needs to be a struggle … because there ought to be growth. You die when you stop growing.”

—Mark Engler is a writer based in Philadelphia and an editorial board member at Dissent magazine. His latest book, written with Paul Engler, is entitled This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (Nation Books).

Research assistance provided by Celeste Pepitone-Nahas.

(Published by Waging Nonviolence)

In order to meet the dire challenges that face us, social movements are going to need new and creative strategies. We are going to need groups that are willing to escalate and take risks. And when breakthrough “movement moments” arrive, we are going to need organizations nimble and adaptive enough to jump into the fray, heighten the impact of mass mobilizations and create mechanisms to help absorb the energy created.

In considering where such innovation might come from, there is a concept that is much discussed in the business world that I think offers a useful provocation for social movements. It is called the “innovator’s dilemma.”

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined this term in his influential 1997 book “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.” His central insight was that the very strategies that make large, established companies successful are often the same ones that prevent them from adapting to change.

Christensen observed that dominant firms tend to focus on refining their existing products for their most profitable customers. In doing so, they ignore newer, cheaper and initially inferior technologies that serve emerging markets. But over time, these upstart competitors evolve and improve. Eventually, they overtake the incumbents. And that is the dilemma: what makes dominant firms strong within the current market also makes them structurally resistant to what comes next. Big companies can do everything right from a traditional business perspective — serve their customers, maximize profits, build strong brands — and still collapse, because staying true to their current strengths can blind them to the future.

Major innovations, in Christensen’s model, usually come from the margins. This is not because the advances are immediately superior, but because they serve a different set of emerging needs. Startup companies oriented toward new developments are willing to fail often, to pivot and to chase uncertain but promising potentials. That freedom is what lets them reimagine their industries.

In social movements, we do not have billion-dollar venture funds betting on our disruptive potential. But we do need to be just as clear-eyed about where to look for innovation, and about how our movement ecology can make space for it. If legacy organizations are structurally constrained, then we need to nurture the new actors — ones willing to fail, to iterate and to take risks that can help spark major transformations. For this reason, I believe it is worth looking in more detail at lessons we might apply from the innovator’s dilemma.

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The Blockbuster story

One of the most common stories used to explain Christensen’s theory involves Blockbuster, the iconic video rental chain. I like this example because it was something I witnessed in my own life. When I was in high school in the 1990s, Blockbuster was a cultural fixture. It had thousands of stores, tens of thousands of employees, and was valued at billions of dollars. Throughout huge swaths of the United States, if you wanted to get a movie to watch at home, you drove to Blockbuster. For many people, it was a Friday night ritual.

On paper, Blockbuster should have been untouchable. If it had chosen to pivot to DVD-by-mail and then to streaming, it would have had huge advantages. But instead, a scrappy newcomer entered the scene. Netflix had no stores, no legacy systems and no late fees to defend. Yet because of this, it was able to adapt to a future that was not in physical storefronts, but in digital delivery.

Blockbuster’s business model depended on foot traffic. The company banked on families wandering the aisles and on collecting annoying penalties from overdue returns. (God knows I paid plenty of those.) To pivot to delivery by mail or streaming would have meant destroying its own source of profit. Netflix did not have to wrestle with that choice. Because it had no major infrastructure to protect, it could be agile and adapt.

Ironically, Blockbuster saw the future. In 2004, it launched a streaming service. But the company could not fully commit. Investors wanted growth and shareholders wanted predictability; neither was looking for transformation. We know how the story ended. Before long, Netflix had become a household name, while Blockbuster closed its last corporate-owned store in 2014.

What seems absurd in hindsight — that this upstart would overtake a Goliath — makes perfect sense through the lens of the innovator’s dilemma. The question we need to ask as social movement builders is: how often do our own institutions resemble Blockbuster? And how are we able to create space in our social movement ecology for the Netflix-like arrivals that appear around us?

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Looking at innovation in movements

The innovator’s dilemma is not without controversy. In 2014, Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote a scathing critique of Christensen’s initial book in the New Yorker. This led to rounds of back-and-forth between his detractors and defenders of different stripes. These included contributions from critical supporters who have diverged from Christensen in their work in the field of innovation theory but retained some of his key insights. In many ways, the innovator’s dilemma was a victim of its own success: Even the book’s author agreed that “disruption” and “innovation” became corporate buzzwords that were sometimes thrown around with careless abandon.

Nevertheless, my experience is that the idea that established organizations are rarely designed to reinvent themselves is relevant not just for markets, but for movements as well.

When I have talked about this concept in social movement contexts, I have found that some people are skeptical of taking lessons from business-world examples, arguing that, in Audre Lorde’s words, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” While I appreciate this perspective, I am in the camp that believes that we should try to draw strategy insights from diverse sources — even including the strategies deployed by our adversaries. Moreover, when I have used the idea in trainings, I have found that it has produced stimulating and generative conversations, suggesting that it is a worthwhile framework to grapple with.

What elements of the innovator’s dilemma, then, do I believe are useful for social movements to think about?

In “This Is An Uprising,” the book I wrote with my brother Mark, we discussed numerous instances of where established and highly structured organizations were caught flat-footed during moments of mass mobilization. During the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the upstart April 6 Youth Movement catalyzed a nationwide uprising, while the Muslim Brotherhood — with all its organizing power and deep roots — initially struggled to respond. We saw a similar pattern play out during the U.S. civil rights movement in the tension between the NAACP’s legalistic approach and the campaigns of civil resistance run by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC. Of course, the SCLC itself, which was rooted in the structures of established churches, at times grew hesitant to ramp up its actions. It had to be prodded into bolder stances by groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.

In each case, it was not the institution with the most resources or legitimacy that led the charge. It was the insurgent formation willing to escalate.

And this does not only pertain to mass mobilization. We have also seen it play out with the emergence of new organizing models within electoral campaigns. Notably, in the 2008 presidential race, the Obama campaign’s embrace of distributed organizing upended the Clinton machine’s centralized structure. Here again, innovation did not come from those who had the most to lose. Instead, it was propelled by outsiders.

* * * * *

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

I like thinking together with other organizers about the innovator’s dilemma because I believe it is a good way to explore the idea — to quote another phrase used both in the business world and outside of it — that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

We like to imagine that our organizations are very adaptable and able to pursue a wide range of different strategies. But, in fact, progressive groups are generally rooted in deep organizing lineages that shape how they conceive of social change and how they respond to emergent challenges. This can be a great source of strength, but it also creates limitations. After they are established, groups very quickly develop entrenched organizational cultures that — as much as any conscious decisions about strategy — will affect how they behave. Increasingly, groups become concerned with protecting and preserving what they have, rather than looking for new ways in which to create the change they seek in the world. And so an organization designed for one purpose becomes hard-pressed to act on new opportunities when they arise.

In their classic book “Poor People’s Movements,” theorists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward documented how, in moments of mass revolt, the instinct of established organizations is generally to rein in the energy of insurgent protest, rather than to escalate it. Piven and Cloward further argue that the “imperatives of mass-membership organizational maintenance characteristically create [a] kind of leadership” that is risk-averse and oriented toward organizational self-preservation. This is less the fault of any individual’s failure of nerve and more the product of the institutional life of the groups they have committed themselves to building.

Similarly, in 2011 veteran labor strategist Stephen Lerner wrote an important article entitled, “A New Insurgency Can Only Arise Outside the Progressive and Labor Establishment.” In it, he argued that “Unions have the money, members and capacity to organize, build and fuel a movement designed to challenge the power of the corporate elite.” And yet, in spite of the incredible dedication of members, leaders and staff, “unions are just big enough — and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure — to be constrained from leading the kinds of activities that are needed,” including campaigns of mass civil disobedience.

The innovator’s dilemma suggests a challenging truth: that established organizations, including those on the left, can be structurally incapable of investing in the very things that can cause the greatest transformations. The same bodies that hold institutional knowledge and history may be unable to usher in the next breakthrough that is needed. That is not unique to our movements, and it is not a result of personal failings. It is inherent in organizational systems.

* * * * *

Responding to the dilemma

Looking at the difficulty presented by the innovator’s dilemma, how can social movements respond? The corporate world has developed a variety of strategies for addressing this challenge. These include using venture capital to fund experimental projects, acquiring start-ups, and creating autonomous units and accelerators within their organizations to pursue transformation. For social movement organizers, there is potential to build parallels to a variety of these approaches, and I believe there are many promising avenues to explore here.

However, for the purposes of this thought experiment, I want to focus on just three points that I believe are particularly relevant for movements: the need to incubate, the potential of spin-offs, and the importance of a movement ecology perspective.

First, our movements need to recognize the importance of incubation. Trying to drive innovation through legacy organizations — ones fundamentally shaped by their existing cultures, incentives and hierarchies — is a very difficult path. That is why it can pay to start fresh, with initiatives designed to find and cultivate small groups of core leaders who undertake “front-loading” processes to launch new projects with intentionally designed strategy and culture. Groups that facilitate these new experiments are called incubators.

We need to create mechanisms to fund these incubators, knowing that many of the experiments they generate will fail, but the few that succeed could make major contributions. (As a big believer in incubation, I have personally been involved in creating two such projects: Momentum and, more recently, a new Climate Resistance Incubator. In the first case, Momentum helped spawn groups including Sunrise and IfNotNow.)

Second, we should recognize the potential for spin-off initiatives. Established organizations do not need to be cut out of the process entirely. Although their involvement in creating new groups tends to be more limited than that of dedicated incubators, they can nevertheless have an important role in conceiving of and making possible spin-offs that advance goals aligned with their missions, but that will have organizational independence. One example of this is how 350.org also contributed to the formation of the Sunrise Movement — providing early funding and staffing support — before Sunrise then emerged as its own force. Rather than resisting new actors, established organizations can seed and nurture them as a way to bring fresh energy and ideas into the broader ecosystem.

Of course, this is rare, and it requires far-sighted vision on the part of movement leaders. But it can also come with benefits, allowing groups to be supportive of bold initiatives while also creating firewalls to protect their existing operations.

In his 2011 article, Stephen Lerner proposed such an approach in the context of organized labor: “The solution isn’t to try to defy institutional gravity by convincing people to do something they aren’t willing to do,” he wrote. “Instead, we need … to develop a movement-based organizational model that taps into and builds on union resources — both financial and organizational — but denies unions’ ‘veto power’ over campaign activities.” In doing so, unions would be able to “help set up, launch, finance and ultimately engage directly in campaigns based on their comfort level” without the projects being fatally constrained by possible concerns the larger organizations may have about exposing themselves to legal risk or burning a relationship with an employer or politician.

Finally, it is essential that we adopt a social movement ecology lens in understanding what different organizations can contribute. Creating strong movements is not a matter of finding one “right” approach to pursuing justice. Instead, it is about recognizing that different groups, coming from diverse lineages and possessing distinct theories of change, each have strengths and weaknesses that they bring to the table. Our ability to effectively leverage change depends on us appreciating what different organizations can and cannot do, allowing them to play to their strengths, and crafting complex collaborations between groups inhabiting different segments of a movement ecosystem.

The point of incubating new groups and promoting spin-offs is not to celebrate novelty or even “innovation” for its own sake. And we do not need to adopt Silicon Valley’s profit-driven motives for wanting to shake up the status quo. The point, instead, is to recognize that new movement initiatives can play a unique role in the social change ecosystem, occupying a niche that established organizations may be unable or unwilling to fill.

This is not to say that the work existing groups are doing does not serve a vital function, or that they might not excel in other areas. After all, the NAACP’s legal strategies proved essential in advancing civil rights and backing up mass protest movements at critical junctures. Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was ultimately much better positioned to institutionalize change and capitalize on the fall of Mubarak — at least for a time — once the upheaval was set in motion by others. Once new organizing models and campaign strategies are established, larger and more well-resourced movement structures can be key in scaling innovative practices and furthering their adoption within the ecosystem.

All that said, thinking through the innovator’s dilemma helps us to recognize the institutional reasons why our organizations and leaders can grow averse to adopting fresh approaches over time. And it can help us to build ecosystems capable of producing new pathways for experimentation, escalation and risk. If we are to succeed in spite of the odds stacked against us today and to birth a next generation of progressive strategies, I believe that taking such action will be essential.

Paul Engler is founding director of the Center for the Working Poor, co-founder of the Momentum training, and co-director of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. He is author, with Mark Engler, of “This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century.”

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In the latest from our new think tank, the Whirlwind Institute, our senior research associate Guillermo “Guille” Bervejillo writes about what we can learn from the life of Uruguay’s former president Pepe Mujica. Mujica was a fascinating figure, known as the “Poorest President in the World” because of the modest lifestyle he maintained, even when he was in power.

When the media tried to point out that his lifestyle was strange for a president, Mujica said: “It’s the other presidents’ fault, not mine… I am living like the majority of people in my country.” When you do otherwise, Pepe insisted, “you end up being swayed by how you live.”

In dark times, we can look to Uruguay as an important example of a country that went from dictatorship to being a leading light for progressive social movements. We believe there are vital lessons for how we can do inside-outside politics here in the United States and beyond—and Guille does a great job of drawing them out.

We hope you will enjoy this dispatch, and we welcome your thoughts!

Mark

The Radical Legacy of the “Poorest President in the World”

What social movements internationally can learn from the life of Uruguay’s Pepe Mujica.

by Guillermo Bervejillo

(Published by Jacobin.)

I met the “poorest president in the world” in late 2023. I had seen him before, at an event in Washington, DC, ten years earlier, but at that time, he was surrounded by wild throngs of adulators — shaking hands, snapping selfies, kissing babies. You might have thought he was a pop-star influencer rather than a man pushing eighty and the sitting president of a small, far-flung South American country. But this was the allure of Pepe: ex–guerrilla fighter, political prisoner turned president, viral phenomenon, philosopher, farmer, survivor.

When I finally had a chance to talk with José “Pepe” Mujica in person, he was no longer the president of Uruguay and had recently resigned from his seat in the country’s Senate due to declining health. We met at El Quincho de Varela, a modest straw-roofed room built around a barbecue, just down the road from his farm. Over the years, it had become hallowed ground, drawing politicians, activists, celebrities, and thinkers from Angela Davis to Brazilian president Lula da Silva. Walking in felt like arriving at a hermit’s retreat in the mountains. We talked about the state of social movements in the United States and our place in the longue durée of history. Even though he had stepped away from public life, Pepe was still curious about social movements abroad and open to being introduced to new ideas.

It is easy to see why Mujica was the source of endless fascination. After becoming head of state in 2009, he refused to move into the presidential palace, instead opting to stay in his ramshackle three-room farmhouse on the edge of Montevideo — guarded only by two cops and his three-legged dog, Manuela. He kept tending to his flower farm, drove himself to work in a powder-blue 1987 VW Beetle, gave away 90 percent of his salary to charity, and kicked off his term with less than $2,000 to his name. This lack of pretension and materialism gave him a global reputation as the most modest head of state one could find.

A onetime member of an armed Marxist revolutionary movement, Mujica spent more than a decade in solitary confinement after the 1973 military coup in his country. When democracy was restored in 1985, he emerged from prison advocating disarmament and a turn to electoral politics. He cofounded the leftist Movimiento de Participación Popular (MPP) and began an improbable rise in democratic government. By the early 2000s, he became a high-ranking cabinet member and then, in 2009, was elected president himself. During his five-year term, he ran a tight ship, made international headlines with major progressive reforms, and saw his country maintain strong momentum in both economic and social indicators. Afterward he continued to serve as one of the country’s most influential senators.

Throughout his time in power, Pepe came across like an unfiltered grandpa, quick with stories and lessons from life, history, and philosophy. He did not present himself as a politician, nor did he speak like one. He did not prepare talking points, and he almost never wore a suit. It was as if he was just another neighbor chatting at a bar, sipping maté at the plaza.

In interviews, Mujica would answer journalistic clichés with a mix of irreverent frankness and philosophical digression, throwing in an enigmatic statement of wisdom every so often. When the media tried to point out that his lifestyle was strange for a president, he shrugged: “It’s the other presidents’ fault, not mine,” he said:

They live like the minority in their countries. But republics came about to uphold a concept: no one is above anyone else. They were a response to feudalism and absolute monarchies: those with powdered wigs, red carpets, and the vassals playing their fanfare when the lord went hunting, all of that. And democracy is supposed to be about the government of the majority.

“I am living like the majority of people in my country,” Pepe insisted. “Otherwise you end up being swayed by how you live.”

All told, Mujica, who died this past spring at age eighty-nine, was the rarest species of politician. Not only was he wildly popular, but he was politically shrewd, an inspiring communicator, and an effective administrator. He never sold out. Pepe defied every cynical expectation: he neither watered down his politics for centrist approval nor fell in love with his own power. He was scrupulously democratic, and as his health began to decline, he stepped back from politics, ushering in a younger generation of progressives — including the recently elected president, Yamandú Orsi, a successor from the MPP. Although he was practically minded, he stayed true to his ideals, he continued to critique the status quo, and urged the struggle to continue.

Mujica is gone now, but there is much he can still teach advocates for social and economic justice, in the United States and across the globe. Pepe’s life and political career offer lessons in inside-outside politics: in how movements can send champions into office and confront the contradictions of electoral politics without abandoning the broader struggle for a better world.

His refusal to live like those in high office typically do was not just symbolic. It pointed toward a different form of democratic governance grounded in accountability to the people, not the elite.

Who Was Pepe Mujica?

José Alberto Mujica Cordano, called “Pepe” from a young age, was born in 1934 on a small farm west of Montevideo. In the 1940s, rural poverty in Uruguay was extreme. Before the future president reached age six, his father died, and his family lost its farm. Mujica grew up on the geographic and political margins of a country that would see its booming wartime economy quickly crumble as a rebuilding Europe focused inward and no longer demanded the agricultural products of the Southern Cone.

In the north of Uruguay, the cañeros — sugarcane plantation workers — endured cruel working conditions and, during the economic downturn, were reduced to famine. The frustrated unionization drive of these workers, combined with the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, radicalized a young Mujica. He soon broke from his early activism in the youth wing of the traditionalist Partido Nacional, one of Uruguay’s two dominant ruling parties, and joined the Tupamaros, a Leninist urban guerrilla movement made up of political activists, trade unionists, students, and former cañeros.

The group gained notoriety for bold operations throughout the 1960s, including sabotage, bank robberies, kidnapping, and weapons raids targeting police, local elites, and foreign actors. But by 1972, the Tupamaros had collapsed under relentless military and police repression. Beginning in 1973, a brutally oppressive military dictatorship took control of the country, and it would ultimately rule Uruguay for twelve years. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pepe was wanted by police. He was shot six times in one confrontation and arrested four times, twice escaping in mass prison breaks.

In 1972, he was captured for the last time. For the next twelve years, Mujica and other political prisoners were shuttled between secret locations and held in solitary confinement. Pepe spent two years in a damp well and seven years without anything to read. He endured months with his hands bound behind his back with wire and survived long stretches in total darkness, cut off from human contact, hallucinating, with only spiders for company.

The dictatorship finally began to lose its grip in the early 1980s, weakened by economic crisis, mass civil resistance, and mounting international pressure. Popular mobilizations — including huge strikes, student protests, and a growing human rights movement — forced the regime to begin negotiations with the opposition. In 1985, after a democratic agreement was reached, civilian rule was restored. That same year, Mujica, then fifty years old, was released under a general amnesty for political prisoners. Pepe emerged from more than a decade of captivity into a country transformed: a still-fragile democracy but once again open to social and political contestation.

The shift to electoral politics sparked intense internal debate among activists in the late 1980s. Mujica never apologized for his participation in armed struggle; he saw it as a necessary response to state oppression and systemic injustice. But he also argued that it was no promised land — that it had ultimately proven just as ineffective at transforming society as electoral politics had during that period.

“Armed struggle cannot be a life goal,” he argued. “In certain circumstances, it might have seemed like a way forward — but it can’t last forever. Because societies can’t be built on that basis. It doesn’t make sense.”

Over the next two decades, Mujica’s party, the MPP, became the most influential political faction in Uruguayan politics, distinguished by its sophisticated grassroots base, highly effective electoral machinery, and clearly defined progressive ideology. In 1989, it joined a coalition known as the Frente Amplio, and in 2004, they achieved a landmark victory. Campaigning in the aftermath of a 2002 financial crisis, which had devastated Uruguay’s economy and sharply eroded public trust in the political establishment, Tabaré Vázquez — a former oncologist and mayor of Montevideo — was elected president in a landslide popular vote. It marked the first time in Uruguay’s history that the presidency was won by someone outside the country’s two traditional parties.

The successes of the first Frente Amplio administration led to continued victories, and in 2009 Uruguay elected an even more progressive president in Pepe Mujica. Although Uruguayan presidents cannot serve consecutive terms, the coalition won three straight presidential elections, securing Mujica’s term spanning the period between 2010 and 2014, as well as Tabaré Vázquez’s return for a second term from 2015 to 2019. The two presidents became key members in Latin America’s broader Pink Tide, a wave of left-leaning governments that swept across the region in the 2000s and early 2010s, challenging neoliberal orthodoxy and prioritizing social justice.

Between 2005 and 2019, Uruguay experienced a period of robust and inclusive growth, and was hailed as a regional success story. Social spending rose dramatically, making possible an expanded cash transfer program that reached over 30 percent of households and sweeping health care reforms that ensured universal, equitable access. These policies contributed to a dramatic drop in poverty, which fell from nearly 40 percent in 2005 to under 9 percent by 2019. This positioned Uruguay as the South American country with the lowest poverty and inequality levels.

By 2019, Pepe’s health had begun to worsen, and he chose not to run for a second term as president. Shortly after, he retired from national politics altogether, yet he continued his activism through his last years. In February 2024, he helped organize a transnational gathering of progressive activists, labor leaders, and elected politicians in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, that made a call for greater internationalism as a strategy for expanding the field of possibility in Latin America.

The Substance of Authenticity

There are many lessons that can be drawn from Pepe’s story. But for activists outside of Latin America, three ideas are particularly relevant.

A first lesson is that authenticity cannot be bought from a public relations consultant. There is a truism often repeated in electoral politics and policy advocacy that you must speak authentically to the people you want to represent — that they must feel that you are one of them. And yet, no amount of messaging and polling is enough to make Kamala Harris feel genuine. Hakeem Jeffries has put on hoodies, Nancy Pelosi has knelt in a Kente cloth, Andrew Cuomo took off his tie and filmed himself in a park in Manhattan, but their efforts never seem to achieve what they are seeking to achieve.

What is it that makes someone like Pepe Mujica different? What makes them feel authentic?

Pepe showed that the real substance of authenticity lies in the politics themselves — in the work, the commitments, the choices. Miss that, and you end up with a generation of Barack Obama knockoffs, a parade of shallow imitations. Mujica demonstrated that authenticity is more than messaging or representation; it is a function of political commitment. His viral global image as “the poorest president in the world” was no stunt. He lived his austere lifestyle with his partner Lucía Topolansky — a political force in her own right — for his forty years of post-dictatorship life. It was less a choice than a reflection of what he saw as his obligations to the people of Uruguay and the world.

Before he won the presidency, Pepe was seen as an unrealistic contender by much of the mainstream Uruguayan media. He was too rough around the edges. He was charismatic, sure, but he consistently made gaffes and broke the established protocols of elected officials. Political commentators saw his unwillingness to adopt the trappings and privileges of higher office as evidence of his lack of seriousness.

But Mujica spoke of his minimalist way of living with pride, declaring, “I’m not poor. My definition of poor are those who need too much. Because those who need too much are never satisfied.”

This was the expression of a unique worldview, shaped by lived experience and informed by the insights of Marxist political economy. In a moving interview, he explained his philosophy: “Either you manage to be happy with very little — light of luggage because happiness is inside of you — or you won’t achieve anything,” he argued. “But since we invented a consumerist society, and the economy must grow — because if it doesn’t, it’s a tragedy — we have created a mountain of superfluous needs. And you have to throw things away and live by buying and throwing away, while what we are really wasting is our time to live.”

A journalist who covered multiple Uruguayan presidents told me how Mujica stood apart — even from fellow Frente Amplio president Tabaré Vázquez. While most presidents kept the press at arm’s length, Mujica treated reporters as equals. On foreign trips, he would ditch his security detail and wander down from his hotel room in decidedly unpresidential pajamas to share a drink with the press at the hotel bar.

But he did not use his friendships with journalists to pump up his own image. When tossed a softball about his administration’s record on poverty, Mujica refused the self-congratulatory script. “We lifted quite a few people out of extreme poverty,” he admitted, “but we didn’t make them citizens — we made them better consumers, and that is our failing.”

And yet, the numbers speak for themselves. Under Mujica, poverty plunged from 21 percent to 9.7 percent, real wages climbed nearly 4 percent a year, and GDP per capita grew at an average 4.4 percent annually. Social spending rose from 21 percent to 23 percent of GDP, expanding the safety net and strengthening the services that sustain working- and middle-class families.

Inequality narrowed too: the real minimum wage rose 37 percent, while the wealthiest tenth saw their share of national income drop by more than 10 percent. By any conventional measure, Mujica delivered on the core promises of the Left, even if he refused to take credit for it.

Pepe’s lifestyle was a reflection of who he was and his political commitments to society. The lesson is that our leaders should not represent us; they should be one with us. What matters is how they remain in a reciprocal relationship with us — how they show deference, how they honor the debt they owe to the community.

All too often, we see the opposite play out in politics, especially in liberal circles. Politicians who once belonged to our communities imply that we owe them deference for their personal success. But in reality, what they have achieved is an exit — a detachment — from the very communities they claim to represent. As they embrace the trappings of elected office, the protocols, the privileges, they tie themselves to that position of power and create a material commitment to elite class status. Eventually they begin to believe that reelection is what matters most.

A material commitment to the majority can help mitigate the tendencies that come with holding state power. Of course, you do not become president without a degree of hunger for power, and some on the Left still privately describe Mujica as a caudillo, a strongman of sorts. But his mode of life kept him close to regular people and gave him critical perspective when receiving the advice of professional pundits and the economic elite.

Accountability Is a Structure, Not a Vibe

The second lesson to learn from Pepe is about how to ensure that personal commitments become political outcomes. It is difficult to maintain genuine accountability to the working class and social movements in modern democratic systems. Time and time again, activists have placed allies in office only to see them caving to corporate and neoliberal pressures. Or conversely, they witness leaders trying to establish control over a political system who end up turning toward authoritarianism. There are too few institutional mechanisms that allow elected officials to avoid these paths and assert a consistent progressive mandate, especially when facing sustained resistance from the media, corporate interests, and the political establishment.

Exceptional political talent is not enough. Without structural support, the likelihood of disappointment is high. Without a durable, independent structure behind electoral efforts, accountability cannot be guaranteed.

No doubt Pepe Mujica was an exceptional political talent, but it was the unique structural accountability of the Frente Amplio that allowed him to stay steady and responsive to his base. It stands as a key institutionalized example of a true mass party in Latin America. Through its creation of mechanisms to keep it beholden to the interests and concerns of its grassroots supporters, the Frente is a uniquely valuable instance of participatory politics.

The Frente Amplio is not a single party. It is a coalition of political movements, including the MPP, in combination with a network of local comités de base, or base committees. These grassroots hubs — which are independent of internal factions — organize members in their neighborhoods, spark debate, mobilize supporters, and connect communities directly to party leadership. The committees are the source of volunteer labor for electoral campaigns. But they also meet regularly to discuss policy proposals and elect delegates that take part in important national decision-making processes. Half of the delegates in the Frente Amplio’s National Plenary, the party’s top decision-making body, as well as significant numbers in other positions of responsibility, come from these grassroots committees.

While the committees are not as active as they once were, they continue to shape the internal dynamics of the Frente Amplio, and they inspire an uncommon degree of political participation. Internal decision-making power in the coalition is not based solely on vote shares won in the general election: the system rewards factions that can build strong, active local networks. In practice, it does not work perfectly. The committees are sometimes ignored, or they become overly partisan. But it does achieve a degree of accountability to grassroots voices that is seldom seen in modern electoral politics.

This structure was crucial in Mujica’s rise. Moderate factions within the Frente Amplio — representing wealthier middle-class professionals and government employees — often opposed him, voicing many of the same criticisms that centrist Democrats in the United States level against progressives. These groups have held significant influence, producing leaders including Tabaré Vázquez, key ministers of finance, and many of the coalition’s policy experts and administrators. Yet despite their mainstream appeal and resources, they were balanced by the coalition’s established internal structure, which amplified the voices of organized activists.

Not only did this structure help Mujica rise, it also helped keep him accountable once in office. It was organizational grounding — not just individual virtue — that enabled Mujica to stay aligned with the communities that brought him to power.

Electoral structures in the United States make this hard to replicate, but activists can take steps in this direction by codifying the internal democracy of organizations that make up the wider ecology of progressive electoral efforts. We can ask: In what ways are these groups — beyond electoral efforts — formalizing their accountability to social movements? There is much in the world of nonprofit community organizing, policy research, and advocacy that claims to reflect the interests of everyday people but, in fact, is driven by the choices of nonprofit boards, philanthropic funders, and political consultants. When these organizations do seek to engage their base, it is usually in a limited advisory capacity — for example, by placing a token community representative on a board where the representative is then expected to assimilate and sign off.

Instead, following the example of the Frente Amplio, groups should prioritize building structures where elected allies are not only supported but also held accountable to the people who mobilized them. Without that kind of durable infrastructure, progressive leaders will always be fighting alone against systems designed to absorb, co-opt, or isolate them.

Keep the Heat On — Even With Friends in Office

This focus on internal structures of accountability overlaps with a third lesson we can draw from Mujica’s career: the importance of active and independent social movements outside the elected administration or political party.

Mujica’s personal commitments and the Frente Amplio’s organizational structure both shaped his approach as a leader. Nevertheless, the critical force behind many of Uruguay’s progressive reforms during his presidency came from a broader set of forces operating beyond the halls of power. The external pressure applied by social movements — the “outside game” — proved essential in driving meaningful change.

Recently I spoke with a close adviser to Pepe, a lifelong leftist who is a committed Leninist and a former elected official. He was embarrassed to admit that there really is not a formal cadre or strict structure of cogovernance in Uruguay that goes beyond the electoral coalition. Although the Frente Amplio has a strong grassroots base, its relations with civil society and wider social movements have been scattershot, sometimes informal, sometimes even antagonistic. Even with its most progressive administration in office, key executive decisions were ultimately made by Mujica and his trusted inner circle.

Yet many of the victories that came to define Mujica’s presidency were not his chosen battles. The legalization of marijuana, legal abortion, and same-sex marriage became iconic reforms of Pepe’s administration, but they were not originally on his agenda. Rather, they were the result of pressure from well-organized social movements.

Mujica was both politically savvy enough and connected enough to his grassroots base to be receptive to these external demands. He recognized the momentum behind these ideas, remained flexible, and avoided rigid attachment to a predetermined plan. But even though these reforms would become some of his signature accomplishments of his time in office, he had to be pushed to champion them.

The legalization of marijuana, for example, was driven by a coalition of activists combating both entrenched international drug policy norms and local conservatism. Groups including the Asociación de Estudios de Cannabis del Uruguay and Proderechos organized marches, lobbied lawmakers, and kept the issue in the media spotlight, making changes politically feasible. Their efforts coincided with mounting pressure to find creative strategies to combat drug trafficking in the wake of the failed “war on drugs” promoted by the United States.

When cannabis activists began mobilizing in the early 2000s, public opinion was initially against them — two-thirds of Uruguayans opposed legalization. Mujica himself expressed reservations. Interviewed on the topic, he said, “Do not think that I am defending marijuana. . . . Love is the only healthy addiction on the face of the Earth. All the other addictions are a plague, whose harms have varying degrees.” But the movement built momentum by tying the cause to a broader rights agenda championed by students, LGBTQ groups, unions, and other civil society forces.

By 2012, rising fears over urban insecurity cracked the debate wide open. Legalization was reframed as a security measure, a way to cut into narcotraffickers’ profits and separate cannabis from harder drugs. In 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize recreational marijuana. In the end, Mujica’s backing and the Frente Amplio’s congressional majority pushed Law 19.172, the country’s legalization measure, over the finish line. But it was relentless social movement organizing that transformed the issue from an improbable and unpopular cause into a political winner.

This is a crucial lesson for social movements seeking progressive change: having allies in office, even a president with deep political commitments to regular people, is not enough. Social movements drive political possibility, expanding the Overton window and forcing elected officials to move beyond their comfort zones. Political power, even when wielded by well-intentioned leaders, is constrained by institutional inertia, competing interests, and the limits of political will.

Uruguay’s story underscores the importance of sustained pressure, strategic agitation, and public engagement — keeping issues alive beyond election cycles and inside the corridors of power. Allies in office may open doors, but movements must push through them. Mujica often described himself as reluctant, even skeptical, but he was also unusually open to being pressed. Unlike leaders who wall themselves off once in office, Mujica kept the door ajar.

More to Carry On

Pepe Mujica’s legacy comes not only from the laws passed under his watch but also the way he embodied a different kind of politics: a grounded politics, a politics of accountability, and a politics of democratic participation. He insisted that leadership must emerge out of everyday life, and that democratic institutions only thrive when civil society is strong enough to hold power to account. In 2024, at Orsi’s postelection victory event, Mujica told those assembled that he was battling death. “I’m an old man who is very close to beginning the departure from which there is no return,” he said. “But I’m happy! . . . Because when my arms are gone, there will be thousands more to carry on the struggle. All my life I’ve said that the best leaders are the ones who leave behind a team that surpasses them by far — and today, you are here.”

Shortly thereafter, reflecting on his journey, he added: “I spent my years dreaming, fighting, struggling. They beat the hell out of me and everything else. It doesn’t matter, I have no debts to collect.”

—Guillermo “Guille” Bervejillo is a senior research associate at the Whirlwind Institute and a research fellow with the Ayni Institute. An economic geographer, writer, and activist, his work focuses on Latin American geopolitics, political economy, and social movements.

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Dear friends and readers,

As we’re getting our new think tank, the Whirlwind Institute, up and running, we’re excited to start sharing some of the great work that our team is producing.

Things in Washington, DC these days are bleak. Responding to the onslaughts of the Trump administration, movements for social and economic justice are necessarily forced into many defensive battles. But if we want to also play offense and push forward a progressive policy agenda, we need to open other fronts—and that means looking closer to home. With federal power currently consolidated in the hands of the right, we have to be thinking about how to build power and deploy it at the state and local levels.

While groups such as Local Progress, ProGov21, and the Mayors Innovation Project are all working to provide resources for local lawmakers trying to push forward innovative measures, more work needs to be done to create a clear model for progressive municipal governance. When successful experiments take place on the local level, movements must coalesce around them and systemize them into a blueprint for other cities to replicate.

A central element of progressive municipalism must be finding popular ways to tax the rich and use the proceeds for public goods such as housing, social services, health care, education, and public transportation. The “maximum wage” measures that Whirlwind Institute research associate Celeste Pepitone-Nahas profiles in today’s dispatch are one means of doing this. They smartly agitate the public around the gross inequalities of executive pay, advance an important conversation about what kind of economy we want to live in, and bring in revenue at the same time. They create a demand that is both popular and polarizing, in good sense.

As Celeste reports, Portland has been a leader in pursuing this issue, San Francisco has followed its lead, and the approach is primed for others to run with. In short, the importance of a “maximum wage” is something we hope to hear people talking a lot more about in the future.

The article is running at In These Times, and we are happy to reprint here.

We hope you enjoy this dispatch, and we look forward to hearing from you!

Mark and Paul

Could a “Maximum Wage” Combat Billionaire Power?

Nearly a decade after Portland passed a landmark law to reign in CEO pay, social movements should aim to replicate the city’s success across the country.

by Celeste Pepitone-Nahas

(Published by In These Times.)

In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the power of the extremely wealthy over public policy has never been more evident. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has asserted, ​“Trump has… said it loudly and clearly: we are a government of billionaires.” The troubling extent to which we are ruled by the rich is hardly debatable. The real question is: what can we do about it?

One solution that has been proposed in the past is implementing a ​“maximum wage.” Such a cap would limit the amount any individual can earn over a given period.

There are a couple different ways that this limit could be accomplished. One way would be to use tax policy: We could simply levy a 100% tax rate on income over a particular level. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed such a measure during his administration in the 1940s. Although he did not reach his goal, the U.S. Congress passed the highest ever federal tax rate of 94% on top earners during World War II, and it kept the rate above 90% for the two decades that followed. (This is a far cry from the reality today, when the highest tax rate is 37%, and when few mainstream Democrats have supported Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s [D-N.Y.] proposal to raise the tax on the top bracket to 70%.)

Another approach to creating a ​“maximum wage” would be to implement regulations that set an acceptable ratio between the salary of those at the top of a business and those at the bottom. These measures might say, for example, that a CEO can only make 10 times the amount of the lowest-paid worker at a firm, lest the business face penalties. If the lowest-paid workers at a business were making $35,000 per year, the maximum salary for the boss would be $350,000.

A 10:1 ratio might still sound like an extreme gap between rich and poor. But, in fact, even a 100:1 ratio would serve as a major restriction on CEO pay. A new ​“Executive Excess” report released by the Institute for Policy Studies in August revealed that, among the 100 S&P 500 companies with the lowest median worker pay, the CEO-to-worker pay gap reached 632:1 in 2024. The worst ratio belonged to Starbucks, whose CEO Brian Niccol — who brought home $95.8 million in annual pay that year — made 6,666 times the pay of an average barista.

For these CEOs, reaching 100:1 would either require a huge pay cut or a big raise for those at the bottom. And that’s the point. Linking minimum wages with maximums incentivizes companies to improve conditions for workers at the same time it encourages them to reign in runaway compensation for executives.

Back in December 2018, Whirlwind Institute co-director Mark Engler interviewed veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies Associate Fellow Sam Pizzigati about the publication of Pizzigati’s book The Case for a Maximum Wage. The book highlighted some instances where activists have successfully pushed for maximum wage laws — both in the United States and abroad. As one example, Pizzigati pointed to Spain’s Mondragón worker cooperatives, which capped the pay ratio between top managers and workers at 6:1 at their start in the 1950s and have since kept limits in place: ​“A key part of the [Mondragón] success story is this idea that they are not going to let the gap between executive and workers widen to an atrocious degree,” the author explained.

Could the U.S. follow this lead?

The most prominent example of a ​“maximum wage” in the United States — or at least a step toward it — comes from Portland, Oregon, which in 2016 became the first city to pass a CEO pay-ratio tax. This measure charges businesses a 10% surcharge if CEOs earn 100 times more than the median worker, and it imposes a 25% penalty if the ratio is 250:1 or more.

Portland, Oregon happens to be my hometown, and I came of age during the Occupy protests there. Because of this, I was curious to find out what has happened since then. How has the measure held up? Have other cities, states and countries attempted such policies?

Looking at Portland’s 2016 ordinance, I was struck by the manifesto-like tone of the document, which opens with a reference to French economist Thomas Piketty and makes a rousing case for the importance of taxing the rich. The measure estimated that the surtax would increase city revenue by up to $3.5 million annually, money which could be used to assist Portland’s unhoused community.

Since then, Oregon Public Broadcasting has reported that the tax has exceeded expectations and actually raised an average of $5 million annually. When the tax first passed in Portland, the city commissioner who proposed the measure, Steve Novick, remarked, ​“I’m hoping we start getting calls from cities, counties and states, and a year from now many other jurisdictions will have done the same thing.”

In the years since, Novick’s vision has not materialized, and in some ways progress has been painfully slow. That said, state-level initiatives have at least been proposed in Connecticut and Illinois (2017), New York (2019), California (2020), Hawaii (2021), Massachusetts (2023), Minnesota (2017), Rhode Island (2017), and Washington (2025).

In 2020, San Francisco became the second city to pass a CEO-to-worker pay ratio tax. Similar to Portland, companies are taxed proportionally to their pay ratio: ranging from 0.1% on gross receipts for the 100:1 bracket all the way up to 0.6% for a bracket of more than 600:1, with businesses also facing additional payroll taxes. During the 2022-2023 fiscal year, the tax generated about $137 million annually on a prorated basis, according to city data — not bad!

There are some differences between the measures in the two cities. The one in Portland was passed by the city council, while in San Francisco the public voted on the proposition, which passed with 65% of the vote. Another difference is that while Portland’s law only applies to public companies, San Francisco includes public and private businesses, a difference made possible because San Francisco requires businesses to release payroll information to the city.

At the federal level, there have been repeated attempts to pass a pay-ratio tax. Most recently, in August 2025, California congressman Mark DeSaulnier re-introduced his CEO Accountability and Responsibility Act — a measure he had previously brought forward in 2020. Citing Portland and San Francisco as precedents, the act proposes to increase the corporate tax rate on companies with extreme CEO-to-worker pay ratios, while also offering positive incentives to companies with pay ratios below 50:1.

“While Republicans bend over backwards to help their CEO friends… I’m countering their misguided efforts… [and working] to put an end to excessive corporate greed that is eroding the middle class and threatening our democracy,” DeSaulnier said in a press release.

Disclosure as a first step

Short of implementing actual maximum wage laws, an important first step is to pass disclosure laws that require companies to publicly share the salaries of CEOs and employees. This is information that corporations would prefer to hide — making it impossible for the public to even know the pay ratio at their businesses.

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act made significant strides in this direction, requiring that companies begin making this information available. When that provision took effect in 2017, a surge in media coverage on income inequality followed.

A 2018 study by the Society for Consumer Psychology reported that when consumers are aware of such data, they avoid buying from firms with higher ratios. India passed disclosure laws in 2013, and the Hindu Business Line subsequently published an editorial claiming that: ​“These disclosures drive home the point that income inequality is alive and well in corporate India — a trend that may need reining in by policymakers and organised workers’ unions.” Australian labor party leaders proposed disclosure laws in 2018, and disclosure laws even stronger than those in the U.S. came into effect in 2020 in the UK. (British firms are to answer pointed questions about their compensation policies, explaining ​“whether the company believes that [the pay ratio] is consistent with the company’s general employee pay, reward and progression policies and, if so, why.”)

Today, the disclosure provision in the United States is being threatened by Trump-nominated Republican members of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. Republican Chairman Paul Atkins, nominated by Trump following the 2024 election, called the CEO pay disclosure regulations a ​“Frankenstein patchwork of rules,” while Republican Trump-appointed commissioner Mark T. Uyeda stated that the SEC should ​“refrain from expanding its rulebook simply because some may think that executive compensation is too high.”

International momentum

While the maximum wage concept has so far gained only limited political traction domestically, it has become a hotter issue abroad.

In the summer of 2024 in France, the leftist coalition New Popular Front won 182 deputy seats out of 577, making it the largest bloc in that country’s National Assembly. While the Left still falls short of holding a majority, the shock victory revived the progressive electoral prospects and went far in legitimizing their demands. One of the party’s most prominent voices, former French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, repeatedly made an executive pay cap part of his platform during runs in 2017 and 2022. ​“I believe that there is a limit to the accumulation [of wealth],” he has stated, ​“If there are any who want to go abroad, well, goodbye!”

Mélenchon’s ideas have worked their way into the mainstream. In 2022, after the CEO of French-Italian multinational car company Stellantis made headlines the previous year for earning 298 times more than his employees, incumbent President Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine le Pen both spoke out against excessive pay, parroting their leftist rivals. Macron, a former business executive and no friend of the working class, even felt pressure to call for an executive pay cap. Understood as largely symbolic, his words nevertheless showed a shifting window of opinion in his country. As for then – Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares, when asked about his salary, he simply said: ​“Make a law, I’ll respect it.” Perhaps Macron should listen.

Beyond reigning in astronomical executive earnings, a maximum wage represents a step toward limiting the influence of the ultra-rich in politics. In other words, it not only pays economic dividends, but democratic ones as well. Almost a decade after the city implemented its groundbreaking ordinance, Portland has demonstrated that it was well ahead of its time. Lawmakers from across the country should be eager to copy its success.

Celeste Pepitone-Nahas is a research analyst with the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. A Fulbright recipient, she holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Washington University in St. Louis. Her debut novel, The Greats, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.

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In recent years, particularly since the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and the subsequent rise of the Squad in Congress, progressives in the United States have increasingly asked themselves what it would look like if we could elect true social movement champions to office. Instead of having movements mobilize to run promising candidates every two to four years, then sending off the newly elected officials to navigate the halls of power by themselves — a process that usually ends in disappointment — activists have worked to envision a different relationship with the politicians they support. They have asked, what would it mean if elected officials actually governed hand-in-hand with social movements as partners?

This idea of movement politicians acting in close collaboration with the grassroots forces that put them into office is sometimes referred to as “co-governance.” In large part, co-governance today serves as an ideal. It helps us to envision a type of democratic partnership distinct from standard transactional deal-making. And it helps movements to articulate their goals and expectations for how they would like to see their most aligned politicians behave once in power.

But there are also some problems: It can be hard to imagine what co-governance would actually look like in practice — and even harder to come up with good examples of how these types of partnerships are being carried out in the real world.

One way to make it easier to think about co-governance could take shape in practice is to look at how pro-corporate politicians (both Republican and Democratic) have long sought to partner with business. “Politicians have a lot of experience with co-governance,” national director of the Working Family Party Maurice Mitchell told The Forge in 2021, “but it’s generally co-governance with capital.”

At the city, state and federal levels alike, politicians brag about having close ties with corporate leaders. They welcome business expertise into their administrations. And they craft partnerships that give representatives of capital explicit roles in designing and carrying out policy. In this respect, co-governance is not something new; it is merely a demand that leaders from social movements be given the same welcome and deference that CEOs have been accustomed to for as long as we can remember.

This raises an interesting question with regard to the current administration: Does this analogy hold for how Trump has treated his partners in the billionaire class? Or, to put it another way: to what extent can we say that Trump is co-governing with business?

* * * * *

Embracing economic elites

In 2022, we wrote a series of articles on the history, theory and practical implementation of co-governance, which we later compiled into a report. In this series, we laid out a set of common practices that characterize co-governance relationships. In places where progressive movements have tried to build partnerships with aligned politicians, there are five things in particular that they have sought to do:

1. Establish a structure or “table” to define who is part of the governing alliance;

2. Create a common agenda and set of priorities;

3. Back movement politicians with staffing and support;

4. Establish ongoing meeting spaces to strategize and assess progress; and

5. Empower allies through initiatives such as task forces and assemblies.

One way to evaluate Trump’s governing relationship with business, then, would be to look at the ways in which he may be adopting these practices — or neglecting them.

Clearly, there are a number of areas in which Trump has embraced the idea of bringing representatives of capital into his administration. In terms of the second item above, creating a set of governing priorities, he has drawn much of his second term’s agenda directly from Project 2025, the 900-page policy “wish list” written by the Heritage Foundation, a flagship conservative think tank heavily backed by business. Trump sought to distance himself from the agenda during his campaign, when it seemed like the extremism of its mandates might be a political liability. But since taking office, his administration has been remarkably faithful to its policies. Progressives can only dream of having such a guiding hand.

With regard to the third practice of co-governance, which involves having outside partners help select appointees and provide staffers for an administration, Trump has again embraced a highly collaborative relationship with corporate elites. By recent count, there are 12 billionaires inside the Trump White House, their net worth totaling to more than the entire GDP of 175 of the world’s nations, as U.S. News & World Report noted. Or, as Bernie Sanders told Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, “Trump has…said it loudly and clearly: we are a government of billionaires.”

Beyond cabinet picks, conservatives have triumphed in placing ideologues in strategic roles throughout government, both prominent and obscure. One of the authors of Project 2025, Russell Vought, now serves in a powerful position in the Trump White House as the head of the Office of Management and Budget. The nominee for Solicitor of the Department of the Interior, William Doffermyre, has long demonstrated his loyalty to the fossil fuel industry, having served as general counsel for a liquid natural gas project before being tapped for a role in the administration. And these are but two among a wide array of examples.

* * * * *

The table is not set

All of these examples point to ways in which we might say that Trump is enacting a model of co-governance with the billionaire class. However, there are other aspects of Trump’s style of rule that do not reflect a shared partnership with business — and these departures from co-governance practice can also tell us interesting things about the administration.

The first practice of co-governance that we lay out in our report is what we call “setting the table.” This involves defining who is part of the governing alliance that will be operating in partnership with the elected official — or who has a seat at the co-governance table, so to speak. Part of the point of co-governance is to envision the use of power as a collective and democratic endeavor, rather than one wholly predicated on the inclinations of a single individual.

As we wrote, “The idea is to amass a set of practices that turn the exercise of governance into a movement task, where inside and outside organizing are linked, and where the politician is but one part of a collective project to deploy social power.” Or as Mitchell put it, “To me, it’s about flipping what has been a very personal, careerist focus to something that is very much rooted and accountable to people.”

Needless to say, Trump is not interested in any such collective process. To the contrary, his governing project is an extremely individualistic one. It is based on cultivating total fealty and reinforcing his absolute executive authority. The structure that defines the agenda is ultimately not based on ideological commitments or shared policy ideals, but on the whims of Trump’s vain and capricious personality.

So while Trump is allowing representatives of capital and elements of the conservative movement to take over parts of government, he has made clear they ultimately serve at one person’s pleasure — his own.

Because he is all about cronyism and personal loyalty, more than any coherent ideology, Trump is an inconsistent ally. This can prove jarring for capitalist titans used to having politicians fawn over them. In some respects, a more traditional Republican administration — or even a neoliberal Democratic one — might be more welcoming of a genuine partnership with business.

As it is, billionaires may end up finding the Trump administration to be a mixed bag. They will benefit from tax cuts, no doubt. But at the same time, Wall Street has been widely dissatisfied with the president’s tariff plans. And, in general, while corporate leaders prefer steady and predictable landscapes in which to pursue profit, the past few months have provided them with anything but consistency. Trump escalating the war against Iran could invite further instability.

Industry by industry, any gains businesses secure under the administration could be spotty. Big Pharma might win an easier regulatory environment one day, but the next find itself losing money owing to canceled vaccine contracts and cuts to government research. (One recent article in Axios was headlined, “Pharma is facing its nightmare scenario.”)

As the recent, acrimonious split between Trump and Elon Musk has illustrated, who can count themselves as being on the inside of the administration and who’s on the outs can shift rapidly. The abrupt personal fallout between the president and the world’s richest man has come with pledges to eliminate government subsidies for and orders from Musk’s businesses. Just weeks ago, Musk was posturing as the power behind the throne. Now, Trump says that he will sell his Tesla.

* * * * *

When it fractures

In our report, we did not just write about the common practices of co-governance. We also outlined the major pitfalls that can doom any partnership between social movements and elected officials. One major problem is that the coalition taking part in the co-governance process can fracture. Movement groups often disagree with one another about priorities and policies. Some groups may feel that an elected official is doing a good job delivering; others may feel betrayed.

We quoted David Hatch, former director of Reclaim Chicago and founder of The People’s Lobby, who told us: “The line between necessary and unacceptable compromise is never as clear as we’d like.” Because of that, we remarked, “As long as activists are prone to disagree about where the line should be, the threat of splintering will persist.”

When the coalition fractures, the risk is that politicians and movement groups turn on one another. Instead of trying to have each other’s backs, they descend into acrimony. And the pursuit of their mutual goals can suffer as a result.

In the case of the current administration, Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told the Washington Post, “Trump likes conflict, and he’s building conflict into his cabinet.” Because his White House runs on personal loyalty, rather than ideological consistency, it is entirely possible that segments of the business community — or other pro-Trump constituencies — that have thus far signed on for collaboration may end up defecting. It’s also possible, if their groveling is insufficient, that they may be expelled.

For those who oppose Trump, there is possibility here. As much as they are able, opponents can endeavor to highlight cleavages between his allies. They can elevate issues that spark disagreement amongst MAGA supporters. They can court constituencies that might have liked the idea of Trump as a repudiation of the bankrupt status quo in Washington, but that now feel alienated by his actual policies. And they can see the administration for what it is: Less a well-ordered partnership that melds business and government into a ruthless, coherent whole — and more a fractious and fearful coalition, the parts of which rub uncomfortably against one another, and which, with a little work, can maybe just be pulled apart.

— Mark and Paul Engler are authors of “This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century” and co-directors of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. Mark is a writer based in Philadelphia and an editorial board member at Dissent magazine. Paul serves as the director of the Center for the Working Poor, co-founded the Momentum Training, and has worked for more than two decades as an organizer and trainer in the immigrant rights, global justice, climate, and labor movements.

Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich.

All those who have been wondering when mass resistance to Trump 2.0 would materialize need wait no longer. It is here. It is happening. It is now.

In truth, the new wave of defiance has been swelling for some time.

Following last November’s presidential election, media outlets such as the New York Times steadily pushed a story of progressive demobilization. The narrative went something like this: back in 2016, Trump opponents were fired up and ready to fight back, but this time around, in 2024, those who voted against his return were merely dispirited and resigned, hardly in the mood to take to the streets again. Oftentimes, commentators piled on by expressing skepticism about whether protesting was even worth it to begin with.

This story was flawed from the start.

Sure, in the immediate aftermath of the election, progressives took time to grieve Trump’s return. But already in November, mass organizing calls led by groups including the Working Families Party were drawing upwards 50,000 participants. (I don’t know about you, but for me anything over 10,000 people counts as being larger than my typical Zoom session.)

Within a week after Trump’s inauguration, protests were fomenting in earnest. We saw rallies outside of federal buildings and weekly boycott vigils at Tesla dealerships. Soon, there were calls for nationwide days of action, first taking the form of the 50501 protests in February. Then, on April 5, the Hand’s Off rallies took place at locations across the 50 states.

Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman, leaders of an effort called the Crowd Counting Consortium, reported in March that “our research shows that street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest.” They also noted that in February “we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.” Last week, they released an updated tally, stating that “protest has been surging” since then and that “Overall, 2017’s numbers pale in comparison to the scale and scope of mobilization in 2025 — a fact often unnoticed in the public discourse about the response to Trump’s actions.”

All of this came before the events of the past two weeks, which further augmented the size and scale of anti-Trump mobilization. First came large demonstrations in Los Angeles against ICE immigration raids and the deployment of the National Guard. (Manuel Pastor has a very nice report from the frontlines of the protests over at Dissent.) Then came the No Kings actions last Saturday, which were massive and took place at as many as 2,000 locations, organizers told NPR. Data journalist G. Elliot Morris, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, estimated the total number of participants at No Kings events between 4 and 6 million.

These are historic numbers.

By way of comparison, gigantic protests against the Iraq War on February 15, 2003 drew possibly 3 million demonstrators in the U.S. (along with between 12 and 30 million worldwide). The Crowd Counting Consortium estimated that the original Women’s March on January 21, 2017, acknowledged as a gargantuan mobilization, attracted between 3.3 million and 5.6 million protestors. In another historic deployment, Black Lives Matter protests may have drawn many millions more in 2020, but with the caveat that actions were spread out over multiple weeks.

In terms of single-day events, No Kings may not have reached the heights of the first Earth Day celebration, in 1970, which is sometimes cited as the largest day of action in U.S. history, but it’s up there with all the big ones.

Our team witnessed strong turnout in Philadelphia (around 80,000) and in New York City (upwards of 100,000). Organizers reported crowds of as many as 500,000 in Boston, 70,000 in Seattle, 200,000 in Los Angeles, and 100,000 in Chicago, among gatherings in other major cities. On his Facebook page, organizer Chris Crass did a wonderful job of compiling photos of No Kings protests from around the country. The images are inspiring: People swarming intersections in Evanston, Illinois, braving the rain in Little Rock, Arkansas, filling Liberty Plaza outside the state capitol in Atlanta, Georgia, and lining roads in Indianapolis, Indiana and Gainesville, Florida. All this stood in stark contrast to Trump’s gloomy, expensive, and under-attended military parade the same weekend.

Now, if you will allow a digression, there are a variety of quirks to consider when talking about the size of any mobilization. Crowd-counting numbers can be notoriously flexible and politicized. In Armies of the Night, his Pulitzer Prize winning “history as a novel” narrating a fall 1967 March on the Pentagon, author Norman Mailer jokingly suggested a rule of thumb for triangulating protest attendance: “[T]he police estimate multiplied by four might be as close to the real number as the Left Wing estimate divided by two and a half,” he wrote. “Thus a real crowd of 200,000 people would be described as 50,000 by police and a half million by the sponsors.”

Even when the numbers are reliable, comparisons between protests are not always apples to apples. For at least five decades after the 1963 March on Washington, the dominant model for a national day of action was to try to get everyone to a single location, often Washington, DC. Success was measured by how many people you could rally in that one spot. In some instances, such as the 2003 Iraq war protests, there might be one leading location on the West Coast (say, San Francisco) and another in the East (New York City), but the general model held. If the protest was to be a success, organizers needed to spend a lot of time thinking about filling buses and transporting people significant distances to join in a collective mass gathering.

By the time of the Women’s March in 2017, this dominant model was being replaced with something different. There was indeed a large central event in Washington, DC for the Women’s March. But there were also sizable events in other big cities such as New York City and Philadelphia, and even gatherings in smaller cities like Harrisburg and many points in between. Previously, the going wisdom had been that sending people by bus to the main event would be mutually exclusive with getting decent turnout locally. But that was not the case for the Women’s March. The big numbers in DC did not really seem to eat into crowds in smaller cities. Success was no longer measured by the numbers of people who showed up in one location, but how many events across the country could be hosted and what the cumulative attendance might be.

As it turns out, having protests everywhere is conducive to participation. Regarding last weekend’s No Kings demonstrations, famed Rabbi Arthur Waskow wrote about attending a modest event in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia:

“Why did my beloved life-partner… and I choose to join about 200 people at the Lovett Library to say ‘No Kings!’ Instead of 80,000 demonstrators downtown where they swallowed up and liberated whole neighborhoods? Because I am 91 years old and my life partner is 82. We were sure that the massive downtown crowd, impressive as it was for demanding change, would make it impossible for the two of us to navigate. The library was one of countless small gatherings across the country and in big and even middle size cities the turnout was enormous.”

Lowering the bar for participation is undoubtedly positive in this respect. Of course, there are trade-offs. Because it’s easier to show up to your local town square than it is to spend a day or a weekend bussing back and forth to DC, participants are investing less time in the collective experience of traveling and assembling with others, things that can be good for cultivating further commitment. And, as I have written elsewhere with my brother Paul, the success of civil resistance often involves demonstrating the hardship voluntarily taken on movement participants—meaning that actions which require people to make higher levels of sacrifice can have their own benefits.

All this is to say that the size of any given crowd is not the only thing that matters.

In some ways, a variety of the smaller No Kings gatherings may have been more politically significant than the largest metropolitan ones. A friend of mine estimated that upwards of 5000 people turned out in his South Jersey town of Collingswood, a huge number for that area—arguably more impressive as drawing twenty times as many in nearby Philadelphia. Another organizer friend went to a protest in a small Pennsylvania town about an hour outside of Philly’s blue bubble. There, she reported, between 500 to 700 people lined a major roadway for a long stretch, encouraging passing drivers to sound their car horns in support. The steady, if intermittent, stream of honks gave courage to neighbors whose town borders a county that went solidly for Trump in 2024.

In Jacobin, Branco Marcetic argued that the presence of events deep into MAGA country signals a notable shifting of political energies. “[There is an] important point to be made here,” he wrote:

“The turnout in liberal cities and even in Trump-voting towns and counties doesn’t necessarily mean that anti-Trump voters outnumber the president’s supporters in these areas or their states—in many cases, they don’t. But it does suggest that voters opposed to Trump’s agenda—who across the country were met with few to no counterprotesters, even in deep red parts of the country—are vastly more energized than his supporters, and that despite his having won the popular vote…that Trump’s public support is a lot softer and more passive than his 2024 victory made it seem.”

In an article a couple of months ago, Paul and I outlined the key characteristics that define “moments of the whirlwind”—or periods of intensified social movement upsurge. It is clear that the current moment exhibits these qualities: Demonstrations are sparked by highly publicized “trigger events” (think ICE raids at Home Depot or a U.S. Senator in handcuffs), and participation is decentralized, not driven through pre-established organizational structures. The No Kings events of last weekend were led or sponsored by groups including Indivisible, the American Federation of Teachers, and the ACLU. All of the 200 organizations that signed on for the protests, especially the more established ones, deserve credit for refusing to bow to the authoritarian impulses of the Trump administration—especially when we have seen some leading law firms, media organizations, and universities fail to muster such bravery. Nevertheless, recruitment of the millions of people to the protests did not come through organizational phone trees or people’s individual relationships with organizers, but through momentum driven by widespread outrage at Trump’s actions.

Wired magazine published an article this week contending that defiance this time around, aided by new technologies, is far more decentralized than the Women’s March in 2017 and other resistance in Trump’s first term. The article reflects the magazine’s techno-fetishism, and its argument is a bit comical, given that the Women’s March itself was no august and long-standing institution but rather an ad hoc formation that swiftly coalesced in the whirlwind following Trump’s first election. Nevertheless, the article showed how abundant dissident energy is bubbling up in countless places and often has yet to be absorbed by formal organizations.

The article also pointed to a third common trait of whirlwinds: In addition to drawing in new participants from unexpected quarters, these moments spur a wealth of activity among these newcomers that is not dictated by any centralized command. As Wired reported, “the Tesla Takedown protests began with a single Bluesky post that exploded in large part thanks to social media posts, including protesters’ pictures and videos outside dealerships.” (Even Elon Musk himself ultimately acknowledged the success of demonstrations in shrinking Tesla’s earnings, although he blamed the impact on “paid protesters.”)

Or, as another example, the magazine profiled a couple in the Deep South that got involved by creating a website that allows people to order free stickers that they can post in high-traffic areas in their neighborhoods. The stickers display a QR code that directs users to resources about the warning signs of fascism: “What began with 500 stickers posted all over their small town,” reporter David Gilbert wrote, “quickly grew—with the help of an appeal on Reddit—to a campaign that has so far seen the couple and their children send 750,000 stickers to more than 1,000 people in all 50 states.”

All this raises the question: What should we do now that the whirlwind has arrived?

Paul and I hope to write on this in more depth, but there are many things that can be noted at least in passing: First, people should contribute however they can, and they should work to convince organizations that they are a part of to join in as well. Many established groups are still hesitant to throw down, yet the addition of their credibility and resources can make an important difference. It is hardly too late to get started: The most sweeping whirlwinds form not when a single trigger event gives rise to protest, but when a succession of triggers result in a series of escalating civil resistance. Along these lines, we can be sure that Trump will present more provocations, giving more opportunities for creative responses.

Protests are polarizing, meaning that they make people who might otherwise have been undecided or inattentive choose a side. Movements should focus on maximizing positive polarization and minimizing the negative. As we have previously argued, this means being smart in framing the demands of an action, highlighting sympathetic protagonists and unsympathetic oppressors, and heightening the contrast between the inventiveness and determination of resistance and the repressive violence of the state.

Trump is unpopular. There is clear evidence—from public opinion polling to pushback on the streets—that he is wildly overreaching his mandate. It is important to remember that Trump’s 2024 election victory was a narrow one: he carried 49.8% of the popular vote, as opposed to 48.3% for Kamala Harris (and even his electoral college win was nowhere close to the commanding totals amassed by Ronald Reagan in 1984, Richard Nixon in 1972, or LBJ in 1964). Since November, Trump’s popularity has tanked, even on issues where he once enjoyed an edge, such as the economy and immigration. The rank cruelty of his ICE raids is becoming increasingly clear, and Republicans have touched a third rail of American politics by slashing programs like Medicare.

Civil resistance plays an important role in solidifying this unpopularity and—as Trump perpetually lies about the impact of his policies—in educating the public about what is really going on. It helps to generate momentum for backlash at the polls, not just in the midterms or the next presidential elections, but in a plethora of state and local contests already taking place. And, in the interim, mass demonstrations encourage noncooperation at many levels that make the implementation of the White House agenda more difficult.

In short, popular resistance boosts the costs of overreach. Let us hope that we can watch the defiance grow.

— Mark Engler is a writer based in Philadelphia, an editorial board member at Dissent and co-director of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. He is author, with Paul Engler, of "This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century."

Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich.

Paul Engler, Makia Green, Seth Woody, Carlos Rojas Rodriguez, Erin Bridges, Abbas Alawieh, Sophie Lasoff, Rachel Gilmer, Nicole Ektnitphong, Amanda Saich, Delaine Powerful, Anthony Vidal Torres, Lee Green, Dani Moscovitch and Alice Aguilar coauthored this piece along with Belinda Rodríguez, Cicia Lee, Rachel O’Leary Carmona, Heather Johnson, Brittany Koteles, Mari Luna, Ebony Watkins, Daniel Robert Hunter and Ebony Battle.

(Published by In These Times.)

We can see on the streets now the precarious situation we’ve studied around the world: the need for mass resistance to state violence and assaults on democracy, and the concurrent need to maintain nonviolent discipline in a dire and escalating situation.

Following the example of other authoritarians, Donald Trump wants us to burn cars. He wants us to throw rocks. He wants images of chaos — especially violence against police or National Guard troops — to flood the evening news. These are precisely the results he wants: to manufacture chaos as a means of justifying repression and extending his authoritarian raids on our communities.

We must not fall into his trap.

Instead, we must rally mass participation in a way that shines a spotlight on his abuses of power, his violence, his desire for chaos.

On June 6, the Trump administration escalated what is now unmistakably a deliberate, premeditated assault on our democracy. What unfolded was not just another cruel immigration crackdown. It was an operation drawn directly from the playbook of dictators: Create a crisis, provoke unrest, then use that unrest to justify an authoritarian response.

First, Trump launched raids meant to terrorize immigrant families. While the scale of these raids was not historically unprecedented — smaller, in fact, than operations under previous administrations — the symbolic violence was staggering. Trump made clear that this was not about immigration enforcement. It was a staged performance of state power, timed to incite maximum fear and provoke confrontation.

He targeted a city — Los Angeles — that represents the beating heart of the immigrant rights movement. A place where nearly one in ten residents is undocumented and where immigrant families, unions, and community organizations have built powerful networks of resistance. An estimated 20% of children in Los Angeles are in households where at least one family member is undocumented.

The initial response to these raids was swift. Local immigrant defense networks mobilized within hours. At this point the protests were mostly peaceful and relatively modest in size.

Second, the federal government responded with the startling deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops — without the consent of the city or the state. This was a constitutional breach, an act of aggression not only against protestors, but against the very principle of local democratic governance. This has only been attempted a few times in U.S. history.

Why would Trump escalate so wildly beyond the scale of the protests? Why stage what amounts to a military occupation of a city already provoked by the initial sweeps?

Because Trump is not responding to a crisis — he is manufacturing one. This is classic ​“wag the dog” politics: Provoke chaos to distract from scandal; replace headlines about corruption or collapse with images of flames and clashes with police; capitalize on fear to expand power and destroy the opposition.

There’s a reason why repressive governments have historically sent agent provocateurs — planted by police or federal agencies — to infiltrate movements, and why they have used them to instigate actions designed to alienate the public. We have seen it so many times in the past — from COINTELPRO to Occupy Wall Street — across the world, and even in our fictional worlds, like in the massacre orchestrated by the Empire in the most recent season of the Star Wars series Andor.

It’s not a new tactic, but it’s one that this administration has embraced with an almost theatrical brazenness.

This approach is another part of Steve Bannon’s strategy of ​“flooding the zone with shit” — overwhelming the media ecosystem with so much noise, confusion and spectacle that meaningful scrutiny becomes almost impossible. It is disorientation as governance, distraction as power.

And it makes perfect sense that they would reach for this playbook now, in the midst of one of the deepest internal crises of Trump’s political life. The alliance between Trump, Elon Musk and the hard-right technocratic wing of the GOP is fracturing in public view. Their supposed policy triumph — a bill that either balloons the deficit by trillions or strips healthcare from millions — is facing mounting opposition, not just from Democrats, but from some Republicans as well. The administration is becoming mired in scandal and controversy. And the image of cohesion within its ranks is crumbling.

By sending troops into Los Angeles, Trump is trying to bait the opposition into confirming the story he needs the media to tell in order to distract from his failures: that the country is on fire, that the streets are ungovernable, and that only he can restore order. He’s counting not just on outrage, but on specific images of disorder that advance his agenda.

The way we avoid this trap is not by staying home. It’s by creating the largest possible mobilization of resistance, with the broadest possible participation.The challenge for movements now is not just to oppose Trump’s naked power grab, but to refuse to play the role he’s cast us in.

To write our own story, we must stay rooted in nonviolent discipline — which means strategically not engaging in things the public sees as violent, such as property destruction, lighting cars on fire in a city just traumatized by wildfires, and physical violence against police and the National Guard. The philosophical definitions of what is violent and nonviolent don’t matter. What matters is whether activist tactics allow us to strategically center the real story — not the spectacle of cars on fire — but the corruption, the cruelty, the collapsing coalition desperately trying to shift the subject. We need tactics that shine a clear light on the authoritarian overreach, the trauma inflicted on immigrant families, the violations of the Constitution.

The timeline in Los Angeles matters. The first wave of protests was overwhelmingly nonviolent. The escalation — burning cars, rocks thrown — came only after police or federal agents fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd. That government aggression provoked understandable anger. If Trump’s provocations are to be exposed for what they are — desperate, authoritarian power grabs — we must respond in a way that sharpens public contrast between popular movements and the government forces that are the clear drivers in unleashing violence.

When street battles with riot police escalate, the state seizes its opportunity. It invokes law and order, justifies repression, and tries to fracture the movement by presenting it as a threat to public safety. But there is a flip side: When repression is seen as disproportionate or unconstitutional — like calling in troops in clear violation of public and political will, or when those troops attack nonviolent protesters — it can spark a powerful backlash.

This backlash can polarize wide swaths of the public in favor of movements that are resisting. It can compel even moderate politicians to align with people in the streets. And it can mobilize broad swaths of civil society to join in protest: churches, unions, immigrant rights groups, community organizations.

The good news is that many of these groups are already responding. Labor unions, churches and immigrant rights organizations have moved quickly to reclaim the narrative. Mass vigils, led by Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) and LA Voice and endorsed by the Catholic Archdiocese — an anchor institution in L.A.’s Latino community — were planned outside ICE facilities. And David Huerta, a respected labor leader, has emerged as a powerful moral voice in this moment: a symbol of principled resistance and courage. A large coalition of labor unions have rallied in the thousands outside city hall.

At the same time, provocations by authorities have at least partially succeeded. When people have been baited into street fighting, it has discouraged wider participation and derailed some of the most promising of the movement’s mass actions. There are hundreds of ways to escalate our resistance without playing into the hands of our opposition. We need to be creative about deploying tactics that build our strength while delegitimizing the forces of repression. The aim of the Civil Rights Movement in promoting disciplined, strategic nonviolence was not simply moral purity — it was power: the power to reveal the brutality of the system, to widen the base of support, to mobilize civil society and resist.

The urgent need at this moment is for a movement that channels justified popular anger into a disciplined and strategic response that can once again make clear the overwhelming injustice being imposed from above — and that can build the power from below to bring this injustice to an end.

Amid daily headlines about the Trump administration’s “flood the zone” assault on American government, it is easy to despair. And yet, people should not lose faith in their own ability to defend democracy. History tells us that, even as authoritarians deploy “shock and awe” campaigns to cause confusion and demobilization, they consistently underestimate the ability of movements to break out in opposition. And it has demonstrated that civil resistance — in the form of mass protest, strikes, boycotts and creative noncompliance — can have profound effects in turning public opinion against a regime and ultimately forcing autocrats from power.

“I have gone through, in my life, a number of social movements,” the radical historian Howard Zinn said in 2008, “and I have seen how at the very beginning of these social movements — or just before these social movements develop — there didn’t seem to be any hope.”

Conditions can alter quickly in part due to the fact that forceful drives for social change do not necessarily take shape incrementally. To be sure, a lot of organizing involves the slow and steady recruitment of new members, development of top leaders and building of organizational structures over many years. Along the way, movement organizations hope to extract concessions from those in power that better the lives of their members — such as protections for tenants in a building, clean-up of industrial pollution that is impacting a community, union contracts with better wages, benefits and conditions of work. Often, the individual wins are not flashy, and the long effort is not glamorous. But this type of work is essential. It is the organizing that has built up the labor movement and groups that form the backbone of an organized left in the United States and beyond.

At the same time, historians, movement theorists and longtime activists alike all tell us that progress does not always come at such a measured pace. Instead, history is punctuated with moments in which mass protests unexpectedly fill the streets, draw large numbers of previously uninvolved people into movement activity, and quickly shift public perception of an issue, changing the bounds of what is politically possible.

Various scholars and social movement participants have called these “ruptural moments,” “upsurges”or “movement moments.” In social science research, political scientist Aristide Zolberg dubbed them “moments of madness” in a 1972 article describing the exuberance of the student left in France in 1968, where pamphlets declared that “all is possible.” Other examples from throughout the world abound. But even within the U.S., the past generation has seen a sequence of these intermittent outbursts on the political stage: from global justice protests in Seattle in 1999, to historic antiwar demonstrations in 2003, to mass immigrant rights marches in 2006, to Occupy Wall Street in 2011, to the subsequent Women’s March and resistance during Trump’s first term, as well as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

In our book “This Is An Uprising,” we call these periods of intense activity “moments of the whirlwind.” We argue that they are of critical importance and should be incorporated into our conception of how social change happens. Unfortunately, these moments have often been downplayed or overlooked by many political pundits, elected officials and the public at large.

In fact, they are regularly underappreciated by organizers as well. Because whirlwinds break the conventional rules of organizing and require strategists to recalibrate based on an entirely new set of conditions and opportunities, established organizations are often not prepared for these periods of escalated activity. As a result, even when outbreaks of protest are not simply dismissed as fleeting and unreliable, the response to them can be scrambled, pieced together in ad hoc fashion after the critical early period of emergence has already passed.

This is a liability for social movements. As Zolberg argued decades ago, those interested in pushing the pace of progress can ill-afford to neglect those exceptional times in which the status quo, often conceived of as rigid and uncompromising, becomes malleable: “If politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ what are we to make of moments when human beings living in modern societies believe that ‘all is possible?’” he asked, going on to warn that our “prejudgment as to what is normal and what is not hampers our understanding of politics.”

When managed skillfully, these periods of elevated activity can accomplish many things. In a democratic context, they can reframe popular reception of a cause, change the landscape of solutions that are considered feasible, compel politicians and bosses to accede to demands that they might otherwise have rejected out of hand, seed the formation of new groups and campaigns, and allow established organizations to reap the benefits of an inflow of new resources and participants. In more authoritarian settings, they have been instrumental in averting coups, halting undemocratic power grabs, stopping the stealing of elections, and even ousting illegitimate regimes.

But without having a vision of what moments of the whirlwind can accomplish and how they can be used, organizations fail to strategically escalate. They lack mechanisms to properly absorb the energy of a movement upsurge. They neglect to communicate to the public why it is worth joining and investing hope in outbreaks of revolt. And they are unable to think about how, at times, it might be possible not merely to wait for whirlwinds to appear, but rather work proactively to engineer them.

Only by carefully studying moments of the whirlwind and appreciating their most distinctive qualities can we make the most of the openings they present. To this end, we believe it is crucial to recognize five key characteristics that define whirlwind moments and lend them their unique potency.

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1. Whirlwinds draw momentum from trigger events that polarize the public

Most social movement activists can point to a time in their lives when they felt swept up in a dramatic outbreak of mass protest. Therefore, it is common to hear people describe the experience being in the middle of a “whirlwind.” Yet although this language has long been a part of movement vernacular, it is generally deployed not to refer to a defined theoretical concept, but rather to point to a feeling of expanded possibility — amorphous and inexact but nevertheless real.

As we sought to bring greater specificity to the common understanding of this phenomenon, we drew the phrase “moments of the whirlwind” from a story about Saul Alinsky, the mid-20th century figure widely regarded as the godfather of U.S. community organizing. The founder of groups including the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in Chicago, Alinsky was known for his disciplined, local approach to community building and his suspicion of mass movements. But something happened in the spring of 1961 that caused him to reconsider his prior beliefs and at least temporarily pivot based on new conditions.

That something was the Freedom Rides, an effort to desegregate interstate busing in the South that became one of the peak moments of the civil rights movement. After Freedom Riders in Alabama were attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan, the campaign burst into news headlines nationally and internationally. Amid the excitement, one of Alinsky’s trusted lieutenants, Nicholas von Hoffman, got a call asking if their community organization in Chicago would host organizers for what would be one of the riders’ first public appearances in the North since the start of their campaign.

As Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt relates, von Hoffman was skeptical, remembering many civil rights demonstrations in Chicago that failed to draw a crowd. (A few years earlier, Horwitt writes, local leaders had called “a protest rally in Washington Park after a Black man had been lynched in Poplarville, Mississippi. When von Hoffman showed up, he recalled, he was the only one there.”) Nevertheless, he agreed to host and booked the gymnasium at St. Cyril’s Church, a local parish.

An hour before the start of the event, just as von Hoffman was beginning to despair, people started trickling in. Then they kept coming in greater and greater numbers. Soon, a flood of Chicagoans packed the gym and poured out to fill the foyer, the stairs and the sidewalks. Von Hoffman, in shock, rushed to find loudspeakers to amplify the Freedom Riders’ story to the overflow crowd that spilled down the block. The energy among those gathered was overwhelming. When von Hoffman got home at 3 a.m. that night, exhausted but still buzzing with excitement, he called his mentor. After describing the evening’s events in disbelief, he told Alinsky, “I think that we should toss out everything we are doing organizationally and work on the premise that this is the moment of the whirlwind, that we are no longer organizing but guiding a social movement.”

Alinsky replied, “You’re right. Get on it tomorrow.”

The community group proceeded to use the momentum of the Freedom Rides to organize a historic voter registration drive among Black voters in Chicago, stunning the city’s political establishment and channeling scores of new participants into a school desegregation drive.

This story about the Chicago community organizers highlights several of the distinctive characteristics of ruptural movement moments. The first key trait of moments of the whirlwind is that they arise in response to trigger events. These are dramatic public happenings that thrust a social issue into the spotlight. A trigger might be a wildfire or an industrial accident, a police murder or public health scare, a military invasion or breaking news of a corruption scandal. As social movement theorist Bill Moyer wrote, any number of such highly publicized incidents can create a situation in which, “Overnight, a previously unrecognized social problem becomes a social issue everyone is talking about.”

Trigger events polarize the public, meaning that they take people who might previously have been uninformed or apathetic about a given topic and force them to take sides. And they often spark protests, as newly outraged citizens take to public spaces to voice their concerns. But, of course, not all scandals and crises that make news headlines become the impetus for mass protest. Many shocking events, even ones that might be expected to produce widespread outrage, end up quickly fading into obscurity, with only muted reaction from the public at large.

To counter this, social movements play a critical role. In vital instances, activists have been able to skillfully capitalize on the opportunity presented by a trigger, provide context and framing that directs discontent at particular targets, and escalate whatever initial organic response may have arisen into a more significant and sustained mobilization. What is more, movements have sometimes created trigger events of their own: They have shown that a creative demonstration, a disruptive strike, or a bold occupation is sometimes able to capture the public imagination in an unexpected way and become the spark that sets off a wider revolt. Such organizing helps turn triggers into whirlwinds.

Moments of the whirlwind are dependent on momentum — which can be measured as the number of a movement’s active supporters times the frequency of their mobilization. While a single trigger event can be enough to draw public attention and send people into the streets, whirlwinds generally take shape as movements build momentum through multiple different triggers. These events reinforce one another and create a growing sense of drama. In a given instance, an initial scandal may start things off, but the media and the public might only truly start taking notice after protesters confronting a politician about the incident creates a new set of headlines. Then, a burgeoning mobilization might attract even more attention due to what is known in the field of civil resistance as the “paradox of repression.” Attempts by authorities to quell unrest can end up producing scenes of police abuse and official callousness that prompt much larger crowds to show up in support of dissenters.

A moment of the whirlwind, therefore, is an unusual state of heightened activity that represents a rare and fortuitous combination of opportunity and effective organizing, planned protest and emergent activity. As we have previously written: “At any given time, history might offer up a ‘trigger event’ that provokes widespread outrage and sends people into the streets. But it takes determined escalation on the part of social movements to keep the issue in the spotlight, to inspire greater participation and sacrifice, and to repeatedly reinforce the sense of public urgency.”

Although whirlwinds can be national or even international in scale, they can also happen on a more localized basis: They might develop in a specific city or community, on a college campus, or within a single industry. Yet on whatever level they occur, they can be traced back to one or more initial triggers.

The moment of the whirlwind experienced by Alinsky and von Hoffman was just one of the periods of concentrated tumult generated by the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The genius of the Freedom Rides, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, was that they were direct action protests perfectly designed to cause a succession of dramatic triggers. From the start, the proposal to send an interracial group of young people straight into the Jim Crow South constituted a bold and controversial plan. The rides posed a clear provocation to Southern racists, as activists vowed they would directly challenge and defy segregationist measures.

“The pace was intended to be slow,” writes historian David Garrow, “with as many stops as possible to test facilities in bus terminals in each town.” The result was a series of staggered incidents. As organizer James Farmer explained, “We planned the Freedom Ride with the specific intention of creating a crisis. We were counting on the bigots in the South to do our work for us. We figured that the government would have to respond if we created a situation that was headline news all over the world. … An international crisis, that was our strategy.”

At first, the stops produced only minor confrontations, but soon the riders encountered the decidedly violent response that their audacious plan had predicted. Outside of Anniston, Alabama, a mob of white supremacists burned one of the buses. Then, in Birmingham, locals pummeled Freedom Riders as they attempted to disembark onto the bus platform. By the time that a frustrated Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy begrudgingly dispatched 500 federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders and finally enforce the Supreme Court’s order to integrate bus stations, scenes of bloodied civil rights activists had become a repeated feature of news broadcasts, triggering national debate and motivating fresh waves of recruits to board new convoys of buses to the Deep South.

More recently, a 2023 campaign against fossil fuel subsidies in the Netherlands again demonstrated how a moment of the whirlwind can emerge from a cascading series of trigger events. Periodic road blockades on the A12 highway in the Hague helped to put the issue on the radar for the public. But other triggers made the popularity of the direct actions explode over the course of the year. A move by authorities to raid the homes of activists sparked indignation and spurred participation. So did a subsequent decision by police to turn water cannons on growing protests in the cold of winter. Once public funding of the fossil fuel industry became a leading political issue, the campaign benefited from the repeated release of new studies and exposés showing that the actual amount of subsidies was far higher than initially estimated.

Each subsequent report served as a fresh trigger, reinforcing the political controversy and adding to movement momentum. By the time activists completed a whirlwind, month-long period of daily protests in the fall, polls showed that 70 percent of the Dutch population was expressing support for a phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies.

* * * * *

2. Whirlwinds create a new wave of active support for a cause that comes from outside established organizational structures

As a second key trait, moments of the whirlwind create a temporary environment in which social movements are able to rapidly secure and grow something that is essential to their success: an influx of committed and mobilized volunteers. In contrast to other models of organizing, this surge in movement energy and participation comes primarily from outside established groups.

In ordinary times, a lot of the work that movements do is aimed at generating passive support for a cause. Ordinary protest and public education elevates levels of general awareness. In doing so, it turns uninformed bystanders who are neutral, indifferent or otherwise preoccupied into people who agree with the idea that something should be done about an issue. These people may not be doing much to push forward solutions, but their sympathies move to the movement’s side, and that represents an important step forward.

Although ruptural moments can have an impact in expanding a movement’s passive support, or the percentage of the public that views the cause positively, these periods of intense mobilization have an even more important function: They serve as a key means of taking people to a further level of commitment and participation. During moments of the whirlwind, large numbers of bystanders who may have seen themselves as in agreement with a movement’s goals but were previously disengaged decide to get involved. As these people move off the sidelines and into the fray, they become active supporters: They show up for demonstrations. They donate money. They make the movement’s issue a top concern when voting. And they reach out to persuade others in their networks. Some start attending organizing meetings, taking leadership roles in protest groups, and making significant personal sacrifices in support of the cause.

Crucially, during moments of the whirlwind, such participation originates predominantly from beyond the ranks of established organizations. Instead of prodding usual suspects from inside existing groups into action, evolving mass protests draw from outside.

This can confound the expectations of veteran organizers. Ordinarily, those who attend meetings, plan actions, sign up for group activities, join electoral canvasses, or show up to demonstrations are people who are integrated into an organizational structure. Their participation over a long period of time is nurtured through relationships they have with peers, staff and leaders within those bodies. When a structure-based organization, such as a union or a community group, wants to put on a demonstration, it deploys participants using something akin to a phone tree. Top organizers might each be tasked with calling 10 committee leaders who are responsible for a given workplace, building or congregation. These leaders, in turn, each activate 10 rank-and-file members.

The organization achieves scale for the protest either by reaching more deeply into its structure or by joining forces with other allied organizations — groups with memberships of their own that can be tapped in the same way. In this manner, every participant who shows up has been identified in advance and can be traced back through the structure, like leaves on a tree connecting to branches and, eventually, the main trunk.

In contrast, during a moment of the whirlwind, energy pours into a movement from members of an activated public who may have never had contact with established groups before. Scale is not driven by the phone tree, but by the magnitude of the public response to a trigger event. Longtime organizers of structure-based groups often marvel at seeing all sorts of new participants “come out of the woodwork” during these periods, asking, “Who are all these people?” As Nicholas von Hoffman joked when putting together the Chicago voter registration drive in the wake of the St. Cyril’s event, “In many instances, we were working with people who had never been in any organization larger than a crap game.”

Meanwhile in the South, John Lewis, one of the original Freedom Riders, reported a similar rush of new volunteers. A key leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, who would later become a U.S. Congressperson, Lewis commented on how the campaign morphed from a small direct action with a carefully selected cadre of riders into something much bigger: It became “a more spontaneous event, less like a precise, military-like assault and more like an organism with a life of its own, a thing that seemed to be growing of its own accord[,]” he would write.

Within a few weeks, he witnessed the “Freedom Ride [burst] wide open… mushrooming and multiplying into Freedom Rides, dozens of them, buses filled with literally hundreds” who arrived “each day from every direction. Quakers, college professors, rabbis, pacifists, unionists, communists, conscientious objectors, clergymen — they were flooding in from Minnesota, Wisconsin, California, as well as from points east and south, merging with the students of SNCC and CORE and overflowing the jail cells of Jackson.”

During whirlwind moments, it is common for the media to run stories that profile people who have not previously engaged in political activism. This could be seen during the January 2017 Women’s March, when women repulsed by the newly elected Donald Trump turned out in record-setting numbers at marches that took place throughout the country. In this instance, the Associated Press published a representative article remarking on the “unusually high share of newcomers for a demonstration,” while USA Today quoted first-time protester Kristen Phillip of San Mateo, California, who brought her daughter with her to a San Francisco rally: “I’m 44 and I’ve never done anything like this but I feel compelled to be here,” Phillip stated, noting that the march made her feel “powerful and hopeful.” “It makes me feel that we can get through this, if we love each other and don’t let them divide us,” she said.

Indeed, the media plays an important role in driving participation — although sometimes social media and alternative outlets can have a decisive hand in amplifying triggers when mainstream news sources are slow to notice. In 2006, the immigrant rights movement exploded into action in response to the so-called “Sensenbrenner Bill” passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Fearing the bill would lead to mass persecution of immigrants, rallies started popping up across the country. First, 100,000 people demonstrated in Chicago, followed by a march in Los Angeles of more than half a million protesters, and a day of action the next month in 102 cities. Many mainstream pundits were mystified by the speed at which word of the actions spread. But savvy observers took note of the role of Spanish-language media — and radio stations in particular — in driving turnout. In Los Angeles, two rival DJs, El Pioín and El Cucuy, crucially joined forces to promote their city’s protests. As Spanish-language stations elsewhere joined in, writer Ed Morales quipped in The Nation, “The Media Is the Mensaje.”

The intensity of a whirlwind cannot be sustained indefinitely. And, as we will see, this produces a genuine challenge for organizers who must reckon with how to absorb the energy it creates. Nevertheless, while it lasts, the inflow of active supporters it temporarily encourages is unique and remarkable, distinguishing mass protest from other forms of social movement building.

* * * * *

3. During whirlwinds, actions are viral, decentralized and emergent

John Lewis’ feeling of watching the Freedom Rides become a creature with “a life of its own” is a sentiment commonly shared by organizers who live through moments of the whirlwind. In fact, a third key characteristic of these periods is that, once a cause goes viral, a movement will experience outbreaks of decentralized and emergent activity. Not only do people come in from outside established groups, but many of the actions they undertake are not directed from any unified command.

In other words, centralized organizations lose control, and people exhibit a much greater degree of self-direction and independent motivation.

When Black Lives Matter erupted into public consciousness, activated members of the public did not merely show up to rallies and make demands of local governments directly related to police violence. They did do those things, of course. But people also pursued a much wider range of activities seeking to confront the ongoing impact of racism in American society. They pushed to see the issue addressed in their workplaces, schools, social institutions and houses of worship.

As a result, companies were pressured to improve their efforts to diversify their workforces and add more people of color to the ranks of their leadership. Students, teachers and activist parents pushed for the adoption of books and race-conscious curricula that would create greater awareness and give young people better tools to understand and discuss legacies of structural racism. Hollywood producers and New York City book publishers came under fire for their failure to adequately promote marginalized voices, and they faced demands from within their industries to increase representation. Meanwhile, students urged their universities to rename buildings on campuses and some local groups similarly moved to rename streets or remove statues that honored slaveholders, segregationists or Confederate generals.

These are just a few of varied and far-flung examples of action that percolated in sometimes unexpected corners. The field of civil resistance sometimes describes this as work to weaken the “pillars of support” that uphold the status quo, while the Gramscian tradition might see it as part of the “march through the institutions” of civil society. Granted, not all of the various drives that emerged were equally impactful or well-conceived. And some of the advances secured in different quarters were later rolled back — pointing to the ongoing need to institutionalize and defend social movement gains, which can be precarious.

But whatever one makes of the initiatives that arose in these many realms, they reflected a diverse and decentralized outpouring of concern. They show how the impact of the whirlwind moment was not contained within a single legislative drive, election or policy campaign, but rather swept over an expansive social terrain.

Another way emergent activity appears is that new participants wanting to join the movement show up in activist spaces with unsolicited but creative offerings: some people who hear about a protest encampment may call in to send food from local pizzerias — as happened when trade unionists took over the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol in 2011. Others appear with donations of blankets or camping gear. At Occupy Wall Street that same year, independent massage therapists came to protest sites with their tables and offered free body work to participants. During the campaign in the Netherlands, classical musicians organized themselves to provide a free concert for the protests, performing a rendition of Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7.” Later, after police started confiscating instruments, they assembled again to enact a mimed performance of Mozart’s “Dies Irae,” their hands vigorously, if silently, bowing the air.

Very little of this type of activity is directed by centralized organizations — and indeed it is doubtful that harried organizers could ever even think to ask for many of the imaginative displays of support that materialize in periods of peak protest.

In the case of Occupy Wall Street, core organizers in New York City embraced the unpredictability of decentralized mobilization. Two weeks into the occupation in the fall of 2011, the mass arrest of Occupy protesters marching on the Brooklyn Bridge created a new trigger event for the movement. Taking advantage of the expanded attention that followed, organizers issued an audacious call to “Occupy Everywhere!” — an invitation meant to encourage allied encampments well beyond New York’s Zuccotti Park. The response was overwhelming. A week later, the Guardian was reporting that “as many as 70 major cities and more than 600 communities have joined the swelling wave of civil dissent.” The total number of encampments would later expand to more than 1,500 globally. With next to nothing in terms of centralized planning or coordination, Occupiers formed countless working groups, highlighted local issues of economic injustice, held protests opposing evictions, launched campaigns against student and medical debt, and planned actions supporting unionization efforts.

This surge in active support for the movement was short lived, and few occupations lasted for more than two or three months. And yet, during that time, the mass protest broke the generally accepted rules of political engagement and encouraged a level of viral participation that would seem almost unimaginable within other traditions of social movement building.

The fact that moments of the whirlwind draw in new activists from outside existing organizational structures and that centralized groups have limited control of the activity that results does not mean that established organizations have no role to play. In fact, these structures very often are activated by their own members, who are charged up by the excitement of the moment and feel called to get involved. Sometimes, the leadership of these groups recognizes the opportunity and makes sure their organizations do what they can to help. Deploying resources and lending expertise, they add organizational heft to the momentum building the streets. As von Hoffman and Alinsky illustrated, skillful respondents can effectively play off of mass protest energies and tap new participants for local campaigns. When they do, these responses from far-sighted and visionary leaders can make an important contribution to amplifying the impact of movement whirlwinds.

Many times, however, the organizations with the most to offer are also the most reluctant to dive in. As theorists such as Frances Fox Piven and Jeremy Brecher have documented, leaders of established groups have historically been slow to respond to public actions galvanized by trigger events — and are sometimes even hostile to emergent mobilizations that are beyond their control. Veteran organizers may be liable to view protests movements warily, as distractions from the targeted campaigns they are already running and the specific goals they are trying to achieve. For this reason, they can end up as followers, rather than leaders, in recognizing the forceful potential of these unusual moments.

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4. Whirlwinds are temporary, as mass mobilizations come in waves, then subside

A fourth characteristic of whirlwinds is that sooner or later, the elevated energy that follows the initial trigger events is destined to subside.

Mass mobilizations come and go in waves. And there are a number of reasons for this.

A primary reason is that the ever-fickle media seldom remains interested in one issue or event for long. Activists can attempt to counteract this tendency by escalating their actions to create a sense of growing drama, by deploying novel tactics that keep their protests fresh, and by looking for additional external triggers upon which to capitalize. But inevitably, the use of the media to keep a mobilization in the public eye — something that contributes to the early energy of a mass protest — becomes a double-edged sword as time goes on.

A second reason that whirlwinds die down is that their participants burn out. When momentum is high, it is common to see both hardcore leaders and more peripheral volunteers set aside their ordinary routines to throw themselves into the movement. They miss work, forgo family time, and neglect other obligations. But this level of sacrifice is difficult, if not impossible, to keep up over a long period. Eventually, more and more people must return to their normal lives, leaving fewer committed participants to push the cause forward.

Finally, whirlwinds are quelled because movements face backlash and repression from their adversaries. While at first the opposition may be taken by surprise by a trigger event — much like the movement’s own leaders — the passage of time allows it to solidify a response. As the public grows fatigued with protests, rhetorical assaults may begin to stick more often. And opponents’ attacks usually extend beyond words: State repression commonly means arrests, fines, court dates and jail time that all take their toll on targeted leaders and slow momentum. Sooner or later, a movement must decide it is time to recover, rest and heal in order to resume the fight in the future — until fresh triggers ignite a new round of mobilization.

All of these factors contribute to a pattern of peaks and valleys for mass protest movements. The rhythms of these rising and receding tides are well known, and both academic scholars and activists themselves have offered a variety of different maps to chart the phases of a movement’s progression. Perhaps the most famous is the Movement Action Plan, or MAP, first developed by Quaker activist Bill Moyer in the 1970s as he sought to “understand the ebb and flow of living, breathing social movements as they grow and change over time.” The MAP model lays out eight stages of a movement’s lifespan, from business as usual, to the initial period of “takeoff,” to later lulls and “re-trigger events” that produce rebounds in mobilization.

In the past decade, Movement NetLabs has offered a similar but modified take on protest stages it calls “the movement cycle.” Meanwhile, the organization Beautiful Trouble has a resource known as the “movement compass” which combines elements of both, while also incorporating research provided by anthropologist Isa Mayah Mukibi Benros and ActionAid Denmark. In each case, the models can only serve as an approximation of the messy reality of lived practice. And yet, they provide useful insights into the common psychological experience of activists at various points in a mobilization, as well as the disposition of the public and the likely response of inside-game reformers and politicians.

Appreciating the common patterns of ups and downs in mass mobilizations has multiple benefits. Knowing where a movement is located in the cycle allows its members to prepare for emotional swings. It allows leaders to focus on making the most of peak periods when they last: working to intensify whirlwind moments, extend them over multiple triggers, and be less reluctant to escalate when the opportunities arise. And it primes organizations to take on the challenge of absorbing the surge in active support and better institutionalizing the gains that are achieved.

Click to read conclusion

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5. The impact of whirlwinds is often indirect and must be tracked over time

Recognizing that cyclical nature of mass protest movements also allows observers and participants alike to better understand the effects that whirlwind mobilizations have. Because this impact is less direct and more diffuse than that of some other approaches to creating social change, it can be harder to track, and it must be measured over time. That said, those who do endeavor to follow the diverse ramifications of mass mobilizations will find that they are often profound and wide-ranging.

The fact that mass protests rise and fall in waves creates a predictable pattern among media pundits: Again and again, we see that as soon as a protest movement begins losing momentum, a raft of commentators will rush to declare it a failure. When a movement falls from public view and becomes “out of sight, out of mind,” casual observers are prone to latch on to this negativity and conclude that mass protests have done little of value.

For movement participants themselves, entering into a quieter period after the exhilarating peak of a mass protest explosion often feels like a letdown — even if conditions for organizing are much better than they were before. In his mapping of movement cycles, Bill Moyer called this stage the “perception of failure.” He noted that, “By the end of take-off, many activists suffer from ‘battle fatigue.’ After [an intense period] of virtual ’round-the-clock activity in a crisis atmosphere, at great personal sacrifice, many activists find themselves mentally and physically exhausted and don’t see anything to show for it.” As the whirlwind subsides and participants return to their daily lives, the intensity of purpose they previously felt fades, contributing to cynicism about future prospects.

Meanwhile, veteran organizers who may have been suspicious of movement outbreaks to begin with may find validation for their misgivings: If moments of the whirlwind are doomed to dissipate, then what is the point at all?

The answer is that whirlwinds leave behind them an altered terrain. Social movements do not end up in the same place where they started, but rather are positioned to enter into new cycles of contention from an improved position.

For Zolberg, the impact of the historic “moments of madness” he examined manifests in several ways. First, the experience of the whirlwind transforms people individually, radicalizing those who participate in movement surges and giving them a sense of agency alien in their day-to-day lives. Zolberg explains this in sometimes flowery language: “Minds and bodies are liberated,” he writes; “human beings feel that they are in direct touch with one another as well as with their inner selves.”

Second, mobilizations expand the public imagination, creating a climate in which solutions previously considered remote become regarded as practical and necessary. In this respect, Zolberg describes a peak period of protest as “a sort of intensive learning experience whereby new ideas… emerge as widely shared beliefs among much larger publics.” Or, as veteran organizer Jeff Ordower wrote in 2022, “ruptural moments open a window into a change in thinking. … [I]n changing how space or public order works, [they] contest the story of the dominant culture.” Gramscians might cite this as part of the project of creating a new “common sense” in society, while more mainstream political junkies might talk about shifting the “Overton Window” of acceptable debate on an issue.

Third, moments of the whirlwind enrich the soil in which movements grow. As Zolberg writes, “From the social structural point of view, stepped-up participation is like a flood tide which loosens up much of the soil but leaves alluvial deposits in its wake.” Rather than being exclusive with longer-term campaigns or institution-building, mass protest feeds the social movement ecosystem, providing an influx of resources, seeding new initiatives, and bringing in new supporters who are prime targets for recruitment.

All of this has concrete ramifications, which become evident over time. The Freedom Rides directly compelled federal enforcement of desegregation in interstate bussing, and it contributed to a series of protest cycles that ultimately helped usher in landmark measures including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But even when gains are less immediate or iconic, and in times when Congressional gridlock precludes most federal legislation from advancing, whirlwind moments can have significant consequences — ones too easily overlooked by cynics. The Women’s March and subsequent #MeToo movement during Trump’s first term, for instance, not only gave rise to scores of state and local laws, but had impacts in institutions such as schools, churches and businesses, in the behavior of the legal system, in shifting the culture, and in influencing electoral outcomes — including major defeats at the polls for Trump in 2018 and 2020.

The work of tracking such affects through multiple social and political arenas is far more involved than documenting the outcome of a single-issue campaign or a contract fight, focused on a more narrow and specific demand. But it also speaks to the potential of mass mobilization to send reverberations over a much wider landscape.

Many of these effects will be felt well after a whirlwind mobilization has progressed through its up and down cycles — after a revolt set off by salient trigger events has drawn active support from outside of existing organizational structures, unleashed a wave of activity not contained under any one centralized command, and finally receded into the past. At that point, pundits and historians will begin to debate the significance of its memory. Meanwhile, new movements can begin to operate in the transformed world of possibilities that it has created.

— Mark and Paul Engler are authors of “This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century” and co-directors of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. Mark is a writer based in Philadelphia and an editorial board member at Dissent magazine. Paul serves as the director of the Center for the Working Poor, co-founded the Momentum Training, and has worked for more than two decades as an organizer and trainer in the immigrant rights, global justice, climate, and labor movements.

Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich.

Currently, The Nation is running an important article by several movement leaders which asks the question, “Will You Put Your Body On the Line to Defend and Support Your Neighbors?”

The article is written by Greisa Martinez Rosas (Executive Director of United We Dream), Theo Oshiro (co-executive of Make the Road States), and Andrew Friedman (co-founder of The Action Lab). It describes a new Solidarity Pledge, organized by a coalition of prominent immigrant rights and community organizing groups, through which you can sign up to join in strategic actions to oppose mass deportations—either by providing mutual aid or vowing to take part in future civil resistance.

Over the past couple months, we have been proud to work with our friends at The Action Lab on planning around this pledge, and also on this Nation article explaining the initiative. In it, Rosas, Oshiro, and Friedman write:

“A few weeks ago, a 10-year-old US citizen with brain cancer was deported to Mexico along with her immigrant parents. Not long after, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent lawful resident, was abducted from his home and forcibly separated from his pregnant wife, simply for exercising his First Amendment rights. In Georgia, a man was arrested as the sermon at his church came to an end, and in Chicago ICE took another man into custody right after his wife dropped their child off at school. These cruel and widespread kidnappings are an affront to professed American values.

“Amid this shock-and-awe, many of us may feel helpless to stop the devastation threatening our neighbors and communities. But, history can be our guide. By following in the footsteps of students, local officials, religious leaders, and community members who have refused to cooperate with injustice, we can uphold a longstanding American tradition of nonviolent resistance.

“Fortunately, courageous people across the country are already doing this. In addition to state and local police, elected officials, and FBI officials who have pledged to oppose the administration’s attacks, frontline civil rights and social justice organizations are taking action. They are filing, and winning, lawsuits and ensuring people know their rights.

“They have also, crucially, organized a Solidarity Pledge which invites people to put their bodies ‘on the line’ to defend and support their neighbors. The pledge reads, in part: ‘I pledge to challenge Trump’s anti-immigrant attacks by working to create welcoming and loving communities, speaking up in defense of our neighbors, and supporting families with information and mutual aid.’”

We encourage you to read the full article here.

The Solidarity Pledge is a vital part of the effort to build a grassroots response to Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy of rapidly reshaping society and grabbing power through executive actions. In the span of just a few weeks, we have seen more upheaval than typically occurs throughout an entire presidential term. This approach aims explicitly to overwhelm our ability to respond. It is a political blitz intended to paralyze democratic resistance.

Regrettably, this strategy is proving all too effective. We find ourselves overwhelmed, constrained by limited capacity, unable to adequately respond to the relentless pace of change.

Yet there are also some reasons for hope. We know from past experience that resistance can strengthen dramatically in response to specific trigger events—moments that ignite public outrage and swiftly expand collective participation in opposition movements.

Resistance to Trump continues to grow, as evidenced by political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s ongoing work tracking protest participation. But to reach our full potential, we must anticipate and strategically plan for upcoming trigger events. Amid the overwhelming torrent of policy changes and executive maneuvers, we must ask how we can cultivate the ability to channel and harness future surges of public revulsion, transforming these crises into powerful resistance movements.

The Solidarity Pledge does so by drawing from historical precedents—from action against the Keystone XL Pipeline more than a decade ago to 1980s movements against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Back in July 2019, Mark wrote another article for The Nation explaining how the tactic of a resistance pledge was developed by the Central American solidarity movement:

“In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration was sending aid and arms to Central America, ostensibly to stop the spread of Communism. In El Salvador, the United States supported a government behind death squads that murdered thousands of civilians, including Archbishop Oscar Romero. In Nicaragua, Reagan funded paramilitary Contras determined to destabilize the left-wing Sandinista government. After the White House ordered troops to invade Grenada in October 1983, participants in the Central American solidarity movement—a diverse network of groups that had formed in opposition to US policy—feared that Nicaragua or El Salvador could be next.

“A few weeks later, a group of religious activists met at the Kirkridge Retreat Center in eastern Pennsylvania and created what they called ‘A Pledge of Resistance.’ Those who took it promised that if the Reagan administration sent troops to Nicaragua, they would travel there in a nonviolent attempt to impede the invasion. Several dozen signed on, and the magazine Sojourners began to publicize the idea. In the summer of 1984, West Coast organizers inspired by the concept expanded and refined the pledge, relaunching it in the fall with the backing of a broad coalition…. In the new version, participants vowed to engage in acts of civil disobedience—such as occupations of federal buildings and congressional offices—should the US undertake any major military escalation in Nicaragua or El Salvador.

“On October 9, organizers commenced the first mass public signing of the pledge. They placed a table and public address system in front of the Federal Building in downtown San Francisco, and hundreds of people showed up. ‘At the last minute, we decided we would have an open mic,’ said Ken Butigan, an early pledge organizer who later became national coordinator of the campaign. ‘We thought maybe a couple of people would come up and say something about why they were signing.’

“In the end, more than 200 people took a turn at the microphone, explaining in personal terms why they were taking the vow. These included individuals who had spent time in El Salvador and Nicaragua and had seen the suffering caused by US actions….

“As many as 700 people signed the pledge that day, and… [w]ithin two years of the pledge’s launch, 80,000 people had signed.”

The idea of the pledge was that, in promising future action, it functioned in a manner similar to a strike vote by a union, which can show workers’ commitment to escalating their fight:

“As it morphed from a tactical idea into a national organization… ‘Signal Group’ met regularly in response to new developments to determine if and when the network should be mobilized. If they gave the signal, word would spread through 10 regional coordinators to 400 local chapters. These were based not just in large cities—Boston, San Francisco, Chicago—but also in many smaller areas, from Fox Valley, Illinois to Juneau, Alaska. By creating this infrastructure, the Pledge became more than a warning; it became a mechanism for preparedness. ‘If the United States invaded, we were not going to sit back and decide at that moment how to respond,’ said Angela Berryman, who was then the associate coordinator of the Latin America and Caribbean Program at the AFSC and who served on the Signal Group. ‘We were going to be prepared to respond immediately. The pledge was an upping of the ante.’”

In the context of the Central American solidarity movement, the Signal Group called pledge signers into action on several occasions, including in November 1989, when they launch more than 1,000 demonstrations at federal office buildings and thousands of people risked arrest. In his article, Mark quoted historian Christian Smith, author of Resisting Reagan, who wrote of Central American solidarity efforts: “Even cautiously judged, it is apparent that the movement made the Reagan administration’s Central American policy of low-intensity warfare exceedingly difficult to implement, and therefore helped to limit significantly the severity of its destructiveness.”

Today, the mass deportations that the Trump administration has promised could yet morph into a major trigger event, dramatically impacting vast segments of the population and triggering public backlash. As Rosas, Oshiro, and Friedman write:

“The kidnappings as well have far less support than the Trump administration would like people to believe. Few Americans approve of using billions of taxpayer dollars to target and terrorize patients in their hospital beds. This is true across the ideological spectrum. Eighty-one percent of self-identified conservatives agree that we need bipartisan legislation to address labor shortages and inflation and protect people that are already in the United States, and 57 percent of conservative voters believe that it is essential to preserve protections for, and welcome, people fleeing persecution.

“The truth is that many Americans recognize that the kidnappings are terrifying for individual people and families—and that an indiscriminate, militarized state makes all of us less safe.

“That’s where the Solidarity Pledge comes in; it’s a chance to put our beliefs into action. Here’s how it works: People who sign the pledge are invited to participate in mass trainings where they can learn more about what is being done to confront the threats to immigrant communities. They are given opportunities to get involved as community educators, organizers of solidarity circles of close friends and neighbors, and as leaders of a nonviolent action corps to defend immigrant workers and families.

“At a moment of fear and fracture, the Solidarity Organizing Initiative creates an opportunity for community, learning, leadership, and action, and builds important, new, decentralized civic infrastructure. These are the values that underlay a participatory multiracial democracy of care and community.”

At current count, more than 6,700 people have signed the pledge, and the effort is laying groundwork to ensure that public outrage can translate into sustained action and organization beyond traditional institutional structures. As we work to turn potential trigger events into lasting movements that embody and strengthen our collective resistance, we believe that this can be an important beginning.

In the opening two months of his presidency, Donald Trump has unleashed a historic assault aimed at destroying public services, punishing vulnerable communities and dismantling any semblance of social-democratic governance in the United States. This “flood the zone” onslaught has been designed to overwhelm and disorient opposition, making it hard to keep up with the outrages and easy to fall into a state of “shock and awe” paralysis.

In this situation, it is easy to picture Trump as being all powerful. Those who discourage protests — such as Democratic consultant James Carville, who famously counseled progressives to “roll over and play dead” — imagine that the administration holds all the cards, and that opponents have little leverage to wield against it.

To the contrary, the White House is not unfettered by political constraints, and popular protest can do much to strengthen them. Recent weeks have featured many examples of the Trump administration being compelled to reverse or scale back initial measures. And they have shown why building civil resistance to the administration is an essential task at this moment.

In response to “flood the zone,” our job is to highlight political missteps, heighten public revulsion, and raise the political cost for Republicans seeking to push forward Trump’s radical agenda. Our aim should be to expand the capacity to resist by building movements and increasing participation in them. We cannot assume that public opinion will turn against the administration on its own — or that the public is even aware of the many controversial and potentially unpopular moves the White House is making, especially given that they are accompanied with endless lies and distortions about combating “fraud and waste.” Therefore, we must educate the public about the administration’s attacks on our communities and use the tools of creative resistance to amplify a backlash.

There are a variety of reasons why the Trump administration has had to back off a range of its initial drives in past weeks. In some cases, they have found their actions to be politically unpopular: As Elon Musk has pushed forward with a “move fast and break things” mentality, Republicans have sometimes found that he may have done damage that could cost them politically. Other times their actions have been stopped by the courts, or the administration has discovered that its sloppy implementation has made the measures susceptible to legal challenges. In still other instances, federal cuts are doing harm even in deep red districts — leading state-level Republicans to balk — or are causing economic damage, creating fissures in the business community. At times when particularly clumsy or unpopular maneuvers have been exposed, Trump and his officials have hastily attempted to limit the damage, often denying that they ever took the actions in the first place.

Among the White House’s retreats, amid widespread anger and frustration in January, the new administration rescinded a memo calling for a spending freeze on federal grant and loan programs less than 48 hours after it was issued. In mid-February, as USA Today reported, the Trump administration gave tens of thousands of K-12 schools and colleges until Feb. 28 to comply with a “sweeping and vague” order to root out diversity, equity and inclusion on their campuses. A couple of weeks later, the U.S. Department of Education issued new guidance “softening that mandate and reversing course” on some of its provisions. “Perhaps most notably,” the story remarked, “the Department of Education acknowledged the federal government doesn't have the power to dictate school curriculum.”

In February, the Trump administration reversed itself days after ordering legal groups that serve migrant children who arrive in America alone to stop their work. Not coincidentally, this happened after members of the public sent more than 15,000 letters to Congress in less than 48 hours demanding that the administration reinstate the program that provides these services. And by the end of the month, Trump had walked back funding and staff cuts to a federal health program for survivors of the 9/11 attacks and reversed its plan to shut down the government website that ships free coronavirus tests.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture backtracked after firing key staffers so haphazardly that the administration's ability to respond to bird flu outbreaks was compromised. And in March, Trump walked back his order to federal agencies to fire thousands of probationary employees in response to a judge’s ruling. The Office of Personnel Management then claimed it never actually ordered those firings.

Prospective cuts to various social programs hurt people living in red states and have ended up causing problems for Republican lawmakers, with angry constituents voicing their displeasure. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently noted, “At a town hall in rural Kansas… Republican Sen. Roger Marshall shut down the event after participants shouted over each other to express concerns about veterans’ jobs being cut and ask whether Marshall believes Russia invaded Ukraine.” Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that “In Georgia, Representative Rich McCormick struggled to respond as constituents shouted, jeered and booed at his response to questions about Mr. Musk’s access to government data,” while in Wisconsin voters pushed Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald on potential cuts to services. Such unpleasant interactions have become so common that GOP leaders are now actively discouraging Republican lawmakers from holding in-person town halls.

In early March, Elon Musk had several closed-door meetings in which Congressional Republicans expressed frustrations to him directly. “With all due respect to Mr. Musk, he doesn’t have a vote up here,” Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said before one meeting. “[Give] courtesy to the members. They’re the ones that have to go home and defend these decisions, not you. So why don’t you give them a heads-up.” He added, “You are certainly complicating the lives of individual members, and you might be making some mistakes and hurting some innocent individuals in the process.”

Potentially the most politically damaging moves on the horizon for Republicans are cuts to entitlement programs — and here the White House has had to scramble to do damage control. The budget passed by the House of Representatives could impose hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has called social security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Recognizing that attacks on these popular and essential lifelines could create significant political fallout, the White House continues to backpedal and insist that it will not enact cuts: “They’re not going to cut Social Security, they’re not going to cut Medicare, they’re just not. That’s just fearmongering,” said Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita on March 14.

After a report by the Washington Post revealed that Musk’s DOGE team was planning to eliminate phone service for people filing for social security and disability benefits — a move that would affect millions of Americans in claiming what they earned — the administration reversed itself and fought to ward off denunciations from watchdogs and opposition politicians alike.

Trump is also being disciplined by the market. Imposing tariffs has been one of the actions the president has pursued most doggedly. And yet, even here, he has repeatedly wavered, in part because of adverse reaction from Wall Street. As Trump has flipped back and forth between announcing new tariffs and then suspending their implementation, the prospect of trade wars has caused the S&P 500 to fall more than 10 percent below its previous peak, with Reuters reporting “U.S. stock market loses $4 trillion in value.” One major investor told the New York Times that the current stock market is “untradable” due to the unreliability of Trump’s positions.

Of course, the market being able to punish politicians or the possibility of Wall Street exercising an effective veto over public policy is not something that should be uncritically celebrated. Historically speaking, the threat of capital flight and market downturn has far more often been used to constrain the left than the right. Nevertheless, it is notable that Trump’s policies are generating economic repercussions and fueling uncertainty. As Robert Reich noted on March 8, “This week’s data on consumer confidence showed it down to a level last seen in 2021. Data from the Commerce Department, out last Friday, showed consumer spending falling sharply in January, adding to angst about the economy’s prospects. After new data came out this week on trade and consumer spending, the Atlanta Fed is projecting that the U.S. is shrinking at a rate of 1.5 percent in this quarter.”

Whether it is through tariffs, deportations, suspension of services, cutting government contracts, or firing federal employees, the administration is hurting poor people, union workers, immigrant laborers, consumers and business owners alike. This opens the door for broad and possibly unusual alliances to form between and among groups that may not have much in common other than opposition to Trump. Emerging movements should leverage this and encourage everyone who will be harmed by White House policies to join in fighting against them.

While current polls on the administration are not all favorable to the opposition, there are some promising indicators: As during Trump’s first term, the portion of people who strongly disapprove of his performance (now 41 percent) is significantly larger than those who strongly approve (currently 26 percent). As of March 12, CNN reports, “a 56 percent majority of the public disapproves of [Trump’s] handling of the economy, worse than at any point during his first term in office.” Moreover, “Just 35 percent of Americans express a positive view of Musk, with 53 percent rating him negatively and 11 percent offering no opinion.”

Trump has done plenty of horrible things, and the fact that he’s been made to reverse course in some cases does not mean that the damage has been fully undone, or that there will not be efforts to extend the harm in the future. But it does show that Trump is not invincible. We know that Republicans can be susceptible to backlash, and that a wide range of resistance tactics can play a critical role in engendering it now — just as they have in the past. During Trump’s first term, widespread mobilization was essential in curtailing some of the worst abuses of the administration, including his signature attempt to repeal Obamacare. And it ultimately stripped the Republicans of their Congressional majority after the 2018 midterms, limiting Trump’s power.

Protests will not directly convince Trump to change his views. But they can create an activated base of opposition, move public opinion against the administration, bolster the resolve of dissident politicians, and raise the stakes for swing-district Republicans who will have to answer for White House policies in the midterms. If done well, they can produce plenty more backpedaling to come.

— Mark and Paul Engler are authors of “This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century” and co-directors of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. Mark is a writer based in Philadelphia and an editorial board member at Dissent magazine. Paul serves as the director of the Center for the Working Poor, co-founded the Momentum Training, and has worked for more than two decades as an organizer and trainer in the immigrant rights, global justice, climate, and labor movements.

Research assistance provided by Raina Lipsitz.

One important answer I keep coming to again and again is: mass trainings.

As I recently wrote, mass trainings are “different from a typical protest training that someone might attend in advance of participating in a nonviolent direct action — a relatively short session designed to brief newcomers on the scenario of how the protest will play out or orient them to the ‘action agreements’ that participants might sign on to when joining the day’s demonstration. Instead, mass training is a way of bringing people into the movement in a more substantive way, fostering sustained involvement.” Or as Dani Moscovitch put it, mass trainings are a way of “giving people a sense of belonging, purpose, motivation and shared responsibility.”

In times of crisis – like now – mass training programs create strong mechanisms to absorb people newly activated by the political moment. But beyond increasing the size of a movement’s base, they also provide a means of increasing the level of commitment of movement leadership. In other words, it’s not just about expanding the breadth of our movements, but also their depth, measured in terms of commitment and leadership capabilities.

In the article I published a couple months ago on the crucial role that mass trainings play in scaling up the number of volunteers engaged in building our movements, I focused on how trainings serve as funnels that absorb and direct new energy during moments of political rupture. But in recent weeks, I’ve also been thinking a lot about our need to go deep.

When I look at what the right-wing is doing, I’m seeing both breadth and depth. They’ve been successful because they both create on-ramps for involvement of large numbers of new people, and they keep people in the movement through mass group experiences and opportunities for development.

When it comes to breadth, or continually expanding their movement, MAGA forces are using the playbook of right-wing populism to reach ever-newer constituencies. The great evil genius of this strategy is Steve Bannon. When New York Times columnist David Brooks’ interviewed Bannon last summer, he compared the experience to “talking with Leon Trotsky in the years before the Russian Revolution.” Recently, many people have been citing Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy as a description of what the Trump administration is doing with its executive orders. But what I find most impressive, and most frightening, about his right populism is its relentless focus expanding the coalition for Trumpism.

As Newsweek reports, Bannon is not satisfied with the current size of the conservative movement. Rather, he has dedicated himself to building a “MAGA Base Plus,” with emphasis on expanding the Trump coalition beyond the hardcore believers. In particular, he told Ross Douthat of The New York Times, he is strategizing about how “you expand your own populace with African Americans and Hispanics”—constituencies that barely anyone thought possible for to capture just a few years ago.

But the right hasn’t only expanded the breadth of the MAGA coalition. They’ve also increased the depth of leadership for rank-and-file activists. They have a variety of mechanisms for doing this, but one I think is paramount is the evangelical church.

Few progressives I talk with truly appreciate the amount of infrastructure that the church deploys in bringing new members into the right. The church has made the ladder of engagement into a high art: when you walk in the door, you’re welcomed by a greeter and channeled into a small group for new members, your kid has a dedicated room to play with other children, you’re invited to stay for coffee and donuts, and you’re surrounded by a community of belonging. Quickly, you are drawn into intimate Bible study gatherings, parenting groups, and other mutual support circles. You’re given opportunities to start exercising leadership yourself, first in small ways and then in more substantial ones. Even some who are critical of the “Church Growth Model” that has been used to build megachurches throughout the country have admired its practitioners’ dogged pursuit of their aims. As one commentator remarked, “The goal was not just to grow more and more and still more disciples, but to replicate more and more and still more leaders.”

The evangelical church’s infrastructure was not originally a pipeline for right-wing movements. Jimmy Carter, after all, was an evangelical and a Democrat who won a majority of evangelical Christian voters in the 1976 presidential election. But as I’ve written before, evangelicals have been very effectively politicized by right-wing activists since the 1980s, and these church communities are now fertile breeding grounds for their movement.

The evangelical church is not the only institution that we see incorporating mass trainings outside of a progressive context: The corporate world, too, invests a ton into training both its management and its workforce through retreats and conferences that often pull from large-group awareness seminars. But I think the evangelical church and the populist far-right are the clearest examples of how conservatives are building up their base at scale and with depth.

Conservatives, in short, have invested in their own version of mass trainings. And, right now, we’re living in the world they created.

The good news is that, in this political moment, I’m seeing a growing hunger for people to get involved in fighting back. The crisis of Trump’s election has created a lot of interest in mass trainings from organizations that have not often engaged in scaled work before. As just one example, I have been in dialogue with The Action Lab and a coalition of immigrant rights forces as they are working to develop a mass training program around their Solidarity Pledge, a pledge that commits signers to taking nonviolent direct action to block mass deportations and to providing mutual aid for targeted communities. Meanwhile, Dani, a major voice in the article I wrote, has been working with still other groups on their training programs.

Protest activity in response to Trump is now on the rise, and I expect it to expand dramatically in the near future. Over the past decade, there have been enormous mobilizations – from the Women’s March to the climate strikes to the Black Lives Matter uprisings – that have, in some cases, broken records in terms of crowd sizes. But that level of activity has not necessarily translated into durable growth in membership for movement organizations. I believe that mass trainings provide at least one key answer to some of the crucial questions that we now face: How do we take advantage of large protests or marches to absorb new participants? How do we go beyond apprenticeship models to develop highly skilled leaders at scale? How do we inculcate the belief that a big mobilization is only the start of our work in building a mass popular movement?

In case you missed it the first time, below is the full article I wrote from a few months back. If you check it out, it makes the case for why I’m so hopeful about mass trainings, and what elements go in to making them powerful. If we do them well, with love and rigor and a commitment to craft, I believe that we can win.

In solidarity,

Paul

Paul Engler is founding director of the Center for the Working Poor, co-founder of the Momentum training, and co-director of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. He is author, with Mark Engler, of "This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century."

Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich.

Need more people power in times of crisis? Run mass trainings

For movements trying to harness the energy that emerges during political upheavals, mass training provides a crucial means to develop leadership and bring in new participants.

(This article was first published in Waging Nonviolence.)

Social movements often face a contradiction: To expand and thrive, they need to bring in ever-greater numbers of new participants. And yet, knowing how to effectively absorb new people and plug them into a movement’s work can be very difficult. This is a problem even during normal times, but it grows even bigger during times of political crisis — such as the moment we are facing right now.

Imagine that you are an organizer and that you just pulled off a fantastic direct action. A small and powerful protest you held locally generated excitement and made news headlines. The public noticed, and the next day there are 10 people at your office door who saw the demonstration and are excited to get involved.

What would you do? Perhaps you would gather contact information and plan individual meetings.

But now imagine that these 10 people, with your support, pull off an even more audacious action, making a big splash with a sit-in at the office of a local politician. A few days later, you have 200 people coming to your door who want to join the movement. What do you do now?

You can hold a meeting, but you probably can’t do one-on-one outreach to everybody in a reasonable amount of time. You are scrambling.

Now think even bigger. Let’s imagine that there’s a massive external political event, and all of a sudden your issue is the leading topic across the media — banner news in major papers and a fast-trending subject people are talking about on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. People across the country are hungry to take action. And thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands, are knocking on your door, sending you e-mails, calling your organization asking how they can get involved.

What do you do with them, and where can they go? What will you do to seize the moment?

This is a thought experiment that Carlos Saavedra and Dani Moscovitch use when talking to organizers about the topic of mass training. Carlos and Dani are two of the people I have worked most closely with on the subject, and I am always impressed by the wealth of expertise and insight that each brings. Carlos, who now runs the Ayni Institute, was a leader in the Dreamers movement of undocumented young people fighting for immigrant rights in the first decade of the 2000s, and he built a training program for United We Dream that brought thousands of activists into the organization.

Dani is a co-founder of IfNotNow, a movement led by young Jews working, in their words, “to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis.” She was the lead architect of that group’s decentralized mass training program, which has conducted repeated one- and two-day trainings in 14 cities, led by more than 300 volunteer leaders.

When Dani does the thought experiment in workshops (you can see her in action here), she tells her listeners to take a deep breath. “If you felt a bolt of fear or dread at the idea of thousands of people outside your door — or even 200, or even 10 — you are not alone,” she says. Many organizational leaders have felt trepidation at the prospect of such a sudden influx.

“But what does it mean that we are not prepared for those moments?” Dani asks. Certainly, we know that the urgency of the present moment and the scale of the problems we are confronting require us to bring tens of thousands of people into our movements. And yet, too rarely are we planning to succeed in those times when this is possible. “If we don’t make a plan for how to bring new leaders in at the scale we need,” Dani says, “it’s because we don’t actually believe that we can win.”

This is not a theoretical challenge. Rather, it is one that mass protest movements have repeatedly faced in recent years. At whirlwind moments when crowds of people take to the streets and seek to join movements for justice — think Black Lives Matter, or the Women’s March, or mass antiwar protests — organizers must somehow find a way to absorb the rush of energy and participation. Too often, they have few systems in place to truly handle the surge of interest. And so when the high-water period subsides, most of the newcomers drift away, and much of the promise of the moment is lost.

So how, then, can movements better respond, making the most of the opportunity to channel this precious wave of new participants into long-term involvement?

Mass training provides a crucial answer.

* * * * *

Why mass training matters

Coming to an appreciation of the power of mass training represented a major breakthrough for those of us who were starting Momentum, the training institute and movement incubator I was involved in founding in 2013. Carlos was another of the founders, while Dani would later become the Director of Advanced Programs. At Momentum, I worked with leaders who had experienced cycles of high movement activity, from the globalization and antiwar movements of the early 2000s, to the mass immigrant rights protests of 2006, to the 2008 Obama campaign, to the subsequent peaks of the Dreamers and Occupy Wall Street. In each case, periods of whirlwind activity were followed by stretches of disillusionment, demobilization and disorganization.

We believed that movements could do better in harnessing and sustaining the power of these peak moments, as well as in channeling the energy into longer-term cycles of organizing. We sought to systematize methods for doing so, and we quickly realized that mass training would need to play a big part.

When discussing “mass training,” the type of program that I am talking about is different from a typical protest training that someone might attend in advance of participating in a nonviolent direct action — a relatively short session designed to brief newcomers on the scenario of how the protest will play out or orient them to the “action agreements” that participants might sign on to when joining the day’s demonstration. Instead, mass training is a way of bringing people into the movement in a more substantive way, fostering sustained involvement.

“Mass training gives you the ability to disseminate a lot of information and primary skills that can allow a group to succeed without as much centralized support,” Carlos says. “It also creates an emotional container where people really get excited about the work.” Its purpose is to transmit the entire DNA of a group — the story, strategy, structure, principles and culture of the movement.

Even with mass protest groups that are based around large-scale mobilizations, too often a big day of protest is the only thing that participants are invited to. If there is any follow up after that, it can be rote — an ask to sign a petition or make a donation. That can be an alienating experience for a new person who has just awoken to the magnitude of the struggle. “The goal of mass training is not just to give people a next step,” Dani says. “It’s to give them a whole path to deep and authentic leadership within the movement. It’s a means of giving people a sense of belonging, purpose, motivation and shared responsibility.”

Obviously, that’s a lot to accomplish. So how do you do it?

To make it work, there are four key components that must be in place: liminality, scalability, going beyond the initiation, and creating the right balance between training, coaching, and action.

* * * * *

A group experience of liminality

The first important component in how mass trainings work is liminality. This concept was initially developed in early-20th century anthropology, coined by European ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, who was interested in the rituals that marked important rites of passage. Contemporary anthropologist Bjørn Thomassen describes liminality as “spaces and moments in which the taken-for-granted order of the world ceases to exist and novel forms emerge.”

In recent decades, the importance of liminal spaces has been taken up in social psychology and a variety of other fields. For trainers in the activist world, the state of being in-between — the power of spaces in which people are open and receptive to personal transformation — is hugely significant because it helps address a key problem: how to enable many people to have breakthroughs in a limited amount of time.

In structure-based organizations such as unions and community groups, which focus on steadily building up organizational infrastructure over many years, the process of onboarding new participants and training new leaders is generally accomplished through one-on-one mentoring and apprenticeship. Organizers develop skills under the tutelage of an experienced master, and with time and practice they themselves can gain a deep understanding of the craft of movement building, but the organization’s capacity is capped at the dozen or two-dozen people that each lead organizer can realistically mentor.

Mass trainings create a space in which a much larger number of new participants can be initiated and put on a path of leadership development. When someone attends a training over the course of several days or a week, their life is disrupted. They have to travel to a new physical location, they are often surrounded by people they do not know, and they are wrestling with big, challenging issues that otherwise take a back seat in their routine lives.

The collective learning that takes place, combined with the shared vulnerability of participants and trainers alike, builds a culture of commitment to a common project. These ingredients open new mental and emotional doors for participants. And when used well by trainers, they create an environment conducive to transformational experiences that cannot be replicated in an individual setting. In short, mass trainings open up a new world for participants to walk into and then come out as leaders.

“The training is a space of reflection, of learning and of listening,” Carlos explains. “A lot of people that participate have never been in a movement space like that before. What happens when people go through a deep listening and sharing process with one another — like in the Marshall Ganz model, which infuses public narrative as the centerpiece of the mass training program — is that there are a lot of stories that people tell that they haven’t told other people before.”

Carlos emphasizes how this generates a powerful bond within the group: “There’s something magical about telling stories to strangers that are going to be listened to,” he says. “That creates a special vulnerability that people rarely find in their lives.”

The effect created is very different from what can be achieved elsewhere. “Emotions grow bigger when you have more people,” Carlos says. “It creates a feedback loop where it’s like, ‘holy shit, we are all in this together.’ And there’s a faith that you can do something together in the world that might otherwise feel impossible.”

Dani echoes this sentiment: “What happens in a liminal space, as opposed to just smaller interactions or one-on-ones, is that it’s exponential,” she explains. “The emotional impact just reverberates. And that experience and that belief can strengthen really fast and really deeply in a way that is carried forward.”

The power of creating collective spaces that can nurture transformative experiences was famously modeled in the U.S. civil rights movement both through the training work of institutions such as the Highlander Center and in the church-based mass meetings that would take place nightly at the height of protest campaigns. The movement’s revival-like gatherings were not merely occasions for soaring oratory from well-known speakers; they also featured communal song, personal testimonials from rank-and-file activists and possibilities to segue into intensive trainings the next day. This made for an experience that built confidence, skills and purpose in participants, fostering a potent collectivity. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, “Through these meetings we were able to generate the power and depth which finally galvanized the entire Negro community.”

We have seen the impact in many more recent movements as well. “At the end of IfNotNow trainings, we would go around and have people say what they were leaving with,” Dani explains. “Every time, at least four or five people would say, ‘I feel like I can finally be Jewish in a way that aligns with my values.’ Or, ‘I finally don’t feel helpless about this issue.’ People would talk about it as a turning point in their lives in terms of their sense of agency and belief that they could have an impact on the world.”

“In the Dreamer movement, a lot of people would share their stories about being undocumented, the struggles of not being able to go to school, dealing with deportations or having a family member be detained,” Carlos says. “People cried a lot, and there was a lot of emotional release.”

This practice grounded people and created a ritual, he argues. “All those stories really make everybody feel really, really clear about what was at stake for the movement. It makes people better activists because they get motivated. They can feel that this is extremely important for their lives, and they’re willing to put in the work to do something about it.”

* * * * *

Making a model that can grow to scale

The second key idea with mass trainings is that, in order to be able to reach the scale needed, they must be easy to replicate.

As IfNotNow’s program was gearing up, Dani and a few other key leaders — including Emily Mayer and Yonah Lieberman — found themselves frantically traveling around the country to lead trainings. “I essentially lived out of a car for a while,” Dani says. “I was traveling 20 to 25 days per month. I remember one time, I was so tired driving from a Boston training to one in New York that I crashed my car. I just parked and left and got on a bus so I could go run the training.”

There was so much demand for the program that new dates kept getting added to the calendar. But what should have been an organizer’s dream instead filled Dani with apprehension. “I was so exhausted, and just the idea of going to more and more trainings felt totally overwhelming,” she says. Her team realized that they could not run a true mass training program if it always ran into a huge bottleneck. “That bottleneck was me,” Dani laughs.

In order to change their model so that it could be scalable, IfNotNow took a lesson from Otpor, a youth movement in Serbia in the late 1990s that was part of the successful drive to oust anti-democratic strongman Slobodan Milošević. In order to initiate new members into the civil resistance movement, Otpor’s founders designed a training program that could be used by local chapters. But once they figured out how the trainings should work, these leaders quickly stopped running the sessions themselves. Instead, they focused on codifying and standardizing their practices into a curriculum that could be taken up and used by local chapters, operating independently. This insistence on replicability allowed the movement to build exponentially within the Serbian public.

As I wrote with my brother Mark in our book This Is An Uprising, “By the time Otpor had 20,000 members, so many trainings were under way in so many different localities that the obvious locations for gatherings — community centers and youth clubs — were constantly booked. More difficult than finding qualified leaders for the sessions was securing the physical space needed to train.”

In addition to bringing this lesson into IfNotNow, Dani and her team emphasized the need to always be developing new people who could master the pedagogy and teach others how to lead the mass trainings. “You have to train the trainers to train the trainers to train the trainers,” Dani says. New leaders do not have to lead a full training on their first outing. But by giving them a role at the next training — perhaps being responsible for a section of content — they both gain new skills and attend the training with a fresh perspective. A participant who learns the material as a listener absorbs a certain amount of information; someone who has to go back and teach it themselves truly takes it to heart.

In systematizing their trainings, IfNotNow implemented mechanisms for quality control to uphold a high level of craft. “Before they ever did it at a training, every trainer did three run-throughs of any module they would lead,” Dani says, “and we trained volunteer coaches on how to give them feedback.” This allowed the group to maintain the sharpness, clarity and integrity of their content. The organization made clear the requirements for people who wanted to take on more responsibility and move up their ladder of engagement.

Furthermore, they established schedules for how preparations for a training should take place, with clear steps to complete even six to eight weeks before the session. They also formalized a set of participant roles that would allow many people in a training to take a part in ensuring its success. These roles included welcomers, feedback collectors, timekeepers, participant supporters, dinner orderers, and fun captains or party leads.

Having a systematized, decentralized and coachable mass training program is what enables exponential growth. “We cannot rely on staff organizers maintaining relationships with all these people, and we shouldn’t have to,” Dani says. “You have to create systems that enable leaders to develop leaders.”

We call it “giving away the keys” — setting up others to organize without centralized control. Once the more distributed model was in place, Dani says, she did not attend an introductory training for two years, instead spending her time on other crucial tasks such as developing high-level coaches.

* * * * *

Balancing training, coaching and action

The third idea that is essential in making a mass training program work is balancing the leadership development that takes place in the group context with the need for coaching and also learning from practice.

People are not passive recipients of information. One model of learning contends that people learn 70 percent by doing, 20 percent through mentors, coaches and relationships with other people, and just 10 percent through formal instruction or coursework. A training program must account for this by rejecting rote instruction and instead maximizing the ability of participants both to build relationships and experience the work of the organization.

This means not only making trainings participatory, but also encouraging behavior in training sessions that will be directly relevant in campaigns. “Whatever you model in training gets replicated,” Dani says. “So if you want people to leave the training and take on work in teams, there should be a part of your training where people sit in groups and start working in teams, making commitments for next steps. If you want people to join a Slack or WhatsApp for inter-movement communication, start using it as a way to bring people together during the training.”

Recognizing the importance of creating practices that acculturate people to the everyday work of the organization, Otpor had new participants plan and carry out a protest at the end of their week of training — coming up with a small but creative act of defiance to the Milošević regime. It was when they completed their first action that new members were officially considered part of the movement.

Since recruitment and development of more and more participants is an essential function of the movement, growing the mass training program is an important objective. But ultimately, training does not exist for its own sake. Organizations have to go out and act on their issue: raising awareness, cultivating allies, challenging those in power, disrupting business as usual, and forcing a response. Therefore, striking the right balance for learning must involve creating infrastructure for coaching that continues beyond the group training.

Movement work is hard and emotionally intensive, and members need regular encouragement and guidance to carry out the mission of the organization. In a decentralized mass movement, the group’s goal must be to create means for people to get individualized support — not from a single supervisor, as in the apprenticeship model — but from peers and leaders at multiple levels of the organization.

The process of building out a decentralized network of coaches is a distinct topic, the details of which deserve longer exploration. But, as a step towards this, organizations can make sure that people leaving their trainings are joining teams. “In some ways, mass training is really about how you can create a massive number of decentralized teams to work around a shared objective,” Carlos says. These teams allow people to learn through experimentation, to act autonomously in small groups while getting continual feedback on their efforts.

“We ran into a problem where we felt like sometimes people left our trainings with a vision for what should happen over the next five years, but they didn’t have a vision of what should happen next month,” Dani says. “You can get really inspired, and get a lot of ideas, and build a lot of relationships that will help you. But you can’t actually learn how to plan a mass mobilization in a day or two.”

Remedying this required being concrete about projects that new people could channel their energy into — whether it be running a phone bank, joining a working group, or taking responsibility for a specific aspect of an upcoming action — and also creating systems so that the teams doing these tasks could get the support they needed.

* * * * *

Going beyond the initiation training

The fourth key step for maximizing the power of mass trainings is going beyond the initiation sessions to create a culture of training in your organization.

One way in which participants can grow their leadership is by becoming trainers themselves and taking on ever-greater levels of responsibility in making the program work. But another way that groups can foster leadership development and promote the value of constant learning is by creating upgrade trainings that allow members to learn essential skills needed to sustain different aspects of the movement. These are designed not just for initiates into the program, but as ways to level up the leadership of older members as well.

The upgrade trainings serve several key functions. They convey that in addition to scale, we also need craft. They show a movement’s commitment to a rigorous practice of honing the skills of organizing and building a deep bench of committed leaders who can steer the movement through challenging times, without the hard cap of a command-and-control staff nerve center. They inoculate leaders against negativity and demobilization by giving them tools to address difficult issues, which inevitably arise during intensive campaigns. And they allow decentralized organizations to make interventions in their collective strategy and culture as time passes.

“Our organizations gain capacity by committing to retrain ourselves over and over again,” Carlos says. “It gives us a way to work out strategic issues, to work on specific skills, and to get people back in touch with their motivation. Once people get used to doing it, they understand that they can go to trainings when they need to get re-energized or when they don’t know what to do.”

Specialized sessions might take on media and communications, logistics, action planning, fundraising, coalition-building, or details of electoral campaigns or legislative processes. Or they can be designed to help a movement work through a specific dilemma. In the case of IfNotNow, one of their most innovative advanced sessions was a “strategy upgrade” training, which they ran in seven different cities with between 30 to 50 people in each. It involved doing a deep dive with top leaders about how to embody the organization’s theory of change and how they could facilitate discussions with their local chapters about creating good action logic, avoiding the “myth of the righteous few,” and keeping the movement focused on bringing in new people from outside the base of usual activist suspects. The training helped these leaders reinforce IfNotNow’s unique role in the social movement ecosystem — rather than drifting into a different mission.

“People felt really developed and invested in,” Dani says. “It was powerful.” She adds, “Doing that training really helped move people from doing one-off actions expressing moral outrage into doing more in-depth national campaigns.”

Constant leadership development is essential for organizations that want to remain volunteer-driven mass movements, rather than staff-driven advocacy groups. Putting a premium on training people to fill needed roles within the organization allows it to keep functioning without constantly turning to the market. And, for participants, recognition of advanced trainings as a pathway to leadership allows people to gain standing without a sense that everyone must join the paid staff in order to be recognized.

Otpor formalized this type of recognition by providing color-coded pins to participants who had completed different levels of advanced trainings. Almost as soon as they were introduced, demand for these markers of esteem quickly climbed: People respected the skills of those who had thrown themselves into building the movement, and they wanted the pins to demonstrate the commitments they had made themselves.

“We don’t have masters programs, or high school classes, or vocational schools to train our organizers,” Dani says. “There’s a reason for this: The ruling class doesn’t want us to know how to dismantle it! It’s not in their self-interest. So we need to be making our own pipelines to develop leaders.”

* * * * *

Embodying the belief that we can win

At different times in the up-and-down cycles that social movements go through, trainings can serve different purposes. At peak moments, when new people are flocking to the streets, they function most crucially as a means of absorption — allowing organizations to capture this energy. But at times when movements have less momentum, the trainings can instead work as mechanisms for promoting on-going leadership development. In those moments, Carlos says, “They can generate a bit of energy, and start getting people working on things that feel slower but meaningful.”

In either case, the time to start is now. For those who want to start developing a mass training program, there is no doubt that a lot of advance planning is required. But Dani also advises, “Just put a date on the calendar!” No matter how much a group prepares, there is always going to be room to grow. And having that first session scheduled makes real the commitment to making it happen.

“I remember my first mass training,” Carlos says. “I was lost half of the time, and I wasn’t nearly as prepared as I thought I was. But the effect of it was still really powerful in the organization. So it doesn’t matter if the training at first is not as good as you want it to be. Just the act of doing it is quite amazing.”

Finally, Dani says, to pull off a mass training program, you have to believe that you can do it. This means visualizing those thousands of people knocking on your door and developing confidence that can bring them into the movement and ask them to step into leadership with you.

“When you embody the commitment to winning, it is infectious” Dani says. “One of the greatest forces holding our movements back from being powerful is our own sense of defeat and exhaustion. But if trainers in the front of the room do the work of tapping into a radical sense of hope and possibility, they allow every participant in that room to reconsider what they are capable of.”

“Everyone who attends that training is going to remember that feeling,” she adds. “And they’re going to want to pass it on, too.”

Paul Engler is founding director of the Center for the Working Poor, co-founder of the Momentum training, and co-director of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. He is author, with Mark Engler, of "This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century."

Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich.

In the start of 2025 we have entered a frightening new era. The first weeks of the new Trump administration have been genuinely alarming, even for those of us expecting bad things from Washington. We believe that it is only through collective action and through the organized efforts of social movements that we can hope to stand up against these reactionary currents. Paul and I are determined to contribute to these efforts in whatever ways we can.

To this end, we are pleased to announce some new projects: First and foremost, we are launching a new think tank, named the Whirlwind Institute! We have envisioned the institute as a social change strategy center, designed to help us expand our writing on social movements and to allow us to directly support an increasing number of organizers and movement participants. In the next couple months we’ll be unveiling a website with a bunch of articles and resources, and we will look forward to keeping you informed of future developments.

Along with this new institute, we are launching this newsletter on Substack. I have maintained an e-mail list for a long time to keep in touch with people, and Paul has kept up a newsletter for many years for the Center for the Working Poor. But with the start of the new think tank, it seemed like it was time to update the platforms we were using and take advantage of new technologies.

So welcome to what we are calling “Dispatches from the Whirlwind”! In this newsletter, we plan to offer thoughts about how social change works, lessons from social movement history, and methods for tracking the impact of mass protests and activist campaigns. We may also take the opportunity to occasionally send random thoughts on politics and culture, nerd out about movement theory, and highlight people we run across who are doing inspiring work in our world. We hope you will enjoy it, and we love hearing back from you.

Finally, we have a new article up that we want to share. It is being distributed by Waging Nonviolence, and it is entitled “It’s going to take multiple strategies to win under Trump 2.0.” In it, we talk about how the framework of social movement ecology can help groups with different organizing traditions work together to pursue change in a time of hostile government.

You can read on below, or check it out at:

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/01/social-movement-ecology-helps-groups-unite-under-trump/

Again, Paul and I are always delighted to hear from you. Drop us a line if you have a chance!

Yours,

Mark

It’s going to take multiple strategies to win under Trump 2.0

By Mark Engler and Paul Engler

(This article was first published in Waging Nonviolence.)

In the wake of the 2024 election and Donald Trump’s return to power, we have heard many suggestions for how progressives should regroup and respond. Some activists have argued that we need to prepare for mass protest and civil disobedience against the horrific policies the administration is bound to implement, such as mass deportations and the rolling back of labor rights — with some organizers, following United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, going so far as to suggest that a general strike could congeal by the end of Trump’s term. Others, citing feelings of “protest fatigue,” are instead using the moment to build communities of care and mutual aid. A third group has pushed for a revival of base-building and community organizing. And still others have looked to electoral campaigns and legal action at the state and local level as a bulwark against federal hostility.

In early December, the Ayni Institute convened a summit in Boston where organizational leaders and veteran activists came together around a different proposition: namely, that none of these strategies, by itself, is sufficient. Rather, movements gain strength when they can find ways for many approaches to work together.

At the gathering, some 70 participants representing movements around climate, criminal justice reform and prison abolition, immigrant rights and economic justice, as well as leaders in philanthropy, engaged spirituality and local government, shared learnings and strengthened ties as a community of practice dedicated to creating healthy social movement ecosystems. These practitioners held in common the belief that defeating the forces of white supremacy and creeping authoritarianism, while winning true economic justice and multiracial democracy, is not a matter of finding one “right” strategy for change. Rather, social movement success is predicated on appreciating the varied contributions of groups pursuing different theories of change and crafting complex collaborations between them.

By finding ways to manage the tensions that commonly arise, while rejecting the idea that diverse initiatives should be seen as being in competition with one another, movement organizations can emerge with greater strategic clarity and a stronger sense of common purpose. The discussions taking place at the summit offered some key insights into how.

Social movements as ecosystems

The Ayni Institute describes social movements as “multi-strategic.” As the organization explains in a video introducing the model of social movement ecology, “This means that they implement many different strategies towards creating social change simultaneously, whether they are conscious of it or not.” Varied theories of change are embodied by organizations in different parts of a movement ecosystem. In principle, these can be complementary. In the moments that movements are most successful, it is generally because groups with different organizing traditions and strategic approaches have been able to come together or play off of one another in constructive ways. Yet often these different approaches come into tension. Crucial to managing the conflicts that emerge is clarifying the divergent assumptions and organizational practices held in the distinct segments of the ecology.

We have worked with Carlos Saavedra at Ayni to develop a framework that classifies movement organizations based on their primary approach to making change, dividing them into five categories. The first category is perhaps the most mainstream and accepted within U.S. society: the inside game. Here, advocates lobby policymakers, enter into electoral contests, file lawsuits or otherwise work within society’s existing dominant institutions.

Two other approaches also try to influence these dominant institutions, but do so by wielding power from the outside. Practitioners of structure-based organizing work to build durable membership organizations, such as unions and community groups, that can leverage the influence that comes from a unified base to extract concessions from corporations, landlords, politicians, bureaucrats and other powerholders. A separate approach, mass protest, uses large-scale demonstrations and escalating campaigns of civil resistance to alter the limits of political debate. Such campaigns allow mobilized communities to create urgency around an issue and shift public opinion, “changing the weather” around their issues and producing more favorable conditions for all the other strategies. At its most potent, mass protest uses the disruptive power of widespread noncooperation to suspend the ordinary workings of mainstream institutions and thereby force concessions from those in power.

The two other approaches to change operate outside of dominant institutions. Activists constructing alternatives attempt to “prefigure” new possibilities for society by building models of social housing, community farms, credit unions, worker co-ops, counter-cultural arts spaces and radical schools. These types of alternative institutions provide bottom-up methods for serving the needs of the community while also embodying a set of values distinct from mainstream capitalist accumulation and profit-seeking. Finally, organizations oriented toward personal transformation believe, in Ayni’s words, “that change happens when we better our lives and the lives of others through providing service, improving our health and well-being, or reaching higher levels of consciousness.” Society is transformed as the lives of individuals are improved through spiritual pursuit, education, therapy or recovery practices, or other one-on-one development and support.

The fact that there can be invaluable work going on in each of the five segments highlights the idea that there is no single correct approach to creating change. Rather, the fortunes of social movements depend on the dynamic relationships that exist within the ecosystem of groups pursuing political transformation.

Mapping the terrain of movement organizations

With regard to its most recent gathering, the purpose of Ayni’s summit was not to introduce movement ecology to new people. Rather, it was to bring together a community of practitioners who have already aimed to implement the framework into their organizing. Participants compared notes about how the tool has aided their work, as well as about how to confront challenges that have gained urgency in the current political moment. To this end, attendees wrestled with issues such as how to make political advances in populist times, how to defend movements against authoritarian repression, how to deal with periods of failure in organizations, how more-neglected segments of the ecology can be integrated, and how to construct more sophisticated collaborations.

In discussions with various organizers, several key reflections emerged about how thinking through the dynamics of movement ecosystems can foster strategic advances.

A first important use of movement ecology articulated by members of the community of practice was as a tool that could help them map the universe of organizations working on their issue areas or within their geographical regions. One participant who described using the framework in this way was Dawn Harrington, who both manages special projects for the National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and serves as the executive director of Free Hearts, a Tennessee-based organization led by women directly affected by the prison system.

“We require people that are trying to join the leadership of our organization to do a course in social movement ecology,” she said. “Then during our leadership campaigns and policy meetings, we look all across the state and ask, ‘What are the different organizations and the different theories of change? And where are the gaps? Where do we need more of this or that?’”

Harrington emphasizes that the framework gives shared language to describe strategic differences, and is helpful in navigating conflicts among diverse groups. “We prioritize structure organizing as our core strategy, and so where there were groups doing personal transformation or straight up inside-game, we were having a lot of conflicts,” Harrington explained. “Before, we were thinking, ‘Okay, it’s just personal issues, or we just hate each other.’ But the movement ecology framework helped us to understand that it’s actually our theories of change that are in tension, and it helped us better appreciate the other areas of change.”

Not all experiments with the framework were successful. “When we first got trained in the model, the first thing we did was try to build a cross-theory-of-change coalition across our state,” Harrington said. “It started out really good,” she added, but resentment built when not all groups were equally committed to joint campaign work. Still, “it wasn’t a complete failure, because I think it got us to the point where we know what’s happening across the state with other organizations, and there is more communication.”

In moments when the Tennessee state government has locked in conservative rule and inside-game efforts have been stymied, movement ecology allowed organizers in the criminal justice space to identify opportunities to build power from the outside, Harrington said: “We can see the whole picture of how, even when politically things are getting worse, we’re still building a movement. All the pieces fit together.”

Filling gaps, navigating tensions

James Hayes, co-director of Ohio Voice, an organization dedicated to doing ongoing civic engagement with underrepresented communities in order to win progressive governance, has seen benefits as the framework has gained a foothold among groups in his state. “Movement ecology has been part of our strategic plan since I joined the team in 2017, and we train a lot of people in our space in Ohio on it,” Hayes said. “In large part, it just helps us have shared language to talk about the things that we are seeing and experiencing. So if we have disagreements, we’re using similar terms and coming to a similar understanding of what we’re disagreeing about.”

At the Ayni conference, a variety of representatives from the foundation world who were present argued that movement ecology allows them to identify areas of need and to make a case for dedicating funding to underdeveloped areas. For Hayes’s organization, the framework serves a similar function, helping them to set priorities. “It’s been helpful in thinking about what type of work we really want to support at Ohio Voice — to ask ‘where do we want to focus our resources, our energy, our time?’” he explained. “Part of our analysis is seeing that we had a lot of mass protest energy erupt over the years, but there has been a loss of organizing capacity in that time for various reasons. We saw that we needed more groups doing base building and running issue campaigns at the local level.”

Furthering the point, Hayes argues that an examination of the ecology in a given region can reveal imbalances that are creating weaknesses for movements. “We’ve been able to talk about how people have gotten away from organizing and become reliant on inside-game strategies — and how that’s not working now because gerrymandering has made it very difficult to move anything,” he said.

Hayes also echoes Harrington’s belief that awareness of movement ecology allows groups to better navigate tensions. He mentioned Equality Ohio, which is one of the more powerful organizations working on LGBTQ issues in the state. “Historically, the relationships between more insider groups like Equality Ohio and more radical queer liberation groups have been frayed and tense,” Hayes explained. “The previous executive director a couple years ago told me how grateful she was for the movement ecology framework, because it gave her the tools to talk with her team and her board and also to talk with outside partners about how they can have better relationships.”

This has concrete effects on how campaigns played out, Hayes believes. “There was really powerful work that happened, where people engaging in the State House strategy were open to there being more outside game energy and to some of those types of pressure tactics,” he said. “In general, it just resulted in a growth of capacity, culminating in getting the governor to veto an anti-trans bill that had been passed.”

Among other takeaways from the Ayni conference, Hayes points to discussion of inside-outside strategies. “I think eight or 10 years ago, there would have been huge pushback on the idea that movements doing co-governance was even possible, let alone necessary,” he said. “I think now there’s a huge hunger for it. We’re bringing more people into a conversation about what type of power we need if we’re going to get what we want out of electoral politics.”

Allowing for both focus and flexibility

Juan Pablo Orjuela, a community organizer and longtime immigrant rights leader with groups including Movimiento Cosecha, spoke to how an ecological framework can help specific organizations focus on what they do best, while also allowing wider movements to make strategic pivots when circumstances warrant.

“First being introduced to movement ecology, it was like an ‘Aha’! Before, when I was coming into mass protests, it felt like a negation of structure-based organizing, which is the philosophy that I came from,” Orjuela said. “Movement ecology helped me reconcile that these two traditions can exist and work together in some way. And it helped me be less resentful when people didn’t understand where I was coming from.”

Belief that change can be a result of multiple strategies does not mean that “anything goes,” or that all efforts are equally effective. Individual organizations must still make difficult choices about how to focus their work. And when they do choose to situate themselves within a given segment of an ecosystem, they should lean in to maximizing the role they have chosen. While doing this, they can also recognize that, as political circumstances shift, different parts of the movement may temporarily come to the fore while others recede in importance, only to become more significant later on.

“I was recently hired to do a strategic retreat with an organization in Los Angeles that was feeling really stretched thin, and we used movement ecology to help them diagnose what they were doing,” Orjuela said. The group’s leaders began to see that they were being asked to operate in many different segments of the ecosystem simultaneously — building alternatives through a land trust, while also running a personal transformation program for tenants, and then still trying to do structure-based organizing with a fiscal sponsor. “They had never broken down their work like that,” Orjuela explained. “And I think it was really helpful for them to realize, ‘we’re stretched thin because we’re working on too many theories of change.’”

The next day they talked about what their priorities were. The conversation allowed the group to drill down into a core strategy that best made use of their capabilities.

In addition to helping leaders focus on the work that they do best, Orjuela has witnessed how movement ecology can allow for greater strategic flexibility at key moments. Previously, he was involved with a campaign in New Jersey to pass a law that allows undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. “This is really important for a lot of people,” he said, because it means that being stopped by police for a traffic violation “doesn’t have to turn into a deportation proceeding.”

Orjuela saw the New Jersey campaign go through several rounds of battle between 2013 and 2019, with activists dealing with feelings of failure and defeat when a given push did not yield success. The first efforts, based in community organizing and inside-game maneuvering, came tantalizingly close. But that made it all the more heartbreaking when they fell short. “In 2015, we had the votes to get it out of committee,” he explained. “But there was an external event — a terrorist attack in Europe — that made anti-immigrant sentiment go up.” In the new climate, the politicians decided to not move forward with the bill. “There was this sense of grief in the base, and a lot of resentment and distrust,” Orjuela said, with many organizers leaving the campaign.

Yet within a couple years, Orejuela found himself drawn back in. “There was a feeling of, ‘We don’t want to fail the same way again,’” he said. This resulted in a hunger for new tactics. And in this context, Orejuela identified mass protest as an organizing tradition that had not yet been significantly deployed. People said to Cosecha, “You need to come here and implement this. It was actually by popular demand. Like we almost felt like we had no choice,” he said and laughed. “We shifted more to getting in the face of politicians and making them answer for why this bill had failed so many times. Instead of lobbying, we would take the tone of demanding.”

The campaign also launched a 300-mile pilgrimage across the state. As Orjuela explained, “It showed the need for driver’s licenses, because to not break the law, we had to walk all the way to Trenton to advocate for ourselves.”

In December 2019, Gov. Phil Murphy finally signed the bill, making New Jersey the 14th state, including the District of Columbia, to expand access to driver’s licenses and state ID cards. The ACLU cited it as a landmark measure, noting that it allows more than 700,000 New Jersey residents to gain the documentation necessary to drive.

In a session at the Ayni summit devoted to how organizers can grapple with the feelings of failure that commonly emerge over the course of movement cycles, Orjuela offered a reflection from the New Jersey campaign: “With grief came a recognition that we needed to try something different,” he said. “These feelings of failure and tension can also birth experimentation — if you’re open to it.”

For Orejuela, the Ayni gathering overall was an opportunity to both share his experiences and build his comfort in working with more people on movement ecology, even if they have never heard of the concept. “I don’t approach it from an academic background. I’m a trial-by-fire kind of person, and sometimes that’s made me afraid to talk about the things that I’ve actually learned about, even if I have the language for it,” he said. “For me, the more I integrate the framework, the more confidence I gain. And it’s cool to talk about it with the level of proficiency that I know I do have.”

Learning through practice

The intent of the Ayni summit was not to launch a formal coalition, or even to create full alignment around strategy on how to build opposition to the Trump administration. Instead, by bringing people together who are incorporating an ecological framework into their organizing and who are coming from different segments of the social movement ecosystem, the gathering showed how a model that might otherwise be just a theoretical construct is being made real through practice and refinement.

Far too often, Ayni argues, “social change gets boxed into narrow choices: advocacy, elections, or service work,” when the real change comes just as much from “building alternatives, organizing mass civil resistance and leading transformative community organizing.” Having a community that has been willing to bring foundational theories of change together, engage with friction and difference, and process the tensions that arise gives hope that the problems that have hobbled movements in the past may have a less pernicious hold.

In this respect, the gathering offered a vital lesson: We do not all have to be working in the same way to confront urgent challenges of Trump 2.0. But if we foster a robust ecology of change, we may yet see the movement resurgence that we need.

Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich.