Making The Road Is Hard on the Feet, Pt. 2
One Road With Many Lanes, or, Uses of a Wind Tunnel
Note: I am one member of the 11-member Interim National Coordinating Committee of Democracy Spring. I do not speak for the committee in writing this article. The facts are agreed upon, the opinions presented are my own.
Prerequisites: Making the Road is Hard on the Feet, Part 1
So we know how we got here. (You read part one, right?)
Democracy Spring, as both a movement organization and as a social movement, is in a moment of challenge, trial by fire. Paul Engler, who along with his brother Mark distilled much of the momentum organizing model into the book This Is An Uprising, said something very kind to me last weekend. We were at the Digital Momentum training discussing the challenges Democracy Spring is weathering when he said something that I think might speak to people in our movement beyond myself:
“You’re going through hard shit right now — and you know what? You’re gonna learn so much from it. Some people never go through the fire — and you’re gonna be so much stronger and wiser as an organizer when you’ve come out the other side.”
It’s important to me to believe that this is true, because the last two weeks have felt like I was wearing cement shoes in the wind tunnel from hell.
Uses of A Wind Tunnel
After the Democracy Spring INCC released “Democracy Spring After the DNC,” our social channels slowly began to be inundated with anger. While we received a strong contingent of positive feedback, on a purely human level it was very, very hard to be hit with a seemingly endless stream of insults, nasty personal accusations, and implications of selling out. It went on for hours, and then all day, and then day after day.
I tried a classic tool in my digital organizer toolbox — I let the mask slip. I began engaging with people on our Facebook page as myself, rather than as the DS page. I hoped engaging with a human would break through the emotional wall many had put up that allowed them to endlessly harass an organization’s Facebook page.
Turns out this was a bad call.
We had not done the work of frontloading our movement family with our strategy. For many supporters our apparent shift from “non-partisan” to “a progressive organization” that was advocating a strategic vote for Hilary Clinton was a shocking surprise. This likely understates it — waves of anger like what you see above surely come out of a deep sense of betrayal.
Beyond the visceral reactions of many apparent trolls, it was painful to see so many people that I had sacrificed and marched and worked alongside vocally abandoning us. People I thought of as movement family had their anger at a boil — even though I was but one member of the leadership body that had made the decisions that brought us here, I felt a deep sense of personal responsibility and even horror that I had provoked so much pain.
The strong reactions made one thing very clear to me: many of our supporters don’t know or understand the theory of change that Democracy Spring and 99Rise have always held.
So many supporters — though, to be clear, not all or even a majority — are holding feelings of anger and betrayal towards Democracy Spring. I feel deeply emotionally exhausted from bearing the brunt of that reaction, and the organization is at a crossroads as the INCC decides what to do in response to the feedback form we created after the uproar began.
One Road, Many Lanes
In any large social movement there are often competing theories of change — in fact, as Ivan Marovic of Otpor! has argued, most splits & fights within social movements can be traced to disagreements about the right approach to winning. The leadership of 99Rise, and the strategic leadership of Democracy Spring, have always held that our role in the ecosystem of the democracy movement is to challenge the dominant institutions of our politics. We intend to win the change we seek by using direct action to force movement on our issues by even the most corrupt members of the status quo.
That is, and always has been, our approach to change — you can find this as far back as the founding documents of 99Rise in 2012. I say this to hopefully inoculate against the idea that our strategic position is somehow an insidious shift brought about by outside forces. Our theory of change has not shifted, and will not shift. (for more context, see part 1)
Others in the democracy movement have a different theory of change: they’re focused on winning by building alternatives to the status quo. The Green Party, Socialist Alternative, Working Families Party, and others are all essential parts of a healthy democracy movement and, we believe, complementary to our work as Democracy Spring — but they are not our work. Our work is nonviolent direct action to force the status quo to move. There are many lanes on our road to victory, and we occupy only one of them. If you can’t join us as we seed the 2017 battleground for direct action targeting the status quo, that’s OK: we need every hand on the plow.
It’s important to point out here that in my view we have done a bad job of making this approach clear to people. 99Rise built its 5-phase grand strategy on this approach to winning, and Democracy Spring has adapted and adopted this grand strategy as its own. But:
it doesn’t matter what it says on your website if the people in your movement aren’t plugged in to your strategy.
#WheresMySorosCheck?
Leading up to the decision around strategic engagement with the 2016 election, there were weeks worth of honest disagreement and lengthy discussion within the INCC. Through this process we led one another to our current shared position. There was never one voice forcing us in one direction, and if there had been — from inside or outside the INCC — it would have been overwhelmed by the plurality of perspectives. We began the deliberation process nearly evenly split across different approaches, and we came to a shared conclusion through an internally democratic & community-focused process.
Because of that, I feel deeply frustrated when I hear it implied that we were influenced or won over by outside forces, or financial needs. We spent almost everything our tiny organization has in order to fly dozens of people to the National Training, because it’s important to us that our community of organizers be open to all, no matter their means. My own small needs-based paycheck from DS, and thus my rent payment, will be both short and late.
We also won’t be getting an influx of money from friends of Clinton for this — most Clinton partisans are still angry at us for the sit-ins outside the DNC. Trust me, I’m the one who reads all the emails they send. They’ve also taken shots at us for the criticisms we did make of Clinton in the course of our strategic voting recommendation. In fact, there’s only one other time in the history of our Facebook page where we’ve had such a rapid drop in likes: the DNC mobilization. Interestingly, we lost an almost identical number of likes during the DNC mobilization as we did after publishing “Democracy Spring After the DNC.” And for the record, reports of our Facebook page’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.
So no: we’re not secretly funded by George Soros. I’m not a sheepdog stooge of the Democratic Party. We weren’t promised any favors or money for our strategic decision. We’re just a group of hard working & imperfect people trying our good goddamndest to change the fuckin’ world. Please: send your hate mail to someone who’s on the wrong side instead.
Some of you reading this will be people who walked 140 miles with me. Some of you reading this have been arrested with me once, or twice, or more than that. Some of you reading this have spent weeks, or months, or years of your life fighting to win real political equality in America, because you know that we have to win. You know that this broken world, with its rising seas and hungry mouths and bodies riddled by police bullets, can be so much better. We can end the toxic corruption that gives us militarized police, and oil-slicked pipeline deals, and hopeless shoeless migrant children like the ones I went to school with in Texas.
We can get to the other side together. One road, many lanes.
I believe in us. I always have. I still do.
Let’s go win.
