In the last two weeks, as pundits across the country have shared their takes on the murder of Charlie Kirk and the rise of political violence in the United States, the conversation has felt oddly disconnected from reality. I agree with public figures stating emphatically that political violence is almost never justified, that this is not how we conduct ourselves in a democracy, that violence only begets more violence. And yet those statements feel less than hollow.

Part of the reason is that they so resemble the cascade of “thoughts and prayers” that public figures in the US share on what feels like a daily basis. Within an hour of Kirk’s shooting a teenager in Denver opened fire at a high school, critically wounding two students before killing himself. That was just one of 173 school shootings this year.

Those statements also rang hollow because politics in the United States have never been anything but violent.

When I was growing up, discussions of political violence among Black friends and classmates used Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as avatars for the two opposing sides. That both men had died by assassination barely registered in those conversations. We understood that, for the vast majority of the history of the United States, political engagement had been a life-threatening activity for Black Americans. The discussions weren’t so much a matter of “is political violence justified” as “what is the best response to ongoing American political violence?”

That violence didn’t end with the assassinations of the 1960s, or the murder of four students at Kent State in 1970. In the mid-1970s, efforts to desegregate public schools led to violence across the country. Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, as the first generation of beneficiaries of 1960s Civil Rights legislation “moved on up” into white suburbs, white residents pushed back with varying levels of violence, up to and including cross-burnings.

But political violence does not just consist of pulling a trigger or burning a cross.

The 1980s were an incredibly painful era in the United States, dominated by three public health crises: HIV/AIDS, crack-cocaine addiction, and record-setting rates of violent crime. Political leaders responded to all these crises with both policies and rhetoric that vilified victims and reveled in state violence based on “the view that a central job of government was to keep good people separated from and protected against bad people”.

The resulting political culture celebrated men like Bernhard Goetz, the slight, nerdy-looking white man who shot 4 unarmed Black teenagers on a train. It gleefully called for the death penalty for 5 Black and Latino teenagers coerced into confessing to a brutal attack on a woman in Central Park. It presumed that people who looked like Goetz were the “good people” and that young Black and Latino boys and men could only be the “bad people”.

No doubt, commentators like New York Times columnist Ezra Klein would push back on characterizing the rhetoric of the 1980s as violence, even as it ended or ruined the lives of so many. As he has argued in his response to Kirk’s shooting, calling for state violence against communities of people you consider to be undesirable or even subhuman is doing politics “the right way.”

But it is only possible to take that view if, like Mr. Klein, you are not a member of one of those communities identified as targets.

For those of us who were targets of Charlie Kirk and remain targets of the movement that is busy canonizing him, the question we face is the same as the one Black Americans have faced throughout our existence in this country: “what is the best response to ongoing American political violence?”

For many, the answer has been to get strapped, not to attack their political opponents but to defend themselves from them. They have seen the roving bands of Proud Boys, January 6 insurrectionists and other coteries of violent white supremacists emboldened by having one of their own back in the White House. They know, despite attempts by conservatives to pretend otherwise, that most interpersonal political violence comes from the right.

Others are just keeping their heads down, trying to make it through while also devising an exit strategy. Every person I know with the slightest connection to a country that might give them dual citizenship has at least researched the process — most have started it. No one is fleeing just yet but they want to be sure they can if they need to.

While I agree in principle with those pundits condemning political violence, I need us to start this conversation with an acknowledgement that millions of us have been made to fear for our lives and those of our neighbors for generations and that widespread concerns about political violence only seem to surface when that violence is directed at those who have always had the luxury of feeling safe.

America’s Long Tradition of Political Violence was originally published in Strategize. Build. Repeat. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Wednesday afternoon right-wing extremist and avid proponent of political violence Charlie Kirk was fatally shot at a campus event in Utah. The identity, motives, and beliefs of the shooter remain unknown — and, with a Federal Bureau of Investigation purged of its best agents, it may be some time before we know more. Yet social media was immediately filled with posts from politicians and pundits condemning political violence and, presumably ignoring anything the man ever said or did, praising Kirk as a legitimate and valuable political figure.

Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom called for us all to “honor Charlie’s memory” by “continu[ing] his work”, which was apparently to “engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed Kirk represented “the best” of “civil discourse”, telling Fox News: “He’s the guy that was the champion out on the front lines having the debate, but he loved the people that disagreed with him.”

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein went all in:

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion…A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.

To Klein and the others praising Kirk, the highest form of politics is firing off at the mouth and so, they argue, we’ve gotta hand it to him for being willing to “debate” questions like:

Are white, college-indoctrinated women ruining America?

Does Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson have the brain processing power to be taken seriously without stealing a white person’s slot?

Is US immigration policy “a strategy to replace white rural America with something different”?

Should doctors who treat trans patients be put in prison?

Can Black people be pilots?

I suppose Klein would question my moxie for saying these are not topics I’d be willing to debate with Kirk or anyone else. But I would argue that walking onto a college campus and challenging all comers to “prove” that Black women can fly planes or trans people should be allowed to exist is not actually practicing politics at all. It’s true that politics involves persuasion, which means engaging with people who disagree with you, but what Kirk was engaged in was not political persuasion, it was political repression.

Kirk’s central argument, if you could call it that, was that women, Black people, immigrants, LGBTQ people and any combination of the above are not to be trusted or listened to and we certainly should not be allowed to take high-ranking or important positions in either the public or private sectors. The point was not to find common ground or a policy that a plurality of us could live with but to eliminate multiracial democracy as an option in the United States.

That is the ultimate goal of the movement for which Kirk was such an effective advocate–to reverse 150 years of slow, painful progress toward equity, inclusion, and democracy in order to revert to 19th century notions of race, gender, and (for some reason) miasma theory. The only way for them to accomplish that goal is the destruction of civic institutions and the dismantling of basic civil and human rights, in other words the basic infrastructure required to practice politics.

If we are going to make it through this horrific moment of instability and white supremacist, misogynist violence we have to stop pretending that yelling epithets at each other is the same thing as civil discourse or that the people setting our democracy on fire want anything more than to see it burn.

The Right Way to Practice Politics was originally published in Strategize. Build. Repeat. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I first launched the series below nearly a year ago. In the weeks and months after, I began to wonder whether a tool like this would actually be helpful to anyone, and so the series stalled. But if this is not a time to develop and share tools to strengthen and defend our democracy, when the hell would be?

So…let’s try this again…

This morning I launched, Tools for Democracy, a series of videos intended to offer tools for advocates, community organizations, and anyone else interested in engaging in state and local policy-making decisions. The goal is to decode processes that are confusing and frustrating for people with bills to pay and kids to raise.

The idea for this series came out of my own frustration, felt throughout my career, with how little political and policy professionals expect from the people they claim to advocate for. I’m not just talking about academics clacking away at white papers for various think tanks. I’m including many people who work as organizers and activists, who think of themselves as “in the field.”

It is an article of faith among those of us steeped in politics and policy all day that “normies” simply do not have the time or, more importantly, the interest to understand the ins and outs of government decision-making. People don’t want to be bored with talk of filibusters and omnibuses and budget deals. They just want to be heard and to see some benefit from whatever it is that goes on in state capitols and Congressional hearings every year.

But part of my job as a researcher and analyst has always been to make some of that dull, confusing stuff accessible. And what I’ve found in trainings and presentations with community members–people with varying levels of formal education, who may be struggling to pay for housing, access healthcare or earn a living wage–is that people want to understand how their government works. They are interested, not just because of the impact that policy has on their own lives, but for the same reasons those of us who do this for a living are interested: they are intellectually curious, empathetic people who want things to get better.

Rebuilding our democracy requires more than protecting the formal infrastructure of free and fair elections…It requires those of us who live and breathe politics to stop treating “normies” as hopelessly incapable of connecting the dots between events in their lives, the policies that created those events and the politicians responsible for those policies and to start viewing the inability to connect those dots as a failure of both journalism and activism.

The thing that makes people turn away from engagement with government decision-making is not a lack of interest, but a lack of trust and, ultimately, a deep lack of respect. People are not entirely wrong when they dismiss politicians as dishonest, but a lot of that dishonesty stems not from any individual politician’s lack of character but from a political discourse that makes truth-telling virtually impossible.

This is easiest to see in presidential elections. The president of the United States has very little power to do big, transformational things and a lot of power to do harm. That’s the nature of an office designed not to create laws, but to enforce them. The president’s most potent tool is malicious compliance.

For those of us who want to see government do more than fund the military and keep corporate taxes low, this structure is particularly damaging. Malicious compliance cannot get us universal healthcare or an increase in the minimum wage. For our preferred policies to become law, we have to have both houses of Congress (with a supermajority of 60 in the Senate) and the White House.

But if any presidential candidate, when asked what they would do if elected, offered an honest assessment based on what they believed they could get through Congress, they would most likely lose. So instead, candidates offer bold, sweeping plans they hope will inspire people to vote for them. And then news outlets track the new president’s performance based on whether any of those sweeping plans become law. Successful or not, the implication is that the president is a king when they’re really closer to a courtier.

That misperception leads people to vote the incumbent out if things aren’t going well and, perhaps, vote in a new candidate who promises to succeed where the other person failed. Eventually people learn that the things presidential candidates say are mostly untrue and politicians in general are not to be trusted. Some version of this pattern exists in state and local government as well.

The result is the kind of cynicism and apathy that makes our institutions particularly vulnerable to an aspiring authoritarian who knows as little about the functions of government as his most ardent supporters.

Rebuilding our democracy requires more than protecting the formal infrastructure of free and fair elections, a free press, and safeguards against disinformation campaigns. It requires a transparent and accountable decision-making process at all levels of government. It requires those of us who live and breathe politics to stop treating “normies” as hopelessly incapable of connecting the dots between events in their lives, the policies that created those events and the politicians responsible for those policies and to start viewing the inability to connect those dots as a failure of both journalism and activism.

This series–and all of my work–is my small contribution to helping us meet those requirements.

Click below to check out the first installment of Tools for Democracy, like and subscribe!

[RE]Introducing: Tools for Democracy was originally published in Strategize. Build. Repeat. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the last forty years, the loss of community connection has chipped away at our democracy. It will take more than an election cycle or two to rebuild what we’ve lost, but every bit of progress we make will strengthen us and weaken the autocracy. So how do we begin?

There is no democracy without community.

In this moment when our democracy faces the greatest threat since the Civil Rights era, much of the focus has been on the attacks to our electoral system. Voter suppression, gerrymandering and a corrupt campaign finance regime have all undermined a fundamental premise of a democratic society: that elected officials should be accountable to the voters. Instead, these and similar policies have protected ineffective and even malicious politicians by allowing those politicians to decide who has the power to vote them out. For that reason, the fight to protect our elections and secure the right to vote is crucial for preserving democracy. But it is not sufficient.

That’s because democracy is not just voting, it is an ongoing practice of community in which people come together to make decisions rooted in a shared sense of purpose and mutual obligation. Neighbors may not agree with or even understand each other, but the fact of being neighbors means they have no choice but to find a way forward together.

That level of connection cannot be created in the 18 months before election day and it cannot be created by strangers whose sole focus is getting a certain number of people to take a single action — vote — on a particular day. Building community requires community institutions — like labor unions, social clubs, local sports leagues, faith communities — and community spaces — like union halls, community centers, farmers markets, and places of worship — to bring people together and allow them to discover their mutual interests and interdependence.

Decades of social and economic policies that treat all of us as merely workers and/or consumers have either weakened community institutions or limited access to them by converting them from public goods to private enterprises. Those same policies have forced each of us out of community and into an isolated struggle to protect our own mental and physical health and financial security. The result is a democracy withered by cynicism, apathy, and lack of connection and a population struggling with loneliness.

The desperate need for community has created an opportunity for autocrats around the world. To people who feel alienated and insecure, autocrats offer something that sounds like community — a tribe to belong to or a banner to claim. To people who feel not only powerless but resentful of their powerlessness, autocrats offer something that sounds like power — a movement that will restore the natural order that put them on top. To people taught to believe that financial insecurity and the struggle to pay bills is a sign of a personal failing, autocrats offer something that sounds like redemption — a scapegoat to blame, punish and/or cast out.

Ultimately, the autocrat’s offerings will fail to satisfy people because they are all a mirage. But in the meantime, everyone, including the supporters of the autocratic regime, will suffer for its failures and be victims of its violence.

For the last forty years, the loss of community connection has chipped away at our democracy. It will take more than an election cycle or two to rebuild what we’ve lost, but every bit of progress we make will strengthen us and weaken the autocracy. So how do we begin?

We must prioritize local action and communities over political hobbyism. Local work is often far less exciting, and far more taxing, than large-scale actions focused on national politics. But the federal government is a creation of state and local politics — not the other way around. We cannot impact what happens in Washington, DC if we don’t have our state and local houses in order. That means directing our efforts and resources — including funding — into state and local organizations, both those that are overtly political and those that are not. We need robust, vibrant local communities to foster representative, responsive local governments that feed into the state level and, in turn, the federal level.

Of course, this does not mean we abandon federal advocacy. Members of Congress still have an obligation to serve and uphold the rights of their constituents, and they must be held accountable when they fail. The problem is, too many of us have all but abandoned local action, and the result has been costly.

The next few years are going to be very difficult for many people. Whenever someone says “we’ve made it through worse” I always want to respond “Some of us did. Some of us did not.” But I don’t know any greater antidote to despair than connecting with our neighbors — people with names and faces who we see every day — in purposeful, tangible action. If we make it through, that will be the reason why.

Building Democracy, One Community at a Time was originally published in Strategize. Build. Repeat. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the days after Luigi Mangione allegedly shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, as the internet delighted in dark humor and thirsty memes about a man we then knew only as a masked gunman, many people were understandably appalled. As Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro told reporters, “We do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint. In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice.”

Governor Shapiro is at least partly right. We are all less safe in a society plagued by vigilante justice. But the rest of his statement feels oddly out of place in a country that has just reelected a twice-impeached former president and failed coup leader who offered no proposals beyond jailing political opponents, mass deportations, and 19th century trade policy.

The institutions that should have thwarted the rise of Donald Trump are the same ones that are supposed to channel public outrage into reasoned, non-violent political debate. In fact, their failure to do the latter is arguably what put Trump in power.

Those institutions (including the federal judiciary, Congress, and the media, among others) have been failing for decades, corrupted by a combination of anti-democratic ideology and corporate interference, leaving millions of people feeling as though there are no political solutions to the problems they face. Thankfully, the vast majority of those people will not resort to violence. Instead, they have either dropped out of the system, refusing to vote or otherwise engage, or they have embraced Trump in the hopes that his bluster might succeed where more reasonable-sounding politicians have failed.

None of these responses will make things any better, but neither will ignoring how meaningless the idea of political activism is to a generation that has grown up in a system that has rendered much of that activism irrelevant.

If Mangione looked into the history of healthcare reform in the US, he would have learned that, four years before he was born, Hillary Clinton’s effort to overhaul the healthcare system was defeated by insurance companies. At that time, about 15% of people in the United States–nearly 40 million–had no health insurance and more than a third of bankruptcies were caused at least in part by medical debt.

Fifteen years later, around the time Mangione would have entered middle school, there were over 45 million people without health insurance and nearly two-thirds of bankruptcies were driven by medical debt. That was when the Obama administration took up the issue, placating the industry by passing a healthcare reform plan that was fundamentally conservative. Unlike Hillary’s proposal and contrary to the demands of advocates for a single payer system, the Affordable Care Act preserved a healthcare system dominated by private health insurance, regulating and expanding the insurance market rather than replacing it. Still, within two years of implementation, the uninsured rate among adults under 65 fell from 20% to 13%.

By 2016, when Mangione was delivering the valedictory speech at his high school graduation, corporate interests and Republicans had chipped away at parts of the law, most importantly allowing states to opt out of expanding Medicaid in the 2012 Supreme Court decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. Currently, there are ten states that have refused to expand Medicaid, denying around 1.5 million people healthcare coverage.

By the time Mangione dropped communications with friends and family in the summer of 2024, 30 years after the Clinton healthcare plan was defeated by insurance companies, and 14 years after the ACA delivered millions of new customers to the industry, 26 million people remained uninsured and half of working adults reported that they struggled to cover their medical bills in spite of having insurance.

That is, for anyone under 30, a lifetime of watching ideologues and insurance companies successfully block efforts to ensure that no one dies or suffers for lack of access to healthcare.

That same cohort has seen a massive financial crisis throw millions out of work and wipe out billions of dollars in household wealth; a series of mass shootings, including several inspired by white supremacist and/or anti-LGBTQ hatred [before I finished editing this draft another mass shooting was reported in Wisconsin]; hundreds of thousands of deaths from the opioid crisis; and a global pandemic that exposed the inadequacy of our healthcare system, public health agencies, and social safety net.

What they haven’t seen is a corporate actor held accountable. The financial industry, after decades of lobbying for deregulation, received billions of dollars in bailouts while facing little consequence for the millions harmed by its recklessness. No mass shooting is terrible enough to overcome the veto power of a gun industry that views even the most modest safety measures as an existential threat. Instead, a new industry of “school security” firms has formed to take local tax dollars to run students through traumatizing “active shooter drills.” The $13 billion the opioid industry made each year by profiting off the desperation of people in pain, both physical and mental, dwarfs the $26 billion over 18 years to be paid in the national settlement.

The impunity of corporate actors is apparent not just in these moments of acute distress but in the daily grind as well. Many people, of all ages, feel they are working too much for too little, or managing a precarious collection of “gigs” that may or may not pay the bills. Things that used to be purchases–software, movies, music–are now subscriptions. In fact, there are so many subscriptions for people to keep track of that you can now subscribe to services that offer to help you manage all your subscriptions.

The combined effect of all of this is a sense of being under siege. Everything costs too much money, nothing is as good as advertised, and every company you deal with–including the one you work for, especially the one you work for–is trying to cheat you. In the context of basic necessities like healthcare, housing, and food, it’s beyond just trying to cheat you–they are telling you, with every denied claim or exorbitant rent hike, that your life simply does not matter.

As Governor Shapiro said, in a “civil society” all of these issues should be addressed through our politics. And that is what millions of us have tried to do for decades. We have found time outside of work and school and kids and life to vote, write or call our member of Congress, maybe even join a community organization or attend a meeting or a rally.

But all of that work is negated by the now standard corporate practice of pouring billions of dollars into our political system to block regulation, limit liability, minimize taxation, disempower workers, and, where possible, advocate for public subsidies and tax cuts (while demanding we address the deficit by cutting food stamps).

It is the individuals pursuing these tactics–executives, lobbyists, lawyers–who live in a civil society in which their concerns are heard and addressed by existing institutions. For a large and growing number of Americans, that is not something they’ve ever seen or experienced.

That is why Democrats’ plea to protect democracy from Trump’s fascist movement failed. That is why so many view Mangione’s actions as at least understandable if not laudable. When all political paths to change are blocked, non-political paths begin to look not just reasonable but imperative.

For those of us who still believe, passionately, in democracy, the rule of law, and civil society, we have to recognize that we are past the point of defending our institutions from an ascendant fascist movement. Those institutions have already failed. Our work now is to use every tool available to defend and protect those who are targeted by that movement while building a civil society that, for the first time in our history, serves all of us.

Politics by Other Means was originally published in Strategize. Build. Repeat. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Millions of people just voted against the policies they say they want. That is as much a “little d” democratic failure as a Democratic one.

In interviews both before and after election day, voters delivered a message that was remarkably consistent. Repeatedly, particularly low-income Black and Latino voters, told reporters and anyone else who would listen that the spike in the cost of housing and food was overwhelming and it didn’t seem like anyone was doing anything to help.

From news outlets, social media, and word of mouth, they heard about wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine and that the US was sending hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to both, even as Congress was cutting food and cash assistance and despite reports that the Israeli government was using US weapons primarily to kill women and children.

They heard that, while they may have just been thrown off the Medicaid rolls, hundreds (thousands?) of children in elementary school were undergoing gender affirming surgeries, with or without their parents’ knowledge. They heard that, while they were struggling to pay rent and had given up on ever buying a home, people who had entered the country without authorization were getting free hotel rooms.

Then they heard Donald Trump promise that tariffs and mass deportations could make all those problems go away. Forget about a child tax credit, Trump was going to get rid of the income tax! And even if they heard experts explain that Trump’s plans–to the extent you could call them that–wouldn’t work, would probably even make things much worse, the options were to go with the guy who at least has an idea or go with an unbearable status quo.

When Harris entered the race, there was a burst of excitement that came with her. But she had only three months to make a convincing case against what felt like nearly four years of economic stagnation or even backsliding. By most accounts, her campaign did as well as it could given the hand she was dealt. But, while she offered voters a series of ambitious but feasible policy proposals, Trump and J.D. Vance offered them a scapegoat and a magic trick.

In this context, it is not difficult to understand the voters who either voted for Trump or simply stayed home. What is difficult is reckoning with what all of this says about our ability to have a functioning democracy going forward, even if we manage to survive Trump’s assault on what’s left of our civic institutions.

Whatever the shortcomings or missteps of either the Harris-Walz campaign or the Democratic Party, the fact is that millions of people just voted against the political party that supports the policies they say they want and for the political party that has fought those policies at every turn. That kind of outcome is as much a “little d” democratic failure as a Democratic one.

So how did it happen?

If you wanted to design a system so that most people did not understand how it worked or what it did or why and therefore could not hold any of its decision-makers accountable for their actions, you could not do much better than what we have.

First, our political media does not consider itself in the business of explaining what Jay Rosen calls “the stakes” of our politics. Most articles on federal policy fights simply quote each side (there are rarely more than two) without much indication of which of those sides has the best evidence. Instead, we read about who is most likely to win the battle and what it means for the next election cycle.

The failure of political media to explain what’s going on in DC is especially disastrous because what’s going on in DC is usually unintelligible. In the minds of most voters, the President is the person who is in charge. Presidential candidates run on a set of policies and, if they are elected, the people who voted for them expect them to enact those policies. If they don’t, voters feel justified in blaming them and voting them out in the next election. That’s precisely what millions of voters just did.

Except, that’s not actually how anything works. Congress has all the power, not the President. And Congress is governed by a set of arcane, ridiculous rules, none of which has done more damage to good policy and democracy itself than the filibuster.

Over the last four years, Democrats have proposed a range of policies intended to ease the financial burdens of low and middle income families including making the expanded child tax credit permanent, investing in affordable childcare and lowering prescription drug prices. Yet, despite controlling majorities in both the House and Senate through 2022, and despite the overwhelming popularity of their policies, Democrats were unable to pass most of their agenda because getting anything substantive through the Senate requires 60 votes (or warping good policy into something that can fit into the reconciliation process).

Contrary to media outlets that reported this as a loss for President Biden and the Democrats, it is really a loss for the millions of voters who voted for these policies to be enacted. It convinces them that voting doesn’t really matter because you never actually get what you voted for. Over 90 million eligible voters stayed home on November 5, many of them because they just didn’t see the point. It would be hard to come up with an argument that they’re wrong.

Then there’s social media. Many of the low propensity voters who either stayed home or voted for Trump after voting for Biden in 2020 get their news from Instagram, Tik Tok, X/Twitter, or Facebook. These platforms have driven political violence around the world, spread anti-vax and other health misinformation, and fueled conspiracy theories from Q-Anon to the belief in a flat earth.

Conservatives have successfully pushed back on any effort of these platforms to prevent the spread of misinformation and incitement to violence, and Trump-hanger-on and Mars enthusiast, Elon Musk, has turned Twitter into a nazi playground. It’s hard to imagine, certainly at any point in the next 4 years, the situation on social media improving.

So what can we do?

This is not the first time that people fighting for democracy in the US have faced a broken and corrupt system and a fractured and/or unreliable media. Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer and the other organizers of Freedom Summer and the Mississippi Freedom Party faced all of that and much more. They studied the system, developed a plan to work with it despite its brokenness and then started organizing, door to door, face to face, at the risk of deadly violence.

The attack on unions has robbed Democrats and the progressive movement broadly of much of the vital infrastructure required to do that kind of deep, impactful organizing. But there are community based organizations across the country, many of which are members of national networks, that have the potential to rebuild some of that infrastructure. To do so, they will need funders that understand, value and are willing to fund real organizing–as opposed to mobilizations and publicity stunts–and the overhead that comes with it.

What does deep organizing get us? It gets us a way to connect people within and across communities to identify their shared interests and work together. It also means that, when we ask people to vote, we aren’t asking as strangers who don’t know them and have never shown any interest in them. We are asking as neighbors and friends who have shown that we care about their well-being. Campaign field programs can mobilize and turnout voters, but it can’t turn people into voters. Only community can do that.

We all agree the system is failing all of us. What are we going to do about it? was originally published in Strategize. Build. Repeat. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The night that Delaware Congressman Mike Castle lost the 2010 Republican Senate Primary, I cried.

I was alone in my apartment in DC, scrolling through a Twitter feed full of ecstatic Democrats and progressives. Castle was a beloved and respected moderate who had been virtually guaranteed to win in the general.

Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party candidate who beat him, was a political novice who had only a tentative grip on policy and an even weaker grip on reality. The most memorable part of her campaign would be the ad in which she declared, “I’m not a witch.”

Her primary win turned a guaranteed Republican Senate seat into a guaranteed Democratic Senate seat (held to this day by Democratic Senator Chris Coons). Similar primary victories by similarly absurd Tea Party candidates across the country cost Republicans the Senate majority that year.

That’s what the folks on Twitter were celebrating the night Castle lost — a gift from a GOP primary electorate in the throes of an anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-Black-president backlash.

I couldn’t join in the celebration because I was convinced that a temporary Senate majority was not worth the damage that electorate was going to inflict.

In a two party system, the loss of one party to conspiracy theories and a desperate longing for an imagined all powerful, all white, suburban United States is a catastrophe. Democrats could not possibly win every election, and their losses would put the power of the federal government in the hands of those who hoped to destroy it. Each election would become a question of system survival, rather than incremental policy changes in one political direction or the other.

The transformation of every election into the “most important of our lifetime” was not the only consequence of the Republican descent into cruelty and incompetence. At each new milestone of Republican extremism — Newt Gingrich’s speakership, George W. Bush’s contempt for truth and democratic institutions, the audacious nihilism of Mitch McConnell and, finally, the authoritarian ambitions of Donald Trump — moderates either left the party or were purged. Some, like Castle, were forced into early retirement by a primary loss. Others left office before the latest right-wing mob had a chance to push them out. Some simply gave in and began parroting the new party line.

And some of them, both elected officials and rank and file voters, became Democrats.

This has been a decidedly mixed blessing for the Democratic party. As in Delaware in 2010, Republican extremism has often resulted in Democratic victories.

But it’s also meant that a single party has to contain the entire spectrum of substantive political debate. Small government, pro-market conservatives are in the same party as social democrats, as are millions of people with views in between.

It’s impossible for anyone to craft a coherent policy platform that satisfies both Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin, so party leadership can only find ways to manage the universal disappointment of its members.

Political reporters, incapable of recognizing (or saying out loud) that one of the two major political parties has gone off the rails, report on this as a failure of leadership, a party unable to maintain the unity and messaging discipline of its rival.

But the Dems aren’t in disarray. They are simply all that is left of genuine, democratic debate over good faith policy differences. Democrats are no longer a party in any meaningful sense. They are simply a bulwark.

Yet that bulwark must stay in place long enough for us to build something new. Another Trump term, combined with an obedient federal judiciary and a dysfunctional Congress, may do more damage than we can repair. And as always, that damage will fall hardest on Black, immigrant and low-income communities.

I don’t blame anyone for resenting the choices they have in this year’s election. I will, however, blame people for acting as though they are entitled to treat voting like an act of self expression, rather than a moral decision with real world consequences.

In the meantime, the work of repairing and rebuilding our democracy belongs to us, not any national party or institution. While our national politics have all but swallowed state and local politics whole, the truth is, the federal government is a creature of state and local politics. Rebuilding our national democracy starts with local organizing, building power one local race, town hall, and community board meeting at a time.

Obviously, this situation is not tenable. A functioning democracy requires institutions that represent the full spectrum of political positions and preferences of the electorate. The fear of a Victor Orban style authoritarian state can only hold the rest of us together for so long.

That’s all the more reason to be clear eyed about what we’re up against and what it will take to push back.

The problem with Democrats is Republicans. The solution is organizing. was originally published in Strategize. Build. Repeat. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Even as people celebrate the fall of Andrew Cuomo, the latest in a series of men who cultivated reputations for fighting for just, progressive policies before being outed as tyrants, hundreds of women in nonprofits and ostensibly progressive offices across the country are cringing at every familiar detail of the Attorney General’s report, wishing their own boss or supervisor were next in line.

There are very few women, nonbinary people or people of color who do not have dozens of stories of harassment, abuse, microaggressions, or just plain irritating behavior from men who wielded power over them at work. Far from this being less of an issue in progressive spaces, the dynamics of these workplaces make abuse even more likely to continue with impunity.

Many of us enter positions in nonprofits, campaigns, or government offices with ambitious ideals. We are seeking to remake the world into a more just place and don’t expect to accomplish that lofty goal 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. We fully expect long hours and weekends, and often find a sense of purpose from a complete and total immersion of ourselves in what we consider to be vital work. That kind of immersion means that our social circles and dating pools are also found in our work, and the lines between our personal and professional lives often become non-existent.

So when a supervisor or manager or executive director or public official is abusive, the cost of speaking out is a paycheck, a career path, but also an entire social life and identity. If the abuser is someone who you long admired from afar, who the whole world (or what feels like the whole world to you) believes is a progressive hero, it can be tempting to find rationalizations for the abuse rather than pushing back on it.

It’s no accident that so many people in abusive workplaces compare the experience to being in an abusive relationship — like victims of mental and emotional abuse imposed by partners, many of us become masters at explaining away abuse. We tell ourselves that it is the stress of the work, the inescapable corruption of growing up with oppressive systems, even misguided passion for the cause that can explain away bad behavior. Sometimes we imagine it is really the fault of bad advisors, trusted by a blameless leader who would do better if only they could hear directly from us. When all else fails, we can tell ourselves that the good that this person or this organization is doing is more important than the damage they are doing to us and our colleagues.

Also like abusive relationships, societal gender norms and politics play a role in abusive workplaces. The leadership model we all are given of a strong, emotionally stunted man who makes no mistakes and needs no help is especially damaging to men who are frightened, insecure and constantly making mistakes. It is impossible for them to live up to that image (indeed, no one can, nor should they want to), but in trying to they feel compelled to make those around them feel small and powerless in proportion to their own sense of insignificance. The only way to maintain the fiction that they make no mistakes is to treat everyone else’s mistakes, real or imagined, as catastrophic. They deflect criticism by casting all critics as either cynical villains or idiots to be vanquished as part of their hero’s journey.

There is no critic or rival who is more threatening to the self-image of an insecure man trying to feel important than a competent woman. Especially a competent Black woman. And there is no clearer way to belittle or diminish a woman than to sexualize and/or infantilize her. Sexual harassment, public humiliation, using pet names like “sweetie” or “honey”, are all tools for a man who needs to undermine a woman he fears.

The nuances of how this plays out can be lost in stories like Cuomo’s. This gendered model of leadership can be taken up by women as well as men. The dismissal of a woman as ugly or bitter is a kind of sexualization, tying her value as a human being to her perceived desirability. The catastrophizing of mistakes can come in the form of shouted vulgarities as happened with Cuomo, or it can come in the form of an evaluation that says this person is just not ready for a promotion or a big, career-building project because of minor errors they’ve made.

As a Black woman who has worked in and around progressive politics for most of her adult life, I have seen all of these variations and others, sometimes directed at me and sometimes at my colleagues. Like many women who can’t bear to see other people harmed, I have been a staunch advocate for colleagues that have been victimized while resigning myself to keeping my mouth shut when I was the one suffering.

I don’t know what the answer to all of this is. People argue for the need to hold abusers accountable, and while I firmly believe in accountability it often feels like so little. In every story of powerful men held accountable there are dozens or more women, named and unnamed, who suffered for years. Women who left behind jobs and careers they loved and were good at. Women whose reputations were destroyed and whose work was denigrated. Women who found themselves coping with food or alcohol and suffered increased anxiety and other mental and physical health issues.

Seeing their abusers finally outed and removed from power may offer some vindication, but it doesn’t undo the damage.

Who’s Next? Cuomo and the Abusive Progressive Workplace was originally published in Strategize. Build. Repeat. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I stood in the middle of a courtyard in the sweltering Washington, DC heat, nursing a cocktail and watching strangers dance. I had decided to attend only days before when the instructor of the Bhangra class at my gym handed out fliers announcing this event celebrating South Asian culture. It was part cocktail meet and greet, part art exhibit, part dance party and I raced through the first two parts to get to the third. In spite of the heat, I relished my time on the dance floor, sweat pouring off of me as the DJ blended hip hop and soul-inflected US pop with traditional Bhangra. When a circle formed around a group of young South Asian dancers, I made my way to the front to watch, disappointed that none of the pictures I snapped with my phone did justice to the energy or swagger of what I saw.

I practically danced home that night — the beats and energy of the crowd still vivid. Of the roughly 365 nights I spent in Washington DC, that was easily the best. One that captured so much of me and the things that I loved — the random invitation spontaneously accepted, the magnetic pull of a bass-heavy DJ set, and the absolute joy in watching others pull off moves I dare not attempt. It was only possible because I was alone that night, my partner at the time out of town for work. Had he been home, I wouldn’t have accepted the invitation, feeling obligated to stay home or to settle for our standard night out of dinner at one of three restaurants.

By the time he returned after weeks away on a campaign, I’d had too many nights of choosing for myself to withstand many more standard nights with him.

Back in New York after our breakup, I thought all I’d learned was a valuable lesson about the kind of partner I wanted. One who shared my love of spontaneity and novelty, who could also be talked into trying almost anything so long as there was someone else to share the thrill.

That requirement was added to a list that had been in place since early childhood, when I felt unnamed stirrings at the thought of both Bugs Bunny’s wit and Robin Hood’s prank-filled swashbuckling (yes, I mean the cartoon Fox, not Errol Flynn). I loved irreverence and big ideas and humor and brilliant turns of phrase, and I wanted a partner who would both embody those things and see them in me.

As a little girl who was constantly having to feminize the names of heroes in my favorite cartoons — “She-Woman” (before She-Ra came along); “Lionessa” — I gloried in stories of defiant women from Alice stumbling through Wonderland to Bette Davis appearing in a scarlet red dress to Red Sonja wielding a sword drenched in the blood of her enemies.

At first, It didn’t occur to me that there was a mismatch between the male heroes I lusted after and imitated and the women I emulated. But as I got older I began to notice that more often than not the latter were marginal characters — best friends and salty neighbors — who were either terminally single or paired with someone who was passive and put upon as if no self-respecting man would be with them.

By late college I had tempered expectations, increasingly willing to play the demure Maid Marian, rather than the fierce Red Sonja.

It wasn’t just our culture’s stifling gender norms that inspired the change. By then I had long since been the only Black girl in many of my classes, and never more than one of two or three. So my desire to be fierce did not just mean I was unladylike. It called into question my already questionable femininity, made me something formidable and even worthy of respect, but not woman enough to be loved. I couldn’t be Red Sonja, I could only be Zula and no one I met in the years between middle school and college had ever been taught to see beauty in Zula.

What I’d learned after my year in DC (and one more stint of trying to be the smaller, marriageable version of myself with another unadventurous dud), was that lowered expectations wouldn’t make me happy. It just made two people miserable.

For years, this was my story as I understood it. I could be the full measure of myself or I could be partnered, but I could not be both, and I had somewhat reluctantly chosen myself.

The one question I never thought to ask was what I might want from a partnership, or whether I wanted anything at all. I certainly enjoyed the trappings of a relationship — the declarations of affection, self-consciously romantic gestures, curling up on couches and in bed — but that is not the same as enjoying a relationship.

And as time went on, the things I didn’t enjoy seemed much more substantial. I have no interest in allowing another person input into the major decisions of my life like where I live or how I spend my money. I don’t want to give up the freedom of planning an itinerary and traveling on my own, meeting people along the way — people don’t strike up conversations with couples the way they do with single women. I love roaming a city or a gallery or a bookstore for hours, with no particular focus or aim. There is a peace and joy in my solitude that I could not imagine giving up after decades of enjoying it almost without interruption.

As much as any cultural biases, that joy has led me to where I am now: In my own apartment where the only other beating heart is someone who cannot speak and whose intrusion into my privacy can be stopped with a baby gate. Even for him, I had to adjust to a level of neediness I was not accustomed to.

Our culture punishes men who seek out romantic love and women who don’t. This lesson is so ingrained that it took me years to realize what I was seeking was not love or even companionship, but proof that I had become something like those characters that had driven me to both lust and admiration growing up. In moments like those in DC several years ago, moments where I followed my own mind and found something joyful and fulfilling, I have all the proof I need.

All of this is not to say that I would turn away a witty, adventurous suitor, but to note, with some regret, that it took me 30+ years to realize that I was one.

1. Elegy (S1E20)
2. Nothing in the Dark (S3E16)
3. The Shelter (S3E3)
4. The Midnight Sun (S3E10)
5. People Are Alike All Over (S1E25)
6. Uncle Simon (S5E8)
7. The After Hours (S1E34)
8. It’s a Good Life (S3E8)
9. Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room (S2E3)
10. Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up (S2E28)
11. Shadow Play (S2E26)
12. The Lateness of the Hour (S2E8)
13. Time Enough at Last (S1E8)
14. Escape Clause (S1E6)
15. The Masks (S5E25)
16. The Invaders (S2E15)
17. Five Characters in Search of an Exit (S3E14)
18. Eye of the Beholder (S2E6)
19. Where is Everybody? (S1E1)
20. The Monsters are Due on Maple Street (S1E22)
21. The Obsolete Man (S2E29)