AUGUST 2021

Marshall Ganz on transforming grassroots momentum into political power

For almost sixty years, Marshall Ganz has played an instrumental role in progressive movements and major democratic campaigns. He began to develop his approach to organizing while working alongside Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers, and would go on to design the grassroots organizing model that helped propel Obama to his historic victory in 2008. He’s now a senior lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School.

CHRISTIAN: Marshall, it’s such a pleasure to have you join us.

MARSHALL: Thanks Christian, happy to be here.

CHRISTIAN: In the past few years, there have been a number of watershed moments, including Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March and climate strikes. While all this energy has been exciting, it’s not clear that these movements have been able to fully translate that into power. You’ve made the distinction between mobilizing and organizing–shall we start there?

MARSHALL: That’s a good place to start, because there has been a lot more mobilizing than organizing. The distinction, I think, is this: you can mobilize individuals’ resources, people who already agree with you, to show up somewhere or maybe to send an email. In other words, mobilizing is taking a capital you already have and spending it, but it doesn’t generate anything new. And that’s because it’s not rooted in the capacity to absorb anything new. What I mean is that organizing is about bringing people together and making commitments to one another to develop a collective capacity–an organization or a movement–in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To do that, you have to bring people into relationship with each other, you have to develop leadership, and you have to commit to people engaging as strategists as well as actors. Then if you have a mobilization, it’s a strategic choice, not just a reaction to the moment, and you’re equipped to use that mobilization to build power.

What we’ve seen so much of in recent years is digital media being taken advantage of to share information with large numbers of people in reaction to some motivating event, asking them to show up somewhere or something similar. But there’s no new capacity-build, no real power built that sustains. So you wind up having lots of these one-shot deals, and then they don’t translate into power, because they weren’t conceived that way. Zeynep Tufekci has a terrific book Teargas and Twitter where she does a study of these mobilizations, and that’s the contrast she makes. One of her arguments is that when you’re trying to mobilize in order to influence decision makers, how they see the mobilization–the rally, march, etc–depends a whole lot on what they think went into it. The March on Washington in ‘63, for example, was evidence of organized power. Some of the rallies we’ve seen more of these days are not evidence of that; they’re evidence of a momentary energized public that then may just disappear.

So mobilizing without organizing doesn’t get you very far. Organizing and mobilizing can get you a lot of places.

CHRISTIAN: In a recent article, you mentioned the work of feminine sociologist Jo Freeman and her phrase “the tyranny of structurelessness.” Can you talk about that for a moment?

MARSHALL: It’s interesting, because culturally when you say structure, I think people want to run the other way. It’s like oh, that’s going to be a constraint on my autonomy, and the highest good I have is my autonomy.

The sort of radical individualism that’s a result of political marketing and economic marketing… well, let me put it this way: structure, at its most basic, is simply a commitment we make to each other that we’re going to coordinate our work in some way. We’re going to meet once a week, or we’re going to use these criteria, or we’re going to end at this time. It’s just agreements we share so as to create continuity in our work or our relationship. That’s all structure is.

So the first problem is that it has a bad rap to begin with. It’s in this culture that feels like, I don’t want that. In part, that’s a reaction to experiences of oppressive structure; if maybe you’ve been in a situation that was a top-down deal, where you were structurally constrained, then you say, I want out of that. And so you go to the opposite extreme: uh-uh, nothing. There’s both a combination of that reaction to an oppressive structure and the lifting up of this kind of extreme individualism around us that makes structure sound like a problem, not a way of solving anything. And then you get what Jo Freeman in the early seventies called the tyranny of structurelessness.

This isn’t the first time this happened; in my generation, we went through the anti-structure phase too. But her argument was look, human beings are going to create structure anytime they get together. They’re going to make agreements. And it can either be on the books, transparent and accountable, or it’s going to happen off the books, opaque and not accountable. In a group where oh no, we don’t want any structure, we don’t have any leaders here... ok great, then what happens? Well, somebody’s still making decisions. Who’s that? Or wait, who decided that? And usually they disintegrate into various forms of factions and antagonisms, and fall apart. Not always–but a whole lot of the time.

Now sometimes the substitute for structure is intense personal relationships. You’ll have a movement or organization start with a core group of people who really trust each other, so they don’t need to build structure. Well, as they grow, guess what? The only decision-making authority in the whole organization is that little core. And so it winds up being the opposite of what it sets out to be; it winds up being very centralized, very personalistic and very top-down. There are organizations around us right now really struggling with this. They have local groups, which sort of want to do their own thing, and a national group of founders, and there’s no locus of legitimate decision-making. So structure is also an antidote to nepotism, to personalism, to all that stuff. It’s a way to be transparent about how we’re going to work together. But the aversion to it is a problem, it’s a big problem. A lot of organizations really struggle with it because see, it was sort of the norm.

Ok, here you’ve got to distinguish between firms–whether nonprofit or for-profit firms–and constituency-based representative organizations, in terms of where the authority comes from. In a firm, the authority comes ultimately from a board, which is fundamentally a function of ownership. And in nonprofits, it’s not so different–it’s still the board. Whereas in a union, for example, the authority comes from the members and is then delegated upwards. And in the federal structure, a citizen delegates to the city, to the state, to the federal–so the authority source goes from the bottom up. That’s the difference between a nondemocratic and a democratic organization.

For many years, up until the sixties or so, the typical form of association in the US was the representative form. It became dominant on a large scale in the late 19th century when a lot of civic capital was created. A typical model was a local chapter, state, and a national, and with elected leaders, and all that. Well, that kind of came apart in the sixties and seventies and it’s never really been successfully replaced. Unions still operate that way, some much better than others; some are much more engaged and capable of renewal. But people’s daily experience isn’t of that much–less and less. So like my students don’t know how to have a meeting. Now what does that mean? They didn’t make Toastmasters? No, it means that it takes a certain orientation to create a collective.

De Tocqueville, when he’s writing in the late 1830s, says the genius of America is associationism. By association, he means people connecting with other people, learning how their individual interests differ from common interests, developing affective bonds and learning to govern themselves. The whole capacity for collective, in this sense, has been eroding seriously. It goes beyond social capital, it’s like self-governance. How many good meetings have you been to? I’m not romanticizing the past, but there was a Civil War general who was active in the YMCA after the war, when all these associations were growing and people were asking, how do we govern ourselves? He came up with a pocket version of a set of rules; that’s where Robert’s Rules of Order came from. The innovation was that you could fit it in your pocket, because there were a lot of competing forms around. Well, that became kind of a standard thing. So it wasn’t this big puzzle, how do we decide? Nowadays, we’re like wait, how do we decide, who’s going to make the decisions? Is it going to be by consensus? Are we going to vote? What’s our commitment to honor decisions we don’t agree with? Oh wait, you made the decision? Then I’m walking. Well, then you don’t have a collective anymore–you just exit.

I guess what I’m saying in different ways is that this capacity for collective effort, where you’re ready to invest elements of your own agency in creating a collective agency, is really very, very much under assault. And so people substitute aggregation for it like, let’s get a bunch of opinions. What’s missing is people coming together and figuring out how to act on what they have in common. Instead it’s just aggregate…which is how a lot of market stuff works, and how politics has come to work.

CHRISTIAN: You talk about these micropractices and how they can turn into macropower. In many ways, this is leading into your thoughts on the breakdown of civil society.

MARSHALL: Yeah, well exactly, you have sort of two assaults. One comes from the economic direction. Markets are fine for certain things; they’re fine for figuring out efficiencies based on who’s got the resources to command them. But they don’t build anything collective, that’s not what they’re about. So a market process can be a pretty efficient way to operate an economic domain, but it’s all based on exit–you vote by your feet or by your dollars. Now politics is essentially, or has been traditionally, a collective effort. It’s about trying to bring people together to find common ground or to articulate their differences in such a way that they can be tested, argued about. That has been disappearing from our politics since the seventies, when the Supreme Court ruled that speech is money. What that meant was that we were the only liberal democracy that has no constraints on campaign spending–not on where it comes from, but the spending. What that did is create an industry that doesn’t exist elsewhere, political marketing–and it’s an, I don’t know, $15 billion industry now, that feeds off itself. The more money that’s spent, the more money they make. So it puts us in this transformation from what, historically, has been a collective process, into yet another form of marketing. It’s through soundbites or videos or social media, but it’s not bringing people together; it’s all about finding the niche that they’ll respond to. It’s kind of like oh, this person can be reduced to this issue, so now I’m going to hit on that issue. People aren’t issues though–they’re whole human beings. And so it fragments so much more than anything else. And at the same time, it turns politics into being dominated by wealth, for the most part.

Now what’s happened is that the wealth that’s generated on the economic side has generated a whole lot of inequality on the civil society side, so over the last thirty years, civil society organizations and movements have come to depend on philanthropy. And it’s crazy, but when we were building movements, it wasn’t like that. There’s been this shift where now I’ve got to figure out how to take care of my donors, I’ve got to come up with data that can convince my donors that this thing matters–as opposed to building a constituency based on people power that can contest the power of wealth. So it’s a big problem. I talk to my organizing friends, and it’s like we’ve got to get a grant, we’ve got to get a donor. Well, that wasn’t the deal, you know.

Now something like the Sunrise Movement is interesting because it didn’t start that way. It started more out of a real movement being generated by young people, just like March for Our Lives. But March for Our Lives pretty soon got taken over. And Sunrise, so far, has resisted that. By taken over, I mean hey, we want to help you, we want to support you–but now you need a board, you need this and this, and oh by the way, yeah we’ll give you a couple seats on the board. Well, it was just coopted; it just got appropriated. And so that’s a problem. In our country more so than in Western Europe where the same thing hasn’t happened to their politics, not like here, and the inequality isn’t as great.

So then the question is: where are the spaces in which you can create power that’s based on people rather than wealth? Movements are often what can fill those spaces. To me, that makes something like Sunrise very important. But also very challenging, in that they need the structure. Because there’s a lot of energy for change out there, but there’s also this problem of… well, here’s another just interesting person, Elizabeth Anderson. Do you know her work?

CHRISTIAN: I don’t believe so.

MARSHALL: She’s a philosopher at the University of Michigan. Her work is on freedom and equality, and her argument is that they are interdependent, not contradictory. Because the argument we get is that if you’re going to have equality, then you have to give up liberty. And she’s sort of saying well, maybe that’s the case if you look at it in an individual, but in a society, you can have the liberty of one person dominate everything based on wealth, and you don’t have much freedom. So if you look at it in terms of who has the capacity to make choices and act on them, then a concentration of wealth, inequality, is the opposite of freedom, not just the opposite of equality. Because if it’s equality in freedom, that’s very different than equality in nominal equality. So she wrote this book called Private Government, and it’s about the fact that most people spend most of their time in what she humorously calls communist dictatorship–in bureaucracies in which they have no say, in which they own no property. And increasingly, the firm or the bureaucracy moves out of just work life into private life. So it’s kind of like, where do people experience democracy on a day-to-day basis? I go from my job, well, there’s my house. But then where do I experience self-governance that actually matters?

All of this comes back to micropractices, because how do you have democracy unless people can learn how to do it? How do you begin to balance concentrations of power with people power, unless you can build collective capacity? The energy’s out there, the need is out there–the George Floyd response showed that woah, there’s a lot out there. But it’s either going to take shape in a form that can really assert power, or it’s going to dissipate. To me, that’s what this moment is about, because clearly there’s an awakening. The question is ok, what do we do with that? We’ll see.

CHRISTIAN: There’s an author you’ve referenced, political scientist Sidney Verba, who says essentially that liberal democracy is a gamble that the equality of voice can balance the inequality of resources. You just mentioned the 1976 Supreme Court ruling in Buckley v. Valeo that money is speech, and it feels like we continue to head down that path. As I look at how we spend our political capital, it feels like money in politics is one of the most pressing issues. Can we go further into how we address the current role of money in politics?

MARSHALL: Now, I think it’s important to go to the starting point. Compared to other liberal democracies, we have far less of a functional democracy. It has to do with the origins, the constitution; it has to do with the institutions and how they were negotiated in order to accommodate slave states, basically. We have this thing called the Senate. Now representatives? Ehh, no way. The Senate gives such power to nonrepresentative minorities, it’s unbelievable. Rhode Island, you get two votes. California, you get two votes. What’s democratic about that? Anything? I mean, nothing. How do you justify that? At the time, they were trying to make an alliance of small states and big states. Well jeez, look at now. Now you have these underpopulated red states exercising more power than super-populated blue states. That’s just wrong. And then the rules of the Senate itself make it so that unless you have sixty, you don’t really have any power to do anything; it’s like a stranglehold. Then there are first-past-the-post districts, where you elect one person per district, so 51% gets you 100% of the representation, but 49% gets zero representation. Then there are the districts designed by incumbents. What I’m saying is that there were deep institutional problems to start with that make it even harder to be a genuinely representative democracy. Now you add into that the money thing, and it’s pretty understandable why the US has kind of been at such variance with the rest of the world, especially in the last 40 years. You know, the whole neoliberal thing–it comes from here.

So we have a lot to overcome if we are going to get a functional representative democracy. Maybe it will take constitutional amendments. Maybe it will take social movements that are able to exercise civil disobedience at such a scale that they can’t be ignored. Maybe it will take electing progressive people wherever they can and beginning to try to build enough of a base for that. But that’s why movement energy is so valuable and so important and so precious. And that’s why to see it dissipate into Occupy Wall Street is so frustrating, because it’s a protest. Great. Protests are not movements. Protests are not organizing. Protests are protests. So it all comes back together. I’m not trying to be gloom and doom, I just think we have to accurately see what the deal is, so that we can figure out how to deal with this thing and use our energy strategically to do it.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. And to comment on your point about undemocratic institutions in our government, I think about the words progressive and conservative, because you look at the amount of power you need to have progress, versus a system that has been set up by the people who want to conserve an unequal and harmful set of norms.

MARSHALL: Exactly. The founders were trying to assure the dominance of local elites, which is what they were. And they weren’t so hot on democracy–they were a republic. They emulated the Romans, not the Greeks. It’s interesting… you see it in the architecture. The design of the 1770s through the 1790s is very Roman-influenced. You don’t get the Greek stuff until about the 1820s or 1830s, when it becomes much more of a democratic ethos, and you actually see architectural styles change and become more like the Greek model.

CHRISTIAN: I didn’t know that, that’s a great observation. So there’s this essentially neoliberal attempt to gut power from the government and present the market model as the only model, as opposed to it being just one of the tools we have to create the world we want. How do you overcome deeply entrenched cultural beliefs like this, beliefs that are human constructs, reinforced through the education system and the media? Maybe this is a chance to dive into one of the major successes of your work, the public narrative.

MARSHALL: You know, the question you’re asking is how do you explain radical shifts of any kind? And boy, we should be so conscious of the contingency there is in life. I mean, nobody thought Trump was going to be president. Nobody thought Tahrir Square was going to happen. Very few people thought a black man would be elected president. In other words, we’re living in a time in which the power of contingency plays out again and again. Now that can be scary, but it can also be hopeful. Because it means that as fixed as things seem to be, they aren’t that fixed.

Covid is a great example–the radical shift in lifestyle that we went through in the way we worked, everything, that’s what change feels like; it’s disconcerting, it can be uncomfortable, but boy, it can be creative, it can be resilient, it can be adaptive. In a certain sense, if we really want to deal with climate change, it’s more like Covid than it is like getting your local city councilperson elected. So we are capable of dealing with change as a species, but it’s also a lot harder for us to initiate it. It’s almost like sometimes it takes an external shock and then things open up and people say woah, wait a second.

The market crisis in 2008 had the potential for that, because it shook up the whole economic system. That was a crucial moment, when Obama went one direction and I think a different direction was possible–was absolutely possible then, and supportable, to manage capital in a different way. Well, that was missed. Trump is another kind of shock and throws a lot of things into play along with Covid. That’s why right now it feels like there’s a lot more fluidity. You have a progressive perspective in the Democrats that just hadn’t been there for a long time. You actually have a critique of capital, which is like, woah. There’s a generational shift that’s going on. The flaws of the system became so clear during covid.

One of my colleagues is running for governor here in Massachusetts, Danielle Allen, and part of her whole deal is, look what happened during Covid with housing. You know the story of the miner’s canary?

CHRISTIAN: Canary in the coal mine?

MARSHALL: Yeah, exactly. So if you look at Covid and where the hurt is, it’s in the most vulnerable people–vulnerable in terms of health, economy, housing, you name it. It’s just all in great relief there. On the other hand, the wealthy have done pretty well. So are the tools there? Is the time right? Because you’ve got to be doing something about organizing people, about changing the narrative. You’ve got to figure out different strategies and how to create enough of a structure.

So I just see lots of possibility, and lots of agency possible right now. Since you can’t predict everything, what you can do is lay as much of the groundwork as you can–to be prepared, so to speak. Does that make sense? Because it’s not just like cost-benefit analysis that we’re talking about, it’s a fundamental value shift. And value shifts don’t happen just because somebody makes an argument, they have to do with thinking about oneself differently, one’s community differently, and about the world that we confront differently.

Now that’s where narrative is. Narrative is a way of understanding and articulating what we care for, what our sources of hope are, what our sources of hurt are–as individuals and also as communities and also as nations. Because what stories teach is what is of value. They teach what is of value in the moments where there is a disruptive challenge or threat. That’s what a plot is, a plot is just that. It’s someone going along and something crazy happens, and they’ve got to deal with it, and then there’s an outcome. Now that basic plot structure–we’re not interested until that happens. It provokes our interest because we’re infinitely curious to learn how to deal with the unexpected, that for which we’re unprepared in our daily lives, like a marriage breaks up or we lose a loved one. So the subject of narrative is how to deal with disruption and how to find the moral or emotional resources to do so. And because we can identify with the protagonist in the story, we feel it. We don’t just understand it with the head, we feel it with the heart. Narrative is fundamentally a form of emotional language, and emotional communication and values are fundamentally about emotion.

So when movements come along, they do that work. I got introduced to organizing in Mississippi with the Freedom Summer Project and I’m so grateful for it, because people were refashioning understandings of themselves as, I am somebody. Yes, I can find the courage. Yes, I merit this. Then that was playing out on a communal level; I’m talking about the black community. That began to create the power to transform the institutional. And that’s the story formulation–of a new story for me, the new story for us, and now this moment is a storymaking moment, because we’ve got a chance to act and really change things and it’s urgent that we do so.

So narrative plays a crucial role, but it’s also not the only role–you’ve also got to build power. And you’ve also got to have some structure. When we came out of the Farmworkers, it was like you always have to have a story, strategy and structure. Why are you doing what you’re doing, how are you doing it, and how are you organizing yourself to do it? It’s interesting to reflect on the progression in Black Lives Matter, which has been a restorying; it’s been a restorying of American history. There was a big shock to the system, a double-whammy. So it provoked sort of a revaluing. And the revaluing is what can help move things in a different direction.

I think that’s potentially a lot of what’s going on right now. The way young people feel about climate–I mean, it’s like a religious thing. A lot of people of my generation don’t get it, you know? Hey, it’s their future. It’s like the givens are not givens. So there’s a tremendous potential for real change there, I think.

CHRISTIAN: We have so many serious issues to address as a society, but the question for climate I think is how do you organize around something when the worst is yet to come, as opposed to organizing around something that’s clearly visible? With Black Lives Matter, the visceral footage of people being killed by police has been a catalyst for civil rights progress.

MARSHALL: Along with hope. Hope not as in flowers in May, but hope as Maimonides’ hope–belief in the plausibility of the possible, as opposed to the necessity of the probable. Hope as more a sense of possibility.

CHRISTIAN: Along with hope. How do you tap into what triggers the shift in the story?

MARSHALL: I think it’s a combination, because you don’t get mobilization without urgency. Urgency is crucial. Now you can respond to urgency in a short-term way like oh, we’ve got to do this. Or you can see the urgency as creating the opportunity for real depth and tackling some of the structural problems. I use the example of the Montgomery bus boycott. The bus issue was a big issue, segregation is really painful, but the initial idea was a lawsuit, because that was Brown v. Board of Education. Now a lawsuit might have won. The movement came because of the boycott. They stumbled into that and then oh wait, this is a whole different deal. And then oh, ordinary people can create power and oh, it doesn’t just depend on the lawyers. So out of that came a whole stream of activity that really nobody predicted. And it was because it was a process of discovery and emergence.

On climate though: the challenge has been to make the important urgent, right? That’s always a challenge, making the important urgent. In a movement, how do you create urgency if the urgency isn’t evident? Well actually, the civil rights movement did quite a bit of that by creating moral crises, like Selma march. In other words, they were using mobilization to create urgency. If you listen to the March on Washington speech, Dr. King’s speech, you’ll see that’s what it’s all about, it’s all about freedom now. Because the experience of Black Americans is very different from the experience of most White Americans. Media played an important role, showing the police dogs etc., and all that was very important. I think one thing that’s changed with climate is that young people are hope, the future. Mothers Out Front, an organization here in Massachusetts of mothers and grandmothers–they’re all about climate. Why? Well, because of their kids. It’s a moms’ movement, it’s not just a kids’ movement, you know? You want a future for your children, well, better look at this. And environmental justice–it’s not abstract, it’s right there, right now. So there are the elements to create the kind of urgency. Is it going to be enough? Who knows. Maybe the next hurricane, or the next earthquake.

CHRISTIAN: That explanation of important and urgent feels vital. In many ways, I see the progressive movement getting lost in things that are urgent, but not necessarily as important.

MARSHALL: Amen. We organized an event here at the Kennedy School a few weeks ago, getting together 70 practitioners and academics to try to do something to get at that, looking at whether you have democracy if certain essentials are missing. Do you have a democracy if there’s not vote equality? Probably not. Then ok, let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with now. And most everybody is caught up in the urgent things. So now is there a way we can respond to urgency deeply so as to recognize the importance of what we’re doing now for the future? It’s a strategic challenge, because you need a venue in which there is that perspective. You’re trying to put the pieces together.

The bus boycott, in doing a boycott rather than a lawsuit, created power, developed leadership and used the urgency to build a base for the future. Did they consciously do that? That may not have been the intent, but that’s what happened. And so the question we have is how do we use these urgent challenges to create greater depth, so that we can actually get to where we need to get to? That’s strategic stuff.

CHRISTIAN: The Democratic Party has tried to build a larger and larger umbrella, which is important because it’s representing a diverse group of individuals, but the challenge then is that we’re each coming to it with the issues we care most deeply about. And it’s sometimes hard to let go to say, you know what, if we collectively focus on building power, then we have power that we can use to address all of the urgent priorities. Getting to that mindset shift is challenging.

MARSHALL: It is indeed, because you need venues in which to do that work, to provoke fresh thinking. In this year’s organizing class, as like a laboratory experiment, we formed teams by issues. What you wind up with is a collection of people who are defining themselves by one sliver of themselves. It’s not too surprising that they may be fragile. It’s not surprising that they’re going to remain small. It’s not too surprising they’re going to lose their creativity. Because what they’ve done is take this one variable and make that the definition of their identity.

Now you can go at it a different way, which is to do the work with other people to discern common values. Values are much broader. In other words, if you organize around a purpose as opposed to a strategic objective, it goes broader, it goes deeper. Let’s say we share this value of a sustainable world. Why do we care about that? Well, we’ve had different experiences that have led us to care about that. So how do we act on that? Well, there are going to be thirty strategies. Now the question is, do we have enough coherence and enough structure to be able to look at those strategies and say hmm, we can build our power best by focusing over here on this? And so then we have the unity we need in order to do that, and they become strategic choices rather than identity choices.

See, defining by issue turns everything into an identity group. Issues fragment like crazy. So an effective political party would do this work. I got to spend enough time in Canada to see an alternative parliamentary system, with a labor party, but enough the same that the differences are interesting. I was really interested in the New Democratic Party, because the unions and the liberals were all thrown together and had to come up with a common leader. They had to come up with a common policy, because it’s parliamentary and so there’s much more pressure to internally negotiate and find common ground. Not compromise, not lowest common denominator but common ground, so as to be able to be more strategic. We don’t have anything that does that.

CHRISTIAN: The word that’s coming to mind in our conversation is political capital. Democrats have a certain amount of political capital at any point, in the form of votes or donors, or having a majority, or press attention. And it seems like we’re deploying our resources and leverage to address individual issues, but we’re almost playing Whac-a-Mole. It feels like maybe we need to set aside the urgent to focus on the important, which would be putting that political capital into building power?

MARSHALL: That’s exactly the question, and see for some reason the other side seems to get it. Now, it’s easy to attribute monolithic character to the other side. But if you look at the role of ALEC [American Legislative Exchange Council] in the assault on public sector unions, that was so strategic–because that’s how you cut off resources at the state level. You weaken the union, but you’re also cutting off the money that it takes to finance democratic politics. So that was a power strategy. Right now they’re in a power strategy about voting. And for some reason, we don’t seem to… I don’t know, why don’t we do that? 

CHRISTIAN: Yeah… the conservative strategy seems to be going unapologetically after power. And with the recognition that values are the keys to power.  

MARSHALL: It’s also a movement-based strategy. 

When I was in high school, back in the day, my senior year I was being recruited by the John Birch Society in Bakersfield, CA. Because I was a promise, right? They already had their local Christian anti-communism crusade bookstore. They had this movie called Operation Abolition that showed how communists had taken over the universities and were going to, you know, destroy democracy. And now they were doing outreach. In other words, there was a movement coming out of the fifties, with roots coming out of the racial fear coupled with this other–boy, how to put it? There was a racial dimension to it, a religious dimension to it, and a kind of anti-state, anti-democracy dimension to it. But you know, it flourished. I mean Barry Goldwater was nominated as a presidential candidate in ‘64 by Republicans. Then it was reversed. But there’s been a core movement that’s gone through different forms, and it’s been at the heart of this thing. 

From my perspective, the sin of the corporate side was to make a deal with them in the seventies. And with Nixon, it was a deal. It was like, ok southern strategy, we love your racist stuff, because it’s common ground with our we don’t want regulation, we don’t want taxes, etc.. hey, we’ve got a convergence here. So it was kind of a deal with the devil. And the Democrats had made their own deal with the devil before the sixties, in terms of the resistance to anything that dealt with race. But that deal that was made in the seventies–that’s been a real problem. The thing is that what they thought was the tail has become the dog. It’s like oh no, well, we’ve got the wealth... yeah, we’ll use that. Well guess what, guess who’s being used? The point I want to make is that there’s been a core set of values and highly committed people who have been working at it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s not like a plot–it’s quite out in the open. 

There was a great movie about Phyllis Schlafly on TV called Mrs. America. Phyllis Schlafly was a brilliant organizer who coupled the anti-choice movement with the conservative movement in the seventies, and really played a critical role in building the women’s base for that. So they’ve had good organizers too. 

CHRISTIAN: That’s so interesting.

I’d like to go back to the word depth and in particular how it factors into campaigns. There’s all this money being raised by progressives to challenge conservative incumbents, but then you have someone like Jaime Harrison raising $100 million and still losing. 

MARSHALL: That goes back to this problem of the political industrial complex. I mean it goes back to turning politics into a business–a business of communications and marketing, but not of bringing people together. And yeah, when I get fund appeals for campaigns, I think okay, what’s this going to be used for? It’s going to make some consultant rich, basically. 

CHRISTIAN: If you had $100 million to run a Senate campaign, what would you spend it on? 

MARSHALL: People. 

CHRISTIAN: What does that look like?

MARSHALL: Well, it looks like a lot of what we were doing in the Obama campaign; we were actually building an organized grassroots base. Now the problem is that the organization didn’t belong to the people; it belonged to Obama, and he didn’t want to use it once he got elected. He sort of went through a big strategy shift from mobilizing support to minimizing opposition. From my perspective, that’s one of the great missed moments in our history. But you build it, you bring people together, you organize them.

Look, after Trump, there was Indivisible [whistles], there were all these things. For the most part though, they weren’t being brought together. There wasn’t an effort to structure it, there wasn’t training… oh maybe in some places. But talk about a massive mobilization. And it was an opportunity to create even the sort of structure we had in the Obama campaign. 

So it’s developing enough skilled leadership, but also ways of telling the story, of interpreting and understanding what’s going on so as to be able to make the shift, because our politics just…. look, Bernie sparked a big deal, right? The first time Bernie ran, woah, look at all that! And then he formed something called Our Revolution… disaster. Couldn’t govern itself, internal fights, just you know, had no staying power. DSA is trying to build organization, but it’s very, very small. It can’t reach out and build a really broad base, the kind it would take. Biden is so interesting because he speaks human. In other words, he doesn’t speak ideology, he speaks values actually. And in a way, that’s exactly what we need, but we need it in a much deeper, more powerful way. 

Progressives often get caught up on the ideological nuances of this, that or the other, which make no difference in people’s daily lives. When you have an activist core that has no constituency–in other words, there’s a big difference in a meeting between someone who has a base they have to answer to because they got elected and someone who has emails they can mobilize that they’re not accountable to in any way.

So when I talk about depth, I’m talking in terms of people and their daily lives–getting at the core of things, not just the superficial things. Because the core of things… people want their kids to have a future. In doing this narrative work in different parts of the world, boy, it just hits you again and again how fundamental the choices are that we face growing up, and the sources of hurt and pain and where we get hope. The deeper you go, the greater commonality you find. Commonality of experience. And the more up here you go, the more difference you find. In other words, abstraction is not how you create unity, it’s depth that’s how you create unity. 

CHRISTIAN: So you’re talking about macro-level depth. And then there’s also the difference on a personal level of being involved in say a demonstration, where you’re interacting with people and potentially putting yourself at risk, versus writing a check to a campaign, or sharing a statement on social media. 

MARSHALL: Absolutely, because we learn emotionally, alright, we learn cognitively… we also learn experientially. When we were organizing farmworkers, I saw how when someone would be lukewarm on the union, once they were on a picket line for an hour, their whole perspective shifted. And it wasn’t the argument, it wasn’t the story–it was their direct experience of being cut out and finding solidarity with others. Those kinds of experiences, they’re transformative. 

In the Obama campaign, the experience people had in those local teams was real; they could actually make decisions and work as a team. I was talking to the former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, which started doing some organizing after the lunch had been eaten by the other side. They had put out a call and well, five of the groups that appeared were groups that went back to Obama. Because that was where they first experienced politics that were real to them. 

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. And what we haven’t seen is organizations that reach that scale, that find a way to generate resources to maintain their independence, that stay in place beyond elections, and that are permanent bases instead of something temporary that gets spun up as quickly as possible.

MARSHALL: You know, and for that to shift, one of two things has to happen. One is there’s a candidate who actually believes they need organization to govern. Or there’s an organization that is able to sustain itself independently of the candidate but chooses the candidate or supports the candidate. Actually, we have someone running for governor here in Massachusetts who I think has much more that vision of organizing not just to win the campaign but to govern. And I think it will be a very interesting experiment here to see if we can do that. 

CHRISTIAN:  Could we talk about leadership actually for a moment? I’m thinking of transactional and transformational leadership, and what they mean for the inflection point we’re at right now.

MARSHALL: Leadership’s one of those words like justice–like what do you mean? It’s used to describe so many things. When I’m talking about leadership... well, the foundation is in these three questions posed by Rabbi Hillel when he was asked, how do I decide what to do with my life? He said well, first ask yourself if I’m not for myself, who will be for me? Not selfishly, but self-regarding… like who are you, what do you bring to this? Then second, what am I if I am for myself alone? Meaning to be who, a human being and not a what, is to recognize the inherent relationality of being a human being. And then finally it’s if not now, when? Not about jumping into moving traffic, but sort of a recognition that you can’t learn to do well what you want to do until you actually do it. In other words, there are always elements of risk in action, and so for me, the interaction of the self with the us with the now is at the heart of what leadership is all about. It’s not just me. It’s not just you. It’s how that works together, and then it’s all about dealing with the uncertain. Because when everything’s working, you don’t need leadership–the system works. 

So leadership has a particularly adaptive role. It has a creative role. It has a role of agency in circumstances. And to do that, you have to treat it as a question of skills, a question of strategy, and a question of courage; it’s a multi-dimensional thing. So the definition I use for leadership is that it’s about accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty. It’s not a diva model of leader, not like a great charismatic persona. It’s a form of interacting with other people around the creation of collective capacity. That’s how I think of leadership. It’s interdependence; it’s not command and control, but much more eliciting capacity. 

And you know, with transactional leadership, James Macgregor Burns made that original distinction and it was all about exchanges. You do this. Or, I tell you. And what he called transformational leadership is really what I’m talking about. It’s about bringing people into relationship with one another so that they see possibilities they didn’t see, strength they didn’t see in themselves and others, so that they find a common purpose. That work is what I mean by leadership. If you look at it that way, then leaders are developing more leaders all the time. It’s kind of like learners become teachers. If you look at how movements spread, like evangelical movements, it’s people who you know, get the spirit, and they go out and they make more and they make more. So there’s a human kind of infrastructure that gets you to scale. I mean it has historically, there’s a little thing called Christianity that started as a movement. All the movements before depended on leaflets, on horses, but they were spread people to people. 

Once you take people out of the equation, it becomes much more problematic. Because you know what happens when we’re on email and social media; each person becomes a symbol. They’re not a person, they’re a symbol, they’re this set of words. So the constraints–the empathetic constraints and enablements that go with interpersonal communication–they’re not there. So we can do whatever we want, and it just becomes savage. It actually undermines the capacity of people to relate to one another. 

Now, it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve been teaching online for a long time, but then you see people, it’s intentional. And leadership, when we teach it, is broken down into five core practices: building relationships, telling stories (which is about motivation), strategizing, action and structure. You can do that in a neighborhood, and you can do that in a country. It’s sort of like getting that Beethoven’s symphonies depended on each note being right, but they were constructed by putting the notes together. And that’s kind of what it takes, putting the pieces together but with a vision of something whole. 

CHRISTIAN:  I am curious whether you see strong leaders emerging…?

MARSHALL: I hope so. Because they don’t just appear. How can I say it? The people we look at as great charismatic leaders–first of all, they had teams; they weren’t just by themselves. And they often came out of a tradition. The tradition of preaching in the black church… there were a lot of really good preachers. So Dr. King didn’t just come from nowhere; he came out of a tradition of moral communication, and he was a master of it. 

Where are people learning how to do this? In other words, okay in churches people learned. Now in politics today, Obama was a practitioner of that, and he understood about narrative, he really did. And it was a source of real power. Now since then, who was cultivated, who was grown from that? What intentionality was there by saying hey, this is an important part of leadership now, you don’t have to be Obama, all of us can do this, we all have the potential. We were trying to do that with Camp Obama, exactly that. Because people would come and say well, I’ve got to tell Obama’s story. We’d say no, learn to tell your story, because your story is what is going to persuade your neighbor about why you support this guy. And so oh, I have that potential?! Yes, you do, we all have it within us and it takes conditions, circumstances, learning. Lawyers used to be like that–Clarence Darrow. Now Gandhi didn’t make much in the way of speeches, right? Gandhi spoke the rhetoric of action. His rhetoric was all in what he did and very little in the words. So there are different ways to communicate this kind of vision, but there have to be places where it matters. 

Now in a typical political campaign, does it matter, really? I mean Hillary could never give a speech worth a damn. It mattered, but they couldn’t help her. I show my class six minutes of Hillary and six of Michelle Obama at the DNC in 2016, where they’re both sort of talking about themselves. You know, Michelle speaks entirely in narrative moments. The basic unit of narrative is the moment; there’s a challenge, there’s a response. Now, she’s talking about the day when the big black cars and the guys with the guns came to take the kids to school when they were in the White House. And their faces are pressed up against the windows of these cars, and she turns to Barack and says, what have we done? And see, you become present to that moment, because she’s present to that moment, and you get the emotional meaning of the moment. Or waking up in a house built by slaves and seeing her beautiful black daughters playing on the lawn. These are all moments. Hillary, there isn’t a single moment in her whole talk. It’s references too. And what that means is she’s never emotionally present in a way that people can even begin to get her. You watch that contrast… man, it is so striking. Because Hillary’s just over here and it’s kind of like by walling yourself in, you wall the world out. I’m sure she had very good reasons for the way she developed that kind of protectiveness, being married to Bill for all those years. But it doesn’t serve you… it doesn’t serve you well. 

But Obama knew how to do it. Michelle knows how to do it. It isn’t just otherworldly, I guess is the point. 

CHRISTIAN: …it’s a skill.

MARSHALL: It’s a skill! It’s a craft. If we were saying you’ve got to be a master of calculus or nuclear physics to be president… no, you’ve got to be able to tell good stories. We’re all equipped for that; we tell our kids stories all the time, we know what stories are. But it’s implicit, it’s not explicit. And so that’s what we’ve been trying to do–come up with a way that can be made explicit so you can treat it as a craft, and so that you can learn to to communicate meaningfully about core values to people. I just think the potential is all over the place out there, but venues are needed. Legislatures are no longer people giving great historic speeches, that’s not what happens. And the Democratic Convention is a production, it’s not a real thing, it’s a ritual. But it’s not even that good a ritual! This year was better… the online one I thought was better, because you actually got to see more real people. 

CHRISTIAN: Can I ask what gives you hope?

MARSHALL: I guess the thing that gives me the most hope is that I get to go to class and have a conversation with the future. In other words, I get to work with people who are all wrapped up in the future, and who want to deal with it. It’s kind of like what Walter Brueggemann, who wrote this book called The Prophetic Imagination, says–that transformational vision comes at the intersection of two things. One is criticality, a clear view of the world’s hurt, of its need, of its pain. And then hope, the sense of its possibilities, its promise. One without the other goes to despair, or it goes to irrelevance, but together they can be a powerful transformational energy. 

Young people come of age with a critical eye on the world they find and, almost of necessity, with hopeful hearts. Generational change is a really important thing and it’s all around us. One of my students just started the institute at Harvard Law School on ending mass incarceration. This guy I had as an undergrad. See, teaching gives you a way to sort of be long-term and short-term at the same time, because you’re investing in people in such a way that then they can go and grow and build. That’s why investing in people is so damned important. Not using them, but investing in them. That’s what organizing does; it’s an investment in people and their capacity to work together. But we don’t think that way–we think oh, spend, spend, spend. So the first source of hope I have is what I get to do. My online class, we have 160 students from 31 countries. We have to do it in a global context. Now, these are people who are shaping the future. They are maybe in their thirties or so. I’m not expecting oh, some best thing. I’m creating possibility, I’m creating potential, I’m creating capacity. And you don’t know what’s going to come of that. So I get hope from that on a regular basis. 

I get hope from Sunrise, I get hope from the reaction to George Floyd, these things that are happening. You have to recognize them for what they are even as you try to grapple with how to make them more. But you can’t dismiss it. So look for where the energy is. That’s what I try to do, work towards where the energy is. And there’s a lot out there. There’s a group called GirlTrek. You know about it? It was started by two black women who were concerned about health, and so they put together this movement really, about walking and health among black women. They have over a million people now, and they want to become organizers. To me, woah, that’s hopeful. See they built something that brought people together around improving themselves and each other, and then said ok, that brought us so far, now we’ve got to get some control over the politics. So I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful.

CHRISTIAN: You’re not the first guest to phrase it that way (laughs).

MARSHALL: You lose hope, you got nothing. There is a real logic to hope. Look at all the crazy things that happen–good things, bad things happen. We tend to remember the bad things more, because they challenge us, but often out of that comes the capacity to create good things. Not necessarily. But we are all authors of our time and the future; we have that capability. 

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. 

MARSHALL: But you’ve got to be willing to take the risks. You’ve got to have enough faith to actually take the risks. Because if you don’t take the risks, nothing’s going to happen, you know? Not really. 

There’s so much in our traditions about sources for that. This is maybe an aside, but I’ve been studying the Koran for the last year and a half every Wednesday night for an hour. And I’ve been reading the Hebrew Bible with a friend; we finally got through Job and Ecclesiastes. So now we’re working on the New Testament. And reading the Gospel of Matthew is amazing. If you read it as an adult and you try to think of the context in which people were doing what they were doing, it’s really rich. There are these ancient sources of human beings struggling with what it is to be human, and where to find hope and all the rest of it. You can get hung up on the particular circumstances of living in tents or whatever, or you can actually read for what’s being shared about human beings and the challenges we face. It’s there.. it’s deep there. It’s sort of like recovering from the past what we need to be able to shape the future that we want. It isn’t imitating the past, but boy there’s a lot to learn, a lot of shoulders on which to stand. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.