is safe to assume that sympathetic readers all around the world will share an interest in the US social justice left figuring out how to pick up our game a few notches. I conclude with a discussion of what a new political zeitgeist—one in which radicals embrace a moral and strategic imperative to contend in the terrain of politics and power—might look like.
Already now there are signs that such a zeitgeist may be coming into view. Indeed, this book is positioned within what I see as an emerging tendency within the contemporary US left; a tendency whose strong moral sense is also oriented toward understanding, mapping, and effectively intervening in the messy terrain of political power. My hope is that some readers may wish to be part of this tendency, and to help it to mature and grow.
2 Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), xiii.
3 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
4 Margaret Thatcher, “Press Conference for American correspondents in London,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, June 25, 1980, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/Speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid =104389&doctype=1.
5 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (trade union).
6 I should make clear for any readers who may be unfamiliar with the Exodus story of the Bible—and how it is a staple text in Liberation Theology—that the “Egyptians” and “Israelites” describe a relationship of economic enslavement and oppression, and thus serve as homology. God being on the side of the Israelites, in the story, is about their position as the oppressed and enslaved people. Egyptian and Israelite here in no way reference any specific present-day nation or “people.”
7 From that day forward, my father has been supportive of my political work, even if he was not ecstatic when I started getting arrested.
8 Paulo Freire, Ana Maria Araujo Freire, and Donaldo P. Macedo, The Paulo Freire Reader (New York: Continuum, 1998), 212.
9 I first heard this phrase from my friend and comrade Max Berger.
10 Tariq Ali, “Venezuela: Changing the World by Taking Power,” VenezuelAnalysis.com, interviewed by Jardim, Claudia and Jonah Gindin, July 22, 2004, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/598.
11 By suggesting that the value of an action is mostly symbolic I do not mean that it is therefore unimportant. Symbolic contests are indispensable to changing structures and relationships of power and winning measurable gains. I will explore this theme in depth later in the book.
12 While I do lead some trainings on my own, I have mostly worked collaboratively with co-trainers through training organizations or campaigning organizations, including The Ruckus Society, Center for Story-based Strategy, School of the Americas Watch, War Resisters League, MoveOn.org, and many other local campaigns and ad hoc mobilization training working groups. Today my training work is through Beyond the Choir (see http://beyondthechoir.org).
13 I mean here the mission statement for the larger effort, which was dubbed the Mobilization for Global Justice.
14 At first activist was used to describe people in Sweden who advocated getting involved in World War I; it was intended as a counter to the label pacifist.
15 Google Ngram Viewer is a corpus tool that charts the frequency of words and phrases in books published from 1800–2012 (to date).
16 Nadia Bashir, Penelope Lockwood, Alison Chasteen, Daniel Nadolny, and Indra Noyes, “The Ironic Impact of Activists: Negative Stereotypes Reduce Social Change Influence,” European Journal of Social Psychology 43, no. 7 (2013): 614–626.
17 Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
18 Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
19 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
20 Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 2003).
21 The rise of neoliberalism is an important backdrop to both tracks.
22 I am borrowing language here from my friend and comrade, Beka Economopoulos, who I once heard advocate, informally at a meeting, that we must “weave ourselves into the fabric of society.”
23 Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass on Slavery and the Civil War: Selections from His Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2003 [1857]), 42.
24 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 1997), 108.
25 This is not to suggest that elites never conspire to maintain and expand their powers, privileges, and profits. Of course they do.
26 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 1998), 96.
27 “Wrong” from the vantage point of elites, of course.
The 99%: The Symbol and the Agent
In this chapter I take a brief first look at Occupy Wall Street, a key “case study” that I will keep coming back to throughout the book. Occupy succeeded in introducing a popularly resonant populist narrative about economic inequality and a rigged political system. How it did so is instructive and foreshadows key concepts that I will keep building upon in later chapters. However, Occupy also offers us lessons about what not to do; I will examine how Occupy turned inward
