Transcripts For CSPAN2 Rules For Revolutionaries 20161210

And sports illustrateds s. L. Price reports on a working class town through the lens of high school football. Thats just a few of the programs youll see on booktv this weekend. For a complete television schedule, booktv. Org. Booktv on cing span 2 cspan2, television for serious readers. So welcome, everybody. Im the cofounder of civic hall, and just briefly, civic hall, i should say, is weve been here now almost two years. It grew out of an yule conference that we do focused on how technology is changing politics and government that weve been doing since 2004 which is, in fact, how i know pote of our guests. Both of our guests. Weve traveled similar paths. Two years ago we opened civic hall to be a yearround gathering point for the same people and conversations focused on civic tech, how tech can be used for the public good. And so its a pleasure to welcome everybody here. Let me just say that im really excited for the chance to get into this conversation about rules for revolutionaries, how big organizing can change everything. Because we are living in a very unusual time. And it isnt just the moment after the election. Its actually that we are living in an age where mass participation in politics now is possible at the scale of millions. And its a very confusing thing to experience, and a lot of us, i think, are right in the middle of that moment now asking what do i do. And the confusion comes from the fact that everybodys in motion. A lot of people are suddenly activated and concerned and ready to get engaged and try to do something important. And this is the classic challenge of organizers, right . And who better than, to get into this question than really two of the, our best veteran organizers in the digital arena, zacking exley, who i think ive known longer, goes all the way back to around 2000 when he built a web site that made fun of george w. Bush and got called out by the president. That was 1998. 1998. The primary, yeah. [laughter] and then he went from there, he worked for a while in the early days of moveon. Org, was sent by moveon to help president ial campaigns in the 2004 cycle, and so ended up helping the Howard Dean Campaign and then the John Kerry Campaign with their work. More recently, he worked for organizations like wick feed ya wikipedia, which is another kind of entity that involves lots of lots of people in a big, distributed enterprise. And more recently, along with beck by bond, worked becky bond, worked on Bernie Sanders campaigns distributive organizing team. Becky, if overever heard of credo mobile or before that working asset, i dont know if there are any people here, but becky has long been organizing the trenches of Progressive Movement work with credo, a phone company with a conscience, i think, is the tagline, right . And she actually built, as president of credo, a Political Action committee that kid very interesting that did very interesting work in the last offyear cycle targeting members of congress who were Tea Party Members and figuring out how to do a lot of field organizing in a way that could challenge them in a serious way. So shes really cut her teeth as well on political organizing. And she, when she left credo to go work with zack at sanders campaign, what was it, about a year or so ago . Thats certainly when i started to pay a lot more attention. [laughter] i know zack, and hes kind of a man genius. But i becky is also one of the Progressive Movements sharpest tacks ands has done a lot of really important things which maybe well get into. So its really, really a special treat to have you guys here. Sorry. Here at civic hall. And i guess i want to just open by asking you to just say a few words at the beginning. I mean, as a question thats on everybodys mind is, okay, so now what . Right . Its a week after 11 9, which say vargas has professed it as a bookend 9 11. Now what . What do you guys think . Oh, wow, okay. Well, i think, first and foremost, we are people who have been deeply moved by what has happened. And its been, you know, really emotional more us just like it has been, i would suspect, for everyone in this room. And one of the approaches that we have to politics has always been that were, that were peers with the volunteers. The volunteers are our colleagues, and were in this movement is something that were in together. So, you know, of the what now, the first thing is were experiencing, you know, and absorbing that. We have entered into an extremely dangerous period in our history as a nation, and i think that we just want to sort of acknowledge that what youre feeling, you know, were also feeling. And, but we can also see certain things more clearly because we work in politics because we were part of the Bernie Sanders campaign, so weve been traveling the country, and weve been talking to voters, and we made a different choice in the primary about who to support and what kind of campaign to run based on where we thought the country was. So we find ourselves today a week after a result that was stunning but something that in many ways doesnt surprise us because we can see how, how we got there. And in some ways some things we think, if they had happened, we would be in a different place. And so we find ourselves trying to understand how can we use the best tools at our disposal to be part of the resistance, to be part of the opposition, to resist the normalization of what is an unprecedented moment in American History. And we also in this whatnow moment, we wrote this book in august. And we wanted to take the lessons from the Bernie Sanders campaign not as highpriced consultants to big organizations and companies that would pay us to tell them how bernie, how we did the thing on the Bernie Campaign, but to actually deliver that back to people. Want a job at uber . No. [laughter] but how do we then turn that back, and how do we open source the things that we learned, because even though we didnt win, we learned some very powerful things. So we find ourselves at this moment ready our book is just literally out this week, which is, you know, helping people with very concrete ways to organize in a big way to face the urgent challenges of our time. And the challenges are just a little bit different than what we thought it would be. So thats what now at this moment is starts with conversation with you. So want to add anything to that, zack . Im tempted to start processing the election, but we said we were going to hold off, right . [laughter] yeah. To be clear, we could to that. We could do, you know, sort of relitigate the campaigns litigate is probably the wrong word to use. Okay. In the trump era. [laughter] and there will be time for audience questions if people really do want to get into that. But i think its more about lessons learned, and in particular lets start, you know, by understanding what was different about the style of organizing, the philosophy of organizing that you developed and that you now call big organizing . I think a lot of people who came up through, you know, experiencing things like the Dean Campaign and then went into things like the Obama Campaigns that were so successful in 2008 and 2012 adopted a certain model of how to you involve volunteers how you involve volunteers, how you understand the electorate and target voters. And a lot of it was, in effect, i think joe rasbar who was one of obamas chief digital strategists in 2008 said you have to sort of, basically, let the bottomup surface, but it has to be directed from the topdown. So they evolved a method of really professionally training people to be community organizers, giving people very concrete tasks and, you know, Neighborhood Team leaders and so on. That it was kind of like a big pyramid. And at its very best, it moved millions of people in a very constructive way to help obama both win as somewhat of an outsider in 2008 against hillary clinton, and then in 2012 as an incumbent. And i think that model was in large degree what was being used again in the clinton campaign. Sanders campaign did not have the same Establishment Base of support, and it also didnt have most of the people who had cut their teeth doing that style of organizing. So you were partly forced by necessity to evolve and experiment, but you also had a different philosophy that you were working on, right . So talk a bit about that. Yeah. I think we need to step back though, actually, and i want to challenge a little bit the way you describe the, you know, how that obama, how the obama organizing stuff played out. And, you know, methods of organizing, you know, they get developed, they catch on, they spread around, philosophies of organizing. And, you know, the book rules for revolutionaries, that title is kind of a swipe at Saul Alinskys rules for radicals, right . And that was when saul alin sky wrote that book and started getting funding from big organizations and started sending organizers around the country, largely because of all the Foundation Funding he got sustained the staff in Many Organizations around the country. It sort of became more and more his paradigm of organizing became a, more and more dominant pair radiodime paradigm. And it was sort of the only paradigm of organizing that was available to anybody. And when i personally became a lay or wore organizer labor organizer, you know, when i was fist out of College First out of college from the connecticut suburbs, i went out and i was train in this alinsky model. And that model, you know, its oneonone, knock on a door, have a conversation, win somebody over to the cause of getting a stop sign on the corner or Something Like that. And then this whole ladder of engagement. Ali nsky never said that, but it kind of comes from his frame of organizing. Once they get the stop sign then, you know, theyre going to get this sense of power, wow, i did something in my community. Then theyre going to want to do something else. Who knows, maybe a stoplight. And eventually people many this way of thinking, like, someday people will build up to actually having power over their whole lives. And so were rejecting that, actually, for something else. But important to note that those organizers on the Obama Campaign also were rejecting that frame. And it didnt come from, you know, joe and the digital team did amazing stuff on the Obama Campaign, but that was a whole other part of the campaign. That Neighborhood Team model came from people like jeremy burns, jodi cushman, and it was simultaneously being pushed forward on clintons primary campaign in 2008 by robby mook and Marlin Marshall who ran the Campaign Just now. And it came from deans New Hampshire primary where they had this Little Laboratory that was led by most of them and karen hicks and some other people where they kind of, they really embrace that sort of alinsky frame where its about relationships and oneonone communication, but they tried to scale it because they werent just trying to get a stop sign. They were trying to win a a primary in New Hampshire and South Carolina and north dakota. So they scaled it up, and they had these house meetings, right . And this was also very influenced by Marshall Gahn who was their adviser, and he had been an organizing director for the farm workers in california. [inaudible] yeah. And so, you know, that house party model was an evolution not party. Marshall would yell at us if we said house party. Its a house meeting. And that house meeting model that the farm workers practiced was an evolution from and a little bit of a rejection of some of the restrictiveness of the alinsky model. So it was amazing what they did in 08 in South Carolina and then all over the country. That model that was incubated in South Carolina took root as the standard, you know, obama organizing model. And so this whole generation of organizers learned how to work with volunteers, and it did start with oneonones. But then they would ask them to lead a Neighborhood Team. And and then that person would be the leader of the team, and they called it the snowflake model. So what we i think the way we looked at what we were doing was, okay, that was great. But we have in the beginning of the campaign, we had 46 states. And before we, you know, youre exactly right about how becky saved the whole operation. It would have been a mess if he hadnt come. There was about a month and a half before becky came where it was just Claire Sandberg and me. Just two of us and 46 states and, you know, hundreds of thousands of volunteers that had signed up saying put us to work. And they were furious because we were not putting them to work. And so we knew that we started going around and sitting down in coffeeshops and having oneonones with leaders saying would you form a Neighborhood Team, that would just be silly, wouldnt it . And the obama camp in 08 really didnt have there were some good experiments, some amazing stuff in the primary in california. But in general, there was not a program in, you know, that mutt people to work that put people to work all in those later states where there was no staff. So we really believed we could do something, so we tried to evolve a model that would allow us to scale it. So do you want to tribe that model describe that model . Well, you challenged, you said, you know, you were saying its not the topdown, but actually we believe in an element of topdown. We think about it in slightly different terms. Yes. So the way we think about is instead of thinking about topdown versus bottomsup, we really think about peer to Peer Movement where theres a central plan to win and we distribute the work. But the relationship of the volunteers doing the work is not just up to a campaign staffer, right . Its actually to each other, right . To the other volunteers. And this is something that hasnt necessarily been possible in the past because its been very difficult for the volunteers to talk to us and to talk to each other, you know, at scale. But what we realized was, was that bernie was such a long shot, and he started, you know the book is about organizing. Its not about the Bernie Campaign. We use bernie as an example because it was a really formative experience that shows, you know, what was possible. But bernie had 3 name recognition in the beginning. By the end of the campaign, wed captured 46 of the delegates to the Democratic National convention, okay . That was we didnt get as far as we needed to go, but we did get very close. What we always knew all along was that we would have to have a huge campaign, right, to overcome the advantages of resources and name recognition that the billionaire candidate had. So we figured out we need to have a centralized plan, right . Because we couldnt just have hundreds of thousands of people doing whatever they thought, right . Could have done that. Well, thats what they were doing, you know what i mean . [laughter] and it was beautiful. They were writing software, they were writing music, you know what i mean in they were doing all sorts of crazy things, but it wasnt thing that would actually add up to bernie winning, right . And it was our job to actually make sure that all the effort that they were putting forth was actually going to be pushing bernie across the finish line. And so it was really important for us to get a centralized plan. And, you know, the idea was that it was not let a thousand flowers bloom, but it was more like it was a modular, you know, flower factory that was, you know what i mean . Franchised across all the states, right . And so we knew we had to get them to work on a centralized plan, but we had to distribute the work so that people could do it across space and time. And we knew that we couldnt manage them to do all this work, right . That we could only divide it up, and then we would have to have them manage each other to do the work if we were actually going to get enough things done. So this was just an enormous organizing challenge that we had to, basically, figure out from scratch. Right. Say a little bit about, so one of your key innovations, you know, its a technology of how to turn a mass meeting into something that plugs almost every person attending the meeting into a really generative role of running a phone bank, right . So the barnstorm model. Unpack that a little bit for us, because thats probably the most organizing innovation in the campaign that you and you write about it a lot in the book. But what were why barnstormers . Like, ill try to put it in context. The barnstorm, there was a structure to, you know, wed get people into a room like this, wed get, like, 100 people, sometimes 500, sometimes 60, and then we had a structure that led to them getting organized. It was almost like forming crystals, you know what i mean . They came in as water, and they left as crystals, you know, that were and they were formed into teams that knew what to do. But that was the structure of how we did the meeting was just one piece of this much larger structure, and there were lots of other teams. Yeah. The barnstorm, its actually a great story which is what happened with the barnstormers is we realized we had to get everybody on the phone calling voters in the first four contests so we could find out who was for bernie. And we had all these people in california and colorado and texas that wanted bernie to win, and they wanted the election to still be going when it got to their state later, but in order to do that, we couldnt get killed in the first four states. What happened was [inaudible] and so were like, great. We have something for people to do. Wed had thousands of [inaudible] well just get them to start a phone bank. So we sent them emails, and there was nothing. So people were not responding to our emails in order to have the one person who raises their hand and says ill invite everybody to my house, and the phone bank will happen at my house, and we can get people to go. Zack said the Fundraising Team was like, no, you cannot [laughter] so zack has this crazy idea, and hes like what if we get people together in person, and we get them to commit in person to holding the phone banks . And i thought it was nuts, right . But he was so attached to this idea, and i felt like the only way to get past it was to try it and have it fail quickly. [laughter] this is really important in campaigns, right . Try things quickly, because we had the standard which is well try crazy things if the payoff is huge. We dont want to try crazy things if the resources are small. But the payoff was potentially big when we worked out the numbers. And wed already discovered forming volunteer teams on a campaign, this really important principle which is dont ask who wants to lead, ask who wants to get to work. Just the wrong people would raise their hand. Its like a person that likes to talk a lot, the person who wants to run the meeting but it doesnt actually translate into work. We ask people to get to work. The most amazing people came out of the woodwork, and it turned out they were the best leaders, and we would make them leaders afterwards, right . So we knew, could we have a meeting that got people to work, right . We couldnt just have a meeting where people volunteered to lead things and have it not happen. So zack sent out an email to supporters saying in tennessee. In tennessee, well, chalk up the email you sent out. Yeah. Also there was a guy named cover bin trent who was corbin trent. He came with me, and we did this together in his home state. And we just had an email to tennessee, to everybody in tennessee, and we said meet us in one of these five cities, and were going to put you to work. Thats it. Not bernie. Yeah. It actually took a lot of experimentation, because people came together and they did want to get to work, but we actually had to create and its funny, because, so the method that we eventually developed in these meetings that did get people to work and not just to work once, but to work every week or two times a week that theyd be running phone banks. Phone banks was sort of the one tool we had that we could put people into for a bunch of reasons, so we just poured people into that. It took a while to develop the exact technique that worked. And its not like any of the innovations were mindboggling, its just like we tried stuff and, okay, get people to sign up in the back of the room and make them line up in the front, and make each one Say Something attractive about their meeting or just personal, personalize their meeting, you know . Like, im going to cook ill have burgers, somebody bring chips. That was enough. And we called them parties. We didnt call them meetings. We didnt make it boring. We, you know, we moved on from the left, and we said its going to be parties. But here is the funny thing, with this technique, you know, we were, like, in the old days of organizing, you know, it was just organizing. It was just called organizing, you know, when you had to work out your way of doing the meeting so it would work. You just had to figure it out. So when we tried explaining that to a bunch of organizers, most of them were young, but also trying to talk to the digital people about this, people coming from a digital background, its hard to get people to replicate, you know, the technique, right . So we found that what we had to do was explain it as a technology. So a meeting was it wasnt just like organizing, it was a technology. And is you had to do it just right, and then that helps people get it. And the result is 100,000 volunteers 100,000 meetings. 100,000 public meetings. 75 million phone calls which i think i worked out the math, if you compared it to the 2012 obama general campaign, was about four times as productive just in terms of the number of phone calls made, whether the contact, we dont know. But, obviously, a huge bundling of people. I want to ask you about one or two of the rules in the book, rules for revolutionaries. What is you say that people are waiting to be asked to do Something Big, to win Something Big. And then you also say dont let the perfect be the enemy of the big. I wonder, becky, if you would get into that. Sure. Yeah, for us, from the beginning we knew the candidate had to be big. The candidate was Bernie Sanders, right . And the Small Campaign was not going to push it over the top. For us, this wasnt a protest candidacy, it wasnt we werent trying to get a message out will, we were trying to win. And i think, obviously, this is a really salient point today, you know, as we think about what happened on tuesday is that, you know, the values that we associate with our campaign, but also if you dont win, there are consequences. And so we were really trying to win. And so in trying to make the big campaign, you know, and get a lot of people involved, we actually found out that in trying to get people to join us that people were more likely to do Something Big, to win Something Big than to do something small to win something small. And this was sort of a counter, like, counterintuitive to us, right . Because usually in organizing youre like, okay, ask somebody to do something tiny, right, and get them involved. Yeah, and then you can move them up the ladder and get them to do progressively bigger and bigger things. But we found out that the American People are really smart, and they understand that things are going backwards. And we dont have to radicalize them, we dont have to trick them into being part of our campaign, we just had to tell them what winning looks like and what we have to do to get there. And depending on their ability to take on work, they took on as much as they could. And often it was really big. And, you know, politics in the last 30 years has just been getting smaller and smaller and smaller as politicians have been more focused on a swing vote, theyve been more focused on trying to win small, incremental victories. And as people have become less engaged with those campaigns as we ask them to do smaller and smaller steps more in isolation from each other because we think they wont do anything big, then theyve sort of been rejecting, you know, the product that weve been offering. And i think too Many Political professionals have treated that as apathies of people, right . As opposed to understanding that the system is broken and what theyre asking people to do is simply not worth their time. And so we had to put together a program that always explained how big, how hard it was going to be to get where we needed to go, how much work needed to be done to get there and then create the ability for them to do things big and small on a daily or weekly basis, right . Such if we all pull together, all this work would add up to something that would make it possible for Bernie Sanders to win. And so when we asked people to do Something Big, lots of people stepped up. And not only did they spend lots of time making phone calls, but other people spent time building web site, Programming Software volunteers for us, managing basically a virtual [inaudible] software that was quite complex and managing dozens and dozens of shifts of volunteers within that. But a corollary was also that we had to accept a lot of messiness and imperfection, right . And one of the rules was dont let the perfect be the enemy of the big. And we knew we could have something that could be close to something small and close to perfect or Something Big where everything wouldnt be exactly like we wanted it. Whenever we had to make decisions on the campaign, we used this software which debt collectors use, and they could they dont care about them, right . To do this. And were we going to wait and develop Something Really Nice and berniebranded that had the same login as your account that you gave money through, or were we going to throw people into this terribly designed, you know, Call Center Software and have them use it and just trust them, right . To sort of deal with the messiness in order to gain scale. And so we we would always pick scale because we needed a big organizing in order to succeed. Another rule in the book, people new to politics make the best revolutionaries. Why . Zack. Because, well, i mean, a whole bunch of reasons. You know, i think what we say in that chapter is that theres well, first of all, after those barnstorm meetings, we would start everyone off by saying how many people here are totally new to politics, raise your hand. Never done anything political before, campaigning before. And it was usually around twothirds of the people would raise their hands. But, you know, this was also our experience with, you know, with obama, with kerry, with dean, with all the people that filled up the, you know, theres a constant inflow of people into movements, right . And theres a lot of people in this country and, you know, only some of them get involved in every movement, and its just sort of like who happens to get caught up in that moment. And, but then when the movements over, because movements come and go, some people stay x. This connects to the tyranny of the annoying rule. And defeat the journey of the annoying. So some people stay. And why do they stay when the movements done . Why do they keep having the meetings when nothings happening . Why do they do that, right . And so so . Well, no. [laughter] its that everybodys got different reasons. And i know this is all going to be misconstrued, and im going to be attacked as if im saying something bad about activists, but im one of these people who stays, right . I think a lot of us here on the stage, were all the people who stay, right . But unfortunately, you know, that third of the people in the meeting who came, you know, who have been doing it for years and years, not all of them, not even most of them, but some of them, you know, just have it all wrong, you know . And so the people that come in new have this sense of urgency and a totally brash take on what to do. And they just dont have all these bad ideas, you know, that are left over from the way they did it last time, you know . And i think so bernie, you know, just like obama in 08, just like shows the power of people new to politics. And also donald trump, you know . I think that most of his people are actually, who came out to those rallies, were new. I want to ask one more question and then open things up to the audience. But i also just want to say that anybody who is in that moment now of sense of urgency, sense of being swept up, i mean, i literally an hour before our meeting we sit here on fifth avenue, and we heard hundreds of High School Students go marching down the street. I think theyre walking out during their lunch hours now. So a lot of people are in motion. Obviously, young people are by definition new to the process. And thats very exciting and promising. And i think at the same time, this book is must reading for anybody in that moment because i do know as someone who has been through that moment over and over how the patterns get reproduced that turn excitement into disillusionment or frustration at not getting anywhere. So rules for revolutionaries really couldnt come out at a better time. One more question, and i suppose this contains a little bit of implicit criticism of a serious weakness in the bernie movement. But rule number four, fighting racism must be at the core of the message to everyone. Why is that one of your rules . Okay. So ill answer that one. You know, we, we failed at some really big things, right . And there will be consequences in that. And when zack and i set out to write this book, one of the things we didnt do is we didnt read any books about organizing. We didnt read any books about organizing, anything that had been written about the Bernie Campaign with the exception of we decided to and those of you who work on campaigns, you dont actually read it while its going on, youre too busy. But we did go back and read pieces that were written during the campaign or after the campaign by black leaders and black inte lectures. One of the things that happened early on was that our campaign failed to empower, make progress with black voters. Although towards the end we were doing very well with young voters of color, latino and black. And so we decided like, okay, you know, were not going to figure this out ourselves. Lets just see what people said, right . That thought about this and were smart and cared and knew about this. And we read alicia garza who is, you know, one of the founders of black lives matter, had written in the nation magazine specifically about the Bernie Campaign and where we fell short, and they wrote with such, like, tough love, you know . It was really, they really tried to tell us not you guys are terrible and you blew it, but they said heres whats going on, and heres something that youre missing in the possibility of this moment. And a big part of that was this idea that race has to be at core of the message to everyone. Not an after thought and also not a message thats just for one constituency. And one of the things they really, these black leaders are breaking down for us and i think we really have to listen to them, is that, you know, the billionaire class is using race to define our movements for change, and the result is that the elites and the billionaires stay in charge. And that racism hurts everyone, right . And its, and that theres no way that well achieve economic equality if we dont deal with racism, and its going to the take a Multiracial Movement to achieve this. And thats not going to happen if we dont have authentic leadership from immigrants and working class people of color. Its not going to happen if we dont have white people reaching out to the white folks who are voting against their economic interests and a just society. And so we took this very seriously, and we do really understand that if we continue to let the billionaires use race to divide us, that we can never win, right . And so any movement that were part of has to make material action to dismantle systemic racism, Structural Racism in our society. And this is not something thats about [inaudible] its not something where we have to mention it every time we talk, right . It literally has to be at the center of our, of our analysis. And i really appreciate that so many people have taken the time to write and talk to us about this and help us learn from this. And i think its going to be essential to the movements that we create as we go forward. Well said. I concur. Okay. So we have about 15 minutes or so for audience involvement. If you have a question, raise your hand. My joke always is if you have a statement, please raise it in the form of a question. [laughter] but just tell us your name. Do we have a mic for folks . Yep . Okay. So just tell us your name and your question. Thank you. Hi. This is, of course, incredibly timely. My names maria, ive been a stayer in organizing women for a long time. Anyway, i on saturday decided to organize some women, you know, asking people [inaudible] before coming tonight. And, you know, so one question is, of course, do you view feminism as also, you know, kind of a, something that needs to be incorporated in everything just like racism given that 53 of women voted for trump . But also yeah, white women. Not women. Yeah. Anyway, so im kind of ahead myself in organizing without directly knowing on purpose other than, you know, becoming like republicans and creating a wall of obstruction. And so, you know, as this group is coalescing across, you know, were trying to knit together all sorts of activities, and i think, you know, a lot of people dont quite know what were doing. And so just would love your advice as to, you know, in the interim what would be a best way to coalesce this group. Well, the first thing i want to say is, yes, feminism, you know what i mean, its part of democratic socialism. And i want to say on the Bernie Campaign, you know, there was a lot especially in social media, there was this sort of delegitimization of the people that were volunteering for bernie by calling them bernie bros, and it was really this meme was used to attack us and our progressive values. I was called a bernie bro, which i found kind of ironic. But the campaign that happened in communities with people working together was largely led by the most effective leaders who were almost all working class women of color. And theres a rule in our book which is if there are no nurses, i dont want to be part of your revolution. And one of the brilliant mainstays of our campaign, actually, was nurses. And one of the first endorsers was the National Nurses united. And why is this important . Its that, you know, there is a us nurses really, theyre humanists, right . And theyre feminists, and they see their job as to heal the world, and they understand that everything from pollution to the stress of joblessness to our broken health care really impacts, you know, their patients and makes it hard for them to do their job. And the way that they came and helped run the Bernie Campaign, i think, actually showed very much what a feminist platform and what a feminist Campaign Looks like. So i think one thing half of the campaign was not, right . You do say that in the book. Yes, yes. Well, there were lots of campaigns. We should say, you know, zack and i were only like, zack and i werent the campaign. We were for the people that were given some technology and some budget organizing all the people in the country that didnt have a traditional field office, right, that they could go to. To we were just that but so we were just that but kind of close fringe and as it turned out, there was a lot of people that wanted to be involved in it, so it became huge. So i would say invite some nurses, right, to be part of your, to be part of your group. And then i also think, you know, wick talk to you more we can talk to you more about it, but literally in meetings that put people the to work, you take a goal and divide up the work, and you do Work Together on a regular basis, together is going to be amazing. And people seeing women doing Work Together, it draws more people in because people want to be part of it. So the advice is really to get started and then maybe to get some people from the nurses union to join you. Great. Also a side note on that 53 of white women, it was actually 26 of white adult women voted for trump, but 53 of the white women who voted votes for trump. But 26 of white women voted for trump. Its just interesting how about 25 of adults voted for trump, can and a little bit more than 25 voted for clinton. [inaudible] yeah. But, i mean, very significant. Okay. Two rows back, behind you. Yeah. Gentleman next to you. Yeah. Hi, im deborah sanger. My question is about organizing big, a big idea, big change. My particular issue is a subset of pushing back against privatization of public good which is pushing back against the privatization of the Public School system which, as you know, our president current president who were going to miss so much was not great at. And so im wondering how do you identify Something Big thats not too big, thats not too big to make people feel like, well, we could never do this, but big enough to inspire action . Yeah. So, and i think weve been talking about the book, i think we finally figured out how to make this point. I dont think we there was one aspect of it that maybe we didnt quite make in the book. And its about the way to inspire people, big doesnt mean national. It doesnt mean that your goal is to take over the whole entire government. But its that you actually have to win. Like really win. And not win something small or incremental, but win the whole thing. And what that means is that you have to come up with a strategy that can get there. And so if your goal is to stop the privatization of the Public School system and roll back and, you know, claw back the privatization thats happened, if thats what you really want to accomplish, then, you know, according to this idea that were putting out there, what somebody should do is lay out a plan. Even if its a 20year plan. If its a credible plan where people can see that, yes, if we work really hard and do x, y and z and a million other things, we can see the strategy where we could actually win the whole thing. And people are smart, and so they understand that your 20year plan might not succeed. But all along the way, youre making progress. And so to expect people to, you know, do the kind of hard work thats necessary, you know, during every one of those 20 years, they have to know where theyre going, you know . There has to be some prize to keep your eyes on, right . And thats what we dropped over the last, you know were generalizing here, but this is sort of the fun, the core of the problem that were seeing that kind of drags down the Progressive Movement in the Democratic Party is somehow and i, somehow we lost respect for, you know, quoteunquote ordinary people and decided that if we present them with a 20year plan to win it all in whatever issue it is or even, you know, or even just a two month plan thats kind of hard, that they wont be up for it, right . And that was just a huge mistake, and we have to erase it from our minds. Theres a saying, i forget who said this, but, you know, if you want to convince someone to take a long, hard ocean journey, you dont tell them about, you know, exactly how youre building the boat and, you know, how many oars its going to have right. You describe the beauty of the ocean and and the adventure. Yeah. And that motivates people. Yeah. I mean, just imagine well, yeah. And see i shouldnt go on, but when i started as an organizer, i was actually trained explicitly not to tell people about the whole strategy of the campaign from the alinsky model. Just tell them to sign this card, dont talk about anything else. Okay. Michael . Yeah, go ahead. Hi. So im michael spitzer, and i actually worked on the Obama Campaign under [inaudible] and then worked on a number of other campaigns and causes that tried to use the same organizing models but failed, i any in large part because i think in large part because they didnt have that big goal. So im curious how applicable this is to other causes beyond the Bernie Campaign. Could hillary have used this kind of organizing, or does it only work for certain types of causes . Well, i think it has to do with are people going to be motivated, right, to take on the responsibility of the work and to do a lot of work. And so, you know, asking for something small and telling people its big or its all you can get is not very inspiring for people. And people are struggling in their lives. People need jobs, are being forced to buy health care with the deductible so high, they cant go to the hospital. You know what i mean . People are hurting out there, and whats amazing is people would rather go for the long shot even if it was likely not to be successful because that was the only thing worth working on, right . So i think if it doesnt work, its probably, the ask is you need to [inaudible] and the great thing is if nobody shows up, i better get another plan. If you cant attract people to your cause, maybe you shouldnt be leading. You need to be thinking about what people actually want to do. You can also talk to people and ask them, you know, what they really think should happen because the American People are really smart. They know whats up, right . And they know when youre feeding them, you know, froth. And too often in politics we tell them its really important, really big, and they know its not, but they feel like they have to tell you that to do, to get you to do it. And its about being honest about where we are, where we need to be. More people will be willing to join you when youre honest in that way. Its so great to hear from you and, you know, im glad i mentioned bucky when we were talking about that. Didnt leave your Amazing Program out. But also, yeah, thats part of the motivation for writing this book, you know, we knew we were going to catch some flak from, you know, colleagues who were not writing books, you know, like, who are we to write this book . But we saw, you know, people didnt really absorb all the lessons from the amazing work that all you guys did in 08 and all throughout the whole program. And so, you know, that was really our motivation here, was we want this to get out. And we should be clear, this book is really not about us. Its really about all the amazing people, most of them new to politics, who got involved in the Bernie Campaign and the Amazing Things that they were able to do. What we did was we helped them shape the tactics to be more successful. And thats what we want to share with you. They help make these new rules, and we want people to go out there and try them, throw something out, write some new rules, right . Because we have some pretty big challenges, and if we keep doing things the way weve been doing them, the holes just going to get bigger. I see a couple of hands here. Anybody on side of the room . Yes, sir. Well come back to this side afterwards. Yeah. Hi. Hi, my names [inaudible] how do we take this energy and enthusiasm right now thats coming out of the left and direct it for the long haul, you know . From Campaign Season to the legislative season for the next several years until the midterms . What do you think needs to be done right now . More organizing, more sustaining, getting into peoples heads how important it is to participate and pitching those big ideas, and that we need to somehow sustain for the long haul. Yeah, yeah. So like get so participation. We had record low turnouts, right . People just didnt show up, right . Very negative campaign, and Everybody Knows as campaigns get more negative, turnout tends to get depressed, right . Yeah. I mean, one thing with adult people, ive been telling people the story of the 2010 tea party wave, you know what i mean . And all the seats republicans won in 2010, and were going to have to have a wave thats even bigger than that, right . And take back congress if were going to actually stop some of the things that the Trump Administration is going to try to shut down. And start thinking about how do we make that, thats going to be even lower turnout to, right . And the senate map is actually really bad. So its going to be an enormous challenge. I think one of the things we should do is Start Talking about that right now and get people to work. Lets not have the campaign be nine months before election day in 2018. People should start, there are things we can start to do now. Yeah, one of the things that really struck me is just how hollow local Party Activity seems to be in many parts of the country. And maybe thats less the case in the swing states where, you know, the candidates invest more heavily, the coordinated campaigns. But that in many places, you know, the Democratic Party puffs u. S. Up for a few weeks puffs itself up for a few weeks and then disappears. Zack, why dont you stay on that tom topic, because your new project, brand new congress, is really on this question of whether a lot of new candidates can be recruited to run against the incumbents in both parties in the house, right . Yeah. Is that the focus . Yeah. So a bunch of us, mostly volunteers, you know, mostly just grassroots leaders that me and a couple other staffers have been working with, we launched this campaign called brand new congress. And coming out of Bernie Campaign. But now its people from, you know, all different mostly new people. People that didnt even participate, you know, in this race. They and the idea is to hand pick really awesome, nonpolitician candidates coming from all different kinds of professions, you know, representing, you know, all of americas communities. Half women, you know, or more than half women, you know, overrepresentive of communities of color and with a plan, you know . And so, you know work a plan like with a plan like when we get elected, this is what were going to do with the economy, this is how were going to reform the criminal justice system, this is how were going to reform the political system so people know what theyre getting. So we think if we can put that slate on the ballot and really on the internet with a big donate button and a big volunteer button, we think that well be able, you know, that we can apply the same model thats worked for, you know, all these president ial candidates, we can apply the same model. And its not going to be people all running their own campaigns, its everybodys going to be housed under one campaign organization, you know . And it, and really, you know, just run out of the unified, really unify bed campaign organization. Unified cam rain portion. So thats the idea. And theres going to be all kinds of amazing movements to resist and to make progress and to get a lot of different stuff, you know, all across the country. Theres going to be some amazing stuff. And i think that you know, but i just think that theres something that weve been ignoring for too long except in the president ial campaigns which is we have a democracy, you know . And so people that are really fired up, like why are the only people up until donald trump and Bernie Sanders, why are the only people using our democracy these establishment politicians coming out of these, you know, major parties, you know, with very middleoftheroad ideas . Why are they the only ones using our democracy when its so much better suited to people with a really great vision about how to make the country way better, you know, and get everybody back to work and get wages going back up and decarcerate the two and a half Million People that are in prison and a bunch of other stuff, right . You know, imagine if we put that, or you know, a big agenda like that on the ballot. I think people would really fight for that. And, certainly, those kids that are marching down the street a couple hours ago, i think they would all get involved, right, in that kind of a big campaign to fix everything. So thats why im working on that, yeah. Right here. Gentleman with the hat. Dan . Dan, say your name. Sorry. Yeah, daniel i work in Community Center urban planning, and im starting a new Organization Called the digital placemaking institute. I was also, after occupy, after the eviction, i cofounded occupy town squares with some other folks to deal with this dilemma of a major kind of upset or loss of momentum and any sort of fragmentation to a placebased, neighborhoodbased approach where you have, you know, mini saturdays in a local park, go to all the different communities of need. And in my placemaking work, you know, part of the observation is, you know, i was just looking over the rules. There is no single issue revolution, right . And this whole dilemma of, like, issuebased politics, it almost seems like whats emerging is, you know, to what degree do we immediate to shift it to a much more placebased approach, you know, especially instead of a kind of ongoing beyond just the electoral cycle, but a much more rooted, present, placebased political apparatus, you know, cellsesome this is the idea of, like, soviets, right . What about the question is, is that what you guys are seeing as well . Does that resonate with yeah. We need to be organizing everywhere, basically. Okay . And theres enough people in this country who want change and are willing to do something about it, we can do that. We do want people organizing to take over, you know, their local government or to win a local fight, but also people, we have new technologies that allow people to work across time and space. And one of the things that happens in a president ial campaign but also can happen in other sorts of campaigns is you can nationalize a bunch of local stuff and get people all over the country work on it. A good example is some District Attorney races, there were six on november 8th. And criminal Justice Reform advocates won five of them. And the way they did this, in part, is they asked people all around the country if they wanted to help turn out voters to elect or unelect a District Attorney to unelect a District Attorney that was refusing to hold cops accountable for beating up or killing black people. And so this is a national issue. How do we deal with Police Brutality and the unaccountable ability of the police to murder black people. And so you have people all over the country that want to be involved in identifying voters and helping turnout in that sense. But thats also a very local campaign, right, thats happening on the ground. So i think we do want to take advantage of this revolution, how businesses are run, where teams can be anywhere and theres lots of software that will remove the friction of some teams being able to work well together no matter where they are. And so to take advantage of that National Energy and be able to, like, everybody focus on a big issue even if its not happening where they are. Also we learned on the Campaign Even as digital people that one of the most important things we could do was get people together where they live. And so i think we have to do all of this. All the way in the back. Hi. Vincent, and im just i wanted to comment and then turn it into a question. The comment starting off is im hearing from you guys organize, and im hearing from this side of, you know, the audience to do what. And theres a lot of that out there. And im just looking back at the crash that happened not too long ago, basically stifled a lot of what people are trying to do for progressive politics during the last administration. And im going to also throw out that as far as the left goes, im hearing use new technologies, get away from the old kind of, the ideas of what the left has done, maybe do them differently, do them better. But one of the things that the left doesnt really want to handle in the society that we deal in, and we all have to admit were all part of it. Its a very capitalistic society, and its getting more so and more so every day, is what do you do as far as using the tools that are at our disposal right now . As far as using economic power if you go back to the crash, only took the mortgage industry to reset the tone of everything that happened in the country locally and nationally. The question is many of us have mortgages, all of us have bank accounts, we all have consolidated wealth using technology, using new platforms. Would you be supportive of do you think it is feasible to try what i am trying to formulate is what is the ask of people come you are saying organize. Economic boycott. Be change boycott is not the word. It will take time for the shifting of wealth, you can move money around. People have tried. Area and a huffington tried the banking mess to get people to move their money out of big banks. I dont remember that being successful. When arianne a did that she would email people, writing on the Huffington Post everybody move their money. Some number either did, big number, small percentage and that is the exact experience we discussed where we have millions of people on our email list, tiny numbers of people click on the link and all they had to do was get a phone number and make a call and didnt even have to dial. So few people did it, it took organizing. We say yes, Cool Technology called barn storm but it is organizing and this is how humanity works, people are busy and dont want to waste time on something that clearly is not going to take off and they know it will not take off so what you have to do is get them into a room or somehow communicate with them virtually in a way where they can see it will take off because you got a strategy to make it take off and other people participate, you see it happen. They have been successful with this. The debt collectors which came out of occupy has built organization among people with college debt, particularly with big for profit colleges, it is hard work but they figure out Community Among students who carry this albatross and back on the dollar and liberate people from it which is an exciting model. There were times in American History when this actually worked. The populist movement, at one point there were 40,000 back in the 1880s, 90s and 20s and there were 40,000 lecturers doing barnstormers and would walk into a town, be in the town square, people would come and set up an alternate economy, in Rural Communities there was only one source of fuel and fertilizer and you would sell your crops to the same source, and backed by wall street it was destroying peoples lives so they created the act was lets create our own alternate economy and created their own bank and their own store and lines of credit and a lot of these cooperatives exist today all over the country, totally went for trump, water, gas and electricity are all coops that were performed in that area and this is looming across the south and the midwest, and it was organized. It wasnt just like lets do this and it went viral. It fell that was one of the it is more complicated than that. Another conversation for another time. This gentleman here will show up. After i read your book which i will going to, what should i read next. Working on a list. That is a really great question. Why dont you take it first . I would read the populist moment. Is that right . That is an amazing book. I would read if only we finished our list. Also read a book called bad samaritans. Proselytizing about the books he wants other people to read, and will eventually relent and read it. What is yours . Zach took the arsenal. Is that the book . Freedom building the economy. And other angles, one book that influenced me was black reconstruction which talked about a massive organizing movement by africanamericans to end slavery and also dealing with race and now how white racism is carrying the country apart right now. The rage of whiteness is an important book especially for white people to read. Influenced by politics, an important read with where we are today, it is called dog whistle politics. Rebecca wrote about in 2004 called hope in the dark, and on november 9th, free for download. I paid for it a few weeks earlier. Be change late at night on november 9th, that was a book i put on my shelf. Everyone has to read the new jim crow and we are leaving out lots of other great books. What is your website . Where should they go to learn about rules for revolutionaries . Rulesforrevolutionaries. Org. There is a way to keep the message also on that site. We want to start a conversation and not here to tell everybody what the answers are but to talk about the tactics, and the trusting people of america to take control of democracy, the we can be part of. Please get to work. I should say we are ultimately going to continue the conversation to find out more and i am expecting to see you it next years democracy forum, june 8th and ninth in new york, find out more about that. This is a great conversation. I want to leave a little time to go out and sell a few books. We have a copy of rules for revolutionaries, first time we have done that. [applause] be change okay. Thanks, everybody, that was fun. Booktv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you, tweet us, twitter. Com booktv or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. Scott ferris is the author of anger, hitlers great love and jay and give her wraps find suspect into a zynga change miss denmark of 1931, but much more than that. A ballerina and concert pianist, anthropologist, explorer, hollowness hollywood gossip columnist, screenwriter for mgm and a great love of javan it john f. Kennedys life. It was a romance. But she was a suspected nazi spy and still married to her second husband. Based on your research do you believe that is an accurate accusation of her being a suspected nazi spy . There is a 1200 page fbi file on her and i would say ultimately it was concluded she was not a spy. Interestingly for several months she was a prime suspect, the key to the not the Espionage Network in the us based on circumstantial evidence that turned out not to be corrected but J Edgar Hoover was convinced she was not a spy. President roosevelt intervened, continuing the observation to be under surveillance and have her phone taps, apartment bugged, a remarkable thing. You are the author of two of the books, kennedy and reagan, why there legacies and door and the man who lost the race for change the nation. What do you think the legacy will be of president Obamas Administration and how the past election cycle has affected the United States . President obamas legacy will be determined over coming years which as our first African American president his legacy is secure in that regard as a historical figure is the most important thing he did was what he did following the great financial crisis of 20082009. Most americans are not aware how close we came not to a Great Recession the great depression. History will be kind to him on that. The of the great accomplish what was obamacare. The question is, is that a steppingstone to other healthcare reform people will view as building upon medicare and moving on to single Care Health System or will it get repealed . If it is repealed by the republicans maybe his legacy will be less but only time will tell. Hard to tell. Harry truman left office as one of the most unpopular politicians in america and 20 years later considered one of the great president s. Time will tell what his legacy is but obviously historically significant figure and we will see how that goes. In terms of the past election cycle how has it affected america . Time will tell. Mister trump is unlike anybody we ever had in the white house. Every previous president has either Held Elected Office before or they have been a general in our army, trump has been neither. He is a different type of president with a different type of background. Hard to say what will happen. I wrote about losing president ial candidates and their impact on American History. What will mister clintons legacy be an American History . Like president obama because she is the first woman to be the nominee of a major party she is already historically significant but the question is what did her campaign to . It is an open question. If she leads to an era in america which is really good or really bad people will say that was very important and her campaign was not successful and about President Trump to come to office but did she change the Democratic Party . Hard to say. She may have been the last centrist democrat for a while, democrats look to move to the left under senator sanderss influence with these things cant be told immediately. Historians need time to get the perspective and there are losing president of candidate at the time, Barry Goldwater and George Mcgovern being two, complete disasters, now from the perspective of 50 years later Barry Goldwater transformed the Republican Party and George Mcgovern transferred the Democratic Party. It will take a few decades before we know exactly what this is clintons legacy and President Trumps. Back to your current book, what is it that sparked your influence in this topic and made you want to write this book . It is an unbelievable story straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie from the 1930s with secret agents, spies and espionage, glamorous women and all sorts of things. A Little Corner of the kennedy presidency most people are not familiar with but the book argues she was in many ways as responsible for john kennedy becoming president as anybody. We think of john kennedy as a handsome, witty man destined to be president but when they had their romance he was a young officer in the office of naval intelligence, skinny, disheveled and had a terrible inferiority complex compared to his older brother joe junior. Inga did a number of things, she bolstered his confidence, she knew adolf hitler, the president of france, the king and queen of denmark and she convinced john kennedy he had everything it tooko