Transcripts For CSPAN2 Rules For Revolutionaries 20161225

Book and interesting conversation. Thank you very much. We are e calls, tweets and emails live from noon till three pm eastern. Go to book tv. Org for. Org for the complete weekend schedule. Welcome come everybody. I am the cofounder of civic hall. And briefly typical i should say is we have been here now almost two years. S. It grew out of an annual conference we do call personal Democracy Forum focused on how technology is changing politics and government that weve been doing since 2004, which both of our guests if we travel similar path. Two years ago we opened a yearround gathering point for the same people and conversations focused on how to hack can be used for the public good. It is a pleasure to welcome everybody here. Let me say im excited for theme chance to get into this conversation about rules for revolutionaries how big organizing can changeies and everything because we are living in a very unusual time. It isnt just a moment after the election. We are living in an age or mass participation in politics now is possible at the scale ofe scal millions. It is a very confusing thing tof experience and a lot of us are right in the middle of that moment now asking what a way to . And the confusion comes from the fact that everybodys emotion, a lot of people are suddenly activated and concerned and ready to get engaged and try to be something important. This is the classic challenge of organizers. Who better to get into this question been really two of our best veteran organizers in the digital arena. Zack exley, who i think i is no longer, goes all the way back to 2000 when he built a website that made fun of george w. Bush and got called out by the president in 1998. And then he went from there. He worked for a while in the early days of move on. Org to help president ial campaigns in the 2004 cycle and ended up helping the Howard Dean Campaign and the John Kerry Campaign with their work. More recently, he worked for organizations like wikipedia, which is another kind of entity that involves lots and lots of people in a big distributedat enterprise and more recently along with becky bond worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign distributed organizing team. Bakke, the many of you may know if youve ever heard of credo mobile or before that, working assets. I dont know if theres any people here, but becky has long been organizing the trenches with the conscience is the tagline. She actually built as president a Political Action committee that is some very interesting work in the last off year cycle targeting members of congress with the feel organization in way in a serious way. Shes really cut her teeth as well on political organizing and when she left to go work was back at the Sanders Campaign, what was it about a year or so ago . Thats a nice early to pay a lot more attention. Zach is kind of a mad genius, but i. T. Is also one of thee of Progressive Movement, sharp as tacks and has done a lot of important things which were getting into. It is really a special treat to have you guys here. Here is that a call. I guess i want to just open by asking you to say a few words at the beginning. As a question on everybodys mind is okay, so now what . The week after 119, jose vargas suggested that the book at 9 11. Now what . What do you guys think . Not while common first and foremost we are people who have been deeply moved by what is happening and so it has been really emotional for us just as everyone in this room and always been somewhere appears that the volunteers and the volunteers are colleagues and we are in this movement together. You know, of the white now, the first thing and absorb enough we ventured into a dangerous and, d you want to acknowledge that what you are feeling we are also e feeling. We also see certain things more clearly week as we work in politics because we were part of the Bernie Sanders campaign so he been traveling the country and talking to voters said we need a different in the primary about who to support and whatnd kind of campaign to run based on where we thought the country was aired we find ourselves today the week after a result that was stunning, but something in manye ways doesnt surprise us because we can see how we got there and in some way some things that some things if they happen and we would be in a different place. 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. We also in this moment is 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 pay us to tell them how we did the thing on the Bernie Campaign, but to deliver that back to people. But how do we then turn not back in the open source thing that we learn because we think even though we didnt when we learned some powerful things. We find ourselves in this moment in our book is out this week, which is helping people with very concrete ways to organize in a big way the urgent challenges of our time in the challenge is different than what we thought it would be. So right now at this moment to start the conversation with you. You want to add anything to that . Intended to start processing the election but we said we were going to hold off. We could do that. We could use it every litigating the campaigns. Litigate is the wrong word to use. In the trunk area. And there will be time for audience questions that people want to get into that. I think it is more about Lessons Learned and in particular, lets start by understanding what was different about the style of organizing, philosophy off organizing you could develop in that you now call big organizing. I think a lot of people who came up through experiencing things like the Dean Campaign and then went into things like the Obama Campaign they were so successful in 20082012 adopted a certain model of how you involve and understand the electorate and target voters and a lot of it was in effect who was one of obamas chief digital strategisn 2008 said you have to start a look about them at the surface but it has to be directed from the top down. They evolved in that bed of professionally training people to be Community Organizers and giving concrete tasks andmmunity Neighborhood Team leaders and someone that he was kind kind of like a big peer amid and that its very best, it moved millions of people in a very good way to help obama win at somewhat of an outsider in two dozen eight again hillary clinton. In 2012 as incumbent. I think that model is a large degree what was being used again in the Clinton Campaign. The Sanders Campaign did not have the same establishment support and it also didnt have most of the people who had cut their teeth into a nice style of organizing. You are partly forced by necessity to evolve and experiment, but you also had a different philosophy you are working on. I think we need to step back. I want to challenge a little bit the way he described that obama, how the obama organizing stuff laid out. Methods of organizing is how we got developed and spread around in the book, rules for revolutionaries, the title is the rules for radicals. And that was when selling ski kind of road that book and also started getting a lot of funding from big foundations and started sending organizers around the country. Partially because of all the foundation unnamed they got the sustainability staff in Many Organizations around the country started became more and more his paradigm of organizing became more and more dominant paradigm and the only paradigm of organizing those available to anybody. When i first became a labor organizer, when i was just outut ga of college and was a lefty from the connecticut suburbs, i went out and i was trained in this battle and that model, you know, it is oneonone knock on the door, have a conversation, when somebody over to the cause of getting a stop sign on the corner and this whole matter of engagement. The idea kind of concern is sort of frame of organizing. Once they get the stop sign, then they are going to get the sense of power. They did send them in my community so they will want to do some analysis. And the people, so someday people will build up to having power over their whole lives. So we are not actually for something else. But it is important to note that these organizers on the Obama Campaign also will reject in that frame and it did not come. Joe in the digital team did amazing stuff on the Obama Campaign, but that was a whole another part of the campaign. That neighborhood model came from people like jeremy berger, joy cushion in and it wasje simultaneously being pushed forward on clintons primary campaign in 2008 by robbie noken and Marvin Marshall who ran the Clinton Campaign just now. They came from New Hampshire primary with the laboratory with most of them in some other the people where they really embrace that sort of frame or its about relationships and oneonone communication. But they tried to scale it. They were trying to win a primary in New Hampshire and South Carolina and nevada. They scaled it up and had the house meetings. They were influenced by their advisor and New Hampshire and had been organizing director for the farmworkers in california. And so, the house pretty model the martial uss if we set house party at a meeting and the house meeting model, the farmworkers product is was an evolution and the son of the restrictiveness of the model. It was amazing what they did in South Carolina and all over the country. Ma the model incubated grew as the standard obama organizing model. And so this whole generation of organizers learn how to workde with volunteers and it did start with oneonone, but then i would ask them to leave the Neighborhood Team and that person would be the leader of the team called the snowflakeey model. So the way we look at what wellt were doing was okay, that was great, but in the beginning of the campaign we had 46 days and before youre exactly right about how becky saved the whole operation. There was like a month and a half before becky came when was Claire Samberg in me. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers signed up staying put us to work and they were furious because we were not putting them to work. We knew if we started going around and sitting down and having oneonone with leaders insanely fun and Neighborhood Team, that would just be silly. The Obama Campaign they were really good experiments but in general buffy makes it amazing stuff in the primary, but in general there is not a program that put people to work all in those later stage where there is no staff. We really believed we could do something that we try to evolve a model that would allow us to scale it. You want to describe that model . You are saying its not the top down, but actually we believe an element of top down. Or think about it in slightl different terms. Instead of thinking about top down versus bottom up, we really think about peertopeer movement where there is a central plan to win and we distribute the work, but the relationship of the volunteers doing the work is not just after the campaign staffer. It is actually to each other to the other volunteers. This is not something that hasnt been possible in the past because its been difficult for the volunteers to talk to us an each other at scale. But we realize was burning with such a longshot and he started in the book is about organizing. We use burning as an example because it is a really formative experience that shows what was possible. Ernie had 3 name recognition ii the beginning. Nd by the end of the campaign recaptured 46 of the delegates to the democratic nationalwe did convention. We didnt get as far as we needed to go, but we did get very close. We knew all along we would have to have a Huge Campaign to overcome the advantages of resources and name recognition. We figured out what we need to have is a centralized plan because we couldnt just have hundreds of thousands of peopleo doing whatever they thought. Thats what they were doing. It was beautiful. They were writing software, they were writing music. You are doing all of crazy things. But it wasnt things that would actually add up and that was our job to make sure that all the effort youre putting forward is actually going to be pushing burning across the finish line. It was really important for usta to get a centralized plan and the idea was that it would not let a thousand flowers bloom, but more like a modular floweroi factory that was franchiseder across all the states. And so, we had to get them to work on a centralized plan but we had to distribute the works of people could do it across date and time. We knew we couldnt manage them to do office work, that we could divide it up i would have to have them manage each other to do the work if were actually going to get an imac. This is an enormous organizing challenge that we had to basically figure out from scratch. So one of your key innovations is technology, how to turn a mass meeting into something that plugs almost every person attending the meeting into a really generativ. Role of running its own bank. The barnstorm model. Compact and a little bit for us because that is probably the most important organizing innovation in the campaign and you write about it a lot in the book. It makes sense and i will try to put it in context. G there was a structure to get people into a room like this. They get like 100 people, sometimes 500, sometimes 60. And then we had a structure that led to them getting organized. It was almost like formingtals. Crystals. They came in as water and left as crystal. They were formed into teams thah knew what to do. Ha but that was the structure of how we did the meeting was just one piece of the larger structure and there are lots of other teams. Fax a great story. What happened was we realized we had to get everybody on the phone, calling voters in theor contest in order to canvass the full state that we had all these people in california, colorado and they wanted to still be going when it came to their leader in the primary. In order to do that we couldnt get killed in the first four states that wed be out. How are we going to do this . We are like ray. We have something for people to do. Weve had dozens of events host. And just not being. People are not responding to emails to the one person who raises their hand and soundbite ever went to my house and then we can get people to go. Zack had that the Fundraising Team is like now, you cannot spend every day. So zack had this crazy idea. What if we get people together in person to holding the phone banks. He was so attached to this idea that i felt like the only way to get past it was to have a stale quickly. It is to try things because we had the standard which was we will try things that the payoff is huge. We dont want to try crazy things that the payoff is small. But the payoff was potentially big when we worked out the numbers. We are to discovered forming cag volunteer things but the important principle, which iss dont ask it wants to lead, asked once to get to work because if we have to wanted to leave something, the long peopl would raise their hand. A person that likes to talk a lot from the person who wants to run a meeting doesnt translate into work. Rk the most amazing people came out of the woodwork who did all this work and it turns out they were the best leaders and we wouldde make them leaders afterwards. So couldnt we have a meeting that got people to work . So literally, the email to a bunch of people are supporters say he aid the email you sent out. Theres a guy named corpsman trend who was a volunteer and tennessee. E he came with me and we did this together in his home state. We just sent an email to tennessee and said everybody, meet us in one of these five cities and we are going to put you to work. Bernie will not be here. It actually took a lot of pics of your mentation. People, but we actually have to create. The method we develop that could get people to work and not just once, but to work to times a week that theyd be running phone banks. D the one tool that we have that we could get people into for budget reasons. Which is poured people into that. But it took a while to develop the exact technique that works. Its not like any of the innovations were mindboggling. It was like we just tried stepping get people to sign up in the back of the room and make them line up and make each one say some pain attract good about their meeting or just personalize their meeting like i am going to cook, you know, ill have burgers. Somebody bring chips. And we called them parties. We didnt call them meetings. We didnt make them boring. We moved on and said its going to be parties. Ng the funny thing is with this technique, you know, in the old days of organizing, it was just organizing. Iz you had to work out your way of doing the meeting that would work. He just had to figure it out. When we tried explaining that to a lot of organizers can try talking to digital people about this, it was hard to get people to replicate the technique. We found that what we have to da is explain it as a technology. It wasnt just like organizing. As a technology and you have to do it just right and that helps people get it. The result is 100,000 volunteers. 100,000 Public Meetings for phone banks. 75 million phone calls which i think over at the math 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 contacts, we dont know. Obviously, a huge funnel enough people. I want to ask you about one or two of the rules for the book. The people are waiting to be asked to do Something Big to mean something they. And then you also say dont let the perfect be the enemy. I wonder if you get into that. From the beginning that if the campaign had to be paid because the candidate was Bernie Sanders and a Small Campaign is just not going to put over the top. For us this wasnt a proteste. Candidacy. We were trying to get a message out there. We were trying to win. Obviously this is a really salient point today that is a think about what happened on tuesday is that we have a lot of values we associate with our campaign, but also if you dont win there are consequences and so we were really trying to win. In trying to make the big campaign and get a lot of people involved, we found out in trying to get people to join nasas people were more likely to do Something Big, when something they can do something small to get something small. This was sort a counter with sound like counterintuitive to us. Usually an organizing you ask somebody to do something tiny and get them involved. And then you could move them up the ladder to get them progressively to do bigger and bigger things. The American People are smart and they understand things are going backwards. We dont have to radicalize them. But ataturk them into being our campaign. We have 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. Politics in the last 30 years has been getting smaller and smaller and smaller as politicians have been more focused on a swing vote. They spend more focused on trying to win small incremental victories and his people have become less engaged with those campaigns as we asked them to do smaller and smaller steps were in isolation from each other because we think they wont do anything big, theyve been rejecting a product weve been offering. Too Many Political professionals have treated that as the apathy of the people as opposed to understanding the system is broken and what they asked people to do is simply not worth their time. We had to put together a program that always explained how hard it is going to be to get where we need to go, how much work needed to be done to get there and then create the ability to do things big and mall on a daily or weekly basis such that if we all pull together, all this work would not something to make it possible for Bernie Sanders to win. When we ask people to do Something Big, lots of people stepped out. Other people spent time building website, programming soft coding soft wares for us, and managing basically a Virtual Call Center software is quite complex and managing doesnt doesnt that just the volunteers it than that. A corollary is we have to accept a lot of messiness and perfection. One of the rules was now glad the perfect be the enemy of the big. We knew we could have something that could be small and close to perfect her we could have Something Big or everything would be exact like we wanted it. Whenever we had to make decisions on the campaign, one of them having to do with that debt collectors use which is totally horrible to use because they are minimumwage people and they dont care about them to do this. Well wait and and develop Something Really Nice is the account you gave money through or are we just going to throw people into this terribly designed callcenter software and have them use that and just trusted him to sort of deal with the messiness in order to gain scale. We will always take scale because we need a big organizing to be able to see. Another when the book. People new to politics make the best revolutionaries. Why . Zack. Whole bunch of reasons. I think what we say in that chapter is first of all, after the barnes story meetings, we would start everyone off by saying how many people here are totally new to politics. Never done anything political before it was usually around two thirds of the people raised their hands. This was also our experience with obama, all of the people that filled a there is a constant inflow of people into movements and a lot of people in this country and only some of them get involved in every move and then it is sort of like who happens to get caught up and not. But then, when the movement is over because movements come and go, some people say. This connects to the tyranny of the annoying role and defeat the tyranny of the annoying. Some people stay provided they stay . Why do they have been made into nothingness happening . And so you know, everybodys got different reasons. This is all going to be misconstrued and im going to be attacked as if im saying something bad about at this. I think a lot of us here on the stage, we are all the people who stay. Unfortunately, that third of the people in the meeting wouldve been doing it for years and years, not all of them, not even most of them, but some of them have it all wrong. The people that come in hungry cents a urgency and a totally fresh take on what to do and they just dont have all these bad ideas that are left over from the way they did it last time. So bernie, just like obama is in no way should the power of people new to politics and also donald trump. I think that most of the people that came out to the rallies were new. I want to ask one more question and an open things up to the audience. I also just want to say that anybody who did not now of a sense of urgency, since it leaves leapt up, i literally an hour before our meeting, we sit here on fifth avenue and we heard hundreds of high schools in go marching down the street during their lunch hours now. A lot of people are in motion. Young people are by definition new to the process and that is very exciting and at the same time, this book is must reading for anybody in that moment because i do know someone who has been through that moment over and over how the patterns get reproduced at 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 an implicit criticism of a serious weakness in the burgeoning movement. Rule number four. Fighting racism must be at the core of the message to everyone. Why is that one of your rules . I will answer that one. You know, we feel that some really big things and therell be consequences of that. When zack and i set out to write the book, we didnt i reread rules and we didnt read any books and written about the Bernie Campaign. We decided it must be working on campaigns dont actually read this stuff going on because theyre too busy. We did go back and read pieces written during the campaign or after the campaign by black leaders and black intellectuals because one of the things that happened early on was that we failed to make progress. Although towards the end with young voters of color, latino and black. We decided we are not going to finish this out ourselves. We thought about this and weve realized a leash of cars is one of the founders of blacklist matter had written in the nation magazine specifically about the Bernie Campaign and Heather Mcghee has the president and andy lopez to read and influential book called dallas of politics also read about the Bernie Campaign and they wrote with tough love and they tried to tell us your terrible conflict, but heres what is going on and heres something youre missing in youre missing in the possibility of this moment. A big part about this is the idea that race has to be at the core of the message to everyone. Not an afterthought and not a message for one constituent v. One of the things these black leaders are breaking down for us and we really have to listen to them is that the billionaire classes using race to divide our move meant for change and the result is that the elite and billionaire stay in charge and that racism hurts everyone and that there is no way we will achieve economic equality if we dont deal with racism and its going to take a Multiracial Movement to achieve this and we wont have authentic working relationship. It will not happen if we dont have white people reaching out to the white folks are voting against economic interest. And so we took this very seriously and we do really understand if we continue to let the billionaires use race to divide us, that we can matter when. So adding this that we are part of has to make material action to the races on in society. This is not something we will mention every time we talk. It literally has to be at the center of our analysis. And i really appreciate that so many people have taken the time to write and talk to us and help us learn from this and i think it is going to be essential to the movements we create as we go forward. Wealth that. I concur. Okay, so we have about 15 minutes or so for audience. If you have a question raise your hand. My joke is if you have a statement, please freeze it in the form of a question. They just tell us your name. Do we have a microphone for folks . So just tell us your name in question. Thank you. This is of course incredibly timely. I name is maria stark, ive been a stairs organizing women for a long time. Anyway, on saturday i decided to ask the people calm [inaudible] so one question is of course, do you view feminism as also kind of something that is to be incorporated in everything just like racism given that it be 3 women voted for trump, but also also yes, white women. So im ahead of myself without knowing the purpose other than becoming republicans agreed in the wall of obstruction. And so, you know, as the group is coalescing, we are trying to knit together all sorts of activities and i think a lot of people dont quite know what we are doing. Just some of your advice as to in the interim world would be the best way to coalesce this group . The first thing i want to say as yet feminism is part of democratic socialism. I want to say on the Bernie Campaign, there is a lot, ashley and social media, there is this delegitimization of people volunteering and it was really just prevalent in the media and social media and ascent and that was used to attack us and our progressive values. The campaign that happened in person and communities where people actually working together was largely led by the most effective leaders almost always working class women of color. There is a rule in our book, which is that there are no nurses, i dont want to be part of your revolution. One of the brilliant mainstays of our campaign actually was nurses. One of their first endorsers was united. Why is this important is that there is they are feminists and they see their job and understand that everything from pollution to the stress of joblessness to a broken Health Care System impacts and the way they came and fought and burned on tremor in Bernie Campaign showed very much what a feminist platform and what a feminist Campaign Looks like. So i think one thing the top of the campaign was not. You do say that in the book. Cap, there were lots of campaigns. Zack and i werent the campaign. We resorted to people that were giving technology and budget to organize all the people in the country that didnt have a traditional field office that they could go to. So we were at this vast outpost of the campaign. A lot of people wanted to be involved in this that became hits but it wasnt exactly central. So i would say invite someme nurses to be part of to be part of your group. I also think youre running inperson meeting set for people to work for you, put a bowl. Divide up the work and you do Work Together on a regular basis to gather is going to be amazing and people seem women to Work Together drives my people and because people want to be part of it. The advice is to get started and maybe get some people from the nurses union to join its also side note on the 83 of white women. It was actually 26 of white adult women voted for trump, the 53 of the white women who voted voted for trump. To 26 o 26 . R it is interesting how about 25 of adults voted for trump and a little bit women 255 voted for clinton. But i mean, its very significant. Two rows back behind you. The gentleman next to you. Deborah sackner. My question is about organizing a big idea, a big change. My particular issue is a subset of pushing back against privatization of public good, which is pushing back againstc d privatization of a Public School system, which as you know our current president who we are going to miss so much is not grayed out. So i am wondering, how do you identify Something Big that is not too big, but we could never do this, but big enough to inspire action. I think in talking about the book, we finally figure out how to make this point. F there is one aspect of it then maybe we didnt quite make in the book. It is about a way to inspire people. It doesnt mean national. It doesnt mean that your goal is to take over the whole entire government. But it is that you actually win. And not when something small or incremental, but when the whole thing. What that means is you have to come up with a strategy that can get there. If your goal is to stop the privatization of the publicschol School System and rollback and call back the privatization that is happening, thats what you really want to accomplish, then according to this idea we are putting out there, what somebodo should do is lay out a plan. If it is a credible plan where people can be if we work really hard and do x,y and z and a million other things we can see the strategy where we can actually win the whole thing. People are smart and so they understand that your 20 year plan might not succeed. But all along the way your make in progress. So to expect people to do thedoe hard work necessary during every one of those 20 years, they have to know where they are going. We are generalizing here, but this is sort of the core of the problem we see that drag down Progressive Movement and the Democratic Party is somehow we lost restart or quote, unquote ordinary people decided if we present them with a 20 lan to win it all in whatever issue it is, or even just a twomonth plan that is kind of hard, that they wont be up for it. I was just a huge mistake and we have to erase it from her mind. I forget who said this, if you want to convince someone to dont tell them about exactly how youre building the boat and how many orders it is going to have come and describe the beauty of the ocean and the venture and motivate people. Just imagine i shouldnt buy one, but when i started as organize there, i was actually trade not to tell people about the strategy of the campaign. Dont talk to them about anything else. Okay, michael. Go ahead. Item i posted there and i actually worked on the Obama Campaign and then worked on a number of other campaign and causes that try to use the same organizing model but failed i think in large part because they didnt have that big cool. I am 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 . I think it has to do with our people going to be motivated to take on the stability and do a lot of work. So asking for something small and telling people its big its not very inspiring for people and people are struggling in their lives. People are forced to buy health care that they can go to hospital. People are hurting out there and what was amazing people would rather go for the longshot to solve their problems, even if it was likely to not be successful because that was the only thing really worth working on. If it doesnt work, it is probably unique to reconsider. The great thing is you can actually try stuff and if nobody shows that, dont keep doing that same fan for two years unsuccessfully. Actually if you can attract people to your cause, maybe you shouldnt be leaving and you need to be thinking about what people want to do. You can also talk to people and ask them what they think should happen. The American People are smart. They know what is up and they know when you are feeding them laugh ended they know its not that they feel at have to tell you that a resent all this work to get this tiny thing. We have to declare victory, but its much better to be honest where we are and what steps will be required if more people are willing to join you when youre honest in that way. Is so great to hear from you. Im glad im mentioned by few i were talking about that we didnt leave your Amazing Program now. But also, that is part of the motivation for writing this book. We knew we were going to catch some flak from colleagues who are not writing book. But we saw a people didnt really absorb all the lessons from the amazing work but all you guys did in 08 and throughout the whole program. So that was really our motivation is somewhat is to get out. This book is not about us. Its really all the amazing people, most of them new to politics who got involved in the Bernie Campaign and the Amazing Things they were able to do would help them shape the tactics to be more successful enough but we want to share with you. They make these new rules and we want people to go out there and try them, write some new rules because we have some pretty good challenges and if we keep doing things the way weve been doing them, the whole will get deeper. You guys were too busy in the white house to write books. I see a couple hints here. We will come back to the site afterwards. Hi, my name is to do. How do we take this energy and the csn right now coming out of the left and direct it for the long haul from the Campaign Season to the legislative season for the next several years until the midterms . What you think needs to be done right now . More organizing, more sustaining, getting into peoples headphone port and is to participate and pitching those big ideas that we need to somehow sustain for the long haul. So participation like we had record low turnout. People just didnt show what. Very negative campaign. Everybody knows this campaign get negative, turnout is depressed he is one and as ive been telling people the story the 2010 Tea Party Way and all the seats that republicans won in 2010 we will have to have have to have the weight even bigger than that and take back congress if we are going to actually stop some of the things the Trump Administration will try and shove down our throats. Starting to think about how to remake back, that would be even lower turnout in the senate map is really bad. It is going to be an enormous challenge. One of the things we should do it talk about that right now and get people to work. Lets not have the campaign the nine months until election day in 2018. One of the things that struck me is just how hollow vocal Party Activity seems to be in many parts of the country and maybe that is less the case in swing states, where the candidate best were happily than a coordinated campaign. But in many places the Democratic Partys server posted about for a few weeks and then disappears. One night you stay on that topic because your new project is really on this question of whether a lot of new candidates can be recruited to run against incumbents in both parties in the house. Thats the focus . And the senate. A bunch of us, mostly volunteers, mostly grassroots leaders that be in a couple other staffers have been working with, we launched this campaign called for a new congress coming out of the Bernie Campaign. But now people from all different mostly new people that didnt participate in this raise. Raise. The idea is to handpick awesome nonpolitician candidates coming along different professions. You know, representing all of americas communities. More than half women coming out, over representative of communities of color and with a plan. With a plan like when we get elected, this is what we will do with the economy. This is how we reform the criminal Justice System and the political system. So people know what they are getting. If we can put that slate on the ballot in on the internet with the donate button and a volunteer button, we think we can apply the same model that is word for all these president ial candidates. We can apply the same model to a unified slate. It is not going to be people running their own campaigns. Everybodys going to be housed under one campaign organization. And really, just run as a unified campaign organization. So that is the idea. Theres going to be all kinds of amazing movements to resist and to make progress and to get a lot of different stuff all across the country there will be some amazing to. But i just think there is something that we have been ignoring for too long except in this insurgent campaigns, which is we have a democracy. People that are really fired up, like why are the people up until donald trump and Bernie Sanders, where the only people using our democracy the establishment politicians coming out of these major parties with very middleoftheroad ideas. Why are the only ones using our democracy when its so much better suited to people that they really great vision about how to make the country way better and get everybody back to work and get wages going back a Indycar Series of people in prison and a bunch of other stuff. Imagine if we put that, a big agenda like that on the ballot. People would really fight for that because kids marching down the street a couple hours ago, i think they would all get involved in the kind of a big campaign to fix everything. So thats why im working on it. Break here. Gentleman with the hat. Say your name. Daniel vettori. I am working the Community Center in planning and starting a new Organization Called the digital place making. I was also after the eviction i cofounded occupied town squares with some other folks. To deal with a major upset or loss of momentum and the sort of frat notation to a placebased neighborhood approach where you have been a saturdays and local parks to then go to the different communities that need. In my place making work, you know, part of the observation that was looking over the rules. One of them as there is no single issue of revolution in this whole dilemma of issuebased politics almost seems like what is emerging as to what degree do we need to shift to a more placebased approach with this question of an ongoing beyond just the elect will cycle, but a much more kind of rooted placebased political apparatus. This is the idea of like soviets. The question is, is that what you guys are seen as well . We need to be organizing everywhere basically. Theres enough people who want change were right to do something about it that we can do it. We do want people organizing to take over their local government or to win the vocal, but also we have a new technology that allow people to work across time and space. One of the things that happens in a president ial campaign is that you can nationalize a bunch of local staffing get people all over the country working on it. A good example is the District Attorneys race is that there were six District Attorneys race is on november 8th and criminal Justice Reform id kick 15 a bad. The way they did this was in part they ask people all across the country they wanted to help turn out voters to elect our economy like a District Attorney that was refusing to hold cops accountable for beating up black people. This is a National Issue of how we deal with Police Brutality and the unaccountable ability to murder black people. You have people all of the country that want to be involved in identifying voters, but also the very local campaign that is happening on the ground. We do want to take advantage of this revolution, how businesses are run routines can be anywhere and theres lots of software to remove the friction from being able to Work Together no matter where they are and so to take advantage of the National Energy and everybody focused on the big issue, even if its not happening where they are. We learned on the campaign that one of the most important things we can do is get people together with each other where they live. All the way in the back. Been sent. I want to comment and turn it into a question, but i am hearing from you guys organize. What do you do as far as using the tools at our dispose al. Half of the country doesnt half of the voting country doesnt want the one we have as a president. What do do when the option does the left realize you had a that number, and i also that at it disposal that this check using economic power and if you good back to the crash, only took the mortgage industry to reset the tone of basically everything that happened in the country, locally and nationally. We all i mean north, your. The question is many of us have mortgages, all of us have bank accountants, we all have consolidated wealth. Using technology, using new met forms would you be supportive of or feasible to try i guess what im trying to formulate is what the ask of people . You guys are saying talk about economic boycotts. Boycott is not the word. Really all it takes. So i us ashifting of wealth. Just to sow sew it up. People have tried, Arianna Huffington tried this in the wake of the banging mess. Banking mess to get peel to move money out of the big bank. The answer is barnstorms. When she did that she was emailing wright on huffington post. Everybody move their now. And some number of enemy did. A very a small personal. And thats the exact experience we just discussed, we had millions of people on our email list, emailed thin tine numbers tiny number ofs people could click on a link and that didnt even click. And so it took organizing and, we say, yes, Cool Technology called barnstroms and but its just opening. This is how humanity works. Boom are busy and people are busy and dont want to waste their time on something that will never take off. So you have to get them into a room or communicate with them virtually, in a way where they can see that it will take off, because youve got a strategy to make it take off and the see the other people participating and its happening. Been successful with this. Building Real Organization among people with very big college debt. Its hard work but they have figured out how to build Real Community among students who carry this kind of albatross, and then to buy back that debt on the dollar and liberate people, which is very exciting kind of model. There were a couple times in American History where this worked. The pop mary pop list movement. At one point there were 40,000 lecture issues they called them going around, doing barn atms and they would walk into a town scare, the word would get around, and they set up an alternate economy, because in Rural Communities there was only one source of seed and fuel and fertilizer and only then you would sell your crop to that same source. So everybody got indebted to banks that were backed by wall street and it was destroying peoples lives, and so they created a whole the ask was, lets create our own alternate economy. And so they created their own bank and their own store and own lines of credit and a lot of these farmers cooperatives exist today. In my mall republic republic town that went for trump are water, gas, and electricity are all coops formed back in that era. And so this is across the south and the midwest and the west. Was amazing and powerful but it was organized. It fell to racism. That is one of the its more complicated than that. We can have another conversation about that. This gentleman here, well start to sow up. Im, a and after i read your book, which im going to, what should i read next . Well, work working on a list. Absolutely that is a really great question. Dont you take it i fist. The populist moment. By lawrence goodwin, and that is on amazing book. And i would read man, we havent finished our list. Read a book called one of zacks favorite books books andh talks about becomes you want other people to read and eventually youll relent and read it. I wanted let zack talk about arsenal in democracy in, called freedom porch. Rebuilding the economy. Since were talking about organizing, some other angles. One book that really influenced me was black reconstruct which talked about a massive organizing movement by slaves, by africanamerican, and also dealing with race and now that really how white racism is tearing our country are part. The wages of whiteness is an important book for white people to read by david rotiger. And also in this book a really important to read about where we are today. Its called dog whistle politics and we have to put in a witch for rebecca fullman wrote a book hope in the dark. She made it free for download, so on november 9th that was the book i pulled from my shelf. And everybody has to read the new jim crow and other great books and well send you a list. Dont email them. Whats your web site . To learn more about rules for revolutions. Rulesesfor disrevolutionaries. Org. We want to start a conversation and were not here to tell everybody what the answer are but to talk about the tactics, were really trusting people in this room and the people in america to take control of the democracy and organize movements that we can be part of. So, please, get to work. I could just say were also going to continue this conversation here at civic hall on civichall. Org and im expecting to see you at next years personal Democracy Forum, june 8th and 9th in new york. This has been a great conversation. I want to leave a little bit of time so that zack and becky can good out and sell and sign a few books. Know we have copies of the rules for revolutionaries. The first time we have seen a pile of books. Thank you. Thanks to the audience. Thanks, everybody. That was fun. [inaudible conversations] over watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv, television for serious readers. This booktv on cspan2. 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