Back in 2018, I snagged an Indivisible t-shirt emblazoned with the following: Register & Phonebank & Canvass & Vote & Win.
Ahh, those were the days; the days when we reveled in our confidence that the t-shirt spoke the truth. There was a belief that if we did all of those actions — and did them significantly better than our opponent — we would almost certainly be carried to election victory.
It may have been true in 2018. But it was certainly not the case in 2024.
Even worse, there is good reason to believe that this trend will continue in future elections. This is not to say that these traditional grassroots actions have no potential benefit. They can still bear fruit in specific targeted situations, especially in very close elections. But their strength has significantly eroded over the years — as the social, cultural, political and technological landscape has shifted beneath our feet. I am referring to the meteoric rise of social media influence, the insidious success of disinformation campaigns, the emerging dominance of right-wing media (from podcasts to Fox News), the concomitant decline in influence of mainstream media (such as The New York Times), the ubiquity of mobile phones leading to a precipitous drop of people who answer their phones, and a population that is generally less likely to answer the door to a canvasser or be swayed by what they might say. Even demonstrations and marches no longer pack the punch they had years ago.
The crucial question that thus emerges is: Where does that leave us? If the old ways are no longer effective the way they once were, what do we do instead? What is our “new way forward”?
As I see it, there are really two separate paths going forward — and we need people to travel down both of them.
The first path focuses directly on what we need to do — in the face of the changing landscape described above — to be successful in future elections. How do we, for example, better connect with our core constituencies of working class and minority voters? Winning may not be everything…but it is essential in politics. Fighting for the causes we believe are just, while laudable, will not produce significant results unless the fight leads to election victories. This was never more true than it is right now — as our confidence in judicial guardrails sinks to new lows. While exactly what to do remains a work in progress, this Substack post offers some excellent starting points. This path also includes supporting and funding the legal challenges to protect our democracy that we can expect from organizations like the ACLU. Still, while we view all of this as critical, it is not the focus of this post.
The second path (which is our focus) considers how to combat (or at least slow down) the forthcoming Trump agenda over the next two years. That has largely been the emphasis of the latest version of the Indivisible Guide. The ideas were expanded in a subsequent email — that described moving beyond resistance and toward defiance! But there is more we can do. And we here at Indivisible East Bay have been hard at work on figuring this out ever since November 5. We are always on the look-out for new and innovative approaches to defending our democracy. That’s why we were intrigued by the proposals in a recent blog by Malcolm Nance. Here’s an excerpt of what he had to say:
“The 2024 election revealed people aren’t necessarily voting against someone who is a wrecking ball. For all the accurate talk about weirdness, lack of normalcy, and mountains of documentable lies, they want to see what the wrecking ball can do to people they hate. And just 31% of the eligible voters elected to usher in the end of democracy.
The time for playing nice is over. The Resistance must eventually become strong enough and loud enough to push reluctant Democrats to do the right thing. It must also warn the apathetic non-voting public about what is happening. In simple, easy-to-digest words and images.”
“The only way out of this hole is to focus on carrying out single, unitary actions that achieve singular objectives simultaneously. I call it FAFO – Focused Actions with Focused Objectives.”
His top two specific recommendations were:
(1) On Inauguration Day and for next 100 hours, do your own personal news blackout of anything related to the Inauguration and Trump.
(2) Delete your Twitter account at noon on Inauguration Day.
To better understand the rationale behind his recommendations, we suggest reading the article in its entirety — although we warn you to take a deep calming breath when you come to the part where he takes a largely undeserved swipe at Indivisible. Nance seems to have missed the point that the ultimate success of his ideas depends on organizing people and generating a large turn-out. This is exactly what organizations such as Indivisible are geared to do! Regardless, his ideas remain worth considering. We especially like that, as his FAFO acronym implies, these are brief and specific targeted actions with clearly-defined goals; concrete actions that can have discernible effects.
If Nance had a plan for a national mobilization effort, his ideas might have translated into a huge success. Unfortunately, we see no sign of this happening. Still, we can view this as a guidepost for future efforts, ones that do garner greater support. And perhaps we here at IEB can pick up the gauntlet and implement these ideas at a personal level as well as spread the word to others — regardless of the likely limited radius of their effect.
The overall point remains: We are in a fight for the future of our democracy. November’s “free and fair” election did not prove that democratic institutions held. Or that concerns about democracy should now take a back seat to other matters. To the contrary, it sets up a Trump presidency that is intent on destroying the very institutions that protect us from autocracy. We’ll need every effective weapon we can find — old and new— to combat Trump’s agenda and regain a winning coalition for future elections.
