Yes mobilize. Then let's organize. (An excerpt from a larger essay)

The April 5 Hands Off! (Shut It Down!) protests brought 5 million people into the streets in 50 states -- a true show of resistance. But to really stop Trump, we need to organize and strategize.

Below is an excerpt from a political journal I also write less regularly on Substack, A is for Autocracy. It’s my raw feelings space, less reported.

But I felt the topic was relevant, including the follow-up remarks about Cory Booker, as it follows comments I made about his historic speech last Monday. I hadn’t been aware of what followed it. Apologies for cross-posting to readers who subscribe to both ‘stacks. - AC

Some of the over 3.5 million people who mobilized on April 5. Now let’s organize to really Shut It Down!

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Calling All Strategists

About two months ago I was reading about how you stop a dictator, which is something I’m studying hard now, and have been for more than a minute, seeking to distill and understand what might work to stop Trump now. I’ve been researching how other countries have overcome dictatorships as well as those suffering under them now, like Hungary, where populist autocrat Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party modeled a systematic crackdown over 14 years that Trump is implementing here, but on steroids. The Orbán model of illiberalism used to develop Project 2025, the how-to policy playbook that Russell Vought and Stephen Miller have implemented so successfully since Trump’s election, with a lot of help. I’ve also looked at American history, including recent history.

One distilled nugget I’ve picked up is that the fissures matter. What you do to take advantage of the fissures matters the most. What matters here are the fissures we are seeing in red America now. Small and early but hugely significant.

That means the US progressive camp has to take advantage of the growing consternation on the right with Trump. We’re only on day three of the tariffs, but the political fallout is as major as the economic fallout. It’s huge. Trump just shot himself in the foot, is what I conclude. He thinks he’s Teflon – a protected king. He’s not, but we have to prove that now. We have to talk about the harms hurting his base as well as everyone else.

Last night I was at a political salon that a close friend who is a terrific lefty journo and feminist hosts monthly, Laura Flanders. She started it months ago because she was needing a space to gather with like-minded friends and connect in person and be together as we confronted the possibility of American dictatorship, a reality still so inconceivable to many. Every month, about 20 of us break bread and share how we are doing, what is giving us hope or a way forward, however small or large, and what we are focused on in our work or personal lives as acts of resistance.

One woman who is a well-known rad lefty political strategist shared an observation I’ve been thinking about myself for the past months (but I’m doing so with patience, because I believe the answer will come, but it will take the time it takes, because America is big, decentralized, and not like Hungary, economically or politically, and how we build a stronger democratic opposition will look very different as a result). This friend noted that the resistance is growing very fast, and we may indeed see over a million people marching later today, April 5, in the nationwide Hands Off! call to action.

She observed that we are seeing a great mobilization effort, but not yet a great organizational one. Meaning, we are starting to get more people into the streets in important numbers, but we’re still not orienting people about what to do to create the change we need. The mobilization achieves a goal of a show of force. But to stop the coup, we need to harness the bodies in the street, we need to give people something concrete to do, some direction, which people are very hungry to have. I really agree with this. I’ve been privately talking about this to a few friends, wishing that the organizers of the recent protests I’ve been to had the foresight or organizational focus to give people something to do as they leave the protests, being all riled up, ready to act, beyond just marching.

Let’s give them something to do, she said. Her suggestions were paper handouts with a few steps people can take as they leave. Steps for local action, urgent priorities. Mine wasn’t handouts, but to use the social media sites where people are already registering by the thousands, on Indivisible or elsewhere, and send them a short list of take-action items with a big thank you for joining the resistance.

Photo: ABC 7 News

We also agreed we need what is now missing, which is a real plan and platform. We need articulated goals that enough people can comfortably agree upon and we need to focus on making them happen. Right now we are rudderless, beyond the shared demand that Trump be stopped, and DOGE be dismantled, and the rule of law be respected, and extrajudicial arrests and inhumane detentions in ICE facilities and third-country prisons be ended immediately.

Someone at the salon asked, isn’t anyone organizing a progressive counter-Project 2025 blueprint for democracy? Because that is needed, they felt. And yes, there are groups who are working on that, in more siloed coalitions, and we also saw larger national shaping political vision documents and platforms emerge from the Black Lives Matter movement. But we don’t have one that a large body of progressive groups are behind, because we have a left movement largely formed, I would argue – this is me getting on my political high horse now – by people around individual topics and identities and specific sets of harms. We have not had a progressive movement that has found a way to name the commons, as I think of what we need: the common basic de minimus needs and demands that every American should have.

We get so easily sunk down into de maximus visions that seek to cater to the most nuanced needs of every constituency, and we quickly lose the basic core demands that we could get behind and advance as an agenda of American decency and civic modus operandi. We are so focused on how we are different from each other that our divisions often divide us more than our commons unite us. On top of that, we no longer know how to respectfully disagree. To disagree is viewed as a conflict and when it can’t be resolved, often gets labeled abuse, as my friend Sarah Schulman put it in her essay book on this topic, Conflict is not Abuse. And because we haven’t created a culture to allow for difference, ironically, while championing our differences, we’ve ended up with what the conservatives call cancel culture. And it’s real. It’s very hard to disagree without being shouted down or viewed as somehow failing to respect another person’s core essential identity. I’m not going to write more about this, it could be its own book, and Sarah wrote her own treatise on this, so read that, and we can debate it. Not everyone agrees with it, not surprisingly. We are a many-opinionated species.

My point here though, is that we have major fractures on the left and they prevent us from setting out basic platforms for priority action we can agree upon . We need to be able to assume and accept we’ll disagree on many issues but we have a basic common set of issues that impact and harm us all. We need to lay that out so Americans can rally behind that plan. A million-people acting to Shut It Down in concrete ways.

One reason we lack that is because we expect people to agree about everything in order to work together. We actually don’t need to agree on the maximum of issues, but we do need to agree on a few shared common goals. Like our freedom of speech and our system of checks and balances. We have to develop some useful framing for taking action that allows us to be different and disagree and still unite behind a few basic priority steps. Easier said than done. But it is doable.

Let me digress for a second to say more about why it’s so hard for us, as Americans.

As I view it, we are a great melting pot nation, and a quilt made up of ever finer threads. Meaning, we have ever-more nuanced identities that we use to differentiate ourselves and also to bond, to connect with others with shared interests and values. We exclude and we include. But the exclusion is also a source of power and organizing.

We are a nation of individuals as Americans and we are taught from the youngest age to define ourselves as individuals, and seek our fortune as individuals, and we do that in relation to a boot-strap founding culture ethos of fighting for our share in our now-post capitalist economy. We aren’t raised, culturally, like my parents were in Europe to think of themselves in terms of, first and foremost, their roles and responsibilities to their families, and communities, and by extension, to France as a kind of protectorate family. We don’t have the social welfare systems of France and other European countries, either, courtesy of higher taxes, that provide more delivery of the basic goods and services needed by every person including free or largely subsidized healthcare in exchange. Americans are individualists, and that makes it harder to organize in common cause.

I look at the social movements I’ve spent time in since I was twenty. They’re wonderful, and were largely siloed. I was and remain in the feminist movement, the antinuclear movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, the global AIDS movement, and I did a lot of early Haiti solidarity work and supported anti-racist organizing and the mission of the Black Lives Matter movement. In all these, many leaders called for intersectional organizing and sought to model it, developed coalitions, but the movements still remained largely siloed.

I don’t think that’s going to change, not tomorrow, and it doesn’t have to in order for us to organize a common platform of action against Trump now. But it does require us to accept our differences are a strength not an obstacle to unifying behind a set of demands. We do need to define that basic de minimus agenda of goals before getting lost in the weeds of what we know every American might or should want to think, be, identify with, and embrace or support in solidarity. So while I’m all for a big vision counter-Project 2025, I really want to see a three or six-month agenda of a few key concrete goals we seek to achieve by fall that will truly strike a blow to Trump’s steady efforts to consolidate power and shred out system of checks and balances. That’s what I want to talk to my colleagues about at Rise and Resist and others in Indivisible and Move On who are bringing people together. Let’s look at the plans that emerged from BLM etc and build upon this. But let’s hone down to some steps that people who marched this weekend can also get behind. Let’s harness the power of millions ready to do more.

We don’t have that plan now, not at all. I haven’t been to one meeting where people talked, concretely, about really laying out a concrete plan. The strategists are all playing defense, and many of them are lawyers in the Democracy 2025 umbrella, and that is understandable, because the fight is very much in the courts, and we are a leaky US boat, having taken blows to every sector that are causing us to bleed out, meaning our democracy is on life support. But we need offense.

In terms of the larger counter-Project 2025, which is a vision of reclaiming our broken democracy, and building up from our broken two-party system, and supporting true leadership, I believe in that and think it’s hugely important, too. But I feel more patient about that process because we didn’t get to where we are in broken America overnight. And there are many pro-democracy groups working on that longer agenda.

Cory Booker with his mentor, the great John Lewis

Photo: Cory Booker office

I have a small confession to make here now. This past week, I was really pleased to see Cory Booker capture the Senate for 25+ hours to make history with a speech that served as a national call to action and named the harms of the Trump regime. (I wrote about that in here days ago.) And after the fact, he declined to vote on a Bernie Sanders-sponsored piece of legislation to end more weapon sales to Israel after a fresh week of headlines about kids in Gaza getting shot in the head. Seriously, I thought. Seriously? What the hell, Cory Booker?! How dare you call us to action, demand our global attention for 25+ hours, channel your great hero and ours, John Lewis, urge us to stay loud and stay strong, and then you vote to support arming the Israeli regime to continue its acts of large-scale murder of civilians in Gaza? How could you? No way! How is that in any way compatible with John Lewis’ vision of democracy! It’ s not. Step up and do better. Walk your talk.

I understand hard political choices. I understand Booker represents New Jersey, where a lot of his constituents include conservative Jewish groups who are staunchly pro-Israel. I know Booker has been strong about speaking out about the Islamophobia. So why that non-vote vote? What happened to the moral compass?

I felt what the MAGA voters felt, there, a degree of it. Regret, and a sense of having been tricked, called to an ideal, only to see it ring hollow. I’m still glad Booker inspired so many people to care, to act, but, dammit, it’s hard when people who hold themselves up as leaders fall so short.

But my point in writing all this is to say we need to follow leaders who espouse values we trust and we need to champion them, and hold anyone who calls themselves a true democrat accountable by their actions, not just their words. I’m just so disturbed by that vote. I can’t understand how anyone looking at the Netanyahu cabinet can see anything other than an apartheid regime. And my heart breaks for all the millions of progressive Jews and Arabs inside and outside Israel and in America who are heartbroken and feel completely unrepresented by their government. Shut it down! they say.

Photo: USA Today

On the positive side, what Booker tapped into is the fast-growing American resistance to Trump’s actions. We are moving incredibly fast now, every day, as people get turned off or alarmed or directly hurt or afraid of what Trump and his team are doing to our country. In that regard, Trump is like a major gift to progressive America, because he’s radicalizing so many people who have never been that political or engaged as they are becoming so quickly. Many of them signed up for the April 5 marches. A lot of newcomers to activism. I talked to several people during the week who had neighbors getting involved now. The tariffs were a final straw. So many newly-minted activists. Trump is doing that for us, that heavy lift. Crashing the world economy and leaving an America furious and ready to do whatever it takes to stop him.

What will it take? We are mobilizing, now we need organizing.

We need organization. We need a group of people, or different groups, to articulate common priority goals we can all agree upon – the minimal necessary objectives, not the whole litany of a renewed America. We need a counter-strike. We need to actually shut something down, not only march to demand that. The march is a great step, but we need strategic action to follow. Concrete objectives and steps.

How do we advance? How do we not fall into the trap of disagreeing more than we agree so we get suck or people get too afraid to voice their opinions?

I learned an important lesson somewhere in my own organizing history and background. It was in Haiti, starting with a painful populist routing of their dictator, Baby Doc Jean-Claude Duvalier. It was back in the 80s, when Baby Doc had thrown a lot of political opponents in jail, torturing them to make examples for others to stay quiet. I watched leftist and centrist political groups who could not agree with each other unite in common agreement that the dictator must go. That is what Trump offers us right now: a unifying goal, an agreed-upon regime of villainy and corruption we must oppose. That’s mobilization. That is step one.

Step two — strategic organization — requires us to articulate concretely the steps to achieve our objectives. What are we trying to do? What’s the strategy? With what means?

What I learned from years of observing a very splintered Haitian movement is that you have to articulate a narrow basic platform that people and groups can agree upon and invite them to organize from their own bases and coalitions. You don’t ask millions of Americans to agree too many points, you don’t ask them to cede power to each other or even to back an outside charismatic leader. You define a basic, priority platform, with concrete steps to reclaim power, and you invite coalition-building, but in a way that every group can organize with its own leaders and members and base to support. Many points of light, then.

Gathering of the tribe. Moi, with old friends and new at the drizzly Shut It Down March, NYC

Photo | Group selfie: Laura Flanders

I was about to delete the next three paragraphs, but I’ll leave them in here, for now, to illustrate what I mean about expecting and working with fractures, rather than fearing them or getting stuck when you disagree.

That’s how I operated in Haiti in my own small way, when I went there in 2010 after the earthquake and was confronted by the chaos of a devastating earthquake that had decimated the country, killing almost 250,000, and displaced over a million. Those who died ran the country. Every government institution fell, literally foundered, and was crippled. Only a few known or trusted leaders survived. In the vacuum, thousands of new grassroots leaders rose up, pressed into service out of necessity. It was incredibly chaotic, a scramble of survival. There was little trust, but everyone agreed that people needed food, water, shelter, school for the kids, and massive investments from outside that didn’t spell empire or a repeat of a bad colonialist history.

My focus was on the immediately needs of women and girls, including those facing sexual violence as an aftershock. I cofounded a diaspora feminist coalition, with known Haitian women’s rights leaders, many reeling from the shock of losing loved ones and their teams and clients. What I learned, not surprisingly to me, not at all, was that UN groups and outside relief groups were failing to distribute aid effectively and distribute resources to the women’s groups because they hadn’t bothered to really learn much about the landscape of the women’s movement in Haiti.

The outside NGOS had their agenda, their plans, and they controlled the funding, the aid. They wanted to give out aid at one organization and expected other women’s groups to turn up at those offices to get help. When many didn’t, they were confused. Their plan wasn’t working. Never mind that the local women’s groups were from opposing political parties. Or they represented small NGOs all fighting for the same funding pie who feared losing members if they sent them to other organizations. The UN officials, themselves feminists, assumed that as women, that would be the unifying identity. Nope.

You can’t expect people who are in complete survival mode and deprivation mentality to be generous to others, though some might be. It takes time to build trust among people; you can’t paper it over or pretend it away. But you can ask them to define their priority needs and see where there is overlap and reach consensus on the agreed-upon items, and leave to the side those not agreed upon. That was my suggestion. So a platform of available good and services was created, and each organization had equal access to it, and they organized using their own leadership and members and they regained agency and stability. In doing so, the groups began to form a coalition and a process for agreement and disagreement on items of the longer rebuilding agenda.

That’s just a little example. And I’m writing quickly to share it, because I’m already late to get to the big Hands Off protest rally and march this afternoon in NYC, where I have volunteered to marshal. But I think it illustrates the idea: you define what you agree upon, what is most important to the greatest number or to those most in need of attention as a matter of survival, and you agree to leave aside a million items that could trip you up. In doing so, you give agency to billions of stripes of American groups to get behind the most critical steps we need to take. Our counter-Project 2025 may take years to develop, but we can create a rapid response action agenda now, and engage Americans to support it. Let’s organize the Shut It Down.

We also need to create a broad platform where even regretful MAGA voters feel welcome aboard. We will disagree but what matters is what we agree upon. The core issues, yes: our democracy, rule of law, the protection of our money, our right to speak out and disagree, and our right to privacy, too, from the AI bots of the tech bros. How do those translate into concrete demands? How do we stop the coup?

We need to articulate our common demands. Concrete demands, not abstract ones. What’s next? What’s the action and why? What do we expect or hope to achieve. Calling all strategists to the front.

Neighborhood Resistance in Washington

There is so much more to say. But I’m going to stop here. I won’t send it though. I’ll wait to do that later, post-march, and I’ll include that little update.

A post-script. Sunday morning, post march….

First of all, I was late to the NYC march, scribbling all of the above, hot to get some of what’s built up inside my brain on paper. But I caught up with my group of marshals, the great Rise and Resist clan, and settled in to help at the front of the march.

Just as I was arriving, on 41st street, across from the public library, I paused to overhear a small disappointed knot of pro-Trumpers, four to six people, young. Only one had dared to wear his red MAGA cap, a young man. He was saying, where is everyone? Where is our army?

I felt a moment of sympathy. I had felt the same way at a Trump rally I attended last year. I also felt a little cheeky, so I leaned in and said, I think they’re home watching their 401Ks fall into the gutter. The young man looked confused for a second, then made a face. You could join us, I suggested. Trump’s not doing you any favors. I didn’t see them again. Nor did I see anyone spoiling for a fight. The mood of the march was defiant, but united, joyful to be locking arms. People were very clear about their overarching demand: What do we want? To shut it down! What do we need to do? To shut it down!

They were shouting about Trump’s attack on our government, and about the DOGE, about Elon and Social Security, and the gutting of our health systems, and public education, and the students sitting in ICE cells praying their lawyers get them out before they are shipped off to a jungle prison and someone throws away the key. The signs were inventive and creative and touched on every issue that drew an estimated 5 million people to take to the streets all over American on Saturday. I am just going to share a few of them. This is the mobilization, I thought. This is a strong beginning.

The NYC march ended sort of abruptly, after 20 blocks. There was no organized rally, no pre-planned speakers. As marshals, we thanked marchers for coming, we told them they are the speakers now, and urged them to stay loud! A good number expressed their disappointment, wanting a rally, ready to stay longer, all dressed up for more protest. They are primed for action, for direction, that was clear to me.

I don’t know about what happened in other cities, but I wish we’d had something to offer them then. A handout or an app to learn about follow up steps or what priority actions are needed. But I wasn’t involved in organizing so I can’t complain just jump in to help make the next march or action even better. That’s an ACT UP lesson: If you want something to happen, raise your hand but be ready to take an action. You can ask others to help you, but you have to be willing to act, too. You can’t just expect others to lead.

April 5 Shut It Down in Washington, DC

Photo: The Washingtonian