Rebuild the Dream

by Van Jones

  Support Centers

  Despite how spontaneous and decentralized the grassroots populist swarms may seem, none of these political swarms could gain traction without at least one entity functioning as what once could call a support center. A support center does not have to be a formal headquarters; it is rarely a fixed site of central leadership or decision making. The support center provides the swarm with sustenance.

  During the 2008 Obama phenomenon, the support center was, in fact, a single, physical hub: the Obama for America campaign headquarters, which collected and distributed resources from logo caps and T-shirts, to donations to keep the phones and lights running in the network’s nodes.

  The Tea Party once again improved on the model of the Obama campaign. Rather than having only one support center, at least ten major organizations stepped forward to play the role. Many of these groups—such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity—are alleged to have funding ties to the Koch brothers. These organizations gave sympathetic, local volunteers some much-needed technical support, media training, conferences, and other help. Having multiple support centers would logically increase the swarm’s resilience.

  Occupy Wall Street has the least visible or centralized set of support centers yet, but they are there. For example, the magazine Adbusters originally propelled the Occupy Wall Street meme into the public domain; unions and community organizing groups turned out thousands of people for major rallies and marches; and when Mayor Bloomberg attempted to clear Zuccotti Park in October 2011, labor unions, social justice groups, and even national organizations such as Moveon.org turned out their members in large numbers to defend the site. When Occupiers have needs—sleeping bags, warm socks, coffee, pizza—they put out calls on Twitter and Facebook, and the support flows in, not just from individuals, but also from institutional sympathizers.

  Media Smarts

  All three of the recent swarms have effectively engaged the media. The Obama campaign attracted favorable, mainstream media coverage on a massive scale and used e-mail and YouTube to go around the media when it needed to. The Tea Party enjoyed the dedicated, round-the-clock support of a single network, Fox News, plus the aid of the right-wing blogosphere and talk radio echo chambers. Occupy broke through the mainstream media firewall by the sheer staying power of its encampments, and it also easily established a dominant presence in the independent media and social networks of Twitter and Facebook.

  Table 5.1 shows some of the features that seem to be present in political swarms that succeed.

  But it must be noted, nobody has a precise formula for creating a successful swarm. In fact, at the time of their inception, these phenomena universally tend to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. A black guy with a Muslim name, campaigning to be the president of the United States against the invincible Clintons and Karl Rove’s GOP? Angry, old white guys, wearing tricorne hats, vowing to “take back” the government from the invincible Obama? Disheveled youth creating tent cities and sleeping outdoors to oppose the invincible mega-banks? Few would have thought that any of these notions would engage and excite millions of people—and make history—before they actually took off.

  Brand Support Centers Media

  Obama 2008 Campaign HQ (MyBarackObama.com) Mainstream coverage, YouTube, e-mails

  Tea Party Koch-funded groups, such as Americans for Prosperity Fox News, right-wing bloggers, conservative talk radio

  Occupy Adbusters, labor unions, non-profit groups Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr (plus mainstream coverage)

  The only thing that can be said for sure is that the business of making change is itself changing. The old, vertical hierarchies are being forced to share the stage with new, more horizontal forms of organizing and mobilizing people. What is interesting is that the swarms are not flattening the existing hierarchies or replacing them; more often, they are capturing, subsuming, repurposing, and using the old institutions in exciting, new ways. One might, therefore, predict that the political parties and professional advocacy organizations will survive. But the ones that will thrive will be those that learn to function as nodes in energized, branded networks that seem, at first, to come out of nowhere.

  6

  STORY

  The Heart Space Revisited

  THE HEART SPACE IS THE HOME OF NARRATIVES that arouse the emotions and touch the soul. Compelling narratives are more important in politics than are facts, policies, or data points. People are moved rarely by facts. We live in a world where people can find facts on their own facts; if someone believes that vaccines cause autism, he or she can find a bunch of facts to support that conclusion. If someone believes the opposite, she can find a bunch of facts to support that conclusion, too. Facts are fickle and forgettable.

  Stories, at their best, are not. Stories are how humans have passed along values and information for millennia. In politics, the side with the best stories almost always wins.

  Communications maven Nancy Duarte writes in her book Resonate,

  Information is static; stories are dynamic—they help an audience visualize what you do or what you believe. Tell a story and people will be more engaged and receptive to the ideas you are communicating. Stories link one person’s heart to another. Values, beliefs, and norms become intertwined. When this happens, your idea can more readily manifest as reality in their minds.

  SmartMeme, a cutting-edge nonprofit organization that collaborates with grassroots groups on messaging, makes the point this way: “Storytelling has always been central to the work of organizers and movement builders. Narrative is the lens through which humans process the information we encounter, be it cultural, emotional, experiential, or political. We make up stories about ourselves, our histories, our futures, and our hopes.”

  Effective political stories have four fundamental elements . . . and when these four parts are clear and compelling, a story has the power to move people to take action.

  In my view, effective political stories have four fundamental elements: a villain, a threat, a hero, and a vision. When these four parts are clear and compelling, a story has the power to move people to take action.

  OBAMA AS CANDIDATE

  The narrative of the Obama campaign follows this four-element format perfectly:

  • The villain was George W. Bush. (Technically, it was Senator John McCain, but Obama wisely claimed that McCain was running for a “third Bush term”—to keep the most compelling villain in the frame.)

  • The threat was that America would be endlessly divided by Bush-style politics (and by cynics of all types).

  • The hero was Obama himself, at the head of the movement working to elect him. While key slogans such as “We are the ones we have been waiting for” and “Yes, We Can!” suggest that the hero was bigger than just one person, Obama’s unique gifts were the focal point of the narrative.

  • The vision was that America would be reunited. (“We don’t have red states. We don’t have blue states. We are the United States of America.”)

  This is a perfect narrative; it could almost be a bedtime story. In the last months of 2008, the hero triumphed—and America seemed to have a happy ending.

  But one must ask, “What made this narrative so powerful? Why did it work?” It worked because Obama was invoking and defending a patriotic value under threat: E pluribus unum. “Out of many, one.” We fought a war over the principle that we are one country, not two. After the Civil War, anyone who threatens the unity of America is, by definition, a villain. And anyone who affirms and defends America’s fundamental unity is, by definition, a hero.

  Also, throughout the campaign, Obama stretched and refreshed the notion of what patriotism and pride in country is all about. He made those concepts much more inclusive and welcoming than they had seemed in the hands of hard-core right-wingers, who had effectively defined “patriots” to mean only those who agreed with them on every issue. In Obama’s telling, “loving America” seemed to mean “loving everyone in America.” Respecting the flag seemed
to be part and parcel with respecting the many kinds of people who salute it.

  By standing up for the American value of “national unity”—and by including everyone in a larger American story—Obama became a hero in the eyes of millions.

  OBAMA IN OFFICE

  Unfortunately, once he became president, Obama’s narrative became a confusing muddle. Any effort to plug his message into the framework reveals its many weaknesses.

  • There was never a clear villain during the first years of Obama’s administration. The White House seemed determined to be bipartisan at all costs, so Obama rarely lashed out at the Republicans. He invited the pharmaceutical companies and the healthcare companies to the table. Tim Geithner seemed to be cuddling up with Wall Street.

  • The threat was also fuzzy. The basic case was, “Things would have sucked worse if I hadn’t become president, and they might suck worse if we don’t continue with my program.” Not particularly inspiring.

  • The heroes were a bunch of fine Democratic leaders in Washington: Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Senator Harry Reid, and various subcommittee heads, depending on the issue.

  • The vision was never clear. One early 2009 speech tried to sum up the administration’s aims as creating a “new foundation,” based on healthcare reform, clean energy, the stimulus package, Wall Street reform, infrastructure, education, and maybe a few other initiatives. Neither the label nor the laundry list stuck in the public mind.

  Why does a story like this one fail so miserably? One reason is the threat, as described, does not seem to imperil a sacred national value. There is no patriotic, American principle that the president is asserting or defending. “Making the economy suck less” is an important goal, but it lacks any emotional punch or deeper resonance.

  Secondly, in this kind of story, the president is not taking on any bad guys who are causing the problems. Instead, he is just standing there next to a bunch of problems, trying earnestly to fix them. Thus it did not take much of a leap for Fox News and the Tea Party to suggest Obama was causing these problems himself, rather than trying to clean up problems that someone else created.

  Thirdly, the heroes are certainly good people. Pelosi, in particular, is a true heroine and a historical figure. But all of them are Washington insiders. They are not “regular folks,” with whom ordinary people might identify. It would prove easy to set them up as foils for a grassroots rebellion, depicting them as elitist, Beltway bureaucrats.

  Finally, there was nothing uniquely or deeply patriotic in that jumble of a vision—nothing tied to our core values that could stir the nation’s soul.

  All in all, this lack of a narrative resulted in a massive messaging failure of the Obama administration—a communications train wreck that begged for an opponent to take advantage of the big opportunity it created.

  This lack of a narrative resulted in an epic messaging failure for the Obama administration—a communications train wreck.

  THE TEA PARTIERS

  The Tea Partiers were happy to oblige. They leapt into the fray and invented their own, powerful counternarrative. In their telling, the story is as follows:

  • The villain is Obama—alleged to be an atheist, a Muslim, a communist/socialist, and a foreign-born pretender.

  • The threat is that Obama will steal our liberty.

  • The hero is not any individual, but a movement of patriots—the Tea Partiers themselves.

  • The vision is that the movement will restore our liberties by taking back our government from a would-be tyrant.

  Here we have another nearly perfect storyline. Why is this narrative so effective? It is because the Tea Partiers have positioned themselves as the defenders of an essential American value: liberty. America fought a war against tyranny to honor this value: the Revolutionary War, led by George Washington. And in the twentieth century’s Cold War, the United States struggled to defend individual liberty against the threat of totalitarianism. A group of patriots that declares itself on the side of liberty and against tyranny will always rally the American people.

  The only problem with the Tea Party story is, of course, it is false. As we have discussed, Obama poses no threat to our economic liberty. In fact, the Tea Partiers’ charges against him are so extreme that no human being could simultaneously be guilty of all of them. For instance, by definition, an atheist cannot be a Muslim, who is required to pray five times a day, and most communists reject religion as an “opiate for the masses,” and therefore could not practice Islam. But the narrative works because it pulls on the heartstrings of patriotism. Unfortunately, stories do not have to be true to be powerful.

  Unfortunately, stories do not have to be true to be powerful.

  Having won the battle of the narrative, Tea Partiers have moved the focus from creating jobs to cutting spending, shrinking government, and tightening belts. They argued that the growing deficit and debt would bankrupt America, opening the door to the enslavement of America and her citizens. Even though poll after poll showed that the number-one concern of Americans was job creation, the Tea Party story was so compelling that it created a deficit obsession in Washington, DC.

  OCCUPY WALL STREET

  But the Tea Party narrative did not appeal to everyone. And those who wanted the financial and political elite to focus more on creating jobs and reducing economic inequality were, at some point, going to have their say.

  Enter Occupy Wall Street. Unlike the Obama administration, the Occupiers had no qualms about naming a villain. Even their name points to the miscreants in the financial sector. According to Occupy Wall Street:

  • The villains are the Wall Street bankers in particular, and the top 1% in general.

  • The threat is that as economic inequality worsens, the majority of Americans—the 99%—will continue to fall behind.

  • The hero is “us”—the 99%—and we must stand up for ourselves.

  • The vision is still a bit muddled. Different Occupiers express different visions, from a freeze on home foreclosures, to student loan relief, to the overthrow of capitalism, to decentralized, locally based economies, to jobs for all.

  Nonetheless, in general, this is a very good narrative. The hero is compelling. The villain may be painted in overly broad brush strokes (which will be discussed in the final section of this book), but at least it offers a clear storyline. The vision and the threat could be stated in more resonant and patriotic terms (which will be explored in later chapters). But the Occupy Wall Street message works beautifully; its rapid adoption throughout society testifies to its power.

  It is ironic that a group of newcomers with no pollsters came up with top-shelf messaging. Meanwhile, the White House, the Democrats, and so many grassroots professionals—with access to vast resources—have continued to struggle.

  To recap, Table 6.1 lists the key elements as they have appeared in each movement’s narrative:

  Tell an AMERICAN Story

  III.

  7

  OCCUPY THE INSIDE GAME

  THE PROTESTS SPARKED BY OCCUPY WALL STREET effectively occupied the bottom half of the grid: the Heart Space and the Outside Game. The protestors figured out how to break the gag of silence about corruption and injustice. They took to the streets, and in the face of police brutality and harassment, the overwhelming majority stayed nonviolent.

  But the pundits at Fox News are not wrong when they say Occupy Wall Street is nowhere near as powerful as the Tea Party movement. That is because—unlike Occupy, so far—the Tea Partiers used their Outside Game success to capture part of the Inside Game. Two years after their rallies began, the energy surrounding them has died down considerably. But there are Tea Party caucuses in the U.S. Congress. And there are Tea Party–sponsored presidential debates. The Tea Party movement cultivated a long list of candidates and elected officials who continue to beat the drum, long after the actual “tea parties” stopped being well attended. Even without a big Outside Game presence, the movement is in a position to continue i
mplementing its draconian agenda.

  Obama successfully converted rising frustration and activist energy into an electoral triumph in 2008. But thus far, Occupy Wall Street has not tried to occupy the institutions of established, formal political power (for example, elections and political parties).

  FEARS OF CO-OPTATION

  Many at the core of Occupy don’t want to engage with political institutions in that way. Some fear being co-opted by the Democratic Party, labor unions, Moveon.org, or by more established political activists (like me!). Rather than getting caught up in all the electioneering, Occupiers are choosing to focus on the hard, risky, and often-thankless work of direct action protest. They are committed to building their own community, presence, and power through direct, participatory democracy. They fear that too much entanglement with the existing system would kill their independence, idealism, and chutzpah.

  For Occupy—as the bright spearhead of a much broader movement—that choice is sensible. But it almost certainly cannot serve all the needs of the broader movement, which potentially includes millions of people. Tens of millions of people are not going to be taking part in consensus-based general assemblies anytime soon, and even if they could, the existing system would still impact every aspect of their lives. Some groups need to step forward to make sure that the interests and ideas of the 99% are represented in political campaigns and in the established halls of power.

  The reluctance to re-engage in elections and Inside Game politics is understandable. Many people were deeply disappointed after the 2008 election. The system was exposed as being rigged to block progressive change—by everything from highly paid lobbyists, to a rabid, right-wing media machine, to a filibuster-guaranteed tyranny of the minority.