Great Strategists Are Made, Not Born
Hi friends,
In The Guardian last week, Stephanie Luce and I had an energizing discussion with labor reporter Steven Greenhouse about the strategies that progressives need to win the big battles ahead.
We argue in our new book, Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, that great strategists are made, not born. We can invest in the strategic capacity of movement leaders at every level, and teach the lineages of strategy that are our inheritance. There are many traditions of strategic rigor and brilliance, exemplified by organizers like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, that can be taught on a mass scale. As we show in the book, the right has been teaching strategy and the art of acquiring and using power effectively through institutions like The Leadership Institute, whose motto is succinct and powerful: “You owe it to your philosophy to learn how to win.” Indeed. We show in the book that there are specific practices organizers can adopt to become better strategists, as individuals and in teams, and there are even techniques and tools we can borrow from our opponents developed by right wing political strategists and in places like the Army War College and Silicon Valley.
To quote Emma Tai from In These Times, “Put simply, up against the rising tide of the authoritarian right and the existential threat of global warming, it’s going to take a lot more of us to win.” The challenges we face are so enormous that without many thousands of people capable of understanding the power relationships in our society and what the leverage points are, progressives aren’t going to win. We wrote Practical Radicals with the aim of democratizing great strategy and making it accessible to those fighting for a more just future for years to come.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Emma last week, Stephanie and I dove into the seven strategies that Practical Radicals explores to offer progressives a roadmap to winning substantive change. Our discussion was animated and informed by the years of organizing experience brought to the table not just by Stephanie and I, but also by Emma, who’s a prominent organizer in Chicago in her own right, and the former executive director of United Working Families. In an emotional interview, we discussed the state of strategy on the Left and how we can resuscitate and leverage lineages of all different traditions of social change to get smarter about strategy and make concrete gains in our future. We argue, among other things, that we need to understand our opponents much better than we usually do.
Organizers also need to take themselves more seriously as people who aspire to power. “If you take yourself seriously, that means you really invest in your own strategic capacity,” I argued. “You believe that it’s important that you understand these different traditions and that you learn new tools, as opposed to just viewing yourself as an interchangeable cog. We aren’t. We’re actually each super important.”
Interested in hearing more? Feel free to check out The Great Battlefield Podcast’s latest episode and the New Books Network podcast, where Stephanie and I dig into the seven strategies in our book and the ways they can be deployed by organizers young and old to achieve meaningful change today.
We’ve been moved by how many people are reading Practical Radicals together or in classroom settings. To support group engagement with the book, Stephanie and I developed a study guide which you can find on the website for Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice here.
And we want to tease the Practical Radicals podcast! Episodes with case studies featuring movement leaders and academics will launch on February 1.
May 2024 bring more justice and joy,
deepak
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