How We Win the Civil War + 2 fellowships + How to Save a Country + Remembering Pablo Eisenberg + Orban's GOP fans
In this issue:
Two fellowship programs for mid-career leaders at Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice are now accepting applications. (deadline to apply is November 15)
We urge you to buy and spread the word about Steve Phillips’s urgently needed new book, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good
Deepak discussed climate migration and democracy on episode 5 of a terrific new podcast: “How to Save a Country,” hosted by Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute and Michael Tomasky of The New Republic. The audio and transcript are here.
Deepak offers a personal tribute to Pablo Eisenberg, the legendary, longtime leader of Community Change, who passed this week at the age of 90. We also include the announcement sent out by Community Change.
And if you need any more motivation to do your part for the midterms, we provide excerpts from a chilling article by Andrew Marantz, who illuminates the likely consequences of authoritarianism by examining the American right’s fascination with Hungary.
Mid-Career Fellowships at Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice Accepting Applications
The Movement Leaders Fellowship is a yearlong program designed to give established professionals in the social justice sector an opportunity to hone their leadership skills, immerse themselves in theory and practice, and expand their community in movement work. The Movement Leader Fellowship is for leaders in labor, advocacy, and community organizing with approximately 10-15 years of experience in social justice work. We are especially seeking applicants from historically marginalized backgrounds such as Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), women and nonbinary people, LGBTQ+ people, and people from low-income, working class, and immigrant backgrounds.
Applicants are accepted from across the country, and the deadline to apply for the Movement Leader Fellowship is November 15, 2022 at 11:59pm.
The Regional Organizers for Community Change (ROCC) Fellowship was created to invest in the leadership of organizers in the South, and provide them with an opportunity to hone their leadership skills, immerse themselves in theory and practice, and expand their community in movement work. This 6-month program provides a cohort-based experience, granting fellows the chance to connect and build relationships across issues, take space for reflection, and prepare themselves for the next level of leadership. The ROCC Fellowship offers a unique combination of academic coursework with practical skills such as management, communications, and strategy development to support participants’ growth. The ROCC Fellowship is for leaders in labor, advocacy, and community organizing with approximately 7-10 years of experience in social justice work. We are especially seeking applicants from historically marginalized backgrounds such as Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), women and nonbinary people, LGBTQ+ people, and people from low-income, working class, and immigrant backgrounds. Applicants are accepted from across the country, and the deadline to apply for the Movement Leader Fellowship is November 15, 2022 at 11:59pm.
More information and application information below. Please spread the word!
The faculty for the programs include Deepak, Heather McGhee, Stephanie Luce, Cristina Jimenez, Mehrdad Azemun, Samir Sonti, and more.
How We Win the Civil War
We are thrilled that this week Steve Phillips published his new book, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good. And we urge all Platypus readers to buy your copies right right way so we can make it a bestseller! (Seriously, sales in the next day or two could put it over the edge to get on bestseller lists!) We read a draft and believe this book has tremendous potential to help us achieve what its subtitle promises. It is both a brilliant reframing of American history and a detailed roadmap for building a better country, based on case studies of people in states and cities who have shown us how to win.
In the introduction, Phillips writes, "If we first recognize that we are in a war, and then learn the lessons and follow the lead of those who have shown they know how to prevail, we can definitely win the Civil War, secure a multiracial democracy, and end white supremacy for good."
Here’s what New Press says:
Steve Phillips's first book, Brown Is the New White, helped shift the national conversation around race and electoral politics, earning a spot on the New York Times and Washington Post bestseller lists and launching Phillips into the upper ranks of trusted observers of the nation's changing demographics and their implications for our political future.
Now, in How We Win the Civil War, Phillips charts the way forward for progressives and people of color after four years of Trump, arguing that Democrats must recognize the nature of the fight we're in, which is a contest between democracy and white supremacy left unresolved after the Civil War. We will not overcome, Phillips writes, until we govern as though we are under attack--until we finally recognize that the time has come to finish the conquest of the Confederacy and all that it represents.
With his trademark blend of political analysis and historical argument, Phillips lays out razor-sharp prescriptions for 2022 and beyond, from increasing voter participation and demolishing racist immigration policies to reviving the Great Society programs of the 1960s--all of them geared toward strengthening a new multiracial democracy and ridding our politics of white supremacy, once and for all.
Historian Mae Ngai (author of The Chinese Question) writes, “Steve Phillips reminds us that the Civil War was a war for democracy, and that the struggle against racism in American society and politics has always been a struggle for democracy. He shows, further, that in our own time, we can save democracy from right wing authoritarianism by mobilizing Black, Latino, and Asian American voters rather than chasing the elusive ‘middle’ of the electorate. It’s not only good politics, it’s a strategy that has worked.”
Also check out the latest episode of the Democracy in Color podcast, which features Steve in conversation about the book with Sen. Cory Booker and MoveOn’s Rahna Epting.
A Tribute to Pablo Eisenberg
by Deepak Bhargava
I met Pablo in 1994. I waited outside his office to interview for a job at the Center for Community Change (now known as Community Change), which he led for 23 years. I heard him scream and curse at the top of his lungs on the phone at someone. When I asked about it, he told me he was talking to the organization’s largest funder. What had I walked into?
Once I was hired, one of my first tasks was to mobilize grassroots groups in key states to defeat the balanced budget amendment to the constitution that Republicans in the Senate were very close to passing. Pablo took a personal interest and tapped his own connections to Senators and to other national and local groups. He would burst into my office yelling about this or that “idiot,” giving me updates, and asking me how he could help. I labored to keep up with him. And I was so moved by his belief in me, a surly twenty-something, when he had so many other important things to attend to.
We used to argue about things. A lot. He was stubborn, and at times exasperating. And yet, I loved the fights we had. Because they signaled that he took me seriously as a young activist. He thought my ideas were worthy of respect — and sometimes of critique and demolition. He would have little patience for today’s culture of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” He showed his respect for you by letting you have it. Pablo believed in young people, more than almost any other leader I’ve known. The number of people inside and outside CCC and its network that he mentored and supported astonished me. He loved to hear about work at Community Change to support young organizers, and more recently about Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice.
Pablo relished having people around him who were smart, tough, and outspoken. He was confident, and that made him generous. When we would go around and introduce ourselves in a meeting, after other CCC staff spoke he would say, “and I’m here to support these great people.” And he meant it. He was tough on people with more power and unfailingly generous to people with less. I can’t count the number of times he went to bat for grassroots groups with donors and foundations – with his trademark aggression. Or the number of people he helped find a job. People’s status meant nothing to him – if he believed in someone’s talent and ideas, he'd move heaven and earth to help. CCC incubated so many organizations in his time – the whole landscape of national organizations that exist today still bear his stamp. For example, CCC hosted what later became the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities as a special project.
His critiques of philanthropy were legendary. He was unafraid to talk back to people with a lot of money. His columns in the Chronicle of Philanthropy named names. (I didn’t always agree with his targets!) I saw him scold foundation presidents for their failure to invest in grassroots organizing, for their neglect of racial justice, for failing to give groups general support and long-term funding, and for being inaccessible and haughty. He demanded to be treated as a peer and upbraided organizers who were tough on political targets but groveled to foundations. He was a founder of the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy, which plays a key role today in bringing nonprofits together to press foundations to be more accountable and responsive.
He was a consummate coalition builder who believed that we could only win by bringing disparate groups together. Under his leadership, CCC housed and launched dozens of coalitions, some of which still exist. We had a running argument for the decades we knew each other – he argued that we needed to do more to bring in middle class and centrist forces into the struggle against poverty, contending that they had been crucial allies in the gains of the 1960s. I was more focused on organizing “the base.” He was (mostly!) right.
I was amazed by Pablo’s life story. He was a renaissance man. His family fled the Nazis. He was named after his godfather, the legendary cellist Pablo Casals, and played the cello himself. He played at Wimbledon several times (and got to the quarterfinals!). He worked for the Office of Economic Opportunity and for the diplomatic service, driving through a hail of bullets in the Congo. He loved his wife of 62 years Helen and his daughter Marina deeply.
Pablo was deeply loyal. He stayed in touch with friends and colleagues he cherished in the Community Change family, like Mary Lassen and Jane Fox Johnson, both of whom he adored. Pablo took a shine to Dorian Warren from the moment Mary and I introduced him as I was preparing to step down as Executive Director and Dorian was preparing to take over. Pablo told me that he believed in Dorian’s leadership of the organization and was confident that its core values and commitments would endure. His legacies live on.
I only got to work directly with Pablo for a few years before he retired, but he shaped my conception of what leadership should be — ferocious and humble, generous and principled, passionate and curious, well-rounded and exuberant. When he retired from CCC, I painted a small, unskilled portrait of him, which now sits in Dorian’s office. I remember what came through was his mischievous, impish side, his irreverence, and his zest for life. He had a great smile and laugh. When I sat with him for the last time this summer, after Helen had recently died, he was sad. But still sharp as a tack — asking me questions about movements, politics, and my own work — pushing me to do and be better. As I left, for the first time he told me that he loved me — and I was glad to be able to say the same thing to him.
The theorist Max Weber lamented that in our modern age we have too many “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” Pablo was a generalist with a big heart. He could feel at home anywhere and with anyone – a remarkable gift. We don’t use the word “honorable” much anymore — but it’s the first word that comes to mind. Pablo was an honorable man — worthy of great respect as a person of integrity guided by a keen sense of duty and ethics. The second word is mensch. He was a great leader who was also a good man, deeply committed to living out commitments to social justice. He was a dear mentor and friend. I’ll miss him very much.
Here is the announcement from Community Change
Dear Friends,
It is with great sadness that we share with you that Pablo Eisenberg, an incredible leader within our movement and former Community Change Executive Director, passed away this week.
Pablo Eisenberg, a social justice reformer who championed the voice of low income people in America passed away this week at the age of 90. He was a Senior Fellow at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute. Prior to his role at Georgetown, he served for 23 years as Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, a leading national organization whose mission is to build the power and capacity of low-income people, especially people of color, to change the policies and institutions that impact their lives.
Eisenberg was born in Paris, France and came to the United States at the age of seven in 1939. Godson to famed cellist, Pablo Casals, he grew up in New Jersey where he excelled in basketball and tennis. He would later attend Princeton and Oxford, captaining both tennis teams and going on to play in Wimbledon five times, making the quarterfinals once, and winning a gold medal at the 1953 Maccabiah Games in Israel.
After two years in the Army and over three years in Africa as a Foreign Service Officer, he became Program Director of Operation Crossroads Africa. He then served as Director of Pennsylvania Operations for the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and Deputy Director of the Research and Demonstration Division at the Office of Economic Opportunity. After leaving OEO, he served as Deputy Director for Field Operations at the National Urban Coalition.
During his tenure as Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, Eisenberg played an instrumental role building up dozens of grassroots organizations across the nation, each taking direct action to address poverty and inequality. Under his leadership, the organization helped reform community development investments to be directly influenced by the communities affected, fought to preserve and expand the nation’s stock of affordable housing, campaigned successfully to halt billions of dollars in cuts to anti-poverty programs and played a leading role in the reform of philanthropy. He championed the importance of coalitions, and during his tenure, Community Change founded and incubated dozens of organizations to work on policy issues affecting low-income people. Eisenberg was founder of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. The Foundation News described him at this time as “one of philanthropy’s most successful fundraisers, a man who berates establishment foundations even as he is soliciting grants from them. Nobody is more eloquent and unswerving in presenting the case for the Americans who generally get crumbs from the foundation table.”
Pablo published numerous articles and chapters of books and was a regular columnist for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. He authored Challenges for Nonprofits and Philanthropy: The Courage to Change. He was a visiting professor at both the University of Notre Dame and New Orleans University. He was a champion of the leading role of young people, especially people of color, in making social change and mentored many changemakers.
He served on the boards of Youth Today, Eureka Communities, the Milton Eisenhower Foundation, ICChange and the University College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, New Faculty Majority Foundation, and was a trustee of Citizen Funds.
Eisenberg was the recipient of the 1989 award for Outstanding Achievement in Public Service from the Alliance for Justice; the Weston Howland Jr. Award for Distinguished National Leadership from Tufts University; a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 by the National Society of Fundraising Executives; and the 1998 John Gardner Leadership Award sponsored by Independent Sector. In June 2004, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Princeton University.
Pablo Eisenberg is survived by his daughter Marina and preceded in death by his wife of 62 years, Helen.
We are working on coordinating with the family about ways to honor Pablo’s life and legacy and we will provide details soon.
Please contact Derek Johnson @djohnson@communitychange.org with any questions.
With heavy hearts,
Mary Lassen, Jane Fox Johnson, Deepak Bhargava, and Dorian Warren
Orban’s threat to American democracy
In case you missed it, the July 4th issue of The New Yorker featured an excellent article by Andrew Marantz about American conservatives’ increasing fascination with Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban: “The Illiberal Order: Does Hungary offer a glimpse of our authoritarian future?” Here a some of the most bracing excerpts — especially relevant as we consider the stakes for the midterms that are already underway.
“You do not have to have emergency powers or a military coup for democracy to wither,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “Most recent cases of backsliding, Hungary being a classic example, have occurred through legal means.” Orbán runs for reëlection every four years. In theory, there is a chance that he could lose. In practice, he has so thoroughly rigged the system that his grip on power is virtually assured. The political-science term for this is “competitive authoritarianism.” Most scholarly books about democratic backsliding (“The New Despotism,” “Democracy Rules,” “How Democracies Die”) cite Hungary, along with Brazil and Turkey, as countries that were consolidated democracies, for a while, before they started turning back the clock. . . .
Orbán, in his speeches, often uses the phrase “Christian democracy,” which he portrays as under continual existential threat. Given that the vast majority of Hungarians, apparently including Orbán, do not attend church regularly, it seems plausible that his audience hears the word “Christian,” at least in part, as code for something else. “If we manage to uphold our country’s ethnic homogeneity and its cultural uniformity,” he said in 2017, “Hungary will be the kind of place that will be able to show other, more developed countries what they lost.” His constant theme is that only he can preserve Hungary for the (non-Muslim, ethnically Magyar) Hungarians—about as close as any European head of state will come to an explicit rejection of ethnic pluralism in favor of state-sanctioned white nationalism. For many of his American admirers, this seems to be a core element of his appeal. Lauren Stokes, a professor of European history at Northwestern University, told me, “The offer Orbán is making to global conservatives is: I alone can save you from the ravages of Islamization and totalitarian progressivism—and, in the face of all that, who has time for checks and balances and rules?” . . .
Lee Drutman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, tweeted last year, “Anybody serious about commenting on the state of US democracy should start reading more about Hungary.” In other words, not only can it happen here but, if you look at certain metrics, it’s already started happening. Republicans may not be able to rewrite the Constitution, but they can exploit existing loopholes, replace state election officials with Party loyalists, submit alternative slates of electors, and pack federal courts with sympathetic judges. Representation in Hungary has grown less proportional in recent years, thanks to gerrymandering and other tweaks to the electoral rules. In April, Fidesz got fifty-four per cent of the vote but won eighty-three per cent of the districts. “At that level of malapportionment, you’d be hard pressed to find a good-faith political scientist who would call that country a true democracy,” Drutman told me. “The trends in the U.S. are going very quickly in the same direction. It’s completely possible that the Republican Party could control the House, the Senate, and the White House in 2025, despite losing the popular vote in every case. Is that a democracy?”