Marshall Ganz - "Post Election Reflections"

...who we are, what we are for, and what we want to be.

I have known Marshall Ganz for some thirty years. That’s but half of Marshall’s long career as a practitioner of the art of organizing people to effectively seek and win changes they need in their political, economic, and social lives.

Suppose I wrote a piece about how we should think about political organizing at this moment. In that case, you might reasonably ask, “What does Charles know about this?” I would respond that I spent twenty years in the same offices with some of the best, most dedicated professional organizers and, as I was interested in their work, I listened closely and learned a great deal. As evidence of what I learned, I would point to the handful of times I found myself responsible for organizing events involving several hundreds of people in which I had considerable success.

Marshall is in an entirely different league!

His organizing experience spans nearly sixty years, from the Mississippi Freedom Movement, to California Farm Workers, then on to other union, community, and electoral campaigns. Today he is Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he founded the Leading Change Network.

With Marshall’s permission, I republish here an excerpt from a letter I received after the election from the Leading Change Network. These are definitely his initial thoughts. Knowing Marshall, he will continue to reflect, revise, and develop more ideas for our building beyond this moment’s disaster.

In the following excerpt, I have taken the liberty to italicize the sentences that spoke most powerfully to me. I also note that Marshall asked me to share with him any comments you might wish to make - so not only will your responses be read by other Substack readers, but also by Marshall Ganz.

[Please note: I will not pass along uncivil or completely unconstructive comments. We don’t have time or emotional energy for those now — if we ever do.]

Initial Post-election Reflections - Marshall Ganz, 7 November 2024

Personally, I was not surprised, but I was shocked.

The truth is that the U.S. has never been governed by a representative democracy. We have been shackled by profoundly antidemocratic institutions: the electoral college, the Senate, and first-past-the-post legislative districts. This contributed to the growing gap between what people need and the government's capacity to respond to those needs. Thus, the experience of a government that neither represents me and, in any event, is profoundly dysfunctional.

We have also allowed our electoral politics to be managed by a multibillion-dollar marketing industry because the more money they spend, the more money they make. Alone among “liberal democracies,” we treat money as speech and bar any constraints on spending: this creates a market driven by infinite demand. Instead of political practices rooted in relational engagement with one’s fellow citizens, we pay for access to narrowly targeted transactional messaging that fragments rather than unifies. On top of this, a self-governing civic infrastructure is being replaced by donor-driven NGOs. And for many years, we have allowed our political economy to be driven by a neoliberal ideology responsible for accelerating economic, political, and cultural inequality.

Is it any surprise this adds up to the disorientation, alienation, and anxiety that enable would-be leaders to draw on historic reservoirs of racism and misogyny to construct a politics of fear (and loss of agency) able to ‘trump’ a politics of hope (enhancement of agency): a politics of “yes I can” over a politics of “yes we can.” Even in this very campaign, one candidate campaigned as an agent of vengeance and the other as an agent of protection.

What’s missing is our failure to develop a political story, strategy, or structure (s) rooted in commitment to democratic values expressed as who we are, what we are for, and what we want to be. In its absence, we begin to define ourselves by what we are against, doing so in terms set by the opposition, allowing ourselves to be defined by what we oppose.

Sometimes recovery can only begin when one hits ‘rock bottom.’ It can create an opportunity to shed crippling practices of the past in favor of healthful practices to shape a future. Trying to predict the future is a fool’s errand. And the radical uncertainty within which we have been living can create an opportunity for a radical regrounding of the democratic project: morally, strategically, and organizationally. Historically, it has been social movements driving values-based change, fueled by a depth of commitment, risk-taking, and imagination, and unafraid to engage in partisan politics, that have made things work. There is no blueprint we can follow, but we can get on a pathway, joining with others, rooted in shared values, schooled in strategic power, operating within a “brave space,” and committed to practice action-based learning, not prior to the action but emergent from it.

I am reading Marshall’s new book, People, Power, Change - Organizing for Democratic Renewal. Want to go deeper into action-based learning, finding and committing to shared values, and winning with strategically schooled collective power? Get yourself a copy - https://www.amazon.com/People-Power-Change-Organizing-Democratic-ebook/dp/B0D7MPTSNR.

Please take special, patient, care of each other, then pick up and carry on to where we so need to go together,

Charles