My guess is, there are thousands - hundreds of thousands in fact - out there just like me. Tired of accepting a backseat. Tired of feeling powerless and voiceless. Tired of the squalid state of our public affairs. At at heart, more than ready, willing, and able to take on the system.
I hope I didn't spoil things, but those are the final words from the epilogue of the new book by our very own Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Taking on the System: Rules of Radical Change in a Digital Era. I was fortunate enough to receive an uncorrected proof so that I would be able to write about it. As you can tell from the front page, you have less than a month until it is "officially available."
And since I have already told you the end of the book, let me do the same for this review. Go forth, purchase, and read. With less than three months between its publication date and our next national election, you will have a lot of useful information to absorb.
If you want to know why I say that, you will have to keep reading this diary.
First let me tell what this book is not. If you want to read the history of the blogosphere, I suggest you go to Feld and Wilcox, Netroots Rising, about which I wrote here and for which Susan G offered this front page review. And if you have read that book, there will be areas of overlap, because Kos cannot discuss his own understanding of the new rules for activism without discussing signature moments in the history of the blogosphere. And those two authors are included for the acknowledgments of this book (as are many familiar names) just as Markos penned a forward for their book. You will read about events in the blogosphere - the involvement in various campaigns, including especially that of Jim Webb, the rise and fall of Cindy Sheehan, the ability of Joshua Micah Marshall and Talking Points Memo to push the story of the firing of the US Attorneys, and so much more. And these are salient stories, relevant to what I see as the larger points of this noteworthy book: how those of us who seek radical change have to learn, to act, to be at times narrowly focused, at others patient, to accept that we will not always win, that we must dream big but be willing to move incrementally, and not to get too inflated with any sense of our own importance.
This will not be a traditional book review. This is one person's reaction, what I want to note about the book in the hopes that I will persuade you to read it. I am sure others will later share their perceptions, and one or more might attempt a more formal review.
In understanding this book it might help to know about Saul Alinsky. Markos notes his own birth in 1971, the year Alinsky wrote his seminal work Rules for Radicals. There are two epigrams at the start of the book, one by Theodore Roosevelt:
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
and the other by Alinsky,
Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society.
In the prologue to this book Kos writes of the '71 Alinsky book that it
was an ode to practicality, common sense and rational activism.
In the same passage, he quotes Alinsky writing
"It is most important for those of us who want revolutionary change to understand that the revolution must be preceded by reformation. To assume that a political revolution can survive without the supporting base of a popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics."
I quote this because it seems to me that those words provide an appropriate guide to understanding the purpose of this book, to helping explain why Markos picks the examples that he does, and how he uses them.
Between prologue and epilogue are 8 chapters, each beginning with a statement in the form of an epigram that lays out the key idea of the chapter, each having three or four subsections to illuminate that main point. For example, the first chapter is entitled THE NEW INSURGENTS and has three subsections: Bypass the Gatekeepers; Crush the Gatekeepers; Influence the Gatekeepers. And the opening statement after the chapter title appears in italics and reads like this:
To create long-lasting change in a democracy, you must shape public opinion by making your voice heard, your ideas clear, and your cause visible. In today's world, that means you must manage modern media - not just its technology, but its gatekeepers, too, by bypassing, crushing, or influencing them.
This shows how the author lays out chapter by chapter a clear architecture of what he is going to discuss. Thus, even though my proof edition has no index (nor is it clear there will be one in the final edition) by looking at the listing of the Contents and then reading that blurb at the start of each chapter, one can readily determine what one is about to read. While I read the book from front to back, I can imagine some people gaining benefit by reading the prologue, then perhaps dipping into chapters not in order. Some material, for example aspects of the Webb campaign, appear in more than one place because they are relevant to more than one part of the presentation, and it is possible to understand that relevance without having read the other parts, although I am sure the author would prefer that you read the entire book in the order he chose to present it.
The remaining chapters are entitled, in order,
MOBILIZE
SET THE NARRATIVE
REINVENT THE STREET PROTEST
FEED THE BACKLASH
DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE
FIGHT SMALL, WIN BIG
THE UNLIKELY WARRIORS
and I don't think it give anything away to say that the four people referred to by that last chapter are Carol Shea-Porter, Michael J. Fox, Stephen Colbert, and Graeme Frost - that by itself should make it very clear that this book is about one heck of a lot more than blogging.
I want to approach this book in a somewhat unusual way. The next section of this diary will consist only of quotes. I will not tell you from what part of the book each comes, nor will they necessarily be in the order they appear in the book. Most will be relatively short. These are things that caught my full attention as I read, and I hope that in offering them I will further whet your appetite for the entire book. And Markos, please don't accuse me of copyright infringement - the total amount I will offer will actually be a quite small portion of what you have written.
Making politics and causes participatory, exciting, and fun is a key to sustaining citizen involvement.
The examples of Eli Pariser and Gina Copper illustrate the power of networks, of bringing people with various skill, initiative, and drive to build something larger than themselves. They also show that, with enough initiative and drive, we can become "professionals" overnight.
Some battles are worth fighting to force rapid change, and choice and civil rights certainly qualify, but the fact remains that the most desirable pathway to change is slow, steady, and incremental, a process that can bring whole societies along. It's the difference between having courts force something on the people and having the people - through their elected representatives in a legislature - make that decision themselves. Only in extreme cases do we want to make that decision for the people, because the most effective change occurs when people lead the way with the ideas they've already bought into - and that takes a long-term commitment to engaging in political persuasion. It is evolution, rather than revolution.
If you find a niche that resonates with a wider audience, a niche were you find yourself being effective, exploit that niche. Extend from that niche carefully, mindful that such expansion may cost you the audience that initially empowered you. Like a recording artist attempting to enter new music genres, changing your game can confuse and annoy a public that expects you to provide a specific product.
These social experiences, whether in a bar or at a barbecue or at a restaurant or in someone's home, have a way of bonding us. And the more bonded the troops are, the more purposefully will they pursue their mission.
For people who don't generally follow politics the way political or news junkies do, simplicity isn't just a virtue, it is an absolute necessity. That means stripping out all extraneous information and focusing one's message like a laser. Sometimes it can mean abandoning the notion of "fairness to the other side."
And shortly after that material appears, Markos quotes from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:
"To expect a man to leave his wife, his children, and his home, to leave his crops standing in the field and pick up a gun and join the Revolutionary Army for a 20 per cent difference in the balance of human justice was to defy common sense. The Declaration of Independence, as a declaration of war, had to be what it was, a 100 per cent statement of the justice of the cause of the colonists and a 100 per cent denunciation of the role of the British government as evil and unjust."
The most effective activists are those who understand that to operate successfully in a given landscape, you have to stand out from the landscape.
Change is never brought about by those who play it safe.
Activists need to understand that they can wield enormous influence in their social networks.
Let me address that final quote above. In my panel on Politically Active Youth, Mica Willis, who just graduated from the high school in which I teach (and who was my student in AP Government last year) pointed out that the social networks often include parents and other relatives and friends and neighbors who might be old enough to vote even if they themselves are not, but whom they might be able to influence. When she said that, I remember Maria Shriver showing up at the event Obama had with Carolyn Kennedy and talking about how her daughters had influenced her on that decision. It is an example of how the words that I read in this book so often struck a chord with me, reminding me of things I had experienced and observed.
I enjoyed the book, and wrote in the margins and underlined constantly. There are points on which I disagreed, but as Markos points out in the book he often experiences that in things that he posts. I have been somewhat of a participant in several of things described - blogging at Dailykos, including being here at the time of the famous post about the contractors killed in Fallujah; the two Yearlykos Conventions that took place before this book went to print; the Webb campaign; . . . - and from my experience of those events his description and analysis is very much on target.
Markos further illustrates his points by using examples of music artists and file-sharing, and of how conservatives succeeded in building their own movement, of which the disestablishment and dismantling of organized labor is a prime example that he cites. He offers illustrations from other nations, particularly the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, to demonstrate the basic nature of the principles he describes, even as some of the particulars are of course dependent upon the culture and technology available in the situation in which one operates.
If nothing else, even if you wind up arguing with the points Markos make, the book will require you to think about activism in a systematic and systemic fashion, not as actions done in isolation at a particular moment of outrage or inspiration. Such moments are important, but also insufficient.
And I would not argue, nor do I thing the author would argue, that this book comes close to exhausting what we can think about how we can best pursue radical change in our time and as American political society currently is. But this book provides a superb embarkation on a journey whose end we may not as yet fully grasp. And as our society changes, and the technology available to people changes and is more widely propagated, it is possible that some of his "rules" will become obsolete and new ones will be required. But the basic principles outlined in the 8 chapters between the prologue and epilogue provide a broad enough framework that they can serve at least as general guidelines for our continued activism.
Let me close by illustrating how several of the passages already quoted are applicable to me. Making politics and causes participatory, exciting, and fun is a key to sustaining citizen involvement. This is a key to how I approach my teaching, which is of course my most important role of activism, challenging students to do more than rote learning. I tell them if I am not having fun, I know they will be bored. And I have a heck of lot more fun when they are actively involved, because they are enjoying what is happening, because they are excited about what they are learning.
And then there were these words, which had an impact on me this week: If you find a niche that resonates with a wider audience, a niche were you find yourself being effective, exploit that niche. Those are of a piece with the decision I made to focus on my teaching and my blogging, and not to pursue other opportunities in government and politics. As it happens, I read them just about the time I was reaching my conclusion. They reinforced some of my own thinking. Other words challenged my thinking, and others are things with which I still disagree. It does not matter into which category different parts of the book may fall. Reading it was time well spent for me, and I suspect that if you are a regular visitor here, you are enough of an activist that you will come to a similar conclusion after you read this book.
So what are you waiting for? You can use the link on this site, or perhaps go to your favorite independent bookstore, and place your order now. That way, come August 20, you will begin to do what I have been able to do this past week - not only read it, but begin to apply its lessons to one's own activism.
Peace.