Most famous guides to strategy are written for overdogs. (Think of Machiavelli’s The Prince or Sun Tzu’s Art of War.) And overdogs today invest in strategic education at a scale that dwarfs anything on the left. Their commitment is captured in the slogan of the right-wing Leadership Institute, which has trained over 200,000 people: “You owe it to your philosophy to learn how to win.”

In researching Practical Radicals, Stephanie and Deepak found that overdogs rely mainly on three strategies to gain and keep power: 1) weakening underdogs’ sources of power; 2) employing what’s known in the military as psychological operations, or PSYOPS; and 3) dividing their opponents to conquer them.

The good news is that underdogs can use these same strategies against more powerful opponents. In this episode, Deepak and Stephanie discuss some great examples of how to counter corporate power, use PSYOPS against white supremacists, and drive wedges in elite coalitions. They also explore other lessons progressives can take from the overdogs’ playbook: crafting long-term plans, recruiting based on belonging rather than belief, and using data-driven evaluation paired with the lean startup model for organizing.

Our guest has made a career out of researching overdogs in innovative ways. Munira Lokhandwala is Director of Tech and Training at LittleSis.org, the “nonprofit public interest research organization focused on corporate and government accountability.” As the answer to Big Brother, LittleSis conducts research on the power elite, offers trainings for social change movements, and provides resources like Oligrapher, a tool that allows organizers to map power networks and pinpoint where to drive wedges. The secretive and overlapping networks of the powerful can seem “daunting” says Lokhandwala, “but actually, every one of those connections is a relationship that has to be maintained for them to maintain their power.” She encourages progressives to “think about[the overdogs’] large networks as an opportunity to come at their power, their reputation, their profits from many different angles. Then we can imagine building long-term, intersectional issue campaigns” that “turn the very source of their power against them.”

Episode 12 transcript

Links:

LittleSis’s Oligrapher for Beginners

LittleSis 2024 Research Tools for Organizers Training Series

Choose Democracy’s scenario planning tool https://whatiftrumpwins.org/

In the struggle to abolish slavery — the social movement that arguably set the template for all that followed — organizers used all seven strategies we identify in Practical Radicals. According to our guest, historian Manisha Sinha, the abolitionists were “radical in their goals . . . but pragmatic in implementation” — the quintessential practical radicals. Stephanie and Deepak begin this episode by talking about the concepts of movement cycles and movement ecosystems and how conflict within movements can be generative. Then Stephanie and Professor Sinha explore some themes from Sinha’s award-winning 2016 book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. As Sinha explains, the conventional wisdom about the abolitionists is wrong in many ways: contrary to depictions of the abolitionists as mostly white, bourgeois, defenders of capitalism, Sinha highlights the crucial role of Black abolitionists (including enslaved people who resisted from the earliest days of the slave trade), and the pervasive and “overlapping radicalisms” of the abolitionists, many of whom were utopian socialists and attended international conferences, not just against slavery but also for peace and women’s rights. Where previous historians have focused on the abolition movement that peaked in the 19th century, Sinha draws attention to an earlier wave of multiracial abolitionism in the late 18th century. And where others have viewed the movement as riven by differences and infighting, Sinha sees the abolitionists’ diversity as a source of strength, applauding their sensitivity to movement cycles and their political acumen in shifting strategies (e.g., at a key juncture, away from boycotts and toward party politics). She contends that the abolitionists served as “a prototype for racial social movements” in America and that radicals have been as “American as apple pie.” Sinha also suggests that the key lesson the abolitionists offer movements today is to “realize who the real enemy is . . . when you have at stake the future of American democracy.” Sinha’s new book, published in March of 2024, is entitled The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, Reconstruction 1860-1920, and it promises to be no less audacious and groundbreaking than her previous work, framing Reconstruction as a continuation of aspirations born in abolitionism and an attempt to fundamentally reground American democracy.