Reflections: Political Organizing and the Work of Changing Minds

The task of the political organizer who wants to win against the odds is to talk with people, give them a vision of what they can accomplish, and show them the connection between voting and the rest of their lives. It is hard work, it takes time, and it requires faith in the intelligence and judgment of the average person. As the revolutionary Frantz Fanon wrote in Wretched of the Earth about the struggle against colonialism, “The masses understand perfectly the most complicated problems. . . . Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.”

Change will be possible when those who see themselves as victims of the political process—and helpless to accomplish anything—begin to realize that they hold the ultimate power: their vote. The millions spent on campaigns are spent to influence their vote. Their vote is valuable. Their vote counts. They are not helpless. They are not victims. They own a vote.

Political organizers the world over who have gone up against the establishment have done so with confidence in the ability of people to change their thinking, change their lives, and ultimately change their communities. Their common tools have been interacting personally, engaging in dialogue, talking genuinely, treating people with respect, and meeting listeners where they are and moving forward from there. As individuals begin to understand why things are the way they are and how things might be changed, they start to change themselves and become energized to take the necessary actions to make things happen.

The first step is freeing people from the belief that nothing they do will make things better and nothing will ever change. Mahatma Gandhi, who led India to independence, preached incessantly to his countrymen that the first step to freeing themselves from England was to think of themselves as being free and to act as though they were free. In The Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer, Gandhi is quoted as saying, “Man is bound by many chains, and the stoutest are forged in the inner smithy, not by church or state. You are not free because you do not free yourself.”

When people see themselves differently, they see the world differently. Omar Cabezas, one of the early Sandinista leaders in Nicaragua, described in Fire from the Mountain the transformation of campesinos, rural subsistence farmers. “Who can say what the process was, but the thing is they were listening, listening, listening. The ideas would travel from their brains to their eyes, and by the look in their eyes I knew their world was turning upside down . . . and so we recruited more people.”

Abraham Lincoln, the consummate American politician, recognized that change didn’t come without a personal relationship. In an early speech on temperance to the homefolk in Springfield, he said, “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him you are his sincere friend.” That is the way to his heart, “which when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one.”

He knew that you can’t sell a program to the voters until they are ready and that a leader can’t move forward without popular support. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin attributed much of his political success to an “exceptionally sensitive grasp of the limits set by public opinion. . . . [H]‍e had an intuitive sense of when to hold fast, when to wait, and when to lead.”

It is the waiting and the step-by-step-by-step progress that makes us impatient. We have a vision of what can be. We are eager to make things better. We don’t understand why not everyone agrees immediately. We are impatient with Alinsky’s advice in Rules for Radicals, that “[i]‍t is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system. . . . Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change. . . . [T]‍o build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that’s the way the game is played—if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’”

Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who became president of Czechoslovakia after the popular uprising that ended nearly fifty years of Communist rule, started to speak when there was no hope of achieving change. In his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters, he writes, “For us this waiting was based on the knowledge that it made sense on principle to resist by speaking the truth simply because it was the right thing to do, without speculating whether it would lead somewhere tomorrow, or the day after, or ever. This kind of waiting grew out of the faith that repeating this defiant truth made sense in itself, regardless of whether it was ever appreciated, or victorious, or represented the hundredth time. At the very least, it meant that someone was not supporting the government of lies. It also, of course, grew out of the faith—but this is of secondary importance—that a seed once sown would one day take root and send forth a shoot. No one knew when. But it would happen someday, perhaps for future generations.”

From: Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life; SIU Press, 2019