Future Hindsight

Theda Skocpol, a prominent political scientist from Harvard, and Caroline Tervo, a researcher focused on grassroots organizing, delve into the evolution of political movements in response to recent elections. They discuss how grassroots groups on both sides have learned from each other’s tactics, particularly post-2016. The duo highlights the significant influence of organized groups in swinging elections and the importance of local activism. They further emphasize strategies for increasing voter turnout and the hope inspired by renewed civic engagement and youth activism.

Building Precincts Precincts are critical to building local and regional party power. Kromer started Davidson's Democratic party precinct with only four other people. Once established, they gained political legitimacy as well as access to state and county voter databases. This allowed them to organize and knock on doors, inform their constituents about the candidates who are running, and get out the vote. As a result, Davidson had a higher voter turnout rate than other local towns. Politics Flows Up The road to high-ranking state or federal positions often begins with local offices where only tens or hundreds of votes decide elections. Holding local office serves as validation for a candidate's run for higher office. The mayor of your small town could become your congressional representative in the next election cycle. Focusing on local politics and seriously opposing bad candidates makes it harder for them to succeed and climb the political ladder. Showing Up We often think of party politics as exclusive clubs or murky organizations full of political operatives, but this is not the case. According to Kromer, 90% of becoming civically engaged is simply showing up. The best way to make sure your voice is heard is by attending local group or precinct meetings. Most local political organizations will welcome you to their initiative, to be engaged, and help solve the issues of your community. Find out more: Drew Kromer studied at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he became involved in the local College Democrats and built the local Democratic precinct in the town of Davidson, NC. He has served as the Vice-Chair of the National Council of College Democrats and currently serves as a DNC delegate in North Carolina. He is now in law school at UNC Chapel Hill. You can learn more about the work Kromer did to revitalize his community here.

Politics Begins with Service Political power starts with service to others. For instance, Russian immigrant and Boston resident Naakh Vysoky began his political career by helping his fellow Russian immigrants gain citizenship and keep their government benefits. He also advocated on their behalf in Washington. Members of his community recognized his leadership and initiative, and began to follow his lead politically. They voted according to his recommendations. By building a voting bloc, Naakh created lasting political power to make government more responsive to his community. Politics Solves Problems Politics is about working together to solve problems. Uniting like-minded citizens through political organizing builds political power, which can be used to ask the government to help resolve the particular issues facing communities. Naakh Vysoky created a voting bloc of more than 1,000, and his precinct voted at three times the state average. When he called the governor's office, the governor called back. The politics of empowerment helps a community grow and thrive, addressing issues like government benefits, the relationship of the police with the community, and communications between parents and the school district. Political Hobbyism Political hobbyism is distinct from power building: it is time spent thinking or worrying about politics without actually doing anything to change it. Political hobbyism includes news binges, political tweets, petition signing, and other forms of "shallow" activism. Further, this makes us look at politics from the "horserace" perspective, entrenching tribalism and making politicians misbehave. By engaging in political hobbyism, we learn the wrong lessons and acquire the wrong skillset, like paying attention to significant national issues. Instead, we should be engaged in local politics, where we can actually have an outsized influence. Find out more: Eitan D. Hersh is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, focusing on American politics. He studies US elections, civic participation, and voting rights. Much of his work utilizes large databases of personal records to study political behavior. His second book, Politics is for Power, was published in January 2020. His first book, Hacking the Electorate, was published in 2015 (Cambridge UP). His peer-reviewed articles have been published in venues such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His next major research project, now underway, is about the civic role of businesses and business leaders. You can follow him on Twitter @eitanhersh.

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Sexual Citizenship The concept of sexual citizenship asserts that people have the right to sexual self-determination, including young people. Recognizing young people's sexual citizenship prepares them to both say no and yes, as well as to be able to hear other people when they do or don't want to have sex. It also recognizes their fundamental humanity. Establishing sexual citizenship and autonomy for young people is a critical step in preventing campus sexual assault and promoting relationships based on trust, kindness, and love. Power and Precarity Meaningful action against sexual assault in its many forms must be grounded in a general project of equality because experiences of assault are fundamentally about power and precarity. Studies show young people who have difficulty paying for basic needs are at a significantly elevated risk of sexual assault. The highest rates of sexual assault reports come from LGBTQ communities because of systemic invalidation of queer identities. Racism, gender discrimination, transphobia, homophobia, and income inequality exacerbate the occurrence of sexual assault. Comprehensive Sex Ed Comprehensive sexual education goes well beyond biology, teaching healthy habits and boundaries around consent and mutual respect. Women who have learned refusal skills are half as likely to be assaulted as their less educated peers. Multi-faceted sex education should begin at a young age, so that by the time they mature, young people are prepared to safely and responsibly explore their sexuality. Parents also play a critical role in how to bring values like trust and empathy to any sexual interaction. Find out more: Jennifer S. Hirsch is professor of socio-medical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Her research spans five intertwined domains: the anthropology of love; gender, sexuality and migration; sexual, reproductive and HIV risk practices; social scientific research on sexual assault and undergraduate well-being, and the intersections between anthropology and public health. She's been named one of New York City's 16 'Heroes in the Fight Against Gender-Based Violence.' In 2012 she was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow. You can follow her on Twitter @JenniferSHirsch. Shamus Khan is professor and chair of sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of dozens of books and articles on inequality, American Culture, gender, and elites. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and many other media outlets. In 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize for "the best sociologist under 40." You can follow him on Twitter @shamuskhan. "Sexual Citizens reveals the social ecosystem that makes sexual assault a predictable element of life on a college campus. The powerful concepts of sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies provide a new language for understanding the forces that shape young people's sexual relationships. Bringing attention to the importance of physical spaces, of peer influences and norms, of alcohol, and most of all, to the many forms of inequality on campus helps shine new and powerful light upon the ways in which young people experience and interpret sex and assault. The result is an innovative lens that transforms our understanding of sexual assault and provides a new roadmap for how to address it.

Surveillance Capitalism Surveillance Capitalism is the dominant economic logic in our world today. It claims private human experience for the marketplace and turns it into a commodity. Vast amounts of personal data are necessary -- often harvested without our knowledge or consent –- in order to predict future behavior. Surveillance capitalists create certainties for companies by modifying people's behavior. Instrumentarian Power Instrumentarianism seeks to modify, predict, monetize, and control human behavior through the instruments of surveillance capitalism, our digital devices. Having mined all of our data, instrumentarians can tune and herd users into specific actions through triggers and subliminal messaging. It is ultimately a political project intended to install computational governance instead of democratic governance. Protecting Your Privacy A myriad of programs and apps can block tracking and scramble your location, making your behavioral data less accessible or even inaccessible. Since instrumentarians gain their power through our use of their devices, limiting internet use and working in-person reduces the power they have over you. Find out more: Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and a former Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Her masterwork, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, synthesizes years of research and thinking to reveal a world in which technology users are neither customers, employees, nor products. Instead, they are the raw material for new procedures of manufacturing and sales that define an entirely new economic order: a surveillance economy. In the late 1980s, her decade-in-the-making book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, became an instant classic that foresaw how computers would revolutionize the modern workplace. At the dawn of the twenty-first century her influential The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (with James Maxmin), written before the invention of the iPod or Uber, predicted the rise of digitally-mediated products and services tailored to the individual. It warned of the individual and societal risks if companies failed to alter their approach to capitalism. You can follow her on Twitter @shoshanazuboff

After listening to this episode, try deep canvassing yourself! Click HERE to read the step-by-step guide. We'd love to compare notes and see how you did. After you've canvassed, tell us about your experience by leaving a message at (929) 262-0752. Thank you! Deep Canvassing Deep canvassing was developed to better understand voters in response to California's Prop 8 legislation, which outlawed gay marriage. Sharing personal stories and active listening techniques establish common ground, even among voters with totally different opinions. These kinds of meaningful exchanges lead to constructive, positive dialogue that can change minds and achieve political results at a higher rate than traditional canvassing. How to deep canvass Start with the change you seek. Put together a list of people to talk to. Recruit a buddy. Before the call, think about someone you love and why you love them. On the call, genuinely listen to people and ask meaningful questions based on what they say. Share a personal story with a loved one where decency and kindness -- instead of judgment -- was extended. Connect the issue with that person's real lived experience. Reconnect with the buddy and compare notes. Voting is Personal Voting is both a political and a personal act. Thinking about voting as a gift to our loved ones is a powerful way to make clear what the stakes are around voting and the world we live in. Deep canvassing taps into the real lived experience of how we treat each other, connecting the dots to why we vote and who we vote for. Find out more: David Fleischer is the Director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Leadership LAB. The Center's carefully honed method of "deep canvassing" delivered the first empirically tested and proven process where a single conversation decreases prejudice in a long-lasting way. Developed after the shocking 2008 win for Prop 8, which made gay marriage illegal in the state of California, Fleischer was motivated to figure out why, in this seemingly open-minded state, people voted against gay and lesbian people who wanted to marry. To find out, he and the Leadership LAB organizers and volunteers went to the neighborhoods where they had lost the worst; 15,000 one-on-one conversations later, they had learned several universally actionable pieces of information. You can learn more about David and his work here, and you can follow the LA LGBT Center on Twitter @LALGBTCenter

Culture Informs Politics The Alt-Right believes politics is downstream from culture. They operate in this meta-political sphere where changing American politics must start with changing culture, discourse, and language. The internet allowed the Alt-Right's ideology to proliferate through memes, in online communities, and finally into mainstream culture. After the 2016 election collapsed the timing between culture and politics, the internet continues to serve as a platform to disseminate their cultural values. Conversely, de-platforming prominent Alt-Right voices like Gavin McInnes and Alex Jones has reduced their ability to gain new adherents. Gateway to Extremism The Proud Boys, McInnes's group, is a gateway to right-wing extremism. They often claim plausible deniability by saying anti-Semitic or transphobic memes are jokes and using seemingly harmless initiation rituals to lure young white men into their orbit. They attempt to "red-pill" their followers and decry modernity, liberalism, egalitarianism, and feminism. They would like America to re-embrace a "traditional" natural order in which white men are at the top of the pyramid, one of the central ideas of white supremacy. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, groups like The Proud Boys are often the first step toward white nationalism. Countering the Alt-Right We must support democratic uses of social media to create a fair online environment. Pressuring companies like Facebook and YouTube to call out and remove hate; exposing the farce of nostalgia for a dominant white culture; and pushing back against tribalistic tendencies, especially among teenagers online, is critical. The Alt-Right is focused heavily on gender norms, so supporting transgender and LGBTQ+ rights is an actionable way to promote and support an inclusive society. Further, we should infuse our public discourse with a positive and racially pluralistic message. Find out more: Alexandra Minna Stern is Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate of History, American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies and Associate Dean for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. She also directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab housed in the Department of American Culture. Her research has focused on the history of eugenics, genetics, society, and justice in the United States and Latin America. Through these topics, she explored the dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, social difference, and reproductive politics. Her book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, applies the lenses of historical analysis, feminist studies, and critical race studies to deconstructing the core ideas of the alt-right and white nationalism. You can learn more at her website: http://www.minnastern.com/.

Conservative media activism Beginning with the America First Movement, conservative political activists also became conservative media figures. In addition to writing conservative books and hosting radio or television programs, these activists also created civic organizations and worked on political campaigns from Eisenhower to Goldwater and Reagan. Media is an important part of their political activism, and not a separate, objective endeavor. Politics of Ideas Conservatives believe political change starts with ideas. They build political power through spreading and popularizing their ideas through their own media outlets where ideology trumps facts on the ground. Conservative audiences -- primed only to right-wing views -- believe that only their sources are right, both factually and ideologically. Hence, conservative voices became the only ones telling the truth. Epistemological divide We are experiencing an epistemological divide where liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different understandings of the truth. This divide is partly born out of the rise of conservative media, which is based on faith claims, or claims of personal authority and knowledge, rather than observable facts. Because many conservatives believe what conservative media and political personalities tell them, they are often impervious to fact-checking and the promotion of truth. Find out more: Nicole Hemmer is a professor and political historian specializing in media, conservatism, and the far-right. She is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. In addition to being an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project, she is also co-founder and co-editor of Made by History, the historical analysis section of the Washington Post, and co-host of the Past Present podcast. Hemmer's historical analysis has appeared in a number of national and international news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Politico, U.S. News & World Report, New Republic, PBS NewsHour, CNN, NPR, and NBC News. You can follow her on Twitter @pastpunditry.

Ethical Communication Ethical communication involves respect and civil discourse. Taking time to listen to other sides and treating lawmakers with civility are key to a healthy democratic process. Respecting procedures that bolster the institutions of democracy and working together can help us achieve a better America. The truth is click bait The truth is not boring. We can be clever about presenting truth and facts. Presenting the truth in a click bait format—with catchy headlines, good photos, and a listicle—is possible. Ethical communication doesn't have to be dry, like eating our vegetables. Improving the media The media can and should cover politics in a way that encourages citizens to be engaged participants in a democracy, instead of spectators. Recognizing robust and ethical leadership in our lawmakers will encourage a high bar of communication among all politicians. Supporting substantive reporting through subscriptions is imperative. Find out more: Peter Loge is the founding director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication and an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University, as well as a strategic communication consultant. He has served in senior positions for Senator Edward Kennedy, for three members of the US House of Representatives, and in the Obama administration. Loge has led and advised a range of campaigns and organizations, put the first Member of Congress on the internet, lobbied for "America's Funniest Home Videos," served as a Senior Policy Advisor for health care in the US House during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, and was a Chief of Staff in the House of Representatives during the Clinton impeachment proceedings. You can follow him on Twitter @ploge.