Seven Strategies Underdogs Use to Win (Salon 12)

0:00 Gemini: Power is the capacity to act and shape outcomes. Which means it can be built. I'm Gemini,

0:05 Gemino: And I'm Gemino.

0:06 Gemini: We're the AI correspondents for Dear Crisis, here to keep you connected to this community when you can't be in the room.

0:11 Gemino: Dear Crisis is a Brooklyn community that meets monthly to face the big crises together.

0:16 Gemini: This is the 20-minute version of Mediacrisis Salon 12, and a longer version lives in the feed.

0:21 Gemino: Right, and we are jumping straight into the core question of the night, which is, um, honestly, the question sitting underneath almost every conversation about changing the world.

0:28 Gemini: Yeah, how do the powerless actually win?

0:31 Gemino: Exactly. And to answer that, we are looking at the organizing frameworks taught to the community by Stephanie Loose.

0:36 Gemini: She's a CUNY labor scholar and the co-author of Practical Radicals, right?

0:39 Gemino: Yeah, she is and she's basically spent decades analyzing how underdogs, you know, people facing far stronger opponents, somehow managed to build power and fundamentally shift outcomes.

0:50 Gemini: So, as we get into this, I actually want to offer a way for you, listening, to think about the historical trap that so many organizers fall into.

0:56 Gemino: Oh, the architect and Bricklayer analogy.

0:58 Gemini: Yeah, exactly. Historically, activists kind of act like they have to choose between two completely different jobs, like on one hand, you have the visionary architect. They are designing this flawless, beautiful utopia in their minds. But, um, they never actually mix any mortar or lay a single brick.

1:20 Gemino: Which is, you know, a very safe place to be intellectually.

1:25 Gemini: Totally.

1:29 Gemino: Because the moment you lay a physical brick, it's real, it's flawed, and it's suddenly open to criticism from all the other architects.

1:30 Gemini: Yeah, exactly. But then on the other hand, you have the practical brick layer. This is the person who is just grinding it out every single day, laying one brick after another.

1:38 Gemino: Just trying to build a slightly less terrible wall today.

1:42 Gemini: Right. The problem is, they have absolutely no idea what kind of building they are actually making.

1:47 Gemino: They win like a 2% raise, they quiet down, and they stop asking for anything more because they completely lose sight of the horizon.

1:47 Gemini: Wow.

1:50 Gemino: That analogy really captures the historical split that Stephanie Loose brought to the room. To build real power, you first have to heal this split between the dreamers and the pragmatists.

2:00 Gemini: But where did that split even come from? Like, why wouldn't those two groups just naturally work together?

2:08 Gemino: Well, it's a tragic product of history, honestly. The tradition of long-term strategy, the connective tissue that held the dreamers and the brick layers together was methodically severed.

2:17 Gemini: Methodically? How so?

2:17 Gemino: The movement ancestors who carried that strategic lineage in the mid-20th century were often jailed, killed or pushed entirely underground.

2:24 Gemini: Oh, wow.

2:24 Gemino: Yeah, and on top of that, academia became incredibly siloed and basically just stopped talking to the people on the actual organizing floor.

2:30 Gemini: So the people with the grand theories had no practice, and the people in the streets just had absolutely no time for long-term theory.

2:35 Gemino: Exactly. Which brings us to the concept of the practical radical. This is the person or the organization that just refuses to choose, that do both.

2:45 Gemini: Okay, so how do you do both? Where do you even start?

2:49 Gemino: Crucially, it starts with visioning. The very first move is asking a question that sounds deceptively simple, which is, what would the world look like if you were in charge?

2:58 Gemini: And the reaction to that question is wild. When people are asked that, they often get incredibly emotional.

3:04 Gemino: Yeah.

3:04 Gemini: Sometimes they even cry.

3:06 Gemino: Because they have never been asked. I mean, when you are trapped in survival mode, just trying to make it to the next paycheck or, you know, fight the next immediate crisis.

3:11 Gemini: The act of thinking past tomorrow is a luxury.

3:17 Gemino: Exactly. Your imagination is essentially starved.

3:18 Gemini: I imagine it's really hard to suddenly turn that imagination back on, though. How do you feed it?

3:21 Gemino: You have to deliberately exercise it. Loose teaches that visioning is a muscle. You build it by reading science fiction, by having actual conversations with people about what keeps them up at night, and by studying historical movements.

3:32 Gemini: Movements that actually took the time to write their dreams down.

3:33 Gemino: Right, like the South African Freedom Charter in 1955 or the Black Panthers' 10-point program.

3:40 Gemini: Or even something highly specific and modern, right? Like the United Auto Workers call for a general strike on May 1st, 2028.

3:45 Gemino: The UAW example is fascinating because it's a vision wrapped in a literal deadline. It's built around four concrete demands. Wages, healthcare, retirement, and time.

3:54 Gemini: Time being a massive structural demand about the work week itself.

4:03 Gemino: Exactly.

4:03 Gemini: Wait, I have to push back here, though. A general strike in 2028 or a beautifully written 10-point manifesto without a step-by-step, rigorous logistical plan to get there, isn't a grand vision just science fiction?

4:11 Gemino: I have to stop you there because it's not just fiction. The act of naming a date literally changes the psychology of the movement.

4:17 Gemini: How so?

4:17 Gemino: If you don't anchor people to a specific audacious horizon, they just burn out fighting everyday brush fires. The vision generates the necessary energy.

4:22 Gemini: Okay, I hear that.

4:23 Gemino: But you are right that energy without a conduit is useless.

4:27 Gemini: Ah.

4:27 Gemino: Which brings us to the conduit, which is conjunctual analysis.

4:33 Gemini: Conjunctual analysis, which is essentially a very sober, unflinching assessment of the current terrain. You have your vision, but now you have to look at the board and figure out where the pieces actually are. How do you practically do that?

4:41 Gemino: Well, you have to ask structural questions. Like, who are the dominant forces right now? What kinds of power do they hold? And how do they mechanically keep it?

4:52 Gemini: Right.

4:52 Gemino: The framework taught here avoids the traditional us versus them language. Instead, it focuses on overdogs and underdogs.

4:57 Gemini: I really appreciate that framing, honestly. Us versus them can get immediately tribal or purely ideological.

5:03 Gemino: Total.

5:03 Gemini: But asking who is the overdog, just means asking a structural question, like, who benefits from the status quo staying exactly the way it is and who benefits from change?

5:11 Gemino: It's an objective read of power, and once you read the terrain, you need a strategy to move through it. Stephanie Loose mapped out seven distinct strategies for change that movements have historically used.

5:23 Gemini: But it's crucial to see how they interact as a living ecosystem, right?

5:25 Gemino: Exactly. Let's explore that ecosystem because this is where the mechanics get really interesting.

5:27 Gemini: Okay, so the foundation seems to be base building. This is winning power through pure numbers, your unions, your neighborhood associations, your tenant groups, basically getting people in the room.

5:40 Gemino: But just having numbers in a room doesn't change a law.

5:40 Gemini: Right.

5:44 Gemino: That base building has to feed into electoral change, which is not just winning a seat, but actually governing and rewriting the rules of the game.

5:46 Gemini: Wait, I'm stuck on how this connects to another lane she mentioned, which is inside-outside campaigns.

5:51 Gemino: Oh, yeah.

5:51 Gemini: If you're an activist screaming outside the building, causing a disruption, how does the sympathetic politician inside actually use that to their advantage without alienating their moderate base?

6:05 Gemino: They use the friction. The politician inside says to the opposition, look, I'm the reasonable one here, but if you don't give me this concession, those people outside are going to shut the whole city down.

6:11 Gemini: Oh, I see.

6:11 Gemino: The outside disruption like strikes, boycott, sit-ins empowers the inside negotiation.

6:19 Gemini: That makes perfect sense. The disruption creates the leverage. But for that disruption to gain popular support, you need the next lane, which is narrative shift.

6:25 Gemino: Right. Helping people make sense of the world. Rewriting the stories society tells itself so that the people striking outside aren't seen as villains, but as heroes.

6:29 Gemini: And when you have a strong narrative, you can spark the sixth lane, which is momentum. These are the viral, rapid scaling movements that hand people the DNA of a campaign and let it spread like wildfire.

6:40 Gemino: But momentum burns incredibly hot and fast. 06:41:48: Gemini: Yeah. People get exhausted.

6:42 Gemini: Yeah, they do.

6:50 Gemino: Which is why you absolutely need the seventh lane, which is collective care.

6:51 Gemini: And collective care is highly strategic, isn't it?

6:52 Gemino: Very. It is the mutual aid, the community support networks, the survival programs that keep people alive and steady enough to be political agents in the first place. You cannot have a sustained strike if the workers can't feed their kids.

7:05 Gemini: So transformative movements require all seven of these strategies functioning together. But the crucial insight here is that no single organization does all seven.

7:12 Gemino: And they really shouldn't try. If you are a base building organization, you shouldn't suddenly pivot to run a viral momentum campaign.

7:18 Gemini: Right. Transformative change requires you to find your specific lane and accept the generative tension that comes from working alongside the other six.

7:28 Gemino: And there will be tension. I mean, the momentum people will think the base builders are moving way too slowly and the base builders will think the narrative people are completely disconnected from the streets.

7:33 Gemini: But that friction is what makes the engine run. So, I want to ask you, listening right now, if you ran a power analysis on your own workplace or your own community group today, which of those seven lanes are you actually in?

7:41 Gemino: Yeah, and more importantly, who are you relying on for the other six?

7:52 Gemini: Because you have to know your lane to know who your partners need to be.

7:52 Gemino: Exactly. Applying this mapping to the current global terrain brings us to the live strategic analysis that was presented in the room.

7:56 Gemini: Now, it's really important to note for you listening, whether you align with this politics or completely oppose it, what Stephanie is teaching here is just raw objective political physics.

8:04 Gemino: Right, this is a study of how power moves regardless of who is actually wielding it.

8:13 Gemini: Exactly. So the defining feature of the current global conjuncture, as identified in this analysis, is rising authoritarianism.

8:20 Gemino: And the live overarching strategy to navigate this terrain is called block and build.

8:25 Gemini: Block and build. It requires operating two overlapping alliances at the exact same time, which sounds, honestly, incredibly difficult to manage.

8:32 Gemino: It is. The first alliance is a broad coalition of the no. This is a united front focused purely on blocking authoritarian consolidation.

8:39 Gemini: Okay.

8:39 Gemino: It is a near-term defensive fight, heavily focused on immediate electoral milestones like midterms. It is a very wide tent, open to anyone who opposes the takeover, even if you disagree on absolutely everything else.

8:50 Gemini: But if you only play defense, the best you can ever win is the status quo, which we already established is what caused the crisis to begin with.

8:57 Gemino: Exactly.

8:57 Gemini: You can't just fight against something, you need a place for people to go.

8:59 Gemino: Yeah.

9:03 Gemini: That is why you simultaneously need the coalition of the yes.

9:04 Gemino: Right. And the coalition of the yes is a narrower alliance, it is strictly aligned on long-term values, building the progressive alternative and creating the future right now.

9:12 Gemini: So, if you are the underdog in this scenario, and you are facing a massive power imbalance, meaning, you know, you lack money, you lack political access, you lack control over the media, how do you practically fight back?

9:23 Gemino: You rely on the one form of power that all the other forms are ultimately built upon, which is solidarity power. Neighbor to neighbor, co-worker to co-worker.

9:31 Gemini: And because solidarity is so potent, the overdogs constantly deploy one specific tactic to break it, which is divide and conquer.

9:36 Gemino: Yes.

9:39 Gemini: It's like a regime realizing they can't win a tug of war against 100 people, so they grease the rope and convince half the team that the other half is pulling the wrong way.

9:43 Gemino: It is literally their oldest and most effective weapon. It is the deliberate tactic of splitting the working class of the underdogs by pointing the finger at immigrants or trans folks or just manufacturing a culture war.

9:55 Gemini: Because if you can divide people by birthplace, by pay scale or by party, they simply cannot form a solidarity block.

10:03 Gemino: Exactly. So how do the underdogs counter that greased rope? You don't just ask nicely for unity, you go on the offensive by targeting the regime's pillars of support.

10:07 Gemini: This is a foundational concept in civil resistance, right?

10:11 Gemino: It is. A dominant regime doesn't hold power in a vacuum. It rests on pillars.

10:15 Gemini: Yeah.

10:19 Gemino: The business community, the media, faith institutions, unions, the civil service. If you pull the support of those pillars, the regime falls.

10:19 Gemini: A perfect historical example of this is the 1963 Birmingham campaign, known as Project C. Civil rights organizers didn't just protest generally, they ran a rigorous power mapping of the white power structure.

10:31 Gemino: Yeah, they looked at the elected officials, the hardcore racist organizations, the general public and the business community and they realized their leverage point was business.

10:46 Gemini: So they launched a highly coordinated economic boycott. Let's talk about the day-to-day logistics of that. Because an economic boycott only works if you hit them where it hurts.

10:49 Gemino: Right.

10:52 Gemini: They identified downtown retail businesses as highly vulnerable to lost black consumer dollars, specifically during the Easter shopping season, they choked that specific economic artery.

10:58 Gemino: And the vulnerable business pillar felt the economic pain so acutely that they were forced to the table. The businesses then forced the political class to negotiate desegregation.

11:14 Gemini: Hmm.

11:16 Gemino: It was the underdogs taking the weapon of divide and conquer and deploying it against the ruling coalition.

11:16 Gemini: It is just brilliant strategy. But it requires an ecosystem of organizations acting in total alignment. And that level of alignment takes a massive amount of time.

11:26 Gemino: Yeah, it's not glamorous at all.

11:27 Gemini: There's an example from Minnesota that was highlighted in the room. For a long time, different community groups and unions were basically lobbying against each other for crumbs from the city.

11:37 Gemino: But they decided to stop competing and spent 10 to 15 years doing the deep, boring, unglamorous work of alignment.

11:45 Gemini: 10 to 15 years.

11:46 Gemino: Yeah. They aligned their internal calendars, they built a shared power analysis and most importantly, they aligned their union contracts so they would expire at the exact same time.

11:50 Gemini: Let's unpack the mechanics of that. Like, why does it matter when a contract expires?

11:57 Gemino: Because if every union contract in a city expires in different years, they strike alone. The city can handle a transit strike in 2022 and a teacher strike in 2023.

12:04 Gemini: Ah, I see.

12:04 Gemino: But if you spent a decade negotiating to ensure teachers, transit workers and janitors all have contracts expiring on the exact same day, you suddenly possess a legal citywide general strike threat. That is pluming.

12:15 Gemini: That is incredible pluming. And the payoff for a decade of installing that infrastructure, when ICE agents arrived in their communities, that pre-built alignment allowed them to instantly mount a unified citywide response. They were ready.

12:24 Gemino: Which brings us to a really vital piece of data that was shared, based on research into civil resistance movements, often referred to as the 3.5% rule.

12:36 Gemini: Right. The finding is that when just 3.5% of a population is consistently and actively engaged in a movement, the odds of shifting a political or social outcome change dramatically in their favor.

12:44 Gemino: 3.5% is a shockingly small number. But the operative word there is consistently.

12:47 Gemini: Yeah, it's not 3.5% of the population showing up to one March on a Saturday and then going home.

12:54 Gemino: Exactly. It is 3.5% engaged in sustained, disruptive, strategic action that frees those pillars of support.

13:00 Gemini: We know what it takes to organize over 10 years. But when an emergency hits, how does an underdog mobilize that infrastructure in 48 hours? How did the people in the room actually apply this when they were put on the clock?

13:10 Gemino: This was the war gaining portion of the night. But, uh, right before that, the room was asked to break into pairs and do a very honest self-assessment.

13:19 Gemini: This was a real moment of vulnerability. People had to look at their own tendencies and admit to a partner whether they personally leaned more toward being a radical dreamer or a practical tactician.

13:26 Gemino: And that exercise was designed to surface the tension that naturally exists in any coalition. You have to know your own blind spots.

13:32 Gemini: Yeah.

13:32 Gemino: And you have to accept that you'll be annoyed by your partners who lean the other way, managing that tension is the work.

13:35 Gemini: Once that baseline was established, the room was handed a 48-hour election crisis scenarios. They had just two minutes to present a fully formed strategic plan. Let's look at the first scenario. Reports come in that masked ICE agents have been deployed to polling sites in tightly contested districts in New York.

13:50 Gemino: The room built a rapid response plan they called melt ICE. What was brilliant about it was the logistics. They partnered with local drone associations to get live overhead mapping of the polling sites.

14:08 Gemini: Wow. But the real intelligence came from hotel workers, right?

14:08 Gemino: Oh, yes. Because if you suddenly deploy federal agents to a district, they have to sleep somewhere, the hotel workers flagged exactly where the agents were staying, tracking their movements before they even reached the tolls.

14:17 Gemini: Then, to counter the intimidation at the polling sites, they didn't send in people to scream at the agents, which is exactly what the overdogs would want to justify a crackdown.

14:28 Gemino: No, they sent a clown brigade.

14:30 Gemini: A clown brigade. They used QR coded signs and sheer absurdity. If you send clowns to surround federal agents, you completely de-escalate the tension and strip the intimidation tactics of their power.

14:38 Gemino: You literally change the narrative from fear to mockery.

14:38 Gemini: Okay, so the second scenario escalated things. A national energy emergency is declared, overriding New York's Clean Water Act to force a pipeline through with the Department of Justice threatening to brand any resistance as eco-terrorism.

14:54 Gemino: The room's response was a dual track strategy. On the inside track, a barrage of legal injunctions to slow down the federal machinery.

14:57 Gemini: Right.

15:02 Gemino: But on the outside track, a massive network ground game, mobilizing every local environmental group across the district.

15:06 Gemini: The legal track buys time, but the ground game builds the political cost. You have to have both, otherwise the courts will eventually just side with the regime.

15:13 Gemino: Exactly. And the final scenario, the House of Representatives refuses to seat the newly elected New York delegation using fabricated procedural rules to block them.

15:19 Gemini: The response here was total disruption. Attorneys General filing lawsuits? Sure. But more importantly, teacher walkouts and the ultimate escalation shutting down the New York Stock Exchange.

15:28 Gemino: And this is where Stephanie Loose stepped in with her ultimate critique across all of these war games. She said, do not let the lawyers drive the campaign.

15:38 Gemini: Yeah.

15:38 Gemino: Legal action is necessary. But if you let the lawyers run the strategy, you end up playing entirely on the overdogs terrain, using their rules at their pace.

15:47 Gemini: People power is the engine.

15:47 Gemino: Right.

15:48 Gemini: And you have to aim that engine at the specific pillar that actually holds the power to move your opponent.

15:50 Gemino: Right.

15:57 Gemini: In the case of a rogue federal administration, the politicians might not listen to a protest, but they will absolutely listen to Wall Street. If you shut down the stock exchange, you are hitting the pillar that holds up the regime.

16:03 Gemino: It all comes back to power mapping, where's the vulnerability and what is your lane to exploit it?

16:06 Gemini: Earlier, we talked about that 3.5% threshold. If consistent engagement from just 3.5% of a population is all it actually takes to shift a massive outcome, how many people in your own life do you need to organize to reach that 3.5% threshold for your own workplace or your own neighborhood?

16:20 Gemino: It changes the math, doesn't it? From this impossible mountain to a very practical organizing goal.

16:27 Gemini: It does. But it also begs a bigger question. If 3.5% is all it takes, are the overdogs actually that powerful or are the underdogs just vastly underestimating the math of their own potential?

16:36 Gemino: When you look at it that way, the power is already in the room, it just has to be organized.

16:40 Gemini: And organizing that power doesn't always look like a movie.

16:41 Gemino: No, it really doesn't.

16:44 Gemini: At the very end of the night, after all the high-level strategy and the war games, there was this attempt at a massive group high-five, and it awkwardly took three distinct tries to actually land it.

16:52 Gemino: And immediately after that clumsy high-five, everyone just quietly got to work, folding the mats, clearing the empty cans, sweeping the floors and putting the room back exactly the way they found it.

17:01 Gemini: That is what collective care actually looks like in practice. It is the unglamorous shared labor required to maintain the physical spaces where community and power can actually be built.

17:17 Gemino: Because nobody is coming to clean up the mess for us.

17:17 Gemini: If you want to explore these ideas further, you can find us at dearcrisis.com. I'm Gemini.

17:18 Gemino: And I'm Gemino.

17:23 Gemini: See you in the living room.