How We Build Power

Movements keep splitting into two camps. The visionaries call for a general strike or a revolution and float free of anyone's real life. The pragmatists grind out a 2% raise and quietly stop asking for more. Each camp drives the other crazy, and each is half right. The practical radical refuses the split: radical in the dream, sober about power, with a plan to win in the short term that still points at the long one. That kind of strategy used to be a living tradition. Rebuilding it is the work.

The class opens where strategy can't: what are we fighting for? What would the world look like if we were in charge? Stephanie's students often get emotional at that question, because no one has ever asked them, and thinking past the next paycheck turns out to be genuinely hard. Visioning is a muscle you build: by asking coworkers what keeps them up at night, by reading science fiction, and by studying the movements that wrote their dreams down, from the South African Freedom Charter to the Black Panthers' Ten-Point Program to Ecuador's Buen Vivir plan. A vision can also be short and dated. The UAW's call for a general strike on May 1, 2028 names four demands: wages, health care, retirement, time.

A vision without a plan is science fiction. The second skill is a sober read of the terrain, what many traditions call conjunctural analysis: where are your people, what do you have, what does the other side have, and what will they use against you. Stephanie doesn't love the war metaphor, but the discipline holds. Rigorous strategy is the bridge between the world as it is and the world as it could be, and it needs solid footing on both banks.

The book traces seven lineages of social change, and every large transformative movement in history has drawn on all of them. Base-building wins power through numbers: unions, neighborhood associations, faith groups. Disruption stops those in charge from doing what they want, through strikes, boycotts, sit-ins. Narrative shift helps people make sense of the world. Electoral change is about governing and rewriting the rules, not just winning a seat. Inside/outside campaigns pair movements with allies in office to land big reforms. Momentum spreads a movement fast by handing people the DNA of a campaign. Collective care keeps people alive and steady enough to act at all. No organization runs all seven. The point is a movement ecosystem where the pieces, sometimes in real tension, add up to more than their sum.

Part 1 closed with a tool from the Grassroots Power Project for holding the short and long term together. Start from your current fights. Then name the structural transformation that would actually shift wealth and power on your issue. That far horizon is where separate movements discover they share a target, even when this year's campaigns compete. Work backwards to milestone reforms and stepping-stone fights that build capacity along the way, and keep checking the same three things: are we building power, building alliances, and waging the battle of big ideas? We don't yet have the power to win the world we deserve. The near-term fights are how we get it.

Conjunctural analysis means understanding the present strategically, to expose fault lines and openings. Who are the dominant forces? What kinds of power do they hold, and how do they keep it? Who is organized on the other side? Will this crisis settle back into the status quo or break into something new? The discipline keeps you from dogmatism, because the terrain moves: narrative power in the age of social media is not what it was in the 1950s. Stephanie is careful with us-versus-them framing. The book says underdogs and overdogs instead, because the honest question is who benefits from the status quo staying put and who would benefit from change. And the defining feature of this moment, here and globally, is rising authoritarianism.

One live answer to this moment is to block the authoritarian consolidation without getting trapped in pure defense, and to keep building the alternative at the same time. That means two coalitions at once. A broad Coalition of the No, a united front against authoritarianism open to anyone who opposes the takeover, business people and unionists and faith leaders alike, on the model of the united front that helped defeat apartheid in South Africa. And a smaller Coalition of the Yes, an alliance aligned on the long-term vision of the world we deserve. Stay only in the first and the best you win is a blocked takeover and a lame alternative. The blocking fight runs through the midterms. The building fight starts now and never stops.

Say you have none of the six forms: no money, no political access, no grip on the narrative. What's left is the power you can always come back to. Solidarity: neighbor to neighbor, coworker to coworker, follower to follower. It's the people power every other form gets built from, and the other side knows it, which is why their oldest weapon is divide and conquer. The cartoon on the slide said it in one line: "Careful, mate, that foreigner wants your cookie." Blame the immigrants, blame China, blame trans folks. Split us left against right, by pay, by birthplace. Naming the move is how you refuse it.

We usually can't take down an authoritarian ruler head-on, so the move is to go after the pillars holding the regime up: business, faith institutions, unions, schools, media, the civil service. Their coalition uses solidarity too, and it is not a natural one, so look for the wedge. The book's example is Project C, Birmingham, 1963. Civil-rights organizers mapped the white power structure into four parts (elected officials, business, the hardcore racist organizations, the general public), decided their leverage was on business, and launched an economic boycott. A boycott takes near-total solidarity, and they had it. The businesses felt the pain and came to the table to negotiate desegregation. Divide and conquer, pointed at the ruling coalition for once.

No organization is perfect and nobody does everything. Run a power analysis on your own group: where are you strong, and where do you only have one kind of power and need partners? Then find your lane. In New York the lanes already exist. Hands Off NYC runs neighborhood defense against ICE. May Day Strong is building disruption capacity across unions, faith, and community groups. DSA is closing in on 16,000 members in the city. Tenant unions and community organizations are everywhere. The deep example is Minnesota, where groups that used to lobby against each other spent 10 to 15 years aligning calendars, contracts, and a shared power analysis. When ICE came this past year, that alignment is what let them mount a citywide response. Two numbers to keep: union involvement measurably improves the odds of reversing democratic backsliding, and research on civil resistance suggests around 3.5% of a population, consistently and actively engaged, dramatically shifts the outcome.