Trump resisters take key 1st step with Wonkathon
Even though it is only a few months old, the fledgling resistance to President Trump is realizing it needs to address three big questions: How do we keep people from burning out? With so many new groups addressing the same issues, how do we keep from duplicating our efforts?
And perhaps the most daunting: How do we transform all this street energy and anger into some electoral wins in 2018 and beyond?
The resisters are also realizing there no easy answers, especially just two months into Trump’s presidency. But a key first step happened Friday when representatives of 31 of the
approximately 200 anti-Trump groups that have formed since November met in Oakland at what organizers dubbed a Wonkathon — a chance for its political nerds and newcomers to connect in-person and figure out their next steps.
Knitting together the movement’s diverse and occasionally duplicative efforts is what it needs to do now. So, organized by the new Bay Area resistance group Wall-of-Us, led by women, Friday’s conference stirred the political startups in with longtime activists and some boldface names of the progressive movement, including retired UC Berkeley professor and message-framing guru George Lakoff, Daily Kos blog founder Markos Moulitsas, and best-selling authors Steve Phillips (“Brown is the New White”) and Arlie Russell Hochschild (“Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right”).
“I’ve have never seen so much energy in politics in my life,” said the 75-year-old Lakoff. “But yes, there is a lot of duplication at this point. That’s OK. It will get settled out.”
The faithful also heard some early warning alarms sounded about potential burnout among those who have been flooding congressional town halls and jamming House phone lines over the past few weeks.
An online survey of 1,000 people taken this month by the new resistance group CitizenBe found that while average resisters took 2.5 actions like calling their member of Congress last month, they’re only willing to take half that many next month. A survey of Wall-of-Us members found that while their favorite activity was marching in protest, their least favorite was making phone calls on behalf of the resistance.
These behavioral researchers are trying to figure out how to keep these acts of resistance “fun” for newbies — and how often to ask them to do things.
“We have a lot of evidence suggesting that if you do something once, you’re less likely to do something similar if you have the opportunity,” said Julie O’Brien, one of the scientists who conducted the CitzenBe survey. “If you do something emotionally exhausting and you’ve invested a lot of effort in it and it doesn’t feel that great, then you’re not going to be energized to do something again.”
The concern is that activists feel that because they, for example, participated in the Women’s March or called their member of Congress a couple of times they can “check that box” and return to their usual life. Instead, movement organizers need to habituate these resistance activities, O’Brien said.
“What (the results) tells us is that we need to really, really strategically think about how we craft that behavior,” she said. “If we want somebody to call (Congress), we can tell them, ‘Pour yourself a glass of wine and call.’ Or ‘Find your best friends and have a calling party.’ Find ways to make it pleasurable.”
Many activists Friday found these preliminary insights helpful, especially because the movement is filling with many people who have not done any kind of activism before.
Though the young groups have tapped into the anxieties of several million Americans since the election, the average age of these groups is 11 weeks old, and they are largely run by volunteers who have day jobs. And what was obvious from Friday was that in their zeal to go out and do something to resist Trump, several are focusing on the same things.
Several organization leaders introduced themselves as some iteration of “organizing tech for the resistance” or “working on flipping Republican districts.”
But in the tradition of Silicon Valley, some of those startups are learning how to fail fast and learn from their early mistakes in this highspeed political era. And some will not survive.
“Yeah, there is some duplication out there,” Nicole Derse, a San Francisco campaign consultant who served as a senior adviser on organizing to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said in between advising the Wonkathoners. “But that’s a good problem to have. I’d rather have people stepping on each other’s toes a little bit than not stepping up.
“And ‘more tech’ isn’t the answer to everything. A lot of voters are over 50. We’re going to have to find the right mix of tech and good old-fashioned door-to-door outreach,” Derse said.
The difference between political startups and tech ones is that “this isn’t a competitive space,” said Vanessa Archambault, a Silicon Valley software engineer who helped found Flippable, which works to flip state legislatures from Republican to Democrat. “We’re all trying to achieve the same objective. We’re all talking — and if someone has a better way to do something, then we can all share resources.”
The half-day conference at the Kapor Center for Social Impact was helpful, sometimes painfully so for her. Archambault conducted a small focus group Friday on the site’s latest iteration, “and some of the feedback I got was tough for me to hear as a software engineer. But it’s all good. Helpful,” she said, and smiled.
With so many new people coming into the movement, it is important that they connect what they’re doing with “the people who are in the communities that are going to be af-
fected by some of Trump’s policies,” said Guillermo Mayer, president and CEO of Public Advocates, a 46-year-old San Francisco group that advocates for low-income communities. “I’m seeing glimmers of that. The desire is there.”
Organizers from the new Sanctuary Restaurants movement — where restaurant owners, workers and patrons bind together to protect workers without documents from immigration authorities — found connections with several of the tech groups.
Starting Monday, Lakoff will be working with Indivisible, a breakout star of the resistance movement with more than 5,000 nationwide chapters, by helping it frame the messages its activists are using to pressure members of Congress at town hall meetings. Next month, he will lead a messageframing tutorial that will be live-streamed to all Indivisible chapters.
But while a progressive like Moulitsas said he is “blown away” by the energy he’s seeing, he offered a cautionary note: “The fault lines in the progressive movement are not Hillary versus Bernie. They are not. The fault line is resistance versus opposition.” Opposition, he said, is not an option with Trump as president.
And he cautioned the groups not to let the Democratic Party or other large groups try to co-opt them.
Mrinalini Chakraborty, a national team coordinator for the Women’s March, sounded another cautionary note: “We may have millions of people who came to the marches around the world. But you have to remember that so many of us are still startups.”