Choose Your Role
We must rely on each other. There's too much to do.
Before the election, it was “give it all you’ve got.” Now, the tanks are empty, the tasks insurmountable, and there is no end in sight. We must make our work sustainable. We need self-care, family and holidays, but we also need division of labor. We are a big community. We can lean on each other and take turns. Find a role in which to serve, and let others carry the other loads. We need protectors, watchdogs, resistors, change agents, creators, institution builders and more. Pick a role.
Thank you for reading Reframing America! I need your help to continue this critical mission. The best thing you can do is to forward this email to everyone you know who cares about improving how we communicate with the American people.
There are several wonderful maps or breakdowns of the many roles involved in political and social justice work, and you may find your place through one of those, if you don’t see it here.
This list is focused on the specific missions we face right now: limiting the harm of the Trump presidency and taking power back at the earliest opportunity.
1. Watch and Warn
Some of us need to dig deep into the dark side of what is possible, to study fascism and tyranny and help us all understand how it works. People like Sarah Kendzior and Timothy Snyder help us know what to look for. Those of us in policy areas or with constituency groups must sound the alarms at the dangerous things that might otherwise go unnoticed inside separate communities and government departments. We also need to watchdog the legacy media, for what it’s worth.
Your job is to make sure that nothing gets by un-noticed, that they don’t get any wins by catching us off guard You enable us to intervene earlier in the process. Thank you for being willing to live in a state of alertness and watch for the worst, so that others don’t have to.
2. Resist
Many of us are already pushing back every step of the way. More of us are getting prepared and will join as soon as we are able. The watchers will warn us and show us where to dig the trench or throw the monkey wrench. We need to make the opposition fight for every inch of ground. We will resist. Delay. Object. Obstruct. Whatever it takes. We will call offices, organize protests, apply pressure, file lawsuits. We will educate the public and build our numbers. We will build coalitions and support each others’ actions.
The movement is ready for this. We weren’t in 2016. We barely existed then. But we’re ready now. We’ve been learning, growing, specializing and coordinating. We have matured into a force to be reckoned with.
3. Protect
We need to lock arms and stand between the bullies and the people they attack. In many places, the harming is already off to the races. The Texas state legislature has apparently just proposed 32 anti-trans laws. Florida. Ugh. They are already well down the road to fascism. We need to help and protect the people who are being singled out by these horrific laws. As the Trump administration starts to take hold, we will need to protect everyone who pushes back, inside our government and out.
Cue the lawyers. Support the ACLU. Build the red-state-to-blue railroad? This task may prove monumental, but we have to try our best to make sure that no-one faces the bullies alone.
4. Push Forward
Some people will have to put all their energies toward keeping the momentum going on the transition to clean unlimited energy. We are at a critical point. We have jump started the transition with the Inflation Reduction Act, but we have to keep it running and accelerating. We cannot afford a set back. If the Trump administration tries to roll it back, we can resist, but we can also work on the private sector, on change through culture, and with other countries. We just have to keep pressing forward in every way possible.
5. Drive Change
We have to win back Congress in two years. Yikes.
The Democratic Party needs help. The Democratic Party is also is not a thing. It is a historical legacy. It is millions of voters and activists. It is current and former elected officials and their caucuses. It is donors, big and small. It is voices: journalists, writers and content creators. It is industries of campaign professionals. It is thousands of committees at the local, country, state and federal level and their underpaid or not paid, exhausted staffers. It is a broken brand. It is a community that has been under siege for decades. What it is not, is any one top-down entity that can control what any of the rest of it does. Understanding this is necessary to enact change.
I have been studying this ecosystem for many years. I have even worked with various Democratic Party committees to facilitate some improvements at the state and national level.
I am working with people who are interested in helping “the Democratic Party” become what we all need it to be. Not just criticizing, but doing the hard work of building something better, and that includes – potentially – whole new entities to do what “the Party” does not currently have the capacity or expertise to do. These include 1. developing and promoting a Party “brand,” and 2. building the infrastructure for year-round local organizing, everywhere.
6. Build
In addition to building new political infrastructure, we must build a new media ecosystem. We have to build, not just to make safe spaces for ourselves, but to reach the entire American electorate. This may have to be an all-non-profit endeavor, as we have seen what profit-driven investors do to news outlets. Also, this is not just to provide a friendly platform to left-leaning political people.
We need this ecosystem to expose the American public to reality with the same degree of force that the entire right-wing media ecosystem exposes people to disinformation. This task seems enormous, but then again, just look at what people like Courier News have been able to do, to mix culture and public affairs in a way that appeals to a broader community.
Some of you will be working on building the institutions we need: more outlets, more funding, more people. Others will have to work at building the vision of a better reality that these channels will deliver to people.
7. Envision
Calling all political and non-political philosophers, policy experts and innovators, writers, linguists, cognitive scientists, behavioral scientists, marketers, persuaders, researchers, ethnographers, listeners, branders, storytellers, journalists, graphic artists, cartoonists, podcasters and filmmakers, curriculum developers, and so on.
This is my passion. What do we want to say to the world, once we have the means through which to say it? How do we articulate the world from our moral perspective? How do we “sell” what is real and good? How do we figure out who we really are and what we really believe? Building a better future requires that we are first able to imagine it. Then we have to share that vision with everyone else.
One thing I know for sure that this will include, is a way to communicate both the fundamental brokenness of the economic system we have now, and the vision of a way forward that breaks free of the false dichotomy of the free-market versus the safety net or socialism.
I don’t know how this is actually going to work. It may be more of a culture-wide mission than a concrete project. I just know it needs to be done, and that I want in.
For me to function, I need to live on the “fix-it” side of the equation. I hope you find a place in this project that allows you to make positive change, but also charges your personal batteries. The movement needs all of us.
This Thanksgiving, I will be reflecting on this: I have never been more grateful to be just one of all of you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
In solidarity, always,
Antonia
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Contact me at antonia@antoniascatton.com or (202) 922-6647
Excellent post.
We can't wring our hands for the next four years, holding our breath and waiting for someone to save us.
It's up to us.
My role is to Envision, Educate and Build.
If we communicate, network, and work together we can make a big difference.
Restack.
This is a call to action.
J.
In keeping with the holiday fast approaching, thank you for this menu of ways to take action and REFUSE to obey in advance.
We, and others before us, have fought and won against those who want to take us backwards and keep us down. I've long argued, winning progress and freedom for all, is not a sprint, nor is it a marathon; it's a relay—in which we all have our laps to run, and our wins come as much from carrying the baton, as they do the handoffs from those who came before us, and to those who will follow us.
Perspective is a key ingredient in this relay, and one POV I would love to encourage all of us who are taking action/choosing a role etc. to keep in mind is the following:
Successful Democratic messaging going forward must recognize that we aren't just competing against MAGA messaging (which is straight up disinformation, lies, projection and gaslighting), we also have to counter the destructive framing of the mainstream/traditional media, which both sane-washes and creates false equivalences.
A couple of examples from the countless media failures to inform and hold power accountable: the media 'calls' the results of our elections, before all votes are actually counted, this does great disservice to all of us as it mis-shapes the core narrative of an election before the true story of that election can even be understood, let alone told.
Also, the media constantly says we are a nation divided in half (on its face, an easily disprovable falsehood).
- There are 334M Americans; 244M are 'voting eligible'...when only 76M voted for MAGA at top of the ticket, that's not even a third of the entire voting eligible population and far under a quarter of all Americans!
- As the votes continue to come in, do most of us know that more Americans in 2024 voted for someone NOT Tr*mp, than for him?
- Or that Clinton 2016's popular vote margin is bigger than the convicted felon's?
- Or, that the last time a Presidential election was this close, it was 2000 (when Gore won more votes than Bush, but was denied a recount by the same corrupt Justices who have been steadily working to take away freedoms from anyone, but a white, wealthy, well-connected few billionaires)?
- Also, for all the hand-wringing around sexism (not disputing per se), why did we not stop to notice that 12 million more Americans have now voted for a woman, than in 2016 (73M vs 65M)?
Instead, we have internalized this idea that we are in the minority; WE are not.
We cling to the idea that we should 'resist' - acting from a position of weakness, rather than the idea that we should 'refuse' - standing in a position of strength.
We forget (having grown so accustomed to the cognitive dissonance) that we have an arcane and byzantine Electoral College construct that decides Presidential elections, an artifice from the slave-owning days of our nation's founding, that continues to reinforce race/class divisions by hollowing out our civil and political society and sense of both individual and collective agency.
We should message to convey that there are more of us than them, and that ALL of us share common values (justice, equality, liberty), paramount of which are our freedoms!
The country as whole shares the freedom to dream and grow up to live out those dreams, the freedom to simply be true to ourselves and be who we are, and the freedom to love whomever we love! We all want those common values, and there's no reason we can't ALSO lift up our specific individual stories of difference to illustrate just how universal those values are no matter our race, birthplace, home, or backgrounds.
Even on the divisive issue of abortion—shouldn't we all have the freedom to decide if, when, or how to start or grow our own families? Why should a handful of powerful people in government take that freedom from us?
Or, why should a handful of greedy corporations profit by polluting our land, water and air, and then buy judges and politicians, just so they don't have the pay the taxes they owe, or be held accountable for their crimes? All this, while those same big-hidden money interests deny working families the freedom to earn a living wage—so we don't have to choose between food, housing, child care, education, healthcare and senior care? We (writ large) are left fighting for scraps while wealth inequality accelerates and is at a level unseen since the era of the Robber Barons or just before the Great Depression.
We can speak BOTH to our diverse, distinct core democratic constituencies AND to the majority of Americans across every constituency, but we have to change HOW we do it.
Borrowing, as you so effectively share already on your blog, from the incredible thinkers/communicators/organizers: Anat Shenker-Osorio, George Lakoff, Marshall Ganz.
1. Start w/ shared values, i.e., what we're FOR, not against (that just echoes/amplifies opposition—learn about the how negation works in neural networks and the 'illusory effect')
2. Call out opposition's actual bad acts AND their motivation (arguments about process/hypocrisy don't matter, people need to have the dots connected—MAGA does this over and over; it's just that they just lie and target the vulnerable rather than the actual villains)
3. End w/ vision of the future we all want and that through our agency, through our community, through our organizing, we can realize (again—because we've done it before)!
If the Democratic party and its allies could adopt such a framework, we would be able to effectively speak to all Americans...but doing so requires all of us to be disciplined, to follow the example set, and to be repetitive, and in this—unlike the fascists MAGAs/Repubs—we face our single greatest challenge.
Because by nature/definition, the 'left' so cherishes our individuality and freedoms, that we put the freedom not follow what's told to us or not to stay inside the lines—especially, when someone else is drawing those lines—above the all-important goal of actually winning over the hearts and minds of our sisters and brothers.
Because even though we already have effective messaging frameworks, we (currently) don't have the mindset to deploy it at scale as needed. The singular mindset that has allowed MAGA to successfully bring a 2X-popular vote losing, 2X-impeached, 34X criminally-indicted, jury-convicted rapist and traitor, who began his first run for office by selling his country out to the highest bidder, and then ended it by leading a violent and deadly attack, built on nothing but lies, to overturn our free and fair elections.
But we can succeed in fighting for our values—because we have before, and because we must now.
Antonia, I wish you and yours a wonderful time of gathering and for much in your own life for which to be thankful, because your inspired writings are one of the resources for which I am personally truly grateful.