The Revolution Will Be LIVE: Top 10 Reasons to Organize in the Real World
The “revolution” will not be televised or on social media. What makes a political movement or campaign catch fire? Word-of-mouth and live human interaction. Being present, modeling our values, and building political power within communities will save our society and our souls.
The Revolution Will Be LIVE
You already know about the part of my mission that involves reframing the political debate. My long-term mission is to move the entire political process away from raising money and spending it on short-term manipulation, and toward what it should be.
Politics should be people having real conversations with their friends, neighbors, and entire communities about what we need from each other and from our government, and who will best represent us in that government.
To get there, we need to build local political agency: campaign capacity within communities themselves. That is the best strategy for winning elections, defeating the influence of money in politics, and reversing the rising tide of fascism in both our politics and our society.
Here are ten reasons why we need to take the movement to the real world.
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1. Elections are decided by people who do not follow political news.
Post-debate analysis shows that Kamala Harris lost people who do not follow political news at all by 19 points.1 I am far less concerned about “winning the news cycle” than I am about reaching the people who live outside the bubble, especially right now when just staying informed can be detrimental to your mental health.
To reach those who are not paying attention, we need to get out there in the real world where they will trip over us as they go about their daily lives. I have always been a passionate advocate of personal engagement and visibility. We will have more impact on these people by wearing a campaign tee while picking up the kids from school than by appearing in the New York Times.
2. The “Enshittification” of the Internet.
The drive to monetize is turning everything online into garbage. Fear drives clicks while good content that influences real-world outcomes gets buried.
AI is also accelerating the inevitable collapse of trust in Internet content. Disinformation was limited by the capacity of live people working in troll farms. AI will blow that up exponentially. You already cannot believe what you see with your own eyes. AI will continue to train itself on own crappy output until the Internet is hopelessly polluted. People are already starting to unplug.
3. Word-of-mouth is the only form of persuasion that works.
Which is more effective: a TV ad for a Honda or a neighbor telling you why they love their Honda? A century of marketing research confirms that a recommendation from a friend or neighbor2 is the number one thing that drives decision making.
Studies also show that generating those personal recommendations is how virtually all advertising works.3 To achieve desired behavior, ads must generate word-of-mouth and keep that word of mouth going, primarily by triggering additional conversations with visual reminders in the environment. That is why products use visual marketing like packaging, displays and branded merch.
This reality argues for reconfiguring our political strategy. We should deliver content to our supporters that is designed to be verbally sharable so they can spread it to their friends and neighbors in live conversation, and then blanket our environment with visual cues like lawn signs to keep those conversations alive.
Even someone who does not have the time to volunteer can still be equipped with talking points that they can use in conversation. Everybody should be a messenger.
4. Community building is campaign magic.
The political book I recommend most to people (other than George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant) is Applebee’s America4 by Doug Sosnik, Matthew Dowd, and Ron Fournier. This remarkable book outlines how businesses, churches and political campaigns achieved massive growth with little or no advertising, through intentional community building.
I have worked on countless political campaigns across the country. The one thing that separates a predictable campaign from one that catches fire and vastly outperforms expectations is the extent to which it generates a real sense of community.
Political campaigns are the perfect engine for community building. People with similar values bond around a shared high-stakes endeavor punctuated by ritual events like debates, rallies, and the election itself. They find meaningful roles and develop friendships.
Unfortunately, as soon as the election is over, we shut the whole thing down: close their meeting space and cut off their communication with each other. In my humble opinion, throwing that magic in the trash every two years is a crime against humanity!
Meanwhile, the Right keeps everybody’s eyes on the latest online outrage while they quietly invest in real-world community building, like campus groups for young men and “Moms for Liberty.” The Republican Party even funded community centers in communities of color.
We can create the optimal conditions for sustained community building by inviting people in, giving them challenging work and meaningful roles, providing communication channels and opportunities for social interaction and, where possible, physical space to gather.
5. Loneliness feeds fascism.
We’ve all heard of the loneliness epidemic. Covid only exacerbated a trend that was already well underway. People are addicted to dopamine hits and alienated from real life. As David Hogg suggests,5 we need to get young people off of their phones and help them remember how to talk to real live humans.
Loneliness and isolation drives nihilism and fascism (not to mention mass shooting incidents.) The best way to prevent that is to fight isolation, to champion a vision of society in which we are all in this together and nobody is being left behind.
6. Reality is the antidote to disinformation.
The best way to fight their depiction of us on social media and Fox News is to be a living example of what a Democrat or a progressive activist really is. We have to put the lie to their demonization by modeling our best values in our personal interaction. We have to “be the brand.”
7. We need to show up for people.
The number one complaint we hear from voters is that Democrats do not care about them: “They only show up when they want something from us.” There is no substitute for showing up, for physical presence in a community. Even if the candidate cannot make it, just sending someone to represent: to hang out, listen, talk with people and take notes, makes people feel valued, and word will get around.
I wish we could have a Democratic community center in every town, but even without that, we should do whatever we can to be visible, to be present and accounted for, to be of service, all year round.
8. We need the human intelligence.
We should never, ever, ever be caught off guard in an election because we did not know what people were feeling on the ground. One of the most valuable roles our people in communities can play is that of listener. Call it informal focus groups, human intelligence gathering, or ethnographic research.
We do not have to settle for being culturally or economically tone-deaf. We have eyes and ears everywhere. We have to listen to our people, ask them to listen to others, funnel that feedback into actionable advice, and actually heed it!
9. Local political capacity is the only way to defeat the influence of money in politics.
Fighting the influence of money in politics is what got me into politics, but it is nearly impossible to get legislators to change the system that got them there. We have to get people elected without being dependent on donors, and that means figuring out how to win without lots of money. Over many years of study and experimentation, I discovered something really great: the things we do that cost the most are the least effective, and the things we do that cost the least are the most effective.
We can run volunteer-driven, large-scale, word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that would make giant corporations like Coca-Cola green with envy.
I have spent much of my life preaching the gospel of building political campaign capacity within local communities themselves. The way to leverage the most value out of every campaign dollar we raise, is to support and equip volunteers, because…
10. Skilled volunteerism is our biggest untapped resource.
Campaigns used to be non-professional: more like “Let’s put on a show! You sew the costumes! I’ll paint the sets!” They were a community effort: all hands on deck. Then we turned everything over to consultants, and the role of volunteer was reduced to a cog in a so-called “coordinated” campaign.
This is a spectacular waste of our most valuable resource: the local knowledge, relationships, skills, and experience of our local volunteers.
Volunteers can do anything. Literally. Volunteers can be retired CEOs, marketing professionals, policy experts, wedding planners, sign painters, chefs, data analysts, community leaders, program directors for their local Elks Club, PTA heads, and restaurant owners. There is very little that people are capable of that cannot be applied productively to a campaign, with a little creativity.
We need to give volunteers meaningful roles and the rewards of community belonging. If all we offer them is a temporary role as an interchangeable cog, they will take their labor elsewhere.
BONUS REASON: Because we need the fuel.
The Internet is a valuable organizing and communication tool. But it should not be mistaken for reality.
Try to envision a politics the way I have described it. I know it is possible because I have lived it, if only in glimpses here and there. The camaraderie. The challenge. The wins and the heartbreaks. The magic.
Since the first time I was in a campaign office and someone came in and said, “I would like to help” and sought nothing in return, volunteers have given me faith in humanity and hope for the future.
Throughout history, writers, filmmakers, and philosophers who have endured war, oppression, and atrocities have chronicled the irrepressible human spirit: our ability to fuel ourselves through the darkest times by finding purpose and community in the struggle.
This is where we are. And I, for one, need the fuel.
People use the term “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and often fail to give credit to the original source: the brilliant radical activist, poet, and jazz artist, Gil Scott-Heron. I am a huge fan and had the pleasure of seeing him perform live on several occasions. If you have never heard the whole song before, I highly recommend that you check it out! Spoiler alert: according to Scott-Heron, the revolution will most definitely be live.
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Contact me at antonia@antoniascatton.com or (202) 922-6647
NOTES
By Antonia Scatton, ReframingAmerica.Substack.com, December 17, 2024: Why Trump Won Voters Who Don't Consume News
Ed Keller and Jonathan Berry (2003). The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy. New York: The Free Press.
Jonah Berger and Eric M. Schwartz (2011). What Drives Immediate and Ongoing Word of Mouth? Journal of Marketing Research, 48 (5), 869-880.
Fournier, Ron, Sosnik, Douglas B., and Dowd, Matthew (2006). Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community. Simon & Schuster
Gabe Fleisher, Wake Up to Politics, January 31, 2025: David Hogg: The Phones Are Dooming Democrats
If only the party infrastructure would listen. We could actually save Democracy. The grassroots are the salvation, yet we are always banging up against a wall of resistance. Makes you wonder what the true agenda is for the powers that be?
This is so spot on. We need to engage our unengaged and under informed neighbors.
“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” - Plato