You cannot get there from here: naming the people-power trap

I opened The Age of Junk Politics with these sentences:

We cannot win. We cannot win our elections and we cannot steer ourselves into a healthy political grounding — one that works for the betterment of our societies — at least not the way we are currently running our political campaigns.

I still believe it. After publishing, people who read it asked the obvious question, and asked it kindly, which somehow made it harder. All right. Then what? They’re right in that it is a great deal easier to define a problem than to propose a clear solution. 

The book you are reading here, aims to move past the diagnosis. Each chapter starts by looking at this problem from a different angle, and aims to move us beyond diagnosing the problem.

The first six chapters have been about the world. In a nutshell, politics turned into something you consume rather than something you do, and the disengagement everyone laments is exactly what we built. Constituents became audiences and wallets, so that two weeks out from an election the money reliably goes into advertising rather than into people. The relationships that actually produce power got replaced by transactional contact, at volume. Strategy stopped being something you do and became something you rent, from a class of people who are expensive and few. What that class produces at scale is a mass-manufactured politics that persuades very few. The money model underneath all of it is failing too, not because the base is tired of being asked, but because it is tired of being extracted for nothing.

The six days since have been about the people who have to act inside all of that. The organizer. The field or campaign director. Whoever ends up carrying the volunteer program when nobody else will. If that is your job, those six days were about the day to day. The real blocks in working with supporters, and why we are so often paralyzed into following the patterns outlined above.

Maybe you work at an organization. You wanted to try people power and were afraid to, because when it goes wrong the name on it is yours. The mess that followed the last attempt was never the people's fault. The structure wasn’t there to hold it in place. The program you did build is capped at whatever one organizer can carry in a week, which is fifteen groups on a good year. The gap you were actually worried about was never anybody's character; it was competence, and we spent twenty years policing the wrong half. The work we hand out, then, is the work that requires no trust at all, which harnesses people rather than developing them. The space in which somebody might have made a real decision was never drawn, so both the over-stepping and the freezing came from the same missing sentence.

Read down that list and it looks like twelve declarative sentences, connected but each a problem in its own right. And this is where I give you some good news: It is one.

Here is the first circle, and the reason why decentralized and distributed structures are essential. 

People are the only thing that produces power at the scale this work requires. People only stick around if the work is real. And real work requires trusting somebody with projects that matter. Trust, as I argued three days ago, is built on a track record accumulated by doing tasks that have stakes, that have meaning, that is real. 

But it appears impossibly unattainable because there is no starting point to get in. There is no first step in that sequence that does not require the last one. 

Here is the second circle: the risk of trying.

Suppose you decide to break in anyway. You draw the decision space. You write the guardrails and you hold them on the week where everything is stressful and you want control back as the chaos feels overwhelming. You coach a first-time leader through the easy calls so she’s prepared for the hard ones. All of that is right, and all of it costs the one thing we’re all lacking: sustained human attention. The luxurious resource of our time from the person who know her situation.

That is one organizer's week, on top of their normal workload. The program gets capped at what they can take on.. At that size it will never produce a result large enough to justify hiring a person to manage the program full time. And in the best case scenario, where this hire does happen, the result is capped at that person’s workweek. 

Around both circles sits the incentive that stops anybody from testing either: doing nothing. Not engaging supporters has a guaranteed floor and it leaves no evidence. Nobody writes a post-mortem for a program that was never attempted. The performance review doesn’t lament that you didn’t try something new.

And so we’re stuck in the cycle: 

You cannot build people power without giving people real work. You cannot give people real work without the capacity to develop and support them. You cannot get that capacity without people power.

Ouroboros. Sisyphisian. A million metaphors to describe that the outcome relies on the solution. I have been calling this the people-power trap.

What makes it a trap rather than a failure is that everybody in it is behaving reasonably. The staffer protecting their name is right, because the exposure is real and it lands on them alone. The director who limits the program to what one person can watch is right, because a program nobody can watch is how the last one ended. The board asking for a number this quarter is right, because that is what a board is for. The organizer who spends her week on the fifteen groups they already have, rather than the forty who want to start, is making the only defensible choice available to them.

Every arrow in that diagram is somebody being sensible. A failure you can fix by trying harder. But this is not a failure. It’s inaction.

If you have recognized yourself anywhere in the past twelve days, you will know the specific exhaustion this produces. It is not the exhaustion of not knowing what to do. Our sector has never had that problem. Everyone agrees about leadership development. Everyone has agreed for forty years. Every serious organizer I know could describe the right version of this in a sentence, and a good number of them have written it down at length.

Agreement was never the binding constraint. That is the part that grinds people down. Being right about all of it, in a room full of people who are also right about all of it, and watching none of it move. Seeing a trap clearly is not the same as having a way out of it. Mostly it is just heavier.

Last year I stopped waiting for the forces to be argued out of existence, and instead started looking for the leverage point where a small push moves something large. I was inspired by Donella Meadows, the systems thinker, who spent a career on where to intervene in systems that will not respond to effort. Her central finding is the useful one here: leverage points are almost never where people look for them. We reliably push on the obvious places, which are the weakest points in any system. More money, more staff, more volume, more messages. She thought we usually push them in the wrong direction as well.

Where is the actual one?

Every circle above rests on a single fact, and once you see it under all of them it is difficult to see anything else. Holding alignment and developing people has always required someone’s focus and dedicated time, and it’s the one input in this entire system that cannot be scaled. Everything else has scaled. Messages scaled. Fundraising scaled. Advertising scaled to two and a half billion dollars in a single American election cycle. The one thing that never scaled is the thing that turns a supporter into somebody who can lead a project, because it has always required another person, sitting with her, over months.

That is not one of the twelve problems. It is the floor they are all standing on.

I’ve hinted that I believe  generative AI opens up some possibilities here. Despite the fact that there are few people exploring this possibility, and that many people on our side of the fight are worried about some elements of generative AI, I do think this is the type of problem AI models are designed to help answer. If that makes you uncomfortable I ask you to sit with me for a minute regardless.  Let me say only what I am confident of. The constraint underneath this trap is not a law of nature. It was a fact about what expertise cost and who has it. That fact is changing, quickly, in a way most of this sector is currently experiencing as a threat rather than as an opportunity. Whether the change turns out to be the best thing that has happened to organizing in forty years or the worst thing that has ever happened to it depends entirely on what gets built, who builds it, and what they think people are for.

There are real costs here: environmental, cultural, and to people's data. There is also an argument to be had about whether a movement that opposes what this technology is doing to workers can pick it up at all. But I don’t think it’s something we can afford to simply write off. 

So let’s sit with the polarizing question of where AI belongs in our politics. Let’s look at how it might be primed to solve some problems and how it has already exacerbated others. And, of course, how it might help solve the people-power trap.

That argument is what the next six chapters are for.