What Do We Do Now? : How Social Movement Theory Explains the Failure of Biden, the Resurgence of Trump and How To Move Forward

In all my years of organizing I’ve learned that there is a deceptively simple formula to change hearts and minds and by extension institutions and societies: agitation+education+ love and support = change. The agitation is what most people familiar with social movements think of in terms of social change. As Frederick Douglas famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will.” We almost never change course when the course is comfortable and rewarding. If there is no friction, there will be no change. 

Social movements tend to achieve change by escalating the tensions of social contradictions through agitation. We talked extensively about this concept of social contradiction in our “Reflections of A Decade of New African Movement” series. So I won’t belabor the point here. Suffice it say:

Social movements are the process of people with a common outlook and experience coming together in informal ways to move towards a shared goal of social change. 

We think that a fundamental lesson to be learned is that social movements get their energy from tension of contradictions in society that propel them through movement cycles where they grow, change their own environment and must adapt to that environment to continue growing. 

A contradiction, in this social sense, is the tension between different social factors or social forces that either pull society in different directions or collide to create major social upheavals. 

Social forces are any human created ways of doing things that influence, pressure, or force people to behave, interact with others, and think in specified ways. Social forces are considered remote and impersonal because mostly people have no hand in creating them, nor do they know those who did. People can embrace social forces, be swept along or bypassed by them, and most importantly challenge them. Sociologyguide.com 

In layman's terms, whenever we find ourselves in a squeeze where some force in society is pushing us up and another is pushing us down, people will maneuver through that pressure by shooting out to the left or the right. Social movements use agitation like protests and direct actions to both increase the overall pressure and shut off escape routes to one side or the other. Social Justice movements tend to try to make it harder or less likely for people to move to the right (towards traditional hierarchies and social norms) while right wing movements try to make it harder or less desirable to move to the left (towards radical inclusion and new values systems). 

To extend the analogy, education together with love and support determine how individuals and communities respond to pressure. In the simplest sense, people generally do what they are taught and supported to do. If the police shut down spaces for building new values with mass arrests and the media spins it to say the lessons are that working outside of the system leads to chaos, people will go back to old habits of working within a broken system until the pressure gets so high that it's untenable. In those moments they might look towards whoever they believe is most likely to break the system. This is, in over simplified terms, how we get someone like Trump. Importantly, it's also who you get, someone like Bernie Sanders, FDR or MLK. 

I said this formula is deceptively simple because it leaves a lot open to context. What kind of agitation is effective and when and for whom? How do you effectively educate people en masse? How do you build systems of love and support on a societal level? These are the essential questions of social movements. 

The reality is that we don’t really grapple with these questions much anymore. Social movements around the world have followed a pretty similar pattern in the past few years. Something bad happens and people protest. As bad things keep happening or as the powers that be fumble to suppress the protests they grow. As protests grow people start to ask “well what do the protestors even want?” Then people, most of whom are not actually protestors themselves, begin to try and answer the question of what do the protestors want. This is how people generally get educated about an issue. Then, we kind of yell at each other for a while until everyone agrees it's so toxic and people start to call for healing and more transformative justice spaces that never really get to the scale of the agitation or media influenced education. 

Thus we end up with a lot of agitated and misinformed people in a social system that is weakened due to protests but with repression systems that have been invested in, also due to protests. Political parties and opportunistic social forces then try to mobilize these agitated and misinformed people towards their own ends. Sometimes you get things like Biden’s agenda for Black America (though notably not defunding the police which was the actual demand of movement organizations). More often in recent years movement energy and backlash is channeled to ends that are directly opposed to what the protestors wanted in the first place, like the election of right wing governments. This is the phenomenon that Vincent Bevins investigates in his book “If We Burn.” 

Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than under the last Trump administration. Trump is the first president in years to really understand this dynamic of social movements and try to use it to his advantage. Like Nixon before him, he tried to escalate the social tension and spin a message of “American Carnage” to educate his base on the needs for violent repression of the left. He then invested in simple stories of the inherent righteousness of his white christian nationalist base as his twisted version of love and support. 

If the pandemic had not happened and if social movements had not demonstrated through their sustained Covid-19 mutual aid that they were more capable of offering love and support to their communities than the federal government, Trump would have won a second term. 

I think this is something that we have not talked enough about. I would argue very strongly that it was not the agitation of the uprisings that denied Trump a second term but the scale of education and love and support offered by the left in those months that was the decisive factor. The strength of protests was to highlight the need for and funnel people into mutual aid efforts. I would argue that it was mutual aid at scale that provided the education and love and support to defeat Trumpism the first time. 

Mutual Aid highlighted in clear terms the fact that the agitation on the left and the right were fundamentally different. It helped frame the education around community resourcing, care economy and need for universal care that formed the basis of not only Biden's successful pitch for the Presidency but also formed the basis of most effective aspects of Bidenomics.

 Biden’s ultimate failure was a mix of unwillingness and inability to name the fact that Liberal Democratic Capitalism had failed. Biden’s push towards aggressively confronting China and refusing to allow developing countries to hold the biggest polluters accountable in the climate accords among other decisions  highlighted the undemocratic reality of the Liberal-Capitalist world order. While at the same time his support for Palestinian Genocide, which violates U.S and International law, undermined his claims of the necessity of a rules based order. 

This is a great example of perhaps the most fundamental flaw of modern liberalism: the advent of cold war liberalism where anti-communism was more important in international politics than democracy. 

[By liberalism I don’t mean socially permissive. I mean the political ideology that focuses on guaranteeing individual liberty of citizens by the implementation of a rational, rules based bureaucratic order. The idea that the act of governing is writing laws, interpreting laws and enforcing laws, particularly in ways that protect property rights. . As opposed to following the wills of the kings or implementing the will of the working classes] 

 By regulating democracy to the domestic sphere alone, Liberals ensured that their only solution to an increasingly globalized domestic population that is concerned with the welfare of other countries is to increase domestic repression. Thus, sacrificing democracy abroad ultimately doomed us at home. 

Whether it was Mccarthyism, the 1033 program that offers military equipment to trigger happy local police or the brutal repression of campus free speech in response to the genocide in Palestine, anti-democratic action by the U.S abroad always has domestic consequences. Perhaps the most illustrative example is that the most prevalent street drug of any era is tied to which region of the world the U.S is most heavily intervening in at the moment. 

Domestically, many of Biden’s policies were innovative and necessary but would take time to fully manifest their economic benefits. Instead of explaining in clear terms what neoliberalism was and how decades of disinvestment in infrastructure, education and social safety nets had created crises that would take time to fix, Biden kept asserting that everything was fine and people were complaining for no reason. Biden and his apologist went on and on about the vibes cession instead of wondering if there were intangible realities that the metrics couldn’t capture. Like, for instance, how the disruption of the supply chain under the pandemic interrupted the cycle of excessive consumption in which we are distracted by the hollowness of our lives by buying shit we don’t need. Once people took a real look at their life, they couldn’t unsee how empty and hollow it had become. 

While Biden and the democrats effectively highlighted the danger of how Trump wants to solve the crises of the system they uncut their own argument by insisting again and again the fundamentals of the clearly broken world system were--despite all evidence to the contrary--strong. 

When we say Trump rode a wave of racism and sexism we don’t just mean that he mobilized a racist and sexist base to do racist and sexist things (though he definitely did some of that). Trump effectively used racism and sexism to reframe the social contradiction that needed to be solved. Yes the system was flawed but not because it is racist and sexist, it is flawed because it allowed liberals to overacted to inequalities in the past. They continued to push for changes to the post war system after legal equality had been gained in a way that tilted the system towards minorities who would vote for them in exchange for allowing them to still get wealthy off the system. 

In other words people did not vote for Trump because they hate Black people (or other minorities) but their fundamental disregard for the welfare of minorities enabled them to overlook Trump’s vitriol. Having no care for another community with less power than yours and being willing to support policies that hurt them to help yourself is how racism practically operates most of the time. Most people mean well. And even when they don’t, hatred takes a level of energy most working people don’t have. 

The idea that the system is fundamentally sound but just needs some tweaks to account for the ways that it disadvantages minorities is not an effective counter argument to Trump’s story. The system does not work for the average white person in different--but still significant-ways than it doesn’t work for the average person of color. You cannot convince them that higher wages and low unemployment are worth terrible schools, a broken care economy, growing instability and the fact that all our so-called technological advancement has mostly led to tech solutions that kinda suck and cause more problems than they solve. When you tie this to the fact that the democratic party did sell out the working class of all races in favor of accepting a multi-cultural elite, you can see that the democratic narrative and solution is fundamentally gas-lighting the working class of all races. 

So the choice given to the working classes is ultimately between being gas-lit about your situation or believing a simplistic lie that leaves you blameless [if you’re white]. Every election progressive Black people hold our noses and stomach this democratic gas-lighting because we understand it's what the white middle class needs to believe in order to disavow  the bigger lie.  Is it really any surprise that most of the working class decided to stay home or believe the lie though? 

The central contradiction of this election is that Liberal Democratic Capitalist Order is not democratic and so incapable of providing order to our everyday lives that our daily lives are often full of untenable chaos and uncertainty. The power of the big corporations that shape our everyday lives is such that they have no competition and no longer need to produce better or cheaper  products or services to increase profits. More and more social interaction is being monetized so many people no longer remember what a healthy community feels like. 

While we all might make more money than ever before we have less and less quality goods and experiences to show for it. Better alternatives get articulate but as washed out by troves of mis and dis information.  Oh…and this state of affairs is fueling climate emergencies which set off mass migration crises and mass extinction events. People want the system destroyed and don’t believe that establishment Democrats are going to do it..because they have shown that they won’t/  

In short, our society is overdeveloped materially and underdeveloped socially, emotionally and spiritually. This is a visceral truth that right wing cultural warriors understand but misanalyze. It's not that liberal values have weakened culture. Our culture and civil society has been degraded by our sacrificing of it to justify our wars of conquest, slavery and extraction around the globe. Racism, sexism and xenophobia are merely the altars we sacrifice for our dreams for a functional society on in order to justify the terrible things we do in places like Wounded Knee, Hawaii, the Philippines and Iraq. This contradiction will not be solved with the Democrats plan of doing DEI on the death star. 

Lessons We Have To Learn

Centrists have to recognize that our refusal to actually look at our history of racism and sexism is the reason that people are so ready to believe Trump’s lie in the first place. They need to understand what Black people understand, that no one is afraid of their history as much as white people. Economic uncertainty is such a motivator for white workers precisely because it was a dividend they were promised from empire. It is the American Dream. It is the distribution of the loot they were supposed to get in exchange for assimilating into the white power structure and  accepting being policed by their need to belong to whiteness. In an empire based on extracting labor from women and racialized communities, you cannot cleanly separate economic motivations from racial or sexual anxieties. So while Trump voters might not all be bigots, their belief that their perceived kitchen table issues are more important than the feelings of safety and belonging of their neighbors of color is fundamentally racist. It is asserting that white comfort is more important than other people’s safety. 

At the same time, so called pragmatists and strategic voters have to come to understand that any solution which doesn’t address the contradiction at the heart of the problem is merely a band aid. If the democrats keep trying to solve the failure of liberalism with half-baked solutions the pressure will build until we get something even worse than Trump. They may tell themselves that a band aid is needed to stop it from blowing now but unless they invest in movements to release the pressure in a liberatory direction they are not just delaying the inevitable but turning a potentially small disruptive eruption into a dystopian cataclysm. 

Similarly, the left--particularly the chronically online left-- needs to recognize that our goal must be to actually resolve the contradictions of Liberal Capitalism. It is not enough to point out what doesn’t work or to critique power endlessly. It is not enough to be right in theory. We have to demonstrate to people who disagree with us that we not only have solutions that make their lives more meaningful and fulfilling but that we care about them and their lives. 

Facism asks us to follow leaders who do not love us. Fascism demands we take orders from people who couldn’t care less if we live or die let alone thrive. It demands that the viewpoint of power be given a privileged position with no justification. The left cannot build and grow an anti-fascist movement if we expect the same.We need to sharpen on analysis while throwing away our toxic culture. 

 We have to recognize that our righteousness is often self protective. It's too vulnerable to say, “could you please not do that, it makes me feel unsafe” so instead we say “if you do that you are a bad person.” In doing so we moralize every social interaction rather than being honest about impact, denying our own feelings and the feelings of others while trying to build a better world. 

I promise you this does not need to lead to a world where we prioritize privileged feelings over the concrete oppression of marginalized  people. Rather, it is a world in which abstract theory and academic jargon are no longer substitutes for feeling our feelings. Where shared moral outrage is no longer a substitute for real belonging. It's a world in which we navigate problematic situations not by defending who is right and condemning who is wrong but by seeking to build more trust, more safety and more understanding. 

Finally, for the left that is doing the hard work of community organizing and movement building, this understanding of how social change happens means that if we seek to match the power of Trump’s repression with militant defiance alone Trump will intentionally escalate the situation to the level of “American Carnage” that will solidify his justification for authoritarianism. He will be able to control education and dole out love and support to his White Christian Nationalist Base so effectively that many will see it as the only solution to crises.

 Our task is daunting. We need to use protests to fuel an infrastructure of education and love and support that is larger and more inclusive than the protests themselves. We have to ensure that we build on ramps to left solutions to crises faster than we escalate the social tension. We are going to have to build Regenerative Movements a.k.a Movements That Don’t Suck.

Full Version Building Movements That Don't Suck by Aaron Goggans