” … a truly remarkable set of suggestions on how to take on the panoply of powerful adversaries that are busy destroying the planet, democracy and everything else that is decent.”
Murray Dobbin, rabble.ca
Love your country, and fight so that its flag and other national symbols evoke its most egalitarian and noble values.
An otherwise healthy distrust of hierarchy can lead to a negative attitude toward all forms of leadership. Actually, we want more leadership, not less.
In search of allies and points of agreement, we must grow comfortable adopting the rhetoric of worldviews we might otherwise oppose.
Recruitment and retention go hand in hand. A few simple procedures for orienting new participants can go a long way to ensuring their ongoing involvement.
If dissident political groups tend to become more extreme over time, then good leaders should help define that ‘extreme’ in constructive ways.
Group identity offers embattled activists a cohesive community, but also tends to foster a subculture that can be alienating to the public at large. Balancing these two tendencies is crucial to sustaining the work of an effective group, organization or movement.
Political action tends to be driven by one of two different motivations: expressing an identity, and winning concrete changes. It’s important to know the difference, and to strike a balance between the two.
An empty or “floating” signifier is a symbol or concept loose enough to mean many things to many people, yet specific enough to galvanize action in a particular direction.