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In the run-up to the November 2024 election, many predicted that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the call to “save democracy” would ultimately ring hollow for the many people for whom American democracy has always seemed like more of an empty promise than anything else. They were sadly correct, indicating that it’s long past time for us to rethink how we practice and discuss democracy within our organizations and movements. 

In 1988, Stuart Hall wrote: “Without the deepening of popular participation in national-cultural life, ordinary people don’t have any experience of actually running anything. We need to re-acquire the notion that politics is about expanding popular capacities, the capacities of ordinary people.” He was reflecting on the rise of Thatcherism, but it remains an essential observation to this day. 

To be able to resist the fascist program, we will need to build organization and advance a vision of democracy that speaks to the conditions of people’s lives. This will require thoughtful examination of our dominant models of organizing and a shift towards a clearer practice of representation in our own organizations, ensuring that large numbers of people can become dues-paying members, debate and make important decisions, and elect their own leaders. Such organizations can both build the muscles for practicing democracy and the force to contest for governing power.

Alinsky’s “crème brûlée” model of political participation

There are a few recent and important works that help us consider how we might build more democratic political organizations and social movements in service of this project. The first is Occupation: Organizer: A Critical History of Community Organizing in America (Haymarket Books, 2023), in which French sociologist Clément Petitjean convincingly uses historical research to show that Saul Alinsky, the oft-critiqued forefather of modern, professionalized community organizing, effectively packaged his intervention as a form of management consulting–one aimed at optimizing the functioning of American democracy, so that “more people can have a voice.”

One of Petitjean’s most useful observations is how Alinsky tailored his innovation to the philanthropic imperatives of Cold War anti-communism, pitching to funders what Petitjean calls the “crème brûlée” model of political participation: a shiny, crispy crust of direct action and confrontation, aimed ultimately at producing concession and reform, all built upon the creamy foundation of free-market liberal democracy.

This intervention would prove to have remarkable staying power. Petitjean turns up notes from a 1994 funder meeting in which many community organizers disagreed about certain features of their organizing model, including the role of race and gender and whether it was better to organize individuals or local institutions, but “they all saw themselves as professional ‘democratizers’ whose role was to give low- and moderate-income Americans a genuine opportunity to influence the political system without being controlled by organizers.”

This one quote neatly encapsulates some of the enduring contradictions of the “crème brûlée” model of community organizing and political participation. What does it mean to be a “professional democratizer” and who gets to decide who becomes one? What does it mean to be “controlled by organizers”? And in what specific ways are “low- and moderate-income Americans” trying to influence the political system–and what happens when they disagree with each other? 

Democracy’s dualities

Astra Taylor’s scholarship on democracy helps us see that the paradox of the “professional democratizer” is far from the only contradiction inherent to democratic practices, at either the scale of a grassroots organization or a federal government. In her book Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone (Verso, 2019), she writes:

Democracy is rife with … occasionally discordant yet indivisible dualities: it always has to balance freedom and equality, conflict and consensus, inclusion and exclusion, coercion and choice, spontaneity and structure, expertise and mass opinion, the local and the global, and the present and the future. There can be no unambiguous resolution on one or the other side of the binary.

Taylor’s naming of the dualities, and her encouragement to “live in the tension” of them, is a useful guidepost to anyone who finds themselves in the role of the professional democratizer. The problem is not managerial expertise per se: anyone who has led a challenging meeting knows the value of a seasoned facilitator who can efficiently move a group of people towards a shared agreement on next steps and a division of labor. But what Taylor’s works on democracy encourage us to do is to explicitly name that as expertise and from there, to question whether that expertise in and of itself is sufficient as the basis for representing a set of collective interests. 

Sociologist Jeremy Levine’s 2016 study of community development organizations in Boston, which Petitjean cites in his work, refers to this as the “privatization of representation”—a sort of worst-case scenario of what happens when managerial expertise, including professional managerial class access to philanthropic resources, becomes the primary basis for representation:

[Community organizations] are ‘nonelected neighborhood representatives’ who have ‘actually superseded elected officials as the legitimate representatives of poor neighborhoods.’ … What is central in the ‘privatization’ of representation is that the claims made by community-based organizations are not validated through electoral channels but certified by agents of the philanthropic field.

Of course this is not to say that all elected officials are better at representing a set of people’s political and economic interests than all privately-funded community organizations. Levine’s observations do, however, point to the importance of explicitly naming the grounds on which a member of an organization or movement–whether that’s an executive director or a protestor in the street–claims to represent more than just their own individual self when giving comment to the press, negotiating with a state agency, or applying for grant funding. 

‘Politics doesn’t go away’

Questions about the legitimate basis for representation loom large over another important book on the struggle against right-wing authoritarianism, Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (PublicAffairs, 2023). In it, Bevins studies the years 2010-2020, in which mass protests around the world, from Brazil to the Arab Spring to Hong Kong, often led to the ascendance of right-wing political organizations.

Bevins identifies two tendencies within these mass movements that made it possible for the right wing to seize control. The first was the leaderless horizontalism of the protest movements themselves: in their determination to prefigure an egalitarian society where everyone has a voice, they were ultimately unable to legibly represent their political demands and contest for power in the moments of upheaval that followed. (Importantly, Bevins distinguishes between movements that were intentionally horizontalist and those that were de facto horizontal because the political leadership of prior generations was killed, imprisoned, or exiled by anti-Communist regimes). 

The second tendency was these movements’ embrace of “anti-politics,” or their orientation away from political parties and political power (“anti-politics” is a term first coined by anthropologist James Ferguson to describe the international development regime guided by the World Bank, in which the depoliticization of poverty was of material but unnamed economic interest to its funders). This tendency showed up both in social movements’ orientation away from politics, and in widespread valorization of electoral candidates whose main credential was being an “outsider.”

The combined effect of anti-politics and horizontalist tendencies produced devastating results in Brazil, where right-wing forces (many of them tied to free-market ideological formations in the United States) hijacked the meaning of the mass street protests of the Movimiento Passe Livre (the MPL, or free fare movement). Cleverly calling themselves Movimiento Brasil Livre (MBL), they claimed that the protests were actually about the alleged corruption of the left-wing Workers’ Party president, Dilma Rousseff, and thus set in motion the chain of events that led to Rousseff’s impeachment and the rise of Jair Bolsonaro. In a 2023 interview with The Dig, Bevins notes how the a-party stance of the MPL slipped into anti-politics, which, under Bolsonaro, turned quickly into anti-democracy (emphasis mine):

MPL are what they call in Portuguese a partidário [a-party] … They are not aligned with any party. They’re never going to join a party, they’re not doing party politics. They are not against the fact that politics is happening, but what to them was staying outside of party politics … was understood by the people as a full rejection of politics in general. … And this a-party stance in Brazil slips into anti-politics, which slips into, in the case of Bolsonaro, a wholesale rejection of democracy, an embrace of authoritarianism. Because anti-politics is always still politics. Politics doesn’t go away.

Politics doesn’t go away: this is essentially what political scholar Wendy Brown tells Taylor in her 2019 documentary, What is Democracy? The alternative to “rule by the people” is not rule by an amorphously-bounded, civically-minded civil society; it’s rule by the financial institutions and profit-driven algorithms that already determine so much of how we live, who turns a profit at the expense of whom, and what kinds of ideas we are exposed to. There are always interests at work–and those of us who care about rule by people, instead of ever-greater rule by market, are served better by naming them than not naming them. 

This is also where the limits of Alinsky’s “management consulting” approach become clearer. Petitjean’s historical research convincingly suggests that Alinsky wasn’t exactly anti-ideological, as he’s often described: he was a booster of American capitalism who refused to ever take a contract working for white supremacist organizations in the US South. But he was anti-political. His core belief in the power of organization-building to enhance the functioning of American liberal democracy was distinctly anti-political in its assumption that progress–towards free markets, free people, and a rising tide of economic prosperity–was not a site of contestation, with some benefiting at the expense of others, but rather an inevitability that could be hastened along with the right set of managerial expertise at the helm. 

That inevitable neoliberal destination of free markets and free people, so essential to Alinsky’s “crème brûlée” model of political participation, no longer seems quite so stable and creamy. We are living in a moment of rupture. On the one hand, we see the free market partisans’ alignment with authoritarianism, from Movimiento Brasil Livre and Jair Bolsonaro to the Heritage Foundation bolstering Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

On the other hand, we have the small-d democrats, whose struggle for political democracy seems increasingly hollow without a real program for economic democracy to accompany it. Taylor writes: 

“If the last fifty years has demonstrated anything, it is that formal political equality, exemplified by the right to vote, is not enough to ensure democracy, as the wealthy have many avenues to exert disproportionate power … Extending democracy from the political to the economic sphere is the great challenge of our age, and also the only way to protect political equality from the concentrated financial power that is proving to be its undoing.”

‘Towards a clearer practice of political representation and contestation’

If we are going to build the formations capable of mounting a real challenge to the resurgent right and advancing not just political democracy but also economic democracy, we need to grapple with the enduring footprint of anti-political thought in the organizing field, and with both the limits and benefits of the “professional democratizer” approach. I’d offer a few suggestions for us to think about.

First, we need to understand how anti-political stances–whether reformist like Alinsky or maximalist like the MPL–create advantageous conditions for those who have fewer compunctions about contesting for power. Contesting for political power in a serious way is a difficult project, rife with contradictions and colored by our own, often harmful experiences with those who have held it in the past–and, I would argue, still preferable to the anti-political alternative. As Bevins notes,

“there is no such thing as a political vacuum … If you want to knock the main players off the stage, you should be paying attention to who is going to take their place. If it is not going to be you, then you had better like the people who are waiting in the wings.”

There are structural reasons, mostly having to do with philanthropic restrictions on political giving, for why organizations shy away from explicitly political conversations about elections. But we must ensure that we do not let these structures warp our understanding of what interventions are actually required.

Secondly, we should work within our own organizations to encourage more honest assessment of our ability to represent a set of collective interests. “We thought representation was elitism, but actually it is the essence of democracy,” reflects Egyptian human rights activist Hossam Bahgat in his conversation with Bevins. In fact, the lack of representation can replicate elite systems and relationships; too many of us have seen how the field rewards highly proficient fundraisers and communicators who can tell a good story about impact without asking how many people they actually represent and whether those members can and do hold an organizational line.

Too many of us have seen how the field rewards highly proficient fundraisers and communicators who can tell a good story about impact without asking how many people they actually represent and whether those members can and do hold an organizational line.

How many dues-paying members does an organization have? What decision-making power do they have? Do they elect their own leaders? Do they vote on a platform or political endorsements? Do they move with discipline once that vote is cast (i.e. even if they disagree with the decision, will they still support it because it was decided upon within the organization)? When I was the Executive Director of United Working Families, I made sure that our by-laws (which included rules for both internal elections and political endorsements) were available on our website, ensuring that members–regardless of the extent of their direct relationship with staff–could read them and work to understand and shape the political decisions of the organization. This may seem like a small intervention, but I was consistently surprised at how many members did not know what by-laws were and would end up asking how they could find them for other organizations with which they were affiliated.

And lastly, we should be clear that the promise of political democracy only resonates when it is coupled with real commitments to economic democracy as well. While economic democracy is often thought of in more narrow terms, such as the workplace democracy or minimum wage campaigns spearheaded by labor unions, Taylor’s writing invites us to think more expansively about the connection between political and economic democracy. “Over the last half century, [the] oligarchs and their acolytes have entrenched their rule and wealth by attacking democratic gains: taxes have been eviscerated, unions and job security crushed, welfare gutted, education defunded, prisons packed to overflowing, voting rights curbed, and regulations repealed,” writes Taylor. “What should terrify us is not the frustration of the people but the sources of their frustration, which have gone unaddressed for so long.” The 2024 presidential election, in which Donald Trump prevailed against the Democrats’ call to “save democracy” and became the first Republican to win the popular vote in twenty years, makes this passage from 2019 seem painfully prescient. Taylor wisely suggests that we reimagine self-rule to include a wide set of “social and collective entitlements” that are needed to support the practice of democracy, including a housing guarantee, good jobs and ample leisure time, and a robust and generous public sector. This framing is a useful reminder that the call for economic democracy can (and has!) come from community organizations and labor unions alike. 

One of the most straightforward distillations of these three recommendations comes from Mike Parker, a longtime labor leader who passed away in 2022. One of his final essays was titled simply “Democracy is About People Having Power”; in it, as in his 1999 book Democracy is Power, he argues that the ability to build powerful labor organizations comes from the degree to which union members themselves have power in their organization: 

Democracy is about people having power. That obviously requires the participation and involvement of people. But participation, for its own sake and that results in nothing, is not about exercising power. The focus on procedures and discussion of process often gets in the way of the real activities of the democratic exercise of power. These include:

• Choosing and demanding leadership.
• Challenging the leadership, holding it accountable, and replacing it when necessary.
• Developing new leadership; increasing opportunities for members to take leadership of parts of the project. 
• Meaningful participation in establishing the broad political framework within which that leadership functions. 
• Involvement in carrying out the common program and learning from it.

In a sense, Parker is describing a different kind of prefigurative organization; not what Bevins describes as the horizontalist, “the riot is supposed to become the society” kind of way, but prefigurative to what American democracy could be: one in which large numbers of people understand, and have the time and ability, to do the work of governing themselves.

Professional community organizers have much to offer as we consider the work that it will take to confront and overcome America’s slide towards authoritarianism: experience leading protests and meetings, recruiting and training large numbers of people, and developing and executing a strategy aimed at using the structures of the world as it is to move us closer to the world as we want it to be, to name just a few. But what Petitjean’s book offers–taken together with the historical research and practical experience that informs Taylor and Bevins’ works–is the importance of being alert to, and shifting away from, the anti-political tendencies of both horizontalism and management consulting, and towards a clearer practice of political representation and contestation.

“The promise of democracy is not the one made and betrayed by the powerful,” Taylor writes. “It is a promise that can be kept only by regular people through vigilance, invention, and struggle.” If we are serious about confronting the rise of fascism in America and abroad, we must fight for economic democracy, build organizations in which large numbers of regular people have power and therefore can be legibly represented by their organization, and turn the page on anti-politics once and for all.

Occupation: Organizer: A Critical History of Community Organizing in America, by Clément Petitjean (Haymarket Books, 2023)

Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone, by Astra Taylor (Verso, 2019)

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins (PublicAffairs, 2023)

Emma Tai is a Chicago-based organizer and strategist. She is currently the Lead Campaign Organizer at Organizing Resilience, a national strategy hub for climate disaster organizing. She previously served as the Executive Director of United Working Families, a multi-racial, working-class independent political organization that has elected over 20 members to city, state, county, and federal office.

Convergence is a magazine for radical insights. We work with organizers and activists on the frontlines of today’s most pressing struggles to produce articles, videos and podcasts that sharpen our collective practice by lifting up stories from the grassroots and making space for reflection and study. Our community of readers, viewers, and content producers are united in our purpose: winning multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic economy.