when he sat down with a reporter named inga, and a template for the future stories pt-109 that portrayed him as a hero and those are all the way up until his run to the white house. >> this is book tv on c-span 2, television for serious readers. here is our prime time lineup for christmas eve. tonight 7:15 p.m. eastern, the former chandelier cleaner. and joseph beck draws parallels between his father's life and the life of fictional attorney atticus finch. at 9:00, john simpson talks about his time as the former editor of the oxford english dictionary. book afterwards, 10 p.m. eastern, new farming methods affect consumers.

and we wrap up our saturday prime time lineup at 11:00 with national book award winner colson whitehead talking about his fictional book "the underground railroad", that happens tonight on c-span's book tv. >> so welcome, everybody, i'm the co-founder of civic hall and civic hall i should say is, we've been here now almost two years. it grew out of an annual conference that we do called personal democracy forum, which is focused on how technology is changing politics and government that we've been doing since 2004, which is in fact how i know both of our guests. we've traveled similar paths for a long time. two years ago we opened civic hall to be a year-round gathering point for the same

people and conversations, focused on civic tech, how tech can be used for public good. and so, it's a pleasure to welcome everybody here. let me just say that i'm really excited for the chance to get into this conversation about rules for revolutionaries, how big organizers can change everything. because we are living in a very unusual time. and it isn't just the moment after the election, it's actually that we are living in an age where mass participation in politics now is possible at the scale of millions. and it's a very confusing thing to experience. and a lot of us, i think, are right in the middle of that moment now asking, what do i do? and the confusion comes from the fact that everybody's in motion.

a lot of people are suddenly activated and concerned and ready to get engaged and try to do something important. and this is the classic challenge of organizers, right? and who better than-- to get into this question than really two of the-- our best veteran organizers in the digital arena, zack exley, who i think i've known longer, goes all the way back to around 2000 when he built a website that made fun of george w. bush and got called out by the president. >> it was 1998. >> 1998. >> during the primary. >> and then he went from there, he worked for a while in the early days of moveon.org, was sent by move on to help presidential campaigns in the

2004 cycle and so, ended up helping the howard dean campaign and then the john kerry campaign with their work. more recently, he worked for organizations like wikipedia, which is another kind of entity that involves of lots of, lots of people in a big distributed enterprise and more recently, along with becky bond, worked on the bernie sanders campaign's distributed organizationing team. becky, who many of you may know if you've ever heard of credo mobile or before that, working assets. i don't know if there are any people here, but becky has long been organizationing in the trenches of progressive movement work with credo, a phone company with a conscious, i think is the tagline, right? and she actually built, as president of credo, a political

action committee that did very interesting work in the last off year cycle targeting members of congress who were tea party members and figuring out how to do a lot of the field organizing in a way that could challenge them in a mysterious way. so she's really cut her teeth as well on political organizing. when she left credo to go work with zack alt the campaign, what was it, about a year or so ago, that certainly is when i started to pay a lot more attention. [laughter] >> 'cause i know zack and zack, he's kind of a mad genius. but i-- becky is also one. progressive movement's sharpest tacks and has done a lot of really important things which maybe we'll get into. so it's really, really a

special treat to have you guys here. oops, all right? i guess i want to just open by asking you to just say a few words at the beginning. i mean, the question that's on everybody's minds is, okay, so now what? all right. it's a week after 11-9. which jose vargas has suggested is a bookend to 9/11. now what? what do you guys think? >> oh, wow, okay. i think first and foremost, we're people who have been deeply moved by what has happened. and it's been, you know, really emotional for us, just like it has been, i would suspect, for everyone in this room. and one of the approaches that we have to politics has always been that we're-- that we're peers with the volunteers, the volunteers are our colleagues and we're in this movement as something that

we're in together. so, you know, of the what now, the first thing is, we're experiencing, you know, and absorbing that we've entered into an extremely dangerous period in our history as a nation and i think that we just want to sort of acknowledge that, that what you're feeling, you know, we're also feeling. and, but we can also see certain things more clearly because we work in politics because we were part of the bernie sanders campaign so we've been travelling the country and we've been talking to voters and we made a different choice in the primary about who to support and what kind of campaign to run based on where we thought the country was. so we find ourselves today, a week after a result that was stunning, but something that in many ways doesn't surprise us because we can see how we got there, and in some ways, some things that we think if they had happened we would be in a different place.

so we find ourselves trying to understand how can we use the best tools at our disposal to be part of the resistance or resist the normalization of what is an unprecedented moment. and we also, when we wrote this book in august, and we wanted to take the lessons and not as high priced consultants of organizations and companies that would pay us to tell them how bernie-- how we did the thing on the bernie campaign. >> and so, but how do we then turn that back and even though we didn't win, we find ourselves in this moment, our book is literally out this week and helping people with very concrete ways to organization in a big way to face the urgent

challenges of our time and the channels are just a little different than what we thought it would be. so that's what now at this moment is to start this conversation with you. >> want to add anything to that, zack? >> start progressing the election, but to hold off. we could, we could sort of relitigate the-- litigate is probably the wrong word to use. >> okay. >> in the trump era. [laughter]. and there will be time for audience questions if you want to get that that, but i think more lessons learned. in particular, let's start though, you know, by understanding what was different about the style of organizing, the philosophy of organizing that you developed and that you now call big organizing. i think a lot of people who

came up through, you know, experiencing things like the dean campaign, and then went into things like the obama campaigns that were so successful in 2008 and 2012, adopted a certain model how you involve volunteers, how you understand the electorate and target voters and a lot of it was, in effect, i think joe, one of obama's digital strategists in 2008 said, you have to sort of basically let the bottom up surface, but it has to be directed from the top down. so they developed a method of really professionally training people, the organizers, giving people concrete tasks and make the team leaders know that it was kind of like a big pyramid

and at its very best, it moved millions of people in a very constructive way to help obama both win as somewhat of an outsider in 2008 against hillary clinton and then in 2012 as an incumbent. and i think that model was in large degree what was being used again in the clinton campaign. sanders campaign did not have the same establishment base of support and it also didn't have most of the people who had cut their teeth doing that style of organizing. so you were partly forced by necessity to evolve and experiment, but you also had a different philosophy, that you were working on, right? so talk a bit about that. >> yeah, i think we need to step back though, actually and i want to challenge a little bit the way you've described how that-- that obama, how that obama organizing stuff played out. and you know, methods of organizationing kind of, you

know, have-- they get develop, they catch on, they spread around, philosophies of organizing and the book, rules for revolutionary, that title is kind of a swipe at sal lynnski's rules for radicals. and when saul kind of wrote that book and started getting a lot of funding from big foundations and started sending organizers around the country, largely because of all the foundation funding they got that sustained all of these staff in many organizations around the country. it became more and more his paradigm of organizing, it became more and more dominant pair time and so it was sort of only paradigm of organizing available to anybody and when i first became a labor organizer, you know, when i was out college and a lefty from the connecticut suburbs, i went out

and i was trained in this model and that model, it's not-- you know, it's one-on-one, knock on a door, have a conversation, win somebody over to the cause of getting a stop sign on the corner, and then this whole ladder of engagement. he never said that, but the idea kind of comes from that, from his sort of frame of organizing. you know, once they get the stop sign, then, you know, they're going to get this sense of power, wow, i did something in my community so then they're going to want to do something else, who knows, maybe a stop light. and eventually, the people in this way of thinking, like some day people build up to actually having power over their whole lives. and so we're expecting that, actually, for something else, but it's important to note that those organizers on the obama campaign were also expecting that and it didn't come from, you know, they did amazing

stuff on the obama campaign, but that was a whole other part of the campaign. that neighborhood team model came from people like jeremy bird, joy cushman and it was simultaneously being pushed forward on clinton's primary campaign in 2008 by robbie mook and marlon marshall who ran the clinton campaign just nowment and they came from dean's new hampshire primary where they had this little laboratory led by most of them and karen hicks and some other people where they-- they kind of-- they really embraced that sort of walinski frame and they tried to scale it. they weren't trying to win a stop sign, they were trying to pin a primary, and in nevada and they had the house meetings

and this was influenced by marshall ganz who was their advisor up in dean new hampshire and marshall ganz, the organizing director for the farmers in california and that house party model was an evolution, not party. marshall would yell at us if we said house party. it's a house meeting. and that was an evolution from and a little bit of rejection of the some of the restriction of the olinski model. so it's amazing what they did in '08 in south carolina and all over the country and that incubated in south carolina took root as the standard, you know, obama organizing model. so this whole generation of organizers learned to work with volunteers and it did start with one-on-one and, but then they would ask them to lead a neighborhood people and then that person would be the leader of the team and they'd call it the snowflake model.

so, what we-- i think when we looked at what we were doing, okay, that was gralt. in the beginning of the campaign we had 46 states and before we, you know, you're exactly right about how becky saved the whole operation. it would have been a mess if she hadn't come, but there was like a month and a half before becky came where it was just clair sandburg and me and two us in 46 states and hundreds of thousands of volunteers that had signed up saying, put us to work. and they were furious because we were not putting them to work and so we knew that there was-- if we started going around and sitting down in coffee shops and having one-on-ones with leaders and saying, will you form a neighborhood team. that would just be silly, wouldn't it? and the obama campaign in '08. there were really good experiments, but in general, wicks did some amazing stuff in the primary in california, but in general, there was not a program you know, that put

people to work all in those later states where there was no staff. so we really believed we could do something we so tried to evolve a model that would allow us to scale it. >> so you want to describe that model? >> well, you said, you know, you were saying it's not the top down, but actually we believe in an element of top down. >> well, we think about it in slightly different terms. so the way we think about it is, you know, instead of thinking about top down versus bottoms up, we really think about a peer-to-peer movement where there's a central plan to win and we distribute the work, but that the relationship of the volunteers doing the work is not just up with the campaign is a staffer, it's to each other, right, to the other volunteers and this has not necessarily been possible in the past because it's been very difficult for the volunteers to talk to us and talk to each other at scale. but what we realize was, was that bernie was such a long--

the book is about organizing, it's not about the bernie campaign and we use bernie as an example bus it was a formative experience that showed what was possible. bernie had 3% name recognition in the beginning. by the end of the campaign we had captured 46 of the democrats to the democratic national convention, that was-- we didn't get as far as we needed to go, but we did get close. we knew all along we would have to have a huge campaign to overcome the advantages of resources and name recognition. and so, we figured out we needed a centralized plan, right, because we couldn't just have hundreds of thousands of people doing whatever they thought. right? >> could have done that. >> well, that's what they were doing, you know what i mean? and it was beautiful, they were writing software, they were writing music, you know what i mean? they were doing all sorts of crazy things, but it wasn't, it wasn't things that would actually add up to bernie

winning and it was our job to actually make sure that all the effort that they were putting forth was actually going to be pushing bernie across the finish line. and so, it was really important for us to get a centralized plan and you know, the idea was that it was not let a thousand flowers bloom, but it was more like it was a modular flower factory that was franchised across all the states, right? and so we had to get them to work on a centralized plan, but distribute the work so that people could do it across space and time. we knew that we couldn't manage them do do all of this work, that we could only divide it up and we would have to have them manage each other to do the work if we were going to get enough done. this was this enormous organizing challenge that we had to basically figure out from scratch. >> all right, say a little about, to one of your key innovations, you know, it's technology of how to turn a mass meeting into something

that plugs almost every person attending in the meeting into a really generative role of running a phone bank. the barnstorm model. unpack that for us. that's probably the most important organizing innovation in the campaign and you write about it a lot in the book. why are barnstorms? >> i think it makes sense, maybe i'll try to put it in context is that the barnstorm. there was a structure to-- you know, get people into a room like this, get people 100 people, sometimes 500, sometimes 60. and then we had a structure that led to them getting organized. it was almost like forming crystals, now what i mean? they came in as water and they left as crystals. and they were formed into teams that knew what to do, but that was the structure of how we did the meeting was just one piece of this much larger structure

and there were lots of other teams. >> yeah, the barnstorm, it's actually a great story. what happened with the barnstorms we realized we had to get everybody on the phone and calling voters in the first 4 contests to canvass the states and for bernie turned out. we had people in colorado and texas that wanted bernie to win and the election to be going when it got to their state primary. we couldn't get killed in the first four states or we'd be out. we used the phone, calling voters. great, we have something for people to do, we had thousands of event homes and do phone banks. we sent e-mails saying will you host a phone bank and there's like nothing. so people were not responding to our e-mails in order to have the one person who raises their hand to says i'll invite everybody over to my house and the phone bank will happen at my house and get people to goment so zack had this crazy-- i was we have to send more e-mails.

send more e-mails. the fund raising people, you can nt send every day and zack had this crazy i.d., what if we get people together in person and get them to commit in person to holding the phone banks. i thought it was nuts, but he was so attached to this idea and i felt like the only way to get past it was to try it and have it fail quickly because this is important in campaigns, is to try things to fail quickly because we had the standard, we'll try crazy things if the payoff is huge if it wins. we don't want to try crazy things, if the payoff is small. because we don't have the resources. and the payout would be big. we discussed forming volunteers on the campaign, an important principle, don't ask who wants to lead, ask who wants to get to work. because if we ever ask volunteers who wanted to lead something, just the wrong people would raise their hand, the person that liked to talk a lot, the person that wants to run the meeting, but doesn't actually translate into work,

so we never asked people to lead, we asked people to get to work and the most amazing people came out of the woodwork who did all of this work and did amazing work and we made them leaders afterwards. could we have a meeting to get people to work. we couldn't have a meeting to have people volunteer and then not happen. and zack sent out a bunch of e-mails to supporters. >> in tennessee. >> in tennessee, talking about the e-mail you sent out. >> and also, a guy named corbin trent, whose, now, a volunteer in tennessee and, you know, when we first got-- he came with me and we did this together in his home state. and we just sent an e-mail to tennessee and we said to everybody in tennessee and said meet us in one of these five cities and we're going to put you to work. >> that's it, not bernie-- >> bernie is not going to be here. >> staff from the bernie sanders campaign and come meet us.

>> it took a lot of experimenttation. because people came together and they did want to get to work, but we actually had to create-- it's funny because, so the method that we eventually developed in these meetings that did get people to work and not just to work once, but to work you know, every week or two times a week, that they'd be running phone banks, phone banks was sort of the one tool that we could have that we could put people into for a bunch of reasons so we poured people into that. but it took a while to develop the exact technique that worked. and it wasn't that the innovations were mind-boggling. get people to sign up in the back of the room and then make a lineup in the front and make each one say something attractive about their meeting or just personal, personalize their meeting, like i'm going to cook, you know, i'll have burgers, somebody bring chips. that was enough, people i'll bring chips to her party, you know? and we called them parties. we didn't call them meetings.

we didn't make it boring. we, you know, we moved on from the left and we said it's going to be parties. but here is the funny thing, with this technique, you know, we were-- in the old days of organizing, you know, it was just organizing, it was just called organizing and you had to work out your way of doing the meeting that would work, you just had to figure it out. but when we tried explaining that to like a lot of organizers, maybe, you know, most of them were young, but it was-- but also when we tried to talk to the digital people about this, people coming from a digital background, it was hard to get people to replicate the technique, right? so we found what we had to do is explain it as a technology. so, our meeting was-- it wasn't just like organizing, it was a technology and you had to do it just right and that helped people get it. >> and result is 100,000 volunteers, 100,000 meetings and 100,000 public meetings where people phone banked. >> yeah. >> 75 million phone calls

which, i think, i worked out the math. if you compared it to the 2012 obama general campaign, it was about four times as products tiff and just in terms of the number of phone calls made, whether the contacts, we don't know. but obviously, a huge funneling of people. i want to ask you about one or two of the rules in the book. rules for revolutionaries. one is, you say that people are waiting to be asked to do something big, to win something big. and then you also say, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the big. i wonder, becky if you could get into that. >> sure, from the beginning we knew the campaign had to be big, right? because the candidate was bernie sanders, right? and the small campaign was just not going to put him over the top. this wasn't a protest candidacy, we weren't trying to get a message out there, we were trying to win and i think obviously, this is a salient

point today is that, you know, as we think about what happened on tuesday is that, we have a lot of values that we associate with our campaigns and also like if you don't win, there are consequences. and so we were really trying to win. and so in trying to make the big campaign, you know, and get a lot of people involved, we actually found out that in trying to get people to join us is that people were lore likely to see something big, win something big than do something small to get something small. and i think this was sort of a counter, it was a sort of counter wisdom, like counter intuitive to us, right? usually in organizing, you're saying ask somebody to do something tiny and get them involved. and then you can move them up the ladder and get nem them to do bigger and big are things. and american people are smart and they understand they're getting screwed and things are going backwards. we don't have to radicalize

them or trick them into being part of the campaign. we have to tell them what winning looks like and what we have to do to get there and depending on their ability to get to work and took on as much as they could. often very big. politics in the last year has been getting smaller and smaller, as politicians have been more focused on a swing vote. they've been more focused on trying to win small incremental victories. as people have become less involved with those campaigns and we ask them to do more and more smaller steps, more in isolation, because we don't think that they'll do anything big, they've been sort of rejecting the product that we've been offering. and i think too many political professionals have treated this as apathies of people as opposed to understanding that the system is broken and what they're asking people to do is not worth their time. so we had to put together a program that would-- that always explains how big the -- how hard it was going to

be to get where we need to go. how much work needed to be done to get there and then create the ability for them to do things big and small on a daily or weekly basis, right? such that if we all pulled together. all of this work would add up to something that would make it possible for bernie sanders to win. and so, when we asked people to do something big, lots of people stepped up. not only did they spend lots of time making phone calls, but other people spend time building websites, programming coding software for volunteers for us. managing, basically, a call center software that was complex and managing dozens and dozens of volunteers. we had to accept messiness in profession. don't let the perfect be the enemy of the big. >> we could have something

small and perfect or something big where it wasn't exactly how we wanted it. whenever we had to make a decision, one we had to use this dial-up software that debt collectors can use and it's horrible, because they're minimum wage or people in the philippines, and were we going to develop something nice as bernie branded as the account you gave money through or just throw people into this terribly designed, you know, call center software and have them use it and just trust them, right, just sort of deal with the messiness in order to gain scale. so we always picked scale because we needed a big organizing to be able to succeed. >> another rule in the book. people new to politics make the best revolutionaries. why, zack? >> because, well, i mean, a whole bunch of reasons, but, hey, you know, i think what we say in that chapter is that

there's-- well, first of all, at those barnstorm meetings we were start everyone off by saying how many here are totally new to politics, raise your hands, never did anything political, campaigning before. usually two-thirds with raise their hands, but this was also our experience with obama, with kerry wdean, with all of the people that filled up those. you know, it's-- there's a constant inflow of people into movements, right? and a lot of people in this country and only some get involved in every movement and it's just sort of like who is-- like who happens to get caught p in that moment and, but then when the movement is over, because movements come and go, some people stay and this connects to the tyranny of the annoying rule. defeat the tyranny of the annoying. some people stay, why do they stay when the movement is done and keep having meetings when

nothing is happening. why do they do this? >> hope? >> well, no. it's that maybe, you know, everybody's got different reasons, and i know this is all going to be miscon trstrued and i'm going to be attacked for saying something bad about activists. i say, people on the stage, we stay, right? but unfortunately, that third of the people in the meeting who came, you know, been doing it for years and years, not most of them, but some of them, you know, just have it all wrong, you know? and so the people that come in new have this sense of urgency and a totally fresh take on what to do and they just don't have all of these bad ideas, you know? that are left over from the way they did it last time, you know? and i think, you know, so

bernie, you know, just like obama in '08. just like dean, showed the power of people new to politics and also donald trump. you know, i think that most of his people are-- that came out to the rallies were new. >> so i want to ask one more question and open things up to the audience, but i also just want to say that anybody who is in that moment now of sense of urgency, sense of being swept up, literally an hour before our meeting. we sit here on fifth avenue and we heard hundreds of high school students marching down the street. i think they're walking out during their lunch hours now. so, a lot of people are in motion, obviously, young people are by definition new to the process and that's very exciting and promising. and i think at the same time,

this book is must-reading for anybody in that moment because i do know, as someone who has been through that moment over and over, how the patterns get reproduced, that turn excitement into disillusionment or frustration at not getting anywhere. so rules for revolutionaries really couldn't come out at a better time. one more question and i suppose this contains a little bit of an implicit criticism of a serious weakness in the bernie movement, but rule number for, racism must be at the corps message of everyone, why is that one of your rules? >> i'll answer that one. you know, we-- there will be consequences to that. and when zack and i set out to write this book.

we didn't read any books about organizing although i reread books for wrad radicals, we didn't read anything working on the bernie campaign. and you don't actually read it when the campaign is going on because you're too busy. but we did go back and read pieces written by black leaders and black intellectuals. one thing that happened early on is that our campaign failed to empower and make pro gr he is with black voters. toward the end doing very well with young voters of color, latino and black and so we decided, like, okay, we're not going to figure this out ourselves, let's just see what people say, that thought about this and were smart and cared and knew about this and we read alicia garza who is, you know, one of the founders of black

lives matter and written in the nation magazine specifically about the bernie campaign and where we fell short and heather mcgee, and lopez who wrote a book. and also wrote about the bernie campaign and they wrote with such, like sort of tough love. it was really-- they really tried to tell us not you guys are terrible and you blew it, but here is what's going on and here is something that you're missing in the possibilities of this moment. and a big part of that was this idea that race has to be at the core of the message to everyone. know the an afterthought and not a message just for one constituency. and one thing that we have to break down and listen to them, the billionaire class is using race to divide our movement for change and the result is that the elites and the billionaires

stay in charge. and that racism hurts everyone, right? and that there's no way that we'll achieve economic equality if we don't deal with racism and it will take a multi-racial movement to achieve that and that's not going to happen if we don't have authentic leadership from immigrants and people of color and it's not going to happen if we don't have white people reaching out to the white folks voting against economic interests and against a just society. so we took this very seriously and we really do understand that if we continue to let the billionaires use race to divide us, that we can never win, right? and so, any movement that we're a part of has to make material action to dismantle systemic racism, structural racism in our society and this is not something that's we have to mention it every time we talk, right?

it literally has to be at the center of our analysis. and i really appreciate that so many people have taken the time to write and talk to us and help us learn from this and i think it's going to be essential to the movements that we create as we go forward. >> well said. i concur. okay. so we have about 15 minutes or so for audience involvement. if you have a question, raise your hand. my joke always is if you have a statement please phrase it in the form of a question. but just tell us your name, do we have a mic for folks? yeah? okay. so just tell us your name and your question, thank you. >> hi, this is of course incredibly timely. i'm maria stark, organizing women for a long time.

and anyway, you know, on saturday decided to organize some women, you know, 30 people are coming together. and you know, so one question is, of course, do you view feminism as also, you know, kind of something that needs to be incorporated in everything just like racism given that 53% of women voted for trump? but also-- yes, white women. >> yeah. >> anyway, you know, so i'm kind of ahead of myself in organizing without exactly knowing our purpose other than becoming like republicans and creating a wall of obstruction and so you know, as this group is coalescing across, we're trying to submit all kind of activities and a lot of people don't know quite what you're doing, would love your advice

as to, in the interim, what would be a best way to coalesce this group. >> well, the first thing i want to say is yes, feminism is part of democratic socialism and i want to say that in the bernie campaign, there was a lot-- especially in social media, there was this sort of delegitimatization of bernie by calling them bernie bros and it was mean ref lant in media and social media and used to attack us and our progressive values. and i was called a bernie bro which i found ironic. and in communities where a people were acting together was largely led by the most effective volunteer leaders were working class women of color. the rule is if there are no nurses i don't want to be part of your revolution and one of the brilliant mainstays of our

campaign was actually nurses and one of the first endorsers was the national nurses united and why that's important, is there's a -- nurses really, they're humanists, right? and they're feminists and see their job to heal the world and they understand that everything from pollution to the stress of joblessness to a he can-- broken system makes it harder to do their job. the way they flocked to help run the bernie campaign showed very much what a feminist platform and what a feminist campaign looks like. so, i think one thing you should get some nurses-- >> the top of the campaign was not. you do say that in the book, in fairness. >> yeah, well there were lots of campaigns and we should say, zack and i were only-- zack and i worked on the distribute organize campaign.

we were given technology and budget to organize people that didn't have a traditional field office to go to. we were this vast, but kind of fringe part of the campaign. a lot of people wanted to be involved so it became huge, but it wasn't central i would say. i would say invite some nurses, right, to be part of your group and then i also think, you know, we can talk to you more about it, but literally running in-person meetings to put people to work. come up with goal or make your own goal and divide work and do work together on a regular basis together, is going to be amazing and people seeing women doing work together, it draws more people in because people want to be a part of it. so the advice is to get started and maybe people from the nurse's union to join you.

>> a side note on the 52% of white women. it was 26% of white adult women who voted. but 26% of white women voted for trump. about 25% of adults voted for trump and a bill bit more than 25% voted for clinton. >> 50% didn't vote. but it's very significant point. >> okay, two rows back behind you. >> yes? the gentleman next to you. >> hi, i'm debra sagner. my question is about organizing big, a big idea, a big change. my particular issue is a subset of pushing back against privatization of public good, which is proving back of the privatization of the public school system which as you know, our president, current president who we're going to miss so much, was not great at.

and so i'm wondering how do you identify something big, that's not too big. that's not too big to make people feel like, well, we could never do this, but big enough to inspire action? >> yeah, so, and i think in talking about the book, i think we've finally figured out how to make this point. i don't think we made it-- there was one aspect that maybe we didn't quite make in the book and it's about that the way to inspire people-- big doesn't mean national, it doesn't mean that your goal is to take over the whole entire government, but it's that you actually have to win. like, really win and not win something small or incremental. but win the whole thing. so, and what that means is that you have to come up with a strategy that can get et there. if your goal is to roll back

and clawback the privatization that happened if that's what you really want to accomplish. then, you know, according to this idea that we're putting out there, what somebody should do is layout a plan. even if it's a 20-year plan. if it's a credible plan where people can see that, yes, if we work really hard and do x, y and z and a million other things, we can see the strategy where we could actually win the whole thing. and people are smart and so they understand that your 20-year plan may not succeed, but all along the way you're making progress. and to expect people, you know, to do the kind of hard work that's necessary, you know, during every one of those 20 years they have know know where they're going. there has to be some prize to keep your eyes on, right? and that's what we dropped over the last, you know, we're generallylizing here, but you you know, this is sort of the

core of the problem that we're seeing that's kind of dragged down the progressive movement and the democratic party is somehow-- and somehow we lost respect for, you know, quote, unquote, ordinary people and decided that if we present them with a 20-year plan to win at all, in whatever issue it is, you know, or even just a two-month plan that's kind of hard, that they won't be up for it, right? and that was just a huge mistake and we have to erase it from our minds. >> there is a saying. i forget who said this, if you want to convince someone to take a long hard ocean journal i, you don't tell them exactly how you're building the boat and you know, how many oars it's going to have. describe the beauty of the ocean and the adventure to motivate people. >> yeah, i mean, just imagine--

oh, yeah, and just, i shouldn't go on, but when i started as an organizer, i was actually trained explicitly not to tell people about the whole strategy. campaign in the olinski model. just tell them to sign this card, don't talk about anything else, yeah. >> okay. michael, i think? >> hi, i'm michael and work done in the obama campaign and other causes that tried to use the same organizing model, but failed. i think in large part because they didn't have that big goal. so, i'm curious aapplicable this is to other causes beyond the bernie campaign. could hillary have used this kind of organizing or only work during certain types of causes. >> are people going to be

motivated to do the wosrk. so asking for something small and telling people it's big is not very inspiring for people. people are struggling in their lives. people are forced to buy health care, but the deductible is so high they can't go to the hospital. people are hurting out there and what is amazing, people would rather go for the long shot to actually solve their problems, even if it was likely not to be successful because that was the on thing worth working on, right? so i think that if it doesn't work, it's probably, the ask is, you need to reconsider the ask, right? and the great thing, you can try stuff and if nobody shows up, i better get another plan and don't keep doing that for two years unsuccessfully. and if you can, and attract people to your cause, maybe you shouldn't be leading. and you need to be thinking about what people actually want to do and also talk to people and ask them. you know, what they really

think should happen. person people are smart, they know what's up and they know when you're feeding them, you know, froth. and too often in politics, we tell them that the small incremental win is important and really big and they know it's not, but feel like you have to tell you that to do it or spent the tiny work and we're going to have a declare a big victory. it's honest where we are and warrior we need to be and if more people are willing to join y you. >> it's so great to hear from you and i'm glad i mentioned buffy when we were talking about that, didn't leave your amazing program out. and that's part of the motivation for writing this book. you know, we knew we were going to catch some flak from colleagues who are not writing books. who are we to write this book? and people didn't absorb the lessons from the amazing work that all of you did in '08 and

throughout the whole program. that's our motivation, we want this to get out. >> we should be clear, this book is not about us, it's really about the amazing people, most of them new to politics, who got involved in the bernie campaign and the amazing things they were able to do. and we helped them shape the tactics to be more successful and that's what we want to share with you. they help like the new rules and we want people to go out there and dry th-- try some of them out and write new rules. we have some challenges and if we do things the that way, the hole will be deeper. >> and we have some on the side of the room. yes, sir, and we'll come back to this side afterwards. >> hi, my name is madu. how do we take this energy and enthusiasm right now that's coming out of the left and

directed for the long haul, you know, from the campaign season to the legislative season for the next several years, until the mid terms. >> what do you think needs to be done right now? >> more organizing, more sustaining, getting into people's heads how important it is to participate and pitching those big ideas and that we need to sustain for the long haul. >> get the participation and we had record low turnouts, right? people just didn't show up, right? and that's-- >> a very negative campaign and everybody knows that as campaigns get more negative, turnout tends to get depressed, right. >> i mean, one thing we would tell people, i'd tell the story of the 2010 and the seats that the republicans won, we have to have a win bigger than that, to

win, if we want to stop things that the trump administration will try to shove down throats. and so it will be lower turnout and one of the things we should do is start talking about that now. let's not let it be election day then there are things to do now. >> one of the things that struck me is how hollow local party activity seems to be in many parts of the country and maybe that's less the case in swing states where, you know, the candidates invest more heavily the coordinated campaigns and, but that in many places, you know, it's the democratic party's party ups itself up for a few weeks on gotv and then disappears. >> zack, why don't you go on that project. the new project has a question

of whether that can be in the house, is that the foe can us-- focus. >> and the senate. it's a grass root volunteers me and other savers have been working with. we tauchd this campaign, brand new congress coming out of the bernie campaign, but now it's people from all different movements. new people who didn't participate in this race. and they-- and the idea is to hand pick really awesome, nonpolitician candidates coming from all different kinds of professions, representing all of america's communities. half women or more than half women. overrepresentative of communities of color and with a plan.

when we get elected, this is what we're going to do with the economy and how we're going to reform the criminal justice department and the political system. so that people know what they're getting. we think if week put that slate on the balance and on the internet with a big donate button and volunteer mod. we can amy this al we work for other-- and it's not people all running their own concerns. how will this be in oun organization and really out of the unified campaign organization. so that's the idea and i think, there's going to be all kind of amazing movements to resist and to make progress and across the country there is some amazing

stuff, but i think there's something that we've been ignoring for too long, except in these insurgent presidential campaigns, which is, we have a democracy, you know? and so people that are really fired up. why are the only people up until donald trump and bernie sanders, why are the only people using our democracy these establishment politicians coming out of major parties with very middle of the road ideas? why are they the only ones using our democracy, it's so much better suited to people with a really great vision how to make the country way better, you know, get everybody back to work and the yaet, and the two a half million in prison and other stuff. imagine if we put a big agenda like that on the ballot and kids marching down the streets a couple hours ago, i think they would all get involved,

right, in that kind of a big campaign that picks everything and that's why i'm working on that, yeah. >> right here. >> the gentleman with the hat. dan. >> and sorry, yeah, daniel latory, i'm starting a new organize called the digital placement institute. i was also after occupy-- after eviction, i co-founded occupy town squares with some other folks and the dilemma of a major kind of upset or loss of momentum and then the sort of frag mentation to a placed based-- neighborhood approach. and saturday in a local park and go to the different communities of need. in my place working work, part of the observation is, i was looking for the rule, there is no single issue of revolution, right?

and the whole dilemma of like >> and you know, there's enough people in this country who want to change or that we can do that. we want people organizing to take over that local government or win a local fight, but also, people, we have these new technologies that allow people to work across time and space and one of the things that happens in a presidential campaign and also can happen in

other campaigns, you can nationallize a bunch of local stuff and get people from all over the country working on it. a good example is some of attorney's races that there were six district attorney races on november 8th. and kril criminal justice reform advocates won five. they asked people across the court if they wanted to elect or unelect a district attorney refusing to hold cops accountable for killing or beating up black people. and this is a national issue how do we deal with the unaccountability of police murder black people. and you have people all over wanting to turn them out in that sense. that's also a local campaign that's happening on the ground

and we want to take advantage of the revolution and businesses run, teams can be anywhere and lots of software to remove the friction from teams being able to work well together no matter where they are and so, the natural energy, and even if it's happening where they are, and also, we learned on the campaign even as digital people, one of the important things to do, to get each other where we live. >> all the way in the back. >> hi, vincent. and i wanted to comment and turn it into a question, but the comment starting off i'm hearing from you guys organize and hearing from this side of the audience to do what and there's a lot of that out there and i'm just looking back at the crash that happened not too long ago, basically stifled a lot of what people were trying to do for progressives, politics, during the last administration.

and i'm going to also throw out that as far as the left goes, i'm hearing use new technologies, get away from the old kind of ideas of what the left has done, maybe do them differently, do them better. one of the things that left doesn't want to handle in society that we deal in, we are part of it, a capitalistic society more so and more so every day. what do you do as far as using the tools at our disposal right now. i'm looking at the country. half the country doesn't want or at least half of the voting country doesn't want the person we're going to have as a president. what do you do when the option is-- does the left realize it has that number, it has and also has at its disposal all of this economic wealth? that's an issue i feel that the tool that the left doesn't use, using economic power.

if you go back to the crash, it only took the mortgage industry to reset everything that happened in the country locally and nationally. we all, i mean, not all of us-- >> and your question is? >> the question is many of us have mortgages, all of us have bank accounts, we all have consolidated wealth. using technology and using new platforms, would you be supportive of or do you think even feasible to try-- i guess what i'm trying to formulate, what is the ask of people. you guys are saying organize. you're talking boycott? >> boycott i feel is not necessarily the word. all it takes sometimes is a shifting of wealth. you can move your money around and move your mortgages. >> and to sew it up. people have tried and ariana huffington tried this in the wake of the banking mess to get people to move their money out of some of the big banks and other bank.

i don't remember that being successful. >> the answer is barnstorms. >> so when ariana did that, she was basically e-mailing people and writing on huffington post. not e-mailing, but huffington post and everybody move their money and some number did, a big number, but very, very small percentage and it's significant. and we have millions of people on the e-mail list and e-mail them, tiny, tiny numbers of people click on the link and all they do is click on the link, get a number and make a call and didn't have to dial. we were going to dial for them and so few people did it. and we say yes.

>> actually been successful with this. i'm going to ask you to pass the mic on. but the debt collective which came out of occupy has built real organization among people with very big college debts, particularly from some of the for-profit colleges like corinthian which went out of business. it's hard work, but they have figured out how to build real community among students who carry this kind of albatross -- >> well, and then -- >> to buy back some of that debt on the dollar and liberate people from it which is a very exciting kind of model. >> yeah. and there were a couple times in american history where this actually worked.

there was, you know, the populist movement, yeah. at one point there were 40,000, you know, this is back in the 1880s, '90s to the '20s. and at one point there were 40,000 lecturers, they called them, doing barnstorms. and they would walk into a small, into a town, they'd be in the town square, you know, word would get around, people would come. and they set up an alternate economy. because in rural communities, there was only one source of seed, and, you know, fuel and fertilizer, and only finish and then you would sell your crop to that same source. so everybody got indebted to these banks that were ultimately backed by wall street, and it was destroying people's lives. and so they created a -- the ask was let's create our own alternate economy. so they created their own bank and their own store and their own lines of credit, and a lot of these farmers' cooperatives exist today all over the country. in my small republican town, you know, that totally went for

trump, our water, gas and electricity are all co-ops that were formed back in that era. and so, and this was a movement all across the south and the midwest and the west. and it was amazing and it was powerful, but it was organized. it wasn't just like, hey, let's do this and it went viral. it doesn't go viral. >> it fell to racism, right? >> yeah. that was one of the big -- well, i think it's more complicated than that. >> okay, the longer -- that's another conversation for another time. this gentleman here, we're going to start to sew up. >> i'll keep it quick. my name's eric, and after i read your book, which i'm definitely going to, what should i read next? >> oh. [laughter] oh. >> working on a list back here. >> that's a really great question. well, so why don't you take it first. >> oh, really? >> yeah. >> okay. well, i would realize the populist moment. is that the right -- >> yeah.

>> by lawrence godwin, right? >> goodwin. and that's an amazing book. >> i would read, man -- >> okay. >> if only we had finished our list. >> no, so i think you should also read a book called bad samaritans by chang which is one of zack's favorite books. zack is always prosthelytizing about the books he wants other people to read, and he'll talk about it so much that you'll eventually relent and read it so he can stop talking about it. yeah, what's yours? >> i wanted to let zack talk about arsenal of democracy. isn't that the week about -- >> no, it's called freedom's forge. >> yeah. >> about rebuilding the economy. but i would say since we've been talking about organizing, i would actually, you know, some other angles to go in, you know, one book that really influenced me was black reconstruction by w.e.b. dubois which talked about this massive organizing movement by, you know, by slaves, by african-americans to end slavery. and also dealing with race and,

you know, and how that's really, you know, how white racism is really tearing our country apart right now, the wages of whiteness is a really important book especially for white people to read. by david rodiger. >> yeah. we've been really influenced by ian haney lopez which i think is really important to read about where we are today what's it called? >> it's called dog whistle politics. and we have to put a pitch for a book called hope in the dark. and she has recently made this book free -- on november 9th she made this book free for download online. >> we paid for it a few weeks earlier. [laughter] >> so i do, i -- so late at night on november 9th, that was a book i pulled from my shelf, was a reckless soul and hope in the dark. >> and everybody's going to read michelle alexander's the new jim crow, and we're leaving out lots of over books. >> e-mail us --

>> no, don't e-mail them. what's your web site? where should they go to learn more about rules for revolutionaries? >> rulesforrevolutionaries.org. finish and there's a way for you to leave us a message also. on that site. really we want to start a conversation, and, you know, we're not here to tell everybody what the answers are, but to talk about some of the tactics that can help, you know, like people build powerful campaigns. and we're really trusting people in this room and the people of america to really take control of their democracy and organize movements that we can be part of. so, please, get to work -- >> fantastic. so i should just say we are also going to continue this conversation here at civic hall, civichall.org to find out more, and i am already expecting to see you guys at next year's personal democracy forum which is going to be june 8th and 9th here in new york. personaldemocracy.com to find out more about that. this has been a great conversation. i want to leave a little bit of time so that zack and becky can

go out and sell and sign a few books. i know we still have copies of rules for revolutionaries -- >> the first time we've ever done this. [laughter] >> the first time we've seen the book, yeah. >> thank you. [applause] thank you very much. >> thank you. [applause] >> thanks to the audience. okay. >> all right. thanks, everybody. that was fun. [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. booktv, television for serious readers. >> david was, at that time, in rehearsal for blues for

mr. charlie which i don't have -- anybody in the audience see it? well, a lot of people left because they couldn't handle it. it was quite a play. actually, a wonderful work of jimmy's that has never received the proper due, as much of his work. but i was in a group performance at the amphitheater every night, and then it closed, and it went to london for a little while. and then it ended. and there have been resurgences of the play. in fact, it was done recently where daniel lives, in providence, rhode island, at the trinity repertory theater or which was exciting to see. it's a wonderful way to read. it's an important play, and too many people said it was polemic and didn't want to have to face what was the play about.

which was based on the emmitt till lynchings and other lynchings. and so it's interesting to note that given this was all the way back in 1964, and he had quite a hard time with the actors' studio to get it done. and burr jess meredith was involved in the whole process as well as a lot of great actors including diana sands and many others. so i then went with david in 1957 to -- [inaudible] and we lived in the house jimmy was exiting that summer. and that's where i also met david -- who has written a biography about jimmy. and i've known david that long. and then we closed the house, we went to london. we got an apartment for jimmy and his sister, paula, and david and i.

we lived in london together in 1967, the fall of '67 through the spring of '68. then i came back to new york. and in 1971 i went back over to amsterdam to live. so when i saw that jules did this wonderful book, i got a copy of it. and it is a wonderful book. great photographs and, apparently, he was living there with barbara in those years, and i just found that out. which is really cool. so i, david and i loved amsterdam. and while we lived there, jimmy bought the house, actually end of '70. we went down in the fall of '71 when i was supposed to be working at a medical publishing house, but i snuck away. and we -- i got an old volkswagen, and we drove through the mountains and fought all the way -- [laughter] about how i to shift and not shift. i was, i was a great driver, i'd been a cab driver, by the way, so i knew how to drive, but i

didn't know how to drive a stick until i moved to europe. [laughter] so we got to jimmy's at six in the morning, and jimmy opened the door, and he had all this food he'd made for us. all kinds of classic soul food. he loved to cook. didn't do it often, but he loved to cook. and he was delighted that we came to welcome the house with him. we stayed for about a week, and then we drove back to amsterdam. and then i went to the house '72, '73, '74, and then he was born in '73, and he came in '75,' 6? >> '9. [laughter] >> and at least four more years. >> '80, couple of times. >> and these are my photos, except for one. and they, four of them are in

the book that i let jules put in the book. and, of course, they're not very good. i was not a photographer. i was not trying to do that. i was taking it for his memory book. we didn't ever think of jimmy as famous jimmy. jimmy was jimmy, uncle jimmy, and my friend jimmy, my brother jimmy. so i had the good upon theture, incredible -- fortune to get to know jimmy very well as a human being, you know? who was jimmy as a man, as a kind human being to the world. and so opposite what the images people try to perpetuate about him. so i got to not only admire him, but to see him as an adviser to me. like, when i made decisions about where should i send daniel to school, he would weigh in on that. what did he think about the

infamous teacher strike that i didn't strike in during 1968 when i started my high school teaching career. and what did he think about that. [laughter] so what's fascinating is a lot of what's going on right now is exactly what was going on then, and that's pretty terrifying. so if anything, we need jimmy more than we ever, ever did. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> well, hello. and welcome. i'm steven, the editor of the photo rei view. and -- review. and before i start the introduction, i will remind you of several things. we are filming this evening. steven spielberg himself, i believe, i think. i'm also to remind you to turn off your cell phones.