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Michael Brownstein et al., "Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change" (MIT Press, 2025)
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books welcome to the New Books Network
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D
welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom decenna from the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guests today are Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly, the authors of Somebody Should Do How Anyone Can Create Social Change In Somebody Should Do Something, my guests paint a new picture of how social change happens, arguing that our most powerful personal choices are those that springboard us into working together with others to connect our personal choices to structural change and why individual choices matters, though not always in the ways people usually think. Organized into three main parts, the book first diagnoses the problem of either or thinking about social change, which stems from the false choices of making better personal choices or changing the system. Then it offers a different way to think about social change, anchored in a new picture of human nature and emerging across the social sciences. Finally, the authors explore ways of putting this picture into practice. Neither a how to manual nor an activist guide. Somebody Should Do Something. Pair stories with science plus some jokes to help readers recognize their own power, turning resignation about climate change and racial injustice into actions that transform the world. My guests today are Michael Brounstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly. Michael is professor and Chair of Philosophy at John Jay College and Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate center of the City University of New York. Alex is professor of Philosophy, Director of the California center for Ethics and Policy and co Director of the Digital Humanities Consortium at Cal Poly Pomona. Daniel is professor of Philosophy at Purdue
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E
University Gentlemen, welcome to the New Books Network.
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F
Thanks so much.
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G
Thanks for having us.
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E
So as we begin our talk today, the first question that I always ask is what brought you to this project both individually and collectively? I think. So let's start with Michael.
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F
Sure. It was a long time in the coming. So we've been friends for a long time and in various constellations have been doing research together. But I think the sort of real motivation came from having been working on questions around the philosophy and the psychology of bias and prejudice and thinking of ways to help understand and do research on how we can become less biased and prejudiced. And one thing that pretty much anybody who does research in that domain is hit with at some point is a certain criticism that their work is too individualistic, that they are trying to solve this great big complex systemic problem of racism or gender inequality or whatever the particular form of social bias is at the level of just fixing people one by one, and that there's something kind of short sighted or small minded about that. And so we had to think really carefully about that criticism when it came to our work on bias and prejudice and develop a set of tools for thinking about why it's really important to think about the individual minds and individual choices as a form of connection with broader social change. And then it kind of dawned on us as we got interested in other research individually that that was a concern that applied really broadly. So we started to do some collaborative work on climate change and saw the exact same dynamic unfolding there where people in all different ways were working on like, how do you motivate individuals to care more about climate change or change their behavior? And they were getting hit with that same criticism that it's like foolhardy to try to fix this problem at the individual level. And so we realized that's a dialogue or a discussion that needed some fresh thinking at a broader level. And and so we decided to tackle that at a book sized project.
- [05:33]
G
Yeah, and what we we after writing a couple of things for academic audiences, responding to this with the kind of precision and scholarly fussiness that's required of those sorts of things. This book is very much for a public audience. And part of the reason we steered in that direction was that we thought it would be nice to have more than five or six readers for the things that we said. But also we thought this was the kind of message that we had was both something that sort of interweaves with a lot of the public discussions about climate change or about systemic inequality that are out there. And then as we started researching the book and it's in the, especially the first part of the book, some of the ways that the public discussions of these social problems are framed. They don't just emerge out of nowhere. They're sort of guided by these shadowy behind the scenes forces. And so that sort of connected the public discussions with the academic discussions in ways that were really interesting. And then just on the way of conveying the message and making the point we want to make, there's a kind of platitudinous sense of the, you know, you say, no, it takes both individual level and systemic or structural level interventions to help solve these things. And no one disagrees with that in the abstract. But actually doing the work of sort of integrating the individual on the structural level is something which we thought hadn't been done in a way which was at least illustrated by the kinds of stories that we try to tell in the book where we just again and again and again try and like introduce an interesting academic concept, but then illustrate it with stories which are much more sort of easy to consume for people who aren't in the academic trenches.
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C
I think Michael and Dan did a really good job talking about sort of why we as a group came to this. So I'll just add a couple notes about myself as an individual. So I think, you know, so the two main case studies in the book are climate change and racism. And when it comes to something like climate change, for most of my life I just took for granted that what it meant to care about the climate was to try to reduce your personal carbon footprint. And so it was a really transformative moment for me to learn that in fact, the very idea of a personal carbon footprint was popularized by formerly British Petroleum, now beyond Petroleum, that it was itself something that we were brainwashed into caring about. And so I think that's that initial moment where you realize, wow, I have been brainwashed into thinking about these problems individualistically, but was a really powerful point of departure. But then you can immediately slip into thinking like, all right, so what we instead need to do is, you know, have the US sign a massive international treaty in order to transform the system. And it's like, what role do I have to play in that? And I think on the implicit bias side, I, and I know Michael and Dan as well, have actually done a fair amount of our own implicit bias training. Right. And in that context you also come across this objection where people say, like, you're talking about us committing microaggressions or doing these small scale, itty bitty behaviors. But racism is baked into our institutions in all these deep structural ways. And wanting to taking those criticisms seriously, but also wanting to try to absorb them and synthesize them and think about are there ways that there can still be a role for something like implicit bias education that is alive and alive to the reality of structural injustice and trying to do something about it, rather than just pretending like the problems are completely inside our heads. And so this project is very much trying to take those criticisms on board and integrate them into a larger perspective where we think the problem is both inside our heads and embedded in our social institutions.
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E
So you mentioned in your response, Alex, that you were surprised to learn about the fact that this idea of your personal carbon footprint was sort of, it was the product of a PR campaign. And I have to tell you, that was one of the more eye opening sections of the book for me as well. I remember very distinctly as a kid watching that commercial with I think, an Italian guy pretending to be a Native American guy and weeping over the trash on the ground. So let's talk about that because your book is divided into three sections and the first one of those addresses this problem of either or thinking. And we're sort of encouraged to think in that way. So let's talk a little bit about that encouragement that we get.
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C
Right. So the commercial in question is probably the most effective and well known public service announcement of all time. And in the, in, in this particular commercial, an individual who seems to be a Native American begins by sort of in, in his canoe paddling through a pristine river. And then gradually he starts to notice trash. And then you start to hear ominous music in the background. And there's a factory, you know, spewing smoke. And then he comes to the shore and it's covered in trash. And then someone, he's at, he's at a highway and someone throws trash out their window and it lands at his feet. And he turns to the camera with a single tear coming down his cheek. And the narrator in the background says, some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don't. People start pollution and people can stop it. And this commercial came out at a time when littering was a huge problem. People would just kind of go on a picnic and then just lift up the picnic blanket and just leave the trash there because they just saw nature as this huge expanse that could accommodate those things. And the video was actually quite effective in encouraging individuals to pick up after themselves and to take littering Seriously. So in that sense, it was a really powerful and important campaign, but that wasn't actually its real purpose. The video was funded by an organization called Keep America Beautiful, which despite its name, was not primarily motivated to keep America beautiful. It was motivated to sell things in disposable containers. So it was a consortium of companies, including canning companies and chewing gum companies and cigarette companies, a whole bunch of different organizations that were selling stuff that, that you would then throw away. And there was a lot of frustration growing at the time about these disposable containers. In fact, Vermont actually passed a law banning the sale of goods in non returnable containers. And the industries realized that this was going to impact their bottom line. And so they realized that they had to change the conversation. And the way that they did that was this brilliant technique of shifting the responsibility off of them as the producers of all this crap onto us and brainwashing us into thinking that it was our responsibility as individuals to take care of them. And so that's one of the organizing case studies in the book. And that is sort of a point of departure for thinking about either or thinking. But I'll hand it off to my co authors to pick it up from there.
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F
So one place the story really gathers steam from my perspective, is in, I think, a kind of increasingly widespread recognition of the history that Alex just told. Obviously not everyone knows the backstory of the so called crying Indian ad or, or knows that BP was the company that popularized the, the personal carbon footprint concept. But I do think in the 2010s and maybe a little bit before, particularly amongst the progressive left, there was this increasing recognition that, that individual change isn't enough. And what we observed, and this is in part what I was describing in the beginning when I said, you know, we had to figure out how to respond to a, a kind of criticism of the work we were doing in looking at the kind of individual psychology of prejudice. This, this recognition pervaded both scholarly discourse but also popular discourse. The idea that ch to solve complex global problems that are woven into laws and economies and institutions, it's not enough to just mind your own corner of the world, your own individual choices. And you saw this in headlines all over the place. We put some in the book. Ones like you can't save the climate by going vegan. Corporate polluters must be held accountable. They all get at this logic that there's something very, very limited about individual level solutions. And so we kind of thought of that as a, as a pendulum swinging back against the history that Alex just Just described. And, and we thought that either or thinking was a nice way to capture this idea that either you can change your own personal behavior because that's what's what you in your power to do, but then you recognize like, that's not really effective, or you can point to the institutions and systems and social structures that need to change. And that's like, you know, what the savvy progressive leftist does. But then everyone kind of feels like, well, okay, what do we do about that? Right. Like, so Alex said, if you think that we need a binding international treaty to address climate change, what do I do about that? Or if we. If the solution to racialized medical outcomes. Right. That black Americans have all kinds of worse health outcomes than white Americans is like, because of poverty and racialized inequality. You kind of have that same realization, like, well, I can address prejudice by being more respectful to people in front of my face, but how do I solve poverty or income inequality or whatever? So either our thinking is this bind that we get ourselves into where we think we have to choose one of these routes to change at the individual level, at the systemic level. And, and so we really wanted to scrutinize that and point out ways in which we think it's both internally flawed, like it's logically flawed, but it's also a kind of dead end for making change. And so the first three chapters of the book set up this history that we've been describing. And, and then kind of arrive in chapter three at the. The status quo, what we call the. The problem of either. And then the. The next part of the book goes into our positive work where we try to provide some different tools for thinking about social change. Which if you want to go there next, I could hand that over to Dan, but maybe you want to.
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E
No, no, that's perfect. Exactly where I was going. The only thing I would question, maybe, Dan, you can address this. While I get the sort of system versus individual dichotomy right. There seems to be. And maybe this is something that sort of reappears later on in the book, a heavy focus on a criticism of the individualistic thinking more than the systemic thinking. I don't. Maybe that's my own. My own biases that I'm bringing to it, or it's something that I'm just.
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C
I don't know.
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E
Yeah, I don't know if you want to speak to that a little.
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G
Yeah, I mean, you're not the first one who's sort of had this response to some of what we said, but I think One, one way that we would want to kind of reframe that would be to say that if it might feel like we're a little bit more critical of the individual way of thinking, it's more because we have some things to say about the impoverished conception of what an individual is that's often operative in a lot of these discussions. So we just talked a little bit about some of the dark arts of corporate PR and the way that different social issues and challenges have been framed in this, this sort of either or way of thinking about it. And those, those messages weren't released into a void. The, you know, we're all three of us are American and most of our familiarity and a lot of those examples are things which are prominent in the US or the, the wider sort of left or sorry, Western civilization. And the conception of what an individual is, especially in the United States, is just very individualistic. So what does that mean? It, you know, we tend to think of ourselves and we have this image or this picture of what it is to be human, which is very atomizing. It's very sort of self focused rather than focused on the communities and the connections that people have with each other. And that shows up, you know, sort of in the, what I think of as the secular scriptures of the United States. Like we really value self reliance and pulling ourself up by our bootstraps. And you know, rugged individualism is this sort of call, call word for a key value of the American way of thinking about what it is. And that tends to focus energy on individuals, but also this really like isolated picture of individuals. And in academic settings there's a way of thinking about people which is sometimes called Homo economicus, which is almost a crystallization of a lot of these things. And it's just mathematicized in various ways. And so when we move from the first part of the book into that second part, part of what we're doing is it's not necessarily criticizing individualistic approaches to social change, but we are trying to update and give a better picture of what it is to be an individual. And so we marshal a lot of different resources to try and sort of expand our moral imaginations about what it is to be a person. And we, we draw mainly because what our background is in the cognitive sciences and the philosophy of mind, we've drawn a lot of lines of evidence which are coming out of different areas of the cognitive sciences and the empirical behavioral sciences to put forward a picture which is just much more social of sort of centers sociality as part of what it is to be human, part of what human nature is, part of what it is to be a person is just to be extremely gregarious, to be inevitably integrated and interdependent on the people around us in such a way that makes more visible. Again, if you think about this as a project, first and foremost in that middle section of expanding our moral imaginations, make more visible the ways in which we're connected to other people. But we're also both extremely susceptible to social influence, but also purveyors of social influence. And we think if we can make that a little bit more visible, if we can give ourselves some conceptual tools for appreciating that, then we can harness and direct it in ways which are really going to magnify what an individual can do and the way they can connect up to larger communities and structures to help change those structures.
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E
Yeah. And I want to point this out that I didn't mean that in any way as a criticism, because I think it's really entirely appropriate for the subject matter that that idea would sort of weave its way through this book. So let's talk for a minute about that second section where we move from either or thinking to both. And thinking here you provide a number of. And one of the things I really appreciated about this book is that your examples, while there is sort of a heavy emphasis on climate change and racism, but you're not afraid to talk about some other social movements that have been effective that might not always seem quite as laudable. So let's. I don't know who wants to take this. Maybe, Michael, we can move back to you. The example of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
- [22:16]
D
Sure.
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F
Yeah. It picks up on some of the themes Dan was pointing to nicely. So I take it for granted, for a specific reason, that nearly everyone listening to this will have heard of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and that's because of its incredible success in getting its message out there and finding visibility for its cause. I think in a survey in 2002 or 2004, something like 92% of Americans had heard of it. And that was, you know, after about 20 years of work as a citizen action group, started virtually by one person. So just, you know, the most straightforward thing to say about it is that it's a testament to the power of a really motivated and inventive and imaginative and sort of dogged crusader for creating change. That person was named Janice Lightner. Her. Her own story was quite tragic. Her daughter was killed by a drunk driver, and that really sprung her into action to create this organization. But in addition to just looking for examples of really successful efforts to create social change, we found the story of NAD compelling because as you said, there are some parts of the story that don't really fit very comfortably with our political sensibilities, I guess I would say. And that's because the, the real ethos of the organization was in fact quite individualistic and quite retributiveist, right? I mean, so she became, she gained notoriety in the Reagan Thatcher era where mass incarceration was growing in the United States. And the whole kind of idea is that we should treat drunk driving like murder and we should seek to punish people who are the individuals at fault. And what was really crucial for us in that story was the way in which the organization understood where people's hearts and minds were at the time. And so the, the lesson that we are trying to point to is that structural change in and of itself is never a fix for anything. Right. It's not as if once you've designed the perfect policy solution to whatever problem it is that's bedeviling you, that you just get to kind of flick your hands and into existence it goes. So before talking about mad, we talk in the book about Prohibition, you know, which is an example of a incredibly seemingly deep and durable structural change, right? A change to the Constitution of the United States. But because it didn't capture people's hearts and minds and didn't get individuals on board relatively quickly, it, it failed, right? And, and it was the only time the United States unamended the Constitution. So MAD was really instructive, both just for the capacity of individuals to organize, but also because one of the things that successful organizing really relies on is paying very close attention to how individuals think how. And the psychology of the time.
- [25:56]
E
Although, as I think you point this out, that while Prohibition failed, that is, you know, we unamended the Constitution, and that Prohibition itself caused a whole cascading series of problems in and of itself. Drinking has been reduced, right? Like, like people don't drink the way that obviously people still drink, but not like, not like they used to.
- [26:21]
F
There were a number of successes in Prohibition. I mean, you know, the temperance movement was really a women led movement. And part of that was because alcoholism is so integral to domestic abuse. And during Prohibition, rates of domestic abuse dropped precipitously. And so by no means was it a blanket failure. And you know, I don't know, I don't have strong views about, about laws around alcohol and so on, but if you think it was a good thing, then the same lesson should come out, which is like, well, why didn't it last? Why didn't it get more mass appeal? And just to connect that up with one feature of the story about, about Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which I neglected to mention before, was originally called Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, just to sort of put a point in that individual ethos, one thing that MAD did to its great success was not just play an instrumental role in changing laws, but perhaps even more importantly, play an instrumental role in changing norms. So the three of us are all roughly the same age, and when we were teenagers learning to drive, um, it. It was just like, totally verboten. Like, you know, everyone knew that drunk driving was just, like, bad, and of course it happens still, but, like, it was not a normative or socially acceptable thing to do. And that is really because of this movement that MAD was at the center of. And I, I think that, you know, there's more historical analysis to be done, but that sort of change in, in norms and expectations in people's minds is something you don't see quite in contrast with, like, prohibition and other failed social movements.
- [28:22]
E
I suspect I'm just a little bit older and I. You might be the generation that went to high school and found the smashed car in the. In the parking lot.
- [28:37]
F
I. I remember that. Yeah.
- [28:39]
E
Okay.
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F
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:41]
E
It was a. It was a little bit after. I was. I was already in college by this time, but I could still distinctly remember driving by a high school and the police would roll in, like, the. The destroyed car from a drunk driving accident, or presumably a drunk driving accident, and lay it in front of the high school as a demonstration of, you know, don't let this happen to you kind of a thing.
- [29:02]
C
I didn't have that. But we did have a guest speaker who had brain damage and ruined his track career from drunk driving.
- [29:12]
E
All right, so this is, I think, in this middle section, what we're calling both and thinking, I think, is one of the most important parts of the book. And I want to get to it by first talking about the acronym Weird Culture. Alex, do you want to pick up a little bit on what we're talking about?
- [29:33]
C
Sure. So WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrial, and something in Democratic. What's the R for it? Rich. Rich. Oh, yeah, right, right. So Joseph Henrich and colleagues have studied how a great deal of social scientific research has been done in countries like the United States or the UK that have a certain kind of profile, and typically on psychology undergrads. And on the basis of that, folks have made huge generalizations about what human beings are like and how human beings see the world. And as we've to continue banging on the drunk that we've been banging on for the last half hour, that is a very individualistic picture of people, that we are fundamentally isolated individuals, that the reasons, the explanations for why we do things are because of what's in our hearts and minds and our traits. If someone does well, it's because they have talent. If someone, you know, does poorly, it's because they don't care. And there's this massive systematic focus on what's going on inside people's heads and a massive systematic ignorance of the situations that people are embedded in. And there is a lot of insight to be gained, of course, from looking at inside of. Inside of people's heads to the extent that we can. But it's also an incredibly partial and misguided view when it's taken too far. And so one of the insights of the middle part of the book is to try to draw on a larger set of intellectual traditions that have not exclusively focused on the individual. And so there's various indigenous traditions and feminist traditions that have said if we want to understand how the world works, we have to understand people as being in relation to each other and fundamentally interdependent. So specifically, within a kind of evolutionary, scientific perspective, what researchers have found is that we are an incredibly, as we put it, gregarious species. The most shy, anxious, isolated human adult is way, way more social than the most social chimpanzee. And we are incredibly distinguished by our ability to be with other people. And so one of the examples we talk about is Sarah Hardy in her book Mothers and Others, who talks about riding on a plane and just being, you know, someone's like, you know, putting their book bag in the overhead bin and bumps into her, and she sort of like, you know, grunts, but kind of smiles to pass it off as, like, not so bad. And it's this kind of, you know, feat where just hundreds of people get stuffed in this tiny aluminum box and then get from point A to point B. And she says, I have to imagine what it would be like if instead of a bunch of human beings, I was in here with a bunch of chimpanzees. And we would be lucky to get through the flight with all of our fingers and toes attached because it would turn into such a catastrophe. And that's a way of bringing out that we are an incredibly social species. And so what the weird perspective, the individualistic perspective misses out on. And this is, again, to circle back to themes that we've already introduced is the extent to which we are shaped by each other, but also the extent to which we shape each other. And so, for example, in a social, psychological context, there's a ton of influence, a ton of emphasis on situationism and the ways that we're shaped by our situations, but a tendency to overlook the extent to which we shape our situations in turn. And so a raft of studies in, you know, in the 20th century found that, for example, people were more likely to be generous or giving if they smelled baked goods or smelled the smell of fresh coffee. And so researchers thought, ah, well, people's personalities don't have that much to do with how they go on to act in the world. It's not that they're. People have generous personality traits, and that's what makes them do what they do. It's just these situational factors. But of course, somebody baked those baked goods. Somebody made that coffee, and that's an individual who's shaping the situation, who's influencing someone else in turn. Right. So part of the. What we're trying to emphasize in that middle part of the book is the extensive interdependence that we have among human beings and that. That both creates certain kind of constraints because we depend on each other, but it also creates a whole set of opportunities because other people depend. Depend on us. And so ultimately, the thought is that the pathway towards social change is going to be leveraging these insights about how human beings really work. And so that, you know, there's some continued role for understanding us as isolated individuals, but that's ultimately a very partial and misleading view of who we are.
- [34:22]
E
Yeah. And again, I think if we have been talking about it quite a bit, I think it's only because it's such an important point to raise and to raise again and again. And I've thought this in working in education, in my primary research is in education, that this is my example. I teach public speaking, and I can do a better than adequate job, I think, of teaching people how to give a fairly decent speech, teaching them online. But something happens in the public speaking classroom or where students come together and form a cohesive unit somehow. And I cannot figure out how to do that in an online environment that is like I can. I can sort of. I feel comfortable that they can walk out of my. My online environment and, you know, ethos, pathos, logos and, you know, invention. You know, like, I really feel comfortable that they have learned how to do those things. But what they haven't learned how to do is to be with one another. And this is the example that I use frequently. And I'm sorry if I'm taking up too much of the time here, but I had a student who couldn't get through a speech. She just broke down in the center of it. But the rest of the group came to her aid and they supported her and they sort of encouraged her to finish. And she got through it at the end of the day, and there was a sense of accomplishment, but also a sense of bonding. And I cannot reproduce that. It's what education can ultimately be about, but it can't simply. There's no formula that would allow that to happen other than doing the hard work. And we're going to get to this later on, I think, of putting in the time to do that kind of stuff. And again, your chapter on this stuff, I think, is really important for getting people to realize that we're not all just out there influencing 25 people in the room, but instead it's creating a sense of us out of all that.
- [36:33]
C
That's a beautiful example, and it's as good an opportunity as any to say, this is why we can't replace the classroom with AI. There are things that happen when people get together in a shared space that cannot be recreated with even the most personalized tailored AI tutor.
- [36:52]
E
Yeah. Speak, brother. Okay, so the final section of this book, since we're all on the same page with that part, the final section of the book focuses on putting some of what you've discussed into practice. And there's lots of examples here that I find, and all of them are interesting. Not again, all of them are equally laudable. We've already talked a little bit about Prohibition, One of the most. And I've seen this case made before, one of the most effective social changes centers around the National Rifle Association. Let's talk a little bit about that. Dan, you want to pick that one up?
- [37:34]
G
So, I mean, I could say a little bit about the backdrop for what happens when we talk about the National Rifle association to the sorts of audiences that. That we tend to talk to as we get some pushback. And it's been really sort of instructive and interesting for us just in the way people react to the very idea of maybe that there's something to learn about taking a close look at the playbook that the National Rifle association has used and maybe pulling out some lessons to be put in the service of other kinds of causes. And, yeah, I mean, I was taken aback the first couple of times where people Were like, no, there's nothing to learn here. This is all sort of morally tainted or something. And I didn't find that. And I don't think any of the three of us did either. What I found particularly interesting about what the National Rifle association did, and there's like a historical story about how that particular organization evolved into its current form, which I don't have the details at my fingertips, but someone else might want to jump in. But what they very much did with intention is build a community and then socially construct a kind of identity that was at the center of that community and then figured out ways to connect that to particular political outcomes and very sort of pragmatic form. So the National Rifle association in its current version, has a magazine. I think it's called the Rifleman. Is that right?
- [39:14]
C
American Rifleman.
- [39:16]
G
American Rifleman, that's right. Where it's a way to disseminate not only information about guns and different policies and everything, but a vocabulary that people have for talking about who they are as gun owners, and not only who they are as gun owners, but who. Who people on the outside of their community are. And they have not only the magazine which binds them together. There's, of course, dues that they pay, but that gets put into various benefits which are then given back to community members. And it's all. It's all built around, you know, this one. What has become this one political issue. They're a single issue voting block which has connections directly to politicians in various ways. And none of that just happened.
- [40:10]
F
Right.
- [40:10]
G
And I don't see. Just to connect it back to where I started. I didn't see any reason why the way that that was set up had anything really specific to do with the issue that it was built around. I'll hand it off to, like, how exactly.
- [40:26]
C
So part of what is really striking about the NRA case is that, you know, for people outside the US they'll just be like, what is it with Americans and their guns? Why do Americans love guns so much? And that is itself a kind of individualistic assumption where they're just assuming that Amer. There's something about American hearts and minds where they just love their effing guns. But part of what's so amazing about the NRA is that it's been incredibly effective despite the unpopularity of its policies. So a majority of Republican gun owners actually say that they would. They would be in support of a policy that would require people to take a course before they can get a gun. So there's a wide. There's like a strong majority of support for stronger gun regulations. And so it actually goes against what is inside of a lot of individual hearts and minds. And part of what is incredible about the organization is its effect effectiveness despite that. So I think that's, I mean one thing that people don't like about the example is that it's counter majoritarian. But the other thing is that people just kind of default to assuming that the reason they've been so successful is because they throw a ton of money at the problem and they have a ton of billionaire and you know, politicians that are supporting them. And the, the fact of the matter is that they have a lot more to show for their efforts than a lot of other organizations who spend a lot more money. So the, the money is not the explanation. What's going on in individual hearts and minds is not the explanation. What has driven it is, as Dan talked about, this cultivation of a sense of identity. The sense of we are the freedom loving individuals and if you, if you don't, if you're not in support of, you know, no restrictions on guns, that means you hate freedom and cultivating this sense of us versus them and we're under threat and so on. And that's part of what's been so powerful about it. And so although obviously I think it's evident from the way we're talking about this, we are not in support of the NRA's policies. We're part of the majority that opposes them, but it's, you gotta hand it to them. So that's part of the framework for the book is let's study how you can be a really effective movement even when it's a case that is not in support of a policy that we agree with. And so the big headline takeaway for us from that section is identity matters. People can often fall into thinking, you know, let's just find the policy that's the most popular for the largest group of people and let's fight for that. But if people are not actually motivated, if they're not actually animated, if they don't actually have a sense of themselves being invested in the topic, then they'll, you know, they'll sure, they'll vote for your policy when the time comes, but they're not actually going to show up and put in the effort and send their letters to the senators and, and show up at the council meetings and, and you know, donate money and so on unless they're like really invested in it. And so we think that the, the way to social change goes through Identity rather than around it. And so then another task for the later parts of the book is thinking about are there ways of incorporating the insight that identity matters that can be less exclusionary, if not, you know, completely, you know, are there ways of doing this that can be as inclusionary as possible?
- [43:39]
F
Right.
- [43:40]
E
Okay, so let's talk about that, because, as you say, the rest of the book picks up on this idea. And again, the NRA has absolutely been masterful at creating that sense of identity around the sort of shared project of gun ownership, even in ways, I think sometimes, having known a few people who are NRA members, like, they're in favor of sensible gun regulation, as a matter of fact, because they have a healthy respect for the firearms to begin with and are not always on board with what the national organization does. And we could probably spend a lot of time on that. But I want to talk instead, and Michael will bring you in here about the possibility of coalitional politics. I've had a number of conversations on this podcast with a lot of folks in social movement work. Most specifically, I had the honor of interviewing Norman Hill, who was a protege of Bayard Rustin, about the notion of coalition politics. So let's talk a little bit about building coalitions.
- [44:49]
F
Sure. I mean, we live in a democracy for now at least, and democracies require coalitions. I mean, that's how they function, is that people who don't necessarily agree on everything find enough to agree about to get on the same side for some period of time. We talk a little bit in the book about FDR and the New Deal and how there was a real uneasy coalition between labor and the Communist Party at the time, time, and how that, you know, in some ways, not all, is a model that we should take very seriously. So one element of building a coalition is obviously compromise and the sorts of obvious, like, agreements that have to be made between groups. But I think a less obvious element of basic building a coalition is seeing past false binaries or seeing past false choices that sometimes get foisted on us in ways that we can avoid. So one of those which was really live at the time we were writing the book was on this debate about whether what was kind of the salient mover in American politics in the sort of early phase of the Trump era was race or class. And there was all kinds of debate about this. And I think it's easy enough to see how the different positions people took on this debate put them on, on different sides of what could be a broad liberal coalition or a broad progressive coalition. And so we really took inspiration from the work of Ian Haney Lopez, who's a law professor at Berkeley and who's long been involved in labor politics and in advising labor organizers. And he talks about something called the race class narrative as a way of seeing how race is often used by political entrepreneurs as a tool of division, as a way of splitting groups that otherwise could be allied. And so his proposal, and he's got a lot of interesting research to suggest that this is a promising way of framing issues around race and class, is that effectively race is a tool used by the powerful to split various parts of the working class against each other. And it's a kind of populist approach. And, you know, it's not a magic solution. But the. The reason we found it inspiring and as a way of thinking about coalitional politics is that it sort of questions a choice that we are sort of often told we have to make. Right. Should we have a race based on politics or a class based politics? And I think the answer is actually we can have both. And so we profile a number of different kind of. In coalitional and intersectional movements that have found ways to do that. And so we, we. What we wanted to foreground was the kind of tool for thinking where we see commonalities that aren't necessarily obvious with people that we can form coalitions with. And I'll just say one last thing and then anyone else can jump in, is that, you know, we were talking a minute ago about the importance of identity in organizing. Another way of talking about identity is just as a building block for community. Right. So the part of what makes the NRA really powerful is that it's a community of people who, who see each other as part of a group. And I think coalitional politics drives at that same sort of idea that what we're driving at is finding ways to create and be part of community in our efforts to make the world more just.
- [49:05]
E
Alex, you look like you wanted to jump in.
- [49:07]
C
Sure. Yeah. So I think so. We explore a number of case studies in the book about coalitional politics. One of them is about coalitions between communists and labor organizers during the New Deal. We also draw a lot of insights from the intersectional feminist tradition and women of color and, you know, folks who said, you know, the, you know, the white woman realizes that she can only be free when I am free and that her chains are shackled to mine. Right. That was Fannie Lou Hamer. And so one of the. Another one of the case studies that we focus on in the book is undocumented youth who came to the US when they were kids. So we call them. In the. In the US we call them dreamers, and the movements that built to try to empower the. Empower those folks. And one of the things that we talk about in the book, and this is coming from the work of Veronica Terriquez in particular, is that, of course, many of the folks who were undocumented and came to the US as children were disadvantaged in other respects as well. For example, some of them were darker skinned, and many of them were queer. And you might think, all right, well, if we want to build a powerful movement on behalf of dreamers, we should just only focus on the one thing, only focus on their immigration status and not think about the other dimensions of their identity. But what a lot of the dreamers did was they actually took inspiration from another social movement, the movement to destigmatize sexual minorities, destigmatize LGBTQ folks. And so there was a coming out of the closet narrative. And so the dreamers came up with the coming out of the shadows narrative, where many of them publicly declared their status as undocumented as a way to draw attention to their cause and to. To build up sympathy and support. And so that's an example where there was a nearby social movement, and they drew on the insights of that social movement to empower their own. And in some cases, you might worry that, okay, like, one movement is appropriating the other movement's tactics, and is that going to lead to problems? But actually, Veronica Terrakez provides suggestive evidence to think that instead of this sort of, you know, negative scenario where one movement is just stealing another movement's tactics, that there was actually a kind of positive feedback loop between the two movements. Because she finds evidence to suggest that once people who were undocumented came out as undocumented, they felt a sense of empowerment where those who were actually LGBTQ now felt more empowered to come out as queer. And so there was a way in which she calls it a kind of boomerang effect or other. Researchers have studied social movement spillover, where, you know, you're initially drawing tactics from another movement to support your own, but that can in turn empower the other movement. Right. And subsequently, activists in both queer activism and migration activism have kind of built those insights into the DNA of their organizations. So, for example, migration groups built the queer Immigration project, where they were, like, you know, having interns who had the specific role. You know, they had specific roles in their institutions that were there for folks who were queer, and queer activist movements built Queer Dream Summer where they were, you know, specifically trying to make space for members of their organization who are undocumented. And there's reason to think that folks who were, in one sense doubly marginalized, folks who were both undocumented and queer, were actually more likely to take on leadership roles in either kind of organization. So that sense of double marginalization could actually turn into a sense of double empowerment. And so that's an example where what seems like, you know, potentially two rival movements that are competing for our attention, that when they come together, the whole could actually be stronger than the sum of their parts. And so we're certainly not trying to deny that difficult choices have to be made, that there are trade offs, that there are real challenges in deciding what to prioritize and so on. That even here there can be a tendency to slip into an excessive sort of either or thinking. Where we're thinking, it's either your movement or it's mine. We're either advancing, you know, the feminist agenda or the anti racist agenda and not realizing that, hey, there are people who are disadvantaged both by their gender and by their race. And maybe there are ways that we can, you know, be the rising tide that lifts all boats and so looking for opportunities for both and thinking where we can try to find solutions that work for everyone. And so part of the strategy there is to acknowledge that policies and prejudices can affect different individuals and members of different groups in different ways, and recognizing the way that elites appeal to these kinds of divisions to advance their own ends, but then ultimately trying to pivot from realizing the ways that people can be disadvantaged in specific ways to trying to find solutions that work for everybody. And so that's some of the key insights that we're trying to think about for coalitional politics. Yeah.
- [54:19]
E
And I think again, having done a few interviews with people who are involved in social movements, I think at the end of the day, if you scratch beneath the surface, you'll find that in every movement for social change, you're going to find rather it's not a singular thing.
- [54:34]
C
Right.
- [54:34]
E
It's never just one thing. It's always a coalition of people coming together to try to create some kind of change. And in addition to that, we'll get
- [54:43]
D
to this next section.
- [54:46]
F
We.
- [54:46]
E
One of the hardest things I think it is to teach, and when I teach courses on social change is the
- [54:52]
D
decidedly unsexy elements about it.
- [54:55]
E
And in chapter 13, you focus on
- [54:57]
D
precisely why
- [55:01]
E
the unexciting parts of social change are Important. Dan, you want to talk a little bit about the grunt work involved in.
- [55:09]
G
I get all the exciting topics.
- [55:13]
E
Well, you know, this is really, I mean, like to go back to, to go back to like the thing about Bayard Rustin.
- [55:20]
D
Right.
- [55:21]
E
There's this, there's this vignette that I read somewhere where they were bringing all of these people for.
- [55:27]
D
To the march on Washington, right.
- [55:28]
E
And someone had to figure out what are they going to eat when they get there. And someone had sort of gathered together bologna and Rustin looked. Rustin looked and said, no, you can't have baloney in Washington D.C. in August. And he made everybody switch and he started to provide peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And it is the most decidedly unsexy thing in the world. But the consequences of getting that decision wrong are so dramatic. Right. Like the whole thing would have been remembered very differently. So anyway, Dan, let's talk about these sort of, the sort of day to day parts of creating social change.
- [56:11]
G
Yeah, I mean, there's a sense in which the point isn't specific to social change or social movements. The more I get into the administrative part of academia, the more I realize how much hard work there is just to keep like all the trains running on time and how much these little decisions make a difference. But some of the things that are maybe specific to, to social movements and social change have to do with the kind of crescendo which can often surround a sense of momentum that a social movement can have as they build up to try and achieve whatever it is that the goal that they've set for themselves. Pass a particular piece of legislation or get the IRA across the finish line, something like that. And there's two points I think I could speak to initially on the grunt work of that. One of them is say that your social movement achieves the goal that it sets for itself without any caveats or any sort of having to surrender any points or something fantastic, pop the champagne bottles, celebrate. But that's not the end of the work. In a lot of ways, that's the end of one part of work. And the beginning of what you were saying is kind of the grunt work, which isn't just getting a policy passed or something big and fanfare involving. But now it has to be implemented. It has to be set up. It has to be defended against opposite side social movements that want to retract it. And it has to be publicized in such a way that the people who benefit from the policy having been passed understand what they're getting from it having been passed. So one of the concepts that we talk about in this part of the book, we take from Leah Stokes, who's a political scientist who works on climate change, this great expression called the fog of enactment. And the idea there is, once something gets passed, well, now it has to be implemented. And now all these gritty little details about how it's going to be implemented in this community, or who's going to be taking care of this element of it, or should we be eating bologna, or should we be eating peanut butter and jelly? And there's just not a lot of glory in that. It's the sort of thing where the public attention is often faded and the huge rallies where everyone comes together, that's not there anymore. But that is absolutely crucial, the publicization of what happens and the sort of entrenchment and making sure that things are being run efficiently. Without that, the policy or the forward progress is either not going to take root or it's going to be vulnerable to regress, either just by attrition or by, again, forces pushing in the opposite side. The other thing I just kind of wanted to add to that is there's a very easy way to think about social movements, especially their victories, as having this crescendo. And we tell great stories around the passing of the civil rights movement or the passing of the IRA or whatever, but there's a psychological mindset that if it gets hypnotized by that picture of what success looks like, can actually be detrimental to any kind of progress being made. So we talk about this in terms of incrementalism, where there's a psychological tendency that if you set a particular bar for what counts as success or what a full bill of goods would look like, and then you get halfway there, you get 60% of the way there, but don't achieve the full thing. It's very easy to dismiss the entire thing as worthwhile or as just sort of a failure and then unplug and just sort of fall back into a kind of hopelessness without appreciating that a lot of times success does take these sort of like it's increments. It happens in increments. Even if we want to tell a story in retrospect, which, which is these sort of revolutions, and even if that's what we're expecting in the future, success to look like, not appreciating that, those are extraordinarily rare, that actually there's a lot of this, like, nitty gritty push a couple of inches, two steps forward, one step back, it can Be extremely demotivating if you don't appreciate the. If you don't take the little wins as they come as well and fight hard for those and do the. The sort of, like you were saying, the nitty gritty grunt work to make sure those happen as well.
- [60:47]
E
I work a lot with our union here on campus, and I can guarantee you that if I was negotiating our contract two years ago, guarantee that if I had called for a strike, I would have had something close to 90% participation in that strike. And if I call a meeting, get maybe 50 people, I mean, that's it. And because there's something, again, there's something really glamorous about standing on a picket line. And you know what I mean? That can be a very cool experience. Meetings can be dreadful, man, but they're so necessary for making those incremental changes and getting the work done and being aware of the issues.
- [61:31]
F
I think the most like, clearest distillation of this idea that we talk briefly about in the book is in about endeavors to do tree planting campaigns as like a climate solution. And there's all these examples out there where, you know, such and such organization or such and such country went out and planted 300,000 trees, 500,000 trees, a million trees, and then six months later they're all dead. Because the. Nobody thought the point was to grow trees. It was just to plant them. And you know, it's just like showing up and watering them is not sexy. Nobody, nobody thinks of that as changing the world, but it really is instrumental.
- [62:16]
E
All right, so we're coming to the end of our conversation here. I would like to ask, and I we. You didn't ultimately decide who was going to get this honor or if anyone knows. But I'd like to ask you to
- [62:29]
D
read a little from your book.
- [62:31]
G
Sure. So this is at the beginning of chapter 14. The list of roles people can play in the fight for a better world is dizzyingly long for anyone looking for a place to join the ranks. Some personal questions can help narrow it down. Which of all the pressing issues out there do I care about the most? What talents and skills do I have to offer? Or am I interested in developing which projects are important enough to me that I'll be willing to stick around through the fogs of enactment and uptake? What are the concrete opportunities I've got right in front of me? What are the main forms of friction holding me back? In other words, what roles am I best positioned to play?
- [63:16]
D
So let's talk a little bit about this fight. Fighting from where you stand and finding
- [63:20]
E
your role in social change.
- [63:21]
F
I could say something real quickly, which was, you know, when you gave that example a minute ago about how if you called for a strike, a lot of people would turn up, but if you call for a meeting, nobody would. And it actually, in an interesting way, pushes back against a way that I think about this sometimes, but I think we could probably reconcile the two, which is that, um, one of the things in our minds when we were writing about the importance of thinking of roles that we can play for social change is that not everybody wants to be a revolutionary, right? Not everybody wants to be out there on the picket line, even if they want to see the change that the strike is after. And so one of our goals was to kind of like, populate people's imaginations with more ways to be part of collective action. And those can be just making the phone calls or making the coffee or spreading the peanut butter on the bread or whatever it is. And so, you know, it's interesting that you say more people want to be on the picket line than want to just show up at the meeting. Maybe that's just because everybody hates meetings, but, like, not everybody hates making food, right? Or not everybody hates, you know, what, like, right. Doing a letter campaign or whatever it is. And so I think one lesson here about thinking of roles is that there's a lot of work to do, and we ought to think, as the passage Dan read pointed to, about, like, what my particular skills and abilities and connections enable me to do. There's a kind of second layer meta point here, which is this is an illustration of what we mean by both and thinking, because each of us is an individual, and individuals do need to decide to get involved, there's no way to avoid that. But when we think about our roles, what we're really thinking about is what is my location in the broader social fabric? What node am I in? A network that enables me to really sort of create power and create change and pull on levers that other people might not be able to. And we all have that, right. I mean, we're not all equally well connected to Congress people and rich people and whatever. But we are all somebody's parent or somebody's coach or somebody's student or somebody's brother or sister or whatever it is. And all of those are opportunities to influence another group of people.
- [66:05]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And so if, you know, let's say that, you know, someone's number one issue is they're trying to fight against class exploitation or, you know, they want to advance workers who are being, you know, know, exploited in all sorts of ways. You might think it's like, well, what can I do for the broader worker movement? And you, and you're sort of forgetting like you are a worker too.
- [66:27]
E
Very likely.
- [66:27]
C
Right. And so, you know, in, in the book what we, we've already, you know, we've talked about like, you know, Chris Smalls and Angelica Maldonado and folks who were able to make strides towards unionizing at Amazon. And, and that is the, that you know, they were focused on their own situation, they were focused on their own social roles. But that was an empowering, exciting advance for workers everywhere in this, in the United States. And so if, if we can make strides and make headway within our own places of work, then that is itself part of the larger social movement for advancing the cause of workers. And so recogn, like taking a look at like, well, what are the social roles that I occupy? What are the things that are holding us back? What are the opportunities that we have, where we are to make a difference? And that, that, you know, that's, you know, one of the early steps towards seeing like I am part of a larger social system. It's not just me as an individual. I do occupy these larger social roles. And so as those of us on this call and probably many of the folks listening to this podcast probably occupy another social role which is as a teacher. Right. And it can be very tempting to think like I'm just like speaking into the void. I'm just, you know, Charlie Brown's parents wobble lying on the trombone and the message is not getting through. And you know, one of the things that can be really difficult in teaching is that other than when students, you know, produce work on a test or in an essay or whatever it might be, we often don't really, we're not really getting feedback about like whether the message is getting through. And so one of the case studies that we talk about in the book is that there's evidence to suggest that students are actually hearing the message. And so for example, in some studies they look at, they have like students take a, you know, do a reading on the animal rights movement and on environmental effects and so on. And then they actually study students behavior when they're purchasing things in the cafeteria afterwards. And it turns out that students for several months actually purchase fewer meat products afterwards. Right. And as you, you occupying your social role, that's not an effect you're going to see. You're not going to be there watching students buy less meat products when they're there. But. But those effects are being felt. And so it can feel like we're not making a difference. But if we do appreciate the social roles that we occupy, those are real opportunities for making a difference. And so that's why, you know, the sort of structure of the book is we talk about the problem of either or thinking. We talk about a broader both and picture of the way human beings work. We sort of build up to talking about social movements. But then in the last chapter, we try to bring it back to you as an individual and what are the social roles that you occupy and what are the opportunities for making a difference within those spaces? And so in our case, our roles as teachers is one of the, you know, important roles that we occupy for trying to make a difference.
- [69:28]
E
Well, I think that's probably a good place for us to end. Gentlemen, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today.
- [69:36]
C
Thanks, Tom. It's been a pleasure.
- [69:37]
F
Yeah, thanks so much.
- [69:38]
G
Thanks for having us, Tom. Yeah, this has been great.
- [69:41]
D
Once again, my guests today have been Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly, the authors of Somebody Should Do How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change from the Massachusetts Institute Institute of Technology Press. My name is Tom Disena and you are listening to the New Books Network.
- [69:57]
H
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ebooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.