The Battles We Pick – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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Civic strategist Caitie Whelan's professional mission is to level the playing field of public policy. As she puts it on her website, "If regular folks don’t know how to have a voice in policymaking, lobbyists do. And they are very good at shaping it for their special interests." Caitie's work helping clients climb the learning curve of policy change advocacy made her a great guest for the podcast.

As she guides clients along the advocacy learning curve, Catie focuses on three core questions:

• Who has the power to do what the advocates want? 
• What's a narrative that could spur those political decision makers to take the desired action? 
• How do you sustain the effort for years to come?

Caitie says she's been especially impressed by the passionate care of the people she works with—the kind of commitment and determination that's crucial for sustaining the work over time. Caitie looks at public policy through a lens of human needs and human emotions, which is probably why she calls her excellent newsletter Policy is for Lovers. In that vein, it was interesting to hear Caitie talk about empathy for politicians and the importance of looking at the issues from their perspective.

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The Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center is well known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate and extremist groups. So it was great to have one of their researchers, Hannah Gais, as a guest on the podcast. Discussing her work on White nationalist and Neo-Nazi groups, Hannah told me about the extremist voices and ideas that the MAGA Republicans have welcomed into their Party. As one example, Hannah gave the back story on the Holocaust-denier who appeared recently on Sean Hannity's show, arguing that America was on the wrong side of World War Two.

The conversation was a sobering reminder of the authoritarianism poisoning our politics and society—and the stakes of the upcoming election. Hannah talked about an authoritarian strategy called entryism, which focuses on reshaping institutions to serve autocratic purposes. It sounded a lot like Project 2025. 

In a discussion of how women feature in white nationalist narratives, I mentioned a pair of historians. Kathleen Belew's Bring the War Home is about the emergence of the American white nationalist movement in the 1970s-1990s, and Tim Snyder's Road to Unfreedom similarly traces how Vladimir Putin cemented his position as Russia's strongman. Both accounts talk about the narrative of the need to protect women from sexual violence or perversion.

Looking beyond the dangers posed by Donald Trump as a chief executive or nominee, there is the larger problem of millions of Americans abandoning democratic principles in favor of authoritarianism. To help grapple with this difficult problem, Hannah and I listened to a clip from the classic post-WWII US government propaganda film Don't Be a Sucker. 

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This episode's guest is a journalist rather than an advocate, the author of one of the best books focused on advocacy work. Political reporter Sasha Issenberg's The Engagement tells the story of the 25-year fight for same-sex marriage, documenting the various efforts, strategies, course-adjustments, and outcomes from the perspectives of proponents and opponents alike. 

Sasha says he was drawn to the subject particularly because of the way same-sex marriage burst onto the agenda quite suddenly in the early-1990s—then coming to the fore as a hot-button topic in national politics. It was fascinating to hear Sasha talk about the complexity of a struggle playing out in Washington as well as state capitals, while also alternating between the judicial and political arenas. Sasha said when he started this project, he assumed proponents would have "this big national plan, but there wasn't one." He said it was a fight where both sides were simultaneously on offense and defense on different fronts.

Sasha recounted a key messaging shift by marriage proponents going from a fairly dry and clinical argument for legal protections and eventually opting for an emotionally resonant case for recognizing two people's commitment to each other. In our discussion of the differences between litigation and political battles, Sasha stressed the higher stakes of losing in court and being stuck with a negative legal precedent. 

One thing that enriches Issenberg's account in The Engagement is the way personalities play into advocacy and strategy. Sasha begins the book by focusing on a Hawaiian LGBTQ activist who decided it would be dramatic to hold a mass wedding to celebrate gay pride. Bill Woods' impulsive gadfly style won him few fans or allies among methodical litigators, but he played a crucial role as an originator—though he's often left out of other accounts of the struggle. As Issenberg told me, "We would not have had the Obergefell Supreme Court decision in 2015 if it hadn't been for Woods starting this ball in motion in 1990."

The podcast ends with the same question as Issenberg's book: the rights of trans people that were left aside by the marriage equality struggle. Sasha predicted that the fight for trans rights will gain momentum as the public takes the cue from science that gender is an innate part of identity just as sexual orientation is. 

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Election law attorney Yael Bromberg is principal of her own firm and litigation practice.  With a specialty in student voting rights, she serves as outside counsel to the Andrew Goodman Foundation—which works on college campuses around the country to promote student voting and is legacy of one of the activists murdered in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. Yael teaches election law at Rutgers University Law School and works with the Harvard Kennedy School’s William Trotter Collaborative on a multi-campus voting rights course drawing students from three historically black colleges and universities.   

The episode features a great discussion of the Republicans' voter fraud myth and how their voting suppression efforts resemble the multi-headed Hydra monster from Greek mythology. Yael said we have to confront that monster with the full range of tools—a mixture of legal and political tactics—and she gave examples from her work. I especially liked Yael’s idea of redefining public confidence in elections as a matter of maximum participation and the most inclusive electorate possible.

Yael also talked about her scholarship to highlight student voters as a protected class under the Constitution’s 26th Amendment, which recently led to the introduction of the Youth Voting Rights Act by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Nikema Williams. 

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To mark the podcast being ten-episodes old, I invited close colleague and good friend Kathleen Sullivan of Fine Gauge Strategies to listen back to some of the most interesting points made by those first ten guests. Similar to the way she and I delve into our interviews for evaluation projects, I wanted to have Kathleen highlight the insights she gleaned from the guests—as well as draw connections to trends and perspectives in the evaluation field.

We revisited Angela Bruce-Raeburn's account of how, after George Floyd's murder, international development practitioners and organizers were newly willing to discuss the way racism skewed their work. As Kathleen noted, such sudden openings pose the challenge of being ready to take make the most of them, especially with the uncertainty of how wide or long-lasting the opening will be.

We also listened to two pairs of clips. Adotei Akwei and Gawain Kripke compared and contrasted the inside game of working with policymaker allies versus building movements and constituencies for more ambitious change. And we heard the perspectives of Richard Healey and Elisa Massimino on why it's important to keep sight of long-range overarching aims for social change, to properly orient current efforts.

Drawing on those sets of observations as well as our recent attendance at the annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association, Kathleen and I discussed the recent rethinking of the role of professional advocates. Over the last several decades, the professionalization of the field has skewed the agenda toward established advocates' sense of the best opportunities for change. In the spirit of Julia Coffman's call to "stand up and step back," we talked about combining the skills and perspectives of professionals and affected communities—forging alliances on a social change agenda with the goals and priorities set by those most affected. 

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The podcast's tenth episode was a reunion with the former executive director of the group where I was an intern right after college. Richard Healey was executive director of not only the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy but also the Institute for Policy Studies as well as founding director more recently of the Grassroots Power Project. In fact, Richard's career as an organizer goes back six decades to his involvement in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.

I was spurred to reconnect with Richard by his recent fascinating Stanford Social Innovation Review article on the lessons the progressive movement can learn from how the military does strategy. His central point is especially apt for a podcast called The Battles We Pick. Richard stresses the need to be clear not just about our battles, but crucially the larger wars those battles are part of. As the old saying goes, you can win the battles and still lose the war.

When it comes to incremental changers versus major transformation, Richard makes a persuasive case for "both / and." On the transformation side, he says progressives should think in terms of goals for decades in the future. "But then we back-cast and ask, if you want to achieve those in 40 years, then what are the big major steps that would have to have happened in ten years to be plausibly moving us toward the 40-year goals?" Richard pointed to Working Families Party leader Maurice Mitchell as a good spokesperson for this approach. 

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Clarence Edwards has worked on nearly every side of US foreign policy and politics—from presidential campaign finance to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to lobbying Congress for groups like the Friends Campaign on National Legislation and Bono’s ONE campaign for global treatment and prevention of  HIV/AIDS. Clarence even worked in the Washington embassy of one of America’s allies. As he says on the podcast, his career has been everything he’d hoped for as a Black kid in Baltimore reading World Book encyclopedias. 

Clarence and I had a fascinating discussion of the thing that interests him most: how power works in Washington—and how that changed when Trump came on the scene. For anyone working to sustain an advocacy career over a period of decades, curiosity about power dynamics and gleaning the right lessons can be very helpful. 

The episode concludes with a conversation about the challenge of getting climate legislation through Congress, particularly the difficulty of building much-needed bipartisan consensus. Despite the years of Republican resistance, Clarence doesn’t view bipartisanship on climate change as impossible. He says he’s seen too many things change that once seemed permanent. 

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In our conversation, Eileen Hershenov of the Anti-Defamation League kept coming back to the theme of advocacy's broadest challenge: to keep progressing and sustaining change over the long haul. As Eileen explained, the only way to sustain progressive organizing is by getting people involved in the effort. Having activists and leaders  who are committed to seeking change is how we build progress upon progress.

Eileen and I trace our career roots back to our first jobs after college, when we were colleagues at New York Public Research Interest Group (NYPIRG). It's remarkable how many of us went on from NYPIRG to long careers as organizers and advocates. For Eileen's part, after law school she had senior positions with Wikipedia, Consumer Reports, George Soros' Open Society Foundation (where she helped Soros found Central European University), and the Anti-Defamation League, where she's been responsible for ADL's democracy initiatives.

Looking back at her time with Consumer Reports, Eileen talked about a fascinating effort to keep patients from picking up infections during their hospital stays. Turns out the answer was checklists and report cards. And because that campaign drew on the personal stories of people who had health problems -- or lost family members -- from hospital-acquired infections, we talked about the power of narrative as a double-edged sword.

The latter part of our conversation focused on the work Eileen has been doing at ADL to counter the homegrown threats to American democracy. She's been working with opinion researchers and scholars specializing in political violence, gaining deeper understanding of the Trump personality cult, Christian nationalism, and racism and antisemitism. 

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When Terry Woodbury was fresh out of his masters program at Princeton Theological Seminary in the late-1960s, an internship with a wealthy Kansas congregation—essentially an experiment in changing local racial relations—sent him on a career path as a community organizer. Terry shares his story of facilitating dialogue between Black and White community members in Hutchinson, Kansas. Terry is white and was given a mandate to lead the process of forging relationships with black neighbors whom the congregation's leaders knew they were disconnected from. In today's terms, he catalyzed difficult conversations that the community needed to have.

A little further into his career, Terry was tasked with assembling a community's bid for a highly competitive national recognition. That experience spurred him to an idea about the four key sectors of any community: local businesses, schools, government, and human services. He sees all those sources of leadership as integral to address the most serious local challenges. They comprise the public square, and he named his consulting business Public Square Communities. Indeed, Terry developed a specialty in helping local areas confronting near existential-level threats. He says that he's typically contacted by someone "worried about things going south."

This episode was a great chance to explore the differences and interrelationship between organizing and policy change advocacy. Where most of Terry's work delves deeply into local power structures and life conditions of community members who've been marginalized, policy advocacy is aimed at whatever changes can be achieved without the heavy lift of mass mobilization. Host David Shorr was connected to Terry because of a shared interest in the workings of the public square. But David's notion of the public square is focused on the deliberations and decisions in the government sector.

Which is why it was especially interesting to hear about a turn at advocacy that Terry took recently on rural water and irrigation issues. The title of the episode—"Twenty years left"—was the degree of threat that an area of Kansas faced  due to the overuse of water by a small set of large farms. With all of the consensus-building and bridge-building work that Terry does, it is noteworthy that he ventured into advocacy in a situation where he faced powerful self-serving businesses who closed themselves off from changes to the status quo. 

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Sandra Ionno Butcher has been chief executive of the National Organisation for FASD for six and a half years—and active in efforts on behalf of the Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder for nearly a decade—after spending the bulk of her career advocating for nuclear disarmament. 

With Sandy having lived as an American in the United Kingdom for even longer, it was interesting to get her perspective on the United States' recent tumultuous politics / fascist threat. Sandy has had a long association with the Pugwash movement, a network of scientists founded by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell to eliminate the threat of nuclear war that their generation of physicists had wrought. With the problem of nuclear weapons persisting to this day, and with only modest progress, we had a fascinating discussion of a core theme of this podcast: incremental change versus more sweeping transformation. 

Sandy's latest career phase was also excellent fodder for reflection on advocacy work. Working on the challenges of FASD put her in a strange new policymaking context. It was fascinating to hear her talk about the basic advocacy skills that carried over to her new field of work.