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We Need a Better Gameplan
Flying home from Phoenix one night in late 2018, I read “Losing Earth”, and it shook me to the point I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
The piece recounted in devastating detail how the early climate movement squandered an opportunity in the 1980s to win bipartisan solutions around the brewing environmental crisis, leading to some of the massive challenges we’re living through now. The window for major change slammed shut by the end of the decade, and took until now to pry open again.
At the time I read this, the criminal justice movement was ascendant: dynamic grassroots campaigns were springing up across the country, progressive prosecutors were winning elections, and criminal justice was being featured all over the media landscape. I had wrapped two years running the extremely successful campaign to close Rikers Island jail complex, more recently helped launch a campaign to close the notorious “Workhouse” jail in St. Louis, and was on a flight back from visiting one of the many ACLU affiliates investing heavily in new justice organizing programs. A few months later, Donald Trump would sign the First Step Act, the biggest federal criminal justice bill in years. If there was ever a moment to feel hopeful about ending mass incarceration, this was it. But nothing lasts forever. How long would this window stay open? Would we look back on a period of transformational change, or our own lost decade?
Well, it definitely feels like the window is closing now. Retrograde “tough on crime” commercials found their way into the 2022 midterms, and a federal Democratic Trifecta ended their two-year session without passing a single criminal justice bill. At all levels of government, both parties are backpedaling. To get momentum back in 2023, we have to up our game. And I’m starting a Substack called The Gameplan to help make that happen.
My experiences as a teenager being manhandled by Rudy Giuliani’s NYPD turned me on to social justice, and George W. Bush’s parlaying New York’s tragedy on 9/11 into a call for war turned me into an activist. Since then I’ve spent more than 20 years fighting for change across the country, from the jailhouse to the White House. What has always kept me going, no matter how dire America’s political situation looks, is the knowledge that so many people seek a better world than the one we have now. The problem is that most of them don’t know how.
We must give people a gameplan for winning power. Instead of putting all of our hopes and dreams in the hands of a few charismatic politicians, or running all activist work through beleaguered nonprofits, we need everyone who cares to understand how the system works and how to change it. That will be the focus of The Gameplan.
My wheelhouse for the past eight years has been building effective criminal justice reform campaigns, but these posts will tackle more universal subjects that can apply to anyone trying to make a difference. And we’ll try to have some fun with it.
Scouting Report: We’ve gotta get better at knowing who our champions are, who our opponents are, and where everyone else falls. Get beyond simplistic Democrats=Good & Republicans=Bad narratives. The Gameplan is going to discuss how to find advocates who are leading on your issue, how to Power Map your politicians, and how even leftists can partner with Republicans.
Keys to the Game:. The core elements of most successful campaigns are the same: organizing, political strategy, policy, and messaging. If you do all of these things well, it won’t guarantee a “win”, but it’ll put your advocacy campaign in the best possible position to succeed. The Gameplan will bring in some of the savviest organizers around today to share strategies for building and growing campaigns.
Drawing Up Plays: In 2023, life is coming at us fast. The half-life of cultural events is shrinking. As Zeynep Tufecki and others have noted, it’s easier than ever to get peoples’ attention but harder to hold it. That means the old school theory of organizing one person at a time that multiple generations of activists were trained on is usually doomed to fail. We need to broaden our array of tactics and deploy them quickly for maximum impact. The Gameplan is going to look at past and present campaigns to look at which tactics were most successful at getting attention, building power, and winning. I want you to learn how to make it impossible for elected officials to ignore you.
Drafting The Team: By far the most under-appreciated part of social justice work is building a team that can win, and keeping everyone together during the emotional roller coaster of campaigns. How do you invest in other people’s leadership, especially directly impacted people? How do you build consensus without paralyzing your campaign? How do you launch a campaign with no money?
Halftime Show: We’ll also cover other important topics from around the advocacy world, like whether you should run for office, what’s happening with the plan to close Rikers Island, and break down the latest in whatever issue campaign has the country’s attention.
And I want to hear from you.
I hope that this Substack becomes a place where you can learn and share strategies for transforming society. We’re going to have an open comments section for people to ask questions, give feedback, and offer their own ideas. The content of this Substack will always be free and donations will be funneled towards grassroots campaigns.
Next on the Schedule: These posts will go out every Sunday. Next week we’ll kick things off with a look at deep dive into policing. The unending tragedies produced by bad policing demand action, but an answer seems as elusive as ever. We’ll dig into why that is, and why this time can be different.
Janos Marton is the Vice President for Political Strategy and National Director of the Justice program at Dream.Org. Janos previously ran the #CLOSErikers campaign, managed state campaigns for the ACLU, and ran for Manhattan District Attorney, among other adve
ntures. Follow me on Twitter @janosmarton.
Janos, I am so glad that you are doing this. It is so needed. A bunch of us were on Zoom this morning talking about how we, pro-reformers, need to be better at getting the word out proactively as opposed to defensively. The Gameplan will help. I will share and amplify and look forward to reading (if it doesn't get lost in my inbox)!