As we work to build out events for next week and the spring behind the scenes, I thought you all might be interested in some of the Shift the Country back story. Here goes —
Seeds & Roots
Shift the Country is anchored in history; sociology; rural sociology; mass communication; economic development; civics; environmental science; systems science; catastrophe and big disaster management; resilience; homeland security; domestic US threat bulletins; the US Intelligence Community’s Annual Threat Assessments; and the principles of democracy.
Shift the Country is an intentional fusion of threat mitigation, connection, community-building, resilience-building, organizing, wicked problem navigation, media theory, and methodology for making change put together in innovative ways to leverage the combined power of the people; fast-evolving technologies; complex media and social media; systems science; and the attention economy.
Addressing the Risk Landscape
Shift the Country grew out of increasing concern since 2015 that the US Republican Party and its leadership are pursuing and implementing anti-democratic measures; throwing out norms and rules of politics and civil society; forming alliances with domestic violent extremist groups; spreading ignorance, lies, and conspiracy theories; denying science; weakening or removing public health provisions designed to protect Americans; attempting to erase uncomfortable parts of history; escalating hostility and culture war fights; pressuring or regulating businesses to gain political support; threatening political violence; spreading and legalizing intolerance and bigotry; eroding US institutions and government; eroding civil society; suppressing votes; and eroding and complicating voting and election processes.
Shift the Country was created in part to help counter and mitigate some of these behaviours, activities, trends, threats, and risks in imaginative and strategic ways that account for the societal-level challenges that they bring. Shift the Country was also created to mitigate and address aspects of the five risks described above in the section called "The Risks We Face: Why We Need This Shift."
Opportunity to Evolve
Shift the Country was established in light of the combination of unprecedented anti-democratic behaviours by minority Republican Party leadership to help majority party (Democratic Party) supporters anywhere help the Democratic Party evolve; and to help transform their political, organizing, and messaging processes where possible.
Democratic Party messaging is often described as “bringing soup spoons to a knife fight;” or: “bringing a briefing book to a gun fight.” Americans are looking for fierce leadership in the midst of huge, overwhelming problems. Shift the Country provides a framework of things anyone can use to help Democrats and the majority coalition lean forward; catalyze innovative action and organizing; build and leverage power; and better inspire and empower the voices of the people.
Republicans – initially guided by Donald Trump – have thrown out the political rules-and-norms books and leveraged fear, resentment, scapegoating, bias, intolerance, and the culture war to whip up their voters into what is now a frenzied, hyper-activated, super-loyal “base” of followers willing to go to great lengths to support their cause. This has included putting their own and others’ lives at risk through the culture war push against COVID-19 virus spread mitigation and vaccinations… yet they persist. Countering the formidable nature of this now-widespread Republican activism takes something extraordinary; a coalition of Democrats and allies can create a phenomenon to address it.
A New Kind of Organizing
Shift the Country combines the 5 Things in our approach with distributed organizing, relational organizing, and digital/virtual organizing… and evolves the fusion of it all into something new – a synchrony of effort.
This is all designed to catalyze widespread volunteering and action; to build connection, community, solidarity, and trust; to renew faith in democracy; to garner attention; to shift the narrative; and to get deeper permeation and reach – especially to people and communities that traditional organizing doesn’t always touch.
The unique, innovative Shift the Country approach leverages, activates, and strengthens online and in-real-life social networks as a key underpinning of the work. We do it by increasing connection and strengthening our social networks (Thing 1); growing and doing more with community and coalitions (Thing 2); partnering with or pressuring businesses (Thing 3); championing vision, values, and moral courage (Thing 4); focusing on more and different messaging; and bringing together methods and ideas to get media coverage, to spread the word, and to drive the narrative (Thing 5).
The Shift the Country 5 Things organizing approach is high-risk. Anytime you catalyze the masses of humanity for anything, unpredictability is involved. This initiative is seeking to catalyze masses of humans who are fired up about fighting for the greater good, motivated to hold on to democracy, and driven to build a future where government serves the actual majority.
The idea and the hope is to get people fired up to fight for what resonates in people’s hearts – humanity, the greater good, what we need, what we want, and the collective vision of what we can be. That’s organic, messy, fluid, fast-moving, and capable of taking on a life of its own. Catalyzing a mass of humanity can be explosive and brilliant in amazing and productive ways that can help the majority of Americans. Will it be? We won’t know unless we try.
Gaps & Opportunities
We don’t get different results doing the same things. It’s essential to energize as many majority voters as possible between now and 2024 – Democrats, independents, and ex-Republicans. Voter suppression efforts by Republicans in many locations underscore the need to out-organize to reach, inspire, motivate, and mobilize voters in new and different ways.
Shift the Country was developed in part by assessing gaps in widely used organizing approaches that don’t always include strategies to reach, persuade, engage, or energize inactive voters, independent voters, rural voters, and/or voters in historically under-served and under-heard communities. The Shift the Country approach expands outward from traditional organizing approaches such as protests, postcards, phone/text banks, canvassing, voter registration, and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) work.
This 5 Things approach provides strategy and tactics to out-organize and out-mobilize to get a majority coalition of voters voting; and to facilitate other change, too. This shift right here incorporates innovation and evolution while also accounting for the frayed social fabric, destabilizing democracy, and decaying social contract. It reflects the fast-changing threat environment, and the fast-changing political landscape. It’s an unprecedented approach for an unprecedented time.
The 5 Things approach can help Democrats and their allies fight fiercely for the heart and soul of this country, go big, and go all out – especially to help candidates win elections in places considered “always Republican.” It’s worth the fight, and it’s time. This approach can help Democrats organize in innovative ways to energize voters in historically under-served communities, voters in rural communities, independent voters, or ex-Republican voters. This approach can help Democratic Party and pro-democracy coalition organizations and campaigns to recruit, engage with, or persuade new voters… or voters who haven’t typically voted for Democrats. Shift the Country seeks to help evolve organizing, messaging, and campaign approaches – while also energizing existing Democratic Party voters, encouraging and cajoling leaders to lean forward, countering cynicism, renewing faith in democracy, and re-weaving the social fabric.
Thought Leaders
The core 5 Things in the Shift the Country approach comes from analysis and deep thinking about how we can navigate instability, revitalize the democracy, and change our trajectory. The 5 Thing approach in this work incorporates and operationalizes ideas and research from an array of sources. That said, at its heart the Shift the Country work is most deeply anchored in and reflective of the thinking and research of a few key individuals listed below. These thinkers are noted in case people reading this would like to understand more about the structural, societal, systemic, and historic aspects of this work:
Katherine J. Cramer is a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her website notes that her “most recent book, The Politics of Resentment (2016), is widely considered one of the authoritative works on understanding the rural-urban divide in the United States and its role in contemporary politics.”
Anand Giridharadas is author of The Ink and a writer, journalist, speaker, and MSNBC political analyst. Media interviews with him on his new book The Persuaders: Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age indicate a very close alignment to the Shift the Country approach.
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies Department Chair and an educator, writer, and political commentator.
George Lakoff is a linguist; co-author of Frame Lab; and Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley with extensive work on political language, messaging, values, and framing.
Heather McGhee is the author of the book The Sum of Us, an educator, a coalition-builder, and a cross-movement leader who “designs and promotes solutions to inequality in America.”
Timothy Snyder a Yale University historian and author of the book On Tyranny, which lists “20 lessons from the 20th century.” That book and numerous interviews in reference to the rise of authoritarianism in the US heavily inform the Shift the Country motivation and structure.
Key Publications
The entire list of literature influencing this initiative is quite lengthy. Here are a few of the core publications that anchor the Shift the Country approach:
Arendt, H. (1948). The origins of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Gilding, P. (2011). The great disruption: Why the climate crisis will bring on the end of shopping and the birth of a new world. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press.
Gladwell, M. (2002, January). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. (Original work published 2000, March).
Granovetter, M.S. (1973, May). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/202051
Granovetter, M.S. (1978, May). Threshold models of collective behavior. The American Journal of Sociology, 83(6), 1420-1443. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2778111
Snyder, Timothy. (2015). Black earth: The Holocaust as history and warning. New York, NY: Tim Duggan Books.
Snyder, Timothy. (2017). On tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century. New York, NY: Tim Duggan Books.
Tisch, J. M. (2010). Citizen you: Doing your part to change the world. New York, NY: Crown Publishers.
Winston, A. S. (2014). The big pivot: Radically practical strategies for a hotter, scarcer, and more open world. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
Inception, Back Stories, & Iterations
In unprecedented times, we need to do unprecedented things. The 7 ways this unique nonprofit can help us all deal with risks facing us such as authoritarianism, extremism, and a threadbare social fabric are listed on the About page.
The risk landscape is changing, the culture is changing, technology is changing, and demographics are changing – yet there are as-yet-unaddressed possibilities and gap areas for civic organizing and for expanding influence and reach. The unique work that is now the Shift the Country approach and implementation plan was put together to identify gaps; and to build potential organizing and influence approaches that other groups don’t appear to be addressing (plans will be posted to Substack). The work was assembled with a design intention to help empower a growing coalition of Democrats, independent voters, and ex-Republicans to increase engagement and influence especially in Republican-leaning areas.
We – Americans – shouldn’t just be writing off entire sections of the country as “unwinnable.” So how do we go about actually winning? That’s the work here.
The spectre of an authoritarian movement in the US became pronounced in 2017 after Donald Trump was inaugurated. The initial exploration of the work that has now become the Shift the Country approach began just after the 2018 election; with that authoritarian threat and the 2018 election results in mind. The 2018 election underlined and highlighted that Democrats and the Democratic Party's agenda and values were not reaching or resonating with many suburban, exurban, and rural voters in often Republican-leaning areas. This persists in 2022; although the culture war has now significantly intensified, and the 2022 election results reflect that. The goal with the methodology was to identify practical, realistic, flexible, scalable ways to build an operational organizing approach that could help a coalition of the majority reach and persuade voters especially in Republican-trending areas that traditional organizing doesn’t tend to reach… by getting voters engaged and interested in their own communities, in our shared future, in what’s at stake in our elections, and in the value of voting for democracy and for the Democratic party’s agenda and values.
Some of those stakes and the increasingly urgent risk landscape for US democracy are covered in the sections called “5 Risks We Face: Why We Need This Shift;” and “Dysfunctional Democracy: What Happens If It Fails?” Big picture risk takes on climate change, systems, instability, disruption, transformation, and increasing disaster/catastrophe intensity are on a legacy back story page: https://counterfear.com/shift-the-country/back-stories/.
Since its December 2018 inception, this Shift the Country work has iterated repeatedly through attempts to implement it in the real world. The initial literature review, thought work, and gap analysis has since been distilled into the core methodology now summarized in the 5 Things. An early iteration called the Proposal to Shift the Country (141-pages) was first pitched April 24, 2019 to a major political organization (the DNC). The original proposal was then pitched to several presidential campaigns operating in Iowa for the presidential caucus. An attempt to launch this work as a Super PAC followed; from August, 2019 to March, 2020. A second formal organizational attempt was initiated but not completed in 2020 as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit.
In March, 2022 – Shift the Country was fully incorporated by a board in its current organizational structure as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. The Substack and this new website at www.shiftthecountry.com launched in July 2022. Post-election updates for the website and "The Big Shift Guide" (see printable PDF on the website homepage) were completed December 9, 2022; with further updates since. The “About” page includes seven ways this highly unique nonprofit can help the US as we establish, grow, and expand the work and its reach.
This post is also on the website at Where Did This Shift Come From?