What Spies, Saboteurs, and Abolitionists Can Teach Us About Effectively Influencing Politics

Change for the better can happen, if we find the right tools for the job.

For those who don’t know, I travel the country doing training with various groups such as Indivisible chapters and county Democratic groups. At every event I hear the same complaint, that people feel unheard. They reach out to their reps and get nothing back. No reply, no form letter, not even a note from an intern confirming the message arrived. Sometimes it is one letter, sometimes a dozen over a year, and the result is the same. This article contains part of my response to that legitimate complaint.

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass said it plainly in 1857. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” The people who represent us respond to specific types of incentives and disincentives, as all biological organisms do. The political organism largely decides what it is going to do based on what helps them get elected or reelected, or hurts their chances of getting elected or reelected. The political scientist David Mayhew based a classic study of Congress on that one assumption, describing its members as “single-minded seekers of reelection,” who were interested, in his telling, in almost nothing else. We do not have to like that conclusion to ethically exploit it.

Three things decide whether influence campaigns produce preferred outcomes. The first is who we contact. Everyone has power they hold, as a potential voter, donor, volunteer, mayor, state house representative, PTA President, you name it. We all have something we can do, so bring your demands to the people who sit at the intersection of “able to do something impactful about it” and “I can move this person’s actions, decisions, and views, in the preferred direction.”

How we contact them is a critical part of the process. If you aren’t getting responses, then you don’t need to give up hope or feel like you’ve failed, you just need to vary your methods and tactics. Here’s an example. Day one, a paper letter in the mail. Day two, a phone call to the office. The next day, an email; the day after, the contact form on the website. Maybe we show up in person at the district office. We send a handwritten note and a typed one, since the office logs them separately. We can bring a friend, and then a few more, each doing the same steps in their own words. We send a direct message on every platform the official uses, on posts that they make regardless of the subject. We can go to the places they are online and in real life and ask them and their supporters why they don’t respond to their constituents. Those are consequences, and it’s time we start introducing them more often for politicians.

What we demand is the third strategic piece, and it has to be one concrete thing the officeholder can do. Not “do better.” Our state representative can sponsor a bill or vote one down. Our governor can sign or veto a bill, issue an executive order, or declare a state of emergency. For a mayor, the action might be an executive order or a directive to a city agency. And any of them can make a specific public policy commitment, on the record.

Then we tell our neighbors, in plain words. This is our representative. I asked them about the data center coming to our county by letter, phone, email, and social media, and I even showed up at their office. They refused to talk about it, bullshitted us, sent back a form letter, or never answered at all. We post that in the community Facebook group and on the local subreddit, the places our political and apolitical neighbors actually show up. When that name is on the ballot, everyone around can know just how terrible this politician is. Most people don’t know the name of their state house representative; you can be the reason your neighborhood knows if this representative is a corrupt freeloader or someone who actually serves the public. That makes you a powerful person.

And that’s pretty much all it takes. Do all of this, and we are taking up their bandwidth, taking up their time, taking up their attention. None of it necessarily changes a vote or stops a bad policy. What it does is show them they are seen, and that they are seen by a public that is ready to make change happen. Our activism is the whistle they hear that tells them the consequence train is coming, and that makes bad actors afraid. That fear, when enough of us show up, with increasing intensity, is what puts the fire to their feet. Picture the office that receives all this: a young staffer in front of a full inbox, a call log, a stack of letters, and a sign-in sheet from the front desk, while down the hall a scheduler decides whether their boss holds the town hall this month or quietly skips it.

One interesting piece of research: when the Congressional Management Foundation, a nonpartisan group that studies how Congress works, surveyed congressional staff, more than nine in ten said a constituent visit influences a lawmaker, more than any other approach a citizen can take. Having grown up around local politics, I can tell you this is absolutely true.

None of this is new. In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the agency that preceded the CIA, wrote the Simple Sabotage Field Manual and distributed it secretly to ordinary people in Nazi-occupied Europe, teaching them to slow the occupation from inside their everyday jobs. The instructions were deliberately mundane. One read, “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’” Another, “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.” Others told people to refer every matter to a committee and to haggle over the precise wording of routine documents. The theory was that thousands of ordinary people doing small, dull things would become a serious problem for the occupation. They used these ordinary acts to slow a war effort. We use ordinary acts of our own to influence the people who represent us.

We make life better for the allies, and we make life noticeably worse for the enemies of freedom and justice. It’s their turn to be the frog in the boiling pot. A reminder, this isn’t getting turned around in a single election. The illness of greed and corruption may never go away, but we can do a damn lot to ensure that “evil politician” is a particularly miserable job.

Each of us is nudging reality, within us and around us, at all times. This is how you nudge more powerfully, for the betterment of humanity.

So we do all of it, and we will probably get a response. And do all of it with a friend, and maybe invite a few more, every one of us making the same demand in a sustained campaign that reaches many “lever pullers” with tailored demands and sophisticated methods, and you will change things.

Ultimately, preaching to the choir will not save us. Every movement for the people, from the founding of this nation to abolition to women’s suffrage to the labor movement to the civil rights movement to the LGBTQ rights movement to the disability rights movement, they all required large-scale civic education, and that education did not come from the powers that benefited from the preceding system. No, they came from the informed putting in the work to educate others and recruiting more to their cause, enthusiastically so. They also did it with their own presses. Two of my favorite examples are Frederick Douglass founding the abolitionist publication titled the North Star, and the French philosopher Albert Camus writing and editing the underground newspaper Combat, a powerful tool that the French Resistance printed and handed around in secret to counter the official propaganda.

Here at the Existentialist Republic, we are considering launching our own print publication, and if you like that idea feel free to let us know in the comments. But here is what I think would be incredible, and I want you to consider it. Do not wait for me, or for anyone else. Make your own underground, and for free tools to help you start, check out any of the links below. We offer free PDFs of everything from model legislation, to my full length books, to around a dozen booklets that are 20-30 minute field guides and educational tools expanding on what was in this article.

If you valued this and want it all to continue, you should know that we need 10 new subscribers per article to keep this machine destroying fascists and equipping activists. Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or are late on rent. But we need 10 folks to step up and join in, if you’re able. Millions of folks will read the article you just read, tens of thousands download the books and booklets, and it’s largely funded by the 10 people who say “today, it’s me who does the thing.” Thanks for being here, and thanks for getting after it. - Chris

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