SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
");background-position:center;background-size:19px 19px;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-color:var(--button-bg-color);padding:0;width:var(--form-elem-height);height:var(--form-elem-height);font-size:0;}:is(.js-newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter_bar.newsletter-wrapper) .widget__body:has(.response:not(:empty)) :is(.widget__headline, .widget__subheadline, #mc_embed_signup .mc-field-group, #mc_embed_signup input[type="submit"]){display:none;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) #mce-responses:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-row:1 / -1;grid-column:1 / -1;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget__body > .snark-line:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-column:1 / -1;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) :is(.newsletter-campaign:has(.response:not(:empty)), .newsletter-and-social:has(.response:not(:empty))){width:100%;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col{display:flex;flex-wrap:wrap;justify-content:center;align-items:center;gap:8px 20px;margin:0 auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .text-element{display:flex;color:var(--shares-color);margin:0 !important;font-weight:400 !important;font-size:16px !important;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .whitebar_social{display:flex;gap:12px;width:auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col a{margin:0;background-color:#0000;padding:0;width:32px;height:32px;}.newsletter-wrapper .social_icon:after{display:none;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget article:before, .newsletter-wrapper .widget article:after{display:none;}#sFollow_Block_0_0_1_0_0_0_1{margin:0;}.donation_banner{position:relative;background:#000;}.donation_banner .posts-custom *, .donation_banner .posts-custom :after, .donation_banner .posts-custom :before{margin:0;}.donation_banner .posts-custom .widget{position:absolute;inset:0;}.donation_banner__wrapper{position:relative;z-index:2;pointer-events:none;}.donation_banner .donate_btn{position:relative;z-index:2;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_0{color:#fff;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_1{font-weight:normal;}.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper.sidebar{background:linear-gradient(91deg, #005dc7 28%, #1d63b2 65%, #0353ae 85%);}
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
As you ride the Amtrak along the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, you pass the San Onofre nuclear power plant, home to three mammoth atomic reactors shut by citizen activism.
Framed by gorgeous sandy beaches and some of the best surf in California, the dead nukes stand in silent tribute to the popular demand for renewable energy. They attest to one of history's most powerful and persistent nonviolent movements.
As you ride the Amtrak along the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, you pass the San Onofre nuclear power plant, home to three mammoth atomic reactors shut by citizen activism.
Framed by gorgeous sandy beaches and some of the best surf in California, the dead nukes stand in silent tribute to the popular demand for renewable energy. They attest to one of history's most powerful and persistent nonviolent movements.
But 250 miles up the coast, two reactors still operate at Diablo Canyon, surrounded by a dozen earthquake faults. They're less than seventy miles from the San Andreas, about half the distance of Fukushima from the quake line that destroyed it. Should any quakes strike while Diablo operates, the reactors could be reduced to rubble and the radioactive fallout would pour into Los Angeles.
Some 10,000 arrests of citizens engaged in civil disobedience have put the Diablo reactors at ground zero in the worldwide No Nukes campaign. But the epic battle goes far beyond atomic power. It is a monumental showdown over who will own our global energy supply, and how this will impact the future of our planet.
On one side is King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes, and Gas), the corporate megalith that's unbalancing our weather and dominating our governments in the name of centralized, for-profit control of our economic future. On the other is a nonviolent grassroots campaign determined to reshape our power supply to operate in harmony with nature, to serve the communities and individuals who consume and increasingly produce that energy, and to build the foundation of a sustainable eco-democracy.
The modern war over America's energy began in the 1880s, when Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla clashed over the nature of America's new electric utility business. It is now entering a definitive final phase as fossil fuels and nuclear power sink into an epic abyss, while green power launches into a revolutionary, apparently unstoppable, takeoff.
In many ways, the two realities were separated at birth.
Edison pioneered the idea of a central grid, fed by large corporate-owned power generators. Backed by the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, Edison pioneered the electric light bulb and envisioned a money-making grid in which wires would carry centrally generated electricity to homes, offices, and factories. He started with a coal-burning generator at Morgan's Fifth Avenue mansion, which in 1882 became the world's first home with electric lights.
Morgan's father was unimpressed. And his wife wanted that filthy generator off the property. So Edison and Morgan began stringing wires around New York City, initially fed by a single power station. The city was soon criss-crossed with wires strung by competing companies.
But the direct current produced by Edison's generator couldn't travel very far. So he offered his Serbian assistant, Nikola Tesla, a $50,000 bonus to solve the problem.
Tesla did the job with alternating current, which Edison claimed was dangerous and impractical. He reneged on Tesla's bonus, and the two became lifelong rivals.
To demonstrate alternating current's dangers, Edison launched the "War of the Currents," using it to kill large animals (including an elephant). He also staged a gruesome human execution with the electric chair he secretly financed.
Edison's prime vision was of corporate-owned central power stations feeding a for-profit grid run for the benefit of capitalists like Morgan.
Tesla became a millionaire working with industrialist George Westinghouse, who used alternating current to establish the first big generating station at Niagara Falls. But Morgan bullied him out of the business. A visionary rather than a capitalist, Tesla surrendered his royalties to help Westinghouse, then spent the rest of his haunted, complex career pioneering various inventions meant to produce endless quantities of electricity and distribute it free and without wires.
Meanwhile, the investor-owned utilities bearing Edison's name and Morgan's money built the new grid on the back of big coal-burners that poured huge profits into their coffers and lethal pollutants into the air and water.
In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal established the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority and Bonneville Power Project. The New Deal also strung wires to thousands of American farms through the Rural Electrification Administration. Hundreds of rural electrical cooperatives sprang up throughout the land. As nonprofits with community roots and ownership, the co-ops have generally provided far better and more responsive service than the for-profit investor-owned utilities.
But it was another federal agency--the Atomic Energy Commission--that drove the utility industry to the crisis point we know today. Coming out of World War II, the commission's mandate was to maintain our nascent nuclear weapons capability. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it shifted focus, prodded by Manhattan Project scientists who hoped the "Peaceful Atom" might redeem their guilt for inventing the devices that killed so many.
When AEC chairman Lewis Strauss promised atomic electricity "too cheap to meter," he heralded a massive government commitment involving billions in invested capital and thousands of jobs. Then, in 1952, President Harry Truman commissioned a panel on America's energy future headed by CBS Chairman William Paley. The commission report embraced atomic power, but bore the seeds of a worldview in which renewable energy would ultimately dominate. Paley predicted the United States would have thirteen million solar-heated homes by 1975.
Of course, this did not happen. Instead, the nuclear power industry grew helter-skelter without rational planning. Reactor designs were not standardized. Each new plant became an engineering adventure, as capability soared from roughly 100 megawatts at Shippingport in 1957 to well over 1,000 in the 1970s. By then, the industry was showing signs of decline. No new plant commissioned since 1974 has been completed.
But with this dangerous and dirty power have come Earth-friendly alternatives, ignited in part by the grassroots movements of the 1960s. E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful became the bible of a back-to-the-land movement that took a new generation of veteran activists into the countryside.
Dozens of nonviolent confrontations erupted, with thousands of arrests. In June 1978, nine months before the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, the grassroots Clamshell Alliance drew 20,000 participants to a rally at New Hampshire's Seabrook site. And Amory Lovins's pathbreaking article, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken," posited a whole new energy future, grounded in photovoltaic and wind technologies, along with breakthroughs in conservation and efficiency, and a paradigm of decentralized, community-owned power.
As rising concerns about global warming forced a hard look at fossil fuels, the fading nuclear power industry suddenly had a new selling point. Climate expert James Hansen, former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman, and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand began advocating atomic energy as an answer to CO2 emissions. The corporate media began breathlessly reporting a "nuclear renaissance" allegedly led by hordes of environmentalists.
But the launch of Peaceful Atom 2.0 has fallen flat.
As I recently detailed in an online article for The Progressive, atomic energy adds to rather than reduces global warming. All reactors emit Carbon-14. The fuel they burn demands substantial CO2 emissions in the mining, milling, and enrichment processes. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen has compiled a wide range of studies concluding new reactor construction would significantly worsen the climate crisis.
Moreover, attempts to recycle spent reactor fuel or weapons material have failed, as have attempts to establish a workable nuclear-waste management protocol. For decades, reactor proponents have argued that the barriers to radioactive waste storage are political rather than technical. But after six decades, no country has unveiled a proven long-term storage strategy for high-level waste.
For all the millions spent on it, the nuclear renaissance has failed to yield a single new reactor order. New projects in France, Finland, South Carolina, and Georgia are costing billions extra, with opening dates years behind schedule. Five projects pushed by the Washington Public Power System caused the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. No major long-standing green groups have joined the tiny crew of self-proclaimed "pro-nuke environmentalists." Wall Street is backing away.
Even the split atom's most ardent advocates are hard-pressed to argue any new reactors will be built in the United States, or more than a scattered few anywhere else but China, where the debate still rages and the outcome is uncertain.
Today there are about 100 U.S. reactors still licensed to operate, and about 450 worldwide. About a dozen U.S. plants have shut down in the last several years. A half dozen more are poised to shut for financial reasons. The plummeting price of fracked gas and renewable energy has driven them to the brink. As Gundersen notes, operating and maintenance costs have soared as efficiency and performance have declined. An aging, depleted skilled labor force will make continued operations dicey at best.
And nuclear plants have short lifespans for safe operation.
"When the reactor ruptured on March 11, 2011, spewing radioactivity around the northern hemisphere, Fukushima Daiichi had been operating only one month past its fortieth birthday," Gundersen says.
But the nuclear power industry is not giving up. It wants some $100 billion in state-based bailouts. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently pushed through a $7.6 billion handout to sustain four decrepit upstate reactors. A similar bailout was approved in Ohio. Where once it demanded deregulation and a competitive market, the nuclear industry now wants re-regulation and guaranteed profits no matter how badly it performs.
The grassroots pushback has been fierce. Proposed bailouts have been defeated in Illinois and are under attack in New York and Ohio. A groundbreaking agreement involving green and union groups has set deadlines for shutting the Diablo reactors, with local activists demanding a quicker timetable. Increasingly worried about meltdowns and explosions, grassroots campaigns to close old reactors are ramping up throughout the United States and Europe. Citizen action in Japan has prevented the reopening of nearly all nuclear plants since Fukushima.
Envisioning the "nuclear interruption" behind us, visionaries like Lovins see a decentralized "Solartopian" system with supply owned and operated at the grassroots.
The primary battleground is now Germany, with the world's fourth-largest economy. Many years ago, the powerful green movement won a commitment to shut the country's fossil/nuclear generators and convert entirely to renewables. But the center-right regime of Angela Merkel was dragging its feet.
In early 2011, the greens called for a nationwide demonstration to demand the Energiewende, the total conversion to decentralized green power. But before the rally took place, the four reactors at Fukushima blew up. Facing a massive political upheaval, and apparently personally shaken, Chancellor Merkel (a trained quantum chemist) declared her commitment to go green. Eight of Germany's nineteen reactors were soon shut, with plans to close the rest by 2022.
That Europe's biggest economy was now on a soft path originally mapped out by the counterculture prompted a hard response of well-financed corporate resistance. "You can build a wind farm in three to four years," groused Henrich Quick of 50 Hertz, a German transmission grid operator. "Getting permission for an overhead line takes ten years."
Indeed, the transition is succeeding faster and more profitably than its staunchest supporters imagined. Wind and solar have blasted ahead. Green energy prices have dropped and Germans are enthusiastically lining up to put power plants on their rooftops. Sales of solar panels have skyrocketed, with an ever-growing percentage of supply coming from stand-alone buildings and community projects. The grid has been flooded with cheap, green juice, crowding out the existing nukes and fossil burners, cutting the legs out from under the old system.
In many ways it's the investor-owner utilities' worst nightmare, dating all the way back to the 1880s, when Edison fought Tesla. Back then, the industry-funded Edison Electric Institute warned that "distributed generation" could spell doom for the grid-based industry. That industry-feared deluge of cheap, locally owned power is now at hand.
In the United States, state legislatures dominated by the fossil fuel-invested billionaire Koch brothers have been slashing away at energy efficiency and conservation programs. Ohio, Arizona, and other states that had enacted progressive green-based transitions are now shredding them. In Florida, a statewide referendum pretending to support solar power was in fact designed to kill it.
In Nevada, homeowners who put solar panels on their rooftops are under attack. The state's monopoly utility, with support from the governor and legislature, is seeking to make homeowners who put solar panels on their rooftops pay more than others for their electricity.
But it may be too little, too late. In its agreement with the state, unions, and environmental groups, Pacific Gas and Electric has admitted that renewables could, in fact, produce all the power now coming from the two decaying Diablo nukes. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District shut down its one reactor in 1989 and is now flourishing with a wave of renewables.
The revolution has spread to the transportation sector, where electric cars are now plugging into outlets powered by solar panels on homes, offices, commercial buildings, and factories. Like nuclear power, the gas-driven automobile may be on its way to extinction.
Nationwide, more than 200,000 Americans now work in the solar industry, including more than 75,000 in California alone. By contrast, only about 100,000 people work in the U.S. nuclear industry. Some 88,000 Americans now work in the wind industry, compared to about 83,000 in coal mines, with that number also dropping steadily.
Once the shining hope of the corporate power industry, atomic energy's demise represents more than just the failure of a technology. It's the prime indicator of an epic shift away from corporate control of a grid-based energy supply, toward a green power web owned and operated by the public.
As homeowners, building managers, factories, and communities develop an ever-firmer grip on a grassroots homegrown power supply, the arc of our 128-year energy war leans toward Solartopia.
Editor's note: The artist's essay that follows accompanies the 'online unveiling'--exclusive to Common Dreams--of Shetterly's latest painting in his "Americans Who Tell the Truth" portrait series, presenting citizens throughout U.S. history who have courageously engaged in the social, environmental, or economic issues of their time. This painting of union organizer and food community builder Peter Kellman is his latest portrait of those who dedicated their lives to equality, freedom and justice. Posters of this portrait and others are now available at the artist's website.
Often one portrait subject in the Americans Who Tell the Truth project leads to another. Terry Tempest Williams suggested Edward Abbey. Howard Zinn said if he were making the paintings his first portrait would be Fanny Lou Hamer. And Richard Grossman told me about Peter Kellman, his collaborator in forming the 'Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy.' This program had been established to expose how corporations in the United States had used (and continue to use) their powerful financial influence to make that influence legal. The results of that legal influence include not only their much talked about "personhood" but also their legal power in relation to controlling labor rights and unions, pollution restrictions, executive compensation, tax policy, corporate welfare, media, and corporate responsibility. Often the issue of corporate responsibility is described as corporations legally internalizing profit and externalizing cost, or, as privatizing profit and socializing cost, i.e., a power company that make large profits selling energy, but saddles the community with environmental and health costs caused by their mining and production. And, when the special interests of corporations write the law, democracy disappears. The people never know till after the fact how laws have been structured to favor corporate power and profit, and the corporate media rarely reports on how the political system has been gamed.
One of the best little books on this subject turns out to be written by that labor leader and labor historian from Maine, Peter Kellman. It's called Building Unions: Past, Present and Future. Kellman was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946 and was introduced to labor politics being pushed by his mother in his baby carriage on a picket line. Family conversation was about progressive politics, the struggles of labor, and how to create a just, democratic society. In his late teens he spent three months learning organic agriculture and socialist politics from Helen and Scott Nearing at their farm in Maine, then he went to south in 1965 to help with logistical support for the March on Selma led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis. He stayed in Alabama to help build a free (integrated) library. He worked with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for a while, then helped organize protests against the Vietnam War and encouraged Draft resistance.
Back in Maine, Kellman began factory work and labor organizing. He was elected president of of Shoe Workers Local 82 fighting for workplace safety, fair wages and regular hours. He was also a major organizer in the Clamshell Alliance, the organization opposing the Seabrook, New Hampshire Nuclear Power Plant. Once he was arrested for refusing to take down anti-nuclear information from the union bulletin board at the shoe company. In a show of solidarity his fellow workers showed up a few days later wearing anti-nuclear buttons. The company caved, brought Kellman and two other workers who had been arrested back to work, paid them for their time off, and asked the county to drop the trespass charges against them. It was a clear victory for workplace democracy.
Perhaps his highest profile work was as an organizer and strategist for the paper workers' strike in Jay, Maine in 1987-88. This prolonged struggle was eventually lost by the workers who felt sold out by their own union leadership. But one thing Kellman learned from that struggle and from all of the other political movements he has been part of was the importance of culture to sustain the movement. Around Civil Rights, Peace, women's, anti-nuclear, gender, and pro-labor movements formed strong "counter-cultures"--music, story, poetry, values, spiritual practice, work ethic, community. But he makes the point that the Peace movement in this country has not succeeded because we have never really built a culture of peace.
Today Kellman is working on building a theory and practice of what he calls the "culture of agriculture." He thinks great attention must be paid to building a culture of local and organic agriculture so that this movement will build community and have deep identity. About his own farming now, he says his effort is not to be self-sufficient. He and his wife Rebekah want to grow much of their own food, but they want to be part of an interdependent agricultural community. Only this way will the movement grow and survive.
Peter Kellman says: "We need to recover the disappeared story of the struggle of common people to create a democratic culture. We need to inject into the current debate a vision of a just society where competition is replaced with cooperation, where greed is replaced with love allowing power to be shared by all."
One of the best ways to do this is to build cultures and communities around local agriculture, people feeding themselves and each other healthy food and caring for the health of the earth.
Those who get involved in social movements share a common experience: Sometimes, when an issue captures the public eye or an unexpected event triggers a wave of mass protest, there can be periods of intense activity, when new members rush to join the cause and movement energy swells. But these extraordinary times are often followed by long, fallow stretches when activists' numbers dwindle and advocates struggle to draw any attention at all.
Those who get involved in social movements share a common experience: Sometimes, when an issue captures the public eye or an unexpected event triggers a wave of mass protest, there can be periods of intense activity, when new members rush to join the cause and movement energy swells. But these extraordinary times are often followed by long, fallow stretches when activists' numbers dwindle and advocates struggle to draw any attention at all.
During these lulls, those who have tasted the euphoria of a peak moment feel discouraged and pessimistic. The ups and downs of social movements can be hard to take.
Certainly, activists fighting around issues of inequality and economic justice have seen this pattern in the wake of Occupy Wall Street. Many working to combat climate change have encountered their own periods of dejection after large protests in recent years. And even members of movements that have been very successful -- such as the immigrant students who compelled the Obama administration to implement a de facto version of the Dream Act -- have gone through periods of deflation despite making great advances. Further back in history, a sense of failure and frustration could be seen among civil rights activists following the landmark 1964 Freedom Summer campaign.
After intensive uprisings have cooled, many participants simply give up and move on to other pursuits. Even those committed to ongoing activism wonder how they can keep more people involved over the long haul.
Unfortunately, the fluctuating cycles of popular movements cannot be avoided. Unlike community organizing, which focuses on the slow and steady building of organizational structures, a boom-and-bust pattern is inherent in mass protest movements. Wide-scale uprisings can make a major impact on public consciousness, but they can never be sustained for long. The fact that they fade from view does not mean they lack value -- the civil rights movement, for one, scored many of its biggest wins as a result of mass mobilization and the innovative use of nonviolent direct action. But it does present a challenge: Without an understanding of movement cycles, it is difficult to combat despondency.
So how, then, do we know when movements have died -- and when are they primed to revive? And how do activists translate periods of peak activity into substantive and enduring social change?
For Bill Moyer, a trainer and strategist who experienced first hand some of the landmark movement cycles of the 1960s and '70s, grappling with these questions became a life's work. Moyer's legacy is an eight-stage model for how movements can overcome despair and marginality to change society -- a framework known as the Movement Action Plan, or MAP. Nearly three decades after it was first developed, the MAP continues to offer insights into problems that, while new to fresh generations of activists, in fact have a long lineage.
The Moyer map
Moyer was born in 1933 and grew up as the son of a TV repairman in northeast Philadelphia. As a child, he aspired to one day become a Presbyterian missionary in Africa. But a trouble-making spirit would ultimately get in the way. As he told it, "In March 1959 I was voted out of the Presbyterian Church because I invited a Catholic and a Jew to talk to the youth group."
The expulsion led him into the arms of the Quakers. At the time, Moyer was just three years out of PennState, working as a management systems engineer and searching for more "meaning." Through Philadelphia's active Quaker meetinghouse, Moyer came in contact with a vibrant circle of socially engaged peers, and an elder couple tutored him in theories of nonviolence. These encounters forever altered his life. "I had no idea that it was the start of 'the sixties,'" Moyer later wrote, "and never suspected that I was beginning my new profession as a full-time activist."
In the 1960s, Moyer would take a job with the American Friends Service Committee in Chicago, helping to convince Martin Luther King to launch an open housing campaign in the city. Moyer then worked on King's last drive, the 1968 Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. In the decade that followed, he spent his energies protesting the Vietnam War, supporting American Indian Movement activists at Wounded Knee, and promoting the newly emerging movement against nuclear power.
As he increasing began training other activists, Moyer saw a gap. "How-to-do-it models and manuals provide step-by-step guidelines for most human activity," he wrote in 1987, "from baking a cake and playing tennis to having a relationship and winning a war." Within the world of activism, however, such material was harder to come by.
Saul Alinsky and his followers had created training manuals for their specific brand of community organizing. Likewise, materials drawing from Gandhi and King were available for instructing people in how to create individual nonviolent confrontations. But Moyer believed that there was a lack of models that looked at the long arc of protest movements, materials that accounted for the highs and lows experienced by participants. The result, he contended, was that activists became stuck in their thinking, always repeating the past tactics and failing to strategize for how to effectively move their campaigns forward.
Moyer's MAP aimed to address this need. It was initially printed in 1986 in the movement journal Dandelion, with 12,000 newsprint copies distributed through grassroots channels. Subsequently, it became an underground hit. The plan would continue to be circulated by hand, translated into other languages, and shared at trainings for well over a decade, before taking its final form in the 2002 book Doing Democracy, published shortly before Moyer's death.
'Every good movement'
Of course, creating social change is a lot trickier than baking a cake. And Moyer was not the only person to propose that movements progress in stages.
Within the academic field of social movement theory, which experienced significant growth in the 1970s and '80s, scholars were increasingly appreciating how social change happens through what sociologist Sidney Tarrow calls "cycles of contention." Drawing on the work of theorists including Herbert Blumer and Charles Tilly, the standard academic account holds that movements pass through four stages: emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization, and decline. The last stage is not necessarily negative: movements sometimes are defeated or repressed, but other times they fade away because they have won their key demands.
Outside of academia, a variety of activists have offered thoughts of their own. In the March 9, 1921 edition of Young India, Mohandas Gandhi wrote, "Every good movement passes through five stages: indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression, and respect." Because Gandhi's take highlights the likelihood that resistance will be met with a crackdown by authorities, the prospect of progressing through his stages seems less inviting than riding out the academics' model. But Gandhi believed that dissidents are strengthened by the trials they endure. "Every movement that survives repression, mild or severe, invariably commands respect," he contended, "which is another name for success."
In recent years British author and activist Tim Gee has gone so far to propose a four-stage model based on a popular maxim that mirrors Gandhi's sentiment (and is often misattributed to him). This version states, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
All of these different models have some value, but they also present problems. One problem, which Gee notes, is that various proposals for sequential stages for movements carry a sense of "implied inevitability." The academic theories, in particular, suggest a sort of linear progression that does not reflect the experience of those living through boom-and-bust movement cycles. As removed instruments of analysis, they can leave real-world participants feeling cold. As Moyer puts it, "While there is much useful information in social movement theories, most do not help us under the ebb and flow of living, breathing social movements as they grow and change over time."
Moyer's MAP model is a different animal. It, too, proposes a progression through which successful movements pass: Over the course of his eight stages, activists raise initial awareness of a grievance, then become more organized in their efforts, engage in confrontation, and finally work to consolidate their gains. However, Moyer is much more attuned to the psychology of those who must struggle to push a cause forward. The MAP captures of the exhilaration of times when -- following a dramatic "trigger event" -- protests explode and "overnight, a previously unrecognized social problem becomes a social issue that everyone is talking about." (The Occupy encampments stand out as a prominent recent trigger, just as the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle fit the bill for the global justice movement.) And the model grapples in detail with the often-challenging aftermath of such peak moments.
Rooted in hard-won experience, Moyer's work is attentive to the different roles and personalities that can help or hinder an effort at any given stage in its development, and it is careful to warn of the common pitfalls that keep some movements from ever realizing their goals. These factors helped earn the MAP its cult popularity. Moyer was proud when trainers using his materials reported that participants would nearly gasp in recognition when his model explained patterns which they had thought were unique to their own experience. Moyer called these "Aha!" moments, and his goal was to create as many of them as possible.
The perception of failure
For those encountering the MAP model for the first time, the biggest "Aha" usually comes with Moyer's stage five. The previous stage -- stage four -- is when protest movements take off, holding attention-grabbing demonstrations and experiencing rapid growth. But what comes next is not a smooth stroll to success. Instead, according to Moyer, the flurry of activity is followed by "Perception of Failure."
With this stage, Moyer highlights a paradox: activists commonly feel let down after a spike in activity subsides. Yet, it is just at this moment when they may be poised to reap significant gains. Moyer writes, "After a year or two, the high hopes of instant victory in the movement take-off stage inevitably turn into despair as some activists begin to believe that their movement is failing. It has not achieved its goals and, in their eyes, it has not had any 'real' victories."
At this point many people "burn out or drop out because of the exhaustion caused by overwork and long meetings." Moreover, the mainstream media reinforces an air of negativity by reporting that, since protests have dropped off, the movement is dead and has accomplished nothing. All of this, Moyer writes, combines to create "a self-fulfilling prophecy that prevents or limits [movement] success."
By identifying the perception of failure as a normal part of social movement cycles, Moyer hoped to blunt the negative force of this stage. He argued that activists who look to history will see that they are not alone in experiencing letdown. And they will also notice that past movements that were able to overcome despondency ended up seeing many of their once-distant demands realized. The key is to step back and prepare for the next stage -- in which activists benefit from the increase of public awareness created by their past protests, and in which their proposals for alternative solutions are more likely to find receptive audiences.
Because feelings of failure within movements are so rarely acknowledged in other sources -- far less considered thoughtfully -- stage five invariably becomes a focal point when Moyer's work is discussed. Waging Nonviolence editor Nathan Schneider applied the "perception of failure" in analyzing the Occupy movement on its second anniversary for The Nation. And none other than far-right guru and ex-Fox News titan Glenn Beck considered Moyer's stage five in some detail in contemplating the future prospects of the Tea Party.
But, we might ask, are perceptions of failure necessarily irrational and misguided?
Clearly, there is a danger here. While everyone likes to be told that they are winning, blase reassurances are no substitute for real analysis. It is possible to misinterpret Moyer's model as a guarantee that, if you feel that your movement is faltering, you simply need to wait a little longer and things will work out. This is a comforting idea, and also a false one. The fate of some movements, Moyer acknowledges on the first page of Doing Democracy, is simply to fail miserably. Yours could be one of them.
The question, then, is: How does one determine when pessimism is misplaced -- and how do you gauge genuine progress?
Hearts and minds
The answer is at once straightforward and counter-intuitive: Movements succeed when they win over ever-greater levels of public support for their cause. This is a point that Moyers repeats constantly and consistently. "Social movements involve a long-term struggle between the movement and the powerholders for the hearts, minds and support of the majority of the population," he argues. Therefore, the job of activists is to "alert, educate, and win over an ever-increasing majority of the public." Without a preponderance of public sympathy, a popular movement cannot prevail. "Because it is the people who ultimately hold the power," Moyers concludes, "they will either preserve the status quo or create change."
These proposals sound reasonable -- perhaps even obvious -- on their face. But in fact they present a serious challenge to the way in which most people think about political life. In conventional politics, the focus is not on winning over the majority of the public or transforming the climate of debate on an issue. Rather, negotiations take place in the realms of the possible and the expedient. Interest groups spend the great bulk of their energy pressuring power-holding elites to grant favors or make concessions. Success is measured by their ability to leverage power in order to secure incremental gains on the issues they care about. Social change, in this paradigm, comes about through the slow accumulation of these calculated, instrumental victories.
Moyer's theory of change, based on the idea of winning majority support, rests on a different set of suppositions. In the MAP model, long stretches of time can pass where little seems to change. Even as they slowly accumulate popular sympathy, movements may lack any real traction in the halls of power. But once public opinion tips, the floodgates of change can open.
"Over the years... the weight of massive public opposition, along with the defection of many elites, takes its toll," Moyer explains. Movement activists may have been told for as long as they could remember that their demands were naive and politically impractical. But once majority support for their position is firmly established, this starts to change, sometimes abruptly. The limits of the possible can be redefined -- as they were with civil rights in the 1960s, or with the call to phase out nuclear power in 1980s, or with gay marriage in recent years.
"The long-term impact of social movements," Moyer contends in a sentence that would be heretical in conventional political circles, "is more important than their immediate material success."
The idea of winning over majority public support creates a metric by which activists can judge where they stand in the MAP model -- and this sets Moyer's framework apart from other, more amorphous accounts of movement cycles. In the MAP's early stages, during the initial ripening of conditions around an issue, less than 30 percent of the population might agree with a movement's insistence that the status quo must change. As activists ramp up protest, greater segments of the public become aware of the problem at hand, and successful movements push levels of sympathy toward the 50 percent mark. Only after they pass this threshold does the endgame of a movement begin. At that point, change agents can shift their focus from demonstrating that a problem exists to advocating for alternatives -- and they can start seeing these alternatives adopted in mainstream politics.
And then you win
A focus on "hearts and minds" provides the key to unraveling the mystery of stage five. When advocates for social change recognize that their core objective is winning over the public, they are equipped to judge whether or not pessimism about their progress is legitimate.
Perceptions of failure are warranted when movements alienate potential supporters. When periods of peak protest activity fizzle, there is a danger that some activists -- a group Moyer calls the "negative rebels" -- will resort to insular vanguardism. Focusing solely on building a radical core rather than on persuading the outside world, these actors advocate for increasing dramatic tactics that appeal to disgruntled activists' militant sensibilities, but that hold little appeal for observers who are not already among the converted. When this happens, a movement becomes more and more marginal, and fears of irrelevancy are not misplaced.
On the other hand, movements that are building popular support need not worry if their initial moment in the spotlight passes and the fickle news media turns its attention elsewhere. Although they may miss the enthusiasm and energy of the earlier period, they should not accept the notion that they have become irrelevant. As long as a movement has gained a larger share of public sympathy as a result of its efforts, its activists are well positioned to push for greater change. This push will typically involve continued public education, advocacy for movement solutions, and readiness to ignite fresh waves of protest when the opportunities arise.
Moyer tells the story of when he first presented the MAP model: In February 1978, he was set to give a presentation at a strategy conference to 45 organizers from the Clamshell Alliance. This anti-nuclear group had conducted a landmark series of direct action protests against the Seabrook power plant in New England. At its peak, the previous spring, the alliance carried out an occupation of Seabrook in which 1,414 people were arrested and spent 12 days in jail. As Moyer writes, "During those two weeks, nuclear energy became a worldwide public issue as the mass media spotlight focused on the activists locked in armories throughout New Hampshire."
In the wake of the Clamshell actions, hundreds of new grassroots groups formed around the country. The Seabrook protest would inspire further occupations in places such as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. Moreover, the organization's methods -- its affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus process, and focus on militant, nonviolent blockades -- would ultimately become an influential model for direct action in the United States.
Because of all they had accomplished, Moyer expected that the group at the conference would be upbeat and celebratory. Instead, he encountered something quite different. "I was shocked when the Clamshell activists arrived with heads bowed, dispirited and depressed, saying their efforts had been in vain," Moyer writes. Because protests had died down and construction on the specific plant they had targeted still continued, they felt defeated.
In his presentation, a sketchy version of what would become his eight stages of social movements, Moyer scrambled to demonstrate how the activists had made considerable gains. By galvanizing national opposition to the industry, the movement already reversed the near-universal acceptance of nuclear power that prevailed during the 1960s and early 1970s. Activists were well on there way to establishing majority support for their position -- and seeing tangible changes as a result.
Moyer believes that the framework he presented helped many of the activists to better understand their predicament and plan for future stages of activity. Whether or not this is the case, anti-nuclear campaigns ultimately achieved a resounding victory. By making the safety, cost and ecological impact of nuclear power into concerns shared by a majority of Americans, they created a situation in which orders for new nuclear power plants ceased, the government was forced to abandon its goal of having 1,000 facilities in operation by the end of the millennium, and the number of working plants was set on a path of steady decline -- a path on which it continues to this day.
Among the majority
Social movement activists are notoriously poor at celebrating their victories. Stage five is not the only point in Moyer's model when they are often inclined toward despair. Ironically, near the end of MAP's eight stages, when movements begin to see concrete wins, it is again common to see participants again experience depression. At this point, with a firm majority of the population in support of an issue, opportunists flourish. Mainstream politicians, centrist organizations, former critics, and once-recalcitrant power brokers all scramble to take credit for gains that have been achieved. Notwithstanding years of stonewalling, silence and timidity, these people insist they, too, are repulsed by segregation; that they are truly committed to environmental protections; that they strongly believe in marriage equality; and that the war they once had endorsed was actually the mistaken folly of their political opponents.
Often, movements receive scant credit for bringing about such changes of heart. Those who have done the most are likely to be missing from the victory parties, and they are also the most likely to have a pained awareness of the work that still remains to be done.
Yet activists who were pioneers in highlighting the injustice of an issue -- and who may well have felt themselves failures at many points along the road -- can take pleasure in seeing society come to regard their once-incendiary views as little more than common sense. These one-time rebels may no longer stand out as much as they did when they were marginal and embattled. But from the new majority they helped create, they can command at least a small measure of begrudging respect. Which is another name for success.