Deva Woodly joins host Alex Lovit to discuss the importance of social movements for American democracy and the role they can play at this precarious moment in American political history. We need these networks of trust and coordinated action to push the country away from authoritarianism and toward a democracy that works for everyone. Deva Woodly is a scholar of social movements. She is a professor of political science at Brown University and a research fellow at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.
Deva Woodly: Right now we're in a situation where the rest of the 21st century is a jump ball. The fight is for what's going to be considered the normal running of the United States in 2180. That moment doesn't last forever. Someone will set the tone. And so the question is, can pro-democracy movements get themselves in formation in time to catch that ball and set the tone?
Alex Lovit: A lot of things in American politics feel unsettled right now, assumptions and norms about how the political system should function are breaking down. Unfortunately, these broken norms include safeguards for democracy and for the rule of law, but disruption also presents opportunities to create something better. So today, during this time of upheaval, we're asking some fundamental questions about how democracy functions and how we could make it work better for all of us.
You're listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone, and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Deva Woodly. Deva is a professor of political science at Brown University, and a research fellow here at the Kettering Foundation. Deva says many Americans are wrong about the fundamental nature of democracy. To her, the heart of democracy isn't in the ballot box, it's in the social movements where people discover mutual interests, imagine political alternatives, and build the social networks that make them real. And she's here today to tell us what we should do, what we must do in this precarious moment.
Deva Woodly, welcome to the Context.
Deva Woodly: Thank you so much for having me and glad to be here.
Alex Lovit: I work for a democracy-focused organization. I'm kind of obsessed with politics. I pay a lot of attention to elections. I pay a lot of attention to government policies, and whether those are government policies that I really like and want to protect or expand or there's policies I dislike and want to change, my general inclination is to think what elected official is in charge of that? When's the next election? Tell me why I'm wrong to think that way. I mean, you're a scholar of social movements. Tell me why if I want to make real political change, I need to expand my horizons beyond electoral politics and think about social movements.
Deva Woodly: Well, here's the thing about democracy. It extends well past elections in terms of what are the institutions, behaviors, knowledges and predispositions that support it. And one of the reasons that we find ourselves in a situation of democratic backsliding is that we have forgotten how extensive the supports of an actual democratic society are. And they're made up of democratic values. They're made up of a disposition toward participation. They're made up of civic associations and institutions where people are able to get to know one another, learn skills for how to solve the problems that they identify in their lives. Elections are a really powerful tool in democracy, but they're actually a tool that is not very information-rich, at least in our context when we're making choices between candidates, that is actually a really blunt tool. You don't know exactly what people are picking when they're picking between two choices. Depending on how the candidates are, that can diminish responsiveness.
And when the people you're voting for are not delivering the things that you intended or wanted or hoped for, then people become disillusioned with politics. And that lack of responsiveness does cause disillusionment. But there's also been other parallel causes. One is the decline of civic associations. So think of Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. That came out in 2001 and he was writing about it from the late 90s and saying, "Hey, look, we're looking at this data. And it's really striking that actually civic associations, these places where Americans get together, get to know one another, support one another, develop relationships, but also understandings about the things in their lives from interpersonal to political. These things are disappearing." And as these social connections disappear, then you start to get parallel, and increase in things like polarization, the occurrence of more disinformation in media environments. You'd start to get more disconnection from politics in general. This also happens at the same time as the political parties start to change form.
So they change from what they were at the beginning and middle of the 20th century. They were these organizations that organized people in neighborhoods. The parties had outposts where people made decisions in local communities. That filtered up to the national parties. And that started to change for a more centralized system in which party leaders really weren't conducting a civic organization that was organizing people from the ground up or from localities to the national level.
Social movements also changed, right? They changed in a similar way to the parties as, for example, communications technology, right? The internet. And then social media came online. Social movements realized that they could mobilize large numbers of people using these really powerful communication tools, but that they were less focused on organizing people locally in smaller, more long-term member-based chapters. That really matters because that connection, that sustained relationship over time is actually what gives social movements the most power to demand responsiveness from representatives. So what you have are large mobilizations that then don't get the level of responsiveness that you would expect from mobilizations of that size. But it's because even though these have the size, they do not have the power of previous movements.
Alex Lovit: There's a lot of stuff there I want to follow up on. But among them, you mentioned Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone. So he's talking about a range of civic organizations there. But the one on the cover of the book is Bowling Leagues. And a Bowling league is not exactly a social movement. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you're talking about formal political parties, and a political party is maybe not exactly a social movement. So can you help me understand what is a social movement? I mean, these boundaries may be a little blurry, but what would you point out and say, "This is a social movement."
Deva Woodly: A social movement is a political formation that is formed for the purpose of influencing governance and decision-making. But you're right, the boundaries between these things are porous. So a bowling league is for bowling, but if the bowlers in the league turn their attention to, for example, a local political issue, they want to get a stop sign put up, they want the school board to do something else, they want to elect or support a Congress member from their district, then their social connectedness turns into a political connection. This is the same thing that can happen with religious institutions, right? Churches as meeting spaces, they're there to engage in their worship, but at the same time, they're a place where people make social connections and then they can turn that power of their social connection to whatever task the members want to. What has happened in the 21st century is that people will often gather around a cause, something that they feel deeply.
They can talk about that cause, both in-person but often online, but they're not necessarily rooted in those longer-term associations that are going to meet, get together, support one another, deliver information, have arguments, whether or not they're focused on a particular political goal. It's hard to continue to take those kinds of political risks when you don't have that underlying social support that helps you to be resilient over time, to both press your demands with the people who are supposed to be your allies, but also protect you from the people who are your opposition and are trying to stop you and slow you down.
Alex Lovit: So the social movements you've studied most closely, which include the LGBTQ+ rights movement, the fight for living wage, Black Lives Matter, those are all from the left, but you've also said that social movements are also a factor on the right. Is there anything that makes them a better strategy, a more effective strategy for any particular ideology?
Deva Woodly: No. Social movements can be effective from anywhere in the spectrum. I do think that there's a difference between democratic and anti-democratic social movements, but regardless of whether a social movement is democratic or anti-democratic, it can be effective.
Alex Lovit: Do you think it makes sense to think of MAGA as a social movement?
Deva Woodly: Yes, 100%. I think it makes sense to think of MAGA as a social movement that has a particular relationship with a political party, but it's also a social movement that has captured one of the major political parties. And we all sort of watched this happen in 2016, Donald Trump, then candidate Trump was not someone who was sort of raised in the Republican Party. He had not held office as a Republican before, but he developed a base, he developed a following of people on the ground who were really interested in what he was saying, and he nurtured his relationship with that base.
And over time, now we're a decade out. Over time, that base became strong enough, extensive enough, and diversified enough in terms of it's not just the people who were sitting at home listening and heard something that they connected with, but it's also people now who have civic skills of various kinds, professional skills of various kinds, and these are people who are devoted to an ideology and a set of actions that they have invented through their collaboration over this last decade. That is exactly what a social movement does. That is exactly what a social movement is, and it's not captured by the party, and it's not loyal to the Republican Party either.
Alex Lovit: Which gives it some power over the party.
Deva Woodly: It gives it a lot of power over the party, because this movement is willing to watch the party lose. And we saw in the beginning, in the sort of first five or six years, certainly during midterms, we saw candidates who were MAGA candidates be in primaries with more traditionally Republican candidates and lose. They would win the primaries and then lose the general elections. But the base was willing to let that happen because they're really committed to the cause that they have created. There has been, from the center to the left, less willingness to see that happen. They have a rather antagonistic relationship with their movements, and they actively try to stop their movements from advancing in the party. But it's also the case that those movements are less willing to damage the Democratic Party and watch it lose.
Alex Lovit: You brought up technology earlier. So we are living in the age of the internet and social media, and people often say that that has revolutionized everything, and in a lot of ways it has. But of course, technological change has been a constant in many ways. So the Montgomery Bus boycott was organized largely using a mimeograph machine, which was a new technology at the time. So is this technological change really a revolution or is it just a case of the mimeograph machine replacing the printing press?
Deva Woodly: Technology is always just technology. It's really what human beings do with it that matters. And the internet and social media have been very much like the mimeograph, really useful for spreading the word faster and farther, but they are not that useful for the in-person durable relationship building that's really necessary for social movement strength. And so I think that one of the things that has happened in the social media age is that there was a little bit of a divergence between the size of movements and their strengths.
You actually see this in the data. Erica Chenoweth is a scholar at Harvard who does quantitative accounting of social movements. And what they see in the data is that after 2019 or so, non-violent movements start to have less efficacy than they did the previous 100 years. In the previous 100 years, they had been very efficacious, actually about three and a half times more efficacious than violent revolutionary movements. And I think part of the divergence in that effectiveness is the divergence between the size and the strength of movements, because I think that strength comes from the resilient relationships that are sustained in organization and in-person local organizing.
Alex Lovit: So it makes it easier to mobilize a bunch of people to do a thing at one particular time, but makes it harder to kind of develop long-term relationships?
Deva Woodly: Absolutely. Yeah. Social media is part of that disconnect, but it's also related to the diminishment of civil society in general. That is that sort of Robert Putnam point, because you can imagine if we had the density of civil society as it existed in the middle 20th century along with social media, that you could have the size and the strength together. There's nothing particularly about social media that says that you can't have it, it's just that it occurred at the same time as this other diminishment.
Alex Lovit: Let me ask you a couple of questions about tensions that I see in social movements and how successful movements navigate these tensions and in any of these cases, feel free to push back on my premise. So this kind of a tension between visioning versus pragmatism. You can't build a better future unless you can imagine it, but at the same time, it helps to have practical, concrete, achievable goals in the short term, in the real world. Is there a tension there? And what does it look like to try to get that balance right? What should people be thinking about?
Deva Woodly: Well, I'm a person who believes in visionary pragmatism, so I live in that tension. I think that it's a productive and generative tension, because the idea behind visionary pragmatism or imaginative pragmatism is that one is interested in working toward the world one wants to build, that's the visionary or imaginative part of it. But then the pragmatic part of it is, okay, what are the steps from here to there? How do we make this possible? And what that entails is saying, "Okay, if this is my goal, if this vision is my goal, say if abolition is my goal, what do I have to do now to make that more possible in the future?" And that's the pragmatic part of it.
So I think that thinking through the kind of parallel institutions that you need to work towards, for example, abolition is something that is quite pragmatic, whereas the sort of state of being that is being in a world that no longer incarcerates people but instead tries to provide people with what they need and prevent harm, is the sort of visionary part of it.
Alex Lovit: Well, but it's a challenge to keep that long-term goal in mind if it feels far away. So you're talking about abolition in the terms of abolishing the carceral system. A couple 100 years ago, people talked about abolition in terms of abolishing slavery. In both those cases, when the movement started, the end goal felt very far away. And people might have to think, this is something that I might not see in my lifetime. This is something that maybe my children and my grandchildren continue to have to fight for. What does it take to maintain fortitude in the face of that?
Deva Woodly: What it takes to maintain a commitment to a vision of a world that you are working to build but might not see is to be in community with other people who also share that vision as you do the work. But also it is about in-between steps. So even if you don't get to see the world in which the carceral system as we see it and have it today doesn't exist, you do get to see a world in which you have an alternative to calling armed policemen for wellness checks.
You do get to live in a world in which you cease to increase the police budget and instead put that money into social workers who will work with youth who are on the street, or people who are having mental health issues or people who are experiencing homelessness. The visionary pragmatism, the imaginative pragmatism, what that means is you're really planning out the steps from here to there so that even if you don't get to see the end state, you know that you're making progress on those steps.
Alex Lovit: Well, let me ask about another potential tension, which is, if you're fighting against some kind of exclusion or oppression, it helps to have a real sense of how that's playing out on the ground, what is happening to people?
Deva Woodly: Yes.
Alex Lovit: But it also can help to have a broader understanding of the problem, to have kind of a theory of change. How do movements maintain that balance between the big picture and a grounded understanding?
Deva Woodly: Movements are very intellectual spaces, so people are always maintaining that balance. People are always talking about ideas. People often do reading groups or study groups. Movements have texts that they work from and with. They often invite scholars and intellectuals to sort of talk to them, so then they talk to each other. I don't think that's a tension. I think that that's something that movements just do because the work of movement really is the work of trying to make other ways of living possible. And so that's always theoretical work at the same time that it's practical work. I mean, the term praxis emerges out of that reality, right? And movements are praxis. So they are theory and practice together.
Alex Lovit: All right. Let me ask you a few questions about the specific political movement that we're living in right now. We're seeing a lot of protest activity, opposing actions of the Trump administration. How did the actions of the last year or so compare to the scale of previous protests?
Deva Woodly: Well, I think that there's been a regrouping in the last year, and I think that protests have become more localized and less centralized. So if you notice in the No Kings protests, if you notice in the protests that have taken place around various kinds of actions from the Trump administration, they have been frequent and numerous, but more dispersed than has been common in the past. So this seems to be a deliberate choice on people's part. They will stay in their town of Lowell, Massachusetts instead of traveling to Boston. And this is partly to make connections with people in that place, to make themselves visible to one another. And that's something that builds morale in addition to building interpersonal connections.
It's also the case that since we're in a moment where the administration is actively using military and police forces on the domestic population, particularly migrants or folks who are suspected of being migrants, that movements are actually really focused on developing strategies for community protection. And that is necessarily localized work. That's very concrete work with very human and immediate consequences. So that is another form that this stage of movement is taking that is well beyond protest. Protest is not the only tactic in a social movements toolkit. And now is a time when other kinds of activities are gaining traction within social movements, and those activities might be less visible to the general public, but they're actually very important in terms of building social movement, strength and resilience.
Alex Lovit: And can you just lay out what those activities are?
Deva Woodly: Sure. Getting together and forming mutual aid groups, getting together and forming contact trees, so who you call when such things happen, getting together and developing information networks so that you know what's going on in your locality, who may be there, what they may be doing. You're able to distribute that information really fast, getting together and educating the public about their rights, about what they can do to protect their communities. Also, coordinating economic non-cooperation. That is a very powerful tool which has actually not been used as effectively in the 21st century as it was in the 20th century. That's something that we are seeing more of. You see that in a kind of distributed manner in terms of where people are declining to buy and where people are buying. So I think the most sort of popular example of this is the Target boycott where people sort of broke from Target to go to Costco.
And we see these kinds of economic non-cooperation strategies gaining traction and actually having impacts in a way that they really haven't for a number of years. That muscle for economic non-cooperation is one that really needs to get built up because that's one of the most effective ways to counter decision-makers or people with power. It's those kinds of long-unused or less used muscles that are getting a workout right now. And that's in part because the political environment has changed so much that people have really come to realize that not only is protests dangerous, it has a risk, but it's less effective than some of these strategies where you're strengthening the connections in your community and the ability to protect yourselves.
Alex Lovit: So you've studied a lot of recent social movements and I think you and I and those social movements would all agree that the United States has not been perfect, has not fully lived up to its promise of being an inclusive democracy, but nevertheless, there has been in general in this country, broad protections for free speech, protest rights. Do you think that those things might come under more attack in the near future? And if so, do social movements need to look different?
Deva Woodly: They have already come under more attack, and I expect that yes, they will continue to come under more attack and therefore social movements will look different. I think that the sort of proportion of which tactics are used when are going to be different. We're still going to have protests where people gather in the street to make a statement, partly because it's a way for people to get together and be visible to one another. So that is a good thing, but it's also the case that building up the power to run for local office, to become decision-makers in your locality, but also to develop these kinds of parallel institutions like the various different kinds of ICE watching and ICE melting organizations that have sprung up. And I don't know if you know what those are, but ICE Watch are kind of like neighborhood watch organizations that keep their eye out to try to spot when immigration authorities are in their neighborhood.
And then ICE melting is a series of tactics that's meant to peacefully antagonize immigration officers. So that can mean following behind them and singing songs, marching in parody behind them, just things that are meant to antagonize and make unpleasant their presence in your locality. So those kinds of tactics and organizations have already popped up, and I think that they're going to proliferate because that's the kind of thing that people need right now, in addition to mutual aid organizations and networks for people who lose their job for speaking out about various kinds of things. So thinking about do we have funds to support those people? Do we have networks where people can get jobs in other places in the interim, can we have meal trains so that they don't have to worry about the cost of feeding themselves and their family? Those are sort of mutual aid tactics also that started to actually become reinvigorated during the pandemic, but that have been really revived for movement purposes now as well.
And that kind of thing is less visible than a protest, but probably, I was going to say probably more important and certainly just as important because those are the kinds of things that actually create those kinds of civic connections that allow people to be resilient. But also it is the support and the fundamental context in which people who want to be self-governing are able to say no. I mean, that's the context that allows people to say no, to say no, even if that puts their job in danger, to say no, even if that might mean that they get arrested, to say no, even if they'll be antagonized in various spheres online. That civic infrastructure, if you know that there are people who are going to provide you with bridge funding or try to help you get another job or connect you with a lawyer or make sure your family is fed if you're not there, that is the kind of support that allows people to say no and mean it.
Alex Lovit: So all the things you're talking about, protests, economic boycotts, mutual aid, information networks, those are all nonviolent, peaceful modes of movement building. We are seeing political violence in our country. We're talking in the aftermath of the recent assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and in the aftermath of violent events, people often blame rhetoric, and so a violent act can be used to try to discredit nonviolent speech, nonviolent protest. Do you have any thoughts on how to address that challenge?
Deva Woodly: I think it should be rejected outright. Rhetoric that does not incite violence, that is rhetoric that does not actually call for violence, but is instead describing the political position of your opponents is not violent speech. It's not violent speech, even if it's not polite. And so people who are seeking to discredit nonviolent speech, for whatever reason, should simply be turned away and say, "Look, we're going to name the things that we see and we can name them as passionately as we want to name them."
Instead, I do think that we should look at what seems to actually enable and generate the lethal violence that we see, and that appears to be a level of social disconnection, at least in-person disconnection from other people, and radicalization online and access to high-powered weapons. Those are the things that cause the lethal violence that we see. Unfortunately, the murder of Mr. Kirk was the 46th school shooting since January, and then the 47th took place minutes later. And so I don't think that we can blame political rhetoric or speech for what seems to be the result of social alienation combined with high-powered weapons.
Alex Lovit: But how should we react? How should social movements react when others make that argument?
Deva Woodly: I think that we should say that you're wrong. That's the thing. I think that social movements and generally speaking, people from the center to the left have to be able to simply stand on their convictions and say, "You're wrong." Part of the sort of political culture on the center to the left that has to change is that it is not the case that you have to concede every point that is made by opponents. Sometimes those points, you can just say, "You're wrong. This is not correct. This is not a valid argument."
And so I think that that should be the response of people who are trying to name this particular political environment, who are being accused of inciting or fomenting violence when they're not. I think that they should just simply say, "Nope, we're not doing that. We're not doing that, and it actually doesn't appear to have motivated anyone who's been involved. So this is a red herring and we need to focus on what has really caused this violence." And I don't think there has to be any apology for naming the political circumstances with urgency and passion as you may see them.
Alex Lovit: Earlier you said that MAGA is a social movement as well.
Deva Woodly: Yes.
Alex Lovit: So in some ways, we're talking about kind of two countervailing social movements.
Deva Woodly: Yes.
Alex Lovit: Does that affect how we should think about it at all, or is that just sort of how it's always been?
Deva Woodly: I don't don't know if it's how it's always been, but it is certainly how it is during what are called critical junctures. So we are in a unique period because the institutions that are supposed to carry out the smooth functioning of society are all in disarray. They're not high functioning right now. That's part of the reason why you have movements that are so active, and you have so many of them, is because movements are really trying to focus our attention on deficits In our regular institutions, they're trying to call attention to and make up for non-responsiveness of various kinds of the kind of regular institutions. And so you have two sort of countervailing movements who are really trying to shift what's going to count as the normal or the steady state, right? That carries us through the rest of the 21st century. That is what the fight is now, the fight is for what's going to be considered the normal running of the United States in 2180.
MAGA has its vision, that's really clear and very well coalesced and written down, and that's a pretty recent phenomenon, right? Project 2025, that's something that has been done in the last basically five years, and that is really people who are from disparate movements getting together and writing a coalition document. That is what that is. And so the challenge is for people who oppose that vision to get their selves together, and figure out what they want it to be. Because right now we're in a situation where the rest of the 21st century is a jump ball, and that moment doesn't last forever. Someone will set the tone, and so the question is, can pro-democracy movements get themselves in formation and array in time to catch that ball and set the tone?
Alex Lovit: One more question. I think I have some sense of what you're going to say here based on what you've said already, but tell me anyway. So I'm pretty interested in politics. I'm pretty worried about where we are right now and there are causes I feel passionately about, including democracy. I've been to some protests. I've marched and I've waved signs and I've chanted. I've contacted my representatives, I've changed some of my shopping habits, but it's hard for me to feel that I'm having an impact. What advice would you give to me about what I can do to have more of an impact or to feel more confident that I'm having an impact?
Deva Woodly: I would say get together with your people.
Alex Lovit: That's what I thought you'd say.
Deva Woodly: I would say find some people. Yeah, that's the only answer. All the other things that you're doing are important, and people should certainly do them as they're motivated to do them and as they can, but the most important thing is to get together with others. And if it feels too intimidating to get together with others in a specifically political organization, you can get together with others in a civic or social organization so long as you're creating those relationships of support, that can carry you through a number of different situations.
So if you have your book group, if you have your parent dinners or mom dinners, if you have your gardening association or cooperative, if you have your tabletop gaming group that meets regularly, whatever it is, don't be isolated. Get together with your people, because the thing is that as circumstances change, those people and those relationships and the information you're able to share with one another and the ways you're able to be connected can become useful, essential, and political. That's one of the reasons that authoritarian regimes often try to stamp out civil society, is because in the end, any kind of social connection that is durable and resilient and not dictated by the regime can become a political power.
Alex Lovit: Well, Deva Woodly, thank you for expanding my political perspective, and thank you for joining me on The Context.
Deva Woodly: Absolutely. It was wonderful to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine O'Leary, and Darla Minnick. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, Kettering.org to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@Kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I'm Alex Lovit. I'm a senior program officer and Historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They are not the views and opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The Foundation's support of this podcast is not an endorsement of its content.
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