Veteran organizer Marshall Ganz sees a path to power under Trump

This article Veteran organizer Marshall Ganz sees a path to power under Trump was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Zohran Mamdani built an impressive grassroots operation during his historic campaign for mayor of New York City, turning out 100,000 volunteers. How successful he will be in enacting his ambitious agenda once in office may largely depend on how well his administration converts and sustains the engagement of his base. Earlier this year, Mamdani’s campaign wisely turned to Marshall Ganz, one of the most experienced movement veterans and thinkers in the country, for advice.

At 82, Marshall, whose lifetime of organizing began with the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the United Farmworkers’ 1965-1970 grape strike, remains a sought-after advisor. He has counseled many movement leaders and electoral campaigns, including as the primary architect of the grassroots volunteer movement that helped elect Barack Obama president in 2008. 

I studied with Marshall more than a decade ago at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches organizing as a leadership craft and oversees the Practicing Democracy Project. Like many of his former students, the practices I learned from him changed my life. 

Marshall calls for organizers to double down on our fundamental human practices of stories, relationships, strategy, structure and action — which he lays out in his most recent book, “People, Power, Change.” He cautions against radical individualism, transactional politics-as-marketing and viewing people as data points, and explains how to build individual and collective agency that grows leadership capacity, even in the face of difficult odds.

In my work with democracy organizations, from supporting Arab Spring activists to domestic and international open government reformers across continents, I have seen some of the pitfalls that Marshall speaks of and how they make it easy for our opponents to deem us as being out of touch. Marshall reminds us of the power of back-to-basics, commonsense approaches to live up to our values. 

I sat down with Marshall on the eve of the New York election to discuss organizing in this moment of rising authoritarianism.

How would you describe the moment of democratic crisis in the United States that we’re living in? 

This feels like a most critical moment not just for the future of this country, but for human well-being. Self-governance isn’t just at stake — so are all the benefits self-governance is meant to bring us. 

It’s the result of years and years of abandoning the ordinary needs of people — it’s a problem when we focus more on data than on humans. This has come from the transformation of politics into marketing — but also from the legacy of institutions shaped by slavery. Trump doesn’t flourish in the absence of fertile ground.

I think of this as a rock-bottom moment. If there was ever a real license for change, this is it. Real change is not just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 

But the question is, do we have the courage? Can we connect with enough solidarity? The destruction of this moment also creates opportunity. We can’t just be obsessed with resisting Trump. What is our vision of democracy? What is it we’re really fighting for? 

Mamdani’s campaign in New York kind of summed it up. You heard the least about Trump because they know what they’re fighting for. That’s the kind of direction we need to urgently move in.

In the face of rapid authoritarian consolidation, what do you think are some things we get right about this moment, and what do you think we might misunderstand? 

We can’t just react and resist, and describe authoritarianism over and over. That’s important, but that doesn’t generate purpose and commitment. If you only do that, you’re actually defending the status quo. So first we have to own the responsibility to craft a way forward. 

Second is the problem of mobilization without organization. We risk reinforcing issues, when what matters most are values. Issues only matter when they relate to values. When issues become identities, we have a problem. Some people love trees and others love fish. But if tree people and fish people can’t work together and think the other camp is wrong and feel misunderstood by each other, then we miss the point. Instead, look at the common reverence for the natural world. Let’s start there and build real power together, rooted in solidarity and interdependence. 

You’ve spoken about how many commentators focus on “head-based” strategies for civil society and not enough on “heart-based” approaches that really sustain leadership. 

The heart precedes the head. The head is about strategy, but there can be so much obsession with strategy that people neglect the heart work … and the people themselves. There’s so much investment in the head. We can develop models and theories until we’re blue in the face, but that’s not changing the world. It’s got to be about politics — which is about people, unless you rob it of values. The first question we need to ask is why. What do we value, and why? That’s the motivational wellspring for action.

So always start with motivation, then skills. Not the other way around. This isn’t rocket science. It’s human behavior. 

Strategy cannot be an end itself. It’s only a means to turn resources into power to accomplish what we value. The only purpose of a campaign can’t be winning — if the how becomes the why, then we sell ourselves short. 

It’s frustrating. Sometimes, as Yoda says, you have to unlearn things to learn new things. 

In my own experience working in the democracy field for 15 years, I see so many people miss the real story because they are observing trends in democracy without practicing democracy in their own lives, organizations and communities. If some readers have been engaging more with their heads but they’re ready to lean in more to direct personal experience, what would your advice be on taking those first steps? 

Mamdani’s campaign is a really important example from electoral politics. The campaign was all about listening and paying attention to people. He has been doing the work that hasn’t been done for years in the city: grounding yourself in people’s real cares and needs. His policy platform is simple; [it’s] a few points that everyone knows. But it has a human foundation. 

He shows lots of courage. He is an immigrant, Muslim and democratic socialist, all of which he honors. And he allows others to see who the person is, rather than a composite of labels. 

And his campaign’s volunteer effort is real. It’s not paid canvassers polling people. It’s [tens of thousands] of volunteers in conversation with people. They’re not just recruiting people as individuals — they’re recruiting people who can accept the responsibility to recruit, train and coach others, which is called leadership development. There’s so much to learn from this. Organizing is about people. You can get caught up in all these abstractions. But whether people are working with real people in an immigration context or for affordable housing … it’s not about crafting policy that might do something someday. It’s about bringing people together to become a source of power today. 

Your book “People, Power, Change,” which I like to think of as your magnum opus, was published just a few months prior to the November 2024 election. What would you want to uplift from the book at this moment? And is there anything you would change now? 

We published it before the election, but you could still clearly see the direction we were moving in then. I wouldn’t change anything in the book, but I wouldn’t call it a “magnum opus,” because in a world changing as rapidly as this one we need to be learning all the time. 

Right after the election, the Harvard Kennedy School hosted a 1.5-day session with the leadership of both presidential campaigns. So I got to spend a day and a half with them — in the same room. The Harris campaign was trying to tell people what they ought to feel, instead of listening to how they do feel. The Trump campaign told people, “I see you, I see your fear. It’s not your fault, it’s their fault. So let’s hate on them, and follow me.” 

In the first Obama campaign, the candidate also said, “I see you” and “there’s a lot we can do about it together; you can be a source of hope and change.” It created capacity rooted in hope, instead of dependency rooted in fear. The exact opposite. 

A whole team [of former students and colleagues] made me accountable to publish the book. It wasn’t written to be a manual, but a resource for people actually doing this work. I think the book’s strength is in making complex practices accessible. It is not a book of models, [which are] just snapshots of dynamic processes. Instead, we focus on practices — real ways of doing things. 

Democracy isn’t something you have, it’s something you do. It’s a practice. Practices involve concepts, skills and values, but they are dynamic. There’s always new learning to be had. And the five leadership practices in the book are accessible to every human being because they are what we do. Everyone builds relationships. Tell stories. Strategizes. We all create structures, which are commitments about how we work together. And we can track the results of our actions — we can count if people did or didn’t come to our meeting. 

This pedagogy draws out what people know implicitly and makes it explicit. So it can become more purposeful, intentional and a craft that you can achieve excellence in. 

You always like to remind your former students that the word education comes from educare in Latin, which means to draw out, not to put in. Once you experience personal transformation through real learning by doing, you can’t go back. So now I love coaching and passing the baton of my experience as much as I can. 

Exactly. When people experience growth, they want more. That’s when you go from head-land to heart-land. 

How would you respond to people who might think the completely unprecedented pace of authoritarian consolidation under this administration is just too much? That we don’t have time to organize because we need to constantly be putting out all the fires. 

I would ask them: Where will you get the fuel to put out those fires? Running around putting out fires means you don’t generate new fuel. That’s not a great strategy. Instead, focus on generating the capacity and power you need to do much more than put out fires — to build something real. Otherwise we’re like headless chickens. 

My generation was part of the spread of radical individualism. If we think individual autonomy is the highest good — well, there’s nothing democratic about that. When you undertake collective work, you invest part of your personal agency in the collective. 

I want to turn to something you speak often about, which is sustaining real sources of hope for the long term. Not a unicorn version of hope, but hope rooted in something much deeper. 

First we need to distinguish between optimism and hope. Optimism and pessimism are both arrogant because they claim to predict the future. But hope is different. Maimonides defined hope as “belief in the plausibility of the possible, as opposed to the necessity of the probable.” In other words, it’s always probable that Goliath will win, but sometimes David does. It was improbable that we’d elect a Black man president in this country in 2008, but it happened. Where I think we get confused sometimes is when we look for hope out there, instead of in here [within us]. Not waiting for some hero to save us, but drawing on our own experiences.

We have to look to ourselves and to each other and the kind of hope we can give one another — not in words, but in heart, in relationship. That’s what organizing and leadership are about.

In movements, sometimes we confuse expressive versus strategic actions. Expressive actions like chanting “down with fascism” play a role but the strategic [approach] is then asking, “How is that building our power?” If raising my voice ends with the shout, then that’s it. It has to turn into power and the interdependent relationships we need to actually make change.

As you look back to the movements you’ve been part of and where we are right now, what final message would you share?

I was blessed to be introduced to organizing in the civil rights movement — which actually called itself the freedom movement, a much more powerful word. When I was in Mississippi, I learned this work was working with people to enable them to find their courage, to find their voice and to engage with each other. After all, they’re the ones whose dignity is at stake and claiming it can be of great risk. It wasn’t about protecting people. 

At a SNCC staff meeting I came upon a “preach-off”: Who could imitate Dr. King better? Here was a sense of joy that had been earned, of humor embedded in humility. We make a big mistake if we start with a model or label or category and try to fit people into it. No, start with the people. Same thing in the farmworkers movement. Because its people who can grow, can learn, can empathize and can find courage. Same thing in teaching. You see a change in a student, then years later they’re interviewing you. That’s real stuff.  

When I was trained in nonviolence, I learned the word nonviolence is a bad translation of satyagraha — which really means truth force [in Sanskrit]. It was never just saying no, never a “non” anything. Gandhi taught that what it did require was the imagination to create other pathways, free of violence. It was never not about conflict. It’s actually such a powerful form of struggle, but it’s rooted in real values, clear action and strong discipline. I’m grateful for having the experience of nonviolent struggle. The core of it was about the worth of the human being. 

Judy Collins recorded the song “Pass it On” in the 1960s. She uses the word freedom because that’s what the civil right movement called itself. She sings:  

Freedom doesn’t come like a bird on the wing, doesn’t fall down like the summer rain. Freedom. Freedom is a hard-won thing, You’ve got to work for it, fight for it, day and night for it. And every generation has to win it again. Pass it on to your children, mother. Pass it on to your children, brother. They’ve got to work for it, fight for it, day and night for it. Pass it on.

And every generation has to win it again. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to do just that: to pass it on. So the struggle grows and continues into the future. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

This article Veteran organizer Marshall Ganz sees a path to power under Trump was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/12/marshall-ganz-sees-path-to-power-under-trump/