What Democrats Can Learn from MAGA

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, could Democrats learn from the MAGA movement? That’s the question our next guest is asking in his latest piece for The New Yorker. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charles Duhigg argues that recent right- leaning movements have thrived by building local networks with lasting community impacts. While, on the other hand, he says Democrats have focused on large, flashy shows of force that have failed to produce durable impact. He explains to Michel Martin what he believes it would take for the left to build broader, more resilient coalitions.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Bianna. Charles Duhigg, thanks so much for joining us.

 

CHARLES DUHIGG: Thank you for having me.

 

MARTIN: Your writing for the New Yorker often kind of unpacks the way systems work, right — how does the system actually work. In your latest piece, it’s titled “What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing–And Infighting.” What made you think about that?

 

DUHIGG: Well, I was really curious about why the — Democrats have obviously been turning people out into the streets for the last eight years, and in some of the largest protests we’ve ever seen. And yet Donald Trump’s victory, most recent victory, and the fact that MAGA has such a sustainable life around it made me curious what was going on because I didn’t see a lot of MAGA protests. And as I got deeper into this, I realized that there was a science behind social movements. There’s a science behind why some movements attract millions of people and sustain and why others are a flash in the pan and disappear.

 

MARTIN: You make an interesting point, because you remember when the, when Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had their debate, you know, Kamala Harris, the Democrat, correctly pointed out that Trump’s rallies weren’t that successful, like they were having to find smaller venues. They were, a lot of people would leave early. And a lot of people sort of saw that as a sign, as kind of waning interest. And that turned out not to be true at all. 

 

And as a tool of analysis, you open the piece by contrasting DARE, which is this nationally funded top-down anti-drug program that spread rapidly through the schools in the 1980s. And you contrast that with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which is a volunteer driven group that grew locally, grew unevenly after a personal tragedy. What made you think of those two groups?

 

DUHIGG: Well, I think they’re perfect examples of what are known within the academic literature about social movements of mobilizing and organizing. DARE was really good at mobilizing, right? They could get millions of people to show up for rallies. They got President Ronald Reagan to declare the first National DARE Day. They got lots of donations. But over time, the program just kind of petered out. It wasn’t very effective at changing people’s behavior. In fact, and much more so schools just abandoned it. 

 

MADD, on the other hand, was really good at what’s known as organizing, pushing down leadership, training local people to build communities and become leaders in their own right. And in doing so, building these durable communities that end up having prolonged impact. 

 

And when we look at the contemporary politics, what we see is the same thing. Democrats are very, very good at mobilization, right? They’re very good at turning people out into the streets and having these large rallies. But when everyone goes home, they stop talking to each other. They don’t make new connections at those rallies. They feel like they’ve done their part, and so they stop, they stop working hard. Whereas on the Republican side, very much under, undernoticed and quietly, MAGA has spent years and years building a network of small groups that work on local levels that have empowered tens of thousands and millions of people to become leaders of the conservative ideas within their own community. And in doing so, they’ve built a very sustainable, very durable movement that will frankly outlast Donald Trump.

 

MARTIN: You write, “For a social movement to create real change. It helps to be skilled at both mobilizing and organizing. But that doesn’t mean that both skills are equally important.” How did you kind of come up with that idea?

 

DUHIGG: Well, there’s a, there’s an academic I love named Liz McKenna, who’s at Harvard, who says that, protest is a tactic in search of a strategy. And what she means by that is that when we protest, it should be the outgrowth of a community that’s built together and has become outraged and wants to take to the streets. The protest is not the goal of the movement. The protest is a symptom that you have a community that’s coming together and is getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Now, when you prioritize that protest, when you push people into the streets, when you use Twitter and the internet to organize and thereby scale very quickly — but sidestep the infrastructure building, that’s really, really important to making a movement durable, that’s when you get what we have right now, which is that people feel very passionate on the Democratic side about being anti-Trump and standing up against ICE. And yet we’re not seeing the widespread change that those people had hoped for because they’re also not at the same time organizing and building those communities that allow people to work day in, day out every week with their neighbors to create change.

 

MARTIN: Well, that’s one of the, one of the weird ironies that you point out in your piece, is that many right-leaning groups studied and adapted strategies that were first perfected by Democrats. How did the right-leaning groups figure out what to do and how did Democratic or slash left-leaning groups lose it? 

 

DUHIGG: Absolutely. I, I think in a lot of ways for the contemporary period, we can go back to Barack Obama’s election in 2008, right at the time, Barack Obama basically turned campaign conventional wisdom on its head by saying, instead of telling volunteers what we’re going to do, we’re just gonna make them into franchisees of the campaign and say, Do whatever you think is best. Take the leadership initiative yourself. Go out and experiment with things. And as a result, they were able to get over 2 million volunteers who turned to their neighbors over 25 million times to encourage them to vote for Obama. And brought about one of the sweeping victories for Democrats in both the legislature and the White House.

 

But at that moment there — two things happened. First of all, we start to see the roots of the Tea Party. And the Tea Party was a very decentralized movement that ended up being very, very successful. And also you saw folks like Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, look at the Obama election and say, Look, they’re out organizing us. We gotta get better at this. So what Ralph Reed did is start an organization known as the Faith and Family Coalition that very much was modeled on the Obama playbook, but for the right. And in fact, one of the things that many of these groups do, including Turning Point USA, the Charlie Kirk organization, is that when a leader joins their group, they make them read this book called “Groundbreakers,” which is all about the Obama campaign and very glowingly about the Obama campaign. And they said, Don’t pay attention to the ideology. Just steal the ideas about organizing. 

 

And so with the Tea Party and groups like the Faith and Freedom Coalition and Turning Point USA, we saw a prolonged emphasis on creating these small groups across the nation of neighbors who are coming together in order to be active — not just on politics, but on all types of things. Faith and Freedom has expanded by focusing on evangelical churches and gun clubs and homeschooling organizations. And in doing so, what they’ve learned is that when neighbors have one issue they care about like guns, then it’s much easier to persuade them when the election rolls around to vote for your, to vote for the Republican candidate. But the point is they’re doing year round organizing

 

MARTIN: But the other point that you make in the piece is that MAGA’s strength comes in part from a tolerance for internal disagreement. 

 

DUHIGG: Absolutely.

 

MARTIN: And this is something that you’re hearing Democrats complain about constantly, particularly national Democrats, is this sort of, sort of a stringency around opinion that is enforced…

 

DUHIGG: Yeah, a purity test.

 

MARTIN: But you look at the Women’s March, for example, which fell apart, which is a huge mobilization in the wake of Trump’s first election, huge mobilization — far outstripped in numbers, the people who attended his first inauguration and the group fell apart over all these sort of… 

 

DUHIGG: Absolutely. 

 

MARTIN: …internal disagreements about who was right and issues like sort of Israel. 

 

You know, what’s interesting though is that you really don’t, I’m based in Washington, so I don’t get the sense that Donald Trump tolerates a lot of disagreement about anything. 

 

DUHIGG: So it, it’s important —

 

MARTIN: So it’s interesting that, you know, you’re saying that the actual organizing structure that keeps him alive and viable politically actually does. Can you say just a little bit more… 

 

DUHIGG: Absolutely.

 

MARTIN: …about how that works on the ground?

 

DUHIGG: It’s important to distinguish between MAGA and Donald Trump. You’re exactly right. Donald Trump, brooks, no dissent within his group. And yet, if you look at the MAGA movement, they welcome almost everyone as long as you’re willing to put on the red hat, right? And for many of them, they actually opposed Trump when he first rose up in the first presidential campaign. And they’ve now come around to being boosters of his, because he’s the guy who’s winning. It’s great to jump on his coattails. But MAGA is a very different movement from Donald Trump as himself. And you’re exactly right. MAGA says, If you wear the red hat, you’re allowed in, we don’t care who you date, we don’t care who you love. We don’t care if you’re pro-choice or pro, pro or pro-life. We don’t care if you’re pro-trans rights or anti-trans rights as long as you wear the red hat, you’re welcome within our camp.

 

And if we contrast that with what’s happening, oftentimes on the left, what we see are these purity tests, right? That if you, if you are a pro-life Democrat, you are excluded from almost every social organization that you, that would, that should be welcoming you. If you’re someone who has questions about DEI initiatives, or January 6th or says, you know, I don’t like Elon Musk, but maybe shaking up the government, maybe there’s something there. There’s no place for you to really participate in the Democrats, and they make you feel like you are excluded. 

 

What we know about political movements and political parties is that they succeed when they become big tents. And MAGA is very focused on being a big tent. All you have to do is say, you’re gonna vote for the guy at the top of the Republican ticket and you’re a member. Democrats have, are much more focused on ideological purity. And it’s to the detriment of the party.

 

MARTIN: How did that start? How did it happen that somebody like Obama led this movement that was very inclusive, and then all of it became sort of ossified into these purity tests? How did that happen? Do you have a sense?

 

DUHIGG: I think, I think two things happened. I think that first was the election of Donald Trump was such an overwhelming shock, shock to the Democratic system that Democrats started saying, We absolutely have to be unified against Donald Trump. We have to that there’s no dissent within our ranks because we feel like that’s the way that we prove that we are the resistance. And that’s an understandable instinct, but it’s exactly the wrong thing to do. 

 

And then on top of that is the, is COVID and the racial reckoning that happened after George Floyd. There was a lot of upheaval in how we thought about social issues. And you’ll remember during COVID that it became a sign of faith on the left that you should absolutely wear a mask and that we should close the schools. And states, Republican states, that didn’t enforce mask wearing and didn’t close their schools were almost demonized. And now we know, looking back that this is a complicated issue. It’s a sophisticated issue. Some people should be wearing masks, others don’t have to. Maybe some, in some places we close schools and other places we shouldn’t close schools. But there was this emphasis on unity on the left that became dogmatic. And we still haven’t grown out of that. In fact, the fact that Donald Trump won by being anti-woke is evidence of how much this perception of a need for ideological purity still exists either –and people are either endorsing it or reacting in contrast to it. 

 

But it’s important to note that this hasn’t always been true. As you point out, it wasn’t true under Obama. It wasn’t true under Clinton. We all remember the Sister Souljah moment, right, when Clinton very visibly broke with some of the core constituencies of the Democratic party. This used to be something that we saw as a good sign that a party is alive and is breathing and is changing. And the Democrats need to get back to that if they wanna succeed.

 

MARTIN: And what about Minneapolis? I mean, we’ve seen an intense kind of grassroots mobilization. These are people saying, This is unacceptable to me. My neighbors are being harassed and persecuted. I’m not tolerating this. And this is of course, after two U.S. citizens have been shot by federal agents under circumstances that the people who witnessed this consider absolutely unacceptable and that many people have now seen for themselves. So, but what do you make of it? Did you think this has some meaningful impact or not?

 

DUHIGG: Absolutely. And what’s interesting about Minneapolis is that it’s not all groups on the left that have ignored the wisdom of grassroots organizing. And in fact, in Minneapolis, we see a number of groups that for years now, have been organizing grassroots in local communities.

One of the, one of my favorites is a group named ISAIAH, which has brought together childcare workers, college students, East African refugees, Islamic centers and churches, groups that normally would never come together. ISAIAH has been bringing them together for over a decade and has been helping them organize among themselves and saying, Look, you share values together, and if we work together, we become stronger. And those are the groups that right now are leading this mobilization. 

 

A social movement can’t exist without both organizing and mobilizing. That mobilizing is really important. But what’s happened in Minneapolis is that the organizing has been going on for a decade on the left. And so now when they mobilize, it’s not just a one day show up and blow your whistle. It’s a prolonged consistent attempt to change what is happening in that city and in this nation. And it’s that durability, those unsung heroes of local people who show up and take out their phones and blow their whistles, day after day after day, because they see their friends there because they see their neighbors there. That is what creates real change.

 

MARTIN: Do you see this as having an impact more broadly on sort of organizing elsewhere? I’m thinking in New York, for example, the election of the mayor, the current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, I mean, nobody thought that — the smart money was not on this person. And it just seemed very much to be a matter of people organizing. And now, and now the question becomes do his strategies for getting elected translate elsewhere?

 

DUHIGG: Absolutely. Absolutely. And politicians are jealous of nothing like success in this world, right? So every single politician, particularly Democrat, watched the Mamdani campaign and said, Why did this guy win? How can I imitate that? They’re watching what’s happening in Minnesota right now, and they’re saying, Listen, like these are the types of people that I want to show up to fight for me to fight for my candidacy, to fight for the policies I care about. What happened there that made this place so special that we see such a prolonged, a prolonged turnout? So yes, absolutely. Everyone is paying attention to the fact that local organizing seems to be the key to sustainable victory. And I think what you’re gonna see in these midterms this year, as well as in the presidential election that’s coming up is you’re gonna see a much greater emphasis on spending money and attention on local areas and local leaders rather than national campaigns. We’re not gonna see another situation like Kamala Harris, where $2.1 billion was spent trying to elect, while local, smaller organizations basically couldn’t get any money. In fact, we’re gonna see the reverse of that because everyone realizes it’s those small local organizations that work year round. Those are the trusted messengers. Those are the people who can convince people to vote.

MARTIN: Before I let you go, Gallup polling found a new high in the number of people identifying as Independents. It says 45% of Americans now identify as political independents. And that suggests, you know, frustration with both parties. If that is the case then, what’s the way to sort of organize to achieve results for a political party? Because that generally is the way politics is conducted in this country.

 

DUHIGG: Absolutely. And I think you have to be clear about what a party’s values are. Listen, as someone who studies politics and watches it, I don’t know what the values of the Democratic party are right now, right — except for being anti-Trump. I don’t know exactly what they’re, what they believe in, what they think the future should look like. And on the right among Republicans, there’s a real disenchantment because they don’t know what the values of the Republican party are, except for saying, I’m willing to put on the red hat and I’m willing to vote for Trump. Neither party has done a really good job of elucidating what their values are and why you should support them, rather than choose the lesser of two evils. And that’s what the primary is going to be. We are going to see a battle among many, many candidates running for president over what the values of the Democrats ought to be and what the values of the Republicans ought to be, and how we elucidate those and clarify those. Because ultimately, people need something to vote for. They need to say, I’m a Democrat because I believe in what the Democrats are saying, or I’m a Republican because I believe in the values of the Republican Party. And until those are elucidated, you’re gonna see people being independent and saying, I don’t identify with either party ’cause I don’t really know what either party is.

 

MARTIN: Charles Duhigg, thanks so much for talking to us.

 

DUHIGG: Thank you for having me.