How Community Organizing Can Stop Authoritarianism and Advance Justice

Hard-won victories for freedom and equality are under direct assault in the United States. Do we have the courage to unite and defeat an authoritarian regime? I believe that we do, but only if we organize strategically and effectively.

We must recognize that the rules have changed. What has worked in the past may not work in the future. So, while advocates continue to demand a role for working people in governance, we must also defeat those who oppose democracy.

Winning does not mean simply removing authoritarians and White supremacists from power. To win requires a bold vision that welcomes people into a new governing coalition backed by the multiracial majority. It requires reimagining how society can improve the lives of everyday people at scale. Ordinary people in the United States have a long history of building power through collective action. We must call forth this tradition of community organizing and revive its power to usher in a new era of reconstruction.

Winning does not mean simply removing authoritarians and White supremacists from power. To win requires a bold vision.

Grassroots, member-based organizations like the ones I lead, People’s Action and the People’s Action Institute, are accountable to millions of people all across the country. In this moment, every one of us must look beyond our egos and short-term agendas to embrace a shared analysis and strategy. The good news is that the conversations to achieve this clarity of purpose are well underway.

Here, I offer a roadmap to how we can achieve this new era—by explaining how our nation got here, illustrating what good organizing looks like, naming concrete next steps, and identifying a vision of success.

What We Face Today

We have made meaningful progress for people and our planet in the decades since landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s and post-Watergate reforms, but we are losing ground. The Reagan administration put corporate interests in the driver’s seat, and its allies on the US Supreme Court have since erased limits on money in politics, gutted voter protections, and granted broad immunity to the president.

Now, the administration of President Donald Trump is concentrating power to silence dissent, deporting migrants and trampling on due process rights, and using enhanced executive powers to enrich the Trump family ($3.4 billion in 2025 alone, according to one account). His administration is also firing election watchdogs, appointing loyalists to oversee vote counting, and issuing executive orders to suppress voting.

Far-right operatives like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller want to erase the Great Society and New Deal, while billionaires like Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, and Peter Thiel demand everything from the dismantling of government agencies and the deregulation of cryptocurrency to the criminalization of homelessness.

Meanwhile, our movement for social justice has fragmented and lost momentum. A lack of clarity about how to build power leads progressive groups to prioritize the interests of donors and the political class over working people.

The landscape has changed. So, too, must our strategy.

The Need for an Organizing Revival

No one should pretend this crisis began in January 2025. A year before that, in an NPQ article that I wrote with Manuel Pastor, we noted that “too often, those of us committed to racial equity, economic inclusion, and multiracial democracy must fight rearguard battles against authoritarianism, racial exclusion, and planetary destruction.”

And in 2023, People’s Action Institute sounded an alarm in our report Antidote to Authoritarianism about the decline of democracy, explaining how “the two-party system has led us to a place where one party benefits from contracting access to democratic systems and consolidating power.” In this context, community organizing must build power, so that people can “intervene in the political systems that feel distant from their daily lives.”

More than 20 national organizations came together to produce this report, which begins with a shared commitment to combating the forces that brought us to this moment—structural racism, corporate power, and concentrated wealth.

We went on to develop a shared strategy to reground our movements in the most effective techniques of relational community organizing through an Organizing Revival. More than 60 organizations have since aligned around these goals, and this is a foundation we can build from.

To forge a path toward lasting change, our movements must build from the ground up.

Our commitment to building this united front is inspired by all those who have risked their lives to overcome our nation’s greatest challenges.

A bright line connects us with the courageous newly freed African Americans and White allies who made Reconstruction after the Civil War possible, and the young people who risked their lives in the modern civil rights movement to overturn Jim Crow, a time often referred to as a Second Reconstruction. Because we have done so before, we know that if we work together now, we can win.

Laying the Foundation for a Third Reconstruction

To forge a path toward lasting change, our movements must build from the ground up. Organized people have been the power behind every great expansion of our democracy, from abolition and women’s suffrage to civil rights and marriage equality.

Yet not all organizing is created equal: Good organizing requires relational power building, which centers and elevates ordinary people. Good organizing is never transactional or extractive. We must work together, hand in hand with partners in philanthropy, to advance social justice, defeat White nationalism, and undo the corporate capture of our society.

Good organizing is not new. Many of its techniques, such as agitation and civil disobedience, were pioneered in the labor movement and then adapted in new ways by civil rights leaders like James Lawson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Diane Nash; and earlier leaders like Septima Clark, who championed popular education.

These foundational techniques have since been widely shared by the Midwest Academy and other leadership training organizations. We have expanded this toolkit with new methodologies like deep canvassing, which emerged out of the movement for marriage equality.

Deep canvassing goes far beyond standard electoral techniques to engage people in nonjudgmental, constructive conversations. It has proven highly effective in bringing people of opposing viewpoints together so they can take action together, with enduring results. And while digital organizing can mobilize and reach millions of people with a single click, it will never replace the effectiveness of knocking on a neighbor’s door or sitting down for a conversation at the kitchen table.

What Success Looks Like

The present picture is not pretty: US democratic practices are increasingly yielding to authoritarianism. To reverse this and usher in an era of reconstruction, multiracial working-class movement groups must be capable of acting together—inside, outside, and beyond elections—to build power and hold institutions accountable to people.

To block authoritarian consolidation in the short term and lay the foundation for the long fight ahead requires a range of tactics and strategies. We must forge alliances with uncommon partners and create narratives of liberation rooted in shared stories of survival, dignity, and democracy that millions recognize as their own. These narratives must bring us together, out of isolation, and into action.

While there is a long way to go, some of this foundation has been built. Lost in the noise of Trump’s 2024 reelection were significant victories for working people in states like Washington, where 64 percent of voters rejected a billionaire-funded initiative to strip $2.2 billion in funding from schools, climate defense, and healthcare to line the pockets of the ultrarich. In Missouri, a deep red state, over 57 percent of voters approved Proposition A, which increased the minimum wage by 22 percent to $15 an hour and extended sick-leave protections to hourly workers and those employed by small businesses. Voters in North Carolina rejected a self-described “Black Nazi” GOP candidate in his run for the governor’s office.

We are inspired by the civil rights movement and all those around the globe who have proven that effectively organized people can defeat dictators.

Each of these victories was won through careful and patient coalition building by grassroots organizers, who sought out allies in organized labor and affinity groups to align around shared interests. And while GOP-controlled state legislatures try to roll back these gains, the voice of the voters in supporting policies for working people is clear. The multiracial majority is with us.

What We Do Next

Our next step is to boldly organize on the ground with collaborative infrastructure. Over the next 18 months, when the freedom and fairness of elections will come under attack, all those who want to preserve democracy must demonstrate our shared resolve to meet the Trump administration’s attempt at authoritarian consolidation with discipline, coordination, and power.

Our strategy is not only to react, but to turn every flashpoint into lasting strength and every surge into a groundswell for change by and for ordinary people. If we do this, we can defeat authoritarians and lay the groundwork for a more accountable democracy.

People’s Action and other grassroots organizations are committed to training our members in the most effective techniques of community power building. We will act together, with nonviolent noncompliance and civil disobedience if necessary. We will not take the erosion of our rights lying down: We will stand together.

We are inspired by the civil rights movement and all those around the globe who have proven that effectively organized people can defeat dictators. The challenges we face are daunting, but they are not without precedent. We must remember that for much of our country’s history, Black people and women were entirely excluded from our political process and faced violent opposition to their participation. For those who mistakenly believe that the United States does not have an authoritarian past, recall that for more than half a century under Jim Crow, the US South was essentially an authoritarian enclave, run by a one-party state.

It was only through the disciplined and courageous actions of abolitionists, suffragists, and Freedom Riders that we have advanced from those terrible times toward the promise of a multiracial democracy that includes all of our voices and hopes.

It is also important to recognize that small groups of people can create the basis for great change. For example, about 450 people participated in the Freedom Rides, in which Black and White young people traveled together on buses to protest segregation. They faced violent attacks and beatings, yet persevered.

During Freedom Summer of 1964, a larger, but still small group of about 1,000 students and volunteers registered voters and helped open 41 Freedom Schools on porches and in the backyards of Black people’s homes in Mississippi. They, too, faced violent and powerful opponents. They took risks, and their courage galvanized the public, forcing major changes in public policy.

Today, as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we face great challenges. Yet we also have the opportunity to build a far more just, inclusive, and prosperous society for the next 250 years—our Third Reconstruction.

I believe we will rise to the challenges of this moment and fight forward. Juntos podemos. Together we can. And we will.