By George Lakey
ZNet, October 2, 2002

The good news is that this approach doesn't require getting a coalition of 80 grumpy people into a room. The bad news is that it does help to get a half dozen or so folks together, and even that news isn't necessarily bad because many of us do our best thinking when we're interacting with others. (In fact, it may pay intentionally to invite a few people who are different from you, to allow yourself to be stimulated by difference.)

This strategy approach is actually quite flexible and is sometimes helpful in large coalition meetings. The reason I'm referring to small group use is that, in the true spirit of decentralist politics, the more small groups use this approach and become familiar with it, the more effective it will be when large groups use it. This approach to strategizing serves bottom-up preferences in building social movements. In Starhawk's terms, it serves power-with rather than power-over, and is inherently democratic.

As you'll see, using the tool on a small group level also frees you to go right into action without waiting for "the movement" to get it together, confident that the tactics you choose will likely serve the big picture when the big picture gets organized. And that's what I believe we need in this very individualistic U.S. culture: organic ways of strategizing that enable independent initiatives that serve the larger whole. My guess is that such organic strategizing will build the confidence activists need, making it easier to shed arrogance and learn to cooperate better on a macro level.

START WITH THIS PARTICIPATORY TOOL AND GET EVERYONE INVOLVED

Using newsprint or a blackboard, draw a horizontal line parallel to the floor. Imagine that the left-most point of the line represents the individuals and groups that are most opposed to the war against Iraq. Imagine that the right-most point of the line represents the individuals and groups that are most in favor of the war.

Then imagine that the line you drew represents a spectrum. The rest of U.S. society is ranged along the spectrum, with some groups inclined to be closer to the anti-war position, some inclined to be closer to the pro-war position, and many groups in the middle. Above the line draw the shape of a half-moon; make it like half of a pie with wedges. Be sure to have one wedge directly in the middle, because (as usual) there are a lot of fence-sitters or people and groups that aren't much inclined one way or the other.

Now our strategy group takes a big analysis step: we fill in the wedges.

• Which groups are closer to us and which farther but still not fence-sitting?
• Which groups are inclined to be closer to the hawks but not as close as others?
• You'll have arguments about where some groups should be placed, and may decide that a category like "mainstream Protestants" or "mass media" will turn up in a couple of wedges and need to be broken down further.

KEY STRATEGY ASSUMPTION

At this point it's time to wrestle with a major principle in making social change: To win, it's usually enough to move each wedge of the pie one step in our direction!

Figure out how to move the nearest allies one step into our camp, and the next wedge out into the position vacated by the nearest allies, and move the fence-sitters one step toward sympathy with our cause, and get the groups on the other side of the fence-sitters to become neutral, and de-fang the group next to them (just moving them one step only) -- you get the idea. There's no need whatever to win the opponent, the group at the other end of the spectrum, to our point of view. Relax. Bush, Cheyney, and Rumsfeld can want war forever. We can still stop the war, if we move the wedges one step toward us.

There are plenty of examples of that in recent U.S. history. The civil rights movement won campaign after campaign without converting their arch enemies to racial equality. The U.S. pulled its troops out of Vietnam even though our war-mongering powerholders still wanted to bomb the country back to the stone age. Gay rights activists win again and again even though pulpits continue to reverberate with homophobic thunder.
This is why it is both incorrect and a waste of energy for activists to focus so much attention on their opponents. When I hear activists talk I sometimes visualize a radical equivalent of People Magazine -- such fascination with the personalities and opinions of people we don't need to obsess about!

What counts -- to win -- is the wedges in between "us" and "them" -- especially from the fence-sitters on over, and the wedge just to the right of the fence-sitters. Move each of those wedges one notch, and one notch only, and we'll stop the war.

The opponents know this, and so they don't usually waste their time obsessing about us (except for Richard Nixon, who truly was an obsessional figure). The opponents' objective is to isolate us, and so they focus most of their attention on the wedges in between, not on us. The National Rifle Association is not going to waste its time picketing the Quakers. The NRA is much more interested in the wedges in between.

CREATE YOUR STRATEGY

Now that your group has some clarity about who is where on its spectrum of allies, it can create a strategy. To do that, ask:

• which wedges we do have some access to or credibility with?
• which wedges already get a lot of attention from activists and which ones suffer from neglect?
• which wedges do we personally feel most called to reach to?

From that discussion reach a provisional consensus on the first wedge you'd like to tackle. Then brainstorm the tactics that are most likely to reach the group(s) in that wedge successfully. Be creative. There are hundreds of tactics already available, but it's fine to make up new ones. As you get ready to try out tactics open up lines of communication "inside" the wedge so you can get valuable information on how the tactics are working when you try them. In that way you can keep tweaking what you do and become ever more effective.

HOW DOES THIS ALL ADD UP?

Picture groups of various sizes in your town, and state, and nation, "taking on" other parts of the population that need to confront the reality of the war and what it means. Listen to the buzz which that creates, and you'll be listening to the kind of buzz that brought down Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic when the thousands of young people in Otpor did this kind of outreach and brought each wedge a step closer until the dictator was isolated.

Enjoy the empowerment that comes from putting yourself outside the comfort zone of futile messages directed to Washington, and make yourself warm and sweaty by plunging into the civil society that is this country at its best.

It adds up to victory, not simply by tens of thousands of groups acting from their own initiative with their own creativity, but because the use of this strategic principle promotes synergy: the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Will macro-movement coordination come about? Will charismatic leadership appear which adds soul and eloquence? Will well-funded national organizing initiatives emerge which add focus? Perhaps, and in my controversial opinion all three might be terrific.

In the meantime, let's put that pie diagram up on the newsprint, and get to work!