With the election of
Donald Trump as President last week, progressives all across the country are
scrambling to figure out what went wrong and how to avoid this type of failure
in the future, with some people arguing that there is a crisis in the movement which
requires nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of its basic
assumptions. In her new book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age longtime environmental and labor organizer and
Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, Jane F. McAlevey argues that the reason
why progressives keep losing a number of issues is that they lack the organized
power to enact significant change and hold elected leaders accountable. Drawing upon her experience as a scholar and
longtime organizer she makes a case that the great social movements of previous
eras gained their power from mass organizing, a strategy today's progressives
have mostly abandoned in favor of shallow mobilization or advocacy. Jane joins
me today on the show to talk all about the book and the need for strong unions
built from bottom-up organizing strategies that place the power for change in
the hands of workers and ordinary people at the community level.
On Sunday,
President-elect Donald J. Trump announced that he picked Washington insider and
RNC chairman Reince Priebus to be his White House chief of staff, we also
learned that he selected right-wing media provocateur Stephen K. Bannon as his
senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist, signaling an embrace of the
fringe ideology long advanced by Bannon’s website Breitbart News. Joining me
today to talk all about Steve Bannon and what we can expect from him in the
White House is investigative journalist, author, and expert on the intersection
of religion and politics, Sarah Posner.
Listen to The Michelangelo Signorile Show weekdays live from 3-6 pm ET on SiriusXM Progress 127 and on the SiriusXM iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps. Not a subscriber? Not a problem! Listen online any time with a free thirty-day pass or, if you have an if you have an iPhone or Blackberry, go to the app store and download SiriusXM for free, for a 7-day trial, and listen on your phone
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