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The Four Types of Modern Progressive Organizing in the WTF Era [1]

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Date: 2025-07-18

In today's world, progressive organizing requires four strong walls. Each campaign and movement must both stand on its own and stand together in coalition, and the only way to guarantee this is with the four walls philosophy. Thankfully, each of the walls exists in real life as we speak, though they do so separately and in disparate groups led by people who often see potential allies as sworn enemies. But just like the walls of an actual house, if they don’t work together, we can’t win in the long term.

Rapid response: Simply put, rapid response is mobilizing for emergency action to stop something from happening, or to make something happen. It's probably the most visible of the four walls to the average person. That's because rapid response so often involves making large groups of people aware that something's happening. Rapid response is also the closest thing to an "ongoing" project that likely exists in some shape or form already in dozens of political organizations. The good news is that means you won't have to organize it from scratch.

A healthy and well-organized rapid response operation follows a series of steps after emergency news is received. For example, let's say that a group hears that their city is about to start cooperating with a large-scale deportation raid that's targeting several thousand immigrants, many of them American citizens. The first step of a rapid response team is assessing how bad the problem is. How big is the raid going to be? Will this be the only one? How many people are being targeted? After getting a sense of the problem, the rapid response team will brainstorm possible responses. They might go into their strategy and tactics bank to see what ideas or scenarios they have that will work to deal with this incoming raid.

The core of any rapid response operation is contact. Good contact lists or directories are the lifeblood of organizing in so many ways, especially when you have to contact as many people as possible as quickly as you can. Responding to an impending deportation raid might mean having several ways to contact immigrant rights organizations, underground railroad leaders, protest leaders, and others. Once everyone's been contacted, rapid response leaders can assign roles based on who said they'd help with this particular action. Successful rapid response teams will keep this flexible because there's a good chance things will change and flexibility will be needed.

Direct Action: Traditionally, direct action is one of the louder of the four walls, but isn't always the most effective. Together with civil disobedience, direct action also has the most potential to be organic, spontaneous, and widely covered by media. Take the 2017 women's march as an example. It was the most widely attended march of its kind in Washington in history. There were celebrity speakers and a couple of US Senators in attendance. It was definitely a successful direct action, but without the other three walls operating in strict coordination it produced limited results and it's hard to draw a line from the march to later victories. There's argument from some that it lead to better performance from progressive candidates in the 2018 midterms, but that is far from conclusive. In short, direct action is highly visible but of only limited effectiveness on its own. It needs to be paired with other forms of action to be successful.

Because direct action can provide a massive push, it's best to think of it as a finale after gains have already been made but need to be set in stone. It can also help to gather people for the next chapter in organizing; once you have people at a direct action, you have a captive audience you sign up for events in the future.

Electoral Organizing: Electoral organizing is often only recognized by the average person through its results. If you live in an area with lots of elections, then even if you don't pay attention to them, they happen and they have consequences. The thing about elected officials is that they have the same human brains as the rest of us and respond to the same social cues. Especially at the local level, where elected officials are likely to meet most of the people that work on their campaigns in person, politicians remember the people who helped put them in office. Even subconsciously, they think of those people first when making decisions. So it's important for any community to have key people in campaigns and helping out elected officials.

Electoral organizing is easy to capitalize on because if your chosen candidate wins, it's easy to point to the results and rally your side around what a good job they did. But it's also a double-edged sword: all too often, people think that when the election is done, their work is "over." Don't make the same mistake political parties do and forget about people who helped until the next election rolls around. Make sure to engage them regularly, particularly as you'll need people to help you with actions that make up the other three walls. Most importantly, don’t rely on the party to talk to people; do it yourself.

Civil Disobedience: Civil disobedience is probably the most romanticized of the four walls and the one tied to what people often call "resistance efforts." It is the highest risk of the four walls when practiced conventionally, but it can also be as simple as a large group of people simply not complying with something they see as stupid. Americans think they're not used to civil disobedience, but technically we all practice it every day. You're not seriously going to tell me you obey all posted speed limit sings, are you? Have you really never seen people smoking under no smoking signs? That kind of civil disobedience is already part of everyday life. Your job is to take advantage of that part of our nature and use it to execute civil disobedience actions against autocrats and their collaborators.

Examples of successful civil disobedience actions are all over American and world history. See the American civil rights movement and the sit-ins at Woolworth's lunch counters. See mass action in South Africa against apartheid in the 1980s. See Danish resistance against the Nazis in the Second World War. See Gandhi's salt march campaign in India. These are all good examples of successful uses of civil disobedience and mass resistance.

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