How Inclusionary Social Movements Succeed

Social movements are powerful engines for change, and they coalesce around a vast range of issues, causes, and communities. But they fall into two basic categories: inclusionary and exclusionary.
Inclusionary social movements attempt to 'widen the 'we.'' That means they work to expand the circle of power, securing the allegiance of a widening galaxy of groups by appealing to their material needs and desire for participation and empowering them to make decisions, thus building a caring society and driving democracy forward. The examples are legion, especially in the U.S. postwar decades: the labor movement, civil rights, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and the anti-nuclear and environmental movements.
Exclusionary social movements attempt to concentrate power and privilege in a narrow but fiercely loyal category of people. They do so by embracing—in the most negative form—the three perennial drivers of individual and social development: the impulse to bond, the scarcity mind, and historical and trans-historical trauma. The Ku Klux Klan and other racist movements of the first half of the 20th century are examples of social movements driven by the scarcity mind, as are the Tea Party and today's Christian nationalism, QAnon, and MAGA.
The driving force behind inclusionary and exclusionary social movements is a desire to control the center of power. We define the center as not just the government and the commercial sector, but the common sense that people carry with them: how they view the world and human society, and what they believe is their responsibility toward them. The degree of influence they exercise over the center—their ability to govern—is also the degree to which a social movement can realize its vision for the whole society.
Given their desire for control, movements inevitably clash, and in the process, attempt to expand their base by building off their adherents' antagonism. The New Deal/Great Society administrations exploited the hunger for change provoked by the Great Depression to build a coalition that eventually spanned farmers, industrial workers, and underserved racial and ethnic groups and brought about enormous social advances. The conservative 1971 Powell Memorandum was, in effect, a blueprint for building popular opposition to the New Deal/Great Society consensus. The waves of right-wing populism that followed moved the Republican Party toward nativism and xenophobic nostalgia while targeting the inclusionary impulse as un-American.
Is There Hope for a New, Inclusionary Social Movement?
Inclusionary and exclusionary impulses occupy two poles on a spectrum of social and political consciousness: the former, as historian Linda Gordon writes, driven by disappointments, the latter by grievances.
With a malignant, grievance-fueled, exclusionist social movement in the political ascendancy today, this may seem to be a less-than-ideal time to launch (or relaunch) a movement founded on inclusivity. Any effort to do so must confront toxic elements, including:
- Rejection of empathy for poor, marginal, and traditionally disempowered groups;
- Alienation from a wider collective social identity not centered on grievance;
- A punishing brand of religiosity;
- Loss of faith in government as a tool for implementing broadly inclusionary social programs; and
- A culture of debt and austerity that reinforces the scarcity mind.
There are reasons to believe, however, that a new inclusionary movement is not only possible but also practical. While political polarization and an appeal to nativism and culturally narrow nostalgia have enabled exclusionary movements to gain and consolidate power over the past five decades, they only paper over an increasingly widespread understanding that people's material needs are being ignored. This manifests itself as:
- Immiseration: an eroding standard of living for working-class Americans;
- Vast economic inequality and barriers to upward mobility, affecting even the upper-middle-class;
- Relentless austerity, creating a sense that the economic and social problems the government traditionally has addressed are insoluble;
- The undermining of basic services—Medicaid, Disability Insurance, and public infrastructure—that an increasingly broad range of people have come to rely on materially and morally; and
- Alienation generated by the right's relentless efforts to keep its base loyal by scapegoating racial and religious minorities and the LGBTQ+ community.
Addressing these disappointments is impossible without the widest possible social consensus. That being the case, they constitute an invitation to propose changes that bring society back together, even when the dominant movement is authoritarian and exclusionary.
There are deeper resources as well that an inclusionary movement can draw upon:
- A reservoir of goodwill and legitimacy that popular government enjoys even in the worst of times.
- The historical achievements that confirm social policy driven by inclusionary social movements can improve the lives of the majority.
- The plasticity of the human mind. Our minds are more flexible, capable of more transformation and growth than we think, and human interaction is often the leverage that enables us to change our minds.
- The persistence of variety. While the range of political and economic structures on offer has lately appeared to narrow, this has not been the case for most of human history. Even today's mainstream political parties—in the U.S., Republicans and Democrats—were founded in opposition to the existing political establishment or in a conscious effort to address issues and conditions it was ignoring. There is no reason to believe our choices or our inventiveness are more limited now.
This places the inclusionary impulse in the mainstream of our expression as a human culture: something that an exclusionary movement can only occupy partially and temporarily.
The Challenge of the Third Force
Exclusionary social movements have been the fuel that drives every reactionary turn from the end of affirmative action to anti-immigrant backlash to the defunding of government at all levels. But any fuel requires a match to ignite it. The match in this case is the Third Force.
The Third Force consists of society's elites: propertied individuals and families who accumulate most of the national wealth, control access to it, and pass it on as inheritance, and the institutions that defend and promote their interests. It occupies the deepest seats of power and manipulates the state and the public to its ends. Its objective is to minimize its required contribution to the common good and maintain the governing power's devotion to the state-capitalist system.
The Third Force is not a social movement, however, but a power vector. It achieves its ends by two routes:
- Exploiting the three drivers: By leveraging the impulse to bond, the scarcity mind, and historical and trans-historical trauma, the Third Force nurtures the growth of exclusionary movements that feed off these forces financially, and encourages them to direct their resentments against marginal groups that benefit, however inadequately, from government social programs.
- Capturing social movements: The Third Force tends to promote exclusionary movements, with which it has the most natural ideological affinity. But it can also capture inclusionary movements when reliance on elite knowledge and resources creates distance between movement leadership and goals.
At the global level, the Third Force has succeeded over the past century in promoting a succession of economic regimes that augment its ability to accumulate wealth: the gold standard, the postwar Bretton Woods monetary management system, the dollar-based system of floating rates that followed, and the neoliberal regime of fiscal austerity that has now prevailed for decades. At the national level, the Third Force fights to deepen its influence over the electoral process and the media: for example, the elite class bankrolled the lawsuit leading to the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision that enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.
The end result of the Third Force's constant application of pressure is to turn society and its economy into what social scientist Peter Turchin has called a 'wealth pump' that enriches elites at the expense of everyone else.
Self-Inflicted Wounds: How Inclusionary Social Movements Undermine Themselves
The Third Force, especially in tandem with an exclusionary social movement, poses a formidable barrier to any inclusionary movement seeking power. At the same time, weaknesses in inclusionary movements can make them vulnerable to manipulation and undermine solidarity.
Letting the Third Force in: Once an inclusionary movement has matured and is recognized as a viable political opposition, it finds itself competing for society's political and cultural center. To do so, it requires greater resources to continue growing and carry on the struggle on a larger scale.
This makes it a magnet for the Third Force, which will seek to influence the movement's leadership by exploiting its need for money in exchange for diluting its commitment to the practical needs of its base. Political power becomes an end in itself, as the leadership becomes alienated from its base and comes to rely on coercive measures to maintain its position. This, in turn, allows malignant elements to assert themselves.
Failing to understand the big ask: Every social movement passes through three phases: grassroots movement, campaign, and government. Face-to-face meetings in private homes and community spaces—the proverbial 'kitchen table'—are where new, more inclusive communities and social visions begin to coalesce and build goodwill, where, in the words of philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, they can 'make what is being lost and invisible a reality of thought.'
At some point, the movement will pose a 'big ask': an undertaking that is critical to one or more segments of its coalition but is especially difficult for other groups to endorse. This could be helping another ethnic or religious group obtain rights they were previously conditioned to think belonged to their members alone, or agreeing to treat that group's members as their equals in the job market. In either case, the movement and its leadership must listen carefully to other groups' concerns and be prepared to answer the question, 'What's in it for us?'
Understanding and responding effectively to the big ask is essential to keeping an inclusionary movement together as it widens. Failing to address the needs and desires of all groups in the coalition conveys to the public that they are not being heard and that the leadership is not representing them strongly and sincerely. This becomes all the more likely when the leadership comes under the influence of the Third Force.
Failing to celebrate the inclusive movement's achievements: These achievements, while never unchallenged by the Third Force and exclusionary movements, embed themselves in the culture and become part of its way of life. When the leadership no longer sees celebrating its role in building a freer, more inclusive society as compatible with its desire to retain power, it loses touch with the process around which the inclusive movement initially coalesced.
Over time, the movement's rank and file forget that the goals around which they solidified—the right to vote, security in old age, the right to organize, and freedom from racial and gender discrimination—were not the work of the government but their own, attained as a social movement.
'The fact that these achievements are under attack,' Linda Gordon argues in her 2025 book, Seven Social Movements That Changed America, 'should not keep us from celebrating what was accomplished—and understanding that these gains were produced by a social movement.'
Celebrating these accomplishments does not mean glossing over failures. Rather, the movement must continually explore how it can build on the lessons from its past successes to create a civic solidarity that doesn't rely on the allocation of blame.
Failing to value local knowledge: As we noted earlier, inclusionary social movements are built at the kitchen table and around kitchen table issues, as perceived by the public who experience them and who, most often, best understand how to address them. Mobilizing public support is done most effectively when it is informed by this local knowledge. Often, however, as the movement grows and becomes more professional organizationally, the leadership comes to disdain local knowledge in favor of elite opinion. The perceived distance widens between the leadership and the movement's base, who come to feel that their experience and their contribution are being shunted aside.
Once in government, the leadership may experiment with giving local bodies more direct control of services that address community needs and the opportunity to apply local knowledge to meet those needs. This results in a more democratic decision-making process, more equal power relationships, and better feedback about the government's work.
Unfortunately, these initiatives seldom receive the time, attention, or funding needed to chalk up successes and build a constituency. This was the case with the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which was established in 1964 and ran many of the Great Society programs under Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency. Subsequent Republican administrations were able to dismantle the OEO without much opposition from the groups it served.
The effect of this cycle is to alienate the base and brand the movement as a vehicle for the technocratic elite.
Failing to universalize promises: When progress for one segment of the movement is seen as mitigating progress for another group, exclusionary elements are encouraged, and cultural differences can overwhelm the universal messages that keep the movement together.
Insisting on the rights of women, people of color, immigrants, gender nonconforming individuals, and other marginalized groups to equal participation and representation in the movement and its campaigns is essential to fulfilling the movement's promise to these groups. The challenge is to balance this demand for the rights of the marginalized with an understanding of the adverse threads of experience that have converged for white Americans, from concrete issues like economic precarity and loss of workers' clout in the jobs market to a perceived loss of status as both members of a dominant group and citizens of a dominant global power.
Balancing the concerns and demands of all sides of the movement is especially difficult in an austerity environment in which allocation of resources is framed as a zero-sum proposition. Previously marginalized groups—such as working-class whites—who gained a measure of social and economic advancement, in part by pressing their demands as members of a specific ethnic group and as part of a larger working class, forget that they themselves have benefited the most from government programs and initiatives aimed at promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
They can be manipulated into a state of social entrapment as the impact of that prior success becomes embedded in their expectations, and they blame the government for their current downward mobility, rather than the economic order and the impact of policies benefiting the Third Force. These groups can then be maneuvered into a scarcity mindset and fail to see that other groups—for example, Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans—are making the same demands they once did, simply because, as working-class people, they share the same vulnerabilities.
In the face of these tensions, fostering a moral logic of just distribution becomes increasingly difficult. Refocusing on the common material needs that sparked the inclusionary movement to begin with is critical to reviving a universal message. One element of this is to emphasize forgiveness and restitution, encouraging working-class whites to view racial and gender differences as part of human experience and expression and embrace them as embracing themselves.
Failing to consider the continuing impact of malignant bonding, the scarcity mind, and trans-historical trauma: These drivers are latent in inclusionary as well as exclusionary movements; ignoring them can erode the leadership's affinity with portions of the public, causing the movement to lose momentum even when it is winning significant victories.
Guarding against this should be a conscious part of any inclusionary movement's organizing and outreach strategy; otherwise, the three drivers can open a channel for an exclusionary movement or movements to regain momentum. Examples include the purging of radical leaders in the labor movement during the McCarthy era and, most recently, efforts by corporations and major universities to accommodate the political programs of the party in power. Such actions, seemingly politically expedient, erode the movement's base and rob it of momentum.
However, the three drivers can be resisted and reversed, inspiring a new inclusionary movement. For example, by focusing the movement's message on actual conditions of scarcity rather than searching for a marginal group to blame. Doing so is challenging but not impossible. Earlier, we noted the plasticity of the human mind and the persistence of variety in our political and economic structures. And in our first article, we noted Benjamin Libet's demonstration of the 'free won't' (as opposed to free will): humans' capability to veto predictions generated deep in the brain.
Failing to respect the boundaries of the holding environment: The term 'holding environment' was originally used in psychological literature to describe the conditions making for a healthy childhood. We borrow it here to delineate a social and political context in which the people feel emotionally understood, their disappointments and grievances recognized and taken seriously, and they are actively involved in a common quest to actualize a universal set of values reflected in a shared common sense.
Also referred to as the caregiving sector, the holding environment is a constant in social life, existing at all times, whether the center is dominated by exclusionary or inclusionary movements. But it typically does not call attention to itself as a distinct force in society. As such, it forms the necessary basis—the legitimation—for any social movement that seeks to develop an inclusive response to the three drivers of individual and social development. It does so by generating a reserve capacity: a store of trust and assurance, otherwise known as goodwill, which a social movement can draw upon when its goals are in sync with the holding environment's social function.
On a practical level, the holding environment consists of delivery systems and volunteer networks reflecting people's impulse to engage in mutual aid. These have ranged historically from labor unions to volunteer organizations, like AmeriCorps VISTA, Habitat for Humanity, and Points of Light, to local food banks, coalitions for the homeless, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, volunteer fire departments, and social services affiliated with religious institutions. Less formal community initiatives like Food Not Bombs and grassroots disaster relief efforts that arise in response to catastrophes, like Hurricane Katrina and the fires that struck Los Angeles County in January 2025, flow from the same impulse and address similar needs.
While social movements are inherently political, the holding environment operates in a non-political, 'civic' dimension. Critical to any inclusionary social movement's success, however, is its ability to establish an unformulated solidarity with the holding environment, which enables it to draw on the latter's reserve capacity. This ability derives from its adherence to moral and ethical imperatives that are inherent in the holding environment.
Foremost among these is the shared mission of ameliorating the conditions of the neediest. Frequently, these also include:
- Ensuring that everyone has access to vital services (for example, education, housing, health care, and public safety);
- Ensuring that all members are cared for in the event of a natural or artificial disaster; and
- Ensuring that everyone feels that someone will listen and respond if they have a grievance or pressing need.
Together, adherence to these imperatives ensures that everyone feels they partake of a basic goodwill expressed through the community and have the opportunity to better their position.
Both exclusionary and inclusionary social movements attempt to form an affinity with the holding environment: the former by promoting charitable organizations (for example, Points of Light) as the most appropriate to address the needs of those considered worthy, without involving the government, the latter by advocating a universalist approach, leaving no one behind, often with the aid of the government (for example, Social Security, Medicare).
This unformulated solidarity has the most to offer to the success of inclusionary movements because the holding environment's grounding in the impulse to engage in mutual aid bolsters the movement's goal of building a caring society around a wider 'we.'
But in either case, an unformulated solidarity should remain just that, respecting the independence of the holding environment; a social movement that attempts to turn this affinity into a stronger and more formal organizational tie risks losing access to the holding environment's reserve capacity.
Conclusion: Nurturing Inclusivity in Dark Times
Inclusionary and exclusionary social movements inevitably clash. Every movement, no matter how successful, will at some point meet resistance and experience at least partial reversal. Its goal, then, must be to sustain its period of ascendancy long enough to achieve its principal goals and to embed these so deeply in the social structure that they are irreversible.
Even in periods when an exclusionary movement dominates, the seeds of a new, inclusionary movement are always sprouting, nurtured by the achievements of the last period of inclusionary dominance. To stay in command of the center long enough to achieve its goals, it needs to maintain a high level of public support. It can only do so if it pays attention to and draws on local knowledge, actively resists co-optation by the Third Force, and takes care not to fall victim to the self-inflicted wounds we detailed above.
If it can avoid these pitfalls, an inclusionary movement, once it acquires a share of power or forms a government, has the opportunity not just to reform the system but to remake and redirect it, bringing about profound social and cultural change. This is, in part, because addressing people's practical needs, making them feel that they are listened to and represented, instills in them a greater acceptance of cultural diversity. Not only can the movement then become more inclusive, but so can society.
By Colin Greer and Eric Laursen
Colin Greer is the president of the New World Foundation. He was formerly a CUNY professor, a founding editor of Social Policy magazine, a contributing editor at Parade magazine for almost 20 years, and the author and coauthor of several books on public policy. He is the author of three books of poetry, including Defeat/No Surrender (2023).
Eric Laursen is an independent journalist, historian, and activist. He is the author of The People's Pension, The Duty to Stand Aside, The Operating System, and Polymath. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including In These Times, the Nation, and the Arkansas Review.

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How Inclusionary Social Movements Succeed

Social movements are powerful engines for change, and they coalesce around a vast range of issues, causes, and communities. But they fall into two basic categories: inclusionary and exclusionary. Inclusionary social movements attempt to 'widen the 'we.'' That means they work to expand the circle of power, securing the allegiance of a widening galaxy of groups by appealing to their material needs and desire for participation and empowering them to make decisions, thus building a caring society and driving democracy forward. The examples are legion, especially in the U.S. postwar decades: the labor movement, civil rights, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and the anti-nuclear and environmental movements. Exclusionary social movements attempt to concentrate power and privilege in a narrow but fiercely loyal category of people. They do so by embracing—in the most negative form—the three perennial drivers of individual and social development: the impulse to bond, the scarcity mind, and historical and trans-historical trauma. The Ku Klux Klan and other racist movements of the first half of the 20th century are examples of social movements driven by the scarcity mind, as are the Tea Party and today's Christian nationalism, QAnon, and MAGA. The driving force behind inclusionary and exclusionary social movements is a desire to control the center of power. We define the center as not just the government and the commercial sector, but the common sense that people carry with them: how they view the world and human society, and what they believe is their responsibility toward them. The degree of influence they exercise over the center—their ability to govern—is also the degree to which a social movement can realize its vision for the whole society. Given their desire for control, movements inevitably clash, and in the process, attempt to expand their base by building off their adherents' antagonism. The New Deal/Great Society administrations exploited the hunger for change provoked by the Great Depression to build a coalition that eventually spanned farmers, industrial workers, and underserved racial and ethnic groups and brought about enormous social advances. The conservative 1971 Powell Memorandum was, in effect, a blueprint for building popular opposition to the New Deal/Great Society consensus. The waves of right-wing populism that followed moved the Republican Party toward nativism and xenophobic nostalgia while targeting the inclusionary impulse as un-American. Is There Hope for a New, Inclusionary Social Movement? Inclusionary and exclusionary impulses occupy two poles on a spectrum of social and political consciousness: the former, as historian Linda Gordon writes, driven by disappointments, the latter by grievances. With a malignant, grievance-fueled, exclusionist social movement in the political ascendancy today, this may seem to be a less-than-ideal time to launch (or relaunch) a movement founded on inclusivity. Any effort to do so must confront toxic elements, including: - Rejection of empathy for poor, marginal, and traditionally disempowered groups; - Alienation from a wider collective social identity not centered on grievance; - A punishing brand of religiosity; - Loss of faith in government as a tool for implementing broadly inclusionary social programs; and - A culture of debt and austerity that reinforces the scarcity mind. There are reasons to believe, however, that a new inclusionary movement is not only possible but also practical. While political polarization and an appeal to nativism and culturally narrow nostalgia have enabled exclusionary movements to gain and consolidate power over the past five decades, they only paper over an increasingly widespread understanding that people's material needs are being ignored. This manifests itself as: - Immiseration: an eroding standard of living for working-class Americans; - Vast economic inequality and barriers to upward mobility, affecting even the upper-middle-class; - Relentless austerity, creating a sense that the economic and social problems the government traditionally has addressed are insoluble; - The undermining of basic services—Medicaid, Disability Insurance, and public infrastructure—that an increasingly broad range of people have come to rely on materially and morally; and - Alienation generated by the right's relentless efforts to keep its base loyal by scapegoating racial and religious minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. Addressing these disappointments is impossible without the widest possible social consensus. That being the case, they constitute an invitation to propose changes that bring society back together, even when the dominant movement is authoritarian and exclusionary. There are deeper resources as well that an inclusionary movement can draw upon: - A reservoir of goodwill and legitimacy that popular government enjoys even in the worst of times. - The historical achievements that confirm social policy driven by inclusionary social movements can improve the lives of the majority. - The plasticity of the human mind. Our minds are more flexible, capable of more transformation and growth than we think, and human interaction is often the leverage that enables us to change our minds. - The persistence of variety. While the range of political and economic structures on offer has lately appeared to narrow, this has not been the case for most of human history. Even today's mainstream political parties—in the U.S., Republicans and Democrats—were founded in opposition to the existing political establishment or in a conscious effort to address issues and conditions it was ignoring. There is no reason to believe our choices or our inventiveness are more limited now. This places the inclusionary impulse in the mainstream of our expression as a human culture: something that an exclusionary movement can only occupy partially and temporarily. The Challenge of the Third Force Exclusionary social movements have been the fuel that drives every reactionary turn from the end of affirmative action to anti-immigrant backlash to the defunding of government at all levels. But any fuel requires a match to ignite it. The match in this case is the Third Force. The Third Force consists of society's elites: propertied individuals and families who accumulate most of the national wealth, control access to it, and pass it on as inheritance, and the institutions that defend and promote their interests. It occupies the deepest seats of power and manipulates the state and the public to its ends. Its objective is to minimize its required contribution to the common good and maintain the governing power's devotion to the state-capitalist system. The Third Force is not a social movement, however, but a power vector. It achieves its ends by two routes: - Exploiting the three drivers: By leveraging the impulse to bond, the scarcity mind, and historical and trans-historical trauma, the Third Force nurtures the growth of exclusionary movements that feed off these forces financially, and encourages them to direct their resentments against marginal groups that benefit, however inadequately, from government social programs. - Capturing social movements: The Third Force tends to promote exclusionary movements, with which it has the most natural ideological affinity. But it can also capture inclusionary movements when reliance on elite knowledge and resources creates distance between movement leadership and goals. At the global level, the Third Force has succeeded over the past century in promoting a succession of economic regimes that augment its ability to accumulate wealth: the gold standard, the postwar Bretton Woods monetary management system, the dollar-based system of floating rates that followed, and the neoliberal regime of fiscal austerity that has now prevailed for decades. At the national level, the Third Force fights to deepen its influence over the electoral process and the media: for example, the elite class bankrolled the lawsuit leading to the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision that enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections. The end result of the Third Force's constant application of pressure is to turn society and its economy into what social scientist Peter Turchin has called a 'wealth pump' that enriches elites at the expense of everyone else. Self-Inflicted Wounds: How Inclusionary Social Movements Undermine Themselves The Third Force, especially in tandem with an exclusionary social movement, poses a formidable barrier to any inclusionary movement seeking power. At the same time, weaknesses in inclusionary movements can make them vulnerable to manipulation and undermine solidarity. Letting the Third Force in: Once an inclusionary movement has matured and is recognized as a viable political opposition, it finds itself competing for society's political and cultural center. To do so, it requires greater resources to continue growing and carry on the struggle on a larger scale. This makes it a magnet for the Third Force, which will seek to influence the movement's leadership by exploiting its need for money in exchange for diluting its commitment to the practical needs of its base. Political power becomes an end in itself, as the leadership becomes alienated from its base and comes to rely on coercive measures to maintain its position. This, in turn, allows malignant elements to assert themselves. Failing to understand the big ask: Every social movement passes through three phases: grassroots movement, campaign, and government. Face-to-face meetings in private homes and community spaces—the proverbial 'kitchen table'—are where new, more inclusive communities and social visions begin to coalesce and build goodwill, where, in the words of philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, they can 'make what is being lost and invisible a reality of thought.' At some point, the movement will pose a 'big ask': an undertaking that is critical to one or more segments of its coalition but is especially difficult for other groups to endorse. This could be helping another ethnic or religious group obtain rights they were previously conditioned to think belonged to their members alone, or agreeing to treat that group's members as their equals in the job market. In either case, the movement and its leadership must listen carefully to other groups' concerns and be prepared to answer the question, 'What's in it for us?' Understanding and responding effectively to the big ask is essential to keeping an inclusionary movement together as it widens. Failing to address the needs and desires of all groups in the coalition conveys to the public that they are not being heard and that the leadership is not representing them strongly and sincerely. This becomes all the more likely when the leadership comes under the influence of the Third Force. Failing to celebrate the inclusive movement's achievements: These achievements, while never unchallenged by the Third Force and exclusionary movements, embed themselves in the culture and become part of its way of life. When the leadership no longer sees celebrating its role in building a freer, more inclusive society as compatible with its desire to retain power, it loses touch with the process around which the inclusive movement initially coalesced. Over time, the movement's rank and file forget that the goals around which they solidified—the right to vote, security in old age, the right to organize, and freedom from racial and gender discrimination—were not the work of the government but their own, attained as a social movement. 'The fact that these achievements are under attack,' Linda Gordon argues in her 2025 book, Seven Social Movements That Changed America, 'should not keep us from celebrating what was accomplished—and understanding that these gains were produced by a social movement.' Celebrating these accomplishments does not mean glossing over failures. Rather, the movement must continually explore how it can build on the lessons from its past successes to create a civic solidarity that doesn't rely on the allocation of blame. Failing to value local knowledge: As we noted earlier, inclusionary social movements are built at the kitchen table and around kitchen table issues, as perceived by the public who experience them and who, most often, best understand how to address them. Mobilizing public support is done most effectively when it is informed by this local knowledge. Often, however, as the movement grows and becomes more professional organizationally, the leadership comes to disdain local knowledge in favor of elite opinion. The perceived distance widens between the leadership and the movement's base, who come to feel that their experience and their contribution are being shunted aside. Once in government, the leadership may experiment with giving local bodies more direct control of services that address community needs and the opportunity to apply local knowledge to meet those needs. This results in a more democratic decision-making process, more equal power relationships, and better feedback about the government's work. Unfortunately, these initiatives seldom receive the time, attention, or funding needed to chalk up successes and build a constituency. This was the case with the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which was established in 1964 and ran many of the Great Society programs under Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency. Subsequent Republican administrations were able to dismantle the OEO without much opposition from the groups it served. The effect of this cycle is to alienate the base and brand the movement as a vehicle for the technocratic elite. Failing to universalize promises: When progress for one segment of the movement is seen as mitigating progress for another group, exclusionary elements are encouraged, and cultural differences can overwhelm the universal messages that keep the movement together. Insisting on the rights of women, people of color, immigrants, gender nonconforming individuals, and other marginalized groups to equal participation and representation in the movement and its campaigns is essential to fulfilling the movement's promise to these groups. The challenge is to balance this demand for the rights of the marginalized with an understanding of the adverse threads of experience that have converged for white Americans, from concrete issues like economic precarity and loss of workers' clout in the jobs market to a perceived loss of status as both members of a dominant group and citizens of a dominant global power. Balancing the concerns and demands of all sides of the movement is especially difficult in an austerity environment in which allocation of resources is framed as a zero-sum proposition. Previously marginalized groups—such as working-class whites—who gained a measure of social and economic advancement, in part by pressing their demands as members of a specific ethnic group and as part of a larger working class, forget that they themselves have benefited the most from government programs and initiatives aimed at promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. They can be manipulated into a state of social entrapment as the impact of that prior success becomes embedded in their expectations, and they blame the government for their current downward mobility, rather than the economic order and the impact of policies benefiting the Third Force. These groups can then be maneuvered into a scarcity mindset and fail to see that other groups—for example, Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans—are making the same demands they once did, simply because, as working-class people, they share the same vulnerabilities. In the face of these tensions, fostering a moral logic of just distribution becomes increasingly difficult. Refocusing on the common material needs that sparked the inclusionary movement to begin with is critical to reviving a universal message. One element of this is to emphasize forgiveness and restitution, encouraging working-class whites to view racial and gender differences as part of human experience and expression and embrace them as embracing themselves. Failing to consider the continuing impact of malignant bonding, the scarcity mind, and trans-historical trauma: These drivers are latent in inclusionary as well as exclusionary movements; ignoring them can erode the leadership's affinity with portions of the public, causing the movement to lose momentum even when it is winning significant victories. Guarding against this should be a conscious part of any inclusionary movement's organizing and outreach strategy; otherwise, the three drivers can open a channel for an exclusionary movement or movements to regain momentum. Examples include the purging of radical leaders in the labor movement during the McCarthy era and, most recently, efforts by corporations and major universities to accommodate the political programs of the party in power. Such actions, seemingly politically expedient, erode the movement's base and rob it of momentum. However, the three drivers can be resisted and reversed, inspiring a new inclusionary movement. For example, by focusing the movement's message on actual conditions of scarcity rather than searching for a marginal group to blame. Doing so is challenging but not impossible. Earlier, we noted the plasticity of the human mind and the persistence of variety in our political and economic structures. And in our first article, we noted Benjamin Libet's demonstration of the 'free won't' (as opposed to free will): humans' capability to veto predictions generated deep in the brain. Failing to respect the boundaries of the holding environment: The term 'holding environment' was originally used in psychological literature to describe the conditions making for a healthy childhood. We borrow it here to delineate a social and political context in which the people feel emotionally understood, their disappointments and grievances recognized and taken seriously, and they are actively involved in a common quest to actualize a universal set of values reflected in a shared common sense. Also referred to as the caregiving sector, the holding environment is a constant in social life, existing at all times, whether the center is dominated by exclusionary or inclusionary movements. But it typically does not call attention to itself as a distinct force in society. As such, it forms the necessary basis—the legitimation—for any social movement that seeks to develop an inclusive response to the three drivers of individual and social development. It does so by generating a reserve capacity: a store of trust and assurance, otherwise known as goodwill, which a social movement can draw upon when its goals are in sync with the holding environment's social function. On a practical level, the holding environment consists of delivery systems and volunteer networks reflecting people's impulse to engage in mutual aid. These have ranged historically from labor unions to volunteer organizations, like AmeriCorps VISTA, Habitat for Humanity, and Points of Light, to local food banks, coalitions for the homeless, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, volunteer fire departments, and social services affiliated with religious institutions. Less formal community initiatives like Food Not Bombs and grassroots disaster relief efforts that arise in response to catastrophes, like Hurricane Katrina and the fires that struck Los Angeles County in January 2025, flow from the same impulse and address similar needs. While social movements are inherently political, the holding environment operates in a non-political, 'civic' dimension. Critical to any inclusionary social movement's success, however, is its ability to establish an unformulated solidarity with the holding environment, which enables it to draw on the latter's reserve capacity. This ability derives from its adherence to moral and ethical imperatives that are inherent in the holding environment. Foremost among these is the shared mission of ameliorating the conditions of the neediest. Frequently, these also include: - Ensuring that everyone has access to vital services (for example, education, housing, health care, and public safety); - Ensuring that all members are cared for in the event of a natural or artificial disaster; and - Ensuring that everyone feels that someone will listen and respond if they have a grievance or pressing need. Together, adherence to these imperatives ensures that everyone feels they partake of a basic goodwill expressed through the community and have the opportunity to better their position. Both exclusionary and inclusionary social movements attempt to form an affinity with the holding environment: the former by promoting charitable organizations (for example, Points of Light) as the most appropriate to address the needs of those considered worthy, without involving the government, the latter by advocating a universalist approach, leaving no one behind, often with the aid of the government (for example, Social Security, Medicare). This unformulated solidarity has the most to offer to the success of inclusionary movements because the holding environment's grounding in the impulse to engage in mutual aid bolsters the movement's goal of building a caring society around a wider 'we.' But in either case, an unformulated solidarity should remain just that, respecting the independence of the holding environment; a social movement that attempts to turn this affinity into a stronger and more formal organizational tie risks losing access to the holding environment's reserve capacity. Conclusion: Nurturing Inclusivity in Dark Times Inclusionary and exclusionary social movements inevitably clash. Every movement, no matter how successful, will at some point meet resistance and experience at least partial reversal. Its goal, then, must be to sustain its period of ascendancy long enough to achieve its principal goals and to embed these so deeply in the social structure that they are irreversible. Even in periods when an exclusionary movement dominates, the seeds of a new, inclusionary movement are always sprouting, nurtured by the achievements of the last period of inclusionary dominance. To stay in command of the center long enough to achieve its goals, it needs to maintain a high level of public support. It can only do so if it pays attention to and draws on local knowledge, actively resists co-optation by the Third Force, and takes care not to fall victim to the self-inflicted wounds we detailed above. If it can avoid these pitfalls, an inclusionary movement, once it acquires a share of power or forms a government, has the opportunity not just to reform the system but to remake and redirect it, bringing about profound social and cultural change. This is, in part, because addressing people's practical needs, making them feel that they are listened to and represented, instills in them a greater acceptance of cultural diversity. Not only can the movement then become more inclusive, but so can society. By Colin Greer and Eric Laursen Colin Greer is the president of the New World Foundation. He was formerly a CUNY professor, a founding editor of Social Policy magazine, a contributing editor at Parade magazine for almost 20 years, and the author and coauthor of several books on public policy. He is the author of three books of poetry, including Defeat/No Surrender (2023). Eric Laursen is an independent journalist, historian, and activist. He is the author of The People's Pension, The Duty to Stand Aside, The Operating System, and Polymath. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including In These Times, the Nation, and the Arkansas Review.

Scoop

19-05-2025

• Scoop

Trump Is Trying To Reverse The New Deal

After the end of World War II, the U.S. employer class—the capitalists—faced overlapping threats, both domestic and foreign. On the domestic side, a coalition of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), two socialist parties, and a communist party had grown large and powerful during the 1930s Great Depression. Together, they pushed hard and successfully for domestic policies collectively known as the New Deal. These policies included the establishment of the Social Security system, the unemployment compensation system, the nation's first minimum wage, and a federal jobs program that employed millions. Along with several other programs, the New Deal represented a leftward shift of state priorities. For the employer class, worse than those spending shifts were the corresponding changes in federal revenue sources. Sharply raised taxes on (and borrowing from) corporations and the rich funded the New Deal's massive program for the employees. This reallocated the nation's income and wealth from the top to the middle and bottom. As against the dominant trickle-down economic policies that were in place before and soon after it, the New Deal represented an experiment in trickle-up economic policies. Once World War II was over, the employer class wanted nothing more than to undo the New Deal, and to bring back trickle-down polices. A second domestic problem threatened the U.S. economy after 1945: the risk of backsliding into depression. Five years of huge wartime deficit finance finally lifted the U.S. economy out of the 1930s depression. When 1945 put demobilization of troops and redeployment of resources to peacetime production on the agenda, it also provoked fears of a reversion to depression. Leading U.S. politicians and academics, more or less influenced by Keynes's work, looked urgently to government interventions to prevent that. The U.S. employer class also perceived foreign threats. Chief among these was the USSR, the wartime ally of the United States. In service to the U.S. employer class, President Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) transformed perceptions about the USSR from a close wartime ally into a fearsome enemy bent on 'overthrowing the U.S. by force and violence.' Despite having suffered enormous wartime destruction, the USSR was quickly rebranded by U.S. mainstream politicians, media, business, and academic leaders as an extreme danger. Communists and their 'fellow travelers' were notoriously purged by what has ever since been called McCarthyism. Western European leaders also feared and turned against the USSR as Europe's eastern countries became the USSR's postwar socialist allies. These countries also became closer to the USSR as it supported and assisted successful revolutions against an already weakened European colonialism. At the same time, Europe's employer classes acutely feared their domestic communist parties that were by then strongly entrenched in their anti-Nazi resistance movements and organized labor movements. The 1930s depression strengthened them all (as it had in the United States). In Europe, labor movements, communist and socialist parties, and many of their supporters mobilized, trained, equipped, funded, and coordinated several anti-fascist resistances. By 1945, that resistance work led to the immense popularity of these parties and movements. Western European employers in each country feared the economic demands their domestic socialists, communists, and labor unions would make. Those demands would be backed by their workers' domestic political power and gain more support due to the USSR's geopolitical proximity. These conditions in the United States and Western Europe resulted in a shared commitment by their capitalist classes, leading to an alliance, which would embrace U.S. dominance—defined as 'free-world leadership'—in military matters and in mobilizing resources internationally against the USSR (NATO, IMF, and World Bank). The employer class in each of these countries focused their resources, along with those of their governments, to purge communists, socialists, labor militants, and their supporters as thoroughly as conditions allowed. The actions ranged from imprisonment and deportation to loss of jobs, income, and social influence. The alliance's central theme was to declare and wage a Cold War against both the USSR and its 'agents' inside the United States and European countries. The purges inside the United States included the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as Soviet spies. Those actions also entailed loudly favoring (and secret CIA funding) many of Europe's 'pro-Western' politicians and parties, media outlets, and student groups. The U.S.-European alliance added Canada and Japan to their bloc. The U.S. dollar and its global position lubricated everything this alliance was and did. The central ideological and political problem for the U.S. employer class after 1945 was how to accomplish the undoing of the New Deal and the United States' wartime alliance with the USSR. The solution it found was a well-coordinated, well-funded campaign featuring cohesive arguments articulated by institutions that could saturate global public opinion. Nothing less than a total turnaround in public opinion and policy would rescue U.S. capitalism from what its employer class saw as an existential crisis. There lie certain similarities with what Trump faced when he took office in 2025. In both cases, the employer class felt deeply threatened, especially due to the escalation of the political and economic dangers. Today, that class worries about crippling social divisions and tensions. The deepening inequalities of the distributions of income, wealth, and political influence have caused the promised American dream to be out of reach for the majority, which has angered them. The employer class also fears the deepening indebtedness of its government, its corporate sector, and the majority of households amid the worrisome decline of the nation's geopolitical position. China's growth over recent decades positions it as the first serious global economic competitor of the United States in a century (the USSR was too small an economy to ever achieve this status). Among the many consequences of China's growth, the fading global position of the U.S. dollar ranks high. As in the case of Truman taking power in 1945, Trump's second term is also defined by heavy cumulated pressures prioritizing breaking from dangerous and declining situations. The U.S. employer class's solution in 1945 was to destroy the domestic left and transform the USSR from ally to enemy. Trump's solution for the employer class is similarly to try to destroy the left but to transform Russia from an enemy to an ally. Despite important differences in time and global conditions—the United States left in 1945 was far more radical than it became later and is now—the similarities here are suggestive. In 1945, employers commenced undoing the New Deal. They eventually succeeded, but only partly. They managed an upward redistributive state, but they had to accept the shift to a regulatory state. Today, Trump seeks to complete burying the New Deal legacy by going further and undoing the regulatory state. The class politics of Trump carry forward the actions of his predecessors across the last century. The details, not the goals, vary with the circumstances. The transition from the USSR to Russia facilitated Trump's changed policy stance toward the country. The decline of the United States' organized labor movement over the last 70 years facilitated Trump's electoral appeal to the employee class. On the other hand, China's continuing rise as an economic competitor reinforces the employer class's worries about its status and security. More deeply, what disturbs the U.S. employer class now is the intertwined decline of the U.S. empire and the U.S. capitalism's global position. After 1945, the employer class reasserted its social dominance. It refocused the federal government on the twin tasks of purging supporters of the New Deal from the government, unions, and other social institutions and demonizing and containing the USSR as the evil global enemy. Anti-communism became the main ideological weapon to achieve this. The purge demanded that all those who supported the deal not only denounce communism but also show sympathy to such dogmas as 'state interference in the economy' is inefficient, wasteful, and inferior to what private 'free' enterprises could and would achieve. Communists, socialists, unionists, liberals, Democrats, and others associated with the New Deal got purged as believers in bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. At best, they were seen as agents of Moscow's crusades against democracy and individual liberty. Putting domestic communists first among its targets let the employer class link the domestic purge quickly and seamlessly with the Cold War struggles against the USSR. These actions against communists at home while waging the Cold War abroad aimed to defeat two evils at the same time. Over the last 80 years, the employer class, directly and through its power over governments, undertook a massive program of ideological change. It made the struggle between more versus less government intervention in the 'private enterprise economy' and 'the free market' an important issue in economics and public policy. Professional economists debated between Keynesianism and neoclassicism. Moderate politicians rallied around slogans that defined the struggle as being between 'meeting people's needs' versus suffering a 'authoritarian bureaucracy.' Extremist politicians called the state evil (often using communist, socialist, liberal, Democrat, and even terrorist as synonyms). The global 'free market' established after 1945 enabled the United States, which became dominant after the wartime destruction of all potential economic rivals (Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Russia, and Italy), to sustain that position through NATO on the one hand and demonizing the USSR on the other. Fighting communism abroad justified sustaining that dominance. Fighting communism at home justified destroying the New Deal coalition and thereby undoing the policy. Cold War leaders in the United States, representing both major political parties, carried out these policies consistently. The Heritage Foundation's 2025 report updates and expands them into a plan that Trump's regime is largely following. That plan targets what little remains of the New Deal: removing 'regulatory' state apparatuses. Trump's regime also accepts implicitly what it denies explicitly: that the U.S. empire and U.S. capitalism are in decline. Tariffs are the magic bullet to reverse all that and fast. Above all, they are implemented with the hope that they will return manufacturing to the United States. (This was promised by each of the presidents this century, but none of them delivered on it.) The tariffs might, at best, slow the decline, but their political, economic, and ideological costs and the retaliations by many nations will make the magic bullet fail. Much the same happened to many empires earlier that failed to stop their decline with their magic bullets. Tariffs will likely function much like the proposal of 'taking back' the Panama Canal or Greenland and loudly squeezing symbolic gains from Canada and Mexico. These plans are aggressive disguises and over-advertised offsets for the painful reality of the declining empire and economy. It is worth remembering that in all empires, when their rise inevitably turns into decline, those who accumulated the greatest wealth and power use these resources to retain their position. They thereby offload the costs of decline onto the middle and lower classes. The latter suffer more and face the consequences first. Trump's first budget proposals starkly exhibit this offloading. For most empires, such offloading proves socially divisive and ends very badly. Recent national election results in Canada and Australia suggest that those classes are beginning to grasp the Trump regime's larger goals and have voted against politicians seen to be insufficiently opposed to them. Some polls in the United States point in similar directions. Europe's leaders are worried too. Most of them have been long and deeply complicit with the United States' goals and methods. Voters may punish them for failure to resist the repeated anti-European policies and attitudes flowing from the Trump regime. European leaders risk voters finding them guilty by association. So many break away from Trump by exaggerating support for Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine and demonizing Russia. The roots of resistance expand and deepen. Author Bio: Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff's weekly show, 'Economic Update,' is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is Understanding Capitalism (2024), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism.

Newsroom

16-05-2025

• Newsroom

Skills training overhaul risks the same old pitfalls

Opinion: The coalition Government appears determined to dismantle many policies introduced by the previous Labour government – particularly those impacting workers. The latest example is the Education and Training (Vocational Education and Training System) Amendment Bill introduced earlier this week. To understand its potential impact, and its pitfalls, it's instructive to look back at former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's New Labour reforms two decades ago, which ultimately failed to deliver lasting benefits for workers or the economy. Blair's New Labour and the New Deal In 1998, Tony Blair's government launched the New Deal initiatives in the UK, promising to revitalise skills and foster economic growth through a more responsive, industry-led approach to vocational training. The policies emphasised expanding micro-credentials, creating flexible pathways, and strengthening employer partnerships. But, despite the lofty rhetoric, they ultimately failed to deliver genuine benefits for workers or the broader economy. The focus on expanding qualifications often led to credential inflation – the devaluation of educational credentials over time – where micro-credentials proliferated without clear links to improved wages or job quality. Labour market demand was not adequately addressed, and many workers found themselves with qualifications that did not translate into better employment outcomes. Key changes in the New Zealand bill The Government's bill proposes a significant overhaul of the existing system within the next two years. Key elements include: shifting away from the centralised Te Pūkenga model toward a more regional, industry-led structure establishing a Federation of Polytechnics, with 'anchor polytechnics' for shared services creating industry skills boards, which will set skill standards, oversee assessments, advise on funding, and initially manage work-based training before shifting this to polytechnics and private providers potentially introducing industry levies to fund workforce initiatives Tertiary Education Commission and New Zealand Qualifications Authority oversight, with ministerial intervention, if needed. The overarching goal is to make vocational education more responsive to local and industry needs, fostering regional decision making and greater industry involvement. On the surface, these reforms aim to address longstanding criticisms of a centralised, one-size-fits-all approach to vocational education. By decentralising control and involving regional and industry voices, the Government hopes to create a more responsive and locally relevant system. Yet, history suggests that without tackling deeper structural issues – worker power, funding, and real demand – these reforms risk superficiality. Without addressing the fundamental issues of labour market demand and worker empowerment, the reforms could be little more than a reshuffling of titles and structures. There are three main problems with the Government's approach. Over-reliance on qualifications as a proxy for skills and power The UK's experience under Blair revealed that expanding qualifications without addressing underlying labour market issues can lead to credential inflation – more micro-credentials that do little to improve actual skills or economic power. Expanding micro-credentials and qualifications failed to translate into improved wages or job quality. New Zealand's focus on micro-credentials and industry standards may also lead to credential inflation if not carefully managed. It also risks devaluing genuine skills if these credentials do not align with actual labour market needs. Qualifications should be meaningful indicators of capability, not just boxes to tick. 2. Neglect of labour market demand and structural conditions New Labour's reforms emphasised basic skills but failed to tackle sector-specific shortages or improve employment quality. New Zealand's reforms aim to be more locally responsive but must ensure they are rooted in real labour market demand. Otherwise, there's a danger of creating a qualifications system full of micro-credentials that don't translate into better jobs or wages. 3. Failure to acknowledge power dynamics and role of collective action The Blair government's policies largely overlooked the importance of workplace power and collective bargaining. Unless reforms here strengthen workers' voices and collective bargaining beyond industry-led boards, gains in skills may not lead to improved wages or conditions. There is also the elephant in the room: funding shortfalls. Chronic underfunding is a persistent obstacle in upgrading vocational training. Without adequate investment – covering modern facilities, fair pay for trainers and educators, and accessible programmes – these reforms are unlikely to succeed. Underfunding undermines quality and relevance, resulting in a system that's more about appearances than genuine transformation. Lessons we need to learn The UK's experience demonstrates that simply expanding micro-credentials and decentralising governance is insufficient. Without prioritising meaningful employment outcomes, empowering workers through collective voice, and, critically, sustained investment, such reforms risk worsening credential inflation and delivering only superficial progress. To truly reform vocational education, policymakers must invest strategically, align training with labour market needs, and strengthen worker representation. However, even well-designed policies will fail without adequate funding, leaving a system that looks good on paper but delivers little in practice. Lasting change depends on structural reforms, long-term investment, and genuine worker empowerment to create a vocational education system that benefits both workers and the economy.