I think people don’t realize what a vast wall of misinformation the right wing has built over 50 years. What started out as pretty straightforward influence peddling has turned into a psyop with Republicans posing as Democrats, social media bots, and narratives that are not to persuade but to confuse.

To have any hope of pushing back against the right-wing wall, we need to have our own progressive wall. We need to start where they started back when they feared liberals had already won, keeping in mind that their strength is money and our strength is people. Here is where we could start:

EXPERTS
Experts are the core of the whole structure. The right wing has pretend experts, but we have the real deal. We need small groups of experts in many different areas to come to a consensus of where we need to be and the steps we can take to get there. These to-do lists are compiled into….

ACTION GUIDE
Republicans have had a written action guide for each election year since 1980. Reagan put roughly half its recommendations into effect in his first term. The current iteration is 30 chapters long, each chapter written by someone different, and includes recommendations to reorganize Homeland Security and immigration and to disempower the department of education. Our action guide would include energy transition, changing the tax code to reduce income inequality, health care for all, and gun regulation. We can use this to have entirely different conversations, especially on energy and climate change, where our position is nearly polar opposite to Republicans.

ARTISTS  
Painters, writers, and filmmakers can show people ideas in powerful ways. It’s no coincidence that authoritarians have always sought to create artistic propaganda and ban art that doesn’t agree with their message. When we have a picture of what a better, more people-centered life can be like, artists can help people immerse themselves in that world and let them understand what we are fighting for. I would hope that people from Tik Tok video makers to novelists to feature filmmakers would be excited to work with that.

MEDIA TEAM
The media team promotes the plan and individual parts of it. They get our experts in front of the public, primarily on the news and on the lecture circuit, and in front of journalists. This can be to comment on current news, but we want to be proactive and introduce new studies that people might not otherwise know about. The media team establishes relationships with bookers and journalists that will lead to them calling on us first. They arrange coaching on how to give good sound bites if needed. They promote books, interviews, movies, magazine articles, events, and other messaging tools. They feed content to social media and set up and maintain informative web sites for the public. They promote the blogs/podcasts of our experts. They create short videos.

THINK TANKS
Think tanks take a high-level view of our goals and our progress and suggest creative ways to further our goals. They would be aware of what the many (SO many) individual progressive groups are doing in the field and enlist them to help the broader plan. It would also be their job to create a coherent action plan from the lists of recommendations compiled by experts. They would do field tests on messaging to learn the most powerful way to present a message.

LEGISLATION MILLS
The right wing has a whole network of these, the most well known of which is ALEC. The idea is to take the list of steps that experts have laid out to accomplish goals and turn them into legislation. It would also include having supporting evidence ready and helping to the legislation through Congress.

LEGISLATORS
We need progressive legislators to sponsor our bills. It’s a win-win. The legislator’s identity is tied to our group and all of our publicity, giving the legislator a higher profile. We have a well-known face in Congress that adds to our legitimacy and effectiveness.

LEGISLATIVE RECRUITMENT
I’m happy to say that we have already made inroads here with groups like Run For Something that recruit and coach people to run for local office and then move up to higher office. There are groups specifically targeting Gen Z potential candidates. But the country is far from saturated. There are still many elections where there is no progressive running.

STATE CHAPTERS
The job of the state chapters is to know what is happening on the ground. Which messages are going to be the most meaningful? What new tactics are they seeing from the right wing? How are our messages being received? What local elections need support? State chapters also recruit volunteers. There are so many people out there who want to help but don’t know what to do. When I have asked on social media what I can do, I have been told to vote or to organize (no details how).  I don’t see anyone saying “You need to go out and talk to people. Here is how you do that and here is some messaging we have found is very powerful.” This is where our people advantage really shines. There is no shortcut to getting people to change their way of thinking. It’s millions of one-on-one conversations reinforced by the media and by experience. We can flood the zone with volunteers.

I see a million points of light, but it’s still dark.

All these things are being done somewhere right now.  The reason we don’t have a stronger movement is that we have no coordination. We have nonprofits and academics and professionals and unions and action funds and journalists and legislators and strategists and media all going in different directions at the same time. They are all good directions, but the result is a blur in which little sinks in. We could be amazing if we all had the same message at the same time.  We don’t have to do it the way I laid out, but we need to be doing all these things and in coordination. Now.