“People don’t think about how important and how influential local politics is, and how much easier it is to intervene in local government, especially for small grassroots organizations. I think that for the next 10 to 12 years the vast majority of electoral effort should be: How do we build local ‘squads’? How do we get people elected? How do we get majorities on city councils? How do we build blocs in state legislatures to deliver public policy outcomes? That’s definitely where I would be putting our money and people power.”

“The US left lacks a widely shared assessment of conditions and priorities. What’s our North Star, or constellation of stars? Our strategies for reaching them? Where’s our shared approach to blocking the advance of white nationalist authoritarianism and for building a governing majority for transformational, multiracial democracy? — assuming we even share goals along those lines. Given what seems to be broad agreement that the stakes are astronomically high and the forces of domination are consolidating their hold on the state, how might left and progressive movements level-up our strategic sophistication and alignment?”

“I get why we moved to this leader-full movement thing, but I think it’s an overcorrection and I think it’s dangerous. We set people up to be leaders in name who have no skill to lead, no base to lead, no flank to be supported as they go through the challenges of leadership. They have no accountability. People’s Twitter followers got them leadership positions, people who couldn’t organize themselves out of a paper bag.”

“We need some strategists to look at the end game and bookmark: What are some achievable wins that we can get in the next decade? What are the bases that we need to be building? Where are the people that need to be in the positions of political power to make these things happen? What kinds of mobilization needs to be happening through direct action? How do we engage with the electoral process? Everybody’s going to bring their limits, their worldview, and their strengths. So how do we bring together the meeting of the minds to actually think through and strategize? We need investment in this kind of cross-movement pollination and strategizing.”

“We need to adapt our current organizations or create formations for all these newly radicalized people and re-engaged people. We have a problem with our current organizations because the criteria for membership is so high. We need much more porous forms of organization in which people get attracted and solidified in very different ways.”

“We’ve got to deal with the way that misogyny is getting used as a really effective gateway into white nationalism. It feels pretty vital that we handle that.”

“I think we need to consolidate around a political party that is outside the Democratic Party. That competition may make the Democratic Party stronger and that independence will make the left stronger. We need to have our own independent political power, our own tent. I don’t think it’s crazy for progressives to be able to choose who the Democratic nominee is in 8 to 12 years, if we take seriously building our own political party that allows us to aggregate our political power.”