Want to Get What You Want? Build Political Power

Throughout my discourse on power, I have defined power as the capacity to decide what happens and to make that decision hold, including for people who do not necessarily agree with you.

Political power is therefore the capacity to shape the rules, the resources, and the conditions through which shared life is organized and to make those arrangements consequential for other people.

Voting can be an expression of political power.

So can legislation or taxation or regulation.

Things like organized labor, public protests, litigation, lobbying, collective bargaining, and the allocation of public money.

But voting is only one mechanism inside a much larger system.

I think the more useful question for an individual is not simply, am I politically engaged? It is, or it should be, who has the power to determine this outcome? What are they dependent on? And what would have to change for my preference to matter? This is where political analysis becomes useful.

Politics often begins by deciding what is not political.

So the idea that you are not political is a political position, regardless of how you look at it.

And one of the most effective exercises of political power is deciding which questions society is allowed to treat as political in the first place.

For a very long time, many issues now understood as political were treated as private matters.

So things like domestic violence that happened inside the home was a family issue.

Child care was a woman's problem.

Low wages were an individual's employment problem.

you know, situation or matter.

Disability was something the individual should adapt to.

Pollution was the unfortunate cost of industrial activity.

Discrimination could be treated as a matter of personal prejudice rather than an institutional design.

Once something is defined as private, the proposed solution usually becomes private too.

So they ask you to manage better, to work harder, to move somewhere else, to negotiate individually or to make different choices.

And oftentimes you are advised to become more resilient.

Once the issue becomes politically legible, a different set of questions become possible.

Should there be a law? Who should pay? What responsibilities does an employer have? What should government provide? What rights should exist and what should be prohibited? What should institutions be required to change? This is why the feminist assertion that the personal is political became so consequential.

It was not claiming that every private experience required government intervention.

It was challenging the assumption that patterns affecting millions of people's private lives were somehow disconnected from public power and that distinction remains useful even now if thousands of people experience the same difficulty it may still be an individual problem but we should at least investigate whether the repetition is being produced by a shared structure that is the first tool i want to give you in this conversation when a problem keeps appearing at scale We have to stop asking about what the individual should be doing differently.