Episode Summary
There is no question that last month’s No Kings protests were huge success. Millions of people turned out in many towns and cities to show their opposition to Donald Trump. But what comes next?
That is a very important question, and it’s one that recent left-of-center protest movements have had a real difficulty answering.
While it is important to show up and be with others who have similar values, people who want to build a better world must first build it among themselves before they can have it in society at large.
To defeat Trumpism, you have to replace it by answering the questions that it purports to answer—and by reaching people that have been left behind politically by the broader center-left, including the 89 million non-voters, and many of the less-informed people who didn’t realize what they were getting when they chose Trump in 2024.
These are difficult things to think about, and so I wanted to do that with Deva Woodley, a professor of political science at Brown University and a research fellow at the Charles Kettering Foundation, where she studies political change movements. She’s also the author of two books on the subject, The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance, and also Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements.
The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast and email apps may truncate it; access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
Related Content
Free excerpt from Matthew’s new e-book, “What Republicans Know”
No Kings showed that millions of Americans have had enough of Trump’s authoritarianism
Election 2025 suggests that Republicans have lost their recent gains among Hispanic Americans
Protests must be about starting movements rather than blowing off steam
How the decline of black churches and media have indirectly increased black support for Republicans
Americans are deeply dissatisfied with society, Democrats must speak to their rightful concerns
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
14:43 — Changing voters vs. tapping into inherent orientations
20:59 — How the American left became post-political
30:16 — Successful politics matches our somatic-abstract cognition
42:57 — Evangelical politics and expanding personhood
47:57 — The left has more money than the right
57:07 — Funding autonomy and building parallel institutions
01:02:40 — Conclusion
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
Matthew Sheffield: And joining me now is Deva Woodley. Hey, Deva, Welcome to Theory of Change.
Deva Woodly: Hi Matthew. Thanks so much for having me on. I’m delighted to be here.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, it’s gonna be a great discussion, I think. So, before we get into it though, let can you just give the audience a little bit about your background and some of the things that you study, and how you got into that?
Deva Woodly: Absolutely. Sure. I’m a professor of political science at Brown University and I study social movements political participation, public meaning and discourse. And I also am just generally interested in how ordinary people impact politics and particularly how movements are able to create political change.
Matthew Sheffield: Okay. Yeah. And so the focus of our discussion today is gonna be exactly that, but in the context of the recent No Kings protests that we saw across the country and whether they can turn into something else bigger and more, that does something really big, and make some real change in the country.
So this is the second No Kings protest that we saw. And a lot of people showed up for these things. But I don’t know, do you think, what do you think are, they, I think there’s more things that have to be done afterward.
Deva Woodly: Absolutely right. One of the things that we’ve found in the 21st century, cycle of protests that we’ve had, that really began I think with the 1999 protests against the WTO and the IMF are that. We have had increasingly large demonstrations, right? So increasingly, large public demonstrations in the street.
However, we have had these large demonstrations at the same time that we’ve had declines in civil society organizations, across the spectrum, but particularly on the center to the left. And when I say civil society organizations, I mean those organizations that are independently organized, not only for political purposes, but for the purposes of getting people together to do something right or getting to people to together for leisure time or to enjoy some kind of interest.
As we know from Robert Putin’s work and from Theta Scott Poll’s work, these kinds of organizations have been in decline. Basically since the 1970s, so you have a little bit of a mismatch between the capacity for mobilization, which we’ve been seeing increasing, but the capacity for organizing, which we’ve been seeing decreasing.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, I think that’s right. And and this has been something that’s been true across the various cycles that we’ve had. So, I mean, there were a bunch of different protest movements since that, that anti WTO we had, the Iraq war protests we had occupied Wall Street, the Women’s March black Lives Matter.
All of these organizations, they had a lot of people supporting. Their cause. But I think when you look at them compared to the Tea party really did go a lot further. I feel like.
Deva Woodly: Well, I think that the Tea Party, well, the Tea Party actually disbanded, right? it is, now like, not Xtend, but it’s true that the way that the Tea Party was organized was based in local civic communities, right? They were organized around local groups that were largely autonomous, although they did take funding from large right wing donors and organizations that had money, as they developed, but they were very careful.
And this is actually all recorded in a really wonderful book by Theta Skal. I think it’s the rise of the Tea Party and the redefinition of the Republican Party or something like that. But one of the things that is observed in that book is that these civic organizations were really careful about remaining autonomous in terms of their agenda.
And they were careful about the things that they took money for. And so what you really had was a group of civic organizations that became well-resourced over time and then developed a particular re relationship with the Republican Party. And that’s the other thing that I do think that we need to be really, we need to be really clear about is that.
The Tea Party movement in particular, but right wing movements, generally speaking have had a different kind of reception in the Republican Party than left wing movements have within the Democratic party. There was an alliance that has now morphed into kind of a takeover. And I know that the takeover part of it, well, you know better than I do, Matthew, the takeover part of it, was not seamless and amiable, but the affiliation that did happen between the Tea Party and the Republican Party was one that was much more congenial than the Democratic party tends to have with its left wing movements.
and this is something that we see in the literature as asymmetric polarization, but also we see this in terms of just the asymmetric politics of the Democratic and Republican party and their tolerance for their respective movements.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Yeah, that’s certainly true. And the reason for that, I think, is that when you go back and look at the history that you see that these, further right activists, they, put media as the centerpiece of what they were doing because they understood that. Our ideas are not RegEd in the Republican Party.
So, William, Matt Buckley. As, an example of that, he, started National Review because he hated Dwight Eisenhower. That was actually why National Review got started, because they thought Dwight Eisenhower was a rhino Republican in name only. And so then, so they made it their mission to convince the Republican voters first and to change them in terms of who they were.
And that’s not the way that, further left movements in the US have tended to behave. Instead, what they tend to do, in my view, is that they use moral appeals to, decency or goodness, or like, that’s what they tend to emphasize rather than pragmatic appeals. And so as a result, people who.
Who are Democrats that have a more pragmatic psychological orientation, they tend to view these movements with suspicion and,
think
Deva Woodly: I don’t, think that the, pragmatic or not pragmatic distinction is the one. I do think that because as you say, right, it’s a question of strategy and the way that strategy aligns with resources, right? So it is not the case that the things that are published in the National Review.
Back in the time of William F. Buckley or today are particularly more pragmatic than things that are published in Mother Jones. It’s the difference between how those organizations are resourced and then what relationship those organizations are able to build or make with decision makers. It’s also about the audience that they’re able to build over time.
But I think something else that you said, I think is also quite key is that the folks who wanted to be influential on the right thought that they could change the voters of the Republican party. And I think that is something that is not as believed on the Center to the left, that you can change the beliefs of the people who are your constituents, that they can be persuaded.
There is instead this belief that people have some sorts of inherent orientation that you have to tap into. Right? And that pe it’s not necessarily worth trying to change. And I do think that is a really big and significant difference in terms of the perception of who people are and, how they.
They work because I think that it’s the difference between a kind of evangelical frame of mind where people can get saved and a kind of Marxist frame of mind. And when I say Marxist, I just mean like scientific, right. A scientific politics, right. Like that’s what Marx says he’s doing. I’m telling you the science of how politics works.
So it’s a really different organ orientation where you believe people can change Right. In a kind of fundamental way. Or you believe that people are as they are, and you have to figure out how to tap into that or how to teach them how things really are, which is quite a different orientation.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, that’s why they use media like that was why they put it as their centerpiece, and, it’s, what’s so bizarre though, to me is that, when that, how today’s modern further left movements or have the, self-conception of what’s possible or how to do it, it’s like they didn’t really pay attention to a lot of the older movements like the, original, 20th century Black Civil Rights movement.
Like that was a movement that. Was a multi-pronged effort. It was one that, yes, they had protests but they also had, they had candidates that they supported in primaries.
Deva Woodly: Well, so does this, movement, I mean, I think that I think that there’s a little bit of a mythology about protests being the only tactic of contemporary left movements. That’s not true. There are lots of progressive candidates running and winning all over the country. They are just not as embraced.
By the party. So you don’t get necessarily the glossy profiles on them. They are not touted as the new stars of the party. They are not funded with an open checkbook the way that you would have or that you do see on the right for their sort of rising stars. They’re also not giving leadership positions within a party, even when they win by all rights.
Somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be like running the joint right now, and I mean that in terms of what she’s shown in terms of her ability to win a broad constituency, to increase her, numbers in terms of votes every single term to raise so much money that she can say almost whatever she wants.
And to really learn how to play the game from her perspective and at the same time be quite respected across. The spectrum of the Democratic Party in terms of its rank its, members in Congress, but then also across its rank and file. She has supporters among moderates.
She has supporters among the most left wing. And so I just hold that up in terms of like, this is the kind of candidate and representative who, if she were a right wing member, would be heading up so many different committees would’ve already been pitched as, in a leadership role on the sort of like national sort of executive level, and you see the same thing kind of happening with Zoran Momani, who’s clearly a generationally talented politician who has been only reluctantly embraced by by the decision makers within the party.
So, so it’s not the case that movements don’t. Aren’t aware of and don’t run candidates. It’s not even the case that they don’t win. They do. It’s, really about a different kind of relationship with decision makers.
Matthew Sheffield: yeah, well, I mean, I, definitely agree. They don’t treat them in that way. It, but it’s also the case though, that the right forced this to happen. And so like the, Buckley’s and, his generation, like they were hated in the Republican party. They saw them as a liability.
They saw them as crazy losers. And, and when they, muscled their way to have Barry Goldwater as their nominee, they got completely destroyed in the 1964 presidential election. So, yeah, that’s, so there is that parallel, but I guess what the difference is to me is that the.
Changing voters vs. tapping into inherent orientations
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, I, yeah, the, left, the modern day left. It wants to appeal to the goodness of party leaders and or the generosity instead of just saying, no, we’re gonna take this power and we’re gonna do it. That’s the difference.
Deva Woodly: I agree with you there. But it’s, yeah, no, and I think that is, again, I do think that is changing. But you’re right. I, do think that I mean it’s just a matter of history that, that wing, the wing of the Republican party that is now ascendant, right and dominant. It was definitely hated in the middle 20th century.
but the people who were really committed to that point of view kept investing in their institutions. And I do think that is a fundamental difference. One of the things that happens on the left is that with every kind of setback, right, or something that’s perceived as a setback or near miss the tendency is to withdraw from its movement organizations to stop investing, in the, media organi, media organs.
The sort of the reporters, the, organizers, the bloggers who are really sort of pushing the point of view and the policy solutions and the world’s, view that is characteristic of the American left. The tendency for those with resources is to withdraw from those things. And that is the exact opposite tendency that persisted on the right in the middle 20th century.
And I think that is a very serious lesson to be learned. Now, I should say that I do think that people are learning that lesson right now, but it needs to be taken up with. Much more speed, right? That understanding that you have to be actually committed to the thing and you have to be willing to believe that you can change people’s minds if they’re not with you or get the word out right.
That you can stand behind things that are unpopular for the time that they’re unpopular until you make them popular, which is the thing that happens right over time. So I absolutely agree with you. There are so many lessons to be learned. But, it’s, it’s really about developing a different relationship between movement folks and folks with resources.
Although there are some movement folks who have resources now increasingly, but even so, that I think is certainly the key.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, and yeah, that, and that local component as you were saying is, so critical. And, and, some of it, I think a lot of it why this is kind of lacking or has been lacking recently on the, in the American left is, due to the, decline of unions in the country. So unions used to be the backbone of a lot of left organizing in the United States, and as, membership has declined in those organizations, and, I have to fault those organizations to some, to degree about not trying to evangelize for what they were doing to the public.
Deva Woodly: Completely agree. Yes. And it we’re in total agreement there. Yeah. Unions and churches, right? So two things have happened. So the decline of unions, which in the middle 20th century was allowed to happen, right? By leaders in unions. They decided to be clientless unions instead of political unions, right?
instead of sort of making their case to the public and trying to increase their memberships they decided to focus on winning the next contract, right, with the members that they had. Now, of course, unions faced all sorts of headwinds. I shouldn’t, it, it wasn’t purely voluntary. There were a lot of political forces arrayed against unions.
At the same time, there were also choices that were made to keep their base narrow instead of trying to grow their base and political power. So that is absolutely true. The other thing though, is allowing the takeover of religious institutions by the right, because religious institutions used to be on balance to be left-leaning.
and seeding that space has been a really bad mistake because that was also one of the bulwarks of, community that is locally rooted movement spaces, right? Even now, even today, right? Like meetings happen in in the spaces that chose churches own right. Churches and synagogues and mosques are still, one of the most important civil society organizations.
There are just fewer of them and fewer people are members of them. And fewer of them are center to the left. That is also something that people are thinking very seriously about now. But having seated that space was a real big mistake. Yes. I think that one of the things that happened after the social movements of the middle 20th century was that people, on the center to the left, let’s call them leftish folks, poured a lot of their hope into government institutions, right, like governing institutions and felt that the remaining progress that was needed and that would ever be needed would come through these governing institutions.
It would come through the courts. It would come through, Basically the national and federal government, right? Increasing federal agencies, et cetera. And it turns out that if all your eggs are in that BA basket, right, then those things can be captured. And there was never a belief that, or I think a suspicion that those things could be captured and utilized for non egalitarian and anti-democratic ends.
And so I think that the less sort of leftish part of the American movement poured all of its eggs into those baskets instead of cultivating its strongest civil society institutions, unions, and churches or reli places of religious worship.
How the American left became post-political
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s a great point. And yeah, because in essence, the American left became post political essentially, is what they tried to do. And so they, thought that politics and civil society were the same thing, and they’re not, and they never have been.
Deva Woodly: That’s really correct. I do think that’s true. I mean, I think this is where the kind of myth of the end of history really comes to bite you, right? The idea that all of the big decisions have been made, right? The, worldview has been settled. Now is just the time of perfecting it, and you perfect it through these institutions, right?
You don’t have to cultivate these autonomous spaces where people. Are having big ideas or are pushing forward major, reorganizations or transformations or correctives. We don’t have to invest in those things because you’re right. I do. I do. I like the idea of post politics, right? It was this notion that you could sort of sanitize the process so that we’re only kind of horse trading about policy rather than having big, profound, important discussions about worldview, right?
And the way that we should live and who we are as a country or who we are as a world.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, and it, and the thing is, it, was accurate to say that, intellectually speaking. The, after World War ii, there was no, there wa the, intellectual case for reactionary viewpoints had completely been destroyed. Like, everybody saw what happens if you let far right people get what they want.
You, literally millions of people dead. That’s what happens when you let, them have what they want. And so people didn’t want that, but,
Deva Woodly: yes,
Matthew Sheffield: but, as the, as that, the memory of that faded,
Deva Woodly: yes. That’s exactly, it’s like, yes. It’s like the generation who lived that died and then everybody was like, Hey, maybe this wasn’t so bad. It’s like the living. That’s an important thing to remember, right? That the living memory of a people particularly a people who doesn’t have a really strong culture of retelling the old stories as though they’re particularly relevant to today.
So a modernist culture that is very like all about the contemporary. Once the living memory passes then it’s harder for people to hold onto what the actual consequences of things are and it’s much easier to rewrite history, right? And its interpretations. I mean, that’s always a possibility, but it’s particularly a possibility in a culture that’s so presentist that if you don’t have the people who actually lived through it to be like yeah, hello.
Absolutely not. Then you have the danger.
Matthew Sheffield: you do. and I would say that this is kind of a. This is an artifact also of that the American political culture is a Protestant political culture because when you look at.
European countries, it overwhelmingly, generally speaking, it’s the countries that are Protestant that have the, strongest, most extreme movements.
Now, there are some further right parties in Maori Catholic countries like Italy for instance. But at the same time, they are not, they’re not trying to dismantle their healthcare. They’re not trying, like they have some economic things that they still believe in civil society and are not trying to destroy it.
Now they, they are more anti, they’re just as anti-immigrant or things like that. But they also, for instance, are trying to say that, like in France for instance, that they, ban or they wanna ban women from wearing a veil, Muslim women, because they say that’s a repression of women.
So in some sense, like that Catholic culture gives. A little bit of a, because Catholicism as a political culture is more multifaceted. So in other words, there are far right elements, anti-democratic elements, but there have always been,
Deva Woodly: of Yes.
Matthew Sheffield: ous human that also is a very long standing tradition within Al Catholicism.
Whereas Protestantism tends to have, a, an id, this, everything is de novo. But truth, I am the
Deva Woodly: Right. I’m the arbiter of the
Matthew Sheffield: My brain is what’s, is what decides true. And, and, Emmanuel Kant really kind of put that up with his, that like his idea that, well, through the categories of understanding, we can have universal truth.
And it’s like you say, like no Catholic would ever believe such a thing.
Deva Woodly: I don’t know. I would have to make a study of this, but yeah, I mean, I, hear you on that and certainly there are some very deep liberation traditions within the Catholic worldview. I mean, look at the current Pope, right? Like Chicago Pope is like, really kind of coming out of the gate swinging for migrants.
And so, which is obviously completely in line with the book, but at the same time. There are right-wing Catholics who pretend that’s not the case. So, yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I do think you’re right about the kind of de novo orientation, and maybe its roots in Protestantism, but it’s also the case that Protestant traditions had been used for liberation as well, right?
Like, so during the 19th century. The, fact of the the fact that there, there had just been the second revival was really instrumental in getting the, abolitionist movement off the ground, for example. So, I don’t think it’s inherently one or the other, but it’s certainly that the dominant orientations of the religious organizations that exist in America today certainly have the right wing.
Protestant, but also Catholic, kind of feel they, the ground was just seated to those people in the middle 20th century. And, secularism was seen as the sort of like chief virtue of, I think leftist intellectualism. And much more space should have been made for people of faith and cultivating these kinds of sensibilities in faith communities, because of course the roots of them are already there.
I mean, it’s a, the books are quite compatible with the kinds of with the kinds of politics for, the people of the
Matthew Sheffield: For a liberationist, democratic politics. Absolutely.
Deva Woodly: Yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: And and actually I, well I’ll have put a link in the show notes, but I did a whole episode about PAI have a friend that’s a political scientist that they, he did a study with the partner about how the decline of the black church actually has made for more Republican black people
Deva Woodly: No, it absolutely has.
Matthew Sheffield: because those churches were the repository of memory.
Like that’s, like there has to be both a memory of misery and a vision of progress. And you have to have both of those things
Deva Woodly: Well, yeah, I mean, I don’t know if it’s misery, but it’s certainly critique, right? It’s definitely the place where, you know relatives and people who might as well have been relatives would call you to account for the kind of presentist thinking that discounts the experience of, people who you are tied to.
I think that’s absolutely true. I think one of the findings in political science in, in terms of black politics, linked fate this notion of, linked fate people I think wrongly interpreted that as something that was just a feature, like a permanent feature of black politics. But of course it was a configuration of black civil society.
And so, I’m sorry.
Matthew Sheffield: It was an artifact. That’s what it was,
Deva Woodly: Well, it wasn’t an artifact,
Matthew Sheffield: production. It was something that was produced by Black
Deva Woodly: It was produced. Absolutely. Yes. It was absolutely produced. That’s right. It was built in artifact in that sense. Yes. It’s not inherent because one thing that civil society organizations do is they cre they create a space for meaning making.
And so absent those spaces of collective meaning making Yeah. People making all sorts of different meetings. Right. Depending on the things that they’re connected to. And we haven’t even talked about the online spaces that people are connected to. Right. That shape their worldviews in the absence of these civil society organizations, particularly it seems for men and boys.
So I think yes. we have really misunderstood the significance of. Meaning making within organizations and the ways in which those things are not objective, right? Those things are subjective. They’re about relationships, they’re about interpretation. and, people can come to believe all sorts of things.
And the question is, what kinds of spaces do we have for the cultivation of pro-democracy, egalitarian beliefs, and we don’t have enough of them, and they’re not well resourced enough.
Successful politics matches our somatic-abstract cognition
Matthew Sheffield: No, they’re not. And and within cognitive psychology, there is this idea of what they call dual process theory. The idea that there’s, that, essentially we have two different cognitive modes for our thinking. And I basically, the, you have your somatic instinctual reasoning and that’s how we govern most of our affairs because it works very nicely.
And it’s quick and, it works nice. And, that’s, it’s our animal instincts. Animals use it, obviously. But not every animal. There’s also the, sort of a recursive. Reasoning or abstract reasoning that’s, that comes on top of that. And the problem for I think, the left globally is that, as science and liberalism became, ever more recursive and ever more abstract, they lost track of the fact that a lot of people weren’t brought along to those innovations and to that way of thinking.
and that’s where civil society and local institutions, they, were that barrier to this, reactionary somatic reasoning that, it says, well, these things that I don’t understand. If I don’t understand something, then it’s a lie. If I don’t understand how vaccines work, then it, then they don’t work.
If I don’t understand the history of trans people, then trans people are not real. If I don’t understand, why if, I have a vision of, a racial group as this or that, then they are that. And it’s not my ignorance, it’s their problem. And, local institutions mediate those kinds of stupid and self-centered conclusions.
But they’re natural.
Deva Woodly: well, I mean, I don’t think that’s true. I, do think that you’re right about somatic processing. But I think that somatic and cognition work together.
Matthew Sheffield: Oh, they do? Yeah.
Deva Woodly: yeah. There, I mean, it’s not one over the other, but, in any case, I think that our somatic processing doesn’t necessarily dispose us Ill to
Matthew Sheffield: nothing wrong with it. Yeah. It.
Deva Woodly: Right. that’s also a sort of part of conditioning and also what we believe about scarcity but or what we experience in terms of scarcity of whatever whatever it is. But I do think you’re right, there are these mediating institutions, but I, disagree. I mean, I think one of the things that I learned, for example, when I was studying the Black Lives Matter movement is that they value, or what I learned there was how much people valued the somatic experience, right?
This is the somatic experience of like, the body keeps the score right, for example. Right. And thinking about the things that we know and, the ways that we experience things in our body and understanding that those things are politically meaningful is something that movements do understand.
But I think that it is true that sort of mainline democrats or liberals in the kind of small l liberal sense really do disavow, That way of engaging with politics and it has been a detriment, but it’s not just the case that our sematic responses dispose us toward. Being away from or, disliking the other, or the things that we don’t understand.
Our semantic, somatic responses can also condition us toward the pleasure of those things, right. As well. It really is, I think, the mediating institutions that tell us how to interpret those responses because so much I would say of like, I would say modern evangelical right wing Christianity is about telling you how.
Your body’s positive responses to things are bad, like, that you shouldn’t have those responses in your body or that, God doesn’t like you to have those responses. So, so I do think that it all comes down to mediating institutions. Even though you’re quite right, we do have, we do, we modern, intellectual society and culture has devalued the things that we learn from that somatic processing, system.
And, hasn’t, I don’t think equipped us or allowed us to equip ourselves with the ways that, that we can get information from, we should get information from the interaction between those two processing systems.
Matthew Sheffield: I definitely agree with that. And actually that was the point. I was rather poorly apparently trying to make
Deva Woodly: I’m just really, I don’t, like it when people talk down the somatic system, so that’s, so I’m perhaps quite defensive about it.
Matthew Sheffield: Okay. Yeah. No, Like, but no, that is, I am literally saying we have to have both of these types of reasoning because in fact, abstract reasoning is a tool of somatic reasoning. Like, so within conventional dual process theory, they say, oh, abstract reasoning corrects somatic reasoning. No, somatic reasoning allows itself to be persuaded.
It’s the boss. It’s the boss. And so if you can’t relate. Your politics in a somatic way, then you’re not going to win in a deme democratic system. It’s that simple. Like you have to, and, that’s part of what these like local institutions really do. They give you a somatic experience with other people that is healthy and, you’re relating to their body, in your own body.
Like, in other words, somatic reasoning isn’t as, isn’t good for understanding math or, understanding tax rates or things like that. No, we shouldn’t use it for that. But on the other hand, if understanding that, if somebody has a different sexual orientation than you that it’s just as real for them as your own is for you, and that’s a proper use of somatic experience.
And just being with other people and friendship and, having that. That in-person bodily experience with other people we’re, people are missing that. And, it makes them vulnerable to this, angry, reactionary, somatic reasoning. and, that’s why we have to make room for,
Deva Woodly: yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: somatic experience.
Deva Woodly: I really like the way you put it. Somatic reasoning allows itself to be persuaded. I think that is so interesting. I really like, I really, like thinking about it in that way because I think that’s quite true. We try to think about what it is about being among and being with other people that helps us to make meaning, and that helps us to and that meaning making is, both, sort of at the level of cognition and also at the level of belief or faith or whatever else.
But I really do like that it is the somatic system that makes that opening, right? That allows itself to be persuaded. Yeah, it really aligns with some other work. It helps me actually understand the work of, for example, Audrey Lorde a lot more. She has this fantastic essay called The uses of the erotic and erotic here is very broad.
It, means this somatic pleasure sort of apparatus that we all have. and I, have always had trouble understanding it as deeply as I think it should be understood. But because she asserts that it is this system that allows us to relate across difference and, so it really makes sense, this notion that it, it is the somatic system that allows itself to be persuaded.
It allows itself to be moved because that is the kind of information that allows us to be transformed, right? Allows us to adapt in ways that are profound.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. and when you look at evolutionary biology and the evolution of cooperation among species, that empathy. That is the grounding, and it is as somatically derived sensation and intellectual idea. and, this connects to one of the other movements that you’ve studied as well, that the movement for same-sex marriage rights that, that was a movement that I think really did connect to that very well and help people understood that, you may not have the same desires or ideas about, relationships as people who are, naturally homosexual if you’re a heterosexual.
But that’s okay because they are still people just like you. And, that’s, that movement or that idea, like they did a lot of things right. And I think people didn’t listen to what they were doing enough. I feel like.
Deva Woodly: Yeah, I mean, I think that certainly the approach for that movement was, one in which everybody understood that they were gonna have to persuade, right? And they were gonna have to persuade in as many registers as was possible. and I do think that really matters. And, I write about that in, in my book, the Politics of Common Sense because. One thing that movement never took for granted was that it had a natural constituency. One of the things that I do think does become a problem with left movements again because of this notion of scientific, right, the scientific sort of truth or real interests or things like this is that they have a natural constituency that doesn’t have to be actively persuaded or that persuasion doesn’t have to be maintained.
And I think that’s always a mistake because it really is like politics really is a contest. It really is always a contest, and you always have to be cultivating the people who are your constituents and members and allies, your team and, there’s no sort of scientific or logical. Or structural reality.
And things may be scientific and logical and structural. I think that those things are true and exist, but that does not create a constituency. A constituency is made through meaning making, and you always have to be thinking about persuasion.
Matthew Sheffield: You do. Yeah. And yeah, and, you’re absolutely right that, this evangelical mentality like that’s politics is an evangelical activity. And it has to be conceived of that way if you wanna win. Yeah.
Deva Woodly: yes, I agree with that. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it in those terms, but it’s really true. And I always joke about myself as a true believer in democracy, like small d, democracy, like having a zeal. But I think that it’s actually true. I think you do have to have a kind of zeal where you’re not only trying to convince people that you have the right issue positions but that you’re actually trying to make them or help them welcome them, invite them into your vision of the world, right? Because that matters more than issue positions. And we see this in the data all the time, right?
Like people have particular issue positions and they misattribute them to the candidate that they like the most, right? Or they deny that candidate disagrees with them. Or if they are presented with evidence that the candidate disagrees with them, they paper over it as insignificant for some of the reason.
But it’s because it’s not the issue position that matters most. It’s the idea that person represents some version of either yourself or the world that you believe in, right? That you think is worthy of your belief. And at least. To a certain extent, your faith. Right? I do think that is true.
And, so I think that sort of trying to pinpoint and triangulate issue positions is absolutely the wrong approach, is about trying to make people, trying to help people to feel that, you want the same kind of world that they want and that they have a place in the world that you wanna build.
This is one of the reasons that I really, appreciate Zoran MA’s campaign in New York, is that in addition to being consistent on issue positions, what that campaign has tried to do is to really create experiences for people to walk into, like literally right experiences for people to walk into.
Because they really want people to feel right in their bodies, that they have a place in the vision of New York that he wants to implement. That’s really smart. That’s the way you have to do politics.
Evangelical politics and expanding personhood
Matthew Sheffield: It is. Yeah. And especially if you’re trying to do a politics that does include a, a an expansion of personhood. Because throughout the entirety of human history, up until just very recently, women were not people and, and, people, and heterosexuality, well, I mean, it was kind of invented, but, like, in the Victorian age and afterward, heterosexuality was kind of assumed to be the only sexuality.
And, and just all, these various things that conceptions of being and who is a human a lot of people, they never were taught that by their parents or the tradition that they came out of. Like a lot of Americans. They went to private Christian schools where they told them that evolution’s not real and that, feminism is from Satan.
And that it’s a threat to men, or like, and a lot of churches will tell, people that. And so it’s no surprise that if you’re not continually making that case, then the opposite that people are gonna, fall back into what they were brought up from their childhood to, to believe in.
And yeah, you have to talk to them.
Deva Woodly: yeah, I mean, to the extent that, that, is an experience, I think that’s certainly true. it’s also the case that you really have to stand behind the things that you believe. That is one thing that I, also see in leftish politics. Well, I mean it, I guess it depends on how. I think center left politics is what I’m talking about right now, is that you really have an unwillingness to stand for things.
If, there’s a width that they might be unpopular in some constituency for some moment in time. The, instinct is to retreat. And that is also not the way to conduct a politics of persuasion, right? You wanna make space for discussion. Possibly. You certainly want to be making your point in as many spheres as you can, but you don’t retreat from the thing that you say you believe.
If you do, then no one will believe anything that you say. Including the people that agree with you.
Exactly. And I think that is a situation that the Democratic party finds itself in right now. And there is, there is research that supports this, although it comes mostly from qualitative research, so focus groups more than it does from polling, but that you have a situation with the Democratic party is that even people who prefer many of their issue positions simply do not trust them to deliver on anything.
And it is part of, that’s the part, that’s the part of the problem with trying to sort of triangulate issues as though issues are the thing that matter most to people. Whereas it’s really about being invited into a worldview that you think that decision makers will actually fight for, that you, that they, that you have a place in and that they will fight for.
We talked about this a little bit in our sort of like pre-conversation, but this is where the sort of double haters come from. These are people who, or what were called double haters during the 2024 campaign. The people who didn’t like Harris or Trump, but they are also people who don’t like the Democrats or the Republicans.
And it’s not because there are no issue positions that they agree with, it’s because the issue positions that they have are heterodox and they don’t think that either are gonna deliver for them or that the one that’s gonna deliver for them and is not gonna deliver what they actually want.
Right? So you have this situation in which people will say things like they trust the Trump’s Republican party to do things, even if they don’t like the things that they do, and they don’t trust the Democratic party to do things, even if they would like the things that they say they want to do.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, and actually, bill Clinton had a phrase for that. When he was running for, or when he was the president, he said that people will always go for strong and wrong, over weak and Right. And
Deva Woodly: that may be true, but Clinton had a lot of sayings. But I, do think that it does bear on this particular political moment. There is a, there’s a high degree of disbelief in political institutions, politicians and candidates generally speaking, but the Democrats bear the brunt of that disbelief because it comes not only from opponents, but from their constituents who they seem to have a ton of disdain for also.
But yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. and, that’s gotta change. Well, and one of the other, I, think enduring myths of. Leftish politics in the US is that the right wing is just so much, has so much more money. And that’s something that I’ve recently written about in my ebook, what Republicans know.
But that’s something that you knew already as well, Deva. So let’s talk about that. That you’ve, been trying to get people to understand that, that we have plenty of money. We just have to spend it better.
The left has more money than the right
Deva Woodly: Yes. It’s really, hard to people to get people to believe that the centers to the left has more money. It, just has more money.
Matthew Sheffield: Objectively. That’s an
Deva Woodly: Objectively, there’s more money on that on that side of the spectrum, both from larger donors, but even more so from its rank and file. When you see candidates who are raising, astronomical amounts of money from small donors, they’re always.
The center to the left, right? They are these leftish candidates or, often progressive candidates who are just raising an enormous amount of money from people in the world. There’s also donors on that side. But the thing is, that this, these resources are not coordinated in a way that invests in civil society or promotes a, transformative worldview.
And I do think the promotion of a transformative worldview is really important right now because most people want transformation. that is also evident in the polling, which is new, right? you didn’t used to have polls where you asked does this? There was recently a poll, I think like this past summer where they asked people.
Does the system need to be majorly transformed or torn down altogether? And something like 70% of respondents said it needed to be majorly transformed or torn down altogether, which is like unheard, unheard of. That is not the sort of data I was raised on, right? As a political scientist, but that’s the situation we find ourselves in now.
And so a kind of status quo maintenance of, worldview is not one that is going to work for most people. so, so absolutely. I think that the money that exists on the center to the left spectrum is not spent in a way that is efficient, in a way that exhibits conviction, in a way that, Is meant to deliver for its constituencies, deliver even, deliver in multiple ways, either ideologically or materially.
And that has to change, but it can change Right. Relatively quickly.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, and yeah, and like in, in terms of, where the. Money is spent. Harris and her allied organizations had more than $2 billion in 2024.
Deva Woodly: printing money. Yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: and all that money is gone now. Like it’s, completely flushed down the toilet. And even worse, a lot of it went to Fox and a lot of it went to Sinclair and a lot of it went to Nexstar.
So money that hardworking donors of Kamala Harris, who really wanted her to stop Trump, that money was given to right-wing media, a lot of it. Hundreds of millions of dollars of that money was handed to Rupert Murda. Like that’s outrageous.
Deva Woodly: Is outrageous.
Matthew Sheffield: and and I’m sure if the donors had known that’s where the money would go, they wouldn’t have given it.
Deva Woodly: Well, certainly the small donors.
The small donors, I think the large donors do know that it goes there
Matthew Sheffield: yeah.
Deva Woodly: and they’re just well, there’s this fantastic work by political scientists called Jake Gruba that shows the gerontocracy, right? Like, so the, age of politicians today, but then also more recent work is on the donor basis and the balance.
Now, of course, large donors tend to be older because it usually takes. Some time to amass an enormous amount of money, even to come into money that you’ve inherited, take some time. so that’s one part of it. But the donor base, in terms of large donors of democratic candidates is uncommonly old, right?
Uncommonly elderly, and they tend to give money in. They tend to give money, into a party that pretends that it’s still operating in the 1990s and spends money the same way that it did in the 1990s, right? On these TV ads on like last minute canvassing on, microtargeting based on data, that’s not actually about building relationships with constituents and that it’s not fundamentally about investing in local organizations, right?
All of that money. Can you imagine if, a quarter of that money had been put into shoring up local civic organizations that would be doing groundwork for democratic candidates across election cycles?
Matthew Sheffield: Yep.
Deva Woodly: would have been immensely powerful. And create a constituency that is actually always doing politics right, not only at election time.
And so, yeah, it’s, a huge miscalculation and as you have written, that is not the same case on the right. And it’s not because of the Republican party. The Republican party operates very similarly to the Democratic party in terms of how it uses money. It’s just that so much of the money on the Republican side doesn’t go through the party, whereas so much of the money on the left does go through the party.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and that they, the donors on the right, they have a vision of what they want, and they pursue it through thick and thin. and I think we can see that also as well, just like with their, attitude toward media. So, like Rupert Murdoch, he’s owned the, New York Post since the 1980s.
It’s never made a profit. The Washington Times, newspaper was started in 1987, never made a profit. you got one. America News never made a profit. Like tons of these organizations, they persist because, both their big donors believe in, them, but they also raise a lot of money from small donors, like every, like real America’s voice.
You watch their things every few minutes, give us money, And they do.
Deva Woodly: Yeah.
Matthew Sheffield: because they, because their, viewers know that it’s important that these things exist. And, I think the left in the US has to, get over this allergy to money.
They have to realize you cannot, like, expecting people hold on, let my things fall out. That you have to understand that, expecting people to say, gosh, this is a really righteous cause I’m gonna support it. Or, or like the, the kind of fantasies of Republicans on the West Wing, they’d be like, oh gosh, you gave a really good speech.
Deva Woodly: Yes.
Matthew Sheffield: Now I have to surrender
Deva Woodly: Yeah, exactly
Matthew Sheffield: persuaded me.
Deva Woodly: right.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And it’s like that’s not how this works. You have, to be there, be there in the world. And you have to be where people are and you have to meet them where they’re, like I, on my, when I was talking about my book on social media the other day, somebody was like, well, I don’t like videos.
I don’t like tv. I don’t like YouTube. No, liberals like it, we like to read because it’s faster and it’s better. and I’m like, well, okay, maybe that’s what you think, but guess what? You live in this country with 300 million other people. And I’ll tell you something most of them don’t like to read articles from the nation or, the New Republic.
I love them. I, I, wanna write for ‘em, like, but that’s not how you, that’s not how you win in a democracy. You gotta, be where the people are in every way.
Deva Woodly: Yeah. And you have to cultivate those other spaces too. I mean, I, just think that, I think that the point about having the courage of your convictions is really important and being able to hold these spaces at a loss and not just being able to, like, understanding that’s a a, long-term. Thing to do that is positive, right? That will have positive externalities and returns in the future. Even if you’re holding them at a loss. Now, that’s really important. It’s also really important to understand in our analysis as the ownership of legacy media shifts, right? People who are sort of like making fun of the fact that the Washington Post keeps losing subscribers, or that X is mostly just the bot farm now, right?
It, and that it doesn’t make any money, are confused about what the new ownership wants out of these organs,
Matthew Sheffield: that’s not what it’s there for.
Deva Woodly: it’s not what it’s there for. It’s not what it’s there for, right? It is not there as a business proposition. It is there as an ideas machine and to understand that. Leftish folks have to invest in their own ideas machines and in ways that are less that allow more autonomy to those organizations.
Funding autonomy and building parallel institutions
Deva Woodly: generally speaking, the way that money is given on the left has to be given, in a way that allows more autonomy to the organizations that exist or are forming because that is also a part of doing politics, is that it has to be adaptive, right? It has to be able to serve and grow the constituencies that are actually there on the ground.
And that requires long-term funding that has many fewer strings than come with, for example, nonprofit. Grants that are reviewed every couple of years and may or may not be renewed. This hamstrings, what’s left of Leftish Civil Society to an enormous degree. Both those organizations that provide services that could be the root of parallel institutions, right?
For governance and service provision, but also for those that are interested in ideas. Policy. And then also something that you talk about that I think is really important is that civil society is also a way to provide jobs and resources for the people who are fighting for the worldview that you say you want.
Right? If, the Leftish people have their own civil society organizations that are independent of governing institutions, which are now captured, right, and legacy media institutions, which are now captured, then it gives them a place where they can continue to produce right? The ideas and push forward, pro-democratic, pro egalitarian ideas.
In a way that they have, they can be less afraid because they’re not afraid that the folks who have captured these other institutions can now in their livelihood. Right. These things are really, important. The fact that the best reporters have been pushed out of the Washington Post is a huge opportunity for somebody.
Right. And it’s one that hasn’t been taken up.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. And, this is also an opportunity for people, with this smaller. Dollar donors as well. and that’s something that you’ve been focusing on as well, that, you know, with people developing mutual aid groups and ice reporting organizations and, ways of supporting and ‘cause like, I, often hear people say, well, we need to have a general strike.
Well, and it’s like people need to have money in order to have a general strike. Someone has to pay for them to eat if there
Deva Woodly: has to be a strike fund like nobody’s business. Yes. And if people are serious about wanting a general strike, which is not a bad idea, general strikes are really effective in terms of regime change. But the preparation for a general strike is not what I is, not happening.
Right. And. If that’s the goal, then there are many, concrete things to do that can be done right? and, even if general strike is not the goal, all of those underlying things should still be done because those are the things that create autonomy, right? And so. Yeah, absolutely.
Investing in mutual aid, trying to shore up organizations that can provide services, basic care, provision of basic needs that’s another part of this and another worthy node of local investment. And there are many ideas about how this could happen, right? Both from folks who are, small donors who used to give their money to the Democratic Party, their local organizations, that they can invest in both their money and their time.
Insofar as any of us have time. But yeah to that extent. But then there’s also ways in which other kinds of organizations like party organizations could function differently as well. There are lots of ideas about this, particularly as Snap runs out the ways that local party offices could be utilized as spaces where a mutual aid takes place, where people could find civil society organizations that have stockpiled food that are able to give stipends for diapers or have donation centers for things like basic needs, that can help carry kind of people through.
And if you were a party who wanted to build a loyal constituency, you would do that, right? Like, so, there are many, opportunities to kind of create the kind of base, right? And the kind of capacity that would be necessary to be autonomous. Enough from this regime to refuse and to force changes.
and there are people thinking about that. I don’t mean to say that like nobody’s doing this. There are people who are doing this, but it needs to be done in a more coordinated manner. And I think with a orientation that is more confident, that is less, doomy and gloomy and more full of the kind of belief that, nobody wanted to be sort of handed this, nobody wanted to be handed this part of history, the stage in history.
But here we are and what are we, gonna do about it? And there’s still plenty to do in terms of, how history has gone, including the history of the United States. This is a troubled period, but it’s not one of our most troubled periods. Not yet. And so there’s a lot of stuff that we can do besides being gloomy.
Conclusion
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. we, can’t choose the times in which we live. We can only choose how we live in them.
Deva Woodly: that’s right. Yeah. And for now, it’s been a shock, certainly for those of us, at least for me, right? Those of us who were born into the late 20th century. And I know that many of us weren’t raised to, or weren’t expecting to have to build a new century that would have to be really, different from the one that we were born into.
But we can do it. I mean, our grandparents did it. But it’s time to, really like, I don’t know, to mix metaphors, step up to the plate, as it were and do what we can. But that also doesn’t mean that everyone’s a hero. That’s the other thing about the small D democracy is that everybody pitches in, the ways that they can from the expertise that they have, from the capacity that they have, and are able to build with others.
And it’s a long term proposition, not a short term one. So people who are expecting a kind of return to 2019 or 1999 just because you have a midterm election in 2026 are badly wrong, right? This is a long-term process, but it is a long-term process in which we can build something really enduring not forever, right?
As we see, right? But something really enduring and something, better. Something good.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Absolutely. All right, well, so what do you have any recommendations for books or that can be by yourself or by others? For people who are, who wanna keep thinking about all of this stuff, David.
Deva Woodly: Oh, yes. Gosh, I would, I, really recommend the book Cooperation by Bernard Harcourt. It’s a really interesting study of COism as a viable kind of political economic strategy that I think was very eye-opening for me. I had no idea how extensive cooperatives were. I thought it was just like, the Park Slope Cooperative at a grocery store.
But no, this is a really, interesting economic model that can work at scale. I think what else is a really good I think that. The book from What Is To What If by Rob Hopkins, who is an environmentalist. It’s a really, interesting text. It is about political imagination, but the ways that political imagination can be enacted, right?
And has many, empirical examples and case studies of the ways that people are transforming their local communities and ideas for what it looks like to have that networked at scale. The final book that I would recommend is Here Comes The Sun by Bill McKibben. And this is a really, good book because it details the technological advance that has happened literally in the last two years since 2023 with solar technology. And the ways that it has become viable as an energy resource at scale that’s actually cheaper and better than fossil fuels and nuclear energy which is something that literally was not true in 2022, but is true now.
So, these are the texts I think that I would recommend to help people think about the future, right? To really sort of claim the kind of ambition that is needed for this era. And it’s an ambition that combines practical imagination with the kind of pragmatic, not in the case of tri triangulation, but pragmatic in terms of really trying to build and making manifest the pragmatic action, which is needed right now.
Yeah, that’s
Matthew Sheffield: Okay. Yeah, they sound like great books. So now how about people keeping up with you? What do you, want to direct them to?
Deva Woodly: Well, people who are keeping up with me can follow my writing. I blog at kettering dot org. I should say that, oh, I should have said this before. A fellow at a research fellow at the Kettering Foundation, which is a pro-democracy foundation in, based in America. It’s American Prodemocracy Foundation.
So I think that in terms of my non-book and article thoughts, that’s where you can find me.
Matthew Sheffield: Okay. Sounds good. All right. That’s been great.
Deva Woodly: Awesome. Thank you for inviting me on, appreciate it.
Matthew Sheffield: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. If you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives, and I thank you very much for your support.
And these are tough times. I know. I understand now that everybody can afford to do a paid subscription, but if you can’t please do share. One of your favorite episodes on social media might be this one or maybe another one. Please tell your friends and your family about the show. I really.
Could use that support as well. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click like and subscribe so you can get notified whenever there’s a new episode. So that’ll do it for this one. Thanks for being here. I’ll see you next time.
