How to Make Change, Slowly

Saul Alinsky, the community organizer best known for his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, had a useful metaphor for explaining why some social movements tend to burn bright and then burn out before making the change they seek. A successful revolution, he insisted, must follow the three-act structure of a play: “The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the play strives to hold the audience’s attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution.”

In other words, a movement needs a period of incubation—of conjuring, planning, debating, and convincing. The problem with the activists Alinsky was observing was that they sprinted to that third act, taking shortcuts that led, he wrote, only to “confrontation for confrontation’s sake—a flare-up and back to darkness.” It’s a dynamic that seems particularly true today, when social media provides us with extremely effective bullhorns that can call people to the streets with enormous speed and scale, or allow for the most clickable version of a radical idea to race around the internet before being fully developed.

If our movements today can devalue that slow, unseen incubation, the