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Block and Build 2.0

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Recalibrating our strategy to block MAGA’s Project 2025 agenda is essential in building enough progressive power to go on the offensive.

Key adjustments: tighter synergy of electoral and non-electoral action, and taking new steps to unite a progressive current rooted in the multi-racial, gender-inclusive working class.

In this article, members of the Convergence editorial board offer an orientation to ways our Block and Build framework can be adapted to meet the moment. Given the complexities we see, this editorial is necessarily broad in scope. We touch on many areas we hope to explore in greater detail over the coming year.

We also invite readers to respond, particularly with commentaries grounded in practice that explore ways this orientation can guide our work, as well as more ways we can adapt the framework to address changing conditions, and areas that need further elaboration. Please reach out to [email protected]

The 2024 election altered the political landscape in a big way. With the GOP in control of the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, we will all confront punitive policies and blatant power grabs, with the most vulnerable communities facing existential threats. We need to update and adjust our Block and Build strategy accordingly. While continuing to strengthen our electoral capacity, we will need to place renewed emphasis on weaving in other forms of resistance and power-building. As we continue to aim for governing power, building deep solidarity and community will be more important than ever. 

Where we can find synergy between the work of blocking and building, we will find some of our biggest opportunities.

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This is a difficult time. Anyone paying attention is carrying a huge emotional and cognitive load. As we try to develop and execute the best strategies we can, we also need to bring our maximum emotional intelligence to bear. “We must not fracture,” Maurice Mitchell reminded us even before the election, and this is as true for our relationships within our networks, our families, and our organizations as it is among the different forces in the movement. 

Election lessons: facts on the ground

The MAGA-controlled GOP utilized a lavishly financed and well-oiled machine of bigotry, fearmongering, and lies to appeal to millions full of anxiety about their economic condition and deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. Despite Biden having taken some important steps away from neoliberalism early in his term, the Biden-then-Harris campaign rejected pro-working-class populism in both substance and messaging. They prioritized appeals to “moderate” Republicans over efforts to reach economically struggling voters and the constituencies appalled by the genocide in Gaza. 

Progressives offered a vision of deep democracy and argued that defeating MAGA was a crucial step for putting the country on the road to a sustainable and radically inclusive society. But we lacked sufficient strength to overcome the combination of US racism and misogyny with the widespread perception that Trump somehow stood for change while Harris represented the status quo. 

Trump still only won the popular vote by 1.5%, the narrowest of margins, but the anti-democratic structure of the US political system gave MAGA “trifecta” control of the federal government and 23 state governments. This indicates a big problem: that a huge swath of the electorate voted for a lying racist who has been convicted of sexual assault. We need to face up to the depth of this challenge, and understand that the combination of serious hardship and rapid change in our historical moment requires us to offer a compelling alternative to MAGA’s promise of a mythic return.

MAGA leadership at all levels has indicated they intend to make full use of all the levers of political power to impose their Project 2025 agenda on the country. This remains an existential threat that operates outside the bounds of even the imperfect democracy we have in the US.

The decisive vehicle for pushing back this threat and building the world we need also remains the same: the broadest possible coalition, one that reflects the sentiments and galvanizes the energy of most people in the US. As we build this vehicle, we need to be especially alert to the specifics of geography. Our forces are weaker nationally than at the state and local level; states and municipalities will take on heightened importance as sites for building political power and fending off attacks. 

Block 2.0

The goals for the “block” side of our work haven’t changed, but the mix of methods involved in cohering and activating our coalition, as well as the specific ways we confront MAGA, must be adjusted to meet the challenges of a changed political landscape.

Here are six components of “Block MAGA 2.0” that are especially important:      

Emphasize work outside the electoral arena

Electoral engagement and preparation for the 2026 midterms and 2028 general election must remain on the progressive to-do list. But for the next phase, we must emphasize work outside the electoral arena: mass mobilizations and rapid response actions to protect people under attack; labor organizing and strike activity; building up thick networks of mutual support in schools, neighborhoods, and localities, and among specific constituencies. Such forms of resistance are not only vital for effective defense, but also crucial for reshaping the national mood and hence the terrain for future elections.

Press non-MAGA forces to defy executive branch mandates

In state and city governments where non-MAGA forces hold power, we must press them to defy mandates coming from the executive branch. It’s time to reach back into US history and recall the pre-Civil War period when the governments in several northern states joined grassroots abolitionists in refusing to obey the Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated returning escaped enslaved people to their “owners.” Several Democratic governors and mayors have already declared willingness to protect immigrants and trans people, and to refuse to go along with gutting environmental regulations, eliminating reproductive rights, and rolling back other hard-won gains. Constant pressure will be needed to make sure those words lead to actual actions and spread to as many municipalities and states as possible. Where elected officials step up, they will need our vocal support.

We can also learn from the Right to engage at the local level wherever possible: block MAGA one school board and election board at a time. These building blocks of our democratic system also create opportunities for everyday people to engage and develop, building a pipeline of grassroots leadership.

“An injury to one is an injury to all”

Consistent practical application of the principle that “an injury to one is an injury to all” is an absolute must. Sowing division and scapegoating vulnerable constituencies has been a hallmark of MAGA and its predecessors throughout the 60-year backlash against the gains of the 1960s. The forthcoming attacks on immigrants, trans people, anti-genocide protesters, and a wide variety of political opponents are not only threats to the people under direct assault: They are battering rams designed to roll over all popular opposition and everyone’s democratic rights. Finding ways to operate in principled alignment with those we may disagree with, but who are also in MAGA’s gunsights, is part of this practice as well.

Claim and keep the moral high ground

Our resistance to MAGA must claim the moral high ground and keep it. There are many dimensions of this: presenting a genuinely inclusive and welcoming face to the broad public even as we fight hard against every attack; refusing to dehumanize those who attack us or who are not yet in the resistance camp; and taking every possible measure to avoid adventurist actions, especially resorts to political violence, even as we stand behind peoples’ right to self-defense against unjust attacks. Faith-based groups can play a particularly important role on this battlefront.

Reserve time and energy for listening and studying

Collectively, we are going into the next phase with far more experience, savvy, and reach than we had in 2016. But we still have much to learn, from two directions:

First, we need to do a lot of listening to people in the constituencies we have long identified as crucial to anchoring an anti-fascist alliance and making transformative change: workers, people of color, immigrants, young people, women, members of the LGBTQ community, people who are disabled, and more – whether they voted for Harris, Trump, a third-party candidate, or sat out the 2024 contest. What are their concerns, what things about the country do they most want to change? How do we understand the deep alienation from politics among many of them? What can we learn from Black and Latino voters who voted for Trump-did the Right win them or did the Democrats lose them? What can we learn from places where people voted MAGA at the top of the ticket yet also voted for progressive initiatives, and where local Democratic candidates outperformed the top of the ticket? As we listen, can we identify values and visions that ring true across different sectors of the working class?  

And second, we need to learn from history, and from those who have direct experience and expertise in resisting authoritarianism here in the US and in other countries. Studying and learning from the abolitionists’ struggle in the antebellum period can give us practical tools and insights, and also provide perspectives to help stave off despair and helplessness.

Bluntly put, if we don’t go into the next phase of the MAGA era recognizing that we have at least as much to learn as we have to teach, we will fail.


Within our movement, there are still people who lived through and fought McCarthyism and the legal Jim Crow “authoritarian enclaves” of the pre-1965 South – and many others who have studied those periods. People are living and organizing in states with MAGA trifectas that already function as electoral autocracies—Texas and Florida, for example. There are also people who participated in resistance to authoritarian regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Serbia, apartheid South Africa and many other countries.

Bluntly put, if we don’t go into the next phase of the MAGA era recognizing that we have at least as much to learn as we have to teach, we will fail.

Aggressively contest for new narratives

Take what we learn in this listening and what we have gleaned from experience, particularly over the last 10 years, and aggressively contest for new narratives. We know we can’t depend on traditional media strategies to make sense of the world. Instead, we need to enliven and expand our movement media ecosystem and experiment with adapting and projecting our narratives to wider audiences. We need to project our positive vision and be alert to every opportunity to leverage MAGA’s missteps when they attack programs that draw broad bipartisan support, like Social Security and Medicare. The control MAGA-aligned Big Tech exerts over the media sphere will present a major challenge here.


We also need to contest the narratives put out by people carrying water for the Democrats. This means resisting attempts to blame and demonize working-class people for the election results or cast the Harris campaign as “too progressive.” Even more importantly, it means repudiating “both sides-ism” and attempts to normalize the new administration. It is not a normal player in US politics and has no respect for even the limited democratic features of the US political system. Rather, it is out to turn our country into a dictatorship, and we need to make that clear at every turn.

Build 2.0

The section of the broad Left that insists on combining opposition to MAGA with building independent progressive power has grown in both size and savvy since 2016. A host of grassroots organizations now put the fight for political power at the center of their vision. Groups that had no contact with each other before 2018 or 2020 are beginning to cooperate. Block and Build, in different variations, has become the scaffolding for the strategy of several important organizations and a reference point for many others. 

Now a leap forward in the strategic acumen, inter-organizational unity, working-class roots, and mass influence of this progressive current is imperative. Only a political force that not only advocates a program that speaks to the needs of the majority but also offers a credible path to that program’s implementation – and ways millions can be actively involved in shaping both – can take the political initiative back from MAGA.

Convergence will be offering our views on the full dimensions of Build 2.0 in the coming months. As a starting point, we would stress four crucial tasks: 

Deeper roots in working-class communities

Sinking deeper roots in working-class communities in a way that facilitates economic, cultural, and organizational means for workers to become active in shaping their future and the future of the country. Most advocates of Block and Build politics already agree on this point. But the devil is in the details of how to make it happen. We will be grappling with this for years to come, but here are a few issues that are right in front of us:

  • Increasing the percentage of workers organized into unions by orders of magnitude has to be an urgent priority. Organizing will be tougher once a Trumpist NLRB replaces the current one. But it is both possible and necessary. We can see this in creative efforts to organize the anti-union South, and in the huge “Red for Ed” teachers’ strike wave in 2018 -19, much of which took place in states where workers have few to no rights.“
  • Unions can play a critical role by not only organizing new members and using strikes as a weapon of resistance, but also by forming deep coalitions in the communities where their members work, bargaining for common good demands, and fighting for programs and policies that benefit the working class as a whole.
  • We need another look at the organizational forms that we use to embed radical politics within the working class. Other than unions (and unfortunately not all of those), there are few forms out there in which significant numbers of working-class people shape the group’s outlook and practical work. Historically, the US Left has been strong when it participated in and politicized organizations that had their origins in large-scale responses to the conditions of working-class life, and was able to help build such organizations where they did not previously exist. That’s a path we need to study and learn from today, especially given the hollowing-out of many of the cultural, religious, and community institutions that used to enrich working-class life.
  • An inclusive view of the working class and its issues and commitment to fight for equal treatment for all is indispensable for building a durable movement. Matters of bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, and mass incarceration are class issues as much as wages, working conditions, health care, and housing.

Opposition to US militarism and empire-building

Upholding opposition to US militarism and empire-building, which is crucial for putting a US progressive current on a firm foundation. A movement whose sense of solidarity stops at the border is ever vulnerable to being swept up behind a ruling class that frames its policies as pursuing the “national interest.” Today the fight against US backing for the Israeli genocide in Gaza and Palestinian rights in general is not just at the cutting edge of the fight for peace, it is at the cutting edge of the fight for international law and for the right to protest. This fight, as well as the fight against a New Cold War policy toward China (complete with military threats), is likely to come to the fore during Trump’s second term. And in general, waging the battle against the “America First” ideology that permeates MAGA will have to be a priority. In today’s interconnected world, internationalism is both a working-class and a human-survival must: there will be security for all or security for none.

Contention with centrist Democrats

Going on the offensive in our contention against the corporate and centrist forces in the Democratic Party, even as we ally with all those willing to fight MAGA. For a while ahead we will be forced to find ways to exercise independent initiative within the two-party system, a challenge that the Working Families Party has led on for the last few years. And as the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections showed, what direction the Democratic Party tilts has major consequences. Part of gaining influence among opponents of MAGA’s repressive agenda is positioning the progressive current as the most effective contender against it, and showing the stances taken by the current Democratic Party leadership as ineffective at best and submissive at worst. 

That battle and the overall power struggle in the Democratic Party will take numerous forms. In the immediate future, contention will likely break out over effective ways to resist MAGA attacks. Many mainstream Democrats are likely to counsel seeking compromise with administration policies on at least some battlefronts and giving top if not exclusive priority to fighting on the legal and legislative battlefronts. Progressives will have to stress – and take action to galvanize – mass grassroots mobilization in close connection with those legal and legislative fights. Our narrative fight over the causes of this year’s defeat will bear directly on debates over electoral strategy for the midterms and state elections. It’s not too early to at least be thinking about the 2028 presidential contest: can a strong candidate be found to play the role Bernie did in 2016 and 2020? And can that candidate tap into the motion in the labor toward a common contract expiration date and mass strike May 1, 2028 as called for by UAW President Shawn Fain?  

Consider new arrangements

Deepening strategy within the progressive movement, increasing cooperation, being willing to take risks, and considering new arrangements, including organizational mergers. Simply working harder at the same things we’ve been doing for the last several years won’t be enough to either beat back the coming attacks or replace MAGA in power with a coalition that can deliver deep structural change. We need to make some changes within our movements if we are going to change the country:

  • Our political strategies need to get more specific and concrete. For instance, neither our resistance nor our approach to attaining governing power can be one-size-fits-all; different strategies are required in red states, blue states, and purple states, and for different states within each of those categories. Getting to that level of specificity – and fleshing out the Block and Build framework on many other issues – requires empirical research, rigorous analysis, and sustained debate in spaces that are accessible to and used by people in all the key sectors of the progressive movement.
  • As organizations and individuals, we need to avoid the impulse to hunker down, avoid risks, and hope to ride out the storm. While often we’ll play defense, staying fractured and on the back foot all but guarantees we will be picked off and gutted one by one. Our program for defense needs to be thoroughly outward-looking – a solidarity-based search for partners, for opportunities to draw new layers of people into the fight, for unexpected acts of resistance that can be amplified in ways that make the mantra “courage is contagious” a material force. 
  • Although cooperation among organizations is growing, it is not yet where it needs to be. There is a limit to how far a political movement – especially one fighting fascism –can go when it is made up of a plethora of organizations, each making its own decisions on priorities and tactics. Even when there is alignment among groups on basic questions, organizational fragmentation makes decision-making cumbersome and rapid united action difficult. At some point, umbrella structures with a measure of decision-making authority are needed.

    In Convergence’s niche of the movement ecosystem, the Movement Media Alliance represents a promising step in the direction of cooperation and mutual support. Convergence as a project exists to serve the process of cohering our movements. We do so by offering a space to try on strategic frameworks, make meaning of events, and engage in rigorous debate. We lift up organizing so groups can learn about and from each other, and engage in partnerships to help make this happen.

Block and Build Synergy 2.0

The Block and Build strategy is all about synergy, understanding how different types of movement work interrelate and strengthen each other.  Each “block” action to resist MAGA is both an effort at harm reduction and a step in building the savvy and strength of those who resist. Each “build” gain in deepening roots in a working-class community increases the capacity of that community to beat back right-wing attacks. 

We saw this at work in 2020, when progressives were able to harness the energy of resistance and the power of grassroots organizing to deny MAGA the White House. Resistance had been building since the 2017 Women’s March and airport mobilizations, and crested in the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. Groups organizing to build power close to the ground spoke to the need to turn that resistance into electoral change. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign attracted noteworthy numbers of voters. This moment of progressive strength compelled the Democratic Party leadership to cooperate with the insurgents and bring important pro-working-class elements into the general election campaign. The working unity established between the Bernie and Biden camps carried on past the elections and contributed to the positive legislation the Biden team put forward early on.

The bottom line: progressive strength driven by mass action, built by sustained organizing,  and manifested in electoral clout can, if wielded in a way that matches the moment, both fortify and unify a broader anti-fascist alignment and produce concrete gains for the popular majority.

Opportunities in the moment

Now, facing the threats spelled out by the incoming administration, we rightly stress defending vulnerable people and organizations. In particular, we know that Trump’s day one agenda includes serious attacks against immigrants – the defense of all immigrants, regardless of status, should be a top progressive priority.

And of course, many of MAGA’s proposed moves will impact a majority of people. Tariffs, for example, could trigger escalating inflation and all-around economic chaos. MAGA has made big promises to make people’s lives better, but – if they follow the Project 2025 playbook – most of their policies will benefit the rich and hurt everybody else.  Efforts to push back these widely-felt attacks could help bring people into the broad anti-MAGA front and build support for policies that put people over profit. In that effort, we can learn from the successes of coalitions that won policies like paid family leave in red states.

Mutual aid work addresses immediate needs in crises ranging from pandemics to climate-fueled disasters and beyond. But when undertaken by thoughtful organizers, it can do more: bring people together across ideologies to build community ties, provide an opportunity for political education, and lead to challenges to the status quo. 

In every space we function, we need to work with respect and care for others, fostering human connection. Doing so is the path to defeating the efforts of haters and fascists to divide us, to steal our grief and our joy.

The block-and-build synergy will be especially apparent in any blue state where grassroots organizing successfully presses the state government to stand firm against MAGA mandates to round up immigrants, criminalize protest, and deny people needed medical care. 

Projects like Plan 2028 can offer opportunities to build much-needed coordination across geographies and electoral and non-electoral efforts.

The defense-offense synergy is also present in the overall condition of the country and the world at the current moment. We are living through a moment of crisis for both. The US-dominated world of the immediate post-Cold War period has come unstuck. There is no stability in a world with today’s obscene gap between the wealth of a few and the impoverishment of so many; where climate change threatens life on our planet, governments across the globe have weakened or completely lost legitimacy, forever wars rage, and the most powerful governments on earth are complicit in a genocide better-documented in real time than any in history. 

Either a new cycle of progressive change will start to tackle these problems at their roots, or authoritarianism will spread even further than it already has and every dimension of this “poly-crisis” will be exacerbated. The period of battle over which of those two futures occur could last some years. Thinking it will all be settled tomorrow can short-circuit the necessary process of winning majorities to our side. We are at an “inflection point” in US and human history and must move with that in mind.

These stakes underscore the need for a sense of urgency. But they also mandate a sense of deep responsibility and generosity of spirit. We will tap the better angels of the majority, or we will lose. That means in every space we function, we need to work with respect and care for others, fostering human connection. Doing so is the path to defeating the efforts of haters and fascists to divide us, to steal our grief and our joy.