Feb 21, 2025 3 min read

Stolen scaffolding

An old mentor of mine is one of the world’s leading experts on analyzing extremist and insurgency movements. She is old school in the way that she uses a flip phone and doesn’t do email but savvy to have intentionally invested in training a generation of analysts and journalists on how to navigate these networks and underworlds.

I think about her when I am in campaign debriefs. From her, I learned the importance of making sure we’re asking the right questions. Asking the right questions isn’t only a struggle in these rooms trying to understand why or how the electoral math did not math. Asking the right questions is a struggle trying to understand any kind of loss. The common question thread most follow in loss can lead to a toxic place of internalization and abandonment fast… Why did this happen? What are we doing wrong?

The nuance I learned is to turn questions like these on it’s side.

What are we doing right?

There is very little scholarship on how the other side works and how the other side has grown to become so successful. There is little scholarship because people tend to want to study movements they belong to or already hold shared identities with and because winning politically is often conflated with counter-movement expertise. While the other side holds zero ego on examining the left's success, replicating and remodeling the best of what we got and pairing that with the best of what they do. They not-ironically quote Alinsky. From my mentor I learned how Morris Dees' McGovern campaign plan is an actual blueprint that is studied by white supremacist nationalist leaders.

They take our successes and make it their own.

This co-option at movement scale has locked in political consequences and real outcomes on our democracy’s infrastructure. Everything they are attacking and intentionally dismantling is a jewel of strength, power and magic. But in processing this most recent electoral loss, the left is following a line of inquiry that resembles a trail of breadcrumbs leading it off a cliff. We are not experiencing a failure of wokeness or identity politics. We are witnessing the incredible speed of narrative change. When we only ask these questions in campaign cycles, we fail to accurately clock the momentum that has never stopped compounding for the other side. So while the Democratic Party enters into its regularly scheduled existential spiral, turning inward and on its own, the extremist right continues to expand, leveled up in scale and reach by our very own stolen scaffolding.

We need to stand on business.

This is one of the many reasons why I love my work with world-builders. The most important, crucial work on our democracy is usually led by those who share our values and carved a space for innovation by simply asking a different set of questions.

But that doesn't make the experience of leadership any easier.

A few years ago a friend working on gun violence prevention reached out to meet for coffee for a soundboard. When we met up and caught up, they shared that they were thinking about starting a new organization that to me sounded amazing and necessary. "But, but, but..

What if I fail?

Ok. That’s one way of looking at it.

Here’s another:

What if you win?

And what are we ready to steal back?

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Sabrina Hersi Issa is a human rights technologist. She is committed to leveraging innovation as a tool to unlock opportunity and dignity for all. She does this through her work in technology, media and philanthropy. This is her personal newsletter.