If “populism” is really a coded critique for the lack of respect for and attention to real grassroots organizing and popular leadership development in the progressive movement, then I say “populism, yes”!

So what’s more interesting, I think, than pointing out the obvious existence of explicit racist extremists in the Tea Party is examining whether the Tea Party as a whole, by its very nature, is intentionally, implicitly built on racial resentment. In this regard, the NAACP resolution might be considered tame — it goes to great pains, as many other liberals have, to suggest that only a few folks in the Tea Party are racist but by no means the entire enterprise. I say: Not so fast…

Parts of this history feel eerily familiar today, but hopefully learning from the past, we can write a different ending this time

Apparently, the original video I created to introduce the Movement Vision Lab is taking off on You Tube — having something to do with its adoption by the management science crowd.

Based on this analysis, my plan is to spend the next six-to-nine months as a movement strategist learning about and experimenting in relation to three questions

The idea of real, democratic decisionmaking in our movement (or movement-aspiring) organizations challenges implicit hierarchies within our own organizing, in which we “assume that leaders know their followers’ interests better than the followers themselves do.”

The Right wing has chosen strategically to fan and mobilize racial resentment, to fuel an us-versus-them narrative that conveniently obscures the real destruction caused by elite Right wing and conservative economic power. But if we listen to where people are at — including the misguided but ultimately hurting like the rest of us Tea Party followers — there are other deep and palpable resentments we could mobilize instead.

I offer the following list of alternative resentments stewing in the American public at large, to be tapped instead of racial resentment and hopefully toward more constructive (including racially unifying) ends