American Majority: Organizing for Freedom

American Majority turned 5 in January, and it has been quite the ride. Trust me. We’ve trained almost 25,000 activists and candidates nationwide in that time, with most of that work in the last three years, and many times with a staff of no more than twenty. Someone asked me the other day what our budget was. I replied, “A gabazillion pennies and nickels (with some paper clips and rubber bands thrown in).” The American Majority staff has done some amazing work on, quite honestly, limited resources, and they’re the ones who have made it happen; you know a lot of them, having worked with them in the field, at trainings, on special projects.

Those staff are what American Majority is about: not a personality driven organization, but a band of irreverent, hard-working, dedicated, and skilled organizers who have bought into a mission and a vision. We seek national, generational change, which does not begin at the top, in Washington, DC. It begins at the bottom in as many local communities as possible so that a groundswell rising from the bottom up will bring the change we want. The Progressives did it in the 20th century, and fundamentally changed our government, and quite frankly, our society. We want to reverse engineer that, and we’ve seen glimpses of the possibilities of it happening over and over again in the past five years. We want to show a different approach to the conservative movement, one that we believe is a winning recipe: build the right infrastructure in the right places for the implementation of the right ideas (hint: the right place is not Washington, DC).

And while it’s nice to chat about mission and vision, of ideas and infrastructure, at the end of the day, unless there is actual work being done to achieve the ultimate goal, all you’re left with is nice conversations about dreams that never become reality. That’s why it’s about numbers, tied into accomplishing a mission. So I always push staff to think about the numbers and metrics, and these are some of the things the American Majority staff has accomplished in the last 5 years:

• 24,900+ individuals trained
• 2,100+ candidates trained
• 700+ training events
• 7 year-round, full-time state offices
• 200+ American Majority trained candidates in office
• 50% trainee win rate in the last major election cycle
• 9 full-length training manuals
• 366,000+ Facebook fans
• 31,000 Twitter followers
• 900+ New Leaders Project signers
• Trainings in 45 different states

We’ve learned a thing or two over the past five years. And we will keep learning. We take the idea of creative destruction, and creative disruption, very seriously. We plan to stay on top of our game and make big change happen despite our relatively small size. We strongly believe that people with bad ideas and good organization always beat people with good ideas and bad organization. We’re determined to implement the right ideas effectively and train tens of thousands more to do so as well (actually hundreds of thousands if I have my way), to become better organized in their local communities so that they can implement the right ideas. When we can get enough local communities organized, and bringing about change in their communities, we will inevitably see national change begin to happen. So we put our hands to the plow, let time go, and see what can be, what will be, if we’re faithful in doing the small things well.