Street Roots • October 13-19, 2017
News
Page 7
How to build change from the ground up
Author
Eric L iu
believes
‘You’re
More
Powerful
Than You
T h in k’
BY MIKE WOLD
and that’s the threat they’ve used all over the
country. How would you address that?
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
T T o u ’re More Powerful Than You
Af Think” isn’t about personal
■X. empowerment.
“There is no chicken soup for anyone’s
soul here,” author Eric Liu writes in the
book.
Instead, it’s a self-help book for
communities, rather than individuals. Liu,
founder of Citizen University, lays out how
citizens can create their own power,
summarized in three main principles:
Change the game: Find the arena
where the rules work in your favor, and
attack your opponent’s plan.
Change the story: Give people a vision
and an alternative story justifying your
cause.
Change the equation: Create power by
organizing, and work in solidarity with
allies.
Real Change, Street Roots’ sister paper
in Seattle, talked with Liu about why he
wrote “You’re More Powerful Than You
Think” and his take on the current political
situation.
Mike Wold: Tell us about the meaning o f
your book’s title.
Eric Liu: We live in this age of radical
severe inequality. When you have levels of
inequality and concentrations of wealth at
levels not seen since before the Great
Depression, you have
a very sick body
politic. That plays
out a hundred
different ways. One
is this self-fulfilling
doom loop of
cynicism and
ignorance: “Well, the
game is rigged, so I
may as well check
out.”
The actual history
of this country is
that every time
things have gotten
concentrated to this
level, people have
pushed back. People have remembered that
they are not atomized individuals, that we
together, when we organize and amplify our
voices and go after things together, can
rebalance the power equation.
In recent years, we’ve been waking up.
Occupy Wall Street, the emergence of the
Tea Party, Black Lives Matter, the
Dreamers, $15 an hour, and, of course, now
the resistance to Trump. The next step is,
“OK, you’re awake; do you know what to
do?” My book is, and our work at Citizen
Univesity is, about trying to give people a
pathway from wakefulness to action.
M.W.: Explain your advice to “attack your
opponent’s plan. ”
E.L.: I paraphrase from Sun Tzu’s “Art of
War”: “Don’t attack your enemy’s forces;
attack your enemy’s strategy.” A good
example has been the Fight For 15. The
dominant strategy of people, particularly
the business community, who have opposed
P H O T O B Y JO N W IL L IA M S
Eric L iu is the founder o f Citizen University.
raising the minimum wage was intimidation.
“If you force me to raise wages, I’m going to
have to fire you,” which is connected to a
storyline, a rationalization, in which
business people are the job creators and it’s
only by coddling and taking care of job
creators that they let their prosperity leak
down to everybody else.
In the past, the approach; “I’m trying to
raise the minimum wage” was, “Hey, that’s
not nice. It’s mean to pay wages that are so
low.” That’s not enough to get you across
the line. What the low-wage workers in
SeaTac did was to attack that trickle-down
strategy and say, “We’re the source of
prosperity. We the workers. When we have
more money in our pockets, then businesses
have more customers. And the whole
economy gets healthier.”
When I’m making $9 instead of $7 or $15
instead of $11,1 can buy my kid new clothes.
I can pay rent. I can get my spouse a dinner
on her birthday. Who benefits? Every
business owner, every participant in the
wider community. That flipped storyline
wasn’t just making an argument from charity;
it went directly at the heart of the strategy of
intimidation and self-justification.
M.W.: So they changed the game and
changed the story. B u t isn’t that the story that
we’re always given for not regulating business?
E.L: You see variations of the trickle-
down story all over the place. The idea that
you shouldn’t push developers too hard for
concessions on affordable housing because
“they’re the goose that lays the golden egg.
You don’t want to chase them out of Seattle,
do you?” I reject that argument
fundamentally. When you see the way that
trickle-down argument is being used, that’s
step No. 1. Step No. 2 is flipping that script
in a way that reminds people that it’s the
many, not the few, who are the source of
community vitality.
M.W.: B u t under the rules o f the game,
businesses can eventually pick up and leave,
E.L.: Among the places that Boeing has
taken jobs to is Kansas. Kansas has been
running this experiment in trickle-down
economics, which has been an absolute,
catastrophic failure. Any self-interested
corporation is going to realize that if they
relocate in a race to the bottom to the
lowest-wage, lowest-tax place, they’re going
to get a place in which the schools stink,
public services aren’t funded and the
community’s breaking down. Chasing the
lowest cost is literally penny wise and
pound foolish.
It is true that a company can say, “We’re
going to pull up stakes,” and that threat of
intimidation is real and you have to do
some negotiating. But you don’t have to
negotiate from weakness. Uber threatened
the city of Austin, Texas, when Austin was
beginning to contemplate a ballot measure
that would have regulated ridesharing
services responsibly.
Uber said, “If you regulate us, we’re
going to pull out.” But the people of
Austin organized and they said, “We dare
you. Go ahead. Leave.” Uber left, and
guess what happened. New services came
in to fill the vacuum to do ridesharing in an
ethical and responsible way.
It’s not an either-or, 100 percent or zero
percent in any negotiation. It’s better to have
Boeing in this state than not. But how much
are we willing to give away, and how much
are we willing to press Boeing to actually
make investments in our education system?
To make investments in the affordability of
housing?
M.W.: D on’t businesses have a much easier
time accessing power than citizens?
E.L.: You bet. We the people and workers
can organize and generate power out of thin
air. That’s the sense in which I mean power
is infinite. What seems like a fixed zero-sum
situation can always be reshuffled. But once
you’ve activated your side, the other side is
also free to activate new power. There’s a
word for this continuous back and forth of
activating power and counterpower, and that
word is politics.
When democracy works, because there
are more of the many than the few, then the
interests of the many get reflected in public
policy-making. The problem right now is
that too many of the many are sitting it out.
It makes it too easy for the few to rig the
game. I don’t mean that those who lack
power can suddenly become infinitely,
perpetually powerful; I just mean that they
can change the equation in a way that gives
them another round to fight.
M.W.: So what’s the solution to the housing
market running amok in Seattle?
E.L.: Agendas like what was put together
in the HALA (Housing Affordability and
Livability Agenda) plan are in the right
direction. But what’s needed is wrapping
that bundle of proposals in a narrative of our
responsibility to each other that says, “If you
don’t do these things, this city will die.” This
city will eventually become a disconnected
See ERIC LIU, page 9