Civic Campaigning Politics: A Muscular Mass Politics for Our Time

The First American Republic is dead. We currently are in the Magafascist Period, a new system that is still solidifying, but a period that is just one aspect of a much wider Renaissance of Global Fascism.

Yet we must not live in despair, as there are clever and brave souls in equal measure still innovating and trying to prefigure the future of democratic politics within and beyond the bounds of magafascism. So let me walk you through the still growing and solidifying concept of Civic Campaigning Politics in 2025 America and abroad.

What is Civic Campaigning Politics? CCP is a method of electoral and non-electoral progressive political action that combines direct mutual aid, direct and decentralized communication, centralized and highly data driven mass volunteer electioneering, and the unifying of political and cultural political spheres.

To imagine this in your mind, think about the campaigns of Kat Abughazaleh, Zohran Mamdani, Omar Fateh, and many others with similar approaches to their electoral activities.

Civic Campaigning Politics is a return to the many methods of the early trade unions and progressive political parties of the past, combining the methods of mutual aid, community building, workers' education and utilizing the most advanced communications tools and methods of their time to do and spread their political work and ideology.

This centers on a few particular aspects that I want to highlight, as I see them as critical to the immediate and long term success of progressive parties to grow and maintain legitimacy. This is not all-inclusive, but a start.

Mutual aid electioneering

Kat Abu aka Kat Abughazaleh who is currently running for Illinois's 9^th Congressional District is the genius we can credit with popularizing this idea, not from theory, but by running her Congressional Campaign by this concept. The very on the nose idea that: what if politicians actually used their campaigns to directly help, support and aid the communities they are asking to represent instead of spending millions on TV ads all the time, and asking for endless donations. What if, when I held an event, I asked people to bring toys, or female sanitary products, or set up a scholarship. All things Kat really did and is currently doing and more.

Win or lose, Kat will have changed actual lives for the better everyday her campaign is running, skyrocketing her credibility, and if wisely embraced by the local, state and national Democratic party, transferred to them as well. Kat will be remembered forever as the lady who ran for office who actually helped a bunch of local people, a legend, and you can't buy political credibility and legitimacy like that with any kind of ad. Only with actual action.

Imagine if you can, that Biden and Harris's Billion Dollar plus campaign spent that money helping out in just the swing states. What if every single event and rally was a mutual aid event targeting that town and region? What if the almost $11 billion spent advertising in the 2024 election cycle in the United States was instead injected right into aiding people, all the time, on every level of elections, top to bottom? Even half would transform these places and peoples.

Kat has innovated and returned politics back to a noble tradition of parties providing social aid, and everyone, everywhere should quickly embrace it. It is the moral and logical route to achieve immediate change all over in and out of government in the process of democracy. While shifting away from the dependency on paid ad media which is ever more ineffective in shifting minds over the long term effort of shifting cultural hegemony which occurs en masse through influencers and on social and digital spaces.

On a selfish practical end political parties should understand when your party is associated with constantly providing support for the community, your elections are secured, and your base becomes ever more solid. Look at the SPÖ (Social Democratic Party of Austria) in Vienna: it literally took fascists ending Austrian democracy and home rule to oust them. Because to the average person, through the wide array of municipal and party social organisations, the Social Democrats directly touched so many people and were seen so often in public actually doing stuff for the people. Sometimes it is that simple, you gain credibility by being seen and really helping people out. Not a photo op, though you can make helping out also a photo op, and should as political marketing, but that is secondary to you helping. Priorities baby. 

Duplication campaigning

In a really eye opening seminar hosted by the Zohran Mamdani campaign and DSA NYC after the primary election his team explained how they built their political machine, and why other groups should embrace their learnings and organizing theory. I am here to tell you they are very correct and you should go watch the entire thing right now. But I will attempt to condense their message here.

DSA NYC explained that their national organisation was in the doldrums post Bernie 2020 and Trump getting re-elected, but locally they were focused on expanding out their elected representatives. DSA NYC explained they had taken a very iterative approach to elections moving from 2016 till now, with increasing success in getting local, state, and national election success. Likewise their membership boomed with Bernie and the revival of a wide electoral left in the United States.

Part of their learnings was the importance of having a massive and highly organized volunteer campaign force which would allow them to operate in every single district, every day of the campaign. They realized that volunteers could not and should not be just followers, but needed to be trained up to take on higher roles and that staffers needed duplication of their skills and knowledge. They needed to teach volunteers everything, so they could duplicate their capacities and thus expand the total capacity of their political campaign.

This seems very simple, but most campaigns have a lot of volunteers who do mostly low level work and the separation between staffers and volunteers is large. Likewise there is not a priority put on training up volunteers to duplicate the capacities of senior leadership and staffers. Even reading that, you can immediately see this is an illogical and self-defeating strategy.

DSA NYC knows very well that time as a finite resource in electoral politics. Each person can only humanely work a certain amount of hours in a day, in a week, in a month. People also need to perform reproductive labour so they can recover to go back to working the next day. Which takes up a lot of time. The only way for a political movement to get more time is to get more people working. One person can give you 40 hours. Two gives you another 80. It’s as simple as that.

The challenge is that people are not perfectly interchangeable with the same knowledge and skills.  But you can teach them, and by teaching them, duplicate your capacity. This is how DSA NYC built a massive machine that can operate everywhere all the time—they have hundreds of duplicated professionalized campaigners who have been trained up, sometimes for years in other campaigns, and thousands more fresh volunteers trained up as well, and it continues to grow. There is a sense of ownership of the Mamdani campaign through this collective effort. And by investing in the capacity to make these collective efforts, DSA NYC campaign expands its membership, providing a community for all these politically empowered and educated people to be together for the long term.

The DSA NYC and similar local chapters like DSA Minneapolis—who also won their own Mayoral Primary with Omar Fateh—have accomplished something tremendous. Empowering volunteers and turning them into educated professional political campaigners grows not just your immediate capacity, but total capacity for progressive politics. Democracy requires building an army of democrats, empowered to think and practice democracy daily. Democracy requires duplication.

The unity of politics and political culture

All the people I have mentioned so far, or that you imagine fall into this melange also share one thing, they are people who are part of and not separate from wider political culture. They are people of the internet, they are posters, they know how to communicate authentically in a digital world, but likewise can do it in person. There is a reason that influencers can get into politics and win, for better or worse. One example of worse is MEP Fidias Panayiotou—a pawn of Vladimir Putin, a grifter and the most corrupt politician in the European Parliament. The reason a man who was kicked out of Japan was able to become a Member of the European Parliament in Cyprus is because he has a very large following in a country with a small population, and was friends with Elon Musk. Personal fame and legitimacy is easily morphed into votes with effort and support, look at Donald Trump.

This also can work for the better. Influencers, which politicians are, can also have good politics, good instincts, and can be great leaders. As influencers, their relevance and salience is dependent on them being heard and seen by audiences. This means being widely and constantly seen in digital, as well as, physical spaces. It also means being boosted by other influencers who transfer their legitimacy to you and vice versa.

Legitimacy flows not from authority alone, but from influencers convincing their audiences that another person, group, or idea is good. Influence is damaged by influencers convincing their audiences that people, groups, or ideas are bad. This is an oversimplification of course, as many other factors exist and this is not a static reality, rather just the current state mid 2025 and for most of the last decade.

Why does legitimacy flow like this? Because audiences develop parasocial relationships with influencers and the trust that builds invisibly from viewer to influencer grows ever stronger over the period they continue to consume the influencer's thoughts and views. In politics you can use this phenomenon to grant legitimacy for your ideology, party, politics and politicians. The far right understands this well and that is why they spend so much time and money on their cultural sphere and participate actively in it, even building and owning the literal digital infrastructure of major social media networks like Gab, X, Rumble, Truth Social and so many more.

This is why, when Vance goes on all these shows constantly, he never appears inauthentic, because he is a creature of that world, it is his natural setting. When Harris went on these shows it appeared inauthentic and just a ritual to try to get votes suddenly. In this age progressives must remerge the political and cultural spheres. As no ideology or party can survive if the people presenting the ideology and the people claiming to be the political wing of the ideology never meet or if they do, it is limited to once every few years during elections. As the culture war never ends, not fighting constantly on every front is surrender. Culture is upstream from politics, and policy is way downstream from politics. 

This is how you win the culture war

To quote the wise Austrian Socialist Flora Felix “Every space is a space that can be politically contested, and if you are not contesting it someone else is, or the space is currently existing in the dominant political status quo.”

Democracy is currently losing the culture war, we are facing an asymmetric threat. For every person trying to push back against the tide of fascist ideas, there is a legion of edgelords and AI-generated slop funneling the far right into the hands, eyes, ears and minds of billions daily.

To solve this quandary we need to fight back, we need to meet and exceed the efforts of the far right. An ideological opponent that is highly internationally organised and controls large degrees of the media landscape and ever more, as efforts are not taken to fight back.

To win the culture war, we need a cultural army, a propaganda effort like in the days of the American revolution. Where influencers changed minds and political ideas, understanding that to win the war for independence, you needed to convince people to fight for it. To be introduced to the idea of liberty.

Every time I read the minutes of old political meetings, the same things are said, which I can summarize as: WE NEED TO MAKE MORE PROPAGANDA! HOW ARE PEOPLE MEANT TO UNDERSTAND IF WE DON'T TELL THEM!? IF WE DON'T TEACH THEM WHAT WE BELIEVE AND WHY!? (emphasis mine.)

Propaganda is a dirty word, but it merely describes a political tool that has to be used to spread ideas. Content made to convince people of political ideas is innately propaganda, regardless of the content or sender. When I make videos for my TikTok I am deliberately making propaganda because I am trying to present people with my worldview and my political lens. This does not mean my content is not factual. Unfortunately, I spend a ton of time reading to make it factual, time which people who do not care about accuracy simply spend making more videos. Yet, as a political communicator, I am always making propaganda, merely by making political content.

Often, the modern progressive understanding of propaganda is that of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, a book with many flaws even setting aside the Bosnian genocide denial. A much more useful understanding comes from the earlier text Crystalizing Public Opinion by Edward Bernays and the later Propaganda by Edward Bernays. He looked at it from a commercial as well as a public policy lens. Bernays' main take was that propaganda not only could work to dramatically shift the opinions of the public, but it could be industrialized and optimized for both private and public sectors. This is why Ed is the father of marketing. He looked at World War One Propaganda’s effectiveness in convincing the Allies to endure and perform incredible things, and likewise saw the Central Powers Propaganda fail, and thought there was something to it. Bernays realised that people attach themselves to symbols and feelings, ideas of things rather than the thing itself. Freedom instead of the Kaiser. The feeling of a Cigarette or Car, rather than the item itself. The vibe, not the material.

This is the backbone of marketing as you and I know it, and of all modern campaigning. We are a century into this now with scarily advanced methods of marketing and individual targeting. Marketing is the science of changing someone's mind or giving them ideas in the first place, and it works scarily well. So what do we do?

Meet my 50502000 plan, which is a minimal starting off point for political parties, modeled for the United States.

Trade Unions, Progressive Institutions and the Democratic Party would fund 50 Influencers per area in all Fifty States and all U.S. Territories with $2000 a month for a year from across the spectrum of content niches and languages.

Meaning not just political influencers, but any kind of content creator that shares political values close enough to yours. Because all forms of content carry political messages, this is why the far right is so aggressive in Trad Wife, fitness and health content.

This would not be a contract, and they do not contact or interact with the creators at all. The Democratic Party would simply go to a Creator's subscription page and enter a custom amount of $2,000 a month as a recurring payment. No weird client relationship, no ethical and moral quandaries for creators taking money from political parties. The Party or Union is merely finding creators making good stuff, with audiences that support them and subscribing, so they continue making that stuff, but with a baseline financial security. No politician can or should complain, they are independent and you control no editorial line. You merely, every year, determine if you want to keep funding them or not. An annual or even biannual review of who you want to support. You're locked in because you want to have a stable cultural sphere, not one dependent on a politician's feelings getting hurt. You want to support your internal critiques as much as your biggest supporters, because your allied critics are your most important influencers. 

Some BIG IMPORTANT DETAILS: this should target mini and micro influencers, not the largest ones already making a living off of their influencer work. Emerging talents or content creators that cannot make a living off of their work are lower hanging fruit. $2,000 a month goes much further for them than it would for creators who are already financial successes. Meanwhile, the platforms these creators must rely on are opaque and often overtly hostile to creators’ political messaging.  Major antifascist Youtubers, like Innuendo Studios, have shut down due to the inability to make a stable living and to support his partner and child by making vital political education content, literally explaining fascism and the modern far right. His alt-right playbook series has millions upon millions of views. Consider my own case, which is fairly typical: I made less than 300 dollars in the last three months from the TikTok Creators Fund and am almost entirely dependent on donations through Paypal. I have also had several of my best videos demonetized for no apparent reason. There is an opaque appeals process, but mine were not being approved. 

A 50502000 plan would, for a year, provide 2750 progressive content creators with the ability to produce media promoting your ideology to their audiences for you in fifty states and all five US Territories. Even if they are all only long form content creators, making only a video a month, that would be 33,000 pieces of content created by this group. This is the scale of effort we need, and this would be a minimal first step. All this would cost $5.5 million per year, which is barely noticeable when we look at multibillion dollar campaign spending by parties in the US.

50502000 is scalable, and allows parties to be participants in promoting voices in the movement and providing them the security to produce content that spreads our ideas and values constantly. Not merely be at the whim of the algorithm-God or lose everything if your account is banned, because far right activists mass report your content and accounts. Our political communications, the transmission and education about our views and beliefs cannot be dependent wholly on algorithms and volunteer influencers. We must take democratic culture seriously and invest directly, to be a participant in and patron of their political culture. 

The Death of the First American Republic is tragic, but likewise it means the happy work of building a Second Republic is here, and the effort to obliterate magafascism is our daily labour. We live in revolutionary times, and where the turning dial lands is up to each of us daily in our efforts to build a world that is more just than it was, and ever more just after that. 

Featured image is Zohran Mamdani with small business owners