When the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders go up on stage during their progressive populism tour, the energy in the air is undoubtedly. Their power to invoke crowds, to animate young disillusioned, to ensure that the ideals feel urgent and alive – it is real. They have become the clearest heirs of a tradition that believes in an oratory as a movement construction tool. And the crowd listens. They sing, they applaud, they walk.
But then they go home. And this is where work stops too often.
The problem is not the rally. The problem is the following vacuum. The emotional momentum to be part of something – a sea of people unified by ends – goes to the static of daily life.
A gathering cannot support a movement. It generates attention. This evokes emotion. But it does not produce, by default, the action. It does not retain people from the works of governance, organization and hard persistence, tedious and often local. This is the central challenge for leaders of the national progressive movement: how to build sustainable structures to channel this energy into a sustained civic and political power.
A show is not a strategy. It can however be A starting point For something even more powerful. This is something I have not learned My political work In Washington but as a musician who has gone around the world, playing shows closed in arenas of 20,000 people across the country.
In the music industry, a show is never only a show. This is an entry point in something bigger. If the fans applaud and leave, we have not fully done our job. We want our audience to feel part of a community; We want them to act long after the end of the concert. And fans take a surprising amount of work to get there. They buy the merchant, they follow us online, they listen and rebalance the messages from our music that attracted them to the Fandom, and perhaps above all, they recruit friends and family to become fans themselves.
Social movements have a lot to learn from this. Fandom mechanics can transform the passive public into active participants. It is not only a question of charisma; These are infrastructure. We start with an effective narration and we build it by giving fans a point of view of an initiate on what we do, whether through documentaries of the tour or publications on social networks. We engage them in a serious dialogue where they can interact with us and in fun games that put them in competition or in collaboration with each other. We reach new audiences by stalking the work of other artists and inviting other artists to appear on ours. And this is only the beginning.
People want to be involved – and not only as music fans. Due to my climate advocacy work, I literally brought in thousands of fans during shows and ask for advice on how they can better contribute to the causes that matter. And I saw how easily this hunger fades when the trails are opaque. Last year, our group therefore brought civic actions to the concerts, by creating tables where people could sign petitions, contact representatives on important local questions, register to vote and scan the QR codes where they could register for future actions. Consequently, more than 35,000 fans took what could have been their first steps in the plea – not because they suddenly decided to be activists, but because my non -profit organization, Planet reinvented, met them with a structure, with clarity and with ramps that had meaning in their world.
There seems to be a false idea among our political leaders that civic commitment is purely intuitive, that people expressed by a speech will somehow find their way to a meeting of the municipal council, a voting initiative, a local organization strategy session. But when we do not give concrete roles, significant comments or localized connection points, we lose them, not because they don’t care but because we have never given them a way to stay.
The truth is: participation is a habit learned. It requires an invitation, an orientation, a rehearsal. The movements do not go to emotion alone. They evolve because someone has built the scaffolding.
When this scaffolding exists, it works. As we have seen with the rise of air-conditioned coalitions and adjustment housing which prompted New York State to adopt legislation in 2023 allowing the State Power Authority to build renewable energy projects. We saw it in the coordinated pressure Defense groups of voting rights which, in 2023, helped to register automatic voters and access to the early vote in Michigan – a victory that started at the local level. These victories were not produced during rallies. They were built in the silent persistence that followed.
Managers like AOC and Bernie do not need to be less magnetic. They don’t need to hold less rallies or reduce their message. But beyond encouraging people to stand in the elections, they would be wise to create engagement opportunities after the end of the gatherings. If the movements must last, they must take care not to confuse emotional resonance with political efficiency. They must take seriously the architecture of commitment – hard, strategic and often little glamorous work of the translation of applause in politics. You need talent to inspire a large audience during a live event. But you need concrete tactics to make sure that when people leave the rally or close the livestream, they don’t only know what they feel, but what they are supposed to do next.
Adam met is the author of the new book Amplify: how to use the power of the connection to engage, act and build a better world.