online – Leading with Vision: Positive Populism in a Reactionary Moment (a War Industry Resisters Network)

Wednesday, December 4, 2024
8:00 PM to 9:30 PM ET

We find ourselves at the crossroads of peril and possibility. Rapid change feels imminent, yet its direction undetermined. The war machine seems fully charged, but the victors claim to be peacemakers. Americans clamor for change but a vision for the future is absent. Historian Gary Gerstle recently described our transit from the New Deal order – through the Cold War – into the Neoliberal political order, its collapse and the emergence of an order that is, as of now, yet-to-be-defined.

Bill Moyer is the co-founder and executive director of the Backbone Campaign. He has long promoted the use of the grand strategy framework of Col. John R. Boyd for use by change agents engaged in building nonviolent social movements. Backbone’s Artful Activism has drawn from the grand tactical and grand strategic ideas in Boyd’s framework. Principles of grand strategy are most clearly applied in its Solutionary Rail project, a campaign to put rail infrastructure in service of public goods and perhaps more fundamentally in service of building common cause amongst unlikely allies for a positive populist vision for the future.