When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders step on stage during their progressive populism tour, the energy in the air is unmistakable. Their power to summon crowds, to animate disillusioned young people, to make ideals feel urgent and alive—that’s real. They have become the clearest inheritors of a tradition that believes in oratory as a tool of movement-building. And the crowds are listening. They chant, they cheer, they march.
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But then they go home. And that’s where the work too often stops.
The problem is not the rally. The problem is the void that follows. The sheer emotional momentum of being part of something—a sea of people unified by purpose—dissipates into the static of daily life.
A rally cannot sustain a movement. It generates attention. It evokes emotion. But it doesn’t, by default, produce action. It doesn’t hold people to the hard, tedious, often local work of governance, organizing, and persistence. This is the central challenge for leaders of the national progressive movement: how to build durable structures to channel that energy into sustained civic and political power.
A spectacle is not a strategy. It can, however, be a starting point for something even more powerful. That’s something I learned not from my policy work in Washington but as a musician who has toured the world, playing sold-out shows at 20,000-person arenas around the country.
In the music industry, a show is never just a show. It’s a point of entry into something bigger. If fans just applaud and leave, we haven’t fully done our jobs. We want our audience to feel part of a community; we want them to act long after the concert ends. And the fans take on a surprising amount of the work to make that happen. They buy the merch, they follow us online, they listen and re-listen to the messages in our music that drew them into the fandom, and perhaps most importantly, they recruit friends and family to become fans themselves.
Social movements have a lot to learn from this. The mechanics of fandom can turn passive audiences into active participants. It’s not just about charisma; it’s about infrastructure. We start with effective storytelling and build on that by giving fans an insider’s view into what we do, whether through tour documentaries or social media posts. We engage them in serious dialogue where they can interact with us, and in fun games that put them in competition or collaboration with one another. We reach new audiences by featuring on other artists’ work and by inviting other artists to feature on ours. And that’s just the beginning.
People want to be involved—and not just as music fans. Because of my climate advocacy work, I’ve had literally thousands of fans come up to me at shows and ask for advice on how they can best contribute to the causes that matter to them. And I’ve seen how easily that hunger fades when the pathways are opaque. So last year, our band brought civic actions to concerts, setting up tables where people could sign petitions, contact representatives on important local issues, register to vote, and scan QR codes where they could sign up for future actions. As a result, more than 35,000 fans took what may have been their first steps into advocacy—not because they suddenly decided to be activists but because my nonprofit organization, Planet Reimagined, met them with structure, with clarity, and with on-ramps that made sense in their world.
There seems to be a misconception among our political leaders that civic engagement is purely intuitive, that people fired up by a speech will somehow find their way to a city council meeting, a ballot initiative, a local organization’s strategy session. But when we fail to give people concrete roles, meaningful feedback, or localized connection points, we lose them, not because they don’t care but because we never gave them a way to stay.
The truth is: participation is a learned habit. It requires invitation, orientation, repetition. Movements don’t scale because of emotion alone. They scale because someone built the scaffolding.
When that scaffolding exists, it works. We saw it with the rise of climate- and housing-justice coalitions that pushed New York State to pass legislation in 2023 permitting the state power authority to build renewable energy projects. We saw it in the coordinated pressure from voting rights groups that in 2023 helped deliver automatic voter registration and early voting access in Michigan—a victory that began at the grassroots level. These wins were not produced at rallies. They were built in the quiet persistence that followed.
Leaders like AOC and Bernie don’t need to be less magnetic. They don’t need to hold fewer rallies or tone down their message. But beyond encouraging people to run for office, they would be wise to create opportunities for engagement after the rallies are over. If movements are to endure, they must be careful not to mistake emotional resonance for political effectiveness. They must take seriously the architecture of engagement—the hard, strategic, often unglamorous labor of translating applause into policy. It takes talent to inspire a large audience at a live event. But it takes concrete tactics to ensure that when people leave the rally or close the livestream, they know not just what they feel, but what they’re supposed to do next.
Adam Met is the author of the new book AMPLIFY: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World.
