What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing--and Infighting

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Amanpour and Company
Charles Duhigg
Writer, The New Yorker
What might Democrats learn from the MAGA movement? This is the question Charles Duhigg asks in his latest piece for The New Yorker. Duhigg argues that recent right-leaning movements have thrived by building local networks with lasting community impacts, whereas Democrats have tended to focus on large, flashy shows of force that have failed to produce durable impacts. Duhigg joins the show to explain what he believes it would take for the left to build broader, more resilient coalitions.

Runtime 17:55
Michelle Martin with Charles Duhigg

Article: What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting

Scholars who study both parties agree that in recent decades Republicans have created broad coalitions, whereas Democrats have often been divided by litmus tests on abortion, gender identity, and other topics.Illustration by Ben Wiseman

What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting
Republicans have become adept at creating broad coalitions in which supporting Trump is the only requirement. Democrats get tied up with litmus tests.

By Charles Duhigg
January 26, 2026

Americans who came of age in the nineteen-eighties will remember the emergence of two organizations that aimed to convert people to a cause, revolutionize social norms, and build enduring grassroots movements—Dare and madd.

Dare, or the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, was created in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County school district. From the start, the program was a success. Its stated goal was “to equip elementary-school children with skills for resisting peer pressure to experiment with tobacco, drugs and alcohol.” The initiative was embraced by police departments and politicians, and within just a few years the Dare curriculum had spread to more than three-quarters of the country’s school districts. More than three million students participated annually, and many were taught that even one toke can end in homelessness and despair. The group received admiring press, and was funded by Congress and various philanthropies; the budget at Dare headquarters eventually approached twenty-five million dollars a year. Nancy Reagan and the White House praised the program, and it received support from major companies, from Kmart to Kentucky Fried Chicken.

madd’s origins were far less auspicious; even to its founders it seemed like a long shot. In 1980, Cari Lightner, a thirteen-year-old girl who lived outside Sacramento, was killed by a drunk driver while walking to church. The man had previously been arrested four times for driving while drunk but had mostly avoided serious punishment—a pattern that continued when he was found guilty of vehicular manslaughter for Lightner’s death but given a sentence of only twenty-one months, with a portion spent in a halfway house. In response, Lightner’s mother, Candy, quit her job in real estate to found Mothers Against Drunk Driving. On her own, she began lobbying legislators, telephoning journalists, and appearing on newscasts, pushing for tougher drunk-driving laws. Eventually, women in other cities—many of whom had also been affected by drunk driving—saw those newscasts and read those articles. They sent Lightner letters asking for permission to launch madd chapters in their towns. She often mailed such volunteers a few pages with advice on how to contact local judges, monitor court cases, and petition legislators. But she essentially gave them permission to use whatever attention-getting tactics they thought best.

On an organizational level, Dare and madd were quite different. Dare was overseen from a central headquarters, in L.A., where staff guided nearly every aspect of operations. As Dare spread across the nation, it became an oft-cited example of what scholars of social movements call “mobilizing”—the process of educating people about a cause and then prompting them to participate in public events. When, in 1988, President Ronald Reagan declared the first National Dare Day, and hundreds of school districts let children miss classes to attend boisterous anti-drug rallies, this was mobilizing at work.
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/02/what-maga-can-teach-democrats-about-organizing-and-infighting
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