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Acknowledgments

This book is the result of more than a decade of research and discussion. The conversations began in late 2009, motivated by an emergent pattern that we began calling The Obama Conundrum. Though the new Obama administration had been elected with a strong mandate for “Change We Can Believe In” and enjoyed filibuster-proof control of Congress, it was not delivering major progressive reforms. We began to see this pattern as reflective of a much bigger theoretical question: what are the obstacles to progressive political change in modern-day societies, and how might we overcome them?

Our answer has been shaped by our research and by an ongoing discussion among the authors, with input from a large circle of friends and colleagues. We wish to acknowledge the help, in one form or another, of Gilbert Achcar, Idil Akin, Ahmad Al-Sholi, Kenneth Andrews, Florencia Arancibia, Diana Baldermann, Fred Block, Vivek Chibber, the late Dan Clawson, Mary Ann Clawson, G. William Domhoff, Barry Eidlin, Louis Esparza, Crystal Fleming, Gabriela González Vaillant, Jeff Goodwin, Sebastián Guzmán, Tiffany Joseph, Wallace Katz, Richard Lachmann, Prita Lal, Clarence Lo, Matt Mahler, John Marciano, Mike Miller, Joya Misra, Aldon Morris, Joshua Murray, Fernanda Page Poma, Joseph Peschek, Frances Fox Piven, Charlie Post, Christopher Rhomberg, S.M. Rodríguez, Magali Sarfatti Larson, Kim Scipes, Diana Sierra Becerra, Marc Steinberg, Juhi Tyagi, Arnout Van de Rijt, Nancy Whittier, the late Jeffrey Young, and Gilda Zwerman; the attendees at conferences of the American Sociological Association, Eastern Sociological Society, Stony Brook University’s How Class Works, and the NYU Economic and Political Sociology workshop, where we presented early drafts of pieces of the book; and editors and reviewers at the journals Mobilization, New Labor Forum, and Politics and Society, where some of the material appeared in print. Finally, our argument about social movement strategy is indebted to numerous organizers, most of whom are not famous, who developed keen analyses of power and how oppressed people could reclaim it.