Triangle Common Good

Come join Triangle Common Good for a discussion on Eitan Hersh's Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change.

As the club begins reviving and expanding a volunteering and organizing wing, we'll be reading Eitan Hersh's Politics is for Power and discussing critically the limits of our own intellectual discussions on politics.

Hersh argues in Politics is for Power that many who regularly consume and discuss political news and count themselves as politically informed are not meaningfully engaged in the work of politics. Politics is treated as a discussion topic and tied to satisfying certain needs, but not towards building tangible power in the political system and enacting a long-term will and agenda.

The book begins with the stories of various grassroots and community organizations that everyday Americans have started as a way of outlining what political advocacy and organizing at the local level can look like, before turning to an analysis of why political parties have turned away from bottom-up organization, local mobilization, and stronger party structures with precinct level presences.

Our interest in this book will be thinking through what meaningful political action looks like and how to encourage in our own lives and club activities a move away from political hobbyism.

Note that we will not use this as an excuse to deny the importance of history, theory, and the intellectual side of politics, but more as a chance to shift our focus.

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor by Steven Greenhouse.

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist who covered labor for the New York Times for 31 years and now works as a fellow at The Century Foundation. His book Beaten Down, Worked Up provides a history of the American labor movement over the past century. This will be a chance to discuss how the history of weakened unions relates to larger weakening of bottom-up social institutions and ways to encourage revitalization of unions without elite capture problems.

As stated in our Mission Statement, one of our value positions is the supporting of unions. This book will be a chance to get a background in the history of union organizing in the United States.

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading C. Thi Nguyen's The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game as we discuss the question of how one can find their values captured by trying to maximize the "scores" used by our society.

C. Thi Nguyen is a Professor of Philosophy whose focus is on the philosophy of games. Having previously written Games: Agency as Art, he is focused on the idea of games and play as a way to realize the value of a thing by the act of doing it, rather than the pure instrumental value it provides. He often uses the example of his hobby rock-climbing, where the route chosen is not meant to be the "quickest" route to the top, but the one that is most interesting and provides a satisfying technical puzzle to solve.

In The Score, Nguyen extends this analysis of games to the ways in which largely quantitative metrics increasingly dominate people's perceptions of success in their life. He charts the ways in which we begin using metrics to track our values, but eventually the metrics become the end instead of the means, and we find our values captured by the institutions and systems responsible for these metrics.