In October 2023, The World Transformed, the annual conference of the British Labour Party’s leftist flank, offered a grizzled socialist organizer a brief speaking slot. He’d been asked the question “Why is the left losing?”—a mystery many liberals in America and around the world have been pondering as well.
The guest, a former organic farmer and scholar of social movement theory named Roger Hallam, looked weary. His lanky frame was noticeably slumped, his plaid button-down shirt hung untucked, and a curl of stringy gray hair escaped from his pony tail. With his beakish nose, sunken eyes, and untamed beard, Hallam’s appearance brings to mind a biblical prophet. His answer to the conference attendees, while far from scriptural, bore the sting of divine judgment: “You’re all fucking cunts.”
While Hallam’s diagnosis drew a mixed response, it can’t have been a surprise. Though virtually unknown in the United States, the 58-year-old, a co-founder and strategic mastermind of the civil resistance groups Extinction Rebellion (often called XR) and Just Stop Oil, is a polarizing public figure in Great Britain—perhaps as famous for his rhetorical vehemence as for his extraordinary record as a climate campaigner. Though his demeanor is often quite affable, even impish, Hallam believes that only direct, emotional language has the power to shake the world’s comfortable classes from suicidal complacency. “We are not facing climate change,” he put it recently in a typical tweet, “we are facing social breakdown—mass rape, mass slaughter, and mass starvation.”
The tactic—which accords with XR’s vow to “act like the truth is real”—has occasionally gotten him into trouble. His oft-repeated claim that surpassing two degrees Celsius of planetary warming, a distinct likelihood on our current trajectory, will lead to the deaths of a billion people occasioned a nitpicky scolding in The New York Times titled, “Just How Many People Will Die From Climate Change?” The writer was none other than David Wallace-Wells, the acclaimed author of the Cassandra-esque blockbuster The Uninhabitable Earth and himself an occasional target of arguably parsimonious rebuttals. Hallam soon fired back, accusing Wallace-Wells of “elite pathology” and adding, “Sorry to ask the question, but what does uninhabitable actually mean?” In any case, his warning had shouldered its way into the prestigious daybook of liberal elite thought, which for Hallam, Wallace-Wells, and anyone else willing to consider the peril before us, probably counts as a modest win.
As discomfiting as Hallam’s methods might be, there’s little doubt the approach has borne fruit. XR made its official public debut on October 31, 2018. Drawing on a year of planning by Hallam and a handful of others, the rally on Parliament Square drew 1,000 people, including the famous teenage activist Greta Thunberg. Just a few weeks later, XR all but shut down London, deploying an estimated 6,000 fired-up protesters from around the U.K. to block all five bridges crossing the Thames, in what became one of the biggest mass acts of civil disobedience in British history. After a variety of demonstrations over the succeeding months, including an action in April 2019 that packed police holding cells, XR’s demand that Parliament declare a climate emergency was eventually met.
Defying the authorities in this way is a proven strategy—see, for example, the Civil Rights Movement—but it is not without risk. In 2017, Hallam and a colleague were arrested for spraying graffiti around King’s College, where he was then working on a Ph.D., demanding it divest from fossil fuels. (The university eventually pledged to do so.) Hauled into court, the pair argued that their action had been a proportionate response to the climate crisis, and the jury agreed, a major win for the movement. But this year, an attempt to mount the same defense in another case was thwarted by a judge, who declared the rationale behind the criminal acts immaterial. In July, Hallam was convicted along with four fellow activists and sentenced to an unprecedented five years in prison for “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” (Hallam’s “crime” had been advocating direct action during a videoconference.) The ruling prompted a harsh response from the U.N.’s special rapporteur for environmental defenders, who warned that the sentence may violate international human rights law. An appeal is set for January 29. Meanwhile, Hallam is being held in a medium-security prison in Norfolk, England. He is making the most of his time behind bars, recording a weekly podcast, cranking out a few books (one about climate collapse and another outlining a new democratic constitution), quietly advising German leftists on electoral strategy, and going on daily runs around the prison yard. Perhaps most important, he’s been doing some hard thinking about what comes next.
Born in Manchester to middle-class Methodist parents, Hallam has been a political activist since age 15. After winning a scholarship to the London School of Economics, he focused his studies on peace activism, and later got involved in workers’ co-ops. Eventually, he decided to try his hand at vegetable farming (Hallam is vegan), turning a 10-acre plot in the Welsh countryside into a thriving operation with 25 employees. A major turning point occurred around 2007, when relentless rains wiped out his entire harvest two years in a row. Forced to lay off his staff, Hallam ceased operations and turned his attention to the growing impacts of climate change. Farms all over the world were experiencing ruined harvests due to extreme weather events, and the problem was only getting worse. Indeed, he realized, our entire food system is far more vulnerable than most of us realize. Simultaneous crop failures in major agricultural regions, an increasingly likely scenario, would lead to widespread famine. In wealthier countries, a sharp rise in prices would increase economic instability and spark social unrest.
And nobody seemed to be doing anything about it, not really.
Hallam rededicated himself to activism, pursuing a doctorate in sociology at King’s College, with a focus on mass social movements, to better understand the characteristics of successful efforts. Drawing on the work of Erica Chenoweth, Paul Engler, Gene Sharp, and others, he began to put together a list of principles. Among them: Movements must dedicate themselves to nonviolence, for spiritual as well as strategic reasons. Typically, only highly disruptive protests, maintained over time, can force change on a Western regime. Like business start-ups, movements need to experiment, learn from failure, and rapidly iterate. And finally, they need to strike a careful balance between accountable leadership and individual empowerment by allowing a small group to make the big decisions—to create the “DNA”—and then giving participants maximum autonomy within those guidelines.
Nonetheless, while XR remains a going concern, with chapters around the world, the original magic that fueled its explosive growth was fleeting—and some of the blame for that no doubt falls to Hallam himself. For one thing, as the group became more of a threat to the established order, Hallam’s defiant approach and polarizing language became a problem. After colleagues rejected Hallam’s proposal to fly drones near Heathrow Airport to halt the construction of a new runway, he formed a splinter group and went ahead with the plan. A few months later, during an interview to promote the German publication of his book Common Sense in the 21st Century, he described the Holocaust as “just another fuckery in human history.” Hallam’s point was that the exceptionalism with which we treat the Nazi murder project can blind us to the many other genocides committed over the centuries and, more importantly, to the era of mass death we’re presently teeing up. It wasn’t taken that way. Though he quickly produced an internal memo suggesting ways in which the outrage might be used in furtherance of the group’s cause, few of his comrades had the stomach for the fight, and Hallam eventually apologized.
Not for nothing did XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook describe him as “our biggest asset and our worst liability.”
Hallam moved on, co-founding Just Stop Oil, which took the same aggressive approach to climate protest that has animated XR, and helping to build an international network of climate protest groups called A22. But even then, he was beginning to reorient his thinking—shifting away from a focus on climate collapse and instead aiming to overturn an entire political system he believes is failing us.
The real problem is “the degeneration of democratic culture, spurred by the capturing of states by corporate power,” he told me. “And a side issue of that is the death project”—the relentless pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—“which is going to destroy the corporate sector and Western society and everything else.” What we really need, he came to believe, is to reimagine, and then recreate, society in a way that supports our shared humanity as we enter a frightening new epoch.
In short: a revolution.
Hallam knows his message—that a nonviolent democratic revolution is not only possible but essential, and that we actually have the power to shape our collective future, as humans have done throughout history—is a challenging one. After all, most of us came of age during a period when progress was thought to march forward of its own volition, albeit in baby steps, and revolution was a dirty word (except when cast in the elegiac hues of 1776). Talk of upending the established order makes us nervous. “We all want a nice, linear transition to a post-carbon future,” Hallam acknowledged, his voice crackling over a temperamental prison phone line. “But that’s not what historical sociology says, right? It just doesn’t happen like that.”
Climate activism alone, he now believes, will never suffice. And while revolution sounds scary, “the concept is simply the necessity to change the political regime to something that’s more functional, more suited to the social context at that point in history,” he said. “It’s a perfectly respectable idea. It’s got its dangers, but welcome to political life. Everything good has its dangers.”
Hallam’s program is elaborate (I would direct those seeking a deep dive to his 30-plus hour podcast, Designing the Revolution), but it boils down to a few central themes: Due to a cascade of carbon-induced emergencies, the coming years will bring major social upheaval. Right-wing forces are adept at exploiting such moments. To combat them, we need to envision and model a new social order based on radically democratic principles. Hallam’s plan for replacing the existing political paradigm involves the formation of a network of citizens’ assemblies—local, regional, and finally national—which will come to act as a shadow government, pressuring the existing system for critical change. When their pleas are ignored (as they almost inevitably will be) pressure will be applied by a disciplined, relentless, and strictly nonviolent mass movement of the sort he’s already helped create several times. Eventually, as the illegitimacy of the government is laid bare, the assemblies will create a new constitution and supplant the system altogether.
No doubt this outline will strike most readers as callow fantasy. But as Hallam points out, revolutionary change always seems impossible until it happens; in retrospect, it appears inevitable. (He offers the example of citizens voting for their own leaders—a scheme that the eighteenth-century European aristocracy viewed as lunacy.)
In considering Hallam’s revolutionary project, the first thing to understand is his unwavering certainty that the status quo is simply no longer on the menu; profound ruptures are coming whether we prepare for them or not. We’ve accustomed ourselves to a world that mostly behaves in predictable ways. But the rate of change is quickening. As we surpass 1.5 degrees of warming and stumble toward two, the capricious will become routine. “All the black swan events are becoming white swan events,” he observed.
On some level, anyone paying attention understands this. We recognize that relentlessly pumping carbon into the atmosphere is destabilizing the complex environmental system on which human civilization rests, that things are going to get worse, and that our inherited political structures, built for times gone by, are not only incapable of addressing the emergency but seem in some essential way precision-engineered to ignore it altogether.
Second, unpleasant though it may be, it’s helpful to contemplate the dire implications embedded within the parade of dry scientific findings we keep reading. A few of the most obvious: As noted above, an increase in floods, droughts, and wildfires will wreak havoc on the global food system. Prices for basic commodities will rise, economies will sputter, social strife will intensify. Densely populated areas will become unfit for human life, forcing hundreds of millions to migrate, and thereby fomenting political chaos in more prosperous regions. Bacteria and insects too will migrate, leading to waves of deadly disease. Struggles over scarce resources will produce military conflict, straining precisely the kind of transnational alliances required to confront a global crisis. And we’ll have to face it all without coffee.
This is not news, or it shouldn’t be.
Hallam calls our current moment a “pre-revolutionary period.” Such eras have arisen throughout history—if never on such a grand scale—and they unfold according to a distinct logic. One of the first casualties is moderation. “The center does not hold,” Hallam said. “You saw this before the Nazis, you saw it before the Bolsheviks, and you’re seeing it at the moment in slow motion in Western democracies.” It’s easy to miss the signs, because “the center still has institutional power,” he added. “In other words, like it’s a zombie space. It’s dead, but it hasn’t yet been pushed over by the new.”
Under such conditions, wrenching paradigm shifts are inevitable. The only question, Hallam suggested, is whether we submit to authoritarianism, as many Americans seem all too eager to do, or embrace a genuinely pro-social revolutionary alternative. While it would have been comforting to hit the snooze button with four more years of Biden-style liberalism—a sound approach in simpler times—when survival hangs in the balance, there are distinct advantages to being awake.
The centerpiece of Hallam’s plan is a radical reinvention of democracy aimed at turning elections into a historical relic. If there’s one thing Americans seem to agree on, it’s that our elected officials do a poor job of representing our interests. According to a 2021 Pew survey, 67 percent think most politicians are corrupt, and 65 percent believe the political system should be profoundly altered. The reason for our mistrust, Hallam says, is quite simple: Despite the widespread belief that we live in a democracy, i.e., a government ruled by the people, the electoral process guarantees the opposite—that only those with access to money, privilege, and elite social status (often all of the above) get anywhere near real power.
This is by design. By the time the Constitution was being drafted in the late 1780s, American elites had already soured on democratic rule, what Founding Father Benjamin Rush called “the Devil’s own government.” They therefore implemented a host of constitutional mechanisms designed to preserve aristocratic prerogatives (most notably, the Electoral College and the apportionment of senators by state rather than population). These systems, along with Citizens United, a democracy-killer the Framers never dreamed of, warp our politics to this day.
For Hallam, the path forward demands a look way, way back, to the origins of democratic governance in ancient Athens, where it was understood that, as Aristotle held, elections were fundamentally “oligarchical.” In his time, representatives were selected not by election but by drawing lots, a process called sortition. It’s a cumbersome word, and not one you tend to hear much outside a small but growing circle of self-styled democracy nerds—earnest academics who, like Hallam, believe our system is due for a fundamental reset. Even so, the concept lives on in our modern jury system, in which enormous power, sometimes over life and death, is granted on a temporary basis to a randomly selected group of citizens.
The approach works remarkably well. On the whole, jurors serve with impressive seriousness of purpose, viewing their work as a sacred duty. Corruption is vanishingly rare. The isolation of the jury room seems to tamp down partisanship. And as it turns out, getting a group of everyday people together, providing them with basic facts, and letting them hash things out results in reasonably good decisions. Not every jury verdict is perfect, certainly, but perfection is not the standard. The standard is reflecting the will of an informed public, and in this respect, there’s little doubt that sortition beats election hands down.
In recent decades, sortition-based citizens’ assemblies have been convened in numerous countries, including France, Australia, Spain, Germany, Britain, Iceland, the U.S., and Ireland, where one such group focused on the contentious issue of abortion, leading to a national referendum that overturned that nation’s ban. These experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that average people, chosen by lottery in a manner designed to represent the full spectrum of political, ethnic, age, gender, and other categories, generate sound policy with minimal rancor. Perhaps more important, by removing expensive campaigns from the political process, sortition undercuts a system in which only the most slick, calculating, and narcissistic need apply, eliminates the corruption of incumbency, and removes the key mechanism through which wealthy elites manipulate the system. “The first thing is these are ordinary people, who are honored to be part of the assembly,” Hallam explained, “so they’re not in this space of power and hierarchy and ‘I know more than you.’ You get rational policy outcomes … but also you create a different political culture, because people listen to each other, and you overcome extreme polarization and all the rest of it.”
The major threat to the Republic has always been “the culture of the rich,” he added, “which puts self-interest before the public interest.” (While this dynamic has a long history, the spectacle of a handful of billionaires dismantling America’s social safety net and civil rights law puts the issue in unusually stark relief.) Under a representative lottery system, Hallam added, “by definition, the one percent are just one percent of the chamber.” As a result, citizens’ assemblies tend to garner exceptionally high levels of public legitimacy. Members of the wider community understand that decisions are being made by people like them and that, indeed, they too may one day be called to serve.
It’s important to note: Sortition-based assemblies are not a partisan project. They are as liable to arrive at conservative policy prescriptions as liberal ones. That’s the point of democracy. For Hallam, specific decisions matter less than the system through which they’re determined. Policies are like eggs, he said. “You want to design the chicken that lays the egg.” Moreover, political categories shrink in significance when the focus is on genuine deliberation rather than surly displays of tribalism. By putting actual power in the hands of average people, assemblies act as an antidote to the political resentment and resignation that sustain our polarized climate. And critically, in cases where a people’s movement actually does manage to topple a regime, assemblies could provide a governance model with wide legitimacy, avoiding the sort of power vacuum that occurred in Egypt after Mubarak was deposed, for instance, and tamping down authoritarian strains that might arise within the movement itself (see Russia, 1917).
Many readers will remain unconvinced. They will doubt the intelligence of their fellow citizens. On learning that assemblies will hear from experts as they deliberate, they will spot an opportunity for bad actors to stack the deck. They will imagine ways in which bias will warp the attempt at representative sampling. They will predict that, as in any group interaction, certain people (loud, charming, aggressive, etc.) will tend to dominate the process.
These are all good points, and advocates of sortition-based democracy have devised a variety of mechanisms to deal with them. While such details are well beyond the scope of this piece, a 200-page study published in 2020 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development offers one good primer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, while the OECD report recommends ways to institutionalize the use of assemblies as a supplement to governmental decision-making, it stops short of endorsing a wholesale replacement of the electoral process. And indeed, in framing the idea as the centerpiece of a political revolution, Hallam parts company with the more tweedy academics who tend to study the subject.
As for those who are persuaded, as he is, that the urgency of climate collapse not only demands but invites a more radical implementation, it’s natural to wonder how exactly he proposes to get there. How does a wonky experiment turn into an authentically transformative revolutionary project?
This may be the toughest question of all, particularly for those of us living in the U.S., a country that seems much too big, complex, powerful, and fundamentally complacent to ever ditch the neoliberal paradigm. Hallam isn’t so sure. “The most exciting thing about American culture is its understanding of the pro-social potentiality of disrupting systems, which Europe doesn’t get,” he suggested. And he readily acknowledged that many of Extinction Rebellion’s most impactful strategies were borrowed from Silicon Valley business culture: the move fast and break things ethos; the holocratic management structure; the acceptance and careful study of failure; relentless iteration, and so on.
Nonetheless, he seems to agree that this change is more likely to begin elsewhere. Imagine the following scenario:
In a rural municipality in a modest-size European country, an experiment is underway—residents selected by lottery have been invited to participate in a People’s Assembly, a series of meetings held over eight weekends. On the first day, after a friendly interaction over coffee and cake, 100 participants divide into groups led by trained facilitators. Their first order of business: identifying the key challenges facing the community. Suggestions range from a lack of affordable housing to the need for a traffic light at a busy intersection. As the session concludes, three priorities are selected by vote. Committees are formed to recruit experts to bring participants up to speed on possible solutions.
Some deliberations are broadcast on social media, drawing an avid audience. Viewers love seeing recognizable types who might be expected to be at odds treating each other with civility and even affection. Citizens in other areas hatch plans for similar experiments. At the end of its term, the People’s Assembly announces a set of policy proposals. It also reveals the selection of one of its members to run for local office on an independent ticket.
The elected representative, Lena, is a high school civics teacher and mother of two, whose enthusiasm, intelligence, and respect for a range of opinions impressed her colleagues during deliberations. While she has scant financial resources and zero experience in politics, she can boast an appealing personal story and a network of supporters who served alongside her and will work hard on her behalf. After all, she has pledged to follow the lead of the assembly (the next cohort, with all new members) when placing votes and setting priorities.
The media loves Lena. She’s a breath of fresh air, an underdog, a real person. The contrast with her opponent, a career politician dependent on wealthy donors, is stark. Lena triumphs, delivering her acceptance speech surrounded by current and former students.
As the idea gathers steam, assemblies are held around the country. The empowerment of ordinary people redirects the populist energy that once fed the far right, which begins to falter. When the following election brings more Lenas into the political sphere, they form a caucus and begin pushing for government recognition of the assembly model. They pass legislation ensuring assembly members are paid for their time, leading to expanded participation.
In time, assembly-based candidates form a party, which quickly adopts its own strict term limits, cycling in new members, upending a culture of stagnant incumbency, and making traditional parties look corrupt and out of touch. When massive floods hit the region, the government is caught flat-footed. Volunteers mobilized by the People’s Party quickly create a network to provide housing, food, and other assistance, cementing the movement’s legitimacy. As localities are beset by further extreme weather events, officials routinely turn to their local assemblies for organizing help and ideas on how to respond.
The country’s political culture perceptibly begins shifting in their direction, and boosters of the model announce a National Assembly with an ambitious goal: to write a new Constitution. Citizens selected by sortition brainstorm and deliberate for months, with meetings carried live on public television. By the time they unveil the contents of their proposal, their work has broad legitimacy. Some elements are controversial—especially the provision requiring a climate impact study for every new piece of legislation—but the televised deliberations demonstrate that objections have been carefully considered. While polling shows 80 percent of the public in favor of the new Constitution, however, the political establishment opposes the change and votes it down.
The new Constitution’s proponents, who have been expecting this outcome, call for protests. People come out in force, blocking traffic. The capital is brought to a standstill. The crowds double the next day, when the nation’s high school students ditch class to join the demonstrations. Labor unions get on board, calling a national strike. The battle makes international news. A pro-democracy movement emerges in country after country, eventually even reaching the U.S.
Could it really happen—a democratic revolution without a drop of blood spilled? Could we survive as a nation without a Chuck Schumer or a Mike Johnson leading the way? In an era when our institutions are rapidly shedding legitimacy; when public anger leads to a national debate over the murder of corporate CEOs; when an empowered far right teams up with a corrupt oligarchy and begins openly dismantling the last vestiges of our democratic system; and when the climate emergencies (let’s not forget those) begin to really bite, I think it’s possible. It certainly sounds a lot better than the other options on the table.
For now, Hallam is well aware, many will cling to the status quo for as long as they can, even those well-credentialed, liberal elites who presumably know better. “They’re all sitting on their hands, right?” he told me as the last few minutes ticked down on his prison phone allotment. “But what needs to be said to the whole space is, ‘Look, the worst possible thing imaginable is going to happen to your values in the next 10 years if we don’t get our shit organized, right? So you have an absolute moral obligation to look at nonfascist alternatives.’”
