Summary
The Three Faces of Power is an organisers’ framework that sorts political power into three kinds: winning visible decisions, building lasting alliances, and shaping how people understand the world. It comes from the US-based Grassroots Power Project. The first face is organised people and money aimed at lawmakers and boardrooms. The second is durable alliances that can set the agenda. The third is “the power to shape people’s conscious and unconscious understandings of the world, of what is politically possible, and of their own place in the world”.
Its argument is that the US right has built all three over decades, while progressive movements have stayed mostly in the first.
Rationale
Its third face is where our inquiry sits: dominant dispositions “help make existing institutions and arrangements feel natural or inevitable”. It talks of “winning the battle of ideas”; we’d say growing contexts.