Rightist blogger, "Liberty, Discovery,Humanity,Victory."
(On Lee Harris, http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-August/020359.html http://www.policyreview.org/dec02/harris.html )
http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006186.php January 26, 2005 Activism's Onanist Fantasy Ideology by Joe Katzman at January 26, 2005 03:57 AM
Al Qaeda may not be the only ones out there with a fantasy ideology (pace, Lee Harris), and another version of same may explain quite a bit about modern American politics and the decline of the Democratic Party. If you see activism as the default mode of politics, goes this thesis, you shouldn't be surprised when it leads to anti-intellectualism, tolerance of extremists, retreat into fantasy, and a self-defeating kind of partisanship designed to make people feel better about themselves rather than produce meaningful change.
At least, that's the thesis we get when we weave together a series of posts by Marc Cooper, then add follow-ups by Michael Totten, and Bravo Romeo Delta. It's an interesting thesis, and definitely worth a read. Since no one post really brought everything together in one coherent argument, I'm going to use links and excerpts and try to do that.
Let's start with lefty blogger Marc Cooper, who begins by noting an essay by Doug Henwood, Liza Featherstone and Christian Parenti, in Lip Magazine:
"WE CAN'T GET BOGGED DOWN IN ANALYSIS," one activist told us at an antiwar rally in New York a while back, spitting out that last word like a hairball. He could have relaxed his vigilance. This event deftly avoided such bogs, loudly opposing the US bombing in Afghanistan without offering any credible ideas about it (we're not counting the notion that the entire escapade was driven by Unocal and Lockheed Martin). But the moment called for doing something more than brandishing the exact same signs — Stop the Bombing and No War for Oil — that activists poked skyward during the first Gulf War. This latest war called for some thinking, and few were doing much of that.
So what is the ideology of the activist left (and by that we mean the global justice, peace, media democracy, community organizing, financial populist and green movements)? Is the activist left just an inchoate "post-ideological" mass of do-gooders, pragmatists and puppeteers? No. The young troublemakers of today do have an ideology and it is as deeply felt and intellectually totalizing as any of the great belief systems of yore. The cadres who populate those endless meetings, who bang the drum, who lead the "trainings" and paint the puppets, do indeed have a creed. They are activistists."
Marc then points to a left-wing book called "Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture" and notes:
"Both authors identify themselves as being on the left and, indeed, as being engaged in a battle to save the left from itself. They raise (and answer) the hard question: how much activism today is thought-out, strategic and effective? And how much of it is rather just a lifestyle option, a hobby that makes its participants feel better about themselves while accomplishing nothing?"
Over to Lee Harris for a moment, who thought back to his own anti-war days and nailed many modern activists' core belief system:
"My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul."
Note that choice of words. There's a strongly religious quality to a lot of supposedly secular activism, in part due to the baby boomers' cultivated sense of grandisoity. This may help to explain why so many activists seem to confuse onanism with sainthood. Harris continues:
"What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him... Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy."
Unsurprisingly, this approach won't accomplish much unless the decision-makers and influencers are complicit in the theatre, and use it as an excuse to enact controversial policies. That isn't true in the USA outside of its universities, which ties nicely back to Marc Cooper's question about the modern ideology of activism and whether it's really bettering the human condition - or even whether it's about bettering the human condition.
Bravo Romeo Delta sees the same connections:
"The third development is the birth of the modern protest movement. While public protest has had a long and fruitful history in the United States, the Vietnam War era protests have a different tone and culture. The protests of the late 60’s and early 70’s have been mythologized and given a place of primacy among activists. Unfortunately, quite often protests don’t actually convert the unconverted any more than a campaign rally woos supporters of other candidates.... Furthermore, this dichotomy has the effect of (at least in the short run) heightening the divide between the true believer and the rest of the populace – or the divide between the political fanatic and the more cynical centrist.
What makes modern protest even more problematic is that protests over the last few years have all but lost any sense of ideological consensus – or even coherency. One would not be terribly surprised to see a “Free Mumia” placard at an anti-WTO protest although the two subjects have absolutely no relation to each other. Today’s protests have made their tent so large that the only thing they have in common with each other (other than an innate dislike for the current President) is their fondness for chants, slogans and indignation. This embrace of dissonance means that it makes all the sense in the world to associate a whole raft of extremist causes. This has had the effect of creating some very odd cross-branding mechanisms. It’s been seen at any one of a number of mass rallies – protesters arguing about trade policy, environmental problems, human-rights, war, oil, unions without a single cohesive understanding of why they are out there, what they hope to achieve and where they think their going with all the chants, banners, street-performers and “Bush=Hitler” signs."
Yeah, we'd noticed that. Hence the coinage of the term "idiotarianism" to denote the merging of useless ideologies and overheated political crusades into one uber-force of global reaction. Michael Totten shares a few experiences of his own and points to Marc Cooper's words in his own comments section:
"It's extremely difficult to maintain normal personal relationships with hyper-activsists--- the atmosphere leaves little room for doubt or nuance. Perhaps someone should ask Josh what it was in his personal experience that generated so much hostiltity toward the Lefties he once worked with. And then after you ask, you might actually listen. Personally, I can’t think of anything worse than spending a Friday night in a dreary meeting with preachy self-righteous activists. About 20 years ago I ceased that practice. And then about 8 years ago I found it was TOO painful to even attend those meetings as the invited speaker (I would always regret having pissed away a perfectly good evening). And for the last 5 years I try to avoid those functions even as a reporter... I can only watch people twinkle with their fingers so many times before full nausea sets in.
I dunno..my wife is a Chilean Socialist and feels pretty much the same way about those sort of meetings. And my daughther, the infamous union organizer, was probably turned off for life by the BS she experienced as a member of small campus-based “Progressive Student Alliance" during the run-up to the Iraq War. Indeed, that's one reason she went into the unions-- to escape into the real world and flee from the sectarian grupuscle wanking off that dominates activist politics."
When you're even turing off these sorts of people, something is clearly wrong. Bravo Romeo Delta, posting over at Demosophia, works to tie it all together. The evolution of the Democratic Party since the 70s, the declining usefulness of "liberal" and "conservative" labels in modern-day America, and the consequences of "activistism".
You could argue that this is a partisan case, and you might be right. Then again, you can also read Marc Cooper's LA Weekly article about MoveOn and its post-election priorities, which lets the people they're all talking about confirm the thesis themselves.
The Right is not immune to this kind of "activism as ritual worship," and various cultural-religious tendencies make the evangelical movement particularly vulnerable to this syndrome down the road. At the moment, however, the most virulent case is clearly on the left of the spectrum, and the steady erosion of its political influence in the United States during the same period is no coincidence.
As I said, it's a provocative thesis - and each of the bloggers and writers who have contributed to it deserve our thanks for advancing the discussion. I'd also like to talk about a few things that I think they've missed, but I'm going to be away for a while and this entry is future-posted. Instead, therefore, I'd invite readers to consider on their own:
The role played by the larger political environment, from the effects of America's unique 2-party system, to attitudes to risk/entrepreneurship and how a country's political scene reflects that, to how politics is funded and practiced. These variables changes how effective "activistism" tactics are, and how resistant the political system is to their employment in future. See this analysis of Canada to get an taste of the sort of thing I mean - it's a good example of "the 68s" managing to institutionalize themselves, creating a hermetically-sealed echo chamber that has maintained its integrity across multiple levels of media, politics, etc. "Activistism" is much more effective here (as it is in Europe), and if the phenomenon concerns people, it's worth looking at those examples too. "Activistists" intuitively understand what it takes to make their approach politically self-reinforcing. Looking at examples where they've succeeded shows us what really maters and what memes to promote and oppose if we want to break or avoid that cycle.
Next, we have the complicating dimension of religion - and not just in the places you'd expect. Glenn Reynolds' article in The Guardian points out that American politics has two clashing religious traditions acting as undercurrents to political debate. Finally, we throw in... The narcisistic baby-boomer generation, and how the phenomenon of 'boomeritis' gave us this headache in the first place. (Boomer) Ken Wilber's book A Theory of Everything, notes that the boomers, as an "awakening generation, have their strengths and weaknesses: "Boomer weaknesses, most critics agree, include an unusual dose of self-absorption and narcissism, so much so that most people, boomers included, simply nod their heads in acknowledgment when the phrase "the Me generation" is mentioned.
Thus, it seems that my generation is an extraordinary mixture of greatness and narcissism, and that strange amalgam has affected almost everything we do. We don't seem content to simply have a fine new idea, we must have the new paradigm that will herald one of the greatest transformations in the history of the world. We don;t really want to just recycle bottles and paper; we need to see ourrselves dramatically saving the planet and saving Gaia and resurrecting the Goddess that previous generations had brutally repressed but we will finally liberate.... We need to see ourselves as the vanguard of something unprecedented in all history: the extraordinarywonder of being us.
Well, it can be pretty funny if you think about it, and I truly don't mean any of this in a harsh way.... But it's true that if you peruse books on cultural studies alternative spirituality, the new paradigm, and the great transformation that will occur if the world simply listens to the author and his revolutionary ideas, sooner or later this "heroic self-inflation" starts to get to you."
No kidding, and what if Wilber is right? if "activistism" is in fact linked to generational demographics, what could that mean as we think about both the mechanisms for change, and the phenomenon's resistance to that change?
If we want to build a politics that's truly about creating a better tomorrow, the points made by Cooper, Totten, Harris and BRD are worth pondering - and so are the additional factors noted above. Is their diagnosis correct? What's the root cause? How can politics be shifted to something better?
Worthy questions, all. "Activistism" doesn't just cost the left. In the end, it costs us all.
-- Michael Pugliese