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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Activists Undermine Themselves
Imagine a scenario: Two people are being threatened with disciplinary action by an authority figure.
One gets angry, whiny, says things like "It's not fair! I didn't do anything wrong! Come on, please don't do this!"
The other is calm, powerful, assertive, says something like, "Okay, let me be clear: You have not explained where any of this is coming from. You simply assert things that are not true, and then declare what you intend to do without seeking any kind of input on my part. This is amazingly disrespectful and unconstructive. I don't know what you hope to accomplish, but this is not the way to go about it. Now, I would like to help you resolve this if I can, but first I need you to be clear about what is going on here."
What is the key difference in the two? The first one concedes authority, and is plaintive - the second one competes for authority, and is demanding without breaching decorum. Authority is not power - it does not require a rank, position, badge, title, or anything other than a conscious decision to seize and occupy the moral and social high ground. Nonetheless, people respond to it, even when they assume themselves to be in authority.
Regardless of how any given confrontation goes, the person with official authority will be more hesitant to confront an authoritative person again than a whiny, childish, plaintive one, because the latter's complaints carry no weight of any kind while the former is obtrusive precisely because they're scrupulously correct. The latter advertises their weakness and passively requests what they want, while the former advertises their strength and seizes control of the conversation.
Even if an authority figure gets pissy at the challenge and just brings down a hammer, they will be irritated and disquieted by the experience, and thus not happy about the prospect of having to do it again. The more they do it, the weaker they look, and they know that if they're remotely competent. Every successful activist in history has been of the authoritative style - Gandhi and MLK being the most obvious examples. They did not try to whine their way to better treatment like a teenager complaining to their parents - they simply took upon themselves the moral authority that the political authorities were failing to meet.
It seems to me there are far too many of the whiny, complaining behaviors in activism - too many attitudes that are tailor-made to be ignored - and not enough of the authoritative, agenda-setting behaviors.
Too many activists are just against things, and have no alternative ideas in the arenas in which they act. They might have the vague outlines of alternatives left implicit, but the alternatives are not treated as a priority - they remain purely in sketch, treated like an irrelevancy, because they are so certain of never being in a position to have to implement them. And people with this attitude act accordingly, in a self-fulfilling prophecy of powerlessness. It's just an endless cycle of "That's not fair, mom!" complaining, which never works and yet they never get tired of it either.
We see a large-scale example of this problem when we compare the Civil Rights movement with the Occupy movement: Concrete objectives with specific policy demands vs. nebulous rhetoric with purely cultural, non-specific goals. One weathered all storms, endured constant violence, inspired millions, and braved terrorist attacks against them over years; the other dissipated like fog in a sudden wind at the first contact with state force. One exercised authority despite having no power, the other preferred to remain in an adolescent state of complaint as a form of entertainment. That difference in attitude makes the vast divergence in their respective impacts easy to understand.
The results are not hard to foresee: People who complain about the composition of the Democratic Party while refusing to participate in primaries to change it; people who complain about the lack of legislative action (which they invariably blame on Obama), while failing to deliver Democratic majorities in Congress; who complain about foreign policies they offer no alternative to; moaning into the clear blue sky about the mountains of shit piled around them because they can't be bothered to work a shovel. Asking to be ignored, being obliged, and then complaining about it.
On the list of things important to activism, expressing yourself is dead last. Your feelings are the absolute lowest priority in being an effective citizen, and anyone who thinks any part of a politician's job is to be your therapist or surrogate parent is incapable of being anything other than totally irrelevant. What matters is knowing what's true and saying what needs to be said to improve the state of affairs; to seize authority for your position such that you can set the agenda and force the other side into a reactionary posture; and to put gravity on your side rather than constantly fighting it so that you can indulge in fantasies of being a rebel.
Progressives are not rebels and never were. We represent knowledge, truth, and compassion, all of which are the absolute bedrock of genuine authority. When you treat these fundamental values as radical, you do the work of their enemies. Everyone already knows we're right. But it's a latent knowledge - they have to be reminded of it. They have to see the authority of your ideas and values demonstrated in action, not merely hinted at in passive-aggressive complaining about their polar opposites. And the first step toward that is to prove that you actually consider your views authoritative, and not merely opinions to be won or defeated by who shrieks the loudest.
You need no permission to see that the sky is blue and act accordingly.
MineralMan
(147,299 posts)elehhhhna
(32,076 posts)Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)So yeah, progressives are revolutionaries, rebels, just from the act of telling the truth.
True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)We won. Now we need to act like it, and stop making excuses for failure.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)It was threat of communism that kept the capitalists in check, now they have nothing to fear from the left and they are acting accordingly.
Had a discussion with a Foxbot lately?
They know less than someone who watches no news at all and the Fox generated memes seep into the other news sources as well. We are awash in deceit.
True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)It's the opposite: The public knew nothing before the Freedom of Information Act. The US government was an opaque shell, and most of the world had governments where even asking a question was dangerous.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)The principle of the socialist economy of the period of transition to communism: the authorities pretend they are paying wages, workers pretend they are working. Alternatively, "So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work." This joke persisted essentially unchanged through the 1980s.
Satirical verses and parodies made fun of official Soviet propaganda slogans.
"Lenin has died, but his cause lives on!" (An actual slogan.)
Punchline variant #1: Rabinovich notes: "I would prefer it the other way round."
Variant #2: "What a coincidence: Brezhnev has died, but his body lives on". (An allusion to Brezhnev's mental feebleness coupled with the medically assisted staving off of his death.)
(Additional comedic effect in the second variant is produced by the fact that the words 'cause' (delo) and 'body' (telo) rhyme in Russian.
Lenin coined a slogan about how communism would be achieved thanks to Communist Party rule and the modernization of the Russian industry and agriculture: "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country!" The slogan was subjected to mathematical scrutiny by the people: "Consequently, Soviet power is communism minus electrification, and electrification is communism minus Soviet power."
A chastushka ridiculing the tendency to praise the Party left and right:
The winter's passed,
The summer's here.
For this we thank
Our party dear!
I rather think that the difference between the Soviet citizens and American citizens is that the Soviet citizens by and large knew they were being bullshitted by their leaders.
True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)It was uniform, alternate-universe mendacity. And they knew that because what they were told bore no resemblance to what they experienced, and if they too loudly questioned anything the government said, they were arrested and sent to prison for years. And that was the "kinder, gentler" Soviet Union after they stopped just shooting people in the back of the head for not clapping loud enough.
There's no association between that and how the US government operated. First and foremost because the US government actually delivered what it promised in those days - we had the most broad-based prosperity the world had ever seen, and did it without doing most of the things Communism said were necessary to achieve it. US politicians' portrayals of a proud, optimistic, wealthy people were not lies - they were half-truths.
But behind the luster of that prosperity and freedom (by the standards of the age) was a nasty and extremely powerful military-industrial complex - one the American people had little incling about (despite Eisenhower's vague warnings in his parting speech) until the Pentagon Papers, and didn't really hear about in depth until the Church Commission investigations after Nixon was thrown out. Now, the power of that system is very diminished. The power of lies worldwide is diminished by the sheer surface area of information.
In decades past, a Russian dictator would have simply had to issue a notice to be read on the radio or TV once, and continents would have trembled. Now Vladimir Putin has to employ paid armies of trolls to shriek nonsense in poor English in other countries' websites, and is still the despised wretch of the world and a laughingstock.
The high tide of lies and evil was 1941, and it's been in retreat worldwide ever since. And why? Because after the war, truth, honor, decency, and all other humane virtues had and still have authority - they were no longer the ivory tower domain of academics and philosophers. It didn't stop the horrors, but it put them on the defensive. Bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia that wouldn't have caused the world of WW2 to blink inspired outrage a generation later; the Iraq War, that would have seemed like a minor skirmish compared to Vietnam, inspired still more outrage because of how egregiously illegal and unjustified it was, and its shameless leaders didn't dare even bring up the subject of a draft let alone try to institute one.
The lie is weaker and weaker, the truth stronger and stronger. Every progressive leader who sees that, and speaks with the gravity, confidence, and joy of that understanding, and confronts problems with bold authority rather than grim elegies, takes us even further toward everything we have ever wanted.
That is my advice to all progressives, and in particular to Bernie Sanders who is currently our best candidate: Hope and light are everything, and people respond to it when you speak authoritatively as someone who doesn't merely wish for a better future, but who can see one as clear as day. When you really understand the words "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," you start to understand how FDR managed to do as much as he did. Nothing stops us from similar levels of achievement.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)It has all of my OPs since DU3 and you can judge for yourself my worthiness as a progressive.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/~Fumesucker
I put this OP up in April.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026540560
And this one in February.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026259991
Another in February.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026241396
True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)If you rewrote that it would make a good OP but it felt rather accusatory as it is.
True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)You broke it up with some carriage returns but it was still wall of text-ish on my monitor, it would have been overwhelming on a phone.
Blaise Pascal once wrote that he would have written a shorter letter but he didn't have the time. Condensing your ideas down to their quintessence and taking out unneeded distractions is important.
jaysunb
(11,856 posts)bookmarked !!
PowerToThePeople
(9,610 posts)True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)Which is part of my point about feelings not being an argument in themselves.
PowerToThePeople
(9,610 posts)Maybe this evening.
True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)All that I ask is that people try not to confuse disliking what they hear for it being untrue.
Right-wingers can get away with having that attitude because their ideas are rotten to the core anyway, so there's no difference. But people who would serve the truth always have to confront our own shortcomings and improve our understanding.
H2O Man
(75,202 posts)Betty Karlson
(7,231 posts)Very insightful.
Also: K & R & allthatjazz
raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)About militarized police forces and private prisons, about the destruction of education, about species extinction, about new Jim Crow laws, about the loss of democracy, and then turn around and assist and invest in the very corporations and people ensuring they will not only never be addressed, they will increase. That we will have more ignorance and denial and avoidance of the truth.
So few of us are shoveling out, so many are shoveling in.
G_j
(40,429 posts)talking about activism, you are talking about complaining. They are actually more like opposites.
raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)If that isn't activism, I don't know what is.
But yes, I am talking about complaining. People who complain about things they themselves are the primary drivers of are funny. Don't you think?
G_j
(40,429 posts)But I'm not talking party politics, I'm referring to actual issues.
True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)My sense is this: A complaint is revolutionary only if it's disallowed. But when complaints are ubiquitous, you have to offer something more compelling to change society - a vision, backed by someone who can articulate it with authority and respectful bluntness. "Struggle" theater and complaining for personal catharsis just doesn't cut it.
G_j
(40,429 posts)some identify the problem and seek effective action.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)Rex
(65,616 posts)Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)Puzzledtraveller
(5,937 posts)many won't. Acting on emotion is reckless and counterproductive. We all have done it, but I have got much better at playing it cool and studying my opponent before saying things I cannot take back, or worse, make me look ignorant of the issue.
Exilednight
(9,359 posts)People of all stripes no matter whatever descripteor, whether it be activist or defender of the status quo. This website is a prime example. The party purists can, at times, be more whiny than idealist activist.
In a thread earlier today, the person of authority stated " To fuck with interlopers and outsiders, this is the Democratic Party and we will proceed with whatsoever is best for the party." (this, from what is understood, is a party insider)
IF party insiders want to win this election, "to fuck with..." Isn't going to win us an election.
I also believe that how you win is just as important as if you win. If this party takes the low road, and we win, don't act surprised when no one trusts us.
DemocraticWing
(1,290 posts)hunter
(38,817 posts)--sigh--
Unfortunately many of these truths "Progressives" believe in are dead wrong; this mountain we are climbing, from slavery to freedom, has no plateau, no place to rest where "Everyone already knows we're right."
Progressives may have discarded more of their toxic baggage then those crawling along behind them, but they still carry a huge burden of crap.
The only solutions to our poblems that preserve our freedom and our environment are radical, and the people who reject any authoritarian solutions are rebels.
I can say in an authoritative way that what we call "economic productivity" today is a direct measure of the damage we do to the earth's environment and the human spirit.
Meanwhile, the "Progressives" are saying everyone should have a job that pays a "living wage."
The truth is that everyone should have a safe and comfortable place to live, good food, good water, free education for life, and free access to appropriate and effective medical care. Most of all, everyone should have a community to be part of, those hundreds of people we all interact with, family, friends, coworkers, acauaintances, and yes, people on the internet in forums like this one.
Any "work" beyond providing EVERYONE those neccesities, ought to be carefully examined for its actual contribution to humanity, and for any adverse effects on workers, the community, and the environment.
It's better to pay people to go to school, or to work on projects that improve communities and the environment than it is to let a "free market" create jobs that are harmful to workers and the environment.
Working "within the system" isn't going to get us to that place. Radicals, rebels, who are willing to push past the punisments they suffer for their non-conformity will bring their truths to the people from a higher place.
The system tried to destroy people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. They were radicals and rebels who reformed the system, not as politicians within the system, but as the leaders of people disrupting the system by their actions.