I wish you had written this when I first got into activism back in the winter of 2019/2020. It would have helped me focus on the aspects of change that made the most sense for me. For example, I'm not a huge fan of electoral organizing, but I do like reading and writing. I wish I had focused on the persuasion paths and just wrote a lot more and used basic digital marketing to get my word out there.
Just reading Julia Galef's excellent book "The Scout Mindset" and she has a relevant anecdote.
---
In chapter 7, we met a band of AIDS activists in New York in the 1990s called the Treatment Action Group. They lived their lives against the background of a ticking clock; their friends and lovers were dying around them at a devastating rate, and most of them had the virus themselves. When the depressing news hit in 1993 that the drug AZT was no more effective than a placebo, it sparked an important update for the activists. Previously, they had been pressuring the government to release new drugs that seemed promising right away, instead of going through the standard testing pipeline, which can take years. They now realized that had been a mistake born of desperation. “I felt I learned an important lesson,” said member David Barr, “which is that as a treatment activist, to the greatest extent possible, let study results determine the policy positions I support and for which I advocate. My hopes and dreams and fears should not guide that which I advocate for.”18 Moving forward, their mandate became: Get the science right. None of them were scientists themselves. Barr was a lawyer; other activists worked in finance or photography or screenwriting. But they were extremely motivated learners. They started with Immunology 101 textbooks, meeting up every week for what they dubbed “science club,” giving each other assignments and maintaining a glossary of all the jargon they were unfamiliar with. They also dove into the politics of government research, familiarizing themselves with how funding was structured and how the drug trials were conducted. The disorganization they discovered alarmed them. “It sort of felt like reaching the Wizard of Oz,” said one activist named Mark Harrington. “You’ve gotten to the center of the whole system and there’s just this schmuck behind a curtain.”19 The more they learned, the more they realized this fight couldn’t be won with their current brand of activism. They had been focused on attention-grabbing protests, like blocking traffic and chaining themselves to politicians’ desks. One night, they even snuck over to the home of conservative senator Jesse Helms and, under the cover of darkness, enveloped his house in a giant condom. But to improve the way drugs were being developed and tested, they would need to be on the inside, working with bureaucrats and scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). That decision was not popular with their fellow activists, most of whom were still furious at the government for its sluggish and, at times, apathetic response to the AIDS crisis. “There was this sort of pseudo-analogy that the NIH was like the Pentagon or something—that we shouldn’t meet with them and that they were bad or evil,” Harrington recalled.20 To tell the truth, it was a bittersweet shift for the Treatment Action Group, too. They were “crossing over” from being outside the structures of power, to inside—and in the process, sacrificing some of their ideological purity. “I knew that we would never be so pure and fervent in our belief that we were right, because we were actually going to be engaged and, therefore, be more responsible for some of the things that actually happened,” Harrington said.21 That willingness to relinquish ideological purity paid off. The “citizen scientists” were so knowledgeable about the cutting edge of AIDS research that it didn’t take long for the scientists at NIH to start taking their proposals seriously. One of those proposals was for a new kind of study called a “large simple trial,” which one of the activists named Spencer Cox had discovered while teaching himself study design. With a sufficiently large number of patients, the study could give them answers about a drug’s effectiveness much more quickly—in just months, instead of years—without sacrificing rigor. Because they now had the Food and Drug Administration’s ear, they were able to convince the FDA commissioner to take their study design plan to the drug companies, which in turn agreed to use a modified version of Cox’s design to test the latest batch of AIDS drugs. The results were announced at a medical conference in January 1996. They were dramatic. One drug kept patients’ viral load below detectable levels for up to two years. Another reduced mortality by half. In combination, they represented a stay of execution for AIDS patients. As Spencer Cox sat in the audience staring at those results on the slide, his eyes welled up with tears. “We did it,” he said. “We’re going to live.”22 Over the next two years, mortality from AIDS in the United States plummeted by 60 percent. It wasn’t over, not by a long shot, but the tide had finally turned.
I like this post, but I don't agree with the pop culture part of it. I'll concede that pop culture representations can be helpful when a group is actually seen as subhuman by parts of the public -- Will & Grace in the 90s, Uhura on Star Trek in the 60s. But there's a declining marginal utility, e.g. putting black characters in TV shows after we had a black president for eight years can't possibly have the same impact.
The more serious problem is that the effects of pop culture on political views are extremely complex, ambiguous, and hard to predict. E.g., is The Wire good because it confronts us with the grim reality of urban poverty and the consequences of the war on drugs? Or is it bad because it reinforces stereotypes about black criminality? The answer depends entirely on the audience, how each viewer interprets the show.
Bottom line is I think pop culture activism falls prey to the same fallacy as the other types of ineffective activism MY highlights -- the idea that symbolic victories are an acceptable substitute for material gains.
This is excellent. I think we could also use a pointed "where Democratic officials are leaving power on the table" post. Like- why do blue states not lower the voting age? The average reading level is around 4th grade. Why not lower the voting age to there- 12 years old? Sure, it'd probably get trimmed back in debate, but if you start at 16/17, it gets trimmed back to what we already have. Lowering the age would get more people in the habit of voting before they hit the challenging moving all the time college age, and they may move to a less blue state where they'll have that voting habit established! That's my SlatePitchOnSlowBoring.
I’m going to plug for good old fashioned activism! Especially in electoral politics. You don’t have to do a ton, just do it regularly. Donate a few dollars. Call your Reps every week (put their local number in your phone and leave a thirty second comment). Log into your zoom townhall. Go to your monthly local Democratic Party meetings. Meet people and hang out with them.
I convinced thirteen friends and family members to vote for my preferred Democratic primary candidate by holding “fill out your ballot” parties. I didn’t pressure anyone, I just explained why I thought my choice was best.
I live in California, so it took me, no joke, ~20 hours to fully research my ballot. But then I had credibility when I made my suggestions.
I wish progressive activists cared more about the existence of Jon Tester than the existence of AOC. The former is far more responsible for positive change than the latter.
Activists get mad at Manchin, but the reason Manchin wields so much power is the failure of several senate candidates to win a seat in 2020 (and 2018/16 as well). Some of this is clearly not their fault, of course, but I don’t believe they’ve helped.
I think this piece highlights a number of strong opportunities to create change - but leaves out a really direct one: go and help governments implement policies that exist today that could work more effectively.
This is often most visible or acute in technology gaps (e.g. people struggling to get unemployment checks during the pandemic because those systems were hard to change, or the fact that the Emergency Rental Assistance program funded by the American Rescue Plan takes a while to roll out because governments have to spin up entire new programs).
It's also visible in the design of application processes for potential participants - this was the genesis of the idea for https://www.getcalfresh.org/, which reduced the barrier to applying for SNAP benefits in CA (in 2013, only 66% of eligible residents participated; by 2017, it was up to 71%).
Doing this work is, like Matt describes politics, a bit like the slow boring of hard wood - there's no miracle that's going to suddenly transform the implementation of every government service to be perfect, but it's a very straightforward way to make change, and ultimately _implementation matters_ for any policy to succeed.
This may be a relatively brief item, but it’s an especially important one. The activist insistence on counterproductive flamboyance that you mention runs all the way down through people who just buy into the activists’ arguments.
One of the many good ideas you give here is something you’ve put more nuance into on other occasions, and I think we need to keep sight of that nuance. It’s the idea of mounting primary challenges to centrist incumbents. Taken only so far, it’s good advice to the left but not to the Democratic Party. As I think you’ve written elsewhere, and as I know I have, a strategy for gaining control of the Democratic habitat is nothing like a strategy for gaining control of the government and actually getting things done. On the contrary, when radicals come to dominate a party, they’re liable to make the party less relevant to the country.
The Democratic Party is unfortunately held responsible for everything left of center on the US political spectrum. People who ought to stand or fall with the fortunes of a Social Democratic Party or a Socialist Party are instead working to manipulate the more massive Democratic Party by tricks of leverage. Sane, politically competent Democrats have got to stop equivocating about their relation to the sloganeering, posturing hard left and act decisively to neutralize it before it delivers the country to the hard right:
What progressive political action committees, lobbying groups or grassroots movements are actually the most effective in a measurable way?
Which groups are even trying to measure their effectiveness rather than provide jobs for people interested in their cause areas? What does it really take to move public opinion?
If I have marginal dollars to give or time to donate and am interested in creating a more just and equitable American society, where should I give?
Where is the "Harvard Business Review" of civic change?
Seems like it should definitely be possible to answer some of these questions in a serious way, instead of having endless philosophical discussions about theories of change based on people's subjective experiences, different readings of history, and how much we find activists annoying or not.
People tend to forget the fun fact that Jon Tester was reelected in 2012 because he successfully got wolves de-listed from the endangered species list via a budget bill rider. This was the #1 culture war issue in Montana at the time.
If Wolf Activists had their way and wolves remained on the endangered list, it is almost certain that Tester would not have been reelected, and thus the ACA would never have passed.
Have you ever noticed how basically all celebrities get to be "activists" in their bios? But, for the most part, it seems what they do is tweet political things occasionally and talk about their beliefs in public.
When regular people do this kind of thing, people used to call it "slacktivism," but we're supposed to pretend that when some of the most influential people in our society do it they are engaged in this noble endeavor to speak truth to power? I just find it distasteful.
I also find it distasteful, but also...maybe they're right? I mean, maybe their celebrity status pushes their tweeting into a much more effective category than your average rando?
I wish you had written this when I first got into activism back in the winter of 2019/2020. It would have helped me focus on the aspects of change that made the most sense for me. For example, I'm not a huge fan of electoral organizing, but I do like reading and writing. I wish I had focused on the persuasion paths and just wrote a lot more and used basic digital marketing to get my word out there.
What a great picture.
Just reading Julia Galef's excellent book "The Scout Mindset" and she has a relevant anecdote.
---
In chapter 7, we met a band of AIDS activists in New York in the 1990s called the Treatment Action Group. They lived their lives against the background of a ticking clock; their friends and lovers were dying around them at a devastating rate, and most of them had the virus themselves. When the depressing news hit in 1993 that the drug AZT was no more effective than a placebo, it sparked an important update for the activists. Previously, they had been pressuring the government to release new drugs that seemed promising right away, instead of going through the standard testing pipeline, which can take years. They now realized that had been a mistake born of desperation. “I felt I learned an important lesson,” said member David Barr, “which is that as a treatment activist, to the greatest extent possible, let study results determine the policy positions I support and for which I advocate. My hopes and dreams and fears should not guide that which I advocate for.”18 Moving forward, their mandate became: Get the science right. None of them were scientists themselves. Barr was a lawyer; other activists worked in finance or photography or screenwriting. But they were extremely motivated learners. They started with Immunology 101 textbooks, meeting up every week for what they dubbed “science club,” giving each other assignments and maintaining a glossary of all the jargon they were unfamiliar with. They also dove into the politics of government research, familiarizing themselves with how funding was structured and how the drug trials were conducted. The disorganization they discovered alarmed them. “It sort of felt like reaching the Wizard of Oz,” said one activist named Mark Harrington. “You’ve gotten to the center of the whole system and there’s just this schmuck behind a curtain.”19 The more they learned, the more they realized this fight couldn’t be won with their current brand of activism. They had been focused on attention-grabbing protests, like blocking traffic and chaining themselves to politicians’ desks. One night, they even snuck over to the home of conservative senator Jesse Helms and, under the cover of darkness, enveloped his house in a giant condom. But to improve the way drugs were being developed and tested, they would need to be on the inside, working with bureaucrats and scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). That decision was not popular with their fellow activists, most of whom were still furious at the government for its sluggish and, at times, apathetic response to the AIDS crisis. “There was this sort of pseudo-analogy that the NIH was like the Pentagon or something—that we shouldn’t meet with them and that they were bad or evil,” Harrington recalled.20 To tell the truth, it was a bittersweet shift for the Treatment Action Group, too. They were “crossing over” from being outside the structures of power, to inside—and in the process, sacrificing some of their ideological purity. “I knew that we would never be so pure and fervent in our belief that we were right, because we were actually going to be engaged and, therefore, be more responsible for some of the things that actually happened,” Harrington said.21 That willingness to relinquish ideological purity paid off. The “citizen scientists” were so knowledgeable about the cutting edge of AIDS research that it didn’t take long for the scientists at NIH to start taking their proposals seriously. One of those proposals was for a new kind of study called a “large simple trial,” which one of the activists named Spencer Cox had discovered while teaching himself study design. With a sufficiently large number of patients, the study could give them answers about a drug’s effectiveness much more quickly—in just months, instead of years—without sacrificing rigor. Because they now had the Food and Drug Administration’s ear, they were able to convince the FDA commissioner to take their study design plan to the drug companies, which in turn agreed to use a modified version of Cox’s design to test the latest batch of AIDS drugs. The results were announced at a medical conference in January 1996. They were dramatic. One drug kept patients’ viral load below detectable levels for up to two years. Another reduced mortality by half. In combination, they represented a stay of execution for AIDS patients. As Spencer Cox sat in the audience staring at those results on the slide, his eyes welled up with tears. “We did it,” he said. “We’re going to live.”22 Over the next two years, mortality from AIDS in the United States plummeted by 60 percent. It wasn’t over, not by a long shot, but the tide had finally turned.
I like this post, but I don't agree with the pop culture part of it. I'll concede that pop culture representations can be helpful when a group is actually seen as subhuman by parts of the public -- Will & Grace in the 90s, Uhura on Star Trek in the 60s. But there's a declining marginal utility, e.g. putting black characters in TV shows after we had a black president for eight years can't possibly have the same impact.
The more serious problem is that the effects of pop culture on political views are extremely complex, ambiguous, and hard to predict. E.g., is The Wire good because it confronts us with the grim reality of urban poverty and the consequences of the war on drugs? Or is it bad because it reinforces stereotypes about black criminality? The answer depends entirely on the audience, how each viewer interprets the show.
Bottom line is I think pop culture activism falls prey to the same fallacy as the other types of ineffective activism MY highlights -- the idea that symbolic victories are an acceptable substitute for material gains.
This is excellent. I think we could also use a pointed "where Democratic officials are leaving power on the table" post. Like- why do blue states not lower the voting age? The average reading level is around 4th grade. Why not lower the voting age to there- 12 years old? Sure, it'd probably get trimmed back in debate, but if you start at 16/17, it gets trimmed back to what we already have. Lowering the age would get more people in the habit of voting before they hit the challenging moving all the time college age, and they may move to a less blue state where they'll have that voting habit established! That's my SlatePitchOnSlowBoring.
I’m going to plug for good old fashioned activism! Especially in electoral politics. You don’t have to do a ton, just do it regularly. Donate a few dollars. Call your Reps every week (put their local number in your phone and leave a thirty second comment). Log into your zoom townhall. Go to your monthly local Democratic Party meetings. Meet people and hang out with them.
I convinced thirteen friends and family members to vote for my preferred Democratic primary candidate by holding “fill out your ballot” parties. I didn’t pressure anyone, I just explained why I thought my choice was best.
I live in California, so it took me, no joke, ~20 hours to fully research my ballot. But then I had credibility when I made my suggestions.
I wish progressive activists cared more about the existence of Jon Tester than the existence of AOC. The former is far more responsible for positive change than the latter.
Activists get mad at Manchin, but the reason Manchin wields so much power is the failure of several senate candidates to win a seat in 2020 (and 2018/16 as well). Some of this is clearly not their fault, of course, but I don’t believe they’ve helped.
I think this piece highlights a number of strong opportunities to create change - but leaves out a really direct one: go and help governments implement policies that exist today that could work more effectively.
This is often most visible or acute in technology gaps (e.g. people struggling to get unemployment checks during the pandemic because those systems were hard to change, or the fact that the Emergency Rental Assistance program funded by the American Rescue Plan takes a while to roll out because governments have to spin up entire new programs).
It's also visible in the design of application processes for potential participants - this was the genesis of the idea for https://www.getcalfresh.org/, which reduced the barrier to applying for SNAP benefits in CA (in 2013, only 66% of eligible residents participated; by 2017, it was up to 71%).
Doing this work is, like Matt describes politics, a bit like the slow boring of hard wood - there's no miracle that's going to suddenly transform the implementation of every government service to be perfect, but it's a very straightforward way to make change, and ultimately _implementation matters_ for any policy to succeed.
This may be a relatively brief item, but it’s an especially important one. The activist insistence on counterproductive flamboyance that you mention runs all the way down through people who just buy into the activists’ arguments.
One of the many good ideas you give here is something you’ve put more nuance into on other occasions, and I think we need to keep sight of that nuance. It’s the idea of mounting primary challenges to centrist incumbents. Taken only so far, it’s good advice to the left but not to the Democratic Party. As I think you’ve written elsewhere, and as I know I have, a strategy for gaining control of the Democratic habitat is nothing like a strategy for gaining control of the government and actually getting things done. On the contrary, when radicals come to dominate a party, they’re liable to make the party less relevant to the country.
The Democratic Party is unfortunately held responsible for everything left of center on the US political spectrum. People who ought to stand or fall with the fortunes of a Social Democratic Party or a Socialist Party are instead working to manipulate the more massive Democratic Party by tricks of leverage. Sane, politically competent Democrats have got to stop equivocating about their relation to the sloganeering, posturing hard left and act decisively to neutralize it before it delivers the country to the hard right:
http://thefamilyproperty.blogspot.com/2021/07/bad-company.html
What progressive political action committees, lobbying groups or grassroots movements are actually the most effective in a measurable way?
Which groups are even trying to measure their effectiveness rather than provide jobs for people interested in their cause areas? What does it really take to move public opinion?
If I have marginal dollars to give or time to donate and am interested in creating a more just and equitable American society, where should I give?
Where is the "Harvard Business Review" of civic change?
Seems like it should definitely be possible to answer some of these questions in a serious way, instead of having endless philosophical discussions about theories of change based on people's subjective experiences, different readings of history, and how much we find activists annoying or not.
I'm not sure many activists are in it to change things, which involves messy compromises
Though I suspect that may be less the case at the local level.
Re: Jon Tester
People tend to forget the fun fact that Jon Tester was reelected in 2012 because he successfully got wolves de-listed from the endangered species list via a budget bill rider. This was the #1 culture war issue in Montana at the time.
If Wolf Activists had their way and wolves remained on the endangered list, it is almost certain that Tester would not have been reelected, and thus the ACA would never have passed.
I like this line of thought, but I have one minor correction: the ACA passed the Senate at the end of 2009.
Fantastic post!
Matt will take my Nintendo Switch from my cold, dead hands.
Live Switch or Die!
> A lot of think tanks these days operate in a space dominated by the production of not-very-convincing partisan propaganda.
Stupid question: If it's not very convincing, why do they do it?
While we're trashing "activists"...
Have you ever noticed how basically all celebrities get to be "activists" in their bios? But, for the most part, it seems what they do is tweet political things occasionally and talk about their beliefs in public.
When regular people do this kind of thing, people used to call it "slacktivism," but we're supposed to pretend that when some of the most influential people in our society do it they are engaged in this noble endeavor to speak truth to power? I just find it distasteful.
I also find it distasteful, but also...maybe they're right? I mean, maybe their celebrity status pushes their tweeting into a much more effective category than your average rando?
(effective relative to the average activist)
I like how there are consultants who can help link busy celebrities with suitable causes and politicians