Activism may be a kind of learned helplessness. If all you can achieve is virtue signaling out people on Twitter, why not do it in the most dopaminergic way possible? You might even get laid!
The modalities of change MY discussed really only work for elites. The typical activist can’t write tv scripts, doesn’t have the grant writing ability to craft credible proposals, doesn’t know enough small donors to make bundling effective, and can only “persuade” elites by calling her legislator.
I occupy a kind of middle ground, because I’m a lawyer, I have access to the courts and judges, and I know a few legislators. Still, my efforts at elite persuasion have been basically a waste of time.
Back in 2009, Henry County used a system of racial quotas to constitute its jury list. The quotas were based on the 2000 census, and a lot of blacks had moved into the county in the interim. Accordingly, the county was 37% black (and steadily increasing) but the jury list was only 11% black. I thought I had a righteous issue, and one that aligned nicely with the interests of my clients. Criminal defendants generally want as many blacks on their jury as possible. I challenged the jury list in 10 different cases in front of 7 different judges, I managed to get American Community Survey statistics that showed the county’s racial composition had changed. This, and the fact that the census bureau attested to then with its official seal, eliminated the need to pay for experts. I appealed a couple cases challenging the jury list, and I lost. Greene v. State 722 S.E.2d 77 (Ga. App. 2011). The Georgia Supreme Court wouldn’t even grant certiorari to review that case.
This was frustrating on several levels:
1) I picked a small issue that only really affected criminal procedure in a few Georgia counties with rapid demographic change
2) I had professional expertise that should have made my work more effective
3) I pissed off judges and prosecutors by rocking the boat and probably hurt my career
4) I did the appellate work for free.
Yet I achieved nothing. At least activism feels good and doesn’t hurt your career.
The legislative subsidy aspect really resonates with me. I remember many years ago hearing Mike Kelly (R - PA who has since gone a bit wacky but used to just be a typical “just north of a democratic city” Republican business owner, car salesman in particular) give a speech at a business in Butler, PA where he said people dump on lobbyists but they don’t understand that that is where they get so much of their information. He was clearly sincere in this - he felt without lobbyists, they wouldn’t find out enough about issues, even if you understand perfectly well all of the incentives behind the lobbyist’s take.
This is why I’ve always like the idea of increasing staffing for Congress or committees, raising pay, etc., as a possible way to reduce the need for this outside reliance or “revolving door” staffing. Perhaps it’s naive to think more stability and reliability in staffing can be achieved by pay raises and will also increase the quality of said staff, but given lobbyists have a lot of sway (look at what corps spend on lobbyists versus pacs, donations, etc) it seems like an area to work on that might find a foothold.
I have a similar complaint about doctor shows, in that I think it glorifies a profession that should come under a lot more scrutiny but instead they are presented as heroes overcoming immense obstacles to save lives.
"[I]t’s not going to require a mass movement with dozens of local chapters....." This might be the ideal, but very few activist groups actually achieve this form. The NRA adopted this form fairly successfully, but few left-leaning groups (maybe the Sierra Club? the NAACP?) can actually claim to have a mass membership where the leaders are beholden to their members. Moreover, those that do rely more on check-book activism than local chapters, a reality that Theda Skocpol and her co-authors have underscored.
That's the problem with many left-leaning activists today. They speak for groups in the United States but don't really represent them. They were never elected by local chapters to speak for a group's issues; they just assume that they know best what should be done to address the group's concerns.
Curious to see that when talking about loud, public activism, and why the culture thinks it works, nobody here brought up Vietnam. The whole "We took to the streets and ended the war, man!" Boomer takes are part of the DNA of the country at this point. It's easy to see the old photos of the protests and think, yes, if only we can recreate that.
And then I did a whole bunch of anti-war protests in the early Aughts, which accomplished nothing, and most of the speakers were yelling about non-Iraq topics. Free Mumia, indeed.
Thinking about this locally, after doing a decade of local civic activism, one thing I want to add is how narrowly activists can think, to their detriment. I worked on a big urban planning process for the Richmond Hwy corridor in Fairfax, Va. The general goal of the project was going to make things better environmentally, for pedestrians and biking. Yet each group would have someone at the meetings being mad because their POV wasn't the dominate one, that they weren't getting the maximalist amount out of things. It drove me nuts, and made me appreciate the local officials and staff who were able to balance all of that.
This puts to formal logic a lot of what my gut has been screaming at me when i interact with, read of, or hear about Philadelphia’s activist community.
There are a number of bright or brilliant people, often coming from the backgrounds and demographics most affected by the issues they advocate for.
There are a lot more hangers-on and followers, as there should be.
Then there are a huge number of Twitter-bound pseudo-activists, purporting to care about the same causes, but with none of the lived experience, intellectual firepower, or work ethic that makes the first group of people credible and effective.
The problem arises not when they exist ( they’re unavoidable), but when their often quite privileged backgrounds provide them with connections and support to become leaders, solicit donations, or found organizations that take queues from them. That’s when we see people who plainly have no idea what they’re doing or talking about picking up the latest, simplistic fad thought from Twitter and doing their best to destroy anyone who disagrees.
When this happens it makes it impossible to build ecosystems and organizations centered on those who have fought for the skills and knowledge to effectively advocate for changes.
There’s a very real “crowding out” effect going on when it comes to donor funds and public attention, and the consequences for the credibility of major social movements are grave.
TL;DR: A lot of the activist ecosystem is dominated by academically-mediocre scions of the managerial class, able to use Mommy’s business contacts to lay hands on resources to inflate their sense of self-importance. They then do bad work and make it hard for those who could do good work to do so.
"But I think it’s very obvious that humanizing, sympathetic portrayals of gay and lesbian characters on American television in the 1990s and aughts was a huge deal politically.
Notably, even something as broad and stereotype-driven as early “Will & Grace” does the work here."
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.
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.
Really appreciated this piece as someone who does a lot of "activism" (I'm the Board Chair of YIMBY Action). It made me think of some recent podcasts I've heard about Sarah Schulman's on ACT UP. There seems to be an idealization of certain activist strategies with no regard to their situational efficacy but particularly in the context of who is using them. Sarah talks about how white, cis, gay men would use their social proximity to the heads of drug companies to push their agenda while queer women of color had to use more antagonistic tactics. I think today's do-gooders, no matter their class and assets put "people-power" tactics on a pedestal and run into real trouble when some positions (Defund the Police, carbon tax, etc.) don't actually have broad support. Which isn't to say they are wrong, but that tactics that don't rely on popularity should get more consideration from people trying to create change. Matt's catalogue of other tactics is helpful in that respect.
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 think, at their most successful, recent mass movements have worked by calling more media attention to their issues or by changing the ways people in the media are talking about those issues. This has probably been the greatest more or less direct success of, for instance, Occupy and BLM. What the movements generally aren't good at doing is coalescing around particular practical policy solutions and winning legislative battles to get them implemented. Defund provides a good example of the limits of mass politics. First, the most passionate voices and extreme positions tend to drown out more cautious ones. It's very difficult for movements to confront complex issues offering suitably complex and considered solutions. Complexity just isn't going to get people out in the streets in the same way apparently clear-cut positions do. Figures urging caution and more consideration of complexities in mass movements tend to be treated as potential impediments to the necessary mass passion driving activism, if not as sympathizers with the opposition. Thus there is an inherent tendency in mass movements to embracing more extreme positions and attitudes, which further cements political polarization. The movements not only are bad at formulating and building support for complex practical policy solutions themselves, in a sense they actually tend to make it harder for others to do so.
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.
Activism may be a kind of learned helplessness. If all you can achieve is virtue signaling out people on Twitter, why not do it in the most dopaminergic way possible? You might even get laid!
The modalities of change MY discussed really only work for elites. The typical activist can’t write tv scripts, doesn’t have the grant writing ability to craft credible proposals, doesn’t know enough small donors to make bundling effective, and can only “persuade” elites by calling her legislator.
I occupy a kind of middle ground, because I’m a lawyer, I have access to the courts and judges, and I know a few legislators. Still, my efforts at elite persuasion have been basically a waste of time.
Back in 2009, Henry County used a system of racial quotas to constitute its jury list. The quotas were based on the 2000 census, and a lot of blacks had moved into the county in the interim. Accordingly, the county was 37% black (and steadily increasing) but the jury list was only 11% black. I thought I had a righteous issue, and one that aligned nicely with the interests of my clients. Criminal defendants generally want as many blacks on their jury as possible. I challenged the jury list in 10 different cases in front of 7 different judges, I managed to get American Community Survey statistics that showed the county’s racial composition had changed. This, and the fact that the census bureau attested to then with its official seal, eliminated the need to pay for experts. I appealed a couple cases challenging the jury list, and I lost. Greene v. State 722 S.E.2d 77 (Ga. App. 2011). The Georgia Supreme Court wouldn’t even grant certiorari to review that case.
This was frustrating on several levels:
1) I picked a small issue that only really affected criminal procedure in a few Georgia counties with rapid demographic change
2) I had professional expertise that should have made my work more effective
3) I pissed off judges and prosecutors by rocking the boat and probably hurt my career
4) I did the appellate work for free.
Yet I achieved nothing. At least activism feels good and doesn’t hurt your career.
The legislative subsidy aspect really resonates with me. I remember many years ago hearing Mike Kelly (R - PA who has since gone a bit wacky but used to just be a typical “just north of a democratic city” Republican business owner, car salesman in particular) give a speech at a business in Butler, PA where he said people dump on lobbyists but they don’t understand that that is where they get so much of their information. He was clearly sincere in this - he felt without lobbyists, they wouldn’t find out enough about issues, even if you understand perfectly well all of the incentives behind the lobbyist’s take.
This is why I’ve always like the idea of increasing staffing for Congress or committees, raising pay, etc., as a possible way to reduce the need for this outside reliance or “revolving door” staffing. Perhaps it’s naive to think more stability and reliability in staffing can be achieved by pay raises and will also increase the quality of said staff, but given lobbyists have a lot of sway (look at what corps spend on lobbyists versus pacs, donations, etc) it seems like an area to work on that might find a foothold.
I have a similar complaint about doctor shows, in that I think it glorifies a profession that should come under a lot more scrutiny but instead they are presented as heroes overcoming immense obstacles to save lives.
"[I]t’s not going to require a mass movement with dozens of local chapters....." This might be the ideal, but very few activist groups actually achieve this form. The NRA adopted this form fairly successfully, but few left-leaning groups (maybe the Sierra Club? the NAACP?) can actually claim to have a mass membership where the leaders are beholden to their members. Moreover, those that do rely more on check-book activism than local chapters, a reality that Theda Skocpol and her co-authors have underscored.
That's the problem with many left-leaning activists today. They speak for groups in the United States but don't really represent them. They were never elected by local chapters to speak for a group's issues; they just assume that they know best what should be done to address the group's concerns.
Curious to see that when talking about loud, public activism, and why the culture thinks it works, nobody here brought up Vietnam. The whole "We took to the streets and ended the war, man!" Boomer takes are part of the DNA of the country at this point. It's easy to see the old photos of the protests and think, yes, if only we can recreate that.
And then I did a whole bunch of anti-war protests in the early Aughts, which accomplished nothing, and most of the speakers were yelling about non-Iraq topics. Free Mumia, indeed.
Thinking about this locally, after doing a decade of local civic activism, one thing I want to add is how narrowly activists can think, to their detriment. I worked on a big urban planning process for the Richmond Hwy corridor in Fairfax, Va. The general goal of the project was going to make things better environmentally, for pedestrians and biking. Yet each group would have someone at the meetings being mad because their POV wasn't the dominate one, that they weren't getting the maximalist amount out of things. It drove me nuts, and made me appreciate the local officials and staff who were able to balance all of that.
This puts to formal logic a lot of what my gut has been screaming at me when i interact with, read of, or hear about Philadelphia’s activist community.
There are a number of bright or brilliant people, often coming from the backgrounds and demographics most affected by the issues they advocate for.
There are a lot more hangers-on and followers, as there should be.
Then there are a huge number of Twitter-bound pseudo-activists, purporting to care about the same causes, but with none of the lived experience, intellectual firepower, or work ethic that makes the first group of people credible and effective.
The problem arises not when they exist ( they’re unavoidable), but when their often quite privileged backgrounds provide them with connections and support to become leaders, solicit donations, or found organizations that take queues from them. That’s when we see people who plainly have no idea what they’re doing or talking about picking up the latest, simplistic fad thought from Twitter and doing their best to destroy anyone who disagrees.
When this happens it makes it impossible to build ecosystems and organizations centered on those who have fought for the skills and knowledge to effectively advocate for changes.
There’s a very real “crowding out” effect going on when it comes to donor funds and public attention, and the consequences for the credibility of major social movements are grave.
TL;DR: A lot of the activist ecosystem is dominated by academically-mediocre scions of the managerial class, able to use Mommy’s business contacts to lay hands on resources to inflate their sense of self-importance. They then do bad work and make it hard for those who could do good work to do so.
"But I think it’s very obvious that humanizing, sympathetic portrayals of gay and lesbian characters on American television in the 1990s and aughts was a huge deal politically.
Notably, even something as broad and stereotype-driven as early “Will & Grace” does the work here."
As an FYI for other readers, the relevant social science literature demonstrating this was led by Ed Schiappa (now at MIT) under the concept-handle of "the parasocial contact hypothesis." See e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17135126/; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0363775052000342544.
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.
This is one of your best pieces. It ought to be the basis for a high school civics course. Here's a short piece I wrote on the role of think tanks in managing political problems. https://www.governing.com/gov-institute/on-leadership/col-california-fiscal-reform-elaine-kamarck-policy-window.html
I think the time is ripe for an Occupy Wall Street retrospective, and what contemporary activists can learn from that experience.
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.
Really appreciated this piece as someone who does a lot of "activism" (I'm the Board Chair of YIMBY Action). It made me think of some recent podcasts I've heard about Sarah Schulman's on ACT UP. There seems to be an idealization of certain activist strategies with no regard to their situational efficacy but particularly in the context of who is using them. Sarah talks about how white, cis, gay men would use their social proximity to the heads of drug companies to push their agenda while queer women of color had to use more antagonistic tactics. I think today's do-gooders, no matter their class and assets put "people-power" tactics on a pedestal and run into real trouble when some positions (Defund the Police, carbon tax, etc.) don't actually have broad support. Which isn't to say they are wrong, but that tactics that don't rely on popularity should get more consideration from people trying to create change. Matt's catalogue of other tactics is helpful in that respect.
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 think, at their most successful, recent mass movements have worked by calling more media attention to their issues or by changing the ways people in the media are talking about those issues. This has probably been the greatest more or less direct success of, for instance, Occupy and BLM. What the movements generally aren't good at doing is coalescing around particular practical policy solutions and winning legislative battles to get them implemented. Defund provides a good example of the limits of mass politics. First, the most passionate voices and extreme positions tend to drown out more cautious ones. It's very difficult for movements to confront complex issues offering suitably complex and considered solutions. Complexity just isn't going to get people out in the streets in the same way apparently clear-cut positions do. Figures urging caution and more consideration of complexities in mass movements tend to be treated as potential impediments to the necessary mass passion driving activism, if not as sympathizers with the opposition. Thus there is an inherent tendency in mass movements to embracing more extreme positions and attitudes, which further cements political polarization. The movements not only are bad at formulating and building support for complex practical policy solutions themselves, in a sense they actually tend to make it harder for others to do so.
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.
God if HBO did 1 billion Americans as TV show…