(Third in this series which will resume (hopefully) next week. The right talks all the time about God and the Free Market. Do us good to talk--and actually critically think--about evolution a whole lot more. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Why do grassroots political organizations sometimes implode right at the peak of their success? This post examines the double-edged sword of highly cohesive political group identities and explores how to build vibrant campaigns while avoiding going (too) crazy...
natural born people pleasers
Imagine yourself a gazelle in a herd of gazelles. Aw snap, here comes a hungry lion out of nowhere - and that lion is fast! Is this the moment you want to be caught on the peripheral edges of the herd? Ok, now imagine yourself a lone wolf trying to catch your next meal. It's freezing out and you're not having much luck. You're just sitting there, hungry and tired and cold, wondering what it was you said that got you kicked out of the pack.
What do we know about prehistoric life in human groups? While there's a lot of mystery and conjecture, we do know that life was, indeed, in groups. We're not gazelles or wolves, but, like gazelles and wolves, we like groups. We are highly social creatures. As evolutionist David Sloan Wilson suggests, "...our ancestors participated in family groups, gathering groups, hunting groups, raiding groups, and so on. Almost everything was done in a social context; to be alone was to be in grave danger." [2004: The New Fable of Bees. my emphasis]
Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá also hit on this in their book Sex at Dawn: "If you ever doubt that human beings are, beyond everything, social animals, consider that short of outright execution or physical torture, the worst punishment in any society's arsenal has always been exile."
If the thought of being abandoned by the group that you identify with troubles you, congratulations; that's probably a hard-wired adapted way to feel. Your cave-person ancestors probably survived in part because they liked, and were liked by, the group. Those who wandered off alone too far, as well as those who pissed everyone off until they got 86'ed, probably didn't fare quite as well evolutionarily.
It makes evolutionary sense that we would want to move toward the center of the group, because those who developed this tendency would have a leg up on those who didn't. This kind of selection may have helped our predecessors to evolve into a more social, more cooperative, kinder, gentler species.
Where does that leave us now? It likely equips us with a predisposition to try to get on the good side of the groups we're part of. We want to feel safe in the center of the group, not threatened on the margins.
So, in some senses we're a species of natural born people pleasers. (As long as those people are within our group - see War, xenophobia and other downsides to group selection.)
This helps explain our capacity for cooperation. In Part I of this series I argued that, under the right conditions, human beings have the capacity for behavior that serves the group, even at a cost to the individual. One "right condition" or prerequisite is a feeling of belonging within a mostly cooperative group. If an individual feels integrated within a group and feels like the group has her back - that she will benefit by casting her individual lot with the group - then she is more likely to display group-oriented behavior.
The degree to which a person identifies with the group will affect how much he is willing to give to the group. In other words, level of commitment to a group depends on the level of one's investment and identity with that group. For example, an "online member" of an internet-based progressive organization may identify enough with "the group" to open every tenth email and occasionally call her member of Congress when asked; while a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) may identify strongly enough with "the group" to endure beatings, arrest, and worse.
(This excellent diary brings a great deal more depth to our understanding of what the term "progressive" means historically, and then shows how that accurate historical understanding illuminates deeper problems with Nate Silver's recent simplistic dichotomization. Lot's to think about here, folks! - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
This is a belated follow-up to Paul and David's critiques of Nate Silver's "Rationalist vs. Radical" progressivism. The dichotomies Silver laid out include:
Rationalist vs. Radical
Empirical vs. Normative
Sees politics as a battle of ideas vs. Sees politics as a battle of wills
Technocratic vs. Populist
Prone to elitism vs. Prone to demagoguery
Prone to co-optation vs. Difficult to organize
Optimistic vs. Pessimistic
Conversational vs. Action Oriented
The ensuing discussion focused mostly on how progressives think, or frame the world. I want to look, instead, at something different and potentially more important: how progressives have historically conceptualized ACTION.
In ongoing historical work towards a book I'm calling Social Class, Social Action, and the Failures of Progressive Democracy, I argue that there are actually three distinct forms of progressivism, all drawing from different interrelated aspects of middle-class culture: Administrative, Collaborative, and Personalist progressives. As with any categorizations, these have their own problems, but I think reflect key historical realities.
Not only do Silver's comparisons miss this three-fold complexity, but he also mixes in working-class models of social action as well.
I was hanging out at home this weekend, being relatively lazy, and one of the things I did was listen to some classic baby boom rock and roll from the 1960s and early '70s: Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Clapton (in his passionate, fucked-up, in-love-with-my-best-friend's-girl Derek and the Dominos phase, not the mellow stuff he's done more recently). Being a baby boomer raised on all that, it's still the best music there is in my book.
I'm not sure what got me in the mood for all that, but perhaps it was Tom Hayden's eloquent open letter to Barack Obama last week, which had gotten me thinking about the last big progressive moment in American history, and how it compares to today.
I'm not going to write about Obama's odd triangulation strategy, which many others have been discussing for months now. I'm more interested in how the entire political culture keeps looking back to that period as a reference point. From progressive activists comparing their tactics and strategies to the civil rights and anti-war movements of that era, to progressive politicians constantly invoking Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., to the DLC types who scream "McGovern" every time a Democrat stands strongly against the Iraq war, to right-wingers who, to this very day still get their rocks off attacking Hayden and Fonda for taking that trip to Hanoi, everybody is obsessed with that era of politics. Perhaps it's because that was the last time that society fundamentally shifted in a positive way.
What haunts me more than anything about the era is why the progressive movement lost the momentum, and the country's politics turned so far to the right. Unlike the 1930s, whose progressive accomplishments set the stage for a New Deal coalition that dominated American politics for two generations, the 1960s generated a backlash that gave us Nixon, then Reagan, then Gingrich, then the 2nd Bush, each one worst than the one before in terms of their right-wing politics and their negative impact on the nation.
The study of history is not well-served by offering simple explanations, and there are many factors in the toxic stew of right-wing political success. The racial backlash is a very big factor, and in combination with the general white-male, working-class backlash against feminism and "hippies", has been a central dynamic. The rise of the carefully constructed right-wing infrastructure discussed by Rob Stein and many others has been a very big factor as well, along with the failings of single-interest group politics that Markos wrote about in Crashing the Gates. My own larger analysis of these dynamics is posted here.
All of these problems, and more, have been written about at nauseum. Something that I think has gotten less attention is the individuality of the movement in the latter '60s and early '70s. While the earlier civil rights movement was very focused on community, and the 1962 Port Huron Statement was written by Hayden and the other SDS founders was all about building progressive communitarian power, I am often stuck when I read or watch documentaries about the late'60s how often protestors say things like "I just want to do my own thing" or even "we don't want to go to war, we just want the government to leave us alone." The identity politics which flourished in that era was often about individual rights, not about expanding the sense of mutual obligation we have to each other.
As these baby boomers aged, and the threat of being drafted and personally going to war ended, it's easy to see how too many of that generation became part of Grover Norquist's "Leave Us Alone" coalition. Indeed, white people in my age cohor who are of a decent income level tend to be as Republican a group as there is in terms of age- and if you are a white guy my age who is not a union member, gay or Jewish, you're in Republican base voter territory.
As we build the modern progressive movement, using online activism and communication as our most important tools, we should take care to learn this lesson from the last great movement era. The internet is a great tool for collective action, but the highly individualistic libertarians love it too, as Ron Paul's supporters have shown. We have the potential to build community and collective engagement as never before, but the individuality of doing your own thing typing away at home on your computer can also lead to the "leave me alone, let me do my own thing" syndrome. We should do all in our power to build that good old community feeling, to build a movement that works well together on behalf of goals that benefit all of us.
