(2004-02-05) Gitlin Activism

Todd Gitlin on practical Activism: "When my crowd was smart (which wasn't always)," he writes, "we were pretty clear about where our indignation belonged and where to channel it ... Our anger was most productive when (1) we had good arguments, (2) we stayed nonviolent, (3) we won a hearing from serious-minded insiders, and (4) we mobilized outside forces."... It's obviously a lot harder now to make the case that there's no difference between the parties. I think it was a foolish case in the first place, but today all you have to do is say the words "JohnAshcroft," "WarOnIraq," to make it very, very difficult to make the claim that this is exactly what Al Gore would have done or even close to it. But there is a phenomenon in politics - and the left isn't any more exempt from it than the right - of Cognitive Dissonance, in which you bend the world, you hypnotize yourself into seeing the world in such a way as to make it unnecessary for you to rethink your first premises... And the result is that the Republican Party now has 30-40 years of experience of holding their crazies with the promise of rewards - either at the judiciary level, or making inroads on Abortion, or walking the line on gay issues and so on. They've been able to distribute enough goodies to keep them loyal. They've also produced generations of politicians, like Bush himself - not to mention George W Bush's brain, Karl Rove - who know how to dance between these worlds and keep everybody reasonably content. While the left is always ready for carnivorous action against one of its leaders... (For a post-Nader left) there would have to be a rock-bottom underpinning that the privatizing, rightwing, anti-feminist, anti-gay attitudes of the Republicans are wrong. (Hmmm, that seems rather a broad-yet-fuzzy underpinning.)

Ironically, Ralph Nader is considering another run. Larry Lessig votes no. As does David Weinberger, who also provides links to tell Ralph.