I thought back on how when I moved into the Catholic Worker I had intended for it to be a temporary move—eventually I would return to where I was from, rejuvenated and more experienced, and I would make change there. Instead the Catholic Worker had served as a diving board into the deep waters of subculture. Somewhere along the way I had lost myself to a subculture whose first point of reference often seemed to be itself. I suddenly felt as if I had checked my own good sense at the door. And for what? I knew that it was because I longed to belong in a community that centered explicitly around social justice values. That was an understandable and worthy goal. But now I felt like I had carved out this identity at a cost of connecting with everyday people—“non-activists”—which also meant a severe cost in political impact.
During my initial politicization in high school, I had experienced a jarring break with the doxa of my community of origin. I had become disillusioned as I began to detect a gap between my community’s stated beliefs and the economic structures that shaped our objective relationship to other people in the world. As I developed this political analysis, I found others who shared it, and soon I dove headlong into subcultures whose bases were (varieties of) this analysis. But now I was experiencing a second break. I was starting to see how the subcultures I was part of were maintaining their own kind of doxa. We were righteously narrating our actions and intentions in ways that hid—mostly from ourselves—the ways that social, identity, community, and ego motivations were driving much of our behavior. It’s not that these motivations are inherently bad. Building community, for example, is a worthy pursuit. But these motivations become a problem when they trump our motivation to accomplish our ostensible political goals. The gap between what we said we were trying to do and the likelihood that our actions would produce such an outcome became glaringly apparent to me.
This second break felt in many ways just as jarring as the first. I questioned and shattered the assumptions I had been working under, one after another, until my own identity seemed to me like the dissected frog from high school biology lab, mercilessly cut open, pulled apart, pinned down and labeled. With my overlapping and competing motivations unearthed, I found myself unable to fulfill some requirements of membership in the radical groups and subcultures in which I had been submerged. I felt conflicted about playing my part in maintaining the group narrative. I stopped ignoring my own better judgment. Now I could see how the flyer decrying US imperialism—with its raised fist and edgy font—was designed to reflect our narrative and identity back to us, not to reach beyond our small insular circle. Our tactics were not really tactics, in the sense that a tactic is one step to move forward a strategy to achieve a measurable goal. More so, our actions were collectively performed rituals to express our values and ourselves. I remembered how I had written in my journal that I had “found my church.” Yes, the movement reminded me a lot of church. Going to a protest felt a lot like a worship service. Getting arrested for civil disobedience was something like baptism; a rite of passage; an assertion of one’s rightful place in the group. And, similar to my childhood experience of indoctrination in a conservative version of Christianity, some information was emphasized and spotlighted, while other information was downplayed, ignored, or attacked. The narrative acted as a powerful meaning-making filter. The same way a stained glass window depicts a static story at the cost of preventing parishioners from seeing outside, our narrative filter prevented us from accurately assessing reality.
We would all refer to “the movement.” We were all part of the movement. I started asking, Where? Where is there a movement? Show me something that fits the minimum requirements of what most people mean by the term movement. Where were there masses of people in motion to advance any of our causes? The moment of the global justice movement had passed. In the peace movement, I did not see the depth or breadth of a movement, aside from the brief window leading up to the 2003 military invasion of Iraq. I have given years of my life to this cause, and those who have stuck it out through decades when the whole culture seemed against them include some of the most dedicated people I have ever known. But the perseverance of a righteous few does not a movement make. What we had was not a movement. Perhaps it could have constituted itself as the core of a movement, but, as it was, it seemed more like residue from when there had been a movement, once upon a time. It often felt like we were gathering to perform historical re-enactments of scenes from an era we wished had not ended.
I wondered why I had devoted so much time to such small and insular circles of people. Was it simply because they were the ones waving the banner of radical change most visibly? Dedicated as we were, I started to see our grip on that banner as a kind of disadvantageous monopoly. Somehow in our society, the project of grassroots collective action had been transformed from a means toward social and political change into a negatively branded niche identity called “activism” that most of the public was effectively inoculated against. Many people in society, including people who were sympathetic on the issues, seemed to view this enterprise—to which I was devoting my whole life—as a foolhardy phase that college students pass through before they grow up.
The relatively recent invention of activism
This was one young radical’s experience coming of age in the lonely decades of a weak and fragmented political left in the United States at the turn of the 21st century. It is this experience with political challenger groups and social movements that serves as the basis for the reflections, concepts, and syntheses that fill the pages that follow.
My organizing and campaigning experience over the past two decades spans many issues, including economic justice (global, national, and local), racial justice, indigenous rights, labor, environmental and climate justice, human rights, US foreign policy, veterans’ issues, and health care; and I have been an active supporter and occasional collaborator on many other issues, including feminist causes and reproductive rights, immigrant rights, prison abolition, and student organizing. I have felt both proud and humbled to work alongside so many dedicated people from so many walks of life, to try to make the world a better place. It is a tricky thing to critique projects that one is part of—perhaps especially in written form. It’s not hard for me to critique my political opponents—I have much more difficulty critiquing things that I love. In this work, my critiques may at times seem harsh, but I hope readers will see this more as self-critique than finger pointing. I hope readers will see that these reflections come from a place of love. I use the pronoun “we” without hesitation throughout the book, to refer to groups and movements of which I am a part, and also to refer to a far larger “we”: the project of society itself.
A central argument of this book is that the larger social world (i.e., society) must always be our starting place and our touchstone. We have to meet people where they are at. The other side of this coin is that underdog groups have to vigilantly resist the tendency of insularity and self-enclosure. There are many factors that contribute to political groups constructing barriers between themselves and society (patterns that I explore at length in the first part of this book). One important contributing factor that has emerged in the United States over just the past few decades is the construction of a new category called activism. You read that right.
Over the years, people have constantly introduced me to others as an “activist.” And let me tell you what a buzzkill dropping that label can be! Of course some people are glad to meet a real live activist, or a “fellow activist.” Such sympathetic or curious persons have asked me countless times over the years how I became an activist. The question of how individuals as individuals become activists, fascinating as it may seem, carries equally fascinating assumptions about activism itself. It tends to imply a voluntary and self-selecting enterprise,