one day an explanation suddenly dawned on me. The mission statement was contentious because it was an expression of our identity. It was about who we were as people—what we stood for and believed and how we expressed ourselves—much more than it was about our instrumental purpose and political goals as a mobilization. Our debate about the mission statement was qualitatively different than navigating and negotiating legitimate disagreements over political goals or strategies and tactics for their achievement. This was about how we conceived of ourselves and projected our identities. That made compromise very difficult.
This epiphany provided a new lens through which I could examine a lot of behaviors in the groups I was part of, including my own actions. How many times, I wondered, had I favored a particular action or tactic because I really thought it was likely to change a decision-maker’s position or win over key allies, as opposed to gravitating toward an action because it expressed my activist identity and self-conception? How concerned were we really, in our practice, with political outcomes? We often seemed more preoccupied with the purity of our political expression than with how to move from Point A to Point B. It felt as if having the right line about everything was more important than making measurable progress on anything.
I took to questioning more and more, not only the injustices of “the system” and the status quo, but also myself and the righteous social justice movements to which I felt a profound sense of loyalty and belonging. Looking back at my brief time organizing in Lancaster County at age 17–18, before I really even had a concept of what organizing meant, it struck me that in important ways I had been better at it back then, before I assimilated into radical subcultures. Back then I wasn’t living in a magical universe composed mostly of ideologically driven self-selectors. I was engaging the people in my day-to-day life. It was really challenging, but I was oriented to persuade the people around me—to find words that would connect with their values and reference points. This was my orientation during the campaign I had organized to oppose Walmart’s arrival in Lancaster County. The campaign generated a lot of involvement from people who had no prior experience with collective action, and it generated a lot of negative media coverage for Walmart. Sure, we lost the campaign, but I was only 18 years old—I was just getting started!
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
