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, an extracurricular activity, a realm of subculture, and a generic differentiating label; that an activist is a particular kind of person. When people refer to me as an activist, I have taken to correcting them: “I dislike the label activist,” I politely explain, “It lets everyone else off the hook!”
The label activist marks a content-less distinction between the active social change participant and the society. It gets in the way, while adding zero value. Moreover, people haven’t always used this word as they do today. Indeed, until half a century ago, people didn’t use it at all. Activism is a surprisingly new word and a new social category. It is tempting to look back at past movements like the abolitionists, suffragettes, or union movement and think of the participants as activists, but the words activism and activist did not even exist during the time of these movements. The word first appeared about a century ago. It had an entirely different meaning for its first couple of decades.14 With (at least elements of) its current meaning, the term only really started to enter into the English lexicon in the 1960s. It hit a plateau at a relatively low level in the 1970s, and then it resumed its ascent in the 1980s and 1990s.
Figure 1: Google Ngram Viewer search of “activists, activist, activism” 1900-2000.15
So what? Weren’t there other words that were more or less equivalent? Isn’t activism just a relatively new label that describes old phenomena? While this is true to an extent—i.e., some characteristics of what is today called activism were certainly present in collective action that predated the existence of the word—there is a great deal of evidence that suggests the word activism also carries important new meanings that were absent in earlier manifestations of collective action. I believe many of these new meanings are detrimental.
Labels are certainly not new to collective political action, but classifications like abolitionist, populist, suffragette, unionist, or socialist all referenced specific contents. These labels were often polarizing, but each polarization constituted its own contest of meaning in the popular imagination. Activist, on the other hand, is an apparently “content-less” label that now traverses political issues and social movements. Negative general stereotypes about activists deter popular support for particular political projects and can even negatively impact people’s opinions about a given political issue once it has been associated with generic “activists.”16 The activist strawman repels many people, cognitively blocking their entry into collective action.
Yet some are attracted to activism as such. Privy to a particular constellation of shared radical meanings and reference points, many activists take pride in activism partly because of their willingness to do something that is unpopular; some come to see their own marginalization as a badge of honor, as they carve out a radical oppositional niche identity. My own story provides texture to this “temptation”—this social pattern—which I had to develop a conscious awareness about in order to not succumb to it.
The likeminded clustering of activists fits into a broader trend in advanced capitalist nations: individual self-selection into values-homogenous communities, especially apparent within the expanded middle class of post-WWII American society.17 Thus, it is a relatively recent phenomenon, partly the result of tectonic cultural shifts in patterns of identity and social organization over the past half-century (atop major structural and economic shifts). In broad strokes, society has become more individualistic and self-expressive,18 as civic involvement has declined.19 With this backdrop, it is as if activism has morphed into a specific identity that centers on a hobby—something akin to being a skier or a “theater person”—rather than a civic or political responsibility that necessarily traverses groups and interests. In a society that is self-selecting into ever more specific micro-aggregations, it makes sense that activism itself could become one such little niche; that activism would become its own particular community of interest, which self-selecting individual activists join. The problem is that, when it comes to challenging entrenched power, we need more than little niches and self-selectors. We need much larger swaths of society to get involved.
A fledgling movement that attempts to attract only individuals as individuals, one at a time, will never grow fast enough to effect big systemic change. Powerful political challengers have never built their operations entirely from scratch, but rather by means of politicizing, activating, and aligning existing social blocs and institutions. Participation in the civil rights movement, for example, was hardly an individual matter; it tended to arise in relation to already established membership in communities and institutions—especially membership in black churches, historically black colleges, and chapters of the NAACP. This is the basic “formula” for how movements gain the kind of leverage they need to contend politically. In the 1980s Ralph Reed and other leaders of the emergent so-called Christian right studied the civil rights movement and emulated components of its approach, as they organized whole congregations and denominations—far more effective than waiting for individual self-selectors to join a movement because they happened to see a flyer. In this way, conservative congregations, especially in white suburban areas, became a major base of power that has been profoundly important for establishing and maintaining the hegemony of a conservative alignment (of Wall Street and social conservatives, in broad strokes) for the last few decades. The right seems to have learned more lessons of political strategy from the civil rights movement than the left has. While some important left campaigns did engage progressive religious congregations (e.g., the Central America solidarity movement), overall the left did not do anything comparable in the 1980s that was remotely at this scale. Instead the liberal left professionalized, producing a plethora of single-issue non-profit organizations (501-c3s), whose memberships were, by and large, passive—useful mostly for donations—if the organizations even had members at all, let alone local chapters that met face to face.20 At the same time, the radical left dramatically imploded and contracted. Many movement veterans were understandably traumatized by the repression and intensity of the 1960s and 70s. The active remnant narrated a common radical constellation of shared meanings and reference points. Newcomers would then orient themselves toward the center of the radical constellation, learning the radical lingo, which was profoundly out of touch with the language, worldview, and social practice of most Americans. Over time, this alienation and marginality vis-à-vis American society became deeply internalized in the practices and psychology of many radicals.
Both the liberal professionalization track and the radical alienation track are part of the story of the relatively recent invention and emergence of activism as a label and social category.21 Idealistic social justice–oriented
