Influencers are in the business of telling you whatever will keep you paying attention, not necessarily accurate history. The nature of the influencer business means they really can’t say anything that would invalidate your worst online habits or hate follows. The worst part of the influencer landscape is the bullshit asymmetry principle — that it takes an order of magnitude more effort to provide factual information than to put out viral posts or spin an enticing word yarn of plausible sounding bullshit that satiates a psychological button but misinforms.
The claim that the right-wing gets what it wants by motivating the base with fear and anger is a big misread of what’s going on. People tend to be stuck in silos and miss what we’re missing, so it’s easy to see how this “feels” truthy, but it’s not correct at all. Right-wing political supporters see, from their perspective, a loving comfy community and hope for a promised world that prioritizes them. You see a hellscape, they see utopia. You see hate mongering, they see a bright future. They are indeed motivated by hope.
So a takeaway from the wins of the right-wing should not be that scaring the shit out of the left will motivate mass action. If all it took was fear, the trucker convoys, gun cults, and mass shootings would’ve ensured a robust Democratic majority in both the House and Senate right now. That didn’t happen. I read the Project 2025 document, laying out what the next Republican president will do, and if you care about public health or a functional society at all — their plans are terrifying. But I don’t expect that to motivate all affected parties to vote for Biden in 2024. I don’t even expect most on the left to bother reading the Project 2025 plan, which is a pity because it lays out a great plan of what to do the opposite of, to make a better world.
The lesson to be learned from the right-wing is don’t wait for everyone to get on board before pressing for something better. Their policies are incredibly unpopular, and yet they push forward. Yes, they get funding from astroturfing right-wing organizations, and that’s why such small fringe groups of people get farther than they would otherwise. But they are being mobilized to vote, to write to your elected representatives, and to run for school board. And their own conspiracy theory websites inform their audience that you don’t need a majority to win power, citing “About 15% of the population supported the American Revolution while 70% were waiting around to see who would live. History is written by the small percentage at either end of the spectrum.” And they’re not wrong, a BBC article from 2019 cites compelling research by Erica Chenoweth saying, “although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.” Historically, change has come driven by a small portion of people dedicated to action who are the first to speak up and push things along. And then later, after the fact, there’s more broad support. So it really doesn’t matter if a whole lot of people are lulled right now — the people who know better can change that. And people who believe there’s no point have no reason to act, so despair is at least as big a threat as complacency, if not bigger.
The environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s were certainly motivated by outrage at catastrophes like those in 1969 — the oil rig explosion and the polluted river on fire. The first Earth Day in 1970 took place during the turbulence of the Vietnam War, but as reported on Earth Day 52 years later, by the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics University of Illinois, “Within the first four years of its existence, the movement achieved an unparalleled, impressive legislative and political trifecta. But it’s also important to recognize that the first Earth Day is framed as a celebration.
There isn’t some simple formula when you look back at this stuff. But one thing that’s very clear is that outrage and anger alone does not lead anywhere. Especially if people think the fight is going to be won on social media with battling influencer hotshots. I keep coming back to the part of the documentary Hypernormalisation from 2016 and how angry people click. And click. And click. And click.
Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis.
”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”
The most offensive silo perspective assertion someone can make is that messaging incremental change started in the 1990s. This is an absurd idea if you have just a pop culture level knowledge of the civil rights movement. Nina Simone sang a scathing critique of pushed incrementalism in her 1964 protest song Mississippi Goddam.
Mississippi Goddam (Live at Westbury Music Fair, Westbury, NY — April 1968)
You keep on saying “Go slow!”
“Go slow!”
But that’s just the trouble
“Too slow”
Desegregation
“Too slow”
Mass participation
“Too slow”
Reunification
“Too slow”
Do things gradually
“Too slow”
But bring more tragedy
“Too slow”
Why don’t you see it
Why don’t you feel it
I don’t know
I don’t know
Yes, all the way back in 1964 Black Americans were being told to go slower, do things gradually. Wait for mass participation — for more to get on board. Sound familiar? It’s an uncomfortable history but there was not majority support for the civil rights movement back then.
I recommend this particular version of the song, Mississippi Goddam (Live at Westbury Music Fair, Westbury, NY — April 1968), a live recording that starts out with Nina Simone explaining that horror which prompted the song initially, and mentions that the Westbury Music Fair recording was in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Nina Simone said she hoped to have songs that “go down in history for these wonderful brave people who are no longer with us.”
Please let’s not ignore this history.
And let’s not ignore or erase the people who have hoped, and also keenly felt the compromise.
I have a dream (Yes) [applause] that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice (Yeah), sweltering with the heat of oppression (Mhm), will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I recently listened to a lecture about organizing on the left from Spring 2017 at University of Wisconsin Madison, by Kali Akuno from Cooperation Jackson, a network of worker cooperatives based in Jackson, Mississippi. Someone in the audience asks if the plan is to make essentially an oasis of equality and socialism in Jackson, and he replies by saying he knows no community can run cloistered off from the rest of the world and that isn’t his intention, but that he works locally because that’s where he is.
We can work small, while recognizing the big picture is important. We can know that we need massive change in the long-run, and still work to mitigate harm in the short-term. We can be angry at injustice, and also celebrate the past, and hope for the future. None of these things are at odds or mutually exclusive.