A Tough-Love Letter to the Left (2017)
A Tough-Love Letter to the Left
In its final months, Hillary Clinton’s campaign depicted
the election in Manichaean terms: the forces of light against darkness, love
against hate, the guardians of a virtuous public against a world-historical
bully. In this story, we lost the election not because we did something wrong,
but because we did something right in a world that’s wrong. We fought the
forces of misogyny, xenophobia, and white supremacy, but they were too strong;
they overwhelmed us. And how could they not? This is America after all.HEGEMONY HOW-TO: A ROADMAP FOR RADICALS by Jonathan SmuckerAK Press, 290 pp., $16.95The left—especially the activist left—makes this
mistake all the time: imagining there is some meaningful consolation in
losing righteously. In 1934, Bertolt Brecht wrote, “It takes
courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but
because they were weak.” A lifelong organizer and educator, Jonathan Matthew
Smucker has been hearing versions of this story his entire adult life. In his
new book, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for
Radicals, he writes “I take no
solace in the prospect of history listing me among the righteous few who
denounced the captain of a ship that sank.” Being right about what is wrong in
the world is no excuse for allowing wrong to proliferate. Those of us who
aspire to a socially just world, says Smucker, must conspire to take the helm.  Smucker’s is one among a batch
of new books that offer practical advice to aspiring change-makers. There is Becky
Bond and Zack Exley’s Rules for
Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything and there is Mark
and Paul Engler’s This is An Uprising,
both of which came out in 2016. A Google doc titled “Indivisible:
A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” went viral this past
December; composed by former Democratic Capitol Hill staffers, it helpfully
translates the practical lessons of the Tea Party for the anti-Trump left. All
of them have Saul Alinsky’s Rules for
Radicals in their DNA, the “Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” he
published in 1971. Together with Smucker’s work, these new writings constitute
a revitalized genre of “what works” journalism for movement building.Since the election, the demand for such analyses
has spiked. Every left-of-center magazine has issued a “guide to the resistance,”
and every day, a new take on the appropriateness of this or that strategy circulates
on social media. There’s a hunger among self-understood leftists and people new
to movement politics alike for a roadmap, a blueprint for how we keep the worst
from happening and start building something better. Smucker’s book is one of
these, a roadmap, annotated with the insight of a traveller who has been down
many roads and found himself at many dead ends.At the age of 39, Smucker has lived the life of a
left wing Forrest Gump, his face appearing in the crowds of countless left
mobilizations large and small since the early 1990s, from the Christian
pacifist Plowshares Movement, whose members symbolically “beat swords into
plowshares” by hammering on military equipment (and earning impressive felony
records in the process) to Occupy, to the Movement for Black Lives. Hegemony How-To is Smucker’s tough-love
letter to this American left, a diagnosis of its self-undermining tendencies
and an ambitious guide to overcoming them. Most of all, the book is a defense
of power and a polemic against the left’s crippling ambivalence about
contesting for and wielding it. We rightly criticized the excesses of power in
the hands of our rulers. But if we want to build an egalitarian world where we
are less subject to the whims of presidents, corporations, police, and bosses,
writes Smucker, “we have to arm our critiques” with power. We have to win.The term “hegemony” in the title signals Smucker’s
theoretical agenda. Hegemony, as
elaborated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, refers to the meanings and
values that define the dominant common sense, and to the structures of
political and economic power that combine to uphold the existing order. To be
“political,” for Smucker, as for Gramsci, is to pose a challenge to the
existing order, by articulating an alternative, aligning existing social blocs
behind that articulation, and building sufficient political power to
instantiate our values as a new common sense. We must, in other words, replace
the existing hegemony with our own. Hegemonic contest means being unafraid to engage
with political structures and symbols that already exist. On this view, running
in Democratic primaries is better than insisting on our own ballot line; changing
the meaning of the American flag is
better than burning it. It’s not that the Democratic Party is good or burning
flags is wrong. Rather, it’s that the Party’s infrastructure and the flag’s
symbolic potency are both too useful to cede to our opponents. As Max Berger,
an organizer with “All of Us” recently told me, “The left will never control
America the country if we can’t take
control of ‘America’ the idea.”
Donald Trump and Steve Bannon have a definition of America—who’s in it and
who’s out. So do the Clintons. We need our own.Building political power is not just a matter of
telling the right story. It involves organizing, building numbers. On this
front, Smucker offers some concise, practical advice: “Develop a core and a
broader base; build a culture and a system of plugging new members into
meaningful and capacity-building roles; maintain an outward focus so as to
avoid insularity, and engage with existing infrastructure [and networks] rather
than constantly starting from scratch.” This last point is crucial. We can’t
recruit a mass movement one-by-one. We should think of our organizations as
vehicles for mobilizing existing blocs, allowing people to take action as
teachers, as union members, as Quakers, as students. These blocs will be
compelled to take action with us if we have presented a compelling enough
counter-narrative: a story about the world we want, an inclusive “we” in which
they see themselves, a vivid “them” in which they see their enemies.Hegemony How-To is addressed to self-identified “activists,” the sort of people likely
to buy, read, and display a bright-red book subtitled “A Roadmap for Radicals.”
Ironically, it’s one of Smucker’s early contentions that the existence of this clear
category of consumers is emblematic of the left’s deficiencies. (Smucker, in
this way, is the rare writer who wishes his readers didn’t exist.) The term
“activist” Smucker writes, “tends to imply a voluntary and self-selecting
enterprise, an extracurricular activity, a realm of subculture,” the idea “that
an activist is a particular kind of person.” In this conception,
activism is the hobby of a select few, rather than “a civic or political
responsibility that necessarily traverses groups and interests.” Activism,
Smucker suggests, might be better off without activists.The existence of “activists” in this sense lets
non-activists off the hook. It permits our opponents to negatively stereotype a
category—smelly, carpet-bagging agitators—instead of addressing the content of
our demands. Even worse, it deters potential allies who may be inclined to
participate in, say, a movement for clean water, but who are instinctively turned
off by “activism” as such. Perhaps most destructively, this thinking encourages
“activists” to seek out other “activists” with whom to form communities based
on their shared values. This self-selection, Smucker writes, causes many “collectively
minded young people … to remove themselves voluntarily from the institutions
and social networks that they were organically positioned to influence and
contest.” Activists congregate with other activists and disassociate themselves
from friends, family, religious communities, sports teams, and clubs that don’t
already “get it.”Of course, this self-isolation doesn’t always
happen. When it doesn’t, when politically activated people remain embedded in
their preexisting networks—and do not conceal their radical beliefs—they can be
extremely effective. An acquaintance once told me the best organizers in her
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter were the Arab frat boys. Active
members of Greek life and committed activists,
the frat boys were not only extremely good at getting a rowdy action started;
they were capable of mobilizing large numbers of their previously unengaged,
white frat brothers to participate in SJP rallies and events.If it’s hard for us to imagine a crowd of pro-BDS
fraternity brothers, or middle-aged white suburbanites taking to the streets
for black lives, that’s because this sort of organizing “beyond the choir” is uncommon.
Instead, what often happens, Smucker says, is that “we build a scrappy little
alternative clubhouse near the perimeter of the ever-advancing logics of
capitalism and bureaucracy” filled with the usual suspects. In exchange for our
clubhouse, we “give away the farm,” forfeiting the contest to organize society around
our values.This is what Smucker believes caused the failure
of Occupy Wall Street: tension between the movement’s “strategic” and
“prefigurative” aspirations. Occupy’s strategic tendency—of which Smucker was a
vocal proponent—sought to build a movement powerful enough to effect political
change in the rest of society. By contrast, Occupy’s prefigurative tendency
sought to model (or prefigure) the
values of participants’ ideal society as reflected in the horizontalist
general assembly, the free library, the people’s kitchen, and the nightly
lectures and music.Smucker does not underestimate the importance of
prefiguring a better society. But, unfortunately, the qualities that make an
activist community compelling to the initiated can make them uninviting or even
noxious to potential allies. Speaking in jargon, writing on endless reams of
butcher paper, wearing black and smashing windows, these rituals by which we
cultivate our group identity—and communicate our fluency with its norms—are
often precisely the things that turn others away.Worse, the maintenance of this community can come
to take precedence over the task of effecting political change. Why bother with
the impossible-seeming work of changing the world when we’ve already built a
version of our ideal society in miniature? If these impulses are left
unchecked, powerlessness and marginalization themselves become valorized; the
aspiration to win, suspect. For many leftists, there’s a perverse logic to this
thinking: “If society is bad, then marginalization within society must be good.”As Occupy progressed, the activists’ rigid
commitment to the group’s less-strategic internal norms (especially
leaderlessness and consensus-based decision-making) and the elevation of the tactic of occupation to the movement’s raison
d’être were ultimately their undoing. It’s not much, after all, to win a park
and lose the world. The movement, Smucker writes, eschewed the “possibility of
gaining ground … in the terrain of society,” opting instead to define the
meaning, values, and culture of Occupy itself and no more. In this way, Occupy
remained a clubhouse, one whose members satisfied themselves with interior
decorating.But strategic and prefigurative goals are not
mutually exclusive. A positive legacy of Occupy is the “progressive stack.” This
is the idea that in our communities, the perspectives of black and brown
people, women, disabled, and trans folks should be prioritized over those who
are less acutely constrained by the dynamics of racial capitalism. By bringing
those voices to the fore in meetings, we’re prefiguring a more egalitarian
society. But it also serves a strategic purpose: Without progressive stack,
white straight male voices will inevitably dominate the space, set the agenda
and terms of debate, and alienate non-white allies. We need the leadership of marginalized people in order to win.
Avoiding exclusionary social dynamics and lifting up non-dominant voices,
therefore, has both intrinsic and strategic value for our movements. A norm
championed by Occupy, it is now used widely among leftist groups from the
environmental justice movement to the Democratic Socialists of
America. It helps us both to live our values and to spread them.As the severity of Trump’s dangers deepens, the
need to preach beyond the choir has become more pressing. Black Lives Matter
co-founder Alicia Garza recently wrote for Mic about making common cause with
white liberals, even those who haven’t shown up to the fight for black lives
before. “Building a movement requires reaching out beyond the people who
agree with you,” Garza writes, “More than a moral question, it is a practical
one. Can we build a movement of millions with the people who may not grasp our
black, queer, feminist, intersectional, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist
ideology but know that we deserve a better life and who are willing to fight for
it and win?” The answer, Garza implies, has to be yes.We have arrived at a strange moment for the left.
In the most basic sense, the world we want—a social order built on racial and
gender equality, in which the needs of human beings are privileged over profit
(or something like that)—is further off than ever. The Trump administration and
the Republican majority will seek to defang the labor movement, destroy the
welfare state, accelerate deportation and mass incarceration, empower police
and prosecutors, undermine environmental protections, rollback civil rights,
start wars, and criminalize our means of fighting back. Much of this is already
underway.At the same time, there have perhaps never been more
people banging on the walls of our clubhouses, demanding to be let in. It is
the left’s first responsibility to fling open the doors. And when we do, we’ll
need to avoid the traps of insularity, purism, and fragmentation that have
undermined our efforts in the past. We’ll have to meet these new allies, as
Smucker says, “where they are, with the language they use, in the spaces they
frequent.”And we’ll have to offer them both a compelling moral vision and a believable strategic agenda
for achieving it. In the words of historian Katrina
Forrester, “Feminist and progressive politics can’t survive on defensive
strategies alone.… A vision of a better life matters just as much.” The wisdom
the left has to offer the Trump resistance is exactly this: that fear will not
sustain us. “Fear might get people
in the door the first hour,” I recently heard organizer and educator Mariame Kaba say, “but you’re
going to lose them in the twelfth hour.” We need an alternative vision, a
shared purpose, and a plan.There are those who believe that articulating—and
forcing the Democrats to articulate—an unapologetic left vision will divide the
opposition. But history (including the history of the Tea Party) suggests the
opposite strategy: the best way to obstruct the ruling party’s agenda is to
intransigently embrace the values of the base. What’s more, the notion that a
purely defensive strategy is adequate suggests that the hegemony that preceded
Trump was acceptable. It wasn’t. The problem with a resistance movement
organized exclusively around
opposition to Trump is not only that such a vision is not sustaining; the
problem is that America wasn’t “already great.” Political theorist Corey Robin wrote in Harpers, “It is easier to huddle
around the campfire of our dread than to mass and march toward a distant
light.” But we have to march, and we have to keep the glimmer of a better world
in our sights. It seems to me that in building a movement powerful enough to
stop the worst of Trump’s agenda, we are simultaneously building a movement
powerful enough to instantiate an alternative. We have to hope so. In these
times, as ever, it isn’t enough to be right. The point is to win.