The Lack of Leftist / Progressive Movement Building

 “Future shock: Progress is good. It’s also disorienting for millions. Helping people cope is vital to beating back authoritarian movements”, Feb 7, 2024, Anand Giridharadas, The.Ink, at < https://the.ink/p/future-shock >

~~ recommended by dmorista ~~

Introductionby dmorista: Girahandas makes a very important point in this article. The Left and the Progressive political movement are not doing a particularly good job at “outreach” to disenfranchised Whites. There needs to be considerably more Progressive / Leftist “Movement Building”, with outreach and incorporation of all disenfranchised groups. A dialogue that emphasizes the many things we have in common, not the relatively few issues that separate us. The right has been using the past years to do serious “movement building” and they have become more powerful because of that.

The Article does suffer from a biased point of view that sees all white men as having had some innate priviledge. White working class men did have some priviledges, but for the great majority of them, those advantages did not begin until the New Deal, when working class people fought to overcome the misery and oppression that were the lot of all working people.

Girahandas is also somewhat wrong about the issue of “progress”. Yes, women and non-whites have made some gains, but for the entire working class population vital questions of living standards including housing, education, health care, have all gotten much worse over the past 40 years. In a way his arguments are the leftist version of how conservative economists always argue that we are better off now because we have cell phones and computers; despite the fact that we are losing access to decent owner-occupied housing, and affordable education and healthcare.  The past should not be oversold, but in many areas everybody, among working class people, in the country was better off than they are now.

Future shock

Anand recently had a live conversation with members of Indivisible about his book The Persuaders. From the talk the following essay is adapted. It is about not losing sight of the head-spinning progress that is behind this era of backlash — and the difficult imperative of helping to usher disoriented people into new times.

On the far side of change

We sometimes forget we have made astonishing, head-spinning progress in recent decades. And because of that progress, life is very disorienting for lots of people.

Here and around the world, we have changed more in the status of women in the last 50 years than in the previous 50,000 years, I would guess. We have done more in the last 60 years to become true to our founding commitments around racial equality, the words that were never lived up to at the beginning — more in the last 60 years than in the previous 340.

We have done more to build a kind of multiracial democracy where people from every corner of the planet Earth are living together and building extraordinary things together — things that often their cousins and ancestors in other parts of the world never got a chance to create because they weren't collaborating with people from every other place in the world.

And because of that extraordinary progress toward a bigger “we,” it is not strange but normal, predictable, and foreseeable that it's destabilizing to many. Managing people through the loss of status, the loss of what was undeserved, turns out to be one of the hardest problems humans face. When you are accustomed to privilege, the famous old saying goes, equality feels like oppression.

Corporations have something called “change management.” But we don’t know how to do that for whole societies. We do progress and expect people to remake themselves on their own time. It’s very laissez-faire.

Consider that we have completely changed the meaning of being a man and what you can do and not do as a man in the last 20, 30, 40 years. Thank god. But let's be honest: We have done a better job of dismantling some of the old stories and practices and structures of masculinity that needed dismantling than we have of teaching men new ways to be men. The result is a vacuum, and certain podcast charlatans are very deft at getting in there and pied-piping men into new misogynistic visions to fill the void.

This is all too often how it goes: We are better at the dismantling than the re-mantling. (And, understandably, some think this is just fine. Why should we fuss over people whom we’ve been fussing over for so long? At last, the fussing time is over.)

We've seen a similar dynamic on race. Consider the enormous legal and structural progress that has been won — those America loved least unrequitedly loving America enough to bother toiling to change it — and think about this: How many white people of a certain age knew about whiteness as a concept when they were growing up, talked about whiteness, wrestled with whiteness, engaged seriously with the problem of race?

But I bet every white person reading this has had to face those ideas, one way or another, like it or dislike it. We forget how much we have been living through. We forget how many battles have been won.

This is why I sometimes feel more hope about our present political situation than events would seem to warrant. The context of this moment is that we have realized a great deal of social progress in recent decades, fought for by movements determined to give ever more of us a say in making the future. And a lot of that progress necessarily requires millions of people to acquire a whole new sense of self, a whole new sense of how they relate to others, a whole new source and definition of their esteem.

If you are a white guy and a coal miner in West Virginia, this vision of progress is, in a sense, asking you to step out of the definition of masculinity you were raised in and inhabit some new one. It is perhaps asking you to step out of a certain obliviousness to or denial of race and demanding that you engage with it, even if it feels remote to you where you live. It is asking you to leave the industry that gave you and your dad and your granddad meaning and purpose and status in society and suggesting that we maybe not even have that industry in the future to save the earth, which might feel like trading abstract gain for concrete loss.

By the way, I happen to support all of those changes. For my taste, they cannot happen fast enough. But we sometimes don't acknowledge that, Yeah, it’s a lot. We're asking people a lot — rightfully asking people a lot.

And when we see people unsettled by it, discombobulated, a lot of them are just trying to get their heads around all that a new era is asking of them. And the authoritarians are getting to them earlier and more effectively than pro-democratic movements. And so people who start out as merely disoriented by change are radicalized into fanatics.

Say you’re a 65-year-old white guy in Arizona, not particularly interested in politics or immigration and the border. But you go to Walgreens to refill your prescriptions, and you have more pills every year because you're getting up there in years. It’s kind of a ritual for you. You get your pills. You chat with the ladies who work there. You stay a little longer than you need to because you're lonely and don't have people to talk to.

Over the years, some of the people you chat with stop working there. They're aging out. They’re replaced by younger, Spanish-speaking clerks, in keeping with Arizona’s changing demographics. Perhaps you can't communicate with them or feel you can’t.

What I learned from on-the-ground organizers in Arizona and elsewhere working on this issue is that such an incident on its own does not make someone a hardcore anti-border person or a MAGA Republican. Just that sadness about the loss of that ritual does not make you a cruel person. Wishing the older white ladies were back doesn't make you heartless. It's a normal thing I've described so far. Change is always hard.

Think of that guy as being at Stage One in a political version of what companies call the customer journey. The extreme right has a full suite of offerings for him to move through a radicalization funnel — to explain that moment, to give him a story of how Biden did this, Obama did that, and so on. How it’s all part of a grand conspiracy that suddenly explains this issue and every issue.

And the right has its churches and other in-real-life thick networks that help with this funneling. They have their own propagandistic media to help. They have Fox News. They have their billionaire backers who, in this very era of widening inclusion, have weaponized people’s sense of status threat and fear of each other to consolidate more and more wealth and power at the top, in their own hands.

And so people just experience normal life stuff like, Huh, my kid's textbook tells a different story about Jefferson than the one I grew up with; I feel unsettled by that — again, that alone, in its embryonic form, is normal. Not a bad person for feeling that.

And then the right has a conveyor belt to take you from that discomfort all the way to, “I am going to war with critical race theory.”

I don't believe many of the people who claim to be worried about CRT — I’m setting aside the minority of hardcore activists and speaking of millions of more mainstream people — actually understand what CRT is enough to be sincerely worried about it.

Instead, I think they have the universal dread of every parent who's ever been a parent that one day your kids are going to grow up and leave you, which they will. That once they come out of that body, they're never going back in, that every day is a further separation, that they will one day think different thoughts than you think. And the whole purpose of their life is to become separated from your life. And it's the great joy and the great fear of any parent — a fear heightened in times of rapid change. That gets weaponized by the right into Your kids are being brainwashed — whether it’s about history or race or their gender or sexuality. But what is the underlying emotion? The underlying emotion is more interesting, and we can speak to that if we understand it.

Similarly, the underlying emotion behind the border panic is more interesting than the actual situation on the border. Why do people feel so invaded? Why do people feel in such little control of their environment? What is making racism so easy to activate?

The missing piece of the puzzle in our battle against today’s authoritarian threat is a serious, concerted effort to help millions of people — not the hardcore fanatics of MAGA, but the next tranche of voters who are in play for fascism, who are fash-curious — help them navigate the age. It is organizing not for the faint of heart.

Yet this, to me, is the central undertaking for a pro-democracy movement in this country, if we are to have one worthy of the name: to be deeply, persistently engaged in the psychological process through which millions of Americans are trying to figure out these changes, figure out the era, find new identities in a changing country, and ultimately come to see themselves in a way they like to see on the far side of change.

“Anger,” Krista Tippett has wisely said, “is often what pain looks like when it shows itself in public.” The worse the anger, the more important the addressing of pain — but also the harder to do, because sympathy for the pain is undercut by the anger.

This is grueling work that many rightly feel they shouldn’t have to do. But in my years of writing about people living through epic change, I’ve taken up the mantra that the burden of citizenship is accepting that what is not your fault may be your problem.

If I'm honest, I think the pro-democracy cause is almost not even engaged in the kind of work I describe — in this process of ushering people in to the vision of progress we seek. The hopeful point is that we could choose to begin this work now. But the hour is late and the work couldn’t be more urgent if we are to save the country and realize what it was promised to be.