I am going to do my best to explain my position, and then I’m going away from the internet for six days, but I will read your response, if you have one, next weekend. I’m going to ask you to put aside your knee-jerk ‘‘she’s drawing a false equivalency’’ stance, and whatever other biases you have, and listen to what I’m actually saying.
The left, including people of color and other minorities, are currently in a very disempowered and precarious position in the United States. We don’t have control over the dominant narrative, we don’t have control over policy, we don’t even have any clear leadership or strategy for dealing wth the seriousness of this situation. We are fucked.
Antifa is a small but growing resistance group that, like Anonymous, uses guerilla-style tactics to achieve its ends. It spawned out of a group of people recognizing the seriousness of our situation and deciding that traditional venues for redressing injustice are not currently open to oppressed people in the United States. They aren’t organized. They aren’t strategizing. There is no central base of ‘‘Antifa’’ operations. This means that people who identify with this growing movement can basically do anything terrible of their own volition and the left is going to be blamed for it.
The people in power, their entire purpose is to discredit and demonize the left. The right-wing media, its entire purpose is to discredit and demonize the left. They will jump on anything, and I do mean anything, to achieve this purpose. We have 27 arrests out of 15,000 counter-protesters, and the rightstream media gives us an anecdote about how some old lady got her flag stolen and was knocked down, ergo this protest was really, secretly violent. Notice how all the commenters see this as evidence of liberal fascism.
Now you may see this as not the left’s problem. It’s not our fault. We are being smeared and treated unfairly. And you are correct. The people who engage in extremist behavior are a very small minority of leftists. But that doesn’t change the reality of our situation, which is that we are not ideologically united, we have no leadership, we have no power, we have no strategy, and we don’t control the media narrative. So rather than bitching about how unfair that is, I would prefer that we look honestly at the reality of our situation and strategize from there.
I can’t imagine what it would like to be a person of color in the United States right now, and I won’t try. But what I understand, fundamentally and instinctively, is how rural and suburban white people think. I particularly understand how rural and suburban white racists think because I was surrounded by that shit growing up. I come from an old-school working-class trailer-park-living white rural background. Not that the average white racist would wave a Nazi flag and cheer genocide, no, racism is a natural part of their culture but not a huge part of their identity. They would mostly bitch about (actual complaints I hear) ‘‘reverse racism’’ in the grocery store, black people using the community pool and getting their hair gunk in it, and black people ruining their grandchild’s basketball team since they always get in so much trouble that everyone is benched. These are people who would listen to Christopher Cantwell bitch about ‘‘black assholes’’ getting away with criminal behavior all the time, and think, ‘‘Well I would never support genocide, but he does kind of have a point. Political correctness has gone too far these days.’’ These people exist in a much larger quantity than white supremacists. These people are in the White House, the Congress, and running the rightstream media. Currently they are the ones shaping the national narrative.
Which brings us back to Antifa, the right’s current bogeyman. If you could boil the current conflict down into one point, it’s that people really want the ethical permission to punch Nazis. And you know, if someone is calling for the genocide of your people, I can’t blame you for your hate, and think if you fly off the handle at a protest it’s more than a little understandable.
But I think as an accepted, viable strategy it’s a poor idea, for a number of reasons. First, it accomplishes nothing by way of political change. It might be temporarily empowering, but it’s a moment that’s going to be played over and over on the rightstream media, and you know damned well they aren’t going to say, ‘‘this small minority of people physically attacked this man for trying to speak his mind.’’ No. They will claim that this is all the left’s fault, that leftists embrace violent, fascist ideology, they will draw comparisons to 1984 and all other kinds of bullshit. And the greater this Antifa movement grows, the more it’s going to be hard to disavow ourselves from their actions in the eyes of the right.
So as a liberal, I personally feel a responsibility to give these lying, hateful fucks on the extreme right no room to to stereotype me into someone who violently oppresses free speech. Not only that, but I feel a responsibility to call out bad behavior on the left, for the same reason. I have never had a problem with calling out bad behavior wherever I see it. I’ve been critical of Obama, Bill Clinton, and many others who supposedly represent me, and I’ll be critical of leftist strategy when it fails, also. The idea that this open criticism is somehow traitorous and bad for liberalism is short-sighted and unfair.
Which brings me to the second problem with Antifa and even some liberal-directed social media campaigns such as making Nazis miserable on the internet. It’s not that it’s an unrighteous cause, it’s that it gives the illusion that we’re creating a solution, a movement, that we’re galvanizing any power at all, when all we’re doing is pissing off a bunch of moderates and right-wingers. It serves to excuse the fact that liberals have no strategy and no leadership, much like ranting on social media, it allows us to delude ourselves that we’re actually doing anything. It feels good, but it serves nothing.
This is not me playing devil’s advocate. This is not me engaging in an intellectual exercise because I lack empathy. It is me trying to use my intelligence in the service of an issue I care very deeply about. A huge part of my education in macro social work was studying the history of social policy and social progress and evaluating the different tactics that have been used over the years. The problem is we aren’t currently using any of those tactics in a strategic, focused way. We have ‘‘flash protests’’ like the one in Boston but there’s good evidence that protests don’t have nearly as much impact on social policy as they used to, because they are so easy to organize and so much a knee-jerk response to the moment that they fail to prove to policy-makers that there is a sustained opposition to any given policy. We have abandoned the wisdom of great strategists like Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King, Malcom X. Antifa can’t even be compared to the Black Panther Party, because it has no strategy and no organization.
The left has always been reviled by the right, but we’ve never been in such a vulnerable position with a populist President who favors using violent and biased rhetoric against his opposition. He’s scary unpredictable and the people he places into his administration are all motivated by different goals, each terrible in their own way. As such, we must tread very carefully. The more reactionary our response, the more violence will escalate, and the more we will be seen as the enemy. And ultimately, the less power we will have to redress racial and other types of social injustice in this country. I want to prevent war in this country, not only because I abhor violence, but because those of us on the side of social justice are going to lose. And if we lose, people of color lose. LGBTQ people lose. Women lose.
So you don’t see a problem because you see the left is doing the righteous thing. Doing the righteous thing is all well and fine, but the righteous thing does not necessarily mean the best, most effective thing. In some cases it makes things worse. When it comes to social change, I am interested not in what feels the most vindicating, but in what actually works to improve the lives of people who are oppressed.
I have never, at any time, claimed that Antifa or even annoying people on my Facebook feed represented the majority of liberals in the US, or even a significant percentage of them. Enough exist to concern me, and I have good reasons for publicly expressing those concerns, not because I ‘‘buy into the right wing narrative’’ but because I’m trying to fight against it. Every time you minimize the negative impact of any particular left-winger’s actions, you feed into their narrative that we are wiling to excuse terrible things. When you say, ‘‘oh, well it’s not like anyone’s life was ruined,’’ that’s minimizing someone’s real and unfairly inflicted pain.
I am not perfect. I don’t claim to know everything. I’m still trying to work out a lot of my thoughts on this, particularly as it pertains to what’s going on in Charlottesville. Maybe it would behoove me to be more careful about how I phrase certain types of criticism on the left. But it is extremely frustrating to me when you cast aspersions on my motives, when it is literally my fucking job to change oppressive systems. As in, I get paid to do it. I studied the history of social change and strategies for systemic change in graduate school, I earned a Master’s degree in Macro Social Work from one of the top-ranked programs in the country, a humble little building that is ironically buttressing the Wharton School of Business that Trump so enthusiastically hails. After I graduated, I attended the Center for Progressive Leadership in Philadelphia, and one of the major subjects of that program was the power of storytelling and narrative. I don’t have nearly as much expertise on this subject as a lot of my colleagues do, since I currently work with smaller systems (nonprofits and the surrounding community) but I have enough of a solid overview, from community organizing to lobbying, to understand that all successful efforts for social change require a sustained, long-term, organized strategy with clearly visible leadership. Liberals sounding off on the internet may be good, but they are chaotic good, occasional sputters of feel-good actions and righteous outrage that are too easily distorted and smeared by the right. What we need to make any headway with this administration is lawful good.
Now, everyone in my field may not agree with me. There are probably people I know who could give me an ideological run for my money. If you had a reasoned response to my criticism that was grounded in a firm understanding of what it takes to change oppressive systems, I’d probably respond quite differently to your criticisms. Your passion is admirable, but we seem to be thinking on very different wavelengths. It’s annoying/hurtful to me when you imply that my thoughts and statements on this matter are little more than a knee-jerk response buying into the right-wing narrative. It couldn’t be further from the truth. I take my work very seriously, and I feel I have an ethical and professional obligation to consider the long-term impact of specific left-wing approaches. This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. I took a six-hour road trip this weekend and that is literally all I talked about on the car ride there and back. I’m not even close to having the answers, but I will be thinking through the questions until the day I die.
See you in six days…