Activism is not a Social Club
Politics is for improving people's lives, not gaining status or looking cool online
Simulacra Levels
The first thing I want to talk about today is the philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard.
Stick with me, I promise this is going somewhere.
Baudrillard makes a point that is fundamentally simple, but profound. According to Baudrillard, a lot of human experience is ‘simulated’ and actual reality has been replaced by things that symbolize reality. There are different levels to this symbolism, some of which go deeper than others. This all gets pretty abstract in Baudrillard’s text, so it’s easiest to illustrate with an example.
Level 1: Listening to lots of music from My Chemical Romance because you sincerely enjoy their music. This is ‘reality’: it’s not ironic, symbolic, or complicated.
Level 2: Listening to lots of music from My Chemical Romance because you are ‘emo’. You are doing the thing because it aligns with the kind of person you see yourself as.
Level 3: Saying you like My Chemical Romance because your friends do. It’s cool to listen to them, you want to be like the cool people, you think there will be social benefit from saying this. You actually listen to them only occasionally.
Level 4: Wearing a My Chemical Romance T-shirt and not knowing who they are.
If you pay attention to the wider world even a little bit, you’ll realize how this captures a lot of cultural expression. You can argue whether it’s good, bad, or something else, but it’s clearly a phenomenon that happens.
This also informs how I think about politics online.
Two Dumb Arguments
As is often the case, in the last week I’ve seen a couple of political arguments online that made me angry. The first involved a leftist comedian doing a routine about how people shouldn’t vote for Joe Biden. It’s worth quoting:
A lot of people want the Democrats to lose. A lot of people want the Democrats to be punished and to suffer a historic and humiliating defeat. And white liberals are very tense, right? They’re like “Is that what you really want? You want Trump to come back? You want Trump to win?”
What I want is for you not to lecture us on how to respond to a genocide you didn’t try to stop, ok?
“You think that’s a good idea for your community? Because it’s your community that’s gonna suffer if Trump comes back. People like you are gonna suffer, what do you think of that?”
I think that a political system that ultimately makes you choose between genocidal dementia and cheeseburger-powered fake tan Hitler is a system worth overthrowing, okay? Maybe that is the conclusion you should be coming to, instead of lecturing Black and Brown people on why they don’t worship the Democrats, okay?
There are a lot of things I could say here. I could say that a lot of this is factually wrong - the Biden administration is very much trying to rein in Israel, for instance. I could point out that the comedian’s imaginary conversation partner raises valid points that he doesn’t actually bother to rebut. I could point out that he sure is talking a lot about overthrowing the system while doing nothing to overthrow the system.
I could point out that there are no jokes here, and that ‘stand up comedian who just lectures you without telling jokes’ is the most shit-for-brains form of cultural commentary that exists. I could say that this guy is an Australian citizen who lives in Melbourne and is performing his set in London, England, so why should I give a flying fuck what he thinks - if Trump is re-elected this guy will be living safe and sound in an entirely different country, facing zero consequences for his grandstanding.
But I’m actually not going to say any of that just yet. I want to talk about a different thing first.
There’s been a round of discourse recently amongst different camps of the Democratic party about whether Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor should retire and let Biden appoint a replacement before the election. This ‘controversy’ has a straightforward answer if you are a Democrat who cares about achieving Democratic priorities. She absolutely should retire. The case is obvious and has been laid out by Matt Yglesias, Nate Silver, Josh Barro and others. It’s such an obvious answer that Silver calls it a ‘political IQ test’. And yet:
There’s a surprising amount of resistance to the obvious, clear logic that Sotomayor should retire and allow a younger liberal justice to take her place. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s failure to retire in a timely way cost Democrats her seat for at least a generation. If Sotomayor has an untimely death, Democrats could realistically be facing 30-40 straight years of conservative control of the Supreme Court. But you still see arguments like this one all over the place saying “Calls for Sonia Sotomayor to retire are ‘ableism, pure and simple’”.
There are a lot of things I could say about this article, if I wanted to be mean. I could say the entire thing is hot garbage that should never have made it past an editor’s desk. I could say it’s an op-ed pretending to be reporting under the guise of ‘advocates claim this is true and I only bothered to talk to the advocates’ and that the author should have some courage and just write an op-ed. I could say worrying that a 70 year old overweight diabetic woman might face a health crisis is fully rational and not ‘ableism’. The article says that diabetic people are sometimes professional and Olympic athletes, which I could point out would be relevant if Sonia Sotomayor were also a 26 year old elite athlete in top physical condition. I could point out that the author doesn’t even try to rebut the Sotomayor critics or engage with their arguments, and instead retreats to complaints about ‘ableism’ as the Big Scary Word, ala Literally Violence.
But I think all of this would miss the point. Sotomayor’s defenders don’t actually want to accomplish Democratic priorities. Brave comedian system overthrowers don’t actually want to help vulnerable people. They’re operating at a different simulacra level.
Activism is Not a Social Club
The simulacra levels we talked about above in regards to music can also be applied to politics. The fights above are inside the Democratic/liberal/progressive/etc camps, so I’ll describe them that way (but the same thing can be done on the right). I’d write them out something like this:
Level 1: Trying to change the world for the better, and taking direct actions to make the world more liberal/progressive.
Level 2: Passively supporting Democrats or liberal/progressive causes because you broadly identify as liberal or progressive.
Level 3: Supporting various liberal/progressive causes because your in-group supports them, and there are social benefits and prestige to be gained from looking like you care a lot.
Level 4: Wearing a Free Palestine T-shirt and not being able to locate Palestine on a map.
Sotomayor defenders and non-joke-telling comedians aren’t operating on the first level. Their arguments aren’t concrete arguments about what will really help everyday people. They’re mostly operating at level three - supporting something to gain a particular kind of prestige or to be part of a group. Level three contains the kind of person who wants to look like an activist, but doesn’t want to put in the real work and doesn’t care about results at all (YOU ARE HERE, ONLINE POSTERS). They’re very concerned that people know they have the right opinions… and that’s it.
Melbourne’s least funny comedian is mostly concerned that we know he is very, very outraged. Whether or not his actions improve the world is beside the point. Sotomayor defenders are mostly concerned that she isn’t bullied out of her powerful position. Whether or not her retirement is a strategically wise choice is beside the point. They’re defending her status because she’s inside their in-group of Latina or disabled, not because it would help normal people.
This sort of thing doesn’t really matter when it comes to pop culture. Hardcore fans might call you a poser, but it’s fine to be a casual fan of a TV series who misses a bunch of episodes. It’s fine to like a band for aesthetic or social reasons. There’s no harm. But when it comes to politics this kind of engagement is absolutely poisonous.
Activism is about winning. Activism is about changing the world in real, concrete ways. Politics is for power.
Activism is not a social club where the most important thing is to be morally righteous. Activism is not about looking cool to other activists. Activism is not dunking on people on social media. It is not when you ratio someone.
Activism is not a participation trophy. You know what mostly doesn’t matter? Having a Latina woman on the Supreme Court. You know what does matter? Improving the lives of millions of real Latina women all over America. Any real activist would trade the former for the latter in a heartbeat. Activism is about standing up for real, everyday people, not standing up for Sonia Sotomayor’s specific right to keep her job.
Activism is not a set of boxes you check. I don’t particularly care what you did or what you organized if it doesn’t lead to change. Activism is not about media stunts, virality or online popularity. Activism is not throwing soup.
Activism is not about ‘making a point’ and it’s not about ‘being right’. Everybody thinks they’re right. Everybody thinks their preferred policies are the best and morally righteous ones. It’s not about making loud declarations. It’s not about renaming things.
Activism is about winning. It is about power. It is about changing the world. If what you’re doing doesn’t lead to concrete change, if it doesn’t WIN, if it isn’t about seizing real power and using it in the messy real world, it’s not activism. It’s political masturbation. It makes you feel good but accomplishes nothing, and it probably makes a mess in the process.
Now some well-meaning people out there will object to parts of this. They’ll say “I’m getting some great dunks online, and I’m very popular and I’m doing social-club-cool-kids behavior. But all of that is also helpful in winning! I’m getting all the online clout, and will use it for actually productive efforts.”
This can be true. If you want to make change happen, it’s surely much easier if you have a big following, a large audience. Messaging strategy is a real thing. Some messages, media campaigns, and attempts to change the public’s mind really do work. Posting can actually be useful… sometimes.
But some messaging strategies are useless, or they fail dramatically and just make things worse. And what you see above is people who aren’t bothering to do any sort of analysis of whether promoting a certain message will be good or bad in the long run. They’re playing status games, not trying to improve people’s lives.
It’s a tough pill for political activists to swallow - to realize more of you are doing useless or actively bad messaging than you’d be comfortable admitting. Are you sure you’re one of the smart ones? Are you sure you’re operating on the first level of simulacra? If you asked the people I’m calling out above they’d certain claim they care about the real impact of their words, even though it’s clear they don’t.
I don’t care how people live their lives in most cases - be a poser, wear the T-shirt of the band you’ve never listened to. You do you. But if you’re engaging in politics, for the love of God, make damn sure you stay focused on level one.
I've also seen this described also as "political hobbyism" by Eitan Hersh, which I only learned about from Pod Save America this last Sunday in a video titled "Are College Educated Democrats Going to Cost Joe Biden The 2024 Election?" It's worth a watch and his 2020 Atlantic article "College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics" is worth a read.
Full time worker on political campaigns and so many people I know scoff at my work and pretend they're doing better when they're engaging on level 3 or 4 at maximum.
I think an important thing you didn't write on quite enough is that activism is hard and takes up time. Engaging at the level of offering cynical commentary or clamoring about a "revolution:" with the date and details TBD is easy and you can claim that you're unable to work with the system we have so the actual work of an activist is avoided. If you convince yourself that the whole structure (elections, Democratic campaigns, etc) is a vehicle that will never lead to change (despite repeated evidence to the contrary) then you can convince yourself that posting on a formerly bird themed social media site run by a Bond villain is the only way to get any wins.