Sunday, August 23, 2020
Great Awakening
The Group just listened to Michelle Alexander talk about mass incarceration and the new Jim Crow where at the end she hopes that American's can experience a "Great Awakening". I'm always a little skeptical at these vague, religious prescriptions for social change (there was an Enlightenment but that's a different story). Then I was reading a piece in the Atlantic on Q anon and the author was saying The Great Awakening is a big meme in that miliue as well. Then I started thinking: what if Michelle Alexander is Q ?
Yes, there are events when great intellectural and cultural shifts occur, disruptions, ruptures, etc. often preceded by technological innovation. But given the ecological timeline and the new media landscape of memes and influencers, an Idea isn't going to sweep humnity to a new understanding- in time. And it certainly isn't going to convince the power elite to surrender their wealth and status and property.
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I agree this kind of thinking is magical, and waiting for crisis to awaken masses of people is part of the problem, BUT, what other than suffering through a crisis has actually ever worked to lead to actual change.
ReplyDeleteI feel like the segment of the population you mentioned in your last post need to suffer massively to rattle their ideological cages. Otherwise it’s always antibodies to facts.
Similarly, the Left as it is, is so deeply ideological and invested in their quest for their identity that they too are an impossible to organize agent for change. I don’t want the solution to be “there is nothing we can do until suffering from crisis changes people,” but it feels cynically true.
I want to be clear that the Liberal is not the same as the Conservative, and accountability for the consequences of behavior should be understood and justice meted out. However, if one reflects onto Occupy even briefly and then dives into today’s groups and projects of the Left, I believe one finds equally impossible organizing possibilities. DSA, Sierra Club, Our Revolution, 350, Climate Smart, and on and on, these are groups as intractable as their counterparts in Hamilton, even if less offensive to our sensibilities. How many years of appealing to left organizations to see their contradictions and then abandon their neoliberal identitarian politics will it take. Theirs are class protectionist projects and so perhaps more intractable than the worst and most offensive denizens of Hamilton’s craven right.
Well said "Bob" !
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