sticky wickets

I was chatting with somebody recently who was rebutting my take on social liberalism (that it's a deeply unhealthy movement right now) by pointing to gay marriage. Well, first, nine out of fifty states performing same-sex marriages does not strike me as great success yet! Although I do, of course, recognize the incredible progress that has occurred. In the broader sense, I actually think gay marriage proves my point. Gay marriage is a specific material goal, whether accomplished legislatively or through the judiciary, and one that we know when we have achieved. I don't doubt for a second that diminishing anti-gay bigotry has played a large role in making gay marriage more possible. But the specificity of the goal stands in a marked contrast to a lot of anti-racist and anti-sexist efforts. What's more, part of the beauty of enshrining gay rights is precisely that they render bigotry less powerful. I have no doubt that some people will remain (quietly) bigoted against gay men and women in perpetuity. But if they can access the full panoply of civil rights granted to heterosexuals, the relevance of that bigotry recedes dramatically.

How to navigate this interface between the personal and the material is, of course, a tangled and vexing question. I don't begrudge anyone difficulty in assessing this question, nor do I think that everyone has to have the same ideas about how to get from one to the other. But I do think it's important that at least some of your goals be the type where you know when you've met them. (Forgive that nightmare of a sentence.) I think it's very important to have a theory of change.

None of this is at all an insistence on keeping your goals realistic. I certainly could never make that argument! Indeed, narrowing the realm of acceptable politics to what seems narrowly realistic is a good way to prevent real change. Besides, "realistic" can be a rapidly changing quality. Again: when I graduated from high school, nobody wanted to hear about gay marriage. Even many of my family's gay friends didn't want to talk about it, for fear it would seem too extreme or militant. Things change. I'm not asking for realism in a short-term political sense. I'm asking for knowing victory when we see it.

Now, a lot of people I disagree with have, in fact, articulated a theory of change. They believe in the idea of the widening circle: that a group of people taking a very strong stance against sexism, racism, and homophobia will create a social expectation that certain attitudes, behaviors, and utterances are socially unacceptable. As time goes on, more and more people become aware of that expectation, they will find themselves within the circle, and will declare themselves part of it by participating in the expression of judgment against these behaviors. Over time, the circle grows to the point where most everyone with political power recognizes the realities of sexism, racism, homphobia, and privilege, and then works to address material or structural inequalities.

At this point, I don't think that this frame is working. I think the evidence against it is present both in the continued intractable racial inequalities we can statistically assess, and in a more anecdotal sense in which I perceive growing skepticism and resistance to social liberalism among people who are not within a certain social or demographic cohort. I think that the reason for this failure is partially explained in this post by Rich Juzwiak, though of course I don't claim to speak for him. The danger with the expanding circle is the potential that, rather than the circle actually expanding, its walls simply become higher and higher; rather than more and more people getting pulled inside, the people inside and the people outside become more and more divided. Each develops a deeper sense of resentment towards the other. More perniciously, those inside develop a social or cultural value in being separated. Because being inside the circle is associated with righteousness, and this righteousness provides social cachet, the incentive is not to draw more people into the circle but to keep them out. And without intending to, essays like the one Juzwiak criticizes become more and more oriented towards elevating people within the inner circle-- and in so doing, make being within the circle less appealing or possible to those who most need to be convinced. When I watch people showily and ritualistically displaying offense on Twitter, I observe exactly this dynamic.

I do, however, recognize that some of my own resentment against those engaging in that outrage cycle colors my perception of their motives, which is never a good thing when trying to get to the truth.

Whatever the case, whether the goal is primarily material or primarily emotional or anywhere in between, I would like a new focus on theories of change. I would like for the people expressing indignity about bigotry or insensitivity-- whether perfectly enlightened or perfectly misguided-- to better express how their discourse can actually contribute to positive change. I don't need political argument to be effective to be worth engaging in. (If I did, I'd have nothing to say.) But I do want people to be more clear about whether they're approaching success, how they would know success if they got there, and what a long-term strategy might look like.