Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id510423119
There is a major misconception in politics that being loud, angry, and confrontational is the opposite of being “pragmatic,” and that people who “want to get things done” must be collegial and not make waves. In fact, this is entirely wrong. The successful social movements of ages past have always succeeded by breaking the rules of decorum—but not arbitrarily or thoughtlessly. The Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s succeeded in part through blatantly illegal protests that called attention to the injustice of the existing rules. Shaffer told me that labor struggles that work within legal frameworks are going to have a very hard time succeeding, because the law is stacked against workers. The law, he said, is by definition a tool to uphold the status quo, so anyone who wants to change that status quo is going to have to be open to the idea of breaking rules when it’s morally and tactically necessary to do so.
id510443286
the activists of the ‘60s achieved some of the most important social and political progress in the history of human civilization. They shattered the Jim Crow regime, they put massive cracks in the patriarchy, they ultimately helped to force an end to the atrocity of the Vietnam War (and restrained the U.S. use of illegitimate military force for the next several decades), and they pushed LGBTQ rights into the mainstream. They certainly did not do it by accepting that there’s a time to protest and a time to follow the rules. Instead, they followed the slogan of May ‘68 in France: Be realistic, demand the impossible.