Calls to Liberal Action

Faux call to action

What policies or efforts can we support today in order to promote Martin Luther King’s vision of a better America? Maybe… 

• Medicare for all
• guaranteed income
• taxes on wealth
• higher taxes on high incomes
• legal weed
• an end to private prisons
• closing gun-purchase loopholes
• promoting education and training
• investing in green jobs and infrastructure. 

We have plenty of directions to choose from. In January, it was heartening to see so many Seattleites joining in the Martin Luther King march. There’s obviously a lot of energy around confronting injustice and inequality, which is great to see. What concerns me, however, is that the liberal project seems to have lost its momentum in the last five years or so. For a hundred years or more, we’ve seen liberal progress, but recently things seem to have gotten worse, not better. One unfortunate thing I noticed at the MLK march is a trend that I’ve seen elsewhere: a lack of calls to action. Protest signs at the march mostly seemed to declare what people are against rather than what we hope to accomplish. Declaring one’s opposition to bad things is easier than proposing a practical course of action, but it’s action that counts. Maybe if we liberals could put more effort into figuring out what we need to do next, then we could get moving in those directions.

If you go back 50 years or 100 years, the amount of liberal progress that we’ve made has been tremendous. Gay marriage, Obamacare, Americans with Disabilities Act, Roe v Wade, interracial marriage (my favorite), Civil Rights legislation, the Great Society, rights of the accused, the New Deal, and women’s suffrage. But if you go back just the last several years, one sees a string of failures: the Zimmerman acquittal, BLM’s attempt to reform policing, NoDAPL, Shaun King’s injustice boycott, and the attempt to keep the Republican candidate from winning the 2016 election. There’s a lot of energy on the left, but not a lot of results. I’m a natural science guy and not a political theory guy, so I want results.

Maybe one thing that keeps us lefties from winning more is that our calls to action are ineffective. For the last several years, I’ve noticed a lack of good calls to action from the left. See, for example, the documentary Thirteenth, which impresses on viewers the horror of mass incarceration but ends with no call to action. This year, the MLK march also demonstrated a distinct lack of calls to action. For example, a big sign that I’ve seen at earlier marches declared “Trump/Pence Must Go”. Great! I agree. What does that mean? Does it mean vote Dem in 2020? Impeach? Does it mean, let’s engage in violent rebellion against the US government? Engage in a national strike? Share memes on social media? 

My sign.
Next year, a call to action.

Plenty of other signs were phrased as if they were calls to action, but they really weren’t. Consider “Smash the Patriarchy”, “End Racism”, “End Racial Disparities Now”, and “Resist”. Those sound good to me. What’s step one? What’s the plan? What’s the timeline? Within the plan, what are the highest priorities? These are faux calls to action, and they come across more like creeds. Everyone who wants to “smash the patriarchy” can find each other thanks to signs like these. But once they have found each other, what will they do next? Burn down a bank? Castrate toxic males? Share devastating memes on Twitter? The beauty of a religious creed like the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is that it requires no change in actual behavior. Any Christian can affirm the creed that Jesus is fully human and fully God without being bothered to donate their wealth to the poor or to evangelize for the Lord. Creeds are easy. As with a creed, social justice advocates who want a better world can affirm a shared desire to “smash the patriarchy” without committing to any particular action. 

An actual call to action combines two things people don’t like: making a decision and taking a risk. To say “Legalize weed”, one has to decide that legalizing weed is a good idea, to decide that it’s a political struggle worth taking on, and to risk being wrong on both counts. Avoiding the risk of making a decision has built-in appeal, but those of us committed enough to carry signs should be willing to go the extra mile and accept that risk. The attraction of a faux call to action is that it feels powerful, but it risks nothing. 

Recently, we on the left have stopped achieving our goals. In fact, we have failed to set realistic goals in the first place. It takes real work to figure out what to do next, and we should do that work. Legalize weed. Medicare for all. Legalize prostitution. Tax wealth. Tax capital gains like wages. Tax high incomes. Get a Democrat elected president. There are lots of good directions forward, and we should point the way.

2020 addendum: I learned that King called on people to change policy and expect that hearts would follow. His entire “Other America” speech is worth a listen, especially as he directly addresses the controversial topic of rioting. Link.