Note: This comment first appeared on The Greanville Post’s group page, with Eric responding to members Addison dePitt and Mailie Yvonne Lazar.
Eric Schechter: I agree with Mailie’s assessment (quoted by Addison). I assume that by “these people” Mailie meant the voters, not the politicians, in the Democratic Party. I agree that they are unthinking and unimaginative.
I would speculate that only the half-truths of someone like Sanders can begin the process of awakening these people. They will not listen, will not even hear, anyone outside their beloved party. But when they hear a little bit of dissent inside their party, from someone like Sanders, that may get them thinking a little bit, and some of them may continue thinking after that. After that, some of them may even begin to hear voices outside their party, e.g., that of Jill Stein. Once people awaken, they can go beyond the person who woke them.
My own political awakening began in 2006 in a similar fashion. Initially I thought Republicans were horribly evil and Democrats were the solution. I’ve come a long way since then, but that initial stupidity may have been a necessary stage for me to pass through. Indeed, I think that most political activists go through a series of stages of awakening. I wrote a note about that, almost 2 years ago, which I’ll link at the bottom of this comment. I may soon revise that note slightly, to add some of the things that have just now occurred to me:
It seems to me that Sanders may be playing a useful role, offering dissent within the party of hegemony, offering a rudimentary first stage for the beginning of thought. I even find it conceivable (though unlikely) that he chose that role intentionally. Perhaps he thought to himself, “what is the farthest to the left that I can go and still call myself a Democrat?” But we cannot know what he was really thinking, and it hardly matters.
I am far to the left of Sanders, but I do not condemn him as so many leftists do. I am willing to work with anyone whose direction seems more aligned with mine than opposite to mine, though of course that is very context-dependent. If I only worked with people who agree with me 100%, then I’d be working alone. If you’re playing a game of tug-of-war with a very long rope, a person is a teammate if she is pulling in the same direction as you; she doesn’t have to be adjacent to you on the rope.
My first choice for president in 2016 would have been Mimi Soltysik, the candidate of SP-USA, if he had had any chance of winning. He didn’t mince words — he said quite frankly and explicitly that he would like to “overthrow capitalism.” But he also said that he wouldn’t win — that was obvious to everyone, but few candidates will admit such a thing, and he did. In early 2016, it looked like the three people who had some chance of winning were Sanders, Clinton, and Trump. Sanders is an imperialist warmonger like Clinton and Trump, but he is not also an ecocidal plutocrat like Clinton and Trump, and so I saw him as a lesser evil. I gave some support to his presidential campaign, but if he had won, I’d have immediately begun protesting against his imperialist warmongering. If he runs again in 2020, I may support him again (depending on who else is running). At any rate, most of my political activism time is not spent on election compromises, but on education efforts — e.g., writing and distributing leaflets without compromises.
Some Common Stages of Political Awakening
By ERIC SCHECHTER· THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2016
[dropcap]P[/dropcap]erhaps a more accurate title would be “some stages of political awakening that I went through.” But I believe that many other people go through similar stages. Generally it’s a one-way process, because once you see certain things, you can’t unsee them.
The starting position is to not be awake at all. In this stage, you simply aren’t paying any attention to the news. Perhaps you vote once every four years, and that is the extent of your political involvement. And you vote for one of the two major parties, the one your family has chosen for decades, because it’s “good” and the other one is “bad.” You listen to the news sources that seem truthful to you — FOX if you’re a Republican, MSNBC if you’re a Democrat.
- And when your party is in power, then your news source has little to complain about, and so you remain asleep. God is in his heaven, and all’s right with the world, as Robert Browning said.
- But when the other major party is in power, then your news source may find quite a bit to squawk about. And the internet is getting better at squawking than the corporate media ever used to be.
Perhaps some particular issue arouses your concern. Or perhaps some politician will get caught in some crime worse than you are accustomed to — e.g., starting a war for lies, or lying about global warming. This might trigger your first stage of awakening. You begin to actually pay attention to some things.
You begin to be concerned and involved, and perhaps you join some local activist group or committee.
But you still see your party as knights in shining armor, and blame all the troubles of the world on the Bad Party. If only we could elect more people from the Good Party, that would solve all our problems.
For some people, this is as far as the awakening process ever goes.
However, in recent decades, the internet has increased the variety of available information, and so some people go farther.
Kucinich
- This might be triggered during election primaries, when you’ve picked one particularly good candidate to support (e.g., Kucinich or Sanders) and you see him being treated unfairly by the people running the Good Party. So the Good Party isn’t so good after all.
- Or it might be triggered when power is transferred from one party to the other, and you notice that this hardly changes the behavior of the government at all. You notice that the unjustifiable wars, the poverty, the ecocide, etc., are all bipartisan, though the two parties may differ in the speeches they make.
So you enter the second stage. You still believe that our society is based on good principles, but apparently we’ve strayed from those principles into corruption. A lot of crooks have gotten into office. We need to “drain the swamp,” evict all those crooks from office, perhaps even jail some of them. We need a clean sweep, to replace the crooks with a “brand new congress.” That way we can get back to normal life, the good old days, the way things were before we started losing our democracy.
Again, for some people, this is as far as the awakening process ever goes.
After that comes stage two-and-a-quarter. I’m calling it that because it’s not entirely different from stage two. And I haven’t figured out what triggers it. But in this stage, you realize that the crooks holding office may be willing agents of the problem, but they are not the source of the problem. The source is some little error in the system, which causes those crooks to get into office. It might be the electoral college. It might be all the money in politics. And so you join a campaign to make one little change in the constitution. Just think, one little change in the rules could solve all our problems! That’s good news! We don’t have to change our whole way of life! Once we make this change, we can resume our “normal lives”; we can get back to “the good old days.”
Very few people get beyond this stage.
A few people get to stage three, the highest stage that I’m aware of, the stage I would call “radical.” I don’t know how people get to this stage. In this stage, people realize that there never were any “good old days,” and the world we need to create is one that has never existed before. It has a very different notion of “normal lives,” because our old notion of a normal life included things that were causing our problems. The different parts of the old life were perpetuating each other; to change any part of the world we will have to change all of it.
But all that explains why few people get this far. It’s difficult for most people to imagine changing their entire way of life. “I wonder if you can,” John Lennon sang. And if people can’t understand you right away, they may dismiss you as a crackpot, rather than think much about what you’re saying. We just have to keep talking, and hope someone hears us.
Original link: https://www.facebook.com/notes/eric-schechter/some-common-stages-of-political-awakening/10154742906862640/
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All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.
The Russian Peace Threat examines Russophobia, American Exceptionalism and other urgent topics
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Patrice, thank you for posting these two pieces of mine, and for your kind words of introduction. Your introduction mentioned “his own journey,” so I thought maybe you were going to post my longer piece, the one I titled “My Own Journey.” If anyone is interested, they can find that one at http://LeftyMathProf.org/journey . It covers more topics, and perhaps it’s longer than it needs to be. I’m particularly proud of the two paragraphs that mention Kazantzakis.
One hint to the rightward drift of the Democrat Party was when they took an ax to the Great Society agenda, and made it cool for liberals to ignore the consequences (our poverty crisis). NAFTA and the TPP were a couple more clues, and taking the lead as the party of war certainly should have been recognized as a clear statement of Democrat priorities. For over 20 years, the media marketed to liberals have called on us to wage a revolution to maintain the status quo of the bourgeoisie, within our capitalist system — and blame Israel and/or Russia for… Read more »
This is a wonderfully illuminating disclosure, shared as it should be with little embarrassment. For many of us have gone through this same process and are chagrin to look back on how ignorant we must have appeared at the beginning our evolution. Not that I think I can improve on this excellent article, it occurred to me that there might be a stage called the “2 1/2”, when a person takes the realization “that the crooks holding office may be willing agents of the problem, but they are not the source of the problem” a bit further, identifying those who… Read more »