Cargo Cult Activism
Causes should be related to their effects
Have you ever tried to find an evocative case study to open a piece, but been overwhelmed by the sheer number of amusing choices?
Because that's very much being faced here in trying to figure out which example of cack-handed activism would be the best lead into the rest of the article. Would it be best to launch with a recitation of:
Pro-Palestinian activists crashing a party for UC Berkeley Law School graduates and getting into a fight with the dean's wife?
Extinction Rebellion protestors interrupting a Broadway revival of An Enemy of the People to demand something unspecific about climate change? These are not the same people who keep throwing soup on famous paintings, for the record.
Another Gaza activist facing 18 felony counts after threatening to murder the Bakersfield City Council, AT A MEETING OF THE BAKERSFIELD CITY COUNCIL?
Vanderbilt students occupying a school building (again over Gaza), holding a 21-hour "hunger strike" because they forgot to bring food, and having an embarrassing freak-out over changing a tampon?
With choices this amusing, the only fair thing to do is to highlight them all in list form.
These are but a few of the recent examples of cringe-worthy protests that left-wing activists have taken to staging in recent years.
It would be terribly unoriginal to just spend an entire article recounting several instances of people beclowning themselves as we point and laugh at them. Though trying to analyze them for some deeper meaning is not especially original, either. Fellow New Liberal Jeremiah Johnson has done an excellent write-up on this style of activism in his substack Infinite Scroll (which you should absolutely be reading).
While Jeremiah's piece is excellent, it feels like it may have missed some of the underlying thinking that motivates this new style of showy, social media focused left-wing agitation. The Infinite Scroll thesis is that one should think of a lot of this as social signaling, rather than a sincere attempt to effectuate political change, akin to changing the background colors of your Facebook profile to show support for LGBT rights, Ukraine, or the plight of legless puppy dogs. This feels pretty spot on when it comes to "activism" that occurs purely in the online space.
But it feels like it's missing something when transposed to the real world. Compared to putting "Free Palestine" or "Love is Love" in your Twitter bio, there is effort and sacrifice required to engage in real-life protest. Exactly how much effort is required to sit in a hall for 21 hours or ruin a graduation party is up for debate, but it's not nothing.
Rather it may be better to think of these events as instances of what shall now, and forevermore be known as Cargo Cult Activism ©™®
For some context, cargo cults are/were a style of religion that popped up at various times on Pacific Islands following the exposure of native peoples to Western religious and technological influences. The precise contours of these beliefs are fiendishly complicated and don't relate all that well to the popular conception of cargo cults. While in real life, cargo cults popped up in response to the various stresses of colonization and invasion by Western powers and the Japanese, pop culture cargo cults are more along the lines of "primitive Pacific Islanders building ramshackle docks, believing that they will summon boats carrying food because they saw western missionaries doing that." While this conception of cargo cults doesn't reflect the real history all that well, it does encapsulate a certain tendency of human behavior that's useful to keep in one's mind when thinking about Cargo Cult Activism.
For our purposes, one can think of cargo cult behavior as taking actions that imitate a form one has seen before, expecting that it will have the same effect, even if it's missing some vital aspect that made the prior action work. E.G. building a dock that you expect food-laden boats to come to, without understanding that you need to have relationships and contacts with people who can launch said boats.
So what does this have to do with interrupting plays and threatening the Mayor of Bakersfield? Well, it seems as if many of these Cargo Cult Activists were attempting to imitate the showy attention-grabbing protests of the American Civil Rights movement, when activists would get arrested or beaten for sitting at segregated lunch counters or riding segregated buses to try to bring an end to Jim Crow in the South. At a surface level, it makes some sense. Those protests grabbed headlines, so if some activists can grab the headlines, maybe they can accomplish their goals.
What this line of thinking misses is that the Civil Rights Movement wasn't just a movement focused on infuriating restaurant owners and getting beaten up by the Klan. Groups like CORE, the NAACP, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee did engage in dramatic protests, yes. But these protests were married to a broader strategy of voter organizing, legislation, and lawsuits. While the Freedom Riders who were getting arrested and beaten, their allies in Congress and the White House were using the buzz generated by their protests to advance legislation.
Also, the targets of the civil rights protests had a cognizable relationship to the policy changes protestors were agitating for. They didn't sit in at segregated lunch counters to demand changes to abortion law. They sat at segregated lunch counters because those counters didn't serve black customers and the protestors wanted them to be open to all.
Contrast with today's Cargo Cult Activists. What relationship does the Dean of Berkeley Law or the Bakersfield City Council have with the War in Gaza? How does throwing soup at Van Goghs and interrupting a Jeremy Strong play help reduce global CO2 emissions? Some say that these protests "raise awareness" of an issue. Though it's a little bit laughable to think that people are somehow unaware of climate change or the War in Gaza. Supporters might make some gestures at university and museum trust funds investing in Israeli companies or fossil fuel concerns, or that a ceasefire resolution by the 9th largest city in California will somehow convince Bibi Netanyahu to pull out of Gaza. But to most people, it sounds like underpants gnome logic.
All this raises the question. Why? Why have these people decided to engage in ineffectual stunts to achieve their political goals rather than some other avenue? Part of it may be an educational issue. Not to say that these people are stupid. But rather, the historical record that many people have digested is incomplete in a way that distorts thinking about how change actually comes about. History plays up Martin Luther King Jr.'s marches and the Freedom Rides because they were dramatic and well-documented, whereas the congressional negotiations on the text of the Voting Rights Act are both boring and a bit murky.
There is perhaps also a bit of intellectual laziness involved. Though crashing a UC Berkeley Law reception is harder than changing your name to "Stop the Gaza Genocide" on Instagram, it's probably easier than calling one's representatives over and over to support legislative proposals that move the needle a tiny bit and then pestering all your friends to do the same. As mentioned in the Infinite Scroll article, the latter option also gets you some amount of clout and admiration from your left-wing activist peers regardless of its actual usefulness, whereas organizing to help get real policy changes is slow, tedious, has no guarantee of working, and probably won't get you any respect from random strangers on the internet who's validation you now depend on for some reason.
With that in mind, consider joining the Center for New Liberalism. We have an active network of people who actually talk to elected officials, try to win elections, and effectuate real change. We don't always win, it's sometimes crushingly dull, and strangers on the internet probably won't call you a Cool Dude. But you're more likely to succeed than by building metaphorical docks on a metaphorical island expecting a metaphorical ship to deliver you your metaphorical deliverance.