Nostalgia

Seeing the NAACP marching into Selma for voting rights a couple days ago should give us pause. Just the Groundhog Day aspect of it, struggling for contraception or the right to collectively bargain or to register to vote, is a sign that MLK's "long arc of justice" might bend randomly unless people are willing to re-evaluate their strategy.

Of course one wants to reflect on history, to consult and interrogate, but simply replicating what once seemed to work is an emotional, simplistic response that avoids the hard question. Like, if it really worked, why are we doing it again? How is it these "rights" end up so ephemeral and fragile? What if we're not asking the right questions?

One thing we might need to look at is the role of civil society. We like to imagine it is the site of people power and participation but what if instead it is a self-referential feed-back loop designed as a pressure relief valve? What if it veils real power and keeps us on a carousel of activism while discreetly ignoring the reproduction of injustice and inequality behind the screen?

Environmentalists always point back to the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, women to Roe v Wade, Progressives to the New Deal, Populists to the Grange, westerners to the Frontier, immigrants to the Statue of Liberty. But moving forward, getting off the carousel, means examining the past with am unsentimental eye and asking what about the road not taken. For labor this means looking at the rightward drift of the AFL-CIO. For environmentalists this means looking at their embrace of Market Solutions or regulation by the capitalist state. Minorities might have to look at voting.