Adam Riggio: The Myth of the Progressive Firing Squad
Written by: Adam Riggio
We eat ourselves. So goes the typical narrative of the left, the narrative that’s become a stereotyped excuse trotted out to skewer progressives for their shortcomings and political failures.
The reactionary right, so goes the story, succeeds because they make better allies over common causes than the progressive left. The left skewers itself – it’s called the circular firing squad.
On the right – plutocrats, extremist evangelicals, white supremacists, factory and extraction workers, they all line up behind President Trump, the mob-connected standard bearer of social and capitalist conservatism.
The Stereotypes and Lies We Can’t Help But Believe
On the left – there’s no unity at all, only progressive causes always undercutting each other’s progress. The conflicts cut across so many progressive vectors, it’s difficult to keep track of them all. They are all lies, but there are just enough shreds of truth in each to ruin the unity of a movement. I’ll mention only a few examples of these oversimplified lies that risk becoming truths.
Imagine a union man, drawing a good working-class salary flying back and forth from Newfoundland to the Alberta tar sands. To this union man, the environmentalist is a tree-hugging dreamer who’d destroy his livelihood to save some fish and ducks. For the environmentalist, the union man is a deluded idiot who defends the super-wealthy oil industry plutocrats burning the world, though he receives a mere pittance compared to the dirty wealth of his industry.
Most frequently discussed in our mainstream media is the split among American progressives, crystallized in the conflict between the progressive left, whose standard-bearer is Bernie Sanders, and the mainstream Democratic Party leadership who are more cozy with corporate interests.
Pundits all too often obsess over this as an unbridgeable cleavage. If a candidate like Bernie Sanders leads the charge against Donald Trump, his relatively extreme views will alienate too many in the electorate who wish for a return to the status quo of more polite authoritarian and plutocratic governance, like the W. Bush and Clinton years, respectively. Likewise, a plutocrat’s candidate like Pete Buttigieg or Mike Bloomberg will push dedicated party activists to tune out.
Remember that none of these are wholly true. The real truth of how the different interests and goals within progressive coalitions fit together or conflict is far more complex than the myths of the circular firing squad.
What Is The Left’s Circular Firing Squad?
The circular firing squad is a metaphor for a supposed tendency among progressive political movements to shatter otherwise powerful alliances with purity tests. Those who can’t demonstrate the highest ideals and the most radical commitments are rejected from the movement as internal enemies. The firing squad is circular, because many of the different camps and ideologies in progressive movements are said to see each other as not progressive enough.
As with all stereotypes, just like the ones above, the image of the circular firing squad takes an ordinary truth and elevates its real potential for crisis, so that we take the crisis as always occurring. Specifically, there are conflicts in any political coalition, and those conflicts have the potential to become so intense that solidarity in the movement breaks. The differences among allied political agendas become so important that the alliance can no longer hold without one or more members making concessions to the others.
This is no purity test, as plutocratic pundits in the mainstream media never tire of saying. Purity tests for political ideology operate very differently. Forcing all members of a movement to conform to a preset, immutable ideology prevents the creation of alliances in the first place.
More than this, conducting politics through tests of ideological purity turns out to be literally impossible. The beliefs, moral values, and models of virtue that distinguish any genuine political movement are shaped through activism itself. Organizers and leaders at every level of a movement develop their ideas from many different sources. We may read different classics and modern works of political theory, engaging with liberal, revolutionary, and conservative thinkers.
Building Ideologies Through Practical Alliances
But ideology doesn’t develop from engaging with ideas alone. Building a political movement powerful enough to succeed requires making contact with people who also face struggles and injustice in the status quo of our societies. So we meet new people and learn about their own experiences, life circumstances, and the roots of their own hardships. We investigate and study the economic, government, and ecological systems in which all our different allies live, and so better understand the struggles people different from ourselves face.
This process is the actual meaning of the phrase, “Check your privilege.”
For an alliance in crisis, however, real differences in policy and cultural agendas make an alliance unworkable. Groups who face different struggles against injustice find their agendas working at cross-purposes. These are the moments of the so-called circular firing squads. Harmonious relationships among political activists from different communities fall into conflict. If the conflict can’t be resolved, the movement splinters.
The practical result of this splintering is that the political movements weaken. Each group that goes its own way does so without the resources of their former partners, and so find themselves more vulnerable to attacks from their enemies. This is always the danger of any political movement.
Progressive politics suffer from such splintering more often because of the nature of such politics. Progressive movements aim to create constructive changes in their societies. They seek to change things from how they are now, reorienting power relationships so that the formerly oppressed hold equal footing with their former oppressors.
Betrayals
But those new relationships will look different, depending on who you are. Think about the examples that started this column. The mining sector union man wants social and economic guarantees for their middle class lifestyle. The prospect of dismantling or radically changing the extraction industries puts that guarantee at risk. Environmentalists want more radical changes to society than the union activist, and each of their changes have different characters. Former allies begin to see how their interests can oppose.
In such a circumstance, conservative coalitions can begin breaking progressive alliances apart. We can see this today, as more working class people in the manufacturing and extraction industries leave progressive parties and activism to support conservative leaders whose rhetoric defends their industries. How to restore alliances that have collapsed in such a way will be the topic of my next several columns.
This article continues next week, with its second part, “The Persistence of the Useful Idiot.” Follow Adam Riggio on Twitter.
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