The Essential Stupidity of Leftist Displays of "Solidarity"
Of the many observations that can be made about the smiling MEChA girls from the UC Irvine anti-cartoon protest, it has to be pointed out that their presence confirms what conservatives and neoconservatives have been saying for years about the essential vacuousness of Leftist college activism. Fashionable "resistance" has taken the place of reasoned argument, until today moral exhibitionism - making sure that others see you pretending to be caught up in the passion of your own cause - has supplanted all other considerations (including knowing whatever it is your cause is supposed to be about). In polite society, showing up at someone's carefully planned event with your own signs, banners, and agenda would be considered untoward - but in the self-congratulatory, self-obsessed world of college activism, the rudeness if called "solidarity". In a rigorous sense, solidarity might mean showing up to lend support to another's cause. As it's practiced, however, solidarity plays out roughly as follows: whenever a suitably large mass of unwashed activists sluggishly take to the streets with some simplistic chant, other unwashed activists march with them screaming about a totally different and unrelated issue.
Now this practice can trace its origins back to something a lot more sensible: in the old days of student protests, various marginalized groups saw in each other's causes genuinely shared interests. So for instance blacks, liberal Jews, and women held that discrimination of any kind was a mutual threat to all of them, and would march together (but alternatively) for civil, secular, and gender rights. In contrast to today's morass, any given march had a largely clear and unified purpose - but one in which different identity groups nonetheless found common cause. Today, instead of meaningfully forming a coalition, an activist group will march for its own obscure cause while another activist group is marching for its own obscure cause, while another activist group... Thus the pathetic spectacle of marches held during the run-up to the Iraq war: animal rights signs hoisted in a sea of anti-WTO signs during what was supposed to be an anti-war protest.
How to account for this incoherent and obviously ineffective hodge-podge of causes? Depends on how generous you're feeling. One could explain these useless displays as the result a fundamental misunderstanding of how coalitional politics is supposed to work - perhaps the tenor of 70s identity politics combined with a form of 60s student politics, with the better intentions but the worse tactics of both eras persisting. Or you could be less generous but probably more accurate. You could say that the spectacle of disaffected youth marching through the streets - substituting whatever pathetic emotion they've alighted to that week for the cause they're supposed to be marching for -is nothing more or less complicated than vulgar narcissism. These kids have been doted on their whole lives - incompetent parents and misguided teachers have convinced them that whatever happens to flit through their minds and out their mouth is quite simply the shiniest and most charming thing under the sun. Having accepted this imbecile liberal catechism, the quivering, unhygienic students really do believe that 'it doesn't matter what you're passionate about just so long as you're passionate.'
And how does a human being justify such rank conceit to him or herself? They tell themselves that it's not conceit, it's "solidarity". "Solidarity" - another word for "not having to explain why you're so self-absorbed in your own cause that you can't or won't genuinely lend your voice to an ostensible political ally."
Either way - whether it be because of misunderstanding or vanity - there's a certain sense in which we're grateful for the sheer incoherency of Leftist campus activists. If they ever figured out how useless their current tactics are, they might alter course and suddenly find themselves persuading people in the rightness of their naive and obtuse notions. And then they'd actually rise to the level of being a genuine nuisance.
Now this practice can trace its origins back to something a lot more sensible: in the old days of student protests, various marginalized groups saw in each other's causes genuinely shared interests. So for instance blacks, liberal Jews, and women held that discrimination of any kind was a mutual threat to all of them, and would march together (but alternatively) for civil, secular, and gender rights. In contrast to today's morass, any given march had a largely clear and unified purpose - but one in which different identity groups nonetheless found common cause. Today, instead of meaningfully forming a coalition, an activist group will march for its own obscure cause while another activist group is marching for its own obscure cause, while another activist group... Thus the pathetic spectacle of marches held during the run-up to the Iraq war: animal rights signs hoisted in a sea of anti-WTO signs during what was supposed to be an anti-war protest.
How to account for this incoherent and obviously ineffective hodge-podge of causes? Depends on how generous you're feeling. One could explain these useless displays as the result a fundamental misunderstanding of how coalitional politics is supposed to work - perhaps the tenor of 70s identity politics combined with a form of 60s student politics, with the better intentions but the worse tactics of both eras persisting. Or you could be less generous but probably more accurate. You could say that the spectacle of disaffected youth marching through the streets - substituting whatever pathetic emotion they've alighted to that week for the cause they're supposed to be marching for -is nothing more or less complicated than vulgar narcissism. These kids have been doted on their whole lives - incompetent parents and misguided teachers have convinced them that whatever happens to flit through their minds and out their mouth is quite simply the shiniest and most charming thing under the sun. Having accepted this imbecile liberal catechism, the quivering, unhygienic students really do believe that 'it doesn't matter what you're passionate about just so long as you're passionate.'
And how does a human being justify such rank conceit to him or herself? They tell themselves that it's not conceit, it's "solidarity". "Solidarity" - another word for "not having to explain why you're so self-absorbed in your own cause that you can't or won't genuinely lend your voice to an ostensible political ally."
Either way - whether it be because of misunderstanding or vanity - there's a certain sense in which we're grateful for the sheer incoherency of Leftist campus activists. If they ever figured out how useless their current tactics are, they might alter course and suddenly find themselves persuading people in the rightness of their naive and obtuse notions. And then they'd actually rise to the level of being a genuine nuisance.
