Activism is worth it

Dedicated to the volunteers from Plymouth, New Hampshire, and around the country that built our win there, as well as my colleagues

Introduction to the introduction

Bernie dropped out. Uh oh!

There are a lot of things that could be said about Bernie’s dropping out and the years that lead up to it. Bernie is probably one of the most impactful presidential candidates in American political history.

The ruling class and the media suck. I wish there were a less candid way to say it but niceties don’t cut it anymore when it comes to those two. They can’t handle their responsibilities, which we’ve been saying for decades, and which has been proven by both’s dismal responses to COVID-19.

Then Bernie, he should have done or said this or that. Some say he shouldn’t have dropped out so soon. Etc.

The movement lives on, thanks to all of the volunteers who sacrificed for the campaign; it was not for nothing! Winning the first three primaries was a historic feat.

Then there’s the Biden angle: what does this man have to offer our country in this moment?

The current president angle.

I’m not going to talk about any of that. Perhaps against my and conventional writing wisdom, I’m also not going to make a big emotional appeal here. The following I wrote before Bernie dropped out. It is a more or less reasoned approach to why radicals of all walks should be politically active if they want to realize their ideals.

In fact, while I’ve been thinking about this for a while, the final straw that caused me to write it was a conversation in a bar with an impassioned Yang supporter who did not vote. It should go without saying that I did not want Yang to win the primary. But I could not fathom how strong a supporter this person was without doing anything about it. What did he think was going to happen? That Yang or people like him would spontaneously combust into office? So my hope, of course, is that justice, compassion, mutual appreciation, love, etc., prevail but the advice pertains to any political radical. In fact, it would probably be fairly simple to abstract my argument for non-radicals, or anyone who wants to make something a reality, but I was thinking about those whose political values fall outside the norm when I wrote it. Of course, a good argument says that Bernie is not a radical, since his policy proposals consistently poll very highly. Again, not my point here.

I take this approach partially as an exploration—are we reasonable to be activists; is the radical who is not politically active missing out on a success that she could have? A guiding principle here is that there ought to be no gap between what you believe you should do and what you actually do, and what you believe is important and what you strive for. I think we underestimate just how inattentive it is to have that gap—so much that I think we just don’t value what we think we do. I find that the major way for the radical to be unreasonable is to be inactive—activism pays off even if we fail more often than we succeed.

Another day I might discuss whether one ought to be reasonable full-stop and I think the answer is no for broad swaths of daily mental life—instead, I prioritize rationality, which describes the way one ought to think—be it reasonably, faithfully, emotionally, etc. But if you want to be reasonable, and you believe that your political values are important, you ought to participate in political society—e.g., volunteering for a candidate’s campaign, volunteering for a local organization that works on a societal issue that’s important to you, knocking doors for a political organization, nonprofit, your church, atheist club, or otherwise, or, you know, can drives, etc. There are a lot of ways to realize what’s important to you—but I’ll also briefly argue herein that some are better and more important than others.

Introduction

A feeling I’ve observed to be common among my fellow political radicals is the overwhelming sense that our views are so prescient, unique, or complicated (we should get over ourselves) that they will never gain enough popular traction to take off within our lifetimes. We feel deflated. Our ideas will require more than twitter or quick conversations and, since we are of the few if any to hold the views, we have a lot of work to do before they even begin to gain momentum.

We don’t end our daunting there. As individuals, we believe that we are not necessary and certainly not sufficient for our views’ popularity; it is an analogous causal impotency whereby we believe that our vote doesn’t matter. We resign ourselves to inactive wishful thinking—that one day what we want will come to pass by another’s hand, perhaps as culture changes.

However, I will argue that it is unreasonable to hold that our values are important to us without our acting to make them the prevailing values in society—even if we are not sufficient and necessary for their success. We don’t need both; we are necessary for our causes and we should act therefore.

In fact, many common objections to activism—many objections we make to ourselves, anyways—do not survive reflection. Many of these mental obstacles merit essays in themselves but I will show some preliminary ways around them. I will often refer abstractly to “activism;” I won’t specify further because it is not my point to describe how to be an effective activist.

I should explicit that no part of my idea for this essay arose from wanting to generate shame, and I hope that will not even be part of the collateral damage. To dive into it, let’s take a look at why your activism is so necessary.

Necessity

First of all and this is the case especially, if not only, in the case of radicals, your activism is necessary for your values’ popularity. To be clear, that means that if you are not active, then, necessarily, your values will not be nor become popular. The fact is, if your values are truly unpopular, then if you are not proposing them, then, in general, no one else is. If popularity is measured per capita, then you need to start with yourself—i.e., checking if you really believe in your values—then trying to bring others along with you. Sure, your proposals are not sufficient for success in the form of popularity but, until the values are in fact popular in the greater population, your proposals are more likely to have been necessary than they are to be unnecessary. And that is true on a sliding scale; the more radical your values, the more likely your activism is to be necessary for your values’ success. (Yet, strangely, I’ve observed that the more radical someone’s ideas are, the more likely this person is to give up.) If the rules of reason require that we ought to choose the action most likely to effect what we want when presented with a set of actions (in this case, a pair, be active or not), we ought to choose to be active if being active is more likely to effect what we seek than being inactive.

In this case, it is in fact a question of knowledge; you cannot know now whether your activism will have been necessary for your values’ future success.

While it might be tempting to think that there is a Sorites Paradox that prevents us from knowing whether our activism is necessary, and many have suggested that that is the case, there is no such paradox here. A Sorites Paradox is a paradox that arises about the numeric boundaries of a vague definition. Let me give an example—perhaps the most famous one. At what point do a collection of grains of sand become a pile of sand? A heap? The definitions of pile and heap are vague about their numeric boundaries. There just isn’t a number of grains of sand that satisfies the conditions of the definitions of pile or heap. It’s not that we couldn’t know whether the number has or will be reached; the fact is that no such number exists.

There are many ways to approach such a Sorites paradox when it arises. However, for at least one very powerful kind of activism, electoral activism, the precise number of people required for success is actually quite definite—it’s just that we cannot predict whether we will reach the number. Successful electoral activism requires winning electoral campaigns. Depending on the electoral system at hand, winning electoral campaigns just requires a plurality of votes, a majority of votes, or a majority of delegates or electors, etc. When the winning number depends on how many people show up to the polls, we cannot know beforehand what the winning number will be, even though it is predefined, but it does exist. E.g., if 100 people show up in an electoral system whereof there are only two options and a simple majority defines victory, the winning number is at least 51. If 102 people show up, the winning number would be 52. This definite number is not the case for Sorites Paradoxes.

We can make another analogy between successful activism and successful voting¹. Please permit me a not-so quick aside.

I think many radicals, and certainly many purported experts and “philosophers,” ask the wrong question when asking whether one should vote. The question they ask is “will one’s vote cause his favorite candidate’s victory?” Let’s ignore the history behind why they ask this, for today. Whereas causing is not well understood but often considered to be something like “being necessary and sufficient for,” these wise guys determine that one should not vote because his vote is very unlikely to cause (i.e., be necessary AND sufficient for) his candidate’s victory. However, one’s vote is so obviously insufficient for his candidate’s victory that I find this causal question spurious, frankly. Let’s review necessity and sufficiency. X is sufficient for Y whereas X alone is enough for Y; X is necessary for Y whereas X is at least one of the things necessary for Y (and without which Y cannot come to pass). (Something can be both sufficient and necessary for something else). It’s obvious that your vote is insufficient for your candidate’s victory—the victory depends on much more than even other folks’ votes; it depends on a successful voting process, the revolution of the Earth around the sun, etc. Therefore, the question is whether your vote is necessary for your candidate’s victory. E.g., sure the Earth might stop revolving around the sun, and the Earth’s revolving around the sun might be necessary for the candidate’s victory, but a collection of other things need to happen as well, such as, potentially, your vote.

So the correct question is not whether my vote will cause my favorite candidate’s victory, but whether it will have been necessary for that candidate’s victory. Since the answer to the question of whether my vote will have been necessary is unpredictable, if I want a particular candidate to win, I ought to take the action that makes that result the most likely. Again, this is because the rules of reason require that we ought to choose the action most likely to effect what we want when presented with a pair of mutually exclusive actions (in this case, mutually contradictory, vote for the candidate or not).

For clarity and to drive the point home, consider your argument in negative terms: I shouldn’t vote because my vote is unnecessary for my candidate’s victory. She doesn’t need my vote in order to win; she will win anyway. Seen this way, abstaining from voting, when a good candidate is on the table, is obviously wishful, if not totally deranged.

Perhaps a more common internal consideration one makes when deterring himself from voting, especially for a radical or outsider candidate, is not that the candidate will win without his vote but, rather, the candidate will not win even with his vote. This is just a restatement of what we have said is obvious: my vote is not enough for my candidate’s victory. It is a pessimism about the chances of victory disguised as knowledge. You cannot know the future and certainly not whether your vote will have been necessary. What you can know, in the present, is that your vote increases the chances of your candidate’s victory, even if minutely. You can reasonably conclude that you shouldn’t vote based on your belief that that your favorite candidate’s victory isn’t that important to you, and that’s fine. My point is that you cannot reasonably argue that your candidate’s victory is important to you but that you shouldn’t vote. The same goes for activism whereas your values are radical enough to require activism for their prevalence.

This may be a hard reality and unfair considering those who can just coast without thinking twice about what they believe or whether to be politically active. But it’s one you have to face if you think your beliefs are important. This is especially the case if you think your values are unique—who else would even be capable of standing for you?

Scarcity

You only have one chance to represent your values on this Earth. And you are one of the few that espouses these values. If you want any chance that someone will have one day or in some way benefited from your values, then you have to try to bring them into practice before you perish into a whisper of the wind.

Radical candidates are not viable very often. When one comes around, you may never have another chance to make such a big difference in how you and other Americans are represented and served by their government.

Urgency

We need your radical beliefs now or they will recede into irrelevance. You may think that you are ahead of your time and your beliefs will become more popular at some future time. But that can only happen if, in general, everyone that has those views stands up for themselves, so that future generations may enjoy even a small basis of support to build off of. Furthermore, to some extent, your views will only make sense in your own time—think of an old book that you’ve read or movie you’ve watched. There are parts of it that you could not understand due to its pertinence only to its own cultural context. Similarly, there will be a big gap to jump between current political trends and the ideals you hope should prevail if you do not start building the bridge now. Take a 15 dollar minimum wage, for instance. The longer you wait to fight for it, the less “sense” it will make; rather, the less justified it will be—15 simply won’t be a living wage in the near future. Now you might say “well, I’ll just fight for a living wage in that near future,” but getting to a living wage in, e.g., 2030 will be much easier if we start with $15 now. My point is not about the particular policy; perhaps UBI is the right way to go. Again, my point here is not partisan even if it is biased by my leftism. I can think, similarly, too, that the Trump administration’s gross tax cuts in 2018 would not have been possible had he not the tea party movement to build off of. My call is to all radicals, conservative vulture capitalists, as well as the diverse types of libertarians, etc. My hope is that there will be more leftists but my advice applies to any radical.

That brings me to why partisan political activism is even more urgent than any old activism. Not only is it the case that if you are not proposing your values, then in general no one is. Not only do you need to lay the foundations for future generations to build off of. To quote Bob Marley (at least according to Will Smith’s character in the movie I Am Legend) “the people who want to make this world worse are not taking a day off, how could I? Light up the darkness.” For many of the problems in our current political system, there are people actively working to quash your values and achieve the reverse goals of your own. We will decline into wretched subservience if we do not stick up for our values. Now, maybe that language is dramatic. But, frankly, I don’t know what watching as my government increasingly works for the few and not the many feels like to you, but complicity in my own subservience is what it feels like to me. At times, emotional desolation. Does it feel OK to you?

You will lose more often than you win, and that’s O.K.

To change gears a bit, I have also found the following counterintuitive conclusion: you should fight for what you believe even if you lose more often than you win. There’s something in the relative permanence of electoral victory that makes it worth the radical’s time. If you are like most Americans, this conclusion might baffle you. Isn’t efficiency the most important of our values? And if you lose more often than you win, aren’t you being inefficient? We can’t escape the feeling that inefficiency makes us feel dumb. A longer term goal of mine is to show that our focus on efficiency, rather than other values like justice, is miscalculated—efficiency is important but overvalued. For now, let’s just see why losing more often than winning is fine for the radical political activist.

In politics, the greatest win you can give your opponent and loss you can give yourself is losing the electoral battle and then giving up². Consider the Justice Democrats. They have lost many a primary, many a race. But over the years, their numbers in congress grow (as well as other areas of representative government), even though they lose more often than they win. Electoral losses simply don’t count; the congressional “scoreboard” counts only wins in the form of public offices occupied. You don’t lose an office when you lose a race; you just don’t gain one. The wins add up over time and, since the opposition changes little to not at all between establishment or conservative democrats and republicans, the scoreboard does not count a radical’s loss as a win for the establishment, since congressional seats are finite; the establishment only holds onto points that it already has—it doesn’t keep adding them up, especially since it changes little legislation over time, except the slow unraveling of civil rights of the many and enrichment of the few (the vast majority of whom are already rich). Thus, political activism is worth it for the radical even if he/she/they loses more often than he/she/they wins. In the long term, the wins add up and the losses, in the moment gut-wrenching, are forgotten. The same goes for single candidates; their numerous losses tend to be forgotten after they’ve won. Sure, the resources spent in the pursuit are lost, but otherwise this conclusion seems to hold. Whatever the case, as throughout the essay, it still holds that your action is necessary for your success. The only way for you to realize your values is to be active.

Now, it’s certainly important to hold onto public offices. When those who do are establishment candidates who change little to nothing, the failure to take one of those offices entails little change, so it just isn’t a very big relative loss—the risk is far worth it. But, when the candidate we wish to unseat is very active and in a bad way, it only makes it more true that we should try to unseat him. While the loss still does not take a public office away from the radical cause, it does make ever more urgent the duty for victory. Still, there is no solution but to fight; the activism is still necessary for victory.

Similarly, when making phone calls or knocking doors for your favorite candidate or cause, you will likely fail more often than you succeed if you are a radical. People will hang up on you, yell at you, slam the door in your face, etc. The only ones that count are those that you bring along with you³—the failure of a single attempt does not count as a point for the other team, since the people you’ve contacted already likely support the baseline establishment candidate or cause, don’t support any cause at all, or would not be active anyway. The political game, it should come as no surprise, is more like king of the hill than it is like basketball.

Mixing public and private life

The following is not an argument I hear from many radicals but it is a very large hurdle for a small number. These potential activists are afraid to mix public and private life. While it’s not clear to me where one should end and the other begin, the mix is nonetheless an important consideration. It is probably the toughest and most complex part of activism to traverse. Until what point should I advocate for my political beliefs? Some folks are business owners that fear losing business. Others simply live in a small town or close-knit neighborhood and fear the judgement of their neighbors. The topic of mixing public and private life is very profound and complex. However, what I’ve found most people are referring to when they wonder whether and to what extent to mix public and private life, they are simply worried about embarrassment. They don’t want to be defeated in argument, represent their ideas poorly, and they don’t want to be identified by their political beliefs.

Probably the very biggest factor about this that I would urge you to consider is just how little people are thinking about you at any given time, even when they’re in the same room as you, or even conversing with you. That is well-demonstrated by the psychological literature. Thus, even if someone were to start thinking of you as a “leftist” above all else, he just isn’t thinking of or noticing you very often—he is the center of his own experience; just like you, he’s sitting around wondering what you think of him! Furthermore, he has responsibilities to think about. This is especially the case for businesses—at that point, the person would have to be so focused on your political beliefs that he is bypassing considerations of your business, product, and personal identity to think first about your political beliefs.

Second, and this is just an argument from experience, most people will not identify you by your political beliefs. People know that I am a Bernie Sanders supporter; it is posted all over my car. I talk about it. It’s on my social media accounts. But, when they see me at a party, or around my neighborhood, they don’t go “oh hey there goes that leftist.” They tend to go “oh hey, there’s Matt, he’s kinda funny sometimes, at others he’s so scattered that I don’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about,” or “oh hey, there’s Matt, he used to babysit my son,” or “oh hey, there’s Matt, the only person who gets to the gym before me in the morning.” (That last one was a good streak while it lasted but probably not true anymore.) And surely many less exciting things are thought or said. But I think “leftist” is rarely the first thing. Frankly, even if it is, I just don’t notice, so I would urge you to give activism a try and see if you notice anyone treating you differently. I think this is a case in which, if the difference is imperceptible, it is a difference that is not harmful.

You should be a proud representative of your beliefs—that could be the very thing that opens someone’s mind or heart to your ideas. One way to think of it is that, rather than associate you with your political values, they will associate the relevant political values with you.

As with other topics I’ve mentioned here, at the end of the day, the question of whether you should be politically active comes down to whether you really believe in the values you think you do. If the risk of embarrassment outweighs the call to activism, then your political values simply aren’t very important to you. And I know that such embarrassment can last a long time in a small town or in the workplace. I don’t mean to belittle or minimize the pain. And don’t think that workplace embarrassment is something I don’t risk as someone who works in politics—a Bernie supporter, while more popular than before, is still less employable than being a supporter of an establishment candidate; there are less radical jobs and radical jobs qualify you more for other radical jobs than for establishment jobs. But the risk of embarrassment and professional judgement is worth taking and simply isn’t as dire a consequence as you might think. And, once again, your activism is necessary for your cause’s success.

I admit that I feel I haven’t done this topic justice; I will likely dedicate a future post to it. For instance, I bet the LGBTQIO community has a lot to teach us about the importance of being who you are despite the consequences. Many communities that our society marginalizes probably do.

Relative abilities

Despite the hardy, perseverant conditions that suggest you should become active, you might respond that you aren’t good at talking to people face to face, over the phone, making signs, or whatever is the task at hand. You, you might say, are better suited for arguing with people on Facebook or Twitter, talking to your friends, or simply aren’t good at political action at all. You worry that you won’t represent the views well enough, thereby doing more harm than good. Perhaps your contribution is on the back end of justice, to enjoy its sweet fruits, e.g., by sipping coffee and reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in peace. I agree on some level: what you are already doing is certainly important, if not inasmuch as its direct political consequences, at least as a manifestation of what political action is for in the first place—things like freedom, justice, and perhaps in a deeper sense, love. That is no small thing. However, as the French proverb goes, “c’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron.” Roughly, “it is by forging that one becomes a forger;” in politics, it is only by our participating in the particular kind of action that advances some cause that the cause advances—not by other important actions. And that is clear in the proverb; there are many important things for you to do day-in-and-day-out but, if you want to be a forger, you have to, well, forge.

It is thus the case that some political actions are better than others and there are no replacements for them; canvassing door to door is one of these actions. That’s right, I said it, at least in the political realm, it’s better to do or be good at some things than it is to do or be good at others. Therefore, you ought to perform some political actions even if you aren’t good at them; they’re more effective than the contribution you are good at, and are often so much more effective that what you think is a contribution is at best next to negligible. I don’t mean to shame you but, rather, inform you. And I don’t mean to be exclusive; some people genuinely cannot walk door to door, or cannot hear well enough to make phone calls, and that’s quite alright. But I must emphasize that there are very, very few people who genuinely don’t have enough time. If you don’t have enough time to volunteer, you know who you are. And that is, again, OK; most people who say they don’t have enough time, however, simply don’t value the things they think they do. Even that’s OK, but I don’t think most potential radicals realize that that’s what’s going on when they say they don’t have enough time.

I’ll also let you in on a little secret: many political actions are difficult for everyone. It’s hard to call people you don’t know. It’s hard not to argue against arguments that you feel aren’t very good, or become frustrated with people whose experiences differ from your own. Etc.; there are many difficulties about direct action. It takes dozens of calls (i.e., about one session of calling) before you get your sea legs under you. Even once you do, every time you start a new phonebank session, it takes a few calls to warm up before you don’t feel awkward. And every time, you learn something about how to better empathize. Phonebanking causes anxiety and frustrations of various kinds. The same is true of knocking doors.

In many, admittedly not all, cases, tweeting or holding a sign in a public place isn’t effective. On the other hand, often they are very effective; for instance, if my point were exclusively to activate radicals, then this essay would be scarcely effective, if at all. Narrating a video about how I came to be politically active and broadcasting it through social media is thought to be more effective at that. This is why I recommend getting together with a local activist group of this or that kind; their leadership best knows which actions the movement needs and when. But I digress; my point is not to explore how best to effect your values, rather to think my way through bad reasoning people like me use to discourage themselves into complacency rather than striving for that which they find most important.

More on difficulty

I almost left this out as it should go without saying but it is easy to forget: the difficulty of the enterprise is also not a good reason to avoid activism. Activism is an inefficient bird. The benefits may be very marginal and the costs may feel heavy. But that shouldn’t be confused for the costs’ outweighing the benefits (because they don’t). Recall that activism is necessary for the dissemination of the radical’s values. The costs should be taken into account by the individual radical as negative values within the value system he is advocating for; i.e., the costs themselves factor into the radical’s values, so to say that the costs outweigh the benefits is just another way of saying that the benefits, i.e., for the radical, his/her/their values, just aren’t important enough to them to be acted upon anyway. For example, let’s say I’m a progressive and it’s important to me that human rights be truly inalienable and universal. Thus, there is no justified conclusion “therefore, this person’s human right should be violated.” If I don’t become an activist based only on that belief because the only relevant cost of that activism is that I would be uncomfortable soliciting donations to my favorite human rights group, then it must be the case, if I’m reasonable, that another value I hold is that the moment-to-moment comfort of individuals such as myself is important enough to outweigh the importance of my human rights activism (or, as discussed before, maybe I think someone else will do it, etc.).

Again, you might say “well I shouldn’t have to make these sacrifices; the world should be such that I have to.” My point throughout has been that, unfortunately, the world is that way. So if you don’t want it to be that way, you have to change it, you have to be the one to do it, and you have to do it now before the opportunity slips away. I suppose my main contribution whereby this essay isn’t trite is just to emphasize the “have to” parts of that last sentence. We radicals don’t often realize the necessity of our activism for the success of our values or prevalence of our views, so we resign to inactivity, wishful thinking, and snide, complicit jokes.

Conclusion

So there you have it. There’s clearly more to the question of radical activism but I’ve gone over why the radical should wake up and activate, despite his intuitive arguments for complacency. If you believe you have a set of values or there is something you want and you are not doing anything about it, then either you are being unreasonable or you do not genuinely value what you superficially believe you do—not enough to do anything about it (you might ask yourself: what values of yours do you act on? Comfort? Diversion? Fear?). This is because your activism is necessary for your values’ success. (A quick counterargument and my reply just occurred to me: what if you believe in the plurality of values or relativism such that you believe others’ values are just as important as yours? In this case, you would still have to fight for others’ abilities to self-actualize, which are quite stifled in the U.S. and the world today.) So stand up, take that first step towards activism! If you go to your local volunteer group and you don’t like the people, bring your friends next time! Or recruit people you do like. Share your thoughts with the group! With patience, it will become more like the group you wanted.

Please stay tuned for my next post on this topic, where I will argue that you should be an activist even given the nonexistence of freewill, time, the self, or even if you are a nihilist.

1. For a more thorough examination of why one should vote, see Alvin Goldman’s Why Citizens Should Vote: A Causal Responsibility Approach. I’m not optimistic about the causal approach but I’ve found Alvin Goldman to be intellectually honest and a clear, concise defender of his beliefs, though I disagree with him on a range of topics. And his prevalence in the academic literature on epistemology suggests my underwhelming endorsement should be taken with a grain of salt.
   1. Another source I think makes the mistake of focusing on voting as a causal factor or moral duty, rather than as the only available way of making something happen. I think the idea of an individual’s being a causal factor in anything is overrated. When are we ever the sole cause of something, and should we ever try to be? But the source offers a more thorough and broad treatment of the topic than I have.
2. This was an attempt to demoralize Bernie and his followers. There are similar attempts against other candidates, causes, etc. They lose if it works; if it does not, the fight lives on. I probably am wasting my time other than to point out the schoolyard Mean-Girls “you broke your arm, does it hurt? How bad does it hurt?” tone she used. But let me explain a little further. The lead-up was totally unnecessary for a journalist. If the question is “what went right and what went wrong,” the context is unnecessary, because he and we know that he suspended his campaign. She could have just asked and saved screen time. Screen time is very important to television shows, producers, etc., so let’s note what she spent the majority of her speaking time on on when asking the question: the years of work that did not yield a winning presidential campaign. In other words, and this is what she is trying to say, years of struggle ended in loss, does that loss hurt? She barely even snuck (sneaked? yuck) in the question; the main purpose was to demoralize. Bernie, of course, sees right through this: he denies her premise by showing how he won. Make no mistake, these are two fighters circling each other. She wants to say, look, you’re finished, you’re done, your goals will die along with you. But Bernie counters: why, then, did we win among voters under 50? Why did every candidate campaign not on what they wanted to, but on what we wanted them to? Why does every serious political argument in America come back to us and our demands? Is that how we peter out? By dominating the conversation and the future? I will not take a stance either way on that argument but I wanted to point out that we lose if we sit around and let bullies rub salt in our wounds.
3. On another occasion, I will show that this does not suggest that the number of attempts is all that matters, or even the most important factor of radical activism. Some mistakenly believe that, since wins aggregate and losses do not, and we win somewhat randomly, increasing the number of attempted successes is the way to power. I’ll call it the lottery ticket to power approach. How do we make a bunch of money? Let’s buy a as many lottery tickets as we can, said no rational businessperson. But even that misrepresents how dumb it is for a sales manager or field director to increase only the number of calls or even contacts; each lottery ticket is as valuable as each other, whereas not all calls or contacts are of equal value, or of marginally similar value. I should explicit that no field director of mine thought that way and perhaps that’s why the state and regional field teams I was a part of were so successful. But I digress, I have mostly apriori evidence.