Every now and then, I blog about political and movement strategy. Those posts hit certain themes. I’ll hit those themes here, too. But I hope to do so in a fresh way. So, I’ll start with a claim: ‘Bark at the moon’ is a terrible political strategy. In fact, it’s not a political strategy at all.
It’s certainly not a strategy when it comes in the form of social media slacktivism. But it’s also a non-strategy in its more sophisticated forms.
Bark at the Moon
What does ‘bark at the moon’ even mean? Despite my background in philosophy, I’m not here to do conceptual analysis or draw sharp distinctions. Instead, I’m going to describe a broad kind of political action with fuzzy boundaries.
Here it goes. At times, people perform actions that amount to ‘hassling’ elected officials. Think about things like bird-dogging, where people pester public officials to get them on the record on some issue. It includes things like writing endless letters to the editor, clogging the public comments section of public meetings, picking and engaging in fights with elected officials on Twitter, and so on.
But – and this is the most important part – sometimes people do these things without anything resembling a coherent plan for what they’d like to see done. And they do it outside of any actual leftist org or movement. Often they act entirely on their own or with a few friends. Alternatively, they could be a part of some electoralist non-profit or Alinskyite community group with narrow goals.
‘Bark at the moon’ is when you put these two things together. People grouch at public officials with no plan or movement. There’s no path to power and no vision for worker and tenant solidarity.
Its Operations
Putting these two things together allows the problem to enter. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about any of these tactics of hassling public officials. But those tactics won’t get anything done without a leftist group that comes together with a deeper strategy. A group that forms a deep reach in the community and brings workers and tenants together. Otherwise, it just reduces to isolated individuals – or temporary collectives – blowing off steam.
Alinskyite community groups, though, do some of these things. But, ultimately, they represent only a narrow slice of the community. They lack any deeper ideological vision to unite workers and tenants outside their narrow reach. They propose ideas that benefit those narrow groups, often to the detriment of other workers and tenants. And they often use select members of marginalized groups as fronts to cover the real leaders of their orgs.
And those groups form the best case scenario! In almost any other case, it’s just a few people shouting into the void. At times, they even pound the table for issues that would backfire on leftists, like UBI or strikes without plans.
Why ‘Bark at the Moon’ is Bad for the Left
Yeah, well, so what? If I don’t think these actions work, I could just ignore them. I mean, that’s what most elected officials do. It’s probably how they should handle it, if I’m dispensing advice on winning elections. Sometimes elected officials get annoyed by it and go out of their way to do the opposite of what activists seem to want. But usually they just take a deep breath and step away from Twitter for a minute.
However, the people who bark at the moon often think they’re doing something useful. And it prevents them from joining or building real leftist movements. And so, not only does it not get anything done, but it can have the side effect of preventing good action. People do some things on social media. Or they show up to a meeting and wave a sign or make a complaint. Maybe they do these things several times. And then they tell themselves they’ve done something. So, they don’t have to do anything more.
In psychological terms, I think this mostly comes from frustration and short-term desire satisfaction. Often it’s more about the person doing it than about the cause. A person gets the itch to ‘do something.’ They scratch the itch by yelling at a public official on Twitter. They go back to regular life until the itch hits again. And they scratch it again.
Itch. Scratch. Repeat.
The Epistemology of Bark at the Moon
So, I lied about one thing. I’ll trot out one $5 philosophy word: epistemology. Some readers might think there’s something a bit too easy about this critique. It’s one thing to point out a bad strategy (or a non-strategy). But it’s yet another thing to name names and list examples. How do we know? How do we identify it?
Activism is messy. Some people and orgs show some signs of barking at the moon, but not all the signs. Maybe they show the signs in degrees. But I’m not going to give easy answers to that. You have to apply it. You have to evaluate actions and decide whether they’re worthwhile, a part of a good org or movement, and so on. I think there are real-world cases in Iowa City where groups got some things done for a minute, but fell apart after awhile. Leftist orgs should dig into those details and ask why actions succeed and fail.
I’ll also remind readers that I don’t make a habit of publicly criticizing specific leftists and leftist orgs. When I do criticize, I try to make it constructive. And I usually try to make it internal or private to the org. I don’t always follow this practice, but I do my best.
