It’s been a joy watching rallies erupt all across the world. From late February to early March alone, we’ve seen rallies in the Middle East, in Wisconsin, and then here at Harvard: first to preserve federal funding for AmeriCorps; then to renegotiate dining hall workers wages; then to defend “youth jobs” in MA at the State House; then to protest planned parenthood funding cuts; then a rally against sexual violence in Boston clubs; and then one against ROTC on campus.
Rallies parade out into the public sphere the moral commitments we make in our private lives. They help us stand in “solidarity.” They’re fun. They’re inspiring.
But they are also, in most instances, inadequate to solve the public problems that we actually face. It’s an obvious claim but one that’s perhaps worth making (especially now): the rally isn’t enough. It’s not enough to sustain a vibrant and effective activist class here at Harvard and it’s certainly not enough if we’re actually looking to use our talents to get big things done.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t rally. Certainly, if I weren’t in class, I’d be on the streets in Wisconsin, and no one alive could deny the role that protest is playing in the Middle East today. But there are other problems aside from political problems that the left should concern itself with, and not everyone lives in a dictatorship. If we delude ourselves into thinking that all problems are the same, and that all solutions involve rallying, then we risk missing out on opportunities to make real, lasting change for the world. The rally, after all, is as much a defeat as it is a triumph. It’s an admission that we citizens lack the creative power to solve our own problems. It’s to say – to declare to everyone in the world – that we citizens qua activists have no recourse but to angrily demand things from those more powerful than ourselves (those to whom our protest is pressuring).
Activists are problem solvers. They change the world for the better by solving real, material problems. If we take this seriously, then it’s clear that the rally is — at its best — just one tool among many others that the activist has at her disposal. And as a tool for public problem solving, the rally is severely limited. Some questions to consider in any given instance:
(1) Can you draw a clear link between your rally and the change you seek? Tell the story of how A leads to B.
(2) Does the issue you’re addressing really lend itself to a morally unambiguous position? Is there complexity that you’re missing? If the solution is clear, why isn’t it being implemented? Does drawing a strict line in the sand between “us” and “them” advance the cause of community development or hinder it?
(3) Can we solve the problem ourselves?
(4) Are there more important problems to solve? Ones more uniquely suited to our talents and access?
Some causes fit the rally criteria, obviously; but others, many others, do not. I suspect that the defining issues of our time — from global warming to economic injustice to prison reform to sex slavery — will depend less on the public expression of moral outrage – as perhaps they did in the heady, illiberal days of the late 1950s – and more on the serious study of complex, multi-sided problems, and the building of novel solutions.
At its worst, I hate to say, the rally plays to some of the least seemly tendencies of the left community. It teaches a generation of Ivy Leaguers that change doesn’t take more than an hour or two of your time, and that the best way to help others is to publicize yourself.
If not rallying, what can activists do? For starters, we should think bigger and work much harder. The models are already there. The Progressives passed government reforms; they built new schools and urban youth programs; they wrote books about radical ideas like minimum wage and uncovered government corruption. Ralph Nader founded “Public Interested Research Groups.” Social entrepreneurs push products that seek social transformation. There is no obvious answer. Everything is on the table. Serious activists should act in the public sphere like jazz musicians do on stage – taking on the systematic exploration of the socially possible.
Our obsession with rallying as a community is indicative of our larger failure to imagine viable alternatives. We’re fooling ourselves if we think that silk-screening t-shirts and publicizing videos on Facebook is all that we can do to advance justice in this world. I don’t mean to belittle this work: I mean to urge us to think bigger. We shouldn’t just be asking people for their bodies in a crowd – we should be asking them for their minds.