The limits of political "strategy"
The limits of political "strategy"
We lose our humanity when we demand, for the sake of "strategy", silence in the face of suffering.
Cooper Lund:
What good is being right all the time if being right all the time pushes away people you want to reach by making it seem like you have bad vibes? Sometimes you sit things out and gain from it. Optics matter…It might make you feel smart, but it’s almost certainly others away so maybe knock it off for a bit and try to be strategic.
I don’t mean to single Lund out; this is an extremely widespread sentiment about Palestine protesters right now, particularly those at the Democratic convention. But that is precisely why I think I need to say something that people on the liberal-left aren’t supposed to say: I don’t think we should be “strategic” about this.
Here’s something I value about humans: we are creatures who cannot help but grieve when we witness suffering. We are so horrified by death and cruelty that we cannot help but speak out about it. These responses are such an important part of who we are that when we see them among other animals — an ape mourning its child, a dog trying to comfort a person who seems depressed — we say that they are acting human. They are such an important part of who we are that when humans don’t respond to pain in this way we call them sociopaths and start looking for things that are wrong with their brains.
One might argue that grief and outrage can be expressed in different ways, and that activists should try to channel them into the kind of calculated rational political action Lund calls for, but I think this gets it backwards. The virtue of grief and outrage is precisely that they are expressions of human empathy that overcome our political reasoning. This almost instinctive reflex of solidarity is humanity’s last and best check on our tendency to rationalize evil. The danger we are always faced with is that the miscalculations and twisted logic that always infect politics will lead us to justify the unjustifiable — but thank god that there is always something in us that protests and revolts at suffering. Even when it seems like we should not.
Israel is perpetrating a genocide, and it is providing strategic rationalizations for what it is doing every step of the way. Israel was attacked so of course it has to defend itself. Israel needs to murder civilians en masse because that is the only way to get to Hamas. Democrats need to support this because they need to stop Trump and that means pandering to Zionist voters. And leftists need to keep quiet about it for clever PR reasons. Every step of the way, savvy men who have thought this through much more than we have are telling us to sit on our hands and watch Palestinians die.
As it happens, I think that Cooper’s advice isn’t even good strategy. If party enthusiasts are going to reverse their position on genocide because you harshed their vibe at their little convention, you probably weren’t going to be able to persuade them anyway. Normal people don’t have that kind of reaction to being reminded that thousands upon thousands of children are dying. The notion that Democratic activists should tailor our activism around winning over one of the least receptive audiences imaginable is the exact opposite of good strategy; it’s the sort of strategy you only counsel when you don’t expect to win.
Even if this strategy were useful in the short-term, asking humans to suppress their empathy and their cries of protest is in the long-term suicidal. So much wisdom from the Holocaust was about precisely this lesson. The so-called “Jewish question,” for the Nazis, was not one to be addressed with empathy; it was a logical question that had to be navigated with ruthless strategy, no matter what form the final solution might take. Listen to what the survivors say, and again and again you find the desperate plea for people to listen to reject the brutal logic of fascism and say something. “Above all,” as Yehuda Bauer put it, “thou shalt not be a bystander.”
But even strategy, I think, has its moral limits. Some day we may very well find out that the optimal political strategy is always to keep quiet in the face of suffering; maybe this is what gets you the most harm reduction. But is a humanity that can’t express empathy worth saving? Do you really want to live in a world where we do not cry out in protest when our brothers and sisters suffer? If Americans were being killed en masse I would hope that the people of Palestine would say something; and I will not ask of them something I refuse, for clever strategic reasons, to give myself.