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Something I've been working on; presenting it here to solicit the feedback of the hive-mind.
The Life Cycle of Fashionable Causes
Inspired by some of this recent commentary on the latest trends in identity politics, I’ve been inspired to try and outline a possible model for how these things emerge, develop, and fade. Originally this was written with identity politics in mind, but you could probably apply the model to other things, such as the centuries-long transition of Christianity from being an outlaw religion to a state-sanctioned religious monopoly, or the rise of revolutionary Marxism. I draw heavily from the “Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths” model. Also, I more or less take it as a given that identity politics, in its most common form, is intellectually incoherent and most of its champions are largely driven by self-interest; I will not be discussing the merits of any particular form of it here.
Stage 1: Client identification
Elite-entrepreneurs identify some conceivably-marginalized group (racial or religious minorities, the handicapped, slaves) and position themselves as champions of said group. This is especially frequent in times of elite overproduction, for obvious reasons. Note that at this stage, these champions may well be selfish, but they aren’t necessarily insincere. On the contrary, they’re likely to be true believers. Remember, the cause isn’t fashionable yet. On the contrary, advocating for it too strongly will likely raise eyebrows in polite society. There was a time when Christians were still a despised and hated minority, and when anyone suggesting that slavery should be abolished would be met with astonishment. John Brown was a villain before he became a hero. Our elite-entrepreneurs are analogous to settlers or prospectors on the cultural frontier. They may hope to hit pay dirt but they haven’t yet.
Stage 2: Advocacy
This is the long march through the institutions. The champions create platforms for advocacy, or seek positions within existing platforms (academia, parliaments, the Senate). They form organizations, publish manifestos, recruit disciples. Very importantly, during this stage the cause starts to accrue social capital. Not a lot perhaps, but a little, concentrated in certain areas. It starts to be possible to accrue legitimacy and street cred in “the movement” even its only with other supporters and second-generation converts to the cause. You may still face penalty or sanction for association with the cause among the general public though.
Stage 3: Critical Mass
The cause is now practically mainstream. People put their preferred pronouns in their linked-in bios; they say “He is Risen” as a greeting. It’s likely that in the process of expanding, the movement has softened some of its hard edges and dispensed with some of its more controversial positions. This is the gold-rush stage. The cost of joining the movement is now relatively low, and an increasingly large portion of converts are simple band-wagon jumpers.
Stage 4: Fragmentation
As the movement expands, the social capital it began accruing in stage 2 starts to dissipate. Its no longer hip or cutting edge to be associated with it. The late-comers to the movement are frustrated because they can no longer accrue status by participation. The old guard (the Old Bolsheviks) are frustrated because the movement has lost its purity and its revolutionary fervor. At this point, you start to see infighting. There are lots of attempts to establish internal discipline, to decide who is and is not truly part of the movement, which particular courses of action best serve the cause. Much of this comes down to fighting over scraps of power and prestige; the gold rush days are over.
Stage 5: Dissolution
At this point, the movement is largely spent. Some of its precepts have probably been normalized in the culture at large (not even the race-realists nowadays advocate for a return to slavery). Precisely because the cause was largely triumphant, you no longer draw any attention to yourself by advocating for it. In the case of sufficiently far-reaching transformations – such as the mass adoption of Christianity – the movement has probably become such a big tent that you can find people advocating for totally-opposed courses of action, each claiming to represent the true spirit of the movement. In the Catholic-Protestant wars which racked Europe for centuries, both sides claimed to fight in the name of Christ. Other such totalizing philosophies, like Marxism-Leninism, have had their own internal schisms. Its important to note that simply because a belief system has become such a big tent that it can seemingly accommodate or justify almost anything, that doesn’t mean the movement which spawned it had no impact. The fall of paganism, the rise of Protestantism, and eventual rise of Marxism-Leninism all left the world a very different place than it was before.
A few other notes here: Obviously this is presented as a linear model, and assumes that the movement in question is ultimately more or less successful. There’s no reason that need be the case. I’m sure further investigation would identify a number of movements which never progressed through all these stages. For that matter, I see no reason in principle a movement couldn’t move back and forth through these stages, or even be in different stages among different sectors of the population.
With regards to identity politics, I think that in certain sectors, (academia, most establishment media organizations), its probably in stage-4. Affirmative-action hiring policies are increasingly ubiquitous, but at the same time, there is massive labor surplus for a relatively small number of jobs. In the case of media, the financial opportunities are rapidly declining, as Freddie DeBoer has documented extensively; while academia hasn’t yet collapsed I strongly suspect the current model is not sustainable, and there may be an implosion at some point in the future. People are hopping on board the identity politics bandwagon in an attempt to carve out a secure niche, but enough people have hopped on this bandwagon that now they’ve hit diminishing returns, and will now have to start adjudicating who is and is not a member of minority group X
Yes but not out of morality, it's because slavery isn't needed. We need higher wages for laborers, not slaves working for free. Same reason we're anti-illegal.
However we do think we need to send blacks back to Africa if we ever want American cities to be livable again.
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Stage 1 and 2 seem to imply that all movements start with elites, who are not themselves a natural client. I'd prefer a more market-style reading, where the niche exists first, and may be filled with a variety of solutions. But as in a nature documentary, we choose to follow a particular entrepreneur who comes up with an idea that allow them to make money/gain power in the niche. They may not be the only one exploiting the niche, so there may be competition. And they may have found the niche by being part of it themselves, as in Paul Graham's advice to build something you want to use. And there were entrepreneurs before them, and there will be some after them too.
I think this would capture an important truth, that a mass of people looking for change can be a powerful force, if they can somehow be harnessed to all work together. And as Lenin discovered, an ideological vanguard is a great way to do it. And if you want the movement to persist, the mass of people should never actually be satisfied, which was one of those criticisms of consumer capitalism that can easily be repurposed to describe the slippery slope of activism.
I think I'd concede that naturally-occurring niches may exist. I think these niches probably don't get filled without some sort of elite-aspirant recognizing an opportunity however. Oil sitting under the Arabian desert didn't do anything until someone with the resources, connections, and know-how to exploit it came along. I also think that relatively narrow niches may be artificially expanded by elites, in the same way that say, De Boers helped create the diamond market. Good point about consumer capitalism; I think its fair to say that incentive structures have a way of cropping up everywhere, however much you try to keep them out.
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And I'd prefer that the proponents of a market-style reading made their assumptions explicit, and backed their interpretation by argument and evidence, rather than relying on the truthiness of their story, hoping it will be enough for the picture of "organic" power that they paint to remain unquestioned.
For example, sure it can be seen as "market-style" and "nature documentary", provided you have sufficiently cynical view of the market/nature. But for people who grew up under 90's liberalism, that sounds like the choices to follow particular "entrepreneurs" are freely made, and if this is what you assert, I'm prepared to push back with examples from both the market, nature, politics, and social movements.
That's no really new, it's a message that all democratic countries bombard their citizens with. What I think is far more useful for people to know is that this implies that if an "organic" movement is getting anywhere, rather than flailing around aimlessly, it means it's being led. If you're participating in one, and think it's "bottom-up" nature is evidence of it's good intentions and mundaneness, you better look twice, identify it's leaders, find out where they actually want to take, and make sure you are comfortable going there.
You seem to be reacting very strongly to something, and I'm not entirely sure what, but we might be closer than you think.
By "nature documentary", I mean that although we happen to be following one little fellow around with our camera, and building audience identification with him, the choice of subject is either largely arbitrary, or selected after-the-fact when we know who gets a result we're interested in. But there's many of these potential subjects operating at any given time, with various degrees of success. If we only follow the stories of young stags who win the mating contest, or successful leaders of movements, or successful startup founders, we don't get a complete picture of the lifecycle, and can fool ourselves into mis-attributing the amounts of ability, tenacity, opportunism, and luck that are required for success. And to the degree that the OP's goal is building a theory of what happens, I think it's important to look at all the angles.
On the one hand, at the level of the individual, of course there's free choice going on. But on the other hand, from the perspective of the potential organizer, it's all statistics, at least after the first few dozen people, and setting aside "whales" or important benefactors. It's treating the people as just another natural resource lying around, under-exploited, like an oilfield or an ocean or a bunch of horny dudes. Individual horny dudes obviously make choices about whether and where to spend money on naked Internet girls, but to the naked Internet girls they're a non-uniform resource which gets exploited as appropriate. (Attention being roughly proportional to revenue, as I understand the market dynamics?)
I think this is the core of the misunderstanding? I can see how that looks a lot more naive and idealistic than I meant, and it looks like the mention of Lenin failed to set the tone. A herd of wild cattle is a powerful force, but if you can manage to round them up and brand them, they're all going to be eaten (or otherwise exploited).
To rephrase a bit, I think that when there are a mass of people desiring a particular type of change, that presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs to recognize and exploit this unfulfilled desire. It's not always the first who succeed; sometimes later ones will do it better. And the nature of the desire is important, in that the presented "solution" needs to cater to it. I suspect that people who come up with an ideology and then look for converts, are going to be less successful than people who find a group of potential converts and then come up with an ideology that makes them want to join (Hitler's path, IMO, although he was a part of the group himself), or people who just start improvising and don't care what they say as long as it gets crowds to cheer their name (Trump's path, IMO). Marxism is something of an exceptional case, but I think this model can cover it.
I haven't read Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals", but from what I've seen, it describes that middle approach (the Hitler one). Sure, it talks about doing everything to help "the poor", but ultimately it's about constructing an organization with yourself as a leader, and acquiring power, and the choice of ideology is completely irrelevant. The organizer may even think that they're doing it for the benefit of the people (and it's probably more effective if they do believe this, on some level), but it still boils down to "find an untapped source of power, and build an engine that exploits it", in the sense of a deck-builder card game. On the one hand, I do care about having good cards, but on the other hand, they're just pieces of cardboard that help me win the game. Maybe the solution I propose is "equal pay for equal work", or maybe it's "gas the Jews", whatever gets my power-base motivated. If the leader is just out for power, from a certain perspective there isn't a difference.
Is that sufficiently cynical? :-)
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Interesting post! Are you familiar with the idea of the Rescue Game? I think you might find the following article an interesting resource, because it presents an alternative perspective on some of the phenomena you're identifying here. Here's an article on the topic that introduced me to the concept - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/american-narratives-the-rescue-game/
First time I've seen the rescue game, though I am familiar with John Michael Greer's writing. Generally I've found him quite insightful, though I think I probably have a fundamental disagreement with (what I understand to be) his broadly anti-growth philosophy. I was most interested to learn about the parallels to race discourse in the post-reconstruction south. Everything old is new again!
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I think there’s also an aspect of “fashion barber poles”. I think my clearest political example would be something like color-blind politics where the race of the person wasn’t supposed to matter at all. This was the goal in the 1970s and 1980s. A not-racist believed that race didn’t matter. The problem was that “normies” started to buy in to that. Essentially they won. Everyone from Reagan to Bernie Sanders believed in that at the time. So it loses a bit of cred not because of internal problems with the movement, but because if you’re upper class, there’s a certain amount of pressure to not be mistaken for the unwashed masses. And much like fashion, food trends, and media trends, ideological trends follow in a predictable pattern of the aspirational trying to imitate the elite, the normie imitating them, and the elite wanting to separate themselves from the mainstream. Thus the movement changes to things that normies don’t do.
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Seems well-written to me.
I can’t say I agree with the stages, necessarily? Especially 1 and 2. “Client ID” describes a phase in some movements, where adoption doesn’t pick up until elites grab the idea. But it doesn’t fit others. Look at Christianity, which didn’t gain elite support until it was firmly established among the periphery. It skips stage 2 entirely, too, since most of its institutions don’t develop until after regional hegemony. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it started from stage 2.
Have you considered a comparison with Scott’s barber pole of fashion?
Pretty similar to the g/m/s model, except all the levels have a similar level of awareness. There’s no clueless class existing only to get played by the next step up; instead, each group acts according to its own intuition. But you still get segmented behavior if there’s enough space to distinguish A from C.
So, does this apply to political causes?
I’m going to argue “yes.” Maybe that’s because I’m an inveterate mistake theorist and I don’t like the idea that individuals are driven by class interest. Personal incentives, though? Fair game. I think you can explain a lot of political phenomena as (counter) signaling without giving too much credit to the sociopaths.
I don't actually know enough about the early history of Christianity to make a claim one way or another, to be honest. I'd be interested if you have an alternative set of stages. Or even if you just think there's a better word than "stages" which does sort of imply a linear progression in what is not necessarily a linear process.
Regarding your latter point, I think for me, "class interest" is basically just an emergent phenomena of people following their own personal incentives. For example, if I'm lawyer or doctor, anything lowering the barrier to entry in these fields is against my personal economic interest. Meanwhile, people with aspirations of upward mobility from non-PMC backgrounds, who can't afford or qualify for however many thousands of dollars of student debt that career path entails, would prefer that these barriers to entry be lowered."Class" is such a slippery phenomena; any given individual might be in different classes over the course of their lives, and if we use the word in the broadest sense (to include, say, religious or ethnic groups as well as socioeconomic strata), several different classes at the same time.
I’d say the five categories (ID-advocacy-critical-fragmentation-dissolution) are describing a real phenomenon. The problem is that it’s not the only life cycle. Sometimes an idea just really is appealing!
This is my understanding of, say, early Christianity, which saw strong growth in the fringes despite active persecution by the elite. No Client ID, since the entrepreneurs of Christianity largely were their underserved population. Advocacy based on building power structures which happened to conflict with elite ones like tax collection. More importantly, the Critical Mass for Christianity either lasted up til the modern era, or passed into Fragmentation immediately! It was actively gaining social capital even through its early schisms and heresies.
When growth is powered by geeks instead of sociopaths, the framework doesn’t make sense. There’s a rival life cycle that describes sincere movements. Call it “technology adoption,” where the underlying idea is strong enough to spread in the absence of status games.
Once you have a rival model, though, you have to ask which one fits each fashion. How do you decide?
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