Political activism has at least two major parts: Drawing attention to an issue and enlightenment to the facts.
This works very well when the relevant audience has no skin in the game, but (to mix metaphors) is much harder if not hopeless when the issue stems from the visceral desires of the audience.
Here are two examples with which we have familiarity: Drug Policy Reform on the national and international level and the streetcar (trolley car) proposal here in Lancaster.
Support for most issues bundled into the War on Drugs had support a mile wide and a quarter of an inch thick. It took a couple of decades of informing the pubic, but over time and bombardment of factual information, national attitudes changed.
Mayor Rick Gray had the city acquire and park a trolley car on a then vacant lot in the middle of downtown and politicians, ‘community leaders’, and the Lancaster media gushed favorable about running a line from the convention center to the Amtrak station. They claimed economic success in a number of other cities, but NewsLanc’s reporting disclosed that, in fact, the experience was the opposite. When informed, better sense prevailed and ultimately the streetcar itself found another home…or was scrapped.
In both of these cases, the public, once properly informed, was prepared to alter its views.
On the other hand, we are currently reading “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” by Perlstein, Rick
And this morning, encountered “How Israel Silences Dissent” by Mairav Zonszein in the opinion section of the New York Times.
The Right Wing of the Conservative Movement did not come about because of its leaders. Rather its leaders, in most cases an inauspicious few, tapped into a reservoir of public sentiment. They were and continue to express what their supporters want to hear and believe.
We derive the same message from the Zonszein article. There is nothing new that political activists can provide the Israelis. They have been bombarded with information. The majority of the public believes what it wants to believe, not out of ignorance of the facts, but because it serves their purposes as they perceive them.
This is not to say that those who do not agree with the Right Wing of the Republican Party and those who take a more liberal attitude on Palestinian rights (and propose what may be better in the long term for Israelis) should not continue to work to bring about change.
But for those of us who work alone or with just a few collaborators, we prefer to put our efforts to bring facts to those who are more susceptible, albeit over much time , to accepting a new approach. Often it is a younger generation.
There is another part to activism that changes the equation. In addition to education there is organization and mobilization. This often needs to involve civil resistance actions as one of its tactics. For example, Jim Crow in the south would fit the types of issues you describe that are not impacted by more information. People living in the south knew of the unfairness of the laws. But, when people organized and mobilized resistance actions that changed the equation. For example the Birmingham Bus Strike which arose after Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus in 1955 and Martin Luther King, Jr. (in his first social justice campaign) led with other community leaders a bus strike. In one year the buses were desegregated.
Perhaps more important, the Civil Rights Movement reached a new stage where it understood the strategic power of nonviolent of civil resistance. It led to multiple campaigns that changed the equation on issues people had been fighting for, for over 100 years — not based on facts but based on disrupting the system so it could no longer survive. The resistance actions showed in a more gut-wrenching way the reality of police behavior, the Klan and others in protecting the inequality of Jim Crow.
We advocate a two track approach to civil resistance for many of the issues the United States currently faces around issues like the unfair wealth divide and climate change. First — stop the machine — or protest actions that make the problems worse and stop them from taking effect. Second — create a new world — build alternative institutions that can replace existing institutions so people can use one of their greatest powers, non-compliance with a corrupt system. We just finished an article on climate change that will be published on Monday — what do people do after the big march in New York City to win climate justice?