I used to think that Eric Hoffer had the last word on the natural cycle of political mass movements. And I first wrote about it in 2010.
Pat Buchanan hauls out a quote from Eric Hoffer today. “Every great movement begins as a cause, eventually becomes a business, then degenerates into a racket.”
Actually, he’s wrong. According to Wikiquote, the real quote is: “Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.”
Okay. The second quote comes from “The Negro Revolution” in The Temper of our Times. But in “The Madhouse of Change” in First Things, Last Things the quote is rendered as
America is hard on mass movements. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a corporation or a racket.
But now, I find that the Hoffer racket argument is just one of many. John Tierney in City Journal has written that all activists are infected with “The March of Dimes Syndrome.” As he writes:
The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics — but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects.
Actually, per Wikipedia, after polio, the March of Dimes first dealt with rubella, then neonatal care, then fetal alcohol syndrome. But you get the point.
Fire Drill Fridays.” Bless her heart.
And who can forget the gay-rights movement, that should probably get a Nobel Prize for inventing new issues for gays to fight for.
According to the Foundation of Economic Education’s Steven Davies, the situation is much worse than the March of Dimes Syndrome. It’s not that activist organizations keep on keeping on after the problem is solved; they usually don’t appear until the problem is already pretty well solved. Davies quotes Herbert Spencer, he of “survival of the fittest.” According to Spencer’s Law in “From Freedom to Bondage,”
the more things improve the louder become the exclamations about their badness.
This applies to alcohol, women, education, poverty. Back in the day, the poor were drunk as skunks, women only got to eat after the men had finished. The poor were illiterate, and starving. But by the middle of the 19th century people were switching from hard liquor to beer, women and children were better treated than ever before in history, literacy was on the upswing, and poverty on the downswing.
It was the years after 1870 that saw the “discovery of poverty” through the works of men like Rowntree and Booth and the growth of an intellectual and political movement that led to the creation of the welfare state in Britain.
Whatabout environmentalism? If you read Wikipedia, it goes back to the Romantics. But I’d say that environmentalism as a mass movement starts with Rachel Carson and Silent Spring and the first Earth Day in 1970.
But action against water pollution started in the 19th century with sewer systems. Peak air pollution in London occurred at the end of the 19th century after actions to switch from coal burning to gas and smokeless fuels.
So why does the movement come after the solution? Why did government get into education after literacy was commonplace? Why did environmentalism become a mass movement after successful actions to clean up the environment?
Obviously, this is a new question, and experts agree that more research is needed.
But I suspect that it occurs because politics is not really into the exploration, or research, or solution business. Politics is about defeating the enemy. Until there is an enemy, there is no need for politics.
Imagine there is a problem, but nobody knows what to do. If you are a royal monarch or a democratic leader, the best strategy is to keep clear of it because when a monarch loses a war he usually loses his throne. For centuries, rulers didn’t know what to do about the rural poor. One idea was to ship the “waste population” off to the Americas, as Nancy Isenberg reported in White Trash and I echoed in my “1584 Project.” Did you know that the first shipload of White Trash from England showed up off Virginia in 1584? But it never occurred to anyone to launch a War on Poverty.
But then came the Industrial Revolution and the poor got jobs. So it was time for Karl Marx to invent Communism.
Only when a problem has recently been solved is it time to hit the streets and crank up government spending on your supporters, and declare a War on Poverty or a War on Illiteracy, or a War on Climate Deniers.
And then, after a decent interval, the March of Dimes Syndrome kicks in and a new generation of educated class activists switch to the Next Thing.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: G.A. Harker
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