Comments Elsewhere

… And then Andrea Dworkin and other insane feminists go back in time and become publicly associated with the suffrage movement: “All men are evil, all sex is rape, all women are virtuous and no man can ever be.”

I know that this is tangential to the point that you were trying to make, but Andrea Dworkin never actually said this or anything like it. (Neither did Catharine MacKinnon, for what that’s worth.) In fact Dworkin rather angrily denounced the last two notions in her essay Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea. Whether you agree or disagree with Dworkin’s positions, these descriptions of her views are exposed fabrications, and should not be repeated.

Now, the substantive point:

Suppose that in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement wasn’t associated with nice peaceful ministers like MLK, but only with the “kill whitey” Black Panther types. Do you think legal segregation would have ended sooner or later, had that been the case? I’d say much later.

Just so we’re clear, Martin Luther King was certainly not very widely thought of as a “nice peaceful minister!” On the contrary, he was repeatedly slammed as an “extremist,” a reckless agitator, and a Communist, both by his open enemies and also by white liberals and “moderates” within the black clergy. He wrote about this in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, concluding “So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice—or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? … So, after all, maybe the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

I’d make similar comments about the principled radicals who were instrumental in the victory of the suffrage movement (Alice Paul, the Pankhursts), the abortion rights movement (NARAL, Redstockings), the abolitionist movement (Garrison, Douglass, John Brown), the gay liberation movement (the Stonewall rioters, GLF, Lavender Menace), etc. Broadly speaking, I think that social respectability and coming off as pleasing to either your open enemies or the stifling “moderates” and “centrists” means precisely nothing to the prospects for a social movement’s success. The people who move the world are very often treated by mainstream opinion as stupid, blinkered, reckless, over-zealous, or simply insane. The important thing is not diplomacy but honesty and tenacity; the problem with Mussolinists who sometimes pose as libertarians is not that they make libertarianism look crazy to the statists (who cares?) but rather because they make us look too “reasonable” to Power. If they make us look crazy to some people, the problem is that they make us look crazy for the wrong reasons; their belligerent bellowing drowns out the “crazy” ideas from genuine radicals who the mainstream dismisses as lunatics for all the right ones.