How to Make Your Very Own [Social Movements]

The Ender

LoisLane wrote:

Hey is anyone willing to start a GST about social movement tactics and their successfulness. I want to discuss this more but I'm not knowledgeable enough about the subject to make a good op.

As requested a little while ago by @LoisLane , herein we can discuss hope and change and maybe also how all those [Others] are gonna get us so we'd better get them first!


What are social movements?

It's a pretty broad definition, covering everything from mainstream political campaigns in modern democracies to counter-insurgent guerrilla actions in civil war zones. When a large group of people with a shared idea for a specific cultural shift organize together & begin working to make that cultural shift happen, that's (generally seen as) a social movement. 'Work' can take the form of explicitly non-violent protests, armed rebellion or even state-initiated military campaigns & pogroms. It's not all fun & games or sunshine & rainbows here in Social Movementville.


What is a successful social movement?

Oh man, it's late. Why the hard questions?

First you'd have to define what success means for you. Is it the completion of some arbitrary set of goals laid by movement organizers, is it making an impression of [X] measurable magnitude in a statistics chart, is it becoming a known quantity in common discourse...? Do you preclude certain things from being encompassed as success (say, for example, hostile takeover of state agencies) even if they otherwise meet your metrics?


I'll try to focus this with an example:

Stanton Friedman is an icon / leader of a movement known as 'UFOology'. As the name implies, the movement's goals are to attempt to raise public awareness about UFOs, argue for public policy related to UFOs, legitimize the study / discussion of UFOs, etc. Has Mr. Friedman succeeded at making UFOology an academically recognized pursuit or gaining state support? No, not really. But he has kept the movement in the public eye (or at least very near it) for decades, long after it's relevance should've arguably faded away.

Do you call that a success or failure? That's pretty subjective, in my opinion.


What are the ingredients that go into successful social movements?

This is, again, very subjective - but there is pretty significant consensus on a few topics:

- Strong orators & writers are an incredible boon, and some would say a necessary element, of social movement leadership.
- A means by which a given movement's message can be amplified & new recruits brought into the fold is necessary. Often this ties back into the previous point, although strong oration still requires a vector for transmission.
- A catalyzing moment / event is arguably the best starting point for a movement, giving people an immediate focus for their thoughts & a reason to be in proximity with many other people who share their desire for change.
- Organization & networking efforts are often needed to sustain a movement's momentum and prevent people from dispersing as time moves them further and further away from the catalyzing event that brought the movement together.

Aside from that, there is enormous disagreement about what is necessary, beneficial, harmful, etc, to a given social movement, and there are whole textbook volumes full of different movements that achieved their goals through different sorts of actions. I would argue, though, that each of those movements overlapped in the four criteria listed (people will no doubt argue for more criteria than that as being requisite - I will just say I looked and looked, and this was by far what I saw as representing the consensus).


Social movements! For social justice warriors & Illinois Nazis alike...

White men! White women! The swastika is calling you. The sacred and ancient symbol of your race, since the beginning of time. The Jew is using The Black as muscle against you. And you are left there helpless. Well, what are you going to do about it, Whitey? Just sit there? Of course not! You are going to join with us. The members of the American Socialist White Peoples' Party. An organization of decent, law abiding white folk. Just like you!

...Ugh.I hate Illinois Nazis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ukFAvYP3UU


Discuss your favorite social movements here, and what you think made said movements work. Discuss what you think doesn't work and/or why you think movements you've had high hopes for have failed.

LoisLane

I u

DinoFight

Another example of a paradoxical social movement is the anti-vaccine movement. It's sorta successful, in that many people still choose to not vaccinate their kids, or believe that doing so will give them autism, but then again a lot of facts that get thrown around about vaccines are simply not true.

Captain Marcus

I'd say an easy-to-remember message is critical to the success of a social movement. The abolitionists had "slavery is wrong", the suffragettes had "women deserve the right to vote", and the mid-century civil rights movement had "separate but equal is unjust". Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, failed because the people running it threw in a jillion other messages ("student debt jubilee, civil rights, gay marriage, etc") in addition to "banks stole our money" and so the message was diluted and it crashed and burned.