Gathering Mass (Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the cringe)
What have you been up to since the presidential election in November?
by Shauna McKenna
What have you been up to since the presidential election in November? No wrong answers. Maybe you’ve been doomscrolling, or processing the news in groupchats, emails and live conversations with your friends and family. Maybe you’ve taken a break from media, social and otherwise. Maybe you’ve gone to a few protests, maybe you’ve gone to a lot. What I’m pretty certain of is that if you’re a reader of this website, you haven’t been feeling so great about the state of the wider world, and you likely see the election as calamitous for our shared future.
I’m right there with you.
But I’m not where I was eight years ago. Eight years ago, I was the single parent of a teenage daughter. The cognitive dissonance of Trump’s win sliced deeper than any event in my life since 9/11, when I’d been working in an office tower in midtown Manhattan and spent a full day fumbling my way home, in shock. Eight years ago I was fumbling again, past a divorce that entailed the loss of stepchildren along with my spouse, and mothballing the roles that went with that past life. I needed something new, but as they say, not like that.
I rode that dissonance of the election into a completely unexpected kind of experience, which I’m bringing up now because even if you’re not in a moment of personal crisis, you likely want to feel more agency over whatever the fuck is this current moment. I began showing up to an informal discussion group organized by a friend from literary circles, which then semi-formalized into a club for finding meaningful action. I’ll never forget driving to the first meeting in a stranger’s office at night in Little Italy: will I sound like an idiot? Will the others make me cringe? I’d been reading my creative writing out loud to live audiences since high school, but a group of earnest strangers on couches and armchairs had me in a near panic. Why?
In “Hegemony How-To,” Jonathan Smucker writes about how all the complications of identity knot up in movement organizing, overwhelming thoughtful planning and growth with both the fetishization of activist identity and just as corrosive, the impulse lots of people feel to reject associating with and thereby becoming identified as activists. During the first Trump administration, people marked themselves as non-activists doing activism carrying signs at protests yearning to go back to brunch, spinning up memes trucking more in wit than sincerity, injecting a paradoxically nihilistic vibe into the political podcasting that constituted the “Dirtbag Left.”
Like me, though, a decidedly uncool middle-aged soccer mom, they also joined organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America in droves. This was not that first group that I fumbled my way into, but it’s the one that stuck, and over the course of the last eight years as a socialist in organization I’ve learned how to organize canvasses for electoral candidates (even though I loathed elected officials when I first got activated, more on that later), what it’s like to show up to a picket line when you’re not yourself a member of a union, first principles for staying safe at protests and marches, and then on a larger scale, bringing thousands of people together to push past conventional partisan orthodoxy to demand dignity for people seeking reproductive and gender healthcare. Maybe the hardest stuff has been the work of organizational democracy – key to that all-important qualifier in democratic socialism – and I’ve got to confess that in practice that will seem really weird and pompous and cringey too. And it’s vital.
Stick with me if you’re wondering what more you can be doing, what more we can all be doing. You might end up in a different place than me, and that’s just fine. What matters most is that you take a deep breath and open yourself to the possibility that a new addition to your identity – the activated organizer, or activist – is exactly what will bring you a larger, mass solidarity. And what will get us all beyond this vicious and individually experienced spiral history seems determined to impose.
Fuck destiny: fight back.
Shauna McKenna is currently cochair of the San Diego chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and has served prior roles in national leadership with a variety of political objectives. While the views here are her own, she encourages you to check out dsasandiego.org to learn more about the chapter.