Tag Archives: social change

Getting Hortatory

My friend and occasional co-author Morton Marcus recently sent me the following:

Hortatory: Definition: giving exhortation or advice; encouraging someone to take a particular course of action
Origin: from the Latin word “hortatorius” meaning “encouraging”
Example: The coach gave a hortatory speech to the team, urging them to give their all in the upcoming game.

Giving exhortation or advice is at the core of what “hortatory” means. It involves motivating or inspiring someone to take action towards a certain goal or objective. This can be done through words of encouragement, counsel or advice. A hortatory speech can be given in different settings, such as in a business meeting, a classroom or a sports team huddle. It is a way to inspire people to aim higher and achieve their desired outcomes. Effective hortatory speeches are often filled with passion, conviction and sincerity, and can be a powerful tool for inspiring others to take positive action.

I’m not sure what this bit of wisdom was intended to convey–whether it was in response to a post, or someone’s comment– but it got me thinking about what I’ve been calling “the resistance.”

A number of people who’ve been advising/considering the options for those of us opposed to the coming full-scale assault on American governance have downplayed the effects of public demonstrations–protests, marches and the like. The central point is that these expressions of anger or disapproval don’t really accomplish anything–that We the People need to apply our energies to more substantive efforts. I don’t disagree with the observation that public dissent by itself is insufficient, but I think it is nevertheless important.

Look at that definition of “hortatory.” 

Widespread expressions of disapproval, whether delivered via letters to elected officials, mass demonstrations, letters to the editor, blog posts, op-eds or other means have important impacts we shouldn’t dismiss: they send a message, and not just to the MAGA folks and Trumpers, many of whom are unaware and dismissive of the extent of public disapproval. Examples of public exhortation help forge community among the people who are participating in other, more scattered acts of resistance. They reassure resistors that they are not alone, that many other people share their belief in American values–especially the rule of law and transparent, competent and ethical governance.

In 2022, the Brookings Institution considered the effects of mass protests. In a study titled “Protest Matters” the focus was on the effects of protests on economic redistribution. Researchers studied whether citizen-led protests were able to nudge governments to increase redistributive efforts of fiscal resources, using evidence from Nigeria. The results were mixed– but overall the results showed that protests did influence fiscal redistribution.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has also looked into the effects of demonstrations. Among other findings, that study found that such protests have been increasing globally.

Mass protests increased annually by an average of 11.5 percent from 2009 to 2019 across all regions of the world, with the largest concentration of activity in the Middle East and North Africa and the fastest rate of growth in sub-Saharan Africa.

Analysis of the underlying drivers of this growth suggests the trend will continue, meaning the number and intensity of global protests is likely to increase.

Protests have resulted in a broad range of outcomes, ranging from regime change and political accommodation to protracted political violence with many casualties.

The study also identified what it called “catalyzing factors” responsible for the trend: (1) the use of technology by protestors and governments alike, (2) the tension between shifting democratic and authoritarian government types, and (3) the need for improved understanding and responsiveness between governments and their citizens.

Some protests have greater impact than others–it turns out that the “how” of a protest is important. A study, titled “Protests: How Effective Are They?” found that three factors were most significant in predicting the success of such mass efforts: Nonviolent tactics, a favorable sociopolitical context, and a large number of participants. (A “favorable sociopolitical context” includes the existence of pre-existing, favorable public opinion, supportive elites, a favorable media environment– and luck.)

There’s a fairly robust academic literature considering the role of mass protests in promoting change, and while most studies don’t use the term “hortatory,” the hortatory element of successful protests was obvious. Those of us who are determined to resist the corruption, incompetence and sheer anti-Americanism of a Trump administration need to include public protest in our arsenal of weapons.

It’s not enough, but we shouldn’t dismiss it. It will be an important aspect of the resistance.

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The Best Analysis I’ve Seen

As I said yesterday, political finger-pointing is utterly beside the point. Harris ran a masterful campaign–unfortunately, she was female and Black, running against a man who encouraged people to vote their misogyny and bigotries.

As I also said yesterday, the election results weren’t political–they were cultural.

The best analysis I’ve seen was from Talking Points Memo.

That analysis began with what we all saw: this was a campaign “fought directly over the issues of democracy, rule of law, basic decency and respect, and protection for the marginalized.” Those were the principles and values that lost–soundly. As David Kurtz wrote, this wasn’t another fluke of our crazy Electoral College.

The dark path ahead was chosen clearly and unequivocally: With 51%, Trump is on track to win a majority of the popular vote. Second, Trump will win without undue reliance on the quirks of our 18th century anti-majoritarian constitutional structure.

There is clarity in that result. This is who we are. Not all of us, but a majority of us. It presents a stark picture of America in 2024, without sugarcoating or excuse. It makes it harder to fool yourself about the task at hand, which is an enormous cultural one more than a political one.

Donald Trump’s win isn’t the product of a constitutional quirk. It’s not the result of a poorly conceived or executed campaign by Kamala Harris. It’s not a messaging failure or a tactical error or a strategic blunder. Other broader dynamics at play – like a post-pandemic revulsion toward incumbents or an anti-inflation backlash – are too limited in their scope and specific in their focus to account for the choice that was made: Donald Trump. It would be a category error to ascribe our current predicament to a political failure.

If politics is merely a reflection of culture, then we get to see that reflection clearly and sharply as the sun comes up this morning. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.

There’s a lesson here: don’t expect politics to fix a cultural problem. Kurtz isn’t counseling us to ignore politics–although he also reminds us that we are at risk of losing the mechanisms for achieving political results – the threats to free and fair elections, majority rule, and the rule of law itself will make politics much harder. What he is doing is reminding us that what needs to change is the culture.

For those of us who believe in the rule of law, a pluralistic society, and standing up to unkind people who engage in hurting others as public blood sport, we’re going to have to take a long view toward promoting those principles in all aspects of our culture so that they are ultimately reflected in our politics in a way they simply are not now. I recognize that many of us have already been doing this slow and steady work, which makes the overnight result even more discouraging. It remains an enormous, decades-long task, but it is something each of us can engage in without uprooting our lives or changing professions or moving abroad.

With respect to the political tasks we face, he reminds us that marginalized and the disenfranchised folks are always hurt first and that it will be worse this time because hurting them has been advertised as the point.

The challenge before us is enormous. It is not a challenge any of us signed up for. It’s been foisted upon us. The past decade has felt like a detour from the lives and aspirations we had hoped to have. I feel a special empathy for those who came of age in the 1960s at the peak of Great Society reforms and have spent their adults lives witnessing their erosion. Those of us with an act or two left, and especially those with their whole lives still to dedicate to making America better than she is presenting right now, owe it to those whose time is ending to summon our essential optimism, roll up our sleeves, and get to down to the hard work that our current predicament demands. That may sound like a rallying cry, but I’m also trying to convince myself.

The first step to finding  a solution to any problem is to define it accurately. Blaming campaign errors or systemic electoral issues just keeps us from recognizing the (very ugly) truth: a majority of American voters are unhappy with social changes that confer civic equality on people they consider inferior. They are unable to recognize the multiple ways those social changes actually benefit them, and they want to “return” to a time that existed only in their imaginations.

Good people have work to do.

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OK–Let’s Talk About Virtue Signaling

A few days ago, a commenter dismissed the recent Women’s Strike as “useless virtue signaling.” That contemptuous comment prompted me to consider both the attitude prompting someone to post that condescending taunt as well as the definition and effect of virtue signaling.

I’m at a loss about the attitude, but I have some very definite opinions about what does–and does not–constitute behavior intended to convey one’s “virtue.”

I first encountered the phrase “virtue signaling” several years ago, when I purchased my first Prius, and a colleague–who, I hasten to say, approved of the purchase and who worries about climate change– told me that Toyota depended upon virtue signaling as a marketing tool. Making people feel virtuous for reducing their use of fossil fuel helped them sell their cars. It’s all about the bottom line, baby!

I understood his point; after all, people have been purchasing cars to “send a message” for generations. Until recently, that message had little to do with virtue or the environment–it was more along the lines of keeping up with the Joneses (or letting them know you could afford that Cadillac…)

Wikipedia’s entry on the term distinguishes between virtue signaling that is what we sometimes call “humble bragging” and the other motivations for– and effects of– communicative behaviors. The entry also included the following, very interesting, observation:

Linguist David Shariatmadari argued in The Guardian that the very act of accusing someone of virtue signalling is an act of virtue signaling in itself. The Conversation‘s Karen Stollznow said that the term is often used as “a sneering insult by those on the right against progressives to dismiss their statements.” Zoe Williams, also writing for The Guardian, suggested the phrase was the “sequel insult to champagne socialist“.

The Wikipedia article also suggested that the term is most commonly applied to online expression rather than in-person behaviors and activities.

The dismissal of the Women’s Strike (and presumably the Women’s March that occurred after Trump’s election) as useless “virtue signaling” struck me as not only patronizing but entirely wrong. It utterly misses the point of civic demonstrations, which are an important–and effective– element of social movements and social change.

The first and most immediate effect of a successful demonstration–a strike, a march, or other public display–is communication. Participation in a protest or other public display does two things: first, it tells other people that their concerns are broadly shared, that they are not alone; and second, it sends a message to those who are in a position to correct the problem that generated the event.

When a segment of the population is upset about something–racism, homophobia, misogyny, failure to fix potholes, whatever–concerted public actions that serve to tell individuals that they aren’t alone, aren’t the only people with that particular concern–are extremely important. (If you hold a demonstration and no one comes, that’s an important message too.) Brooding alone about problem X leads to feelings of powerlessness; joining with others who share your concern or anger strengthens your resolve to do something about it.

It also facilitates contact with others who agree with you, making other action more likely.

In states unlike Indiana, where the existence of referenda or the absence of gerrymandering means that legislators actually have to respond to constituent concerns, demonstrations and other public actions alert those in office to matters requiring their remedial action.

It’s true that few of these public protests get prompt positive results.

But even when strikes or marches or other displays of public concern fail to produce immediate results, over time, those expressions of opinion can and do change the culture. Little by little, they produce social change. Where would the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement or the women’s movement be today without the years of “virtue signaling” that John Lewis aptly called “good trouble”?

In any effort to effect social change, there will be good-faith arguments among proponents about the tactics to be employed. Will X be effective or counter-productive? Is this the right time to try Y? What if we plan a march and no one comes? Those are important discussions.

But they have absolutely nothing to do with “virtue signaling.”

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Inter-Generational?

Whoever said that change is the only constant was on to something. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen enormous changes in everything from social mores, to communication, to travel…and I’m pretty sure that most of the people who regularly read this blog can offer lots of other examples.

Apparently, even the widespread belief in generational differences–the life changes that have formed the basis of innumerable poems and novels, that have spawned repeated admonitions of how “someone your age” should behave–is undergoing a change.

According to a report in Fast Company, BMW in Germany is pioneering a multi-generational workplace.

The growing potential of the multigenerational workplace challenges the traditional way in which we think about people of different ages and what we can do and accomplish at various points in life. We frequently hear people say, “I’m too young for that job,” or “I’m too old to learn a new gig.” When universal schooling and “old-age” pensions were first introduced in the 1880s, life became organized into a simple sequence of stages. Infanthood was all about growing and playing. School, and perhaps college, would follow, and then work. Before we knew it, we would be in retirement, looking back at the linear pattern that a full and orderly life was supposed to be, hoping that our children and grandchildren would successfully replicate the very same trajectory in their own life spans. Our time in this world became compartmentalized into a rigid series of distinct stages ever since.

I call this way of organizing our lives the sequential model of life. Over the past 150 years or so, every generation has been told to follow the exact same rules all over the world, from Japan to the United States, and from Scandinavia to the southern tip of Africa. Meanwhile, wars were fought, empires came and went, women gained the right to vote, and we set foot on the moon and dispatched robotic rovers to Mars. But we continued to live our lives in the same old way, one generation after another, in endless reprise.

This state of affairs is becoming obsolete due to long-standing demographic transformations.

People now live longer, for one thing. In 1900, average life expectancy at birth in the United States was 46 years; as of 2022, it’s 78. Americans who have made it to age 60 can expect to live an average of another 23 years, dramatically up from just 10 years in 1900.  As the article points out, that’s “another lifetime within a lifetime.” (Western Europeans are even better off, with a life expectancy at age 60 of 25 years.)

As anyone with eyes can see, not everything about our increasing longevity is positive–there are frictions between younger, taxpaying generations and those in retirement enjoying healthcare and pension benefits. Many people struggle with transitioning from one stage to another. We’re all subject to the destabilizing effects of technological change.

The article suggests that we think about life differently–that we rethink the ways in which “rising life expectancy, enhanced physical and mental fitness, and technology-driven knowledge obsolescence” are working to fundamentally alter the dynamics of the human life course, “redefining both what we can do at different ages and how generations live, learn, work, and consume together.”

The multi-generational workforce at BMW includes older workers–dubbed “perennials”–and the experiment has increased productivity.

The author predicts a massive transformation, a “postgenerational revolution” that will “fundamentally reshape individual lives, companies, economies, and the entire global society.”

As a result, we will witness the proliferation of perennials, “an ever-blooming group of people of all ages, stripes, and types who transcend stereotypes and make connections with each other and the world around them . . . they are not defined by their generation,” in the words of Gina Pell, a serial entrepreneur….

If people could liberate themselves from the tyranny of “age-appropriate” activities, if they could become perennials, they might be able to pursue not just one career, occupation, or profession but several, finding different kinds of personal fulfillment in each. Most importantly, people in their teens and twenties will be able to plan and make decisions for multiple transitions in life, not just one from study to work, and another from work to retirement.

Sounds great to these old ears…..

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How Old Is Grandma, Anyway?

My husband recently shared a FB meme going around, a recitation that–in addition to being generally interesting–sheds a good deal of light on the reason so many older Americans are disoriented, uneasy and cranky.

The story went like this: A grandson was asking his grandmother what she thought about shootings at schools, the computer age, and just things in general.

In response, the grandmother notes that she’d beenI born before: television, penicillin, the polio vaccine, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, Frisbees and the pill. She was born before credit cards, laser beams, ballpoint pens, pantyhose, air conditioners, dishwashers, and clothes dryers.

When she was born, men hadn’t walked on the moon.

In her youth, she’d never heard of FM radios, tape decks, CD’s, electric typewriters, yogurt, or guys wearing earrings. Anything “made in Japan” was junk. Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and instant coffee were unheard of. 

The list didn’t even include the Internet or social media…

The meme ended with grandma saying that, In her day,’ “grass” was mowed,  “coke” was a cold drink, “pot” was something your mother cooked in, “Aids” were helpers in the Principal’s office, “hardware” was found in a hardware store and.”software” wasn’t even a word. 

Add to all that, when we did get TV, news anchors, weathermen, sports reporters etc. were all White men…women were just entering the workforce (except for Black women, who had mostly only been allowed to be domestics.) Gay people were still way behind the coats in the closet.

The meme’s big “reveal”–“grandma” is only 70 years old. She was born in 1952.

Full disclosure: I did not go through this list and check its accuracy. It seems incredible that so much of our environment–so many of the things we simply take for granted and assume have always been around–weren’t part of our realities until after 1952.

I was born in 1941, and I can confirm the absence of many of these inventions. I can also confirm the disorienting impact of many of them; the laptop computer on which I compose these blog posts–not to mention the advent of the Internet–still doesn’t feel natural. (I’m reasonably okay until the computer has a problem…)

I know that a significant percentage of those who read this blog are in my general age cohort, and can probably add items to the “when did that happen?” list. We older folks should also stop to consider that living through immense changes in technology and society have presented “grandma” (and grandpa) with significant personal challenges.

Some of us–including yours truly–have welcomed most of these changes. Others have found them to be very threatening.

When Morton Marcus and I were researching our recent book–the one I’ve been shamelessly promoting--we were essentially exploring the changes in grandma’s life. Morton wanted to understand how technology had emancipated women–how appliances like washing machines and innovations like frozen food had enabled women to enter the workforce. I wanted to document the enormous importance of the pill and other medical advances allowing women to control their own reproduction, and I wanted to trace the political consequences of efforts to nullify those advances.

There’s a side benefit to reviewing the enormity of the changes in “grandma’s” environment; it should generate a bit of sympathy for the numerous older Americans who have found the extent and pace of those changes unnerving. These are folks who look at a world that is immensely different from the world into which they were born and socialized and who feel unseen and unmoored.

As anyone who’s had children can attest, different personality types respond differently to change, and we have arguably been living at a time when the rate of both technological and social change has greatly accelerated.

For eons, humans occupied relatively stable environments. Since the time of the first Industrial Revolution (scholars tell us we are now in the second), that stability has been regularly upended. It is inarguable that the inventions and innovations have made life far better for most people–but constant disruption comes with a cost.

I’m pretty sure that the MAGA Americans screaming about making the country great “again” are disproportionately drawn from the ranks of the people most uncomfortable with modern life. They want to return to a more familiar environment–one in which they not-so-incidentally enjoyed a superior status. They want their grandchildren to inhabit that same world. 

That worldview can be dangerous–especially when those who hold it are armed. It is also doomed. The culture has moved on.

That said, memes like this one about grandma’s age ought to elicit some sympathy for those of our fellow-citizens who find themselves visitors in a world they didn’t expect and no longer understand.

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