Reflections on Entryism

[ecosophia]

One of the things I've been thinking about of late has been entryism -- the habit, very common in certain extremist political groups, of having people join some other, larger group with an unrelated focus in the hope of taking it over, or at least using it as a venue for recruitment and propaganda. I noted on this week's post over at the main blog that American secret societies, all through the years when they were large and culturally significant, had to fend off attempts at entryism, and noted with a certain wry amusement that the two groups most famous for entryism back in the day were socialists, on the one hand, and the Ku Klux Klan on the other. 

I wasn't exaggerating. On the one hand, it took the Masons a long bitter fight in the 1920s and 1930s to identify and throw out Klansmen who had joined Masonry with the goal of turning the Craft (that's what Masons call Masonry) into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Klan. On the other, quite a few other lodge organizations had to engage in similar struggles to keep socialists from taking them over -- that's when a lot of lodges started making the Pledge of Allegiance part of the opening ritual; socialists hated that and usually wouldn't say it, which made it easy for them to be identified and rendered harmless in various polite but effective ways. 

The irony?  There are two groups of people who quite frequently pop up on my blog, either trying to post links to articles on their websites unrelated to the topic of the weekly essay, or trying to give my feet a tongue bath because they think they can then talk me into agreeing with their positions. You guessed it: it's either socialists on the one hand, or people from the racist right on the other.

It's interesting that this should still be the case a century after the examples I'd studied. Now of course socialism and racial politics both have ghastly track records -- between them, they're responsible for most of the major genocides of the last century and a half -- and that's got to be a problem for recruitment. Still, given the abysmal historical ignorance of most Americans, it shouldn't be that insuperable. Some sort of subcultural heredity?  Or some other factor? 

Comments

[aldabra]

People who think they're right but have no traction look for traction. It's the Green problem; if you think ecosystem viability is the main issue but the practical effect of voting Green is splitting the left vote and electing people who will accelerate the trashing of the ecosystem you eventually get disillusioned with that and look for a route towards having a positive effect. The most promising route looks like Labour/the Dems, so you try that, and if you get anywhere at all then everyone else who is caught in the same bind notices.

I don't think you even need deliberate co-ordination for that to happen. I'm that kind of entryist in Labour at the moment; I joined when it looked like they were moving in a direction I agreed with, and I haven't got around to leaving yet despite them repudiating it, because there isn't a better option.

When I was at Oxford there was a legend about how the Conservative Association had organised to join the Liberal Society en masse, in order to have enough of a majority at the AGM to vote to close it down. Obviously that kind of entryism happens too, and in that case it's a conspiracy. But finding the most congenial home in a hostile environment isn't conspiracy. (Setting up your own home instead is fine in frontier territory, but stops working by about the third generation because the assets are all allocated. You can't, in the US, set up a viable third party without significant donor-class support, and the donor class are well served by the existing parties.)

[ecosophia]

That's a good point. On the one hand, you have entryism; on the other hand, you have cooptation -- the environmental movement, for example, has been coopted by the Democrats here in the US, and the anti-abortion movement by the Republicans; neither party does anything for the groups they've coopted, because they can simply wave the other party around as a bogeyperson come election time and get the coopted groups to line up meekly and vote for another candidate who won't do a thing for the causes they favor.

[mo_drui_mac_de]

I recently made exactly that point to a coworker who was worried that Biden's election meant his gun rights would be taken away. I pointed out that that would never happen, for precisely the same reason that the pro-choice camp's fears of abortion rights being completely overturned are poorly founded: doing so would deprive the opposing party of a reliable bogeyman to threaten their constituents with come election time. Both are certainly chipped away at here and there, and in certain regions genuinely imperiled, but Joe Biden is no likelier to hamstring the Second Amendment than Barack Obama was, just like the recently appointed Justice Barrett is no likelier to repeal Roe v. Wade than was the overwhelmingly Republican court that passed it.

[(Anonymous)]

If the Democrats wanted to take away your guns (or outlaw Christianity, or make you get gay-married in a FEMA camp or whatever), they would have done it already, when they were in power at some previous time. Equally, if the Republicans wanted to throw homosexuals in jail or make one religion dominant over all the others, they would have already done it. Those are just things to threaten their constituents with, and to raise money. "Donate now, or those terrible people on the other side will do all these terrible things to you! Only we can save you from them, but we need your money to do it!"