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

Re: Distributions

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe it has to do with the level of evangelism associated with a specific group. Beer drinkers as a group mostly couldn't care less whether you drink beer or wine. But political/social theory groups have an extremely high interest in everyone else's political affiliation and try to change it. Maybe it is because the ideals tie back to core beliefs or because the political beliefs of the masses do have big impacts on everyone's interests, but it is just one of those areas that people evangelize about, especially the extremists.

So maybe it's not that they joined the group for the explicit reason of pushing their political agenda, but are actually interested in druidry or masonry and happen to be extreme on the political dimension and just can't help but to push their political agenda regardless of what setting they are in.

It is just a theory, and maybe naive - but I work in an area shrouded in government secrecy and I so often see outsiders attribute random dynamics to malicious organized conspiracies that I tend to try to find alternate explanations before believing conspiracies.