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

[(Anonymous)]

Entryism was the subject of a legendary Tweet by David Burge, which stated:

1. Identify a respected institution
2. Kill it
3. Gut it
4. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect

I tend to think that entryism only works on institutions that are already well into the decline stage, which is why so many august and official bodies have been effectively taken over by woke idealogues. That's to say that the left's entryism has in formal terms been very successful. However, the problem is that once the institution has been captured, people outside inherently sense that something is wrong, and the institution begins to be drained of credibility.

[ecosophia]

I've seen entryism happen just as effectively in organizations that were just getting under way, for what it's worth. Still, you're right that entryists are parasites that kill their host.

[scotlyn]

1. Identify a respected institution
2. Kill it
3. Gut it
4. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect

Of course, if you made a slight change to No 4, thusly:

4. SELL its carcass as a skin suit, to people who will buy and wear it as a way to demand respect

You would have named the kind of entryism that can turn a grass-roots effort into a saleable commodity and status signaller.

I'm not sure what name to give this type of entryist perpetrator, but as an example, I give you the trajectory that has taken a wide variety of grass roots environmental movements, stolen their "skin suits" and sold them back to folk who want the "respectability" of the skin suit in the form of a virtuous product, such as an electric car or carbon credits.

[ecosophia]

Oof. Dead on target.