By Meagan Fischer
I was honored to be invited to write a reader essay for Tangle a number of months ago, but I’ve been stuck on it for months. It normally wouldn’t be ‘good writing’ to start by sharing that, but in this case my trouble finding my voice for this audience connects to what I find it necessary to write about. My voice has been stuck in part because I haven’t felt safe to use it in so many situations. Some of those situations were personal and not directly connected to political discourse (though I could easily digress here about the personal being political), but a significant contributing factor to how I lost my voice was both personal and political: cancel culture.
My own personal experience with cancel culture not only led me to be afraid of speaking my mind and heart; it has also created a backlog of things I wanted to say but didn’t know how, or where I could express them with any expectation of being heard or respected by the people around me. Many moments when my words stuck in my throat have become crystallized memories, frozen in my psyche. One of them was knocked loose recently while reading Isaac’s comment in his March 18th take on Cuba: “It is the peak of American-obsessive criticism, often proffered by non-interventionists and progressives, to look at Cuba and think we are responsible for all its struggles.”
This brought me back to circa 2017, when I had returned to the California State University, Chico campus after an absence of four years from higher education to finish a bachelor’s degree in a new major, Latin American Studies. After a year surrounded by public policy up-and-comers while interning with the Friends Committee On National Legislation, I decided any degree at all would help me be taken more seriously. I already had all my general education requirements and a few Spanish classes under my belt, plus I had traveled in Latin America, so Latin American Studies would be an easy major to complete. Little did I know how much the insights from my classes would dovetail with my observations of the activist networks I had embedded myself in.
The rise of algorithmic clicktivism over the previous few years had strained my sometimes deep, loving relationship with nuance and complexity. I noticed the changing times bringing out the most self-righteous version of my advocacy — the same passion and surety of my correctness that led me to berate my mom in my teen years for not taking the full step from vegetarianism to veganism, backed up by many a disturbing PETA pamphlet. (Self-disclosure: I spent only a small percentage of my life eating vegan, though I continue to be deeply concerned for animal welfare and will happily shell out extra dollars, even on a limited budget, for a Certified Humane label.)
But despite the supposed leftist-brainwashing of the university, studying Latin America was actually pushing me the other way — possibly because where I was at the time left me little room further to the left to go. My takeaway from studying Salvador Allende’s Chilean presidency was that when people push too fast and hard to the left without sufficient popular buy-in, worse outcomes may result from the inevitable pendulum swing I’ve seen this reflected in contemporary times with the Trump administrations.
I learned about the most disturbing and violent paths that leftist rigidity can result in with the case of Peru’s Shining Path guerillas. When I read Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara by Jorge G. Castañeda, my takeaway was that Che was a hypocritical white savior, daring to insert himself into the struggles of nations to which he did not belong using tactics many citizens did not want or ask for (see: Bolivia). When he was successful (Cuba), he participated in the centralization of power that dooms movements to failure. And Castañeda’s description of Guevara working himself to the bone cutting sugar cane from dawn to dusk — and then demeaning those who had labored under these conditions their whole lives and wanted the promise of something different to be delivered — revealed to me a larger-than-life resentful activist who lashed out at the world after burning himself out. I’d been there, and I was seeing it all around me. I even lost a friend to this pattern when he ended his own life, which is a story for another time.
We also read Uva de Aragón’s Memories of Silence, with its fictionalized accounts of incidents like Cubans beaten up for wearing jeans with a small American flag on the tag, and characters who eventually confide in one another that “the revolution was stolen.” This was all too reminiscent of the informal surveillance and violence-seeking I was observing in the “social justice warrior” culture I had surrounded myself with. For example, someone I met through carpooling to South Dakota for the #NoDAPL water-protector camps later messaged me on Facebook saying that I should probably “unfollow” a webcomic artist because she was a TERF — despite their comics having nothing to do with gender identity.
With regard to violence, I recall going to a book sale at AK Press’s warehouse — a business I had always respected for their egalitarian ownership structure — and feeling peer-pressured to acquire a button that said, “I will fuck up any bigot that fucks with you.” I slowly began to wonder if this was really about solidarity or looking for an acceptable outlet for pent-up rage, much like how fantasizing about what happens to child-molesters in prisons seems to be an enjoyable hobby for a certain type of person. I became increasingly concerned about the unacknowledged downstream consequences of such approaches, even while seeing their logic. How close on the spectrum to Shining Path violence is punching bigots? And who gets to decide how those bigots are identified?
Don’t get me wrong, my worldview was and still is quite left-of-center in many fundamental ways. At the campus discussion of Aragón’s book, after she spoke, a woman shared a supposedly heartbreaking tale of going back to Cuba after many years and being greatly disturbed to see the logo of a large clothing company on the sidewalk, next to an empty building. This kind of tragedization of loss of access to capitalist consumption makes me want to get out my tiny violin and flick away invisible tears (there, that’s my one self-allotted mean-spirited comment). Simply put: This did not seem like a legitimate problem to me. I learned how terrible conditions in Cuba were before their revolution, and I’d trade away sweatshop-made clothing for universal healthcare anyday.
But I noticed that the leftists I’d surrounded myself with were disappointingly unwilling to really engage questions, like How can we learn from the past’s mistakes? How can we do better than people like Che Guevara? Could we maybe not send homosexuals to work camps this time? Instead, people I met at conferences and at organizing meetings seemed to be more interested in defending Che’s actions — and all historic leftist figures — from all critique than talking about how to up our game.
That was the mise-en-scéne that Isaac’s comment brought me back to. One day, I tried to discuss what I was learning about Cuba with a fellow activist who had gotten a job on campus, and she said something like, “I think we just haven’t had a chance to see what communism can look like without capitalism.” I went wide-eyed and silent in shock. What did she think, that some switch could flip allowing us — or any country — to simply change systems all at once? It was obvious to me that any strategy for social change doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, and if it isn’t accounting for predictable responses such as embargoes from other countries, it isn’t a strategy at all.
If I’d had the wherewithal I probably could have made that point and maybe she would have even seen the value in it. But by that point, I was just so discouraged and on edge when it came to dissenting within my milieu of activists. In addition to all my examples above, a steady onslaught of intramovement surveillance had been growing.
A few months earlier, when the Chico chapter of the organization 350.org put together a solidarity rally for #NoDAPL, a group whose steering committee I sat on at the time, a self-described “cultural consultant” rapidly contacted a number of folks to call us out for not consulting with local tribes before putting on an event related in any way to indigenous solidarity. At that point, I was still willing and wanting to be an ally — and I was expecting good-faith communication. I sent a message offering to be a liaison for this person’s concerns by bringing them to the 350 steering committee. He utterly ignored me, and he continued to ignore me when I attempted to communicate further. His stance seemed to be that I was associated with a group that had breached etiquette in a way that was unrecoverable and thus not worth talking to. (To be fair, I’m doing a lot of interpretation here, but that’s what’s left when communication is cut off.)
The irony is that this person had only recently moved to the area, coming in with a lot of preconceived notions of how things should be done based on cultural norms of the Bay Area, where the political divide is between the far left and the center left, while I had been deeply embedded in my community’s activism network for many years. This person’s blue-metropolis approach was not adapted for a purple city.
One of the more difficult aspects of this era was how close to home it all felt. I was living in a community house at the time, and at least one of my housemates took such call-outs very seriously. Intra-movement conflicts playing out locally often dominated conversations in our shared kitchen as we each prepped food on our respective counter spaces.
I question the “airing of dirty laundry” about prior activism experiences by writing about it publicly. I wonder if it will be received as me simply ranting about personal grudges rather than meaningfully contributing to political discourse. But I want people to know about the shadow side of progressive movements from someone who isn’t dismissing the underlying values or the context in which they emerge. Because these are the same phenomena that have pushed people with slightly different constellations of personality and experience into far-right rabbit holes, as Isaac pointed out a number of months ago about Nick Fuentes.
This often feels like Cassandra’s dilemma. When I have tried to sound the alarm about the pitfalls of progressive strategies over the last ten to fifteen years, which are still slowly making their way to more mainstream environments, many leftist assume I am just a “reactionary” with opposing values. It’s hard to give these criticisms to people I agree with politically and continually be disappointed when I am not recognized as a good-faith critic — as someone who has been in the same trenches and shares a lot of the same hopes for the world, but who doesn’t think those goals will be achieved if many of the movement’s tactics don’t change.
To be fair, I am sure I dismissed many similar critiques in the height of my participation in this same activist culture that I now am so critical of. Despite the doubts I’ve had all along, I admit that I got caught up in the excitement and thrill of the social media-enabled SJW-moment in my mid-twenties. For the first time in my life, I was able to enjoy speaking my mind fully with limited fear of reprisal, in the face of people who reminded me of all the ways I had felt stifled and belittled in my life, mocked for being a hippie/treehugger/Californian. I remember telling the cop friend of a co-worker (!) on Facebook that if he and the others in our argument/brawl thread were talking in person, he probably would have already shot them. My experience with police has been that they escalate all too quickly, or leave the room, or shut down conversations that challenge their worldview in supposed community “listening forums” where they expect others to do all the listening. This is why oversimplified calls for “civility” also fall flat for me even while I critique cancel culture: Maybe I needed to get that kind of thing off my chest, and maybe it’s unfair of me to expect others who are just now finding their voice for the first time to modulate that voice. On the other hand, I’ve seen some people using their voice for many years now to try to shout everyone else down, without any apparent self-reflection or course-correction.
This is where nuance becomes so difficult: Yes, calls for respect and civility are reflecting basic human needs, and the lack of them threaten our democracy. And yes, calls for “civility” can reinforce existing power imbalances and be used to avoid shining light on where our democracy falls short. I see my country, or at least those who vote similarly to me, mostly only able to be aware of one of these sentiments at a time. It has been hard to find my voice to express this, because I so often feel like I can only get halfway through my point before the people I’m talking to write me off, thinking they’ve heard a “dogwhistle.”
I have now distanced myself from the label “activist” due to its own dogwhistle connotations, though I still deeply consider sociopolitical issues and how to contribute to the world every single day. Instead of partisan politics, I have been investing in bridging efforts like a Community of Practice for civically engaged facilitators and mediators, organizing ad hoc Living Room Conversations, and attending the monthly Equality Caucus of Braver Angels. Participating in even these spaces, though, involves a real risk of losing nuance and empathy as we create a new meta-axis of polarization: between those fighting against polarization and those who are seen as contributing the most to it. I try to be mindful of this hall of mirrors as I navigate it.
One effect of grappling with all these complex sociopolitical dynamics on my life has been a move back toward long-form content that makes room for complexity, contradictions, disclaimers, and synthesis. It is a reason I appreciate Tangle, for the modeling of others using their voices to express their unique perspectives, which is one of the blessings helping me find my own voice again.
Meagan Fischer is a facilitator and edge-cultivator attempting to make her right-sized contributions to collective trauma relief. She recently obtained a Community Ministry Certificate from Cherry Hill Seminary, a Pagan school, and is inspired by the notion that “we are all Gaia’s children.”
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