Last week, when I suggested that the best way for anyone appalled by the actions of the conservative Boston University student I dubbed “the BU Snitch” to combat right-wing anti-immigrant views is to help organize a strong left wing, I was encouraging people to work hard to win political battles on the strength of the best left ideas.
That is, I want to see left activists use people’s natural revulsion to acts like calling ICE down on a bunch of immigrant workers at an Allston car wash as a “teachable moment” to win hearts and minds over to the goal of rebuilding a broad left-wing movement for a more democratic nation and planet.
One reason I think about politics the way I do is because I was a student of Howard Zinn, the famous BU history professor. And a big lesson I learned from his anarchist-inspired political pronouncements was that how you engage in politics is at least as important as what you’re trying to win. He used to say “means and ends” like a mantra during his lectures.
Zinn’s long study of US and world history informed him that people who try to win political contests by throwing moral and ethical standards out the proverbial window, typically do more harm to humanity than good—whatever their initial intentions may have been. And that when you judge a political opponent to be amoral or even evil, that doesn’t make it correct to fight that person’s fire with similar fire of your own. Such fire having a way of burning down the societal house we all share.
So when I noticed that some Boston University left-wing student activists had decided that striking while the iron of public opinion was hot against “the BU Snitch” meant a letter campaign calling for the university administration to punish their fellow student by getting him thrown off of his sports team (etc., etc.), I thought to myself: This is not what I meant when I wrote about building a strong enough left-wing political movement to make federal immigration law more humane again.
In fact, I wasn’t thinking about activism at BU at all when I wrote my “BU Snitch” column. But if left-wing students at BU—and I usually count at least one or two from their ranks among my interns in any given academic term—had asked me how best to take advantage of the misstep by a leader of one of their main political antagonists on campus, I would have said to use the opportunity to win fence-sitters and even a few Republicans over to their side on matters like immigration.
How? Like what would I do and what do I think mentors of mine like Howard Zinn would have done in a similar situation? Creating opportunities to publicly debate “the BU Snitch” and any supporters he may have on immigration policy would be job number one.
Actually, some of the same left student activists that are pushing the questionable letter campaign have also revived what I view to be an excellent campaign to make BU a “Sanctuary Campus” for immigrants and foreign students. Which I think is a perfect issue to debate with “the Snitch” and his allies.
That kind of tactic is politics. Pitting your ideas against your political opponents’ ideas and gambling that your ideas are strong enough to win debates—inspiring more people to join your political network in the bargain.
As your network grows, your political faction gets stronger. And the stronger it gets, the more you have the power to change policy.
That’s the positive side of my speculative admonition. The negative side is this: Never push for political outcomes that can easily blow back on your faction. Trying to make your antagonists somehow go away, trying to drive that person or persons from the political field entirely—especially at a time when your faction is still weak—makes turnabout very much fair play to onlookers and, more to the point, to your opponents. Best not to attempt to raise the stakes of a game that you aren’t really able to play yet. History informs us that it will go badly for you. As it did for me and fellow student activists nearly 40 years ago.
I believe left-wing student activists at today’s BU implicitly understand what it’s like to experience, to give a very pertinent example, the power of right-wing billionaires to directly affect them in ways that my generation of left-wing activists never experienced. What we went through in the mid-1980s was bad enough. But in a period when even centrist presidents of Ivy League schools can be thrown out for not being sufficiently pro-Israel, the situation is automatically much worse.
Being able to go toe-to-toe with that kind of power, takes far greater numbers, money, and power than the left-wing currently has at any level. Even in New York City, where some of the sharpest minds in the Democratic Socialists of America have managed to put one of their own in power, holding onto that power and using it well in the public interest is another matter entirely.
Left-wing BU student activists and student activists elsewhere want to build a powerful left in this country? Then you all have to commit yourselves to a long, tough political struggle. In a period when the right-wing holds many of the available cards.
And you all need to grow your ranks as a first order of business. And you do that by beating your opponents on the hustings. Discussion and debate, discussion and debate, again and again and again at higher and higher levels to more and more people until the left is a dominant force in American politics.
That kind of strategy starts where you are at. BU students are at BU. Left-wing and right-wing all together in one town-sized pond. The right-wing power arrayed against the left there is considerable. So that left has a lot of work to do, there as everywhere.
First thing is to “study, study, study” everything you need to know (as I tell my interns when it comes to becoming good journalists) and to strive to understand your opponents better than they understand themselves. Then you don’t try to cancel them—a tactic that has not gone at all well for the campus left of recent years. You call them out in public debate. And you do your best to win any debates you have. And you win those hearts and minds. And if you lose, you learn from your defeat and you try again. And again. And again. Until your arguments are the strongest. Your cause is the most righteous. And you start moving from strength to strength. At BU. Then in local politics. Then state. Then national … and beyond.
And should you all ever get powerful enough to visit justice upon people like “the BU Snitch,” make sure it’s really justice you’re administering. Not revenge. Because otherwise you’ll have become exactly like the people you worked so hard to replace. Means and ends, right?
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
