The Radicals Are Revolting!

So. What else is new?

I was in Atlanta some years ago, well before George Floyd happened, when I watched Black Lives Matter activists interrupt and shout over a white woman running for state office in Georgia. Their ostensible purpose was to demonstrate the inconvenience of police interrupting black lives by shouting over a Democratic candidate at a progressive networking conference.

This was a few years after a crowd of enthusiastic radicals debated whether to let Civil Rights legend John Lewis speak at Occupy Atlanta. Someone filibustered and the resulting discussion took so long that Lewis walked away. Occupy died as a movement because nothing could be decided without an 85 percent consensus of the general assembly, Robert’s Rules of Order being deemed too authoritarian for such a big, diverse movement.

Radical politics are fraught with this divisiveness by design. Every question becomes a struggle because the radical struggle is endless. For example, feminism keeps dividing because the struggle against…