photo top: Hilary Klein background photo: David Hanks

POST-ISSUE ACTIVISM
— HOW TO CHANGE THINGS —
have to organize people where they are at.” In other words, if we tell
people our truths in a way that that connects with their experience, they
will understand it, and they will believe it.
I find that most people largely believe the stories that activists tell them
about bad things happening in the world. Activists excel at packaging
issues, explaining the problem, the solution, and the action that people
can take. Activists break it all down into sixty-second raps with
accompanying flyers, fact sheets, and talking points, and these tactics win
important campaign victories. But where is our system-changing mass
movement? Although many of our critics are so blinded by propaganda and
ideology that they will always see us as naive, unpatriotic, or dangerous,
there is already a critical mass of people who recognize that our society is
facing severe problems.
This analysis is supported by the work of researcher and author Paul Rey,
who has done extensive demographic research into the beliefs and values
of the American public. Rey’s work first received prominence through his
discovery of the “cultural creatives” which he describes as the cultural byproduct
of the last forty years of social movements. The defining
characteristics of this social grouping includes acceptance of the basic
tenets of environmentalism and feminism, a rejection of traditional
careerism, big business, and monetary definitions of “success,” a concern
with psychological and spiritual development, belief in communities, and a
concern for the future. Perhaps most profound is the fact that since the
mass media of America still reflects the modern technocratic consumerist
worldview, cultural creatives tend to feel isolated and not recognize their
true numbers. Most important, based on their 1995, data Rey and his
coauthor Sherry Ruth Anderson conclude that there are 50 million cultural
creatives in America and the numbers are growing. 13
Rey has continued his work in The New Political Compass, in which he
argues with statistical data that the Left/Right breakdown of politics is
now largely irrelevant and proposes a new four-directional political
compass. Rey’s compass is a fascinating tool for illustrating the complexity
of public opinion, mapping not only political beliefs but also cultural shifts.
Rey contrasts the Left of New Deal liberalism and big government as
“West” with the “East” of cultural conservatism and the religious right. Rey
gives “North” on his compass to a grouping he calls the New Progressives,
composed largely of cultural creatives and completely unrepresented in
the current political system. He defines their major concerns as ecological
sustainability, the corporate dominance, child welfare, health care,
education, a desire for natural products and personal growth. He contrasts
them with “South,” who espouse the Big Business Paradigm of profits
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— HOW TO CHANGE THINGS —
Altered version of the control mythology’s battle of the story.
before planet and people, economic growth, and globalization. Again, his
statistical data has profound messages for all of us working to change the
world. He estimates that whereas only 14 percent of the population
supports the Big Business paradigm, 36 percent of Americans fall into the
New Progressives category. 14
To me the message is a simple affirmation of postissue activism. Our
movements need to stop focusing on only the details and start getting the
bigger picture of a holistic analysis out there. Unless the details articulate
a broader vision, they are just more background noise in our informationsaturated
culture. The eighteenth-century political frameworks of left
versus right no longer fully capture the political fault lines of our era.
Perhaps a better description of the real debate is flat earth versus round
earth. The corporate globalizers’ program of ever-expanding industrial
exploitation of the earth is in such deep denial of the ecological realities of
the planet that it is akin to maintaining that the earth is flat. Fortunately,
more and more people understand that the earth is in fact round and that
we need to make some big changes to both the global system and the way
we think of our relationship with the planet. What we need now are social
movements with the vision and strategy to harness this consciousness into
real momentum for shaping a better world.
The ability to choose your issue is a privilege. Most people involved in
resistance are born into their community’s struggle for survival. They
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POST-ISSUE ACTIVISM