In online political debates it’s often said that leftists used to want to change our political system, but now they just want Management to take their side. Students demanding that the Dean silence their political enemies, workers demanding that their co-workers (and perhaps their customers or clients) be re-educated, activists transforming themselves into lobbyists—all tacitly assume that the structures of power are fixed and unassailable, and that meaningful political action consists in manipulating those structures for virtuous political ends.
The limitations of this model of political change have been illuminated recently as Management has had second thoughts. Most notoriously as I write, Meta/Facebook has ended its fact-checking program—one that for some years had been driven by concern about the more extravagant declarations of Donald Trump and allies, and about misinformation (or, some would say, “misinformation”) regarding Covid—and is replacing it with “Community Notes,” a system already in place at Twitter/X, in which users report other users they feel have erred against Truth. The new system is not as bad as it may sound, but it’s hard not to suspect that its appeal to the people who run social media platforms is that the users do the work for free. Think of it as a digital self-cleaning toilet.
In any case, Meta’s decision—along with those of many other corporate executives and boards who are walking back their previous commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—reminds us of the perils of trying to get Management to take your side. As Bob Dylan taught us a long time ago, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” and you probably don’t get to the top of a multinational corporation without developing a facility for detecting the prevailing breezes.
And of course the same phenomenon is occurring in government as people who got Management—in the form of the executive branch of the US government during the Biden administration—to take their side are now finding out that the new Management is very much on the other side. Leftist activists who had hoped for a “long march through the institutions” have discovered that they are now marching in the opposite direction than they had intended. The very institutions they had sought to enlist for their goals have now fallen into the hands of their enemies.
Who could have predicted such an eventuality? The answer is: anyone who thought about it for five minutes, especially since there’s a relevant and quite recent history here for people who are willing to reflect more seriously on how social change happens.
Back in the day—“the day” being the 1960s—the political left was, generally speaking, more aware than today’s left of its vulnerability to manipulation by the institutions it wanted to change. The key term here was “co-optation”: Activists worried that institutions, by seeming to share the activists’ beliefs and commitments, would enfold, domesticate, and de-fang their opponents—would “co-opt” them for the institutions’ own purposes. In the Vietnam War era, university presidents sometimes invited student protestors to join committees or task forces charged with articulating a response to the war, and while some protestors responded warmly to such invitations, others warned that anyone so participating would simply be “co-opted” by the institution and willy-nilly implicated in its mechanisms. Swallowed by the Beast named Management. Herbert Marcuse famously called this and related maneuvers “repressive tolerance.”
And indeed, the wise men of Management sometimes openly recommended co-optation as a strategy. In 1979, John P. Kotter and Leonard A. Schlesinger published an essay in the Harvard Business Review called “Choosing Strategies for Change” in which they give this advice to executives:
Co-opting an individual usually involves giving him or her a desirable role in the design or implementation of the change. Co-opting a group involves giving one of its leaders, or someone it respects, a key role in the design or implementation of a change. This is not a form of participation, however, because the initiators do not want the advice of the co-opted, merely his or her endorsement.
Kotter and Schlesinger acknowledge that co-optation “has its drawbacks”; nevertheless, they say, “Under certain circumstances co-optation can be a relatively inexpensive and easy way to gain an individual’s or a group’s support (cheaper, for example, than negotiation and quicker than participation).” Manipulation is always an option!
We’re not completely oblivious to such dangers these days—for instance, we typically understand that when corporations tout their commitment to the environment, they’re probably just greenwashing rather than heeding the promptings of their innermost convictions. But I don’t believe that today’s political activists, on the left or the right, understand why institutions are so hard to march through.
Many of the issues I have just described appeared in their current form—in other forms they are ancient—in the 1960s, but, though few seem to know it, they all recurred in the late 1980s, around the time that student activists of the Sixties got tenure. It was in 1987 that Jesse Jackson led a group of protestors at Stanford University who chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” This was but one moment in a long and acrimonious debate that were then called the “canon wars”—a debate that led to many books and countless essays, and a lastingly influential diagnosis of the pathologies of the controversy: James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book Culture Wars.
In the midst of all this, Gerald Graff, a literary critic and theorist then at Northwestern University, published a fascinating essay called “Co-Optation.” He begins the essay by describing a lecture he once gave in which he recommended a radical restructuring of the curriculum and methods of study in English departments. Afterward, a member of the audience—one who had not forgotten the lessons of the Sixties—asked him whether such a proposal, if implemented, “would be very easily ‘co-opted’ by the established system.” Graff:
A nice piece of academic one-upmanship of the sort that normally would have stopped me in my tracks. I had been around this particular block before, however, and was ready with a counterploy: “I certainly hope so,” I replied. “To say that my proposal figures to be ‘co-opted’ would be simply to say that it actually has a chance to work. What’s the point of advancing ideas in public anyway if it isn’t to get them ‘co-opted’? That is, to get others to adopt them, to be successful?”
Through the course of his essay, Graff first congratulates himself on his cleverness—but then asks whether he was really so clever after all. Had he not simply evaded a legitimate concern? (One whose legitimacy, as it happens, I have been emphasizing throughout the essay.) Had he not failed to notice that his colleagues in literary studies insisted that their work was “oppositional,” “radical,” and “subversive” while sitting in the same offices, teaching the same courses, receiving the same perks, as the traditional scholars they had (in their view) overthrown. To paraphrase the conclusion of Orwell’s Animal Farm: Graff looked from Old Fogey to Tenured Radical, and from Tenured Radical to Old Fogey, but already it was impossible to tell which was which.
“Co-optation” is always a danger to would-be “change agents” for two major reasons. The first is that institutional structures, procedures, and norms are very powerful, indeed eerie in their apparent willfulness, in ways that many scholars have explored. The second involves what has been called the iron law of institutions: “The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” But the third, and the one I wish here to emphasize, is less widely recognized today: In a democratic society, there is no substitute for persuasion. And that goes for societies that are only imperfectly democratic, which is to say, every democratic society.
“Getting management to take your side” is the almost inevitable strategy, the natural default, for people who disdain the work of persuasion, simply don’t know how to do it, or are unaware of the significant differences between democratic and authoritarian societies. (Karl Marx thought it an absolute law of history that the Western democracies, because of their economic systems, would be the first to embrace communism. Instead it was the economically and politically “backward” Russia—because no strong democratic habits and practices made it necessary for the Bolsheviks to persuade anyone. One authoritarian regime in its senescence readily yielded to a younger and more vigorous one.) If you get the current Management to do your will, you may think you have succeeded, but if new Management gets elected, or if vox populi whispers winningly in the ear of the the same old Management, then your victory will be carried away in the wind, as evanescent as a cloud.
For those who wish to bring lasting change to their societies, persuasion, and especially persuasion of those they hate, is the only option. My counsel has been the same for many years now: Embrace the pain. But where to begin?
That, as it happens, is a question with an easy answer. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest one book: Aristotle on rhetoric.