Outside Agitators

by Cliopatria

"So take the universe of people who really respect right-wing politicians and listen to right-wing media. Most of them will hear this stuff and turn against the bill. Some will hear this stuff and really be afraid of the bill. And then a small group will hear this stuff and believe it and wonder whether they need to do something more significant to stop this bill from becoming law. And then a couple will actually follow through."

-- Ezra Klein,"We have something to fear from fear-mongering itself," washingtonpost.com. March 24, 2010. (See also.)

"The plan of the people of property, is to raise the lower class to prevent the execution of the Law...The lawyers are the source from which these clamors have flowed...Merchants in general, assembly men, magistrates &c have been united in this plan of riots, and without the influence and instigation of these the inferior people would have been quiet."

-- Major General Thomas Gage, letter of Dec. 26, 1765 (quoted here).

Bonus:

"At the height of the 'Berkeley insurrection' press reports were loaded with mentions of outsiders, nonstudents and professional troublemakers. Terms like 'Cal’s shadow college' and 'Berkeley’s hidden community' became part of the journalistic lexicon. These people, it was said, were whipping the campus into a frenzy, goading the students to revolt, harassing the administration, and all the while working for their own fiendish ends. You could almost see them loping along the midnight streets with bags of seditious leaflets, strike orders, red banners of protest and cablegrams from Moscow, Peking or Havana. As in Mississippi and South Vietnam, outside agitators were said to be stirring up the locals, who wanted only to be left alone."

-- Hunter S. Thompson, The Nonstudent Left, The Nation. Sept. 27. 1965

History would be so much cleaner if these troublemaking elites would stop planting ideas in the otherwise-empty minds of the peasants.

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More Comments:

Chris Bray - 3/31/2010

There's surely an exchange, or a set of exchanges: between social classes, between media and consumers (both ways!), etc. But even the post you link to here -- "Where do they get their ideas?" -- suggests that ideas are packaged at the top and beamed into the human houseplants in the passive masses.

Real unemployment is near twenty percent -- I don't think ordinary people are angry because Fox News beamed the activation code to their angry switch. ("Hello, Raymond. How about passing the time with a little game of solitaire?")

All this history from the bottom up, and we're still stuck with this discussion about pure top-down causation. Why are the peasants angry? Who did this to their thoughts?

Jonathan Dresner - 3/30/2010

Are you saying that there isn't a connection between media messages and popular attitudes?

Chris Bray - 3/27/2010

Late addition -- just realized that the crucial piece of Hunter Thompson's description is the part about "cablegrams from Moscow, Peking or Havana." Thompson was describing an elite discourse (which culminated in 1965 with a state law banning outsiders from campus) in which teenagers in Berkeley were guided by their Comintern controllers. So, again, apparently popular protest was being dictated by a political elite in a national capital. Moscow pulled a string, and Mario Savio's mouth opened.

Chris Bray - 3/26/2010

From the Huffington Post:

"Of course, the individuals who take these vile actions, must themselves be held directly responsible. But there is no doubt that the atmosphere that incited them to do so was intentionally crafted from the "respectable" glistening towers of the big insurance companies, the offices of the national Chamber of Commerce that overlook the White House, and the stately suites of the Republican Congressional leadership.

They were incited to take these actions -- many of them against their own best interests -- by people who would do anything and say anything to promote their own financial or political interests."

I love this "the atmosphere that incited them" formulation. Let me ask you something, Madrake -- you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?

Chris Bray - 3/26/2010

Wonderful comment. You're right: the minds of the peasants should already be filled with the thoughts of their betters.

Ezra Klein is such a great example: people who "really respect right-wing politicians and listen to right-wing media" will "turn against the bill" when they "hear this stuff." It would never occur to people who respect right-wing politicians and listen to right-wing radio to be against the bill on their own; their default setting is to support a national mandate and federal regulation of health insurance, but the jerk on the radio ruins the harmony of their thoughts with the agenda of the state.

It could all go so well, if only other elites would stop saying wrong things. Don't they see what it does to the minds of the little people?

And I love the rest of your comment, although I can't claim to know the history of the Free Speech Movement well enough to compare their goals to the others and decide precisely how the case compares. But all very interesting, and all well said.

Jonathan Jarrett - 3/26/2010

Otherwise empty? I realise you're being satirical, but this discourse seems to me to require that actually the mind of the plebs is already full, with your chosen élite's preferred ideology, i. e. in all these cases passive obedience. If you go back to good old-fashioned medieval heresy, or indeed the conversion period in whichever society with a majority state-backed religion you like, you'll see the opposite of this coin, where that passive authoritarianism still has to be imposed and the ideas that the mob can come up with by itself, or guided by the allegedly-misguided, can be dangerous. And I think Thompson's agitators in your quotes are much more like these, people outside power who want in, whereas the first two are the propertied establishment reacting against the state's agenda, which is different and much more interesting I think (or, if you're a Democrat in the USA, horrifying I suppose).