Radicalizing movements

I had a professor once who taught me an important principle. Social and political movements almost always start reasonably and get progressively more extreme as time passes. One can see this in the history of movements like the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and many of the world’s socialist movements.

The mechanism is straightforward. A group will have a real grievance against society that needs to be addressed, and so a movement will form. The initial leaders of the movement will make demands that, in retrospect, are probably fairly reasonable, and so after a period of years of agitation and re-education and consciousness-raising, society will eventually, though perhaps grudgingly, acquiesce to these demands.

So what happens to those initial moderate leaders once they have gotten everything they asked for? They no longer have a mandate to lead, and many of their followers leave the movement because it has achieved what they set out to achieve. So they are replaced by leaders with more radical demands that haven’t yet been met, and smaller groups of followers who want more. And so on, until the movement finally splinters into lots of small groups, often at odds with each other, all with extreme demands that society is not prepared to meet.

An interesting principle. I see it in operation all the time, all over the world.