the-transfeminine-mystique:

I’ve been thinking a lot about two posts I made previously and how I think they connect under the surface.

On the one hand, there’s this post, a throwaway:

and on the other, there was a longer on that I wrote about how in MLK’s reinvention/rehabilitation by white liberals interested in assimilating him into their national/religious narrative resulted in nonviolent protests being portrayed not as a tactic but as a moral imperative.

I think the narrativized, reinvented MLK that white liberal establishments hold up as an icon is responsible for this shift away from politics to (political) eschatology. Because in order to produce a MLK that was not threatening to the status quo, white liberals had to come up with some reason for his success other than mass mobilization. King’s nonviolence, of course, was a tactic intended to take advantage of breakthroughs in mass media that the state was not used to dealing with. Its audience was the masses, the people who would be shocked by the one-sided violence on their television screen.

The reinvented MLK, however, practiced nonviolence because it was morally right. His audience was not the masses but was rather God, or (in slightly more secular, though no less teleological, terms) the arc of the moral universe. This MLK did not win because he was politically savvy; he won (and it is important in this conception that he did win, regardless of the messy topic of just what exactly he won) because he was right, because he was moral. He proved that he was just, and the moral arc of the universe accordingly bent in his direction. Good triumphed over evil not because it mobilized people but merely by virtue of being good.

And this is what modern liberal politics has inherited — the belief that being right is more important than winning, because somebody, be it the Supreme Court or God, will throw the penalty flag and everything will be set aright. Democrats aren’t trying to win elections, they’re trying to build cases as to why, upon review, they should have won, why they’re right, so that when the ref reviews the play it’ll be awarded to them. But it’s important to note the origins of this approach. White liberal establishments created a Civil Rights Movement narrative that disavowed the masses (because revolutionary populism is dangerous but how could they claim to support civil rights gains if they condemned all of the civil rights leaders and the means by which those gains came about?) and then promptly fell in love with their own fiction. They told each other and us over and over again about how MLK won because he was right, because he was just, and they told it so much that they began to believe it themselves. They began to see victory as something that just sorta happens when you’re right, maybe not immediately, but inevitably.