Three Cheers For The Remnant! Or, Why Movements Are Less Important Than You Think

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There exist things in the world that drive people to action. There exist things from which they can derive meaning and significance for their actions. It is entirely natural that people are attracted to these things. We may have curiosities that grow into passions, interests that have strong social implications, and visions for what a better world can look like for ourselves and others. We want to feel like what we care about matters and that it is realizable. It is difficult to imagine devoting significant portions of our time to things that we think have no chance whatsoever of being realized.

People are attracted to social movements for these reasons. They want to manifest their values and beliefs in the world and build a sense of camaraderie and fellow-feeling with others who feel passionately about the same niche issues.

The Movement as Social Change Ideal

These social movements are founded on ideals, principles, and philosophies that are — by their very nature — not highly popularized. The members of movements work to manifest the implications of these principles in the world. The movement may be founded on economic/political philosophy, religious philosophy, educational philosophy, social philosophy, or any number of ways of seeing the world differently than the status quo. What matters is that the individuals who join these movements see what they have to offer as being superior to the status quo and that this offering is rooted in a set of principles and philosophies.

A mass-movement has intuitive appeal as a means of social change. Individuals may feel that they require the resources and networks that movements offer them. The idea of implementing a radical vision for the future on your own is laughable at best and terrifying at worst. Movements allow for division of labor and for individuals to do what they are best. Some people may be attracted to articulating the ideas underlying the movement, while others may be popularizers, and still others may be attracted to politics or to education.

As more people discover the ideas of this movement — its thinkers, its popularizers, and its vision for a better future — more sign on as advocates for its future. The culture and the institutions around it slowly begin to change to reflect the popularization. The vision offered by proponents of this movement not only gains appeal; it gains mass traction. If it is a political movement, members may look to elect politicians who reflect their positions and their ideals or force a change of stance from incumbents.

For single-issue movements, this can work well. Take the same-sex marriage movement as an example. Over time in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, members of this movement popularized the position that members of the same-sex ought to have legal rights to wed. Through experience in a few select markets (e.g., California), they were able to show that their opposition’s arguments of total societal breakdown were largely unfounded and to shift the window of popular opinion in their own direction. For incumbent politicians looking to retain control of their seats, this meant that they were then forced to change their stance on the issue. Political entrepreneurs who see an opening to take down an incumbent then run and win on this particular issue against select few who were unable to change their stances with electorates now supporting a newly liberalized position on same-sex marriage.

The Movement as Nothing Reality

The problem with this ideal is that it largely rests on the idea that organization and manifestation of the ideas in society will lead to more people agreeing to act upon them. The reality is much different. Any movement that is founded on a radical vision of the future cannot popularize itself without losing its radicalism.

Populism and radicalism are diametrically opposed paradigms. The danger of movements lies in their motives to become popular. Popularity rests on winning over the lowest common denominator of a group. At its inception, the lowest common denominator may be a person with barely-different beliefs than the most radical of the founders, but radicalism naturally wanes as time goes on and persons are added from further and further groups. Given how different each individual is from another, the likelihood of winning over everybody on the core issues that define the radicalism of the group is incredibly low.

Over time, the compromises that are necessary to grow the movement as an organization undermine its original mission. Something founded on a radical, earth-jolting vision for the future begins to look barely different than the mundane reformism of yesteryear. In efforts to “reach out,” movements splinter into niche areas of other systems, trying to convince others that they actually already hold the beliefs behind the movement, rather than actually swaying them to change their minds altogether.

The growth of a movement to encapsulate more people from different walks of life also leads to a higher probability of fundamental disagreements on important issues. Derided as “infighting,” the movement splinters further as people have lost vision — or never even held in the first place — the ideas that motivated the radicalism and have nothing to look to to inform their confusions and disagreements.

As they grow, movements as organizations are naturally driven to undermine their own values and foundational visions simply due to the reality of heterogeneity among society at large.

Frank Chodorov, the Old Right commentator, dismissed the attraction of organizations on the very same grounds, noting their propensity to undermine their own ideals:

In the end, every organization vitiates the ideal that at first attracted members, and the more numerous its membership the surer this result; this is so because the organizational ideal is a compromise of private values, and in an effort to find a workable compromise the lowest common denominator, descending as the membership increases, becomes the ideal.

“On Doing Something About It”

The Remnant as a Solution

There exists a possible solution to this eventual watering-down, but it requires a shift of vision from the “organize to win” mindset and to one of understanding the importance of preserving these values. What is needed is a group fiercely devoted to the radical ideas that would otherwise be the foundations for an organized movement. What differentiates this group is that it is not motivated by a value to organize and popularize to win; rather, it is motivated by the preservation, elucidation, and education of and on these radical foundations.

Albert J. Nock presented this concept as a modern adaptation of its Biblical roots in his essay, “Isaiah’s Job.”

The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either. (emphasis added)

In brief, the Remnant is a small subset of people who not only profess to understand and adhere to a set of beliefs and values, but are willing to stand by them and “cleave to them” when challenged. By the nature of a radical set of beliefs, the Remnant is going to be a very small group of people who are unlikely to gain popular support.

Nock, channelling the Biblical story, goes as far as to say that the Remnant is not a group of people you can go out and make popular and find through marketing. Rather, they exist, they are out there, and the person who holds steadfastly in their beliefs will naturally attract them:

[I]n any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.

What a Remnant offers is not the same as what a movement offers. Movements organize to gain popularity, to market, to elect leaders. Remnants exist to protect and develop important ideas. The mindsets that both operate on are not only different but also end up being diametrically opposed.

As a movement gains in popularity, it will be forced to either dilute the values and foundational premises from which it operates in order to keep growing, or pass up on the opportunity for growth. A Remnant faces no such dilemma. Its followers and proponents aren’t organized (at least not actively for the purpose of marketing and for growing). The dilemma never crosses their minds, as they don’t operate on that wavelength.

This teleological (or purpose-based) difference is of utmost importance. Movements cannot incorporate Remnants after they have organized, or else the movement and the Remnant will be faced with odds. Remnants exist separate from movements and may be organized around the same foundational principles as movements, but they are not the same thing and cannot be.

Remnants as Defending the Undefendable

When the going gets tough and the premises of radicalism come under fire, movements may be tempted to moderate their stances in order to maintain growth towards mass appeal. At best, a sort of party-line develops and individuals within the movement adopt a compromise stance among themselves. At worst, the challenges to the foundational premises cause disagreements within the movement and it begins to splinter. Everybody believes they are right, and that they are the true proponents of “the proper stance for an X to hold.”

As infighting among members of the movement continues, the foundational principles begin to lose their significance. Even among the movement, the more moderate stances are more likely to win out, taking power and significance from the radicalism that underly the movement.

Take a case of a civil libertarian movement as a hypothetical. As they popularize the ideas that people should be able to say what they want and believe what they want without government interference, more individuals will join their cause and call themselves civil libertarians. Then comes along a group of neo-fascists who are organizing around their own beliefs in a public space. Such a controversial issue is likely to begin calls for the neo-fascists to be restricted in their activities from the general public. Calls for a “balancing act” and “getting your priorities straight” will even come from within the civil libertarian movement. Those who stand steadfast behind the unpopular idea of allowing the neo-fascists to organize without interruption will be derided as purists and as undermining the mission of popularizing civil libertarianism.

This is where a Remnant is of utmost importance. It is the job of the Remnant to stand by, support, and develop foundational principles both when it is easy and when it is incredibly difficult. Many can claim to support an idea when it isn’t under intense public scrutiny and when those who rally around it are accused of not having the best interests of the public at large. Few can steadfastly stand behind these principles when they are intensely unpopular, even from those who otherwise support them.

To use a historical example, the American Old Right stood as the sole defenders of the ideas of liberalism while fascism, nazism, communism, and progressivism were taking over the world and stamping out the idea that individuals have rights and are the locus of society. A handful of individuals (such as Nock, Chodorov, HL Mencken, Isabel Patterson, and others) stood against the cries of “just do something!” in the United States while fascism was on the European doorstep, the Great Depression at home, and cries for nationalization of anything that moved were coming from the Roosevelt administration. Had these individuals not stood against the grain and preserved the ideas of a tradition, (classical) liberalism in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world would be considerably weaker than it is today.

It is the job of the Remnant to defend the undefendable. At best, this works to remind those who identify with the ideas what their own principles really are and to attract fellow members of the Remnant at large. At worst, they preserve ideas and traditions which may otherwise be lost to populism.

Is The Remnant a Tool of Social Change?

“Sure,” a skeptic may say, “a Remnant may provide a valuable resource for any tradition, but it can’t be a tool of social change! Social change requires that we engage with the real world. A bunch of stuffy purists stomping their feet on the ground aren’t going to affect real change in policy or culture!”

Direct social change through political institutions isn’t the point of the Remnant. A Remnant may work to influence culture over time and preserve ideas for the day when the culture allows for their broader dissemination (as in the age of the Internet). It may provide a bulwark of principled objectors against the dilution of populism.

At the very least, a Remnant operates as a check on movements. It works as a way for movements to remind themselves what they are fighting for and the utopia they wish to create. Without this check, movements quickly devolve to nothing more than appealing to the lowest common denominator, dilute their radicalism to nothing more than run-of-the-mill moderatism, and run the risk of becoming nothing more than another footnote in history.

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