Lydia DePillis interviewing Ralph Nader:
What about something like Black Lives Matter, which I think has made quite an impact on the discourse?
Yeah, but how far does Black Lives Matter go? Is it raising money for offices and permanent staff? It’s like Occupy Wall Street. They had the same technology. It gets you to first base, and it doesn’t get you further.
Well, what if it serves a purpose in the moment — which is to make an impact on the debate — and doesn’t carry on as an institution?
OK, well, there’s a negative, which is demoralization when they can’t get there. You’ve already seen that with Black Lives Matter. They’re so sensitive to injustice, and then they don’t see any response to their work.
It’s like an unwitting caricature of millennial politics. The empty jargon about having an “impact” on the “discourse” which would fit interchangeably in either the academic or corporate TED-talk settings. The perplexed inability to imagine why viral videos, likes and retweets wouldn’t change the world.
Oh, well, there’s always more impotent fantasies of cleansing violence. Wait till Generation Safe Space learns that tear gas, truncheons and stun guns don’t require affirmative consent.