Thanks for this, well done.

I cringed at the sentiment expressed by the Bush advisor opining why the tea party was more impactful than liberal efforts: “…due to liberal movements’ lack of organizational structure and clear leaders”.

I couldn’t help but think about various other instances where well structured organizations with “clear leaders” emerged and took hold of nations (e.g. Germany in the mid 20th century for one). Nope, I’ll take messy and structural “deficiency” any old day over what Bush and that ilk advise. Authoritarian types love structure and clarity because they ain’t too crazy about life and life is nothing else if not messy and unclear and unstructured.

It’s significant to remember that when movements have “clear leaders” it’s quite tempting for those prone to violence (which, in the U.S., are generally those invested in structural oppression) to kill those leaders and thereby cause disarray in the movements they’re affiliated with. It’s rather telling that within a 5 year period in the U.S. (1963 to 1968)… JFK, Malcolm X, MLK and RFK were all murdered. When genuine progress/transformation seems possible…well…you can figure this out yourself. Oppression rarely goes quietly into the night.

It’s not accidental that the first president of the U.S to be murdered while in office was Abraham Lincoln and he was murdered by a white supremacist…when less violent folks oppose folks more prone to violence…it’s not unpredictable that the the flow of violent harm will tend to trend in one direction instead of “randomly”.

It may be that the current BLM folks are focusing on a dispersed and “unorganized” mode of operating…for good reason. Maybe some lessons learned from the 1960s aren’t so obvious.