The Study Group: a Model for Building a Movement
In an ideological landscape dominated by the social media monopoly and its blue-checkmarked demagogues, sincere political discussion must return to the community
The great irony of American democracy is the extraordinary lack of participation. In the 2020 presidential election, which had the highest turnout since 1960, and was certainly the most contentious in living memory, only 62% of the voting age population actually cast a ballot. A 2016 census report surveying nonvoters found the following (emphasis added):
In 2016, among the estimated 18.9 million registered nonvoters in America, the most common reason for not voting was dislike of the candidates or campaign issues (4.7 million registered nonvoters), followed by not being interested in the election (2.9 million), being too busy or having a conflicting schedule (2.7 million), and having an illness or disability (2.2 million)
Polling by FiveThirtyEight also found similar reasons (again, emphasis added):
In the survey, we asked voters who have missed at least one national election — which included some people who almost always vote — why they didn’t cast a ballot. Nearly a quarter cited some of the structural barriers we mentioned above. But another 31 percent said that they decided not to vote because they disliked the candidates or they thought nothing would change as a result of the election (26 percent).
To a very large portion of the American people, participation in the political system is simply pointless. Either the options offered to them aren’t worth supporting, or they don’t feel their participation makes a difference anyway.
There is a statistical basis for this. A 2014 analysis by the American Political Science Association found (emphasis added):
By directly pitting the predictions of ideal-type theories against each other within a single statistical model (using a unique data set that includes imperfect but useful measures of the key independent variables for nearly two thousand policy issues), we have been able to produce some striking findings. One is the nearly total failure of “median voter” and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
Translation: when public opinion and the opinion of elites coincide, it can look as if US policy outcomes track public opinion. But when elite preferences contradict those of the greater public, the political system practically always sides with elites. One need only look at the government’s disregard towards climate change (in complete contradiction of overwhelming public opinion) the pandemic, or the 2008 financial crisis before it to see the failure of small-“r” republican politics.
This isn’t surprising; it’s entirely in line with the aristocratic preferences of the founding fathers, which I’ve alluded to before. The American system of government, while it probably was never intended to be as dysfunctional as it is (particularly in regards to hyper-partisanship), was also never meant to empower the citizenry at large, and it has certainly not served any such purpose since the 1970s.
Nevertheless, because of the concurrent crises of widening inequality, climate change, technological privatization and the pandemic, along with the cartoonish personality of Donald Trump and the re-awakening of the American left inspired by Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders, there is more political interest and intensity of rhetoric now than in any period since the 1960s.
But I perceive a few problems with modern political discourse that desperately need to be addressed. These are harder to identify with data, but bear with me. First, I think there is an intimate relationship between political polarization and attachment to political and media personalities and organizations who directly profit from this partisanship. Certainly this is the case as it pertains to Donald Trump, who has cultivated a slavish base within the Republican party. FOX hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson enjoy a nightly audience of around 4 million, which makes CNN’s still gargantuan audience look tiny. Online personalities and groups like Tim Pool, Ben Shapiro, The Young Turks or Contrapoints collectively rake in billions of views. The point here isn’t that any of these sources is inaccurate or dishonest (I’m a big Contrapoints fan myself), but that there is a direct profit motive in this competitive media marketplace to shock and enrage to maintain attention, and it plagues all media, not just independent youtube creators.
To some extent, the large drive toward independent media consumption can be seen as a good thing: I for one think this has lead to a wider diffusion of ideas that people are being exposed to, even if these ideas are often crazy. But even as this diffusion of ideas has taken place, there has been a verified tendency towards the development of echo chambers. With a vast expanse of information available and little in the way of tools to discern it, people tend to favor information that favors their existing viewpoint.
None of this is new. We’ve been told to watch less TV since we were kids and the awareness of echo chambers and online misinformation has existed for years- in my opinion, much of it is likely overstated. Yet one thing can’t be denied- large media personalities are dominating more and more of our time, and as a result we are deriving more and more of our worldviews from them.
My fear here is that while we may be diversifying our political influences, we are not learning to participate, and as our political engagement moves more and more online we find it harder to organize to achieve anything. Political participation reached its heyday in the early 20th century, roared back to life again briefly in the ‘60s before being mostly silenced apart from ineffectual but massive protests against the Iraq War, and then Occupy Wall Street a decade later. Now, almost a decade separated from that movement, we feel a greater need for political organization than ever, but we have found our political lives largely segregated to the consumption of media online and perhaps an occasional debate with a fellow keyboard warrior we’ll never meet in real life.
The social units that traditionally made the basis of resistance- the intergenerational, well-connected neighborhood, the workplace, and indeed the close friend group have been almost scientifically divided, alienated from one another such that many people have closer relationships to machines than they do to any single human being. This is exacerbated by the growing prevalence of parasocial relationships (note the data used for the cited article was created to figure out how to intensify parasocial relationships for profit). Setting aside the brutal implications for our mental health, we have to consider the dangerous possibilities here- capitalism has in fact found a profit motive in the act of making us more politically enraged than ever, yet has also found ways to divide us such that it is harder and harder to channel this energy productively.
The Study Group as a Unit for Political Participation
What I am describing here is a very real commodification of political identity, where people will feel aligned to a movement because of the media they consume or their formal party alignment without much understanding of the history or core values of that ideology. I am convinced that this ideological commodification is a death knell for any radical anti-capitalist movement. We must remove the discussion of this critical part of our lives from the economic sphere.
The reality is our political lives and our social lives are not separate- politics is after all only really the ethics of group behavior. Our public lives, even on the most informal level, are in some sense political. What is a casual gesture in one culture is quite radical in another, and so we must recognize that how we behave on a day-to-day basis says a great deal more about our politics than how we vote. The political movements of old were really just enormous tapestries of social connections knitted together, resulting in a unified group that could undertake massive, decisive actions. I suspect it was the strength of these intimate connections that sustained the participation and vigor of these movements, and thus made them politically effective in ways present-day extraparliamentary political movements haven’t been.
I feel it’s necessary to at least begin to stitch these communities back together, to find each other again. But for this reconnection to work, there has to be some sort of glue. It isn’t enough to sit a bunch of people in a room together and tell them to get to know each other. This just results in small talk, which I think we can all agree is a fairly miserable thing. The study group, the old-fashioned model of bringing interested people together around a political or philosophical text, provides a model for deep, focused discussion, allowing us to go to the heart of what actually interests us without the need for pleasantries. Murray Bookchin gives a description of the study group here:
I feel the study group is uniquely valuable because it provides a social forum that is precisely focused on unifying people by investigating and understanding the device that has driven us apart.
The study group works because it is small. The members come to know one another and in the process also educate themselves- if more than a dozen or so people want to participate, I would suggest at that point the appropriate thing to do is create another one, and while these groups stay separate to allow for maximum participation by all members, they can remain aware of each other and network with each other when it is useful to do so for the purposes of mutual aid, political action or any other form of social connection. It provides a cheap, enriching environment for self-guided education and spontaneous, active participation, creation and analysis, rather than mere consumption. The study group, ideally, is not a forum for lectures- discussion ought to be critical and participatory, with regular interruptions and interjections. It is not only a building block of potential political movements, but also of a real and vibrant counterculture of the sort we seem to be starved for today. To the extent the group has leaders, well-read individuals who can guide other participants, their role is really to draw out creative thought from the participants so that they can come to recognize their own value and capacity for developing original thought. The result of developing these active, hungry, critical minds is to create the sort of excited, vibrant political engagement people experienced in the past, a focused political dialogue motivated by real passion and interest, not merely a desire to make money or build a name for oneself. Then politics can be experienced in its best form, as the active participation in the bettering of one’s community, a forum for the exercise and recognition of one’s rational and moral capacity, rather than politics as a mere spectator sport to be passively consumed. This is how I see the construction of an extraparliamentary movement for a better politics.
Hi! Thanks for reading. If you found the idea of the study group interesting, I am currently accepting new participants in my own study group in the Boston area. There are no qualifications other than a desire to learn and discuss ethics and politics with others in a frank, critical manner. If you’d like to join, send me an email, and consider subscribing to this substack. Otherwise, start your own!