Progressivism and disruptive legitimacy

When disruption becomes the only acceptable means of political change, everyone is in trouble.

"Riot...." by micadew is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

My new book, Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, is now available at Amazon via Wicked Son Books and the Z3 Project.

To some political movements, the only legitimate form of political activity is a disruptive one. Such movements are, by and large, impatient with normal legal or political means of change or view them as fundamentally compromised and illegitimate. As a result, rather than work through existing institutions, they attempt to make an end run around them through street theater, activist disorder, mob action, and even outright terrorist violence.

All other means, these movements believe, are fundamentally illegitimate because they involve collaboration with corrupt and morally compromised institutions. Thus, the only forms of legitimate dissent or change must lie outside the law and outside political norms. It can only be legitimately achieved by organized illegality, upheaval, and, at the end of a certain terrible logic, terror.