Marching is the spontaneous-ish expression of energy, among other things; it seems, in the moment, obvious that it can be harnessed and transformed into something more concrete. A day or two later, that seems just as vital, but less self-evident. The momentum of the crowd dissipates and it’s hard to maintain the energy on your own. Nevertheless, you must – stifled solidarity leaves you more than disappointed, it leaves you gripped by an arid fatalism that, if memory serves, ends in thinking Blur v Oasis is more important than people v profit. These are some practical acts, not exhaustive, not all of them exactly acts, and not including direct action.
Direct your political energies
If you live in a byelection constituency and can get involved in a campaign, great; if you live in an area that’s politically quite sclerotic, traditional party involvement might be a dead end. You might be better off outriding in the Women’s Equality party, setting up an Equality Trust local group, campaigning to save a hospital or pressuring the council to accept refugee families. Activism has its own Keynesian multiplier; every person who gets involved generates creative optimism in someone else. Curiously, this works even if that person is a bit of a jerk. But you have to use your time wisely: work out how much of it you have, what your strengths are, where you would have most impact and what you care about. There’s a big push in the US enjoining progressives to stand for office, any office, whatever comes up, just to get some liberal people back into politics. But standing isn’t for everyone, and there is space in the machine to involve yourself in other valuable ways.
Stay informed
When politics is particularly dark or particularly boring, I’m always tempted to just leave the idiots to it. Engaging each morning sets you up for ceaseless frustration, like breakfasting on too many eggs. But the alternative – what the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman described as “quietism”, which for his practical purposes meant switching off the news and doing a lot of gardening – is irresponsible and will be more dispiriting in the long run.
Be vocal
Social media is blamed for almost everything, from the spread of fake news to the myopia of being trapped in an echo chamber of your own devising, mistaking the world for just the people in your own mould and being ceaselessly horrified when that turns out to be wrong. All that stuff is true, but it’s also true that you can do a lot with Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp. Show solidarity, argue with people who get their baseless confidence from going unchallenged, state positions that may sound obvious, but are getting lost in the fever: women are people, too; refugees aren’t criminals; you know the kind of thing.
Listen
A curious feature of the current discursive landscape is that anyone leaning towards a humane or egalitarian position is supposedly part of a liberal elite that doesn’t listen. But the people complaining about immigrants are never the ones asked to listen, having attained the magical status of the not-listened-to. It irks me, and yet listening is all we’ve got. We are never going to rediscover any shared beliefs and heal the pointless national rift of Brexit, opened up for personal gain by a handful among the real elite, unless we listen. It might mean going to a Ukip meeting, but not to harangue anybody, OK?
Be prepared to be wrong
After Brexit, I wanted a concerted call for a general election, in recognition of the fact that we had an unelected prime minister, charting a course that was entirely undemocratic, having been described in no particulars beforehand. May’s government was a travesty, whose actions had the furthest reaching possible consequences. It still is, but a snap election wouldn’t help – it would merely deliver the Conservatives a bigger majority and silence their europhiles. Fortunately, my influence was rather limited in the matter and we limp along as we are, but the downside of living through history is that you often won’t have enough of the picture when circumstances compel you to act. There is no shame in changing tack, even while a huge number of people will tell you there is.
