Week 2: Extremism and social movements

This week we looked at the opposition between 'extreme' and 'moderate' or 'mainstream' political groups, and at the way that extreme ideas and forms of action can become mainstream. This involved using some concepts from the sociology of social movements.

The life cycle of a social movement goes something like this. A social movement forms in response to system blockage; it uses innovative tactics and puts forward new frames. It then keeps up the pressure until some of those new frames and tactics get adopted by mainstream forces. The movement's supporters see that they've got at least some of what they wanted, and the movement subsides.

In a bit more detail:

1. Social movements are broad groups united by a cultural identity, opposition to the status quo and autonomy from the political sphere
2. Movements form in response to system blockage: i.e. they can't get what they want through legitimate political routes (think women agitating for the vote 100 years ago)
3. Movements use new and innovative tactics: new ways of protesting and getting noticed
4. They put forward new and modified frames: ways of 'framing' issues so as to make the movement's position more persuasive. (A movement to liberalise the drug laws might 'frame' cannabis as a less dangerous drug than alcohol.)
5. They then keeps pushing (while the political mainstream pushes back) until...
6. Some of the new frames and tactics get adopted, usually in the form of political reforms
7. The movements then subside as people see no reason to support them any more

There are three really important points here, which can easily be overlooked. Firstly, while the movement is on the rise, it will attract both support and opposition. In particular, it will be opposed by the parties and institutions of the political mainstream - and the way that they will oppose it is to label it as extremist, unacceptable, criminal, violent etc. 'Extreme' is a position on the political spectrum; it's also a label applied by mainstream parties to discredit their rivals.

Secondly, towards the end of the life of the movement its innovations get adopted by the mainstream - but only some of them. Some of them are rejected - and labelled as unacceptably extreme, violent etc. As Charles Tilly said, before strike action was legal in the USA it took a far wider range of forms than it did after it was legalised: legalising strikes meant legalising a certain way of taking strike action, and criminalising all the rest.

Thirdly, stages 6 and 7 above represent a positive outcome, but this isn't the only way a social movement can come to an end. (This model was developed by Sidney Tarrow, and in his version it only included positive outcomes. However, later work - some of it by me - has shown that negative outcomes are also possible.) A negative outcome is what happens when all of the movement's innovations are rejected, and the movement is repressed out of existence. In this situation, everything the social movement had to offer has effectively been dismissed and labelled as 'extreme'. In hindsight, this creates the impression that the social movement was unacceptably extreme, and that its new tactics and frames never could have been adopted. The repression of a movement gives future historians a job of archaeology, digging out the more hopeful possibilities from beneath the dismissive labels that were applied to them.

The other key point about negative outcomes for social movements is that they may be more likely to prompt disappointed activists to resort to violence. The turn to violence may be one more tactical innovation - an innovation that is chosen when all the non-violent tactical possibilities seem to have been removed.