NEW POLITICAL movements generally take shape around a single issue—a wrong being done to the people who join or to some other group with whom they have political connections or moral sympathies. The activists are likely to disagree about much else, but this sense of injury or indignation they must share. As they work together, they may come to share more than this. Issues related to the original one come into view, and the values that underlay their first choice of action may lead them to choose again, to extend the range of their movement. Sometimes, however, and probably more often, new issues have opposite effects: the movement splinters; its members discover that they are really radically different from one another.
These different possibilities lead from the first to very different views of what the movement should be like. Some members insist that its focus should be resolutely fixed on the single issue that brought them together. Necessarily they attribute great importance to that issue: they believe or they say that the world will be different (and much better) once it is resolved. They blind themselves, sometimes willfully, to the entanglements of social and political life, to all the obstacles that lie between the particular victory they may in fact win and the transformations they hope for. They choose the part over the whole; that is, they have or choose to have perceptions of the part, but only visions of the whole. Other members seem to be more realistic. They try to fit the single issue into a complex of problems. They try to develop a coherent program for social or political change. Then they want the movement to adopt their program, to switch from single-issue to multi-issue politics. Perhaps that means that some activists will drop out, but ultimately, they say, the movement will be stronger and, because of its wider scope, will appeal to more, not fewer, people. The tendency of this second group is to turn the movement into a political party.
Now, it is a great deal harder to launch a party than a movement, as American history amply demonstrates. Or, to make the same point in another way, it is all too easy to establish a very small political party, an association of activists who have the same position on almost everything. But a party that grows, losing something of its coherence yet retaining a common program—this is an extremely rare and difficult achievement. It may well be the “right” response even to very particular wrongs, rooted in sociological sophistication, reaching toward intellectual complexity and completion. But it requires too much from too many people—too much time, energy, money, above all too much commitment—to be politically viable. The movement, with all its necessary pretension, is more nearly possible. And victories can be won through single-issue campaigns. Indeed, it is hard to think of any other kind of victory that citizen activists have ever won. Winning turns out, of course, to be something less than they expected. The end of child labor, the achievement of women’s suffrage, prohibition and its death, the end of this or that war: none of these planted the new Jerusalem. Nor, however, were they or will they be without significant effects, for good or ill.
Issues should be defined so that victories can be won. This doesn’t mean that one should be able to imagine winning tomorrow. The question is not so much of time as of particularity and limit. It is always possible to describe one social problem so that it involves every other, so that its solution requires the solution of every other problem and the transformation of society as a whole. This is one of the major achievements of Marxist ideology. But it is also possible to describe one social problem as if it stands alone or sufficiently apart from other problems so that it can be solved without doing anything else or waiting for anything else to happen. Neither description is true, though it is possible that the first is more sophisticated.
Political activity anywhere in a society obviously produces adjustments, not necessarily transformations, everywhere. But the character and extent of these are almost impossible to predict. We make guesses and are usually wrong. In any case, action cannot and does not depend upon a true theory of social change. It requires a useful theory, or something less than a theory—a point of view, a set of opinions, an argument—that at least does not contradict whatever little we know to be true. And the most useful argument is one that imposes upon activists only one choice and only one fight at a time. They can always make further choices, join further fights, later on. Some members of the movement will want to plan ahead and should certainly do so, though not at the expense of the movement’s immediate focus. That focus should almost certainly be on a single issue, an important issue, but simply stated: the vote, the war, the bomb. Activists and their spokesmen can safely exaggerate both the importance and the simplicity. Let victory bring its complications and disappointments.