Here’s Who You Should Be Mad at Online

Matt Shirk, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The list of outrages that have rankled liberals and the left in recent weeks is extensive and ever-growing. They include pro-Russian comments by former president Trump, insults directed at President Biden’s Supreme Court pick, and a number of smears directed at the president and various Democrats. But by all accounts, the key conflict of the moment appears to be over a new law passed in Florida that would ban discussions of sexuality and force teachers to out trans students to their parents. The law, colloquially known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, has led to national fallout as Democrats put pressure on national politicians and Florida-based corporations to fight back.

This process is a common one that has been repeated time and again over the past ten years or so. An egregious law or person goes viral on social media platforms for an act or comment that aggrieves the left, mostly those who are young, on Twitter, and attune to social issues. The aggrieved group starts to fight back with the tools at hand. They create hashtags and engage in campaigns of various levels of coordination. They tweet at political leaders, encouraging them to fight back against the law or act in question.

When that pressure campaign fails, they turn to corporations who are either based in the state passing the egregious law or those who give money to or employ the egregious person. The most notable recent examples of this phenomena are Delta following a Georgia elections law and Disney following the recent “Don’t Say Gay” law. In many cases, the corporations involved take some sort of action, either temporarily cutting off campaign contributions or issuing a statement. This pressure continues until the campaign is either successful or the online left moves on to another challenge.

The issue with this approach is that in many cases it simply does not work. The online left is using the tools and tactics of social media. As a result, the only people who care are those who are closely connected to social media. Corporations want to please Twitter so they can continue holding on to a highly desirable demographic. Activist-influenced politicians want to make their constituents happy or want to continue appealing to swing voters. But a politician with a strong political base of older voters will not care about a social media push. In fact, online outrage on the left may lead to a consequent backlash that leads to more support on the right. For instance, Ron DeSantis won his position as governor of Florida with a large number of older voters who are not swayed by Twitter campaigns or hashtags. His business sponsors, for the most part, are either heavily conservative or in fields that are mostly immune to public pressure (investment banks and law firms come to mind). Finally, he is clearly more concerned about attacks from the right rather than the left, so a campaign coordinated by leftists online is actually good for his brand and his marketing.

The left should not give up, of course. Pressure and criticism are hallmarks of the American political system, and they should not be abandoned because they do not work in every instance. However, a better course of actions for online activists would be to switch their tactics and their focus to battles that they may be able to win regularly.

One growing field of conflict in American political life is the debate over green energy construction. The American left is nominally supportive of the Green New Deal, the idea that the government can help radically transform and decarbonize American society in order to curb the devastating impact of climate change. Groups such as the Sunrise Movement call for immediate global change, the end of fossil fuels, and significant restrictions on factory farms and oil drilling in addition to government-led renewable energy projects. The Sierra Club supports the construction of wind and solar power as well as more controversial renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric and nuclear power.

But these efforts have hit a snag in recent years. A growing contingent of local activists have spoken out against individual projects that would lead to decarbonization and green energy. They have pushed back against high-power transmission lines and solar panel construction. In 2021, The Sierra Club released a report about opposition to solar panel construction in Vermont where one of the leading opponents was a local Sierra Club chapter. Eric Levitz at New York has chronicled many of their complaints and debunked them as pseudo-scientific. His conclusion is that “given the myriad other political obstacles to swift decarbonization, the climate movement cannot afford to have any significant portion of its self-professed members agitating against emissions-reducing projects.”

The most effective strategy to fight these recalcitrants may actually be online campaigns. The Sunrise Movement and other climate change activist groups are enormously sensitive to social media campaigns. Some of these groups exist entirely on social media. They are comprised of young people who spend many hours of their days on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. These men and women are especially sensitive to social media campaigns and could easily be swayed by a sincere, thoughtful online push to call out their obstinance and push them to accept green construction.

Furthermore, these campaigns would have the potential to do immediate good for the environment. A few thousand activists and left-leaning Twitter users cannot easily influence the policies of the entire state of Florida. But they can overwhelm opposition to individual green projects, especially when that opposition is led by leftists, and in some cases make those projects a reality. Solar panel systems and high-power transmission lines have the potential to remove thousands of tons of carbon from the atmosphere over their lifetimes. Along with its individual impact, each project increases the visibility of renewable energy and makes the technology marginally more attractive to investors and lawmakers.

The online left has achieved extraordinary gains in American society over the past decade. They have forced the repeal of terrible laws and caused a number of bad actors to lose their jobs. The online left helped make the candidacy of Bernie Sanders possible, a movement that has changed the Democratic Party forever. The opposition to green power is another challenge that the left can overcome. Are they up to the task?