Movement Politics: "Are You In or Are You Out?"

Noah earns his nickel's worth of credit by giving us a dime's worth of difference between feminists and anti-feminists:

What I really wanted to argue was that while David III and Helen agree (and to a lesser extent, so do I) about how gender works, the difference is more important than the similarity. Because the decision that matters most isn't what you see when you look around you, or even when you look at yourself as David III argues. It's what you do about it.

So you cannot, cannot, cannot claim to be a feminist, of any sort of prefix, and support Phyllis Schlafly. It just doesn't work. Sorry. Try again. [...] And if you think that the feminist movement is racist because, using your different mode of analysis, you figured out that it privileges problems of the white middle class (and you'd be right more often than not!), you don't get to take your ball and go home. You fight like hell and take it over. Because at the end of the day, they're on your team. [...] So really, all I'm saying is that since we aren't all special little political snowflakes, you have to pick a team. That means figuring out what similarities matter to you and which differences matter. To me, the movement matters. Are you in or are you out?

I'm in agreement with the point that the most useful way to use the word "feminism" isn't to refer to a set of ideas but a movement, and the question "Are you a feminist" has less to do with what you think about women's issues and more to do with whether or not you situate your ideas in the feminist tradition. In other words, not "Do you agree with Feministing more than 50% of the time?" but "Do you feel like you're playing on their team?"

Noah's point about feminism translates perfectly into conservatism: we can argue all day about whether or not neocons are ideologically "conservative"; what's more important is the extent to which they failed to realize that it was a movement they were crashing. It matters less to me that neocon heavyweights disagree with paleos and libertarians (which is not to say it doesn't matter at all) than that they don't treat them like members of the same team, which has to mean something more than "people with whom I have a common enemy."

I part ways with Noah's theory of movement politics inasmuch as I'm not convinced that figuring out "which team you're on" looks like figuring out which side you most agree with. When I was deciding about whether I wanted to be on the Right or the Left, it wasn't "Who do I agree with more often?" but "What context do I want for my ideas? Will situating my ideas in the tradition of conservatism yield a more interesting and effective result than situating them within the tradition of the Left?" This means looking not just at where your movement is but also where it's going, and not just who agrees with you but who will disagree with you in an interesting way.