"The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along - however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened"
About this Quote
Gitlin’s sentence is a cold shower for activist vanity. It punctures the comforting fantasy that “progress” arrives when the unenlightened are replaced by a newer, cleaner model of human being. The world doesn’t get remade by hypothetical future citizens; it gets negotiated, badly and slowly, by the flawed inventory on hand.
The intent is both pragmatic and accusatory. Gitlin is telling would-be world-changers: you don’t get to skip the people. You don’t get to treat prevailing beliefs as mere clutter to be cleared before politics can begin. His phrasing - “available” - sounds logistical, almost managerial, and that’s the point. Change is constrained not just by institutions but by the moral and cultural baggage ordinary people carry into every coalition, vote, strike, or protest.
The subtext is a critique of a certain self-conception on the left (and, frankly, among intellectuals): the “enlightened” as a class who imagine they’ve transcended ideology. Gitlin’s line “those of us who see ourselves as enlightened” quietly mocks that posture. It suggests enlightenment can become a costume that licenses contempt, and contempt is a terrible organizing strategy.
Context matters: Gitlin came out of the New Left and spent decades watching movements collide with the public they claimed to represent, then fracture over purity tests and rhetorical one-upmanship. The quote reads like a veteran’s diagnosis: if you want durable power, you have to work with retrograde beliefs without being captured by them - translating ideals into language and interests people already inhabit. The hard work isn’t moral denunciation; it’s conversion under real-world constraints.
The intent is both pragmatic and accusatory. Gitlin is telling would-be world-changers: you don’t get to skip the people. You don’t get to treat prevailing beliefs as mere clutter to be cleared before politics can begin. His phrasing - “available” - sounds logistical, almost managerial, and that’s the point. Change is constrained not just by institutions but by the moral and cultural baggage ordinary people carry into every coalition, vote, strike, or protest.
The subtext is a critique of a certain self-conception on the left (and, frankly, among intellectuals): the “enlightened” as a class who imagine they’ve transcended ideology. Gitlin’s line “those of us who see ourselves as enlightened” quietly mocks that posture. It suggests enlightenment can become a costume that licenses contempt, and contempt is a terrible organizing strategy.
Context matters: Gitlin came out of the New Left and spent decades watching movements collide with the public they claimed to represent, then fracture over purity tests and rhetorical one-upmanship. The quote reads like a veteran’s diagnosis: if you want durable power, you have to work with retrograde beliefs without being captured by them - translating ideals into language and interests people already inhabit. The hard work isn’t moral denunciation; it’s conversion under real-world constraints.
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