One year ago, I wrote an article titled ‘Disruption is the essence of effective protest,’ arguing that radical activism is more effective than catering to the politically neutral, and that fence-sitters aren’t worth engaging with. But after another year spent watching and reporting on student activism, I can see that I was wrong.
Activism has gotten louder in the past year, but it has also become increasingly insular. Inclusion in activist spaces has grown contingent on adhering to a set of expectations that aren’t always explicit, but are quickly and harshly enforced when broken. There is simply a zero-tolerance policy for error.
This demand for perfection and refusal to compromise aren’t just unhelpful but actively counterproductive. History proves it: The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO program exploited internal divisions within the Black Panther Party by amplifying existing tensions and spreading rumours about ideological purity—and it worked. By the 1970s, the Panthers were spending more energy on internal purges than organizing. Similarly, Occupy Wall Street failed in 2011 because—despite the hundreds of passionate, radical thinkers—the movement demanded a unanimity that would never materialize.
The expectation that everyone involved in a social movement must be hyper-radical is strategically self-defeating. Most people who care about a cause are not experts, nor are they willing to dedicate their lives to it. That is not a moral failure. Social movements have never been powered solely by their most radical participants; they succeed when the radical few who are willing to sacrifice everything are supported by a much larger base of people who contribute in smaller ways. Divest McGill needed both visible building occupations and slow, years-long negotiations with administrators to succeed. We can’t all do the superhero work on the frontlines.
And perhaps more importantly, this stubborn need for a singular, perfect kind of activism conflates performance with substantive change. Telling someone to use the word ‘unhoused’ rather than ‘homeless’ is accomplished in a single breath, but when’s the last time you donated to the food bank or volunteered at a shelter? While changes at the level of language and rhetoric do carry real symbolic weight, their impact pales in comparison to tangible efforts at change. The outcomes we strive for require something much less gratifying—but much more fundamental—than correcting people from our high horse: active, sustained community involvement, and sometimes even compromise.
Refusing practical engagement comes at a cost, one that has clearly registered at McGill. In 2024, students alleged that the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) President Dymetri Taylor misconstrued the scope of a legal injunction regarding the Policy Against Genocide in Palestine (PAGIP), suggesting that a proposed strike motion could not proceed as drafted. They argued that this misunderstanding prevented McGill students from participating in a nationwide strike.
The frustration was justified, but the scale and intensity of the response quickly outpaced its strategic value. Students launched a motion to impeach Taylor: Hundreds showed up with pitchforks for the General Assembly public humiliation ritual, but those who called for Taylor’s impeachment perhaps hadn’t considered that installing new leadership would take a whole semester and would interfere with various other facets of student life. By fixating so intensely on punishment under the guise of accountability, we lost sight of the practical reality that SSMU is one of the few bodies capable of turning student demands into institutional action at McGill.
In the end, the impeachment motion failed. Taylor remained president, and the PAGIP passed the following year. Yet, the hundreds of people with pitchforks are nowhere to be found today. While we were busy debating SSMU’s “delinquency of duty,” SSMU voter turnout dropped by over 50 per cent between the Fall 2023 and Fall 2024 referenda. The motion to increase the Student Services Fee failed, leaving groups such as First Peoples’ House and Student Accessibility and Achievement with less funding to support the groups we purport to advocate for. We showed up in droves for spectacle but not for tangible action.
No effective movement has ever succeeded by reserving the right to activism to a select, terminally online, jargon-obsessed few. We’re eating our own because of our obsession with ideological purity. At some point, we must choose: Do we want to create change, or do we just want to feel good about ourselves?