The better things get, the more desperately activists struggle to stay in business. -
John Tierney"In the spring of 1979, a few weeks after the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania,
more than 65,000 people marched on the United States Capitol chanting
“No Nukes, No Nukes.” As a young reporter at the Washington Star assigned to cover this new movement, I interviewed march organizers and noticed that all of them had previously organized protests against the Vietnam War.
This struck me as curious: How had they suddenly become so passionate and knowledgeable about nuclear power?
I later learned that a term exists for this phenomenon—the March of Dimes syndrome—and that the tendency affects many other movements, too.
- Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people?
- Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement?
- Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting?
- Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?
These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio.
The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects...
