Crisis Lobbying
This is cold poli sci term I made up the other day. If my tone here comes off as sarcastic sometimes, please chock it up to repression caused by middle fingers I never flipped my old professors.
Crisis lobby. A crisis lobby is the strength of the appeal by the people affected by a crisis to bring their crisis attention so they can resolve it. The victims of each crisis beg for help and some people hear the call and do as much as they can. Unfortunately, all the people facing every other crisis are calling, too. Therefore, each crisis has its own 'lobby,' comprised of the victims (and/or potential victims), individual citizens who become activists to support them, NGOs, and any government officials they can reach.
Unfortunately, resources are limited. In terms of private money, a lot of people who have the ability give don't. In terms of public money, we give a lot total, but very little per capita, which personally I blame on the gargantuan defense budget. As part of the defense budget, which is really an offense budget, the government often interferes and makes crises worse, or in some cases, like Iraq, makes them, period. The outcome is extreme military spending to defend a country where millions of children don’t have healthcare.
The continuing effort to improve child healthcare is a perfect example of a crisis lobby. It would be defined as the affected children, the NGOs trying to help them, the activists and voters who support them, and politicians working on their behalf. They compete against all the others for attention, in terms of things like how much press coverage they get and the number of hours that citizens are willing to be activists for them. The strength of their lobby ultimately translates into how big a share of government and private resources they can pull. In most cases, it’s not enough, hence the state of the world.
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The worst thing a government can do is create massive new crises that divert attention from already existing ones. For example, Iraq. By invading Iraq and unleashing a civil war that killed frightening numbers of civilians and soldiers, the U.S. government forced scarce activist resources to try to stop the war when there were already 2 million other crises screaming for attention.
This helps explain why Darfur was never a high priority. Scarce activist hours, media headlines and government assets that could have gone to Darfur were allocated to Iraq instead. So when considering the tragedy of Iraq, you should also consider how it impacted all the other problems going on in the world between 2003 and 2008.
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The good news in this is that the amount of activist resources and possible number of media headlines are NOT fixed amounts. Admittedly this is just a theory, but I think each can drive the other upward. Successful activists get media to pay attention. When the media covers a story, more people get the info, so more people can become activists, therefore raising the chances of success.
But unfortunately, we’ve been trapped in a negative feedback loop, with mass apathy causing the media, which is coldly market-driven, to not effectively broadcast information about crises, therefore lessening the number of people who might become stimulated enough to become activists on the behalf of victims. However, it’s possible that the trend could be reversed and a positive feedback loop established; this is why activists routinely put on events to “raise awareness” --- to get more activists, more media, and more political support.
Furthermore, certain issues are also more able to get people active in the first place; every activist has to start somewhere. Even though an issue like Iraq took away from the child soldiers lobby for the last 5 years, its sheer size and momentum, ability to generate headlines, and moral urgency had an attractiveness that brought new people into the activist community who otherwise might not have gotten there.
It’s possible that, once the war is over, those activists will move on to other causes. It’s also possible that, like the Vietnam generation, we’ll lose our way and end up electing Reagans, Bushes and Clintons for the rest of our lives. But while it's too early to tell, I think some of our early indicators look good. But then again so did theirs, so who the hell knows where we'll end up.
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