Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
By Hannah Proctor
Verso, 272 pages, $14.99
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
By Vincent Bevins
Wildfire, 352 pages, $17.99
Books teaching political leaders how to win and wield power go back to the ancients, and there is a large shelf of political self-help tracts more or less modeled on Machiavelli’s The Prince. But what about losing? In politics, more people lose than win. So what are they supposed to do? Fittingly for our moment—one characterized by resurgent elites; lawfare against yesterday’s renegade candidates; and censorship of yesterday’s renegade movements, left and right—the books for losers are starting to appear.
Hannah Proctor’s Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat reconstructs a psychological history of how radical groups have dealt with the experience of losing, threading the needle between nostalgic melancholia and becoming so hard-hearted as to forget why they wanted to change the world in the first place. Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution is a reminder to those radicals who speak scornfully of “electoral politics” that horizontal activism doesn’t have such a great hit count over the past decade, either. Of the 10 protest movements around the world analyzed by Bevins—from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring to Ukraine’s Euromaidan uprising—most experienced “something even worse than failure,” many even contributing to the exact opposite political outcome of the one they set out to achieve.