THE GOAL OF ANY ORGANIZATION IS SURVIVAL.

City Journal contributor John Tierney rediscovers the principle.

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. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.

For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.

The March of Dimes came up in a management theory class fifty years ago as an illustration of the survival principle.  In their case, it might have been an extreme example: you had President Roosevelt encouraging the donations for polio research, an effort that to this day is honored by his face on the dime, and there was encouraging research on live and killed viruses that culminated in two vaccines.  There was also, as the previous sentence hints at, quite the promotional and fundraising apparatus, there might even be car cards in transit vehicles of the era, and once the polio vaccine succeeded, it's not as if there weren't other medical challenges to go after.  I recall the promotional materials that were distributed in schools, one of them showed an archer having scored a bulls-eye on polio and taking aim at birth defects, which was the term at the time.  There was a third target, might have been muscular dystrophy, and yes, I'm showing my age, that became Jerry Lewis's cause; and yet there are plenty of challenges to the health of the moms and the babies alike to keep the fundraising going.

Mr Tierney notes the same sort of dynamic at work with the professional protest communities.  Sometimes the efforts seem more laudable than others.

Civil rights groups tried but failed to stop President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress from enacting welfare reform, and they struggled during the 1990s with declining membership, lower revenues, and staff layoffs. The movement had lost its sense of urgency. After all, by then it had succeeded in its fight to eliminate the legal barriers facing blacks, and popular attitudes about race had undergone a sea change. The Cosby Show was the most popular program on television for five years in the 1980s. Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell were two of the most respected figures in America. Back in the 1950s, 96 percent of whites opposed interracial marriage, and a majority opposed integrating schools and neighborhoods. By the 1990s, the vast majority had rejected such views.

As the civil rights movement searched for new causes, no group shifted as adroitly as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group launched in the 1970s to offer legal representation to individual victims of discrimination but then switched to filing lawsuits against chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1986, the SPLC’s entire legal team resigned in protest—they’d signed up to help poor people, not sue an organization whose national membership barely eclipsed 10,000. But the Klan made an ideal villain for fund-raising appeals to northern liberals, and the SPLC prospered from the publicity about lawsuits that bankrupted chapters of the Klan.

Since then, that organization has fallen into foolishness, as have the so-called atomic scientists.  Perhaps the best thing to do is ignore their appeals for funding and let them indulge their delusions.  Mr Tierny comes close to acknowledging as much.

Since overt racism became the ultimate taboo in America, activists and academics have shifted to identifying subtler varieties of prejudice, with limited success. They have decried “microaggressions,” “unconscious racism,” and “systemic racism,” but have struggled to raise money to fight these invisible enemies. Their claims that America was a “fundamentally racist country” became a tough sell after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Considering Obama’s presidency as evidence of a “post-racial America” was a wonderful vision—unless you happened to be a civil rights activist contemplating a post-employment future.

So it often is with Chicken Littles.  Let Normals brace themselves to their duties, in the case of the outraged fundraising, by closing wallets and checkbooks, and in conversations identifying as Foxy Loxy.