Idealist (reflector)

The term comes from the Duchin formula, a strategy outlined in a 1991 speech by Ronald Duchin teaching corporations how to dismantle activist organizations, which divides activists into four types: radicals, idealists, realists and opportunists. Marsh adopts the taxonomy and re-reads it in her own terms. The idealist and the realist are not two categories in her framework but one, the reflector, and what distinguishes them is only which endo-ideal they are currently reflecting. An idealist reflects the radical idea or its leader. A realist reflects corporate or government power. Neither holds the position by conviction, which is why the conversion Duchin recommends is possible at all. The formula's instruction is explicit. Isolate the radicals, cultivate the idealists and educate them into becoming realists, then co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry, at which point the credibility of the radicals is lost and the opportunists can be counted on to share in the final policy solution. Educating an idealist means poisoning their perception of the radical position, which works because a reflector's attachment is to a figure or a framing rather than to the substance. Marsh's practical point for organizers follows directly. The people most enthusiastic about a movement are not necessarily its most reliable members, and the ones who can be turned by a change in how the movement is characterized were reflecting rather than participating.

The Duchin formula is documented in activist and research literature on corporate counter-campaigning, and it surfaced widely after the Stratfor emails were released in 2012. Related material includes the Powell memorandum and a long history of corporate public relations strategy against environmental and labour campaigns, studied by researchers of astroturfing and SLAPP litigation. Social movement scholarship has its own vocabulary for the same dynamics in co-optation and channelling theory. What Marsh does that the source material does not is translate the categories into a structural account, so that idealist and realist stop being personality types an organizer must sort people into and become one position that a person occupies until something moves them.