Breaking the Social Justice "Doom Loop"

Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party is challenging some shibboleths of today's activist left. Plus, will NY Dems fix their ailing party?

Last June, Ryan Grim published a controversial article in The Intercept describing how many marquee advocacy organizations on the liberal-left have been wracked by “wrenching and debilitating turmoil” in recent years, especially after the #MeToo and #GeorgeFloyd protest waves. “Instead of fueling a groundswell of public support to reinvigorate the [Democratic] party’s ambitious agenda [in the wake of the 2020 election],” he wrote, “most of the foundation-backed organizations that make up the backbone of the party’s ideological infrastructure were … spending their time locked in virtual retreats, Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.” Speaking mostly on background, various leaders and ex-leaders of organization told of spending nearly all their time on internal strife and “internal bullshit.”

Grim’s article, “Elephant in the Zoom,” generated a lot of heated argument, with some responding that many advocacy organizations treated their staff terribly and that a correction, either via social media-driven accountability campaigns or unionization, was in order. A younger generation of idealistic staff was inevitably colliding with an older leadership generation (or sometimes, two generations older), and attitudes toward sexual harassment and internal culture definitely needed to be changed. At the same time, Grim struck a chord with plenty of people of all ages who—though they feared saying so out loud and with their name attached—agreed that a zeal for healthy workplaces committed to transformative change had gone overboard and in some cases was being weaponized by people seeking to either advance their own careers or just “blow shit up.”

Talking or writing about this topic is hard because the seemingly high stakes of getting something wrong or being misunderstood. So it’s understandable that there hasn’t been much in the public arena that might help people and organizations move through this difficult situation. Which is why I want to lift up and praise a long essay called “Building Resilient Organizations” by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party and the co-founder of Blackbird, an anchor organization within the Movement for Black Lives. It was published simultaneously in three places—The Forge, Convergence Magazine and Nonprofit Quarterly—and it deserves careful attention. Recapitulating Mitchell’s writing could take as much space as his original piece, so I won’t do that, but rather I just want to point to a few highlights that strike a chord with me (at the risk of eliding some of the subtleties of his argument).

First, kudos to Mitchell for starting out by admitting that we collectively have a problem in the current tensions between leadership and activists within advocacy organizations. “Identity and position,” he writes, “are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces.” How can we exit from that doom loop?

Mitchell sets the table by noting all the historical and structural challenges movements for justice face, including decades of government disruption or repression, the demands of the nonprofit tax code and the values of Big Philanthropy, and the tendency to elevate people with exceptional oratory or organizing ability rather management skills. But then he goes, one by one, after some key problems with a variety of unspoken rules of progressive culture:

• The elevation of one’s identity or personal experience to confer intrinsic ideological or strategic legitimacy, as in “As a working-class, first-generation American, Southern woman…I say we have to vote no.” Mitchell disagrees, pointing out that no one’s identity is “in and of itself” sufficient to settle a leadership or strategic decision.

• Maximalism, or the choice to reject anything less than the most idealistic position, fails the most basic question of whether we have enough power to win that position. “Holding on to tactics and overly idealistic demands that keep us small but pure ignores the basic strategic imperative of building power,” Mitchell writes.

• Always reflexively questioning anyone in leadership is another over-correction, he argues, because it leaves no room for principled and responsive leadership to act. And pretending that formal leadership doesn’t exist just allows more obscure hierarchies to wield power.

• Likewise, Mitchell argues that a reflexive disdain for institutions as inherently oppressive amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament against far more powerful adversaries.

• Using arguments against white supremacy culture can lead to “incoherence,” or worse, “into tools for individuals to virtue signal or provide weight to an argument that does not stand on its own premises.” Mitchell adds, “Decontextualized or uncritical use of intellectual material, like the Tema Okun essay on white supremacy culture, has at times served to challenge accountability around metrics and timeliness or the use of written language. Yet metrics and timeliness—and the ability to communicate in writing—are not in and of themselves examples of white supremacy.” All I can say to this is, amen brother.

Mitchell is walking through a minefield made more explosive by social media, and he knows it. “These platforms—owned and controlled by megacorporations—reward us for our ability to articulate or reshare the sharpest, pithiest, pettiest, most polemic, or most engaging ‘content.’ There is no premium on nuance, accuracy, and context. There is little room for low-ego information sharing or curious and grounded political education. These platforms are ideal for, and give immediate reward to, uninformed cherry-picking, self-aggrandizement, competition, and conflict.” Using them to gain personal benefit or the satisfaction of dunking on someone or something less sophisticated, he suggests, is a destructive practice.

It's clear that Mitchell is desperately trying to get younger and less experienced activists to add more perspective to their passion. Too often, he suggests, they are consuming with fighting the “small war” over tensions inside an organization rather than over the larger power dynamics in society, insisting that until each and every “glass house” is fixed we can throw no stones. Too often, they misinterpret the scale of a problem, claiming that an experience of discomfort is the same thing as violence or that any mistake is an example of corruption. “If everything is ‘violent,’ nothing really is,” he writes. “If every slight is ‘oppression,’ nothing is.” Again, amen brother.

Mitchell’s essay goes well with an elegant piece written this summer by Dissent editorial board member Brian Morton that questions how valid concerns about “white privilege” have come to obscure or turn attention away from deepening economic inequality. He writes:

“Left politics should be about trying to bring together the vast majority of the population to press for changes that would benefit us all and would benefit the poor—who, as we’ve seen, are disproportionately nonwhite—most of all. Such changes include a living wage, labor protections, the removal of barriers to labor organizing, generous welfare programs and unemployment insurance, tax-funded healthcare and child care, decriminalization of drugs, police reform, and responsible stewardship of the environment. But today’s privilege-walk politics is preoccupied, instead, with calculating the relative degrees of social advantage among people who share the same broad goals and sorting those people into the categories of the innocent and the guilty. This brand of politics is a gift to those who want to see our inequalities persist.”

Figuring out how to convert these insights into practice is another matter, but certainly it starts with more reflection and group conversation around the norms that we want to live and work by. Mitchell also argues that progressive organizations should welcome unionization as a way to mitigate the glass house/small war/anti-leadership tendencies that keep cropping up when the inevitable tensions between management and staff aren’t collectively addressed. And he rightly insists on more formal transparency within organizations that clarifies leadership roles, decision-making and responsibilities at all levels.

Will any of this happen? I hope so, because time’s a wasting.

New York Blues, Continued

As Democrats continue to pore over the results of the midterm elections, attention has started to focus in an unusual way on New York. In most cycles, the Empire State has not just been a reliable bastion for Democrats, it has effectively exported resources like money and volunteer time to other more embattled states. But the party’s terrible showing in House elections in New York is now being blamed for ruining whatever chances Democrats might have had of holding onto their slim majority in the US House of Representatives. Fingers are being pointed in many directions, including at NYC Mayor Eric Adams for how much he legitimized the Republican narrative that crime was out of control, and at Governor Kathy Hochul for running a lackluster campaign.

Most interesting to me is the storm over the future of longtime state party chairman Jay Jacobs, an ally of disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, for his role bungling the midterms. In the days after the election, more than 1,000 Democratic elected officials and grassroots activists signed an open letter calling on Governor Hochul to replace him, which she has so far declined to do. On November 16, Jacobs pushed back by proxy, getting 40 Democratic county chairs to sign a letter supporting his tenure. Notably absent from that list were the county chairs from voter-heavy districts along the Hudson river, many of which outperformed Democrats across the rest of the state.

On November 22, nine Democratic county chairs representing districts all along the greater Hudson valley put out their own letter addressing Jacobs directly (along with Christine Quinn, who is chair of the party’s state executive committee). Instead of calling for his dismissal, they proposed reforms in how the state party works in the hopes of finding a way forward together. Reading the letter, you can only come to one conclusion—since these county chairs are in regular contact with the state party, everything they are asking for represents something that isn’t happening now.

• To wit, they want its executive committee to meet monthly as “an active collaborative decision-making body” with “goals, objectives and timelines” for standing committees.

• They want “updates and information sharing on county and state party operations.”

• They want the full state party committee to approve an annual plan for the party, including investments “in our county committees.”

• They want a “framework for coordination and shared message development” with the various national Democratic party committees.

• They want a digital platform to connect various party committee members and organs to each other, along with internal communications guidelines.

• They want orientations and trainings for new members of the state committee.

In short, what they are saying is the current New York State Democratic party has none of these things. “The command-and-control organizational model does not serve our party,” they conclude. You don’t say!

According to City & State reporter Rebecca Lewis, Gov. Hochul “has quietly begun looking for someone to replace Jacobs,” and is specifically considering US Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who is already the center of his own political machine in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. If that is true, it’s another indication of Hochul’s terrible political radar. (Recall that her first pick for Lieutenant Governor, state senator Brian Benjamin, resigned after federal prosecutors charged him with bribery and fraud.) The problems with New York’s Democratic party won’t be fixed if another machine politician takes its helm.

Odds and Ends

—I’m curious to see if the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto-currency empire (which just claimed another giant crypto firm, BlockFi) and the implosion of his political operation will temper the tilt toward crypto that’s been emanating from places like Higher Ground Labs, the incubator-investor hub for lots of progressive political tech startups. Back in August, HGL published a big report on Web3 technologies and how they could be used in the political space that, at least in my biased reading, bent over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to things like non-fungible tokens (which are also crashing of late, by the way), decentralized autonomous organizations and play-to-earn games. The word “innovation” appears dozens of times in the report; the word “scam” does not. (And the fact that twice as many men as women say they’ve invested in crypto-currencies is cited by HGL as a proof of promise, not a warning sign.) HGL is also an investor in Endaoment, a platform that aims to make the process of donating crypto to nonprofits easier for all involved, and Shrina Kurani, a failed congressional candidate and climate investor who made crypto a big part of her campaign, just joined HGL’s advisory board.

—Related: You can add your voice to HGL’s 2022 Election Tech Survey here; it closes tomorrow.

—While we are on the topic of crypto-currency, I should note that I’ve gotten some friendly pushback from readers who don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and who think I’m going too far in calling the whole industry as giant scam. I agree, there ~may~ be something to DAOs as a tool for large scale democratic collaboration, and I've got the book that Nathan Schneider just did with Vitalik Buterin, Proof of Stake, on my desk to read hopefully soon. That said, it's not like we need DAOs or blockchain to invent better forms of democratic self-governance. I've been around the political reform world and the tech world now for a few decades and in general I've gotten really skeptical of all shortcuts to salience. There's a reality distortion effect created by concentrated piles of money, too. So while I applaud people like Nathan who are trying to unearth the pony hidden under all the bullshit, I still think we've been sucked down another rabbit hole by the crypto craze, and I'm going to keep trusting my instincts here.

—Here’s a list of tech products ranked by how much they may protect or endanger your privacy, courtesy of Mozilla just in time for your holiday shopping.

—Mage, one of the new AI image generators, now has a social function that allows you to explore other people’s creations by tag and the results are inspiring.

End Times

How many times can a man … sing Jingle Bells?