Marching Through the Wilderness

Despite shrunken turnout at gun safety rallies, there's some progress toward new legislation. Meanwhile, are progressive DC orgs being stymied by internal rancor?

Last Saturday, about 50,000 people showed up at the big March For Our Lives rally in Washington DC to demand action on gun violence. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, which collates local press reports, there were at least 350 sibling events around the country, with 20,000 marching in New York City; 4,000 in Atlanta; 2,000 in Boston; 1,000 in Chicago; 2,000 in Los Angeles;; and 2,000 in Parkland, Florida, the birthplace of the movement. This means the MFOL youth-led gun safety movement has shrunk anywhere from one-third to one-tenth the size it was in 2018, when half a million people marched in Washington alone and there were nearly 900 sibling marches across America. In 2018, 20,000 marched in Denver; last Saturday a few hundred did. The relentless wave of additional mass shootings plus the rigid resistance of most Republicans to any serious reform, coupled with the movement’s own moderation, has left many people too discouraged to act.

With such reduced numbers, perhaps the Everytown/Moms Demand Action gun safety lobby, which I wrote about here two weeks ago, is right to be celebrating the announcement of a tentative bipartisan deal in the Senate to take a few modest steps toward commonsense gun safety reform. On NBC News, Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, called it “incredibly historic,” touting in particular the closing of the “boyfriend loophole” to protect the dating partners of domestic abusers. The bipartisan framework, which still has to be turned into written legislation and then make it through Congress, would also tighten of background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, incentivize (but not force) states to enact red-flag laws allowing police to temporarily confiscate guns from people on the brink of violence, and add funding for community mental health centers and more school safety training.

These changes, if they get implemented, will save a few lives but they won’t put much of a dent in gun ownership or gun violence, which is why some of the Parkland survivors who started MFOL are not happy. Ryan Deitsch told NBC News the deal was just about Senators winning “brownie points for doing the bare minimum”; on Twitter he said, “We need to address gun violence at large. That means addressing our unchecked military & police spending. If kids are to be safe inside & outside of schools, we can’t ignore America’s school to prison pipeline, nor can we ignore killer cops or blatant militarism abroad.” Cameron Kasky couldn’t hold back his sarcasm about how little Democrats extracted from their Republican colleagues, despite the popularity of tougher measures like universal background checks or an assault weapons ban. On the other hand, Sari Kaufman, another Parkland survivor, called it a “monumental day for the gun violence prevention movement.” Unlike Deitsch and Kasky, Kaufman is a Students Demand Action volunteer and a former member of its national advisory board, and thus part of the Everytown organization.

As I noted two weeks ago, there’s an unresolved tension inside the gun safety lobby. People affiliated with Everytown are devoted to finding a “bipartisan” coalition that can pass something, anything, through Congress addressing guns. Groups with more far-reaching demands, like the Dream Defenders of Florida, simply don’t get the same attention when they talk about the need to address the school-to-prison pipeline or police violence (topics that Mike Bloomberg, who has put more than a quarter billion dollars into Everytown, would also like to ignore after his years of defending stop-and-frisk and the NYPD). It’s just the more radicalized survivors of Parkland like Deitsch or Kasky who seem to get invited onto national media to raise such issues. The fact that they keep speaking up suggests that even if they remain out-funded and out-organized, they won’t be silenced. And sadly, we know that the gun violence crisis in America isn’t going away. So on balance, my feelings about the pending Senate deal are, a slice of bread is better than no loaf, and this is a cause that desperately needs some good news. But the deal is only historic in what it shows about the current state of “bipartisanship” in America.

—Related: I would be remiss if I didn’t address some comments Shannon Watts made in response to my piece from two weeks ago. On Twitter, in response to a question from Jodi Jacobson, a friend of mine who is a longtime organizer in the reproductive rights and HIV/AIDS movements, who shared my post, Watts wrote, “How do I respond to this fucking sexist bullshit that accuses me of making this a career when I’m a fulltime volunteer and have been for a decade? Heard any male activists who actually make a living doing this accused of that???” and also, “How do I respond to the accusations that my activism is too soft BECAUSE IM A FUCKING WOMAN ? The people showing up at gun bill hearings and town halls and school board and city council meetings for a decade are our volunteers. Thats how we did this.” Oh, and also, “Don’t tell me you respect me and then throw another bullshit hit piece at me by a progressive man who clearly despises women over 40. I get enough of that from gun extremists. You don’t like the way we’ve won over the last decade? Cool. You don’t like our style of activism? Fine.”

For the record, I criticized Watts for giving Democratic Senators cover in the days immediately after the Uvalde shooting. She doesn’t address that, instead choosing to argue that I singled her out because she is a woman (later in the same thread calling me a “misogynist”). Nor does she address my argument that the decision to ally Moms Demand Action with Everytown defanged the former. I think those points stand. But perhaps I erred in referring to Watts as having become a “professional advocacy organization head” because she does all her work for Moms Demand Action as a full-time volunteer. I do not despise women over 40. Or under 40.

Organizing Notes

—Ryan Grim’s Intercept piece, “Elephant in the Zoom,” on the “meltdowns” at progressive advocacy organizations is a must-read. “It’s hard to find a Washington-based advocacy organization that isn’t in tumult” over internal race and gender dynamics, he writes, mentioning the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the Guttmacher Institute, the Sierra Club, Demos, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement and the National Audobon Society as examples. Leaving aside that at some of these groups, internal dysfunction has been rooted in charges not just of white management mistreating employees of color but political hypocrisy (Time’s Up and the Human Rights Campaign’s closeness to Andrew Cuomo), Grim is surfacing an important issue: are internal debates over “hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender and power” stymieing the ability of progressive groups to advance their policy agendas during this brief period of “trifecta” Democratic control? Are the demands of younger staff who are manifestly more vocal and less loyal to their jobs out of proportion? Or is this an overdue reckoning with what people in the tech world refer to as “organizational debt,” i.e. the failure to build healthy internal cultures rooted in humane and inclusive management practices?

Grim’s piece is weighted towards the mostly anonymous voices of organization executive directors, many of whom are quitting in frustration or spending close to all their time dealing with internal strife, and so some of his examples and quotes may appear unbalanced. “Maybe I can’t end racism by myself, but I can get my manager fired, or I can get so and so removed, or I can hold somebody accountable,” one former executive director told him, arguing that at a time of larger political gridlock, some staff may be overemphasizing problems in their own workplaces. Personally I think it’s good that younger staff are pushing their elders to practice what they preach, though sometimes claims about “white supremacy culture” at advocacy organizations seem overblown.

What makes Grim’s piece exceptionally valuable is how much he tries to situate the problem not just in the current social context of COVID and Zoom meetings, where interpersonal relationships are flattened, but also the larger historical context of movement ebbs and flows. He quotes veterans of the 1960s and 1970s like Jo Freeman and Mark Rudd, showing that hyper-ideological internal conflict is not a new phenomenon, but something often seen inside social change organizations. Grim’s piece is getting a lot of affirmations from interesting places, not just left-bashers like Matthew Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald, but also veteran and venerated organizers like Ady Barkan and Naomi Klein. Read the whole thing.

—After the first two hearings of the January 6th Committee I’m impressed by how well they’ve prepared to tell a story that punches through the clutter, and somewhat concerned that there is no plan or call to action for when the hearings end a week from this Thursday. What exactly do advocates want the 20 million people who watched the first session, which was held in prime-time, to do? This is where the committee’s focus on Trump may have unexpected effects. He and his enablers, like the “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani, may be indelibly damaged by the hearings, but what of Fox News or the RNC (which is fighting efforts to expose how it helped Trump grift $250 million out of grassroots donors for a nonexistent post-election organization)? Or, for that matter, what of the other politicians now building careers in Trump’s wake? The somewhat naïve hope that truth alone will set us free, do we think that’s going to be enough? Not to be a broken record, but this is why I keep harping on the need to convert momentary attention into ongoing group formation and maintenance. Watching the hearings by yourself and then maybe calling your Senators isn’t going to build the kind of social infrastructure that we need to keep pushing back on fascism in America. We may defeat one Big Lie but not Big Lieism.

—On that very point, “Knitting together a multiracial, democratic governing coalition in the context of a very real, weaponized, white grievance, authoritarian political movement … is very hard.” That’s Doran Schrantz, the director of Faith in Minnesota, speaking to organizer Deepak Pateriya in the first of a series of pieces in the Forge on power analysis. The whole interview is fascinating for what it illustrates about the challenge of building progressive power in a state that is 90% white. “The electorate right now is not as progressive as a lot of people wish it was — it is not conservative’ either,” Schrantz notes, “but it is made up of thousands and thousands of conflicted people who can be moved one way or another based on the climate, the media, the conditions of their daily lives.” Schrantz is a very strong advocate for the argument that there are no short-cuts, pointing out that realistically, progressives who only focus on motivating their hardcore base and trying to expand that electorate, like, say, Bernie Sanders, haven’t managed to gain more than 30% of the statewide vote, while others that are careful bridge-builders, like Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, have won statewide election. Her bottom line: “We and many of our partners believe there is a way to expand the map, carefully, over years that can be grounded in a multi-racial, democratic coalition and still win. The key is to not think only in terms of electoral cycles and to build sustained, community-grounded, place-based, relational power over time.”

One more item to flag from the interview is Schrantz’s critique of how the political industrial complex of data-driven campaigns affects organizing. “We are not someone else’s ‘field,’” she says. “We don't want to be a vendor for other people. We don't want to think that our power equals how many new contacts we did for the audience of some political funder’s idea of a voter universe. The conventional wisdom in the dominant electoral practice is that some organizations or leaders have access to a particular community and are paid to be the field — field meaning the cheap, efficient machine for producing ‘voter contacts’— and, if you can prove your efficiency at making a certain number of ‘contacts,’ that will accrue political power to that community. There is no evidence for this assertion.“ Read the whole thing.

Odds and Ends

—The second issue of New_ Public’s online magazine was just posted last week, focusing on the theme of trust. There are 11 pieces in the issue, far too many to summarize here, but as a teaser, here are tidbits from two that caught my attention. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Ca) is a fan of Habermas and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister. Who knew? And new trends in cyber-security that rely more heavily on multi-factor authentication are seriously widening the digital divide, since many Americans only own a smartphone (and in some cases share them), according to this piece by Maggie Engler.

—“Millions of Democratic voters can see and feel that American politics has changed in profound ways since at least the 1990s, and they want their leaders to act, and react, accordingly. Standing in the way of this demand, unfortunately, is the stubborn — and ultimately ruinous — optimism of some of the most powerful people in the Democratic Party.” That’s Jamelle Bouie writing about the Democrats’ geriatric wing in today’s New York Times. Maybe after this November, they won’t be standing in the way any more.

End Times

I don’t think Google’s AI is sentient, but I still can’t get enough of these wild visualizations from Dall-E Mini.