Progressive beliefs are by their nature ever-changing. Pick any decade and canvass progressive thought and you’ll find there are few core policy prescriptions that stand the test of time. This is also likely true of any particular governing philosophy, to be honest. The thread that ties together progressive beliefs over the years, though, are not hard to find. Some may quibble with the wording here and there but for the sake of this diary here’s a good working summary of what progressives have always believed at their core.
- Science, economic conditions, social institutions, technology, and government are necessary to improve the human condition. I refer to these as the Five Pillars. (Note: Environmentalism is an increasingly significant part of many progressive movements and for good reason. However, its role in progressive philosophy is relatively new. I’ve left it out but you can feel free to include it because it doesn’t change the underlying theme presented here.)
- Improving the human condition should be one of the primary goals of the Five Pillars. Therefore, a progressive seeks to use science, economic policy, social institutions, technology, and government to address human needs/problems.
- Popular engagement, essential to the progressive philosophy, is not only a method of promoting progressive values. It’s a goal, in and of itself.
The last bullet, alas, is the rub. In it lies the progressive’s greatest challenge and the soft underbelly of its movement. Why is that? Because the populist wing of the progressive movement is beholden to the same prejudices and misinformed, inaccurate memes as the rest of the electorate. In some cases, more so.
I’m a student of history and I claim to be no expert. But it seems there is a bit of a pattern. I’ve written before about the differences between an activist and an organizer. Organizers are educators and listeners first. Activists are preachers and provocateurs. Each has its place in any social movement but progress is generally made when organizers have laid the foundation and the influence of activists are managed to prevent its excesses from marginalizing the message.
An example: in the 1960s, a coalition of organizations worked together — often with plenty of friction — to desegregate the South and then to promote voting rights. A premium was placed on training the organizers with a certain set of core ideas of what works: non-violence, getting to know and augmenting local efforts, and having a clear set of tangible objectives for each project. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were only the most dramatic examples of the incredible progress that was made during this time, due in large part to the leadership approach of the Big Six. Over time, the first generation of organizers were replaced with an infusion of newer participants (many of whom came from northern communities which I think raises some fascinating questions about the role of geographical background in the CRM). As the participants of these movements were changed over, their commitment to the core ideas lessened.
Gone were the days when organizers stressed a thoughtful examination of how something as mundane as personal appearance might impact the way a march got covered in the media. Gone were the days when organizers taught that retaliation in the face of hatred was selfish to the movement. Gone were the days when bullying and suppression were seen as self-defeating — when the other side did it, you had to shine a light on it; when your side did it, you had to denounce it firmly and unequivocally.
Over time, the balance between activists and organizers tipped towards the former. I don’t want to outline the effect in detail because that would be a whole new diary, well worth the effort but more than I have time for now. Suffice it to say, something changed with the new crop of leadership. In my reading of history, the conservative backlash that happened with the rise of Nixonian politics, the Southern strategy, and the Reagan revolution were by and large a reaction to the oversized and (at times) unfair coverage of the activists. The message discipline of the earlier generation was gone and conservatives exploited that to push back against the progressive goals of the civil rights movement. In fact, more than pushing back, the legitimacy of the entire progressive agenda was the target.
So what happened and why does it matter?
There’s a brand of activism that, if unchecked, is self-defeating. It appears in every movement of any note but a combination of good leadership and organizational values leaves them marginalized, by and large. Eventually, though, if an organization is not careful, this brand of activism can hijack the effort and drown the message in its own drama. I think this happened to a certain level throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
I also think it happened in the Republican Party with the coming of the Tea Party and is happening now in the Bernie Sanders campaign. If the Democratic Party wasn’t being led by President Obama, there would be a greater risk of it happening there too.
When it happened to the Republican Party, we called it the Tea Party. There are different names for it depending on the issue and the organization. There is no name for it right now in the Bernie Sanders campaign. I’d like to give it one here.
Before I do, though, let me be clear what I’m naming. I’m not saying *all* Sanders supporters are infected by this brand of activism. I would not even say most of them. The vast majority of Sanders supporters are voting to upset the apple cart but still believe in our political system. The message of Revolution isn’t the bell they’re answering. They’re voting for policy prescriptions and a political agenda that fit very comfortably within the progressive movement. They’re voting for Sanders because they trust him more than Clinton to push a progressive platform from the White House.
But there are other types of supporters in the Sanders coalition. And they’re starting to hijack the message. I call them Pitchfork Progressives. There have been versions of the Pitchfork Progressives in every political coalition, conservative, liberal, and everything in between. Although the issues change, there is a thread tying them all together — a thread that is decidedly anathema to the movements that spawn them. Here is my effort at describing these threads:
- Confirmation bias runs rampant. Information and sources of information are either part of the orthodoxy or hostile to it. Pitchfork Progressives promote and defend almost anything that reinforces its narrative and viciously attack anything that doesn’t.
- There is a strong belief that the opposition is never arguing in good faith. Also, any supposed ally who gets critical of The Movement suddenly become the opposition and therefore are no longer operating in good faith. See: John Lewis, Dolores Huerta, Barney Frank, Jim Clyburn, etc.
- Winning is proof of rightness, no matter how that victory is earned, and losing is proof of a broken process.
- Dig deep enough and you realize that Pitchfork Progressives are inherently anarchist. They simply cannot exist as part of the levers of power or governance. Drawing an analogy to the Tea Party, once elected, they can survive only by obstructing. The moment they are identified as part of the power structure, the shelf life of their careers is reduced substantially. See: Eric Cantor. See also: Nevada State Convention — the outbreak of disorder, shouting, and conspiracy mongering were all committed by delegates, not random people off the street.
- Power is not governance. Governance is not power. Power is about disruption, interruption, and sabotage. It makes a certain kind of sense. If the system is inherently working against The Cause, then any type of disruption is a victory for The Cause — even if it leads to further marginalization.
- Almost always once the balance between organizers and this brand of activism tips toward the latter, these movements devolve into anti-identity politics (I’m making a distinction between identity politics and anti-identity politics, the latter marked by prejudice rather than dignity/justice). It’s the scourge of populism, really. In the 1960s, the broad-based coalition based on love and I Have a Dream devolved into a fractured civil rights community and splinter groups, some of whom expounded on the evils of Whitey and claiming that the only good position in the movement for women was the prone position. Unionism has often devolved into ignorant anti-immigration memes. Infighting among feminist groups are legendary, much of it predicated on what positions/ideas are *authentically* feminist. Do I even need to mention the Tea Party? It’s important though uncomfortable to acknowledge this dynamic among progressive organizations; I’m making a point to emphasize them rather than focus solely on The Other Side.
The above bullets are placed into a sort of progression. I think by and large it starts with epistemic closure. Once your most ungenerous assessments of the opposition get reinforced by the feedback loop of an echo chamber, you’re well on your way to equating incremental progress with soul sucking compromise. Unless strong leadership steps in to set the tone, the original message gets lost in a sea of daily dramas and controversies… and you lose. (The Gingrich Revolution is almost a perfect encapsulation of this progression, by the way.)
Bottom line — there’s nothing particularly new or liberal about the Pitchfork Progressives. In fact, take away the drama of the moment and it’s a bit of a cliche. The Revolution isn’t here and what happened in Nevada isn’t the byproduct of inspirational leadership from Bernie Sanders. It’s what happens when the leadership isn’t strong enough to stem the tide of destructive forces, the seed of which are in every organization.
Senator Sanders built a coalition of mostly white, mostly young voters. He did so with an insurgency campaign that was destined to include an out-sized contingent of Pitchfork Progressives — certainly those voters weren’t going to gravitate towards Clinton. He raised a ton of money and spent almost none of it on training his volunteers. His messaging of late has doubled down on the very things that appeal to Pitchfork Progressives and Nevada was the predictable result.
But none of this is the end of the world. None of this means that the Clinton campaign is going to lose the general election to Donald Trump. Based on the tea leaves I’m reading, it seems the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign are well aware of what is happening here and are taking steps to address it.
But whether or not they succeed is, in part, dependent on all of us keeping our houses clean. The Pitchfork Progressives might win a few twitter battles and get more than their share of diaries up on the Rec List with claims of oligarchy and the Establishment (cue dramatic music!), the evils of Super Delegates and endless false equivalencies between tax returns (which are a legally required government disclosure) and speech transcripts (which are intellectual property). They will ignore the fact that Senator Sanders appeared on stage with a member of the Keating Five to accept his endorsement while railing against the evils of Wall Street and its influence on Clinton. They’ll pretend that whether it’s a Clinton or a Trump, a Republican or a Democrat, it’s all the same. The system is rigged, politics are crooked, and disagreements are based on greed.
It’s politics as soap opera, where there are heroes and larger than life villains. The halls of power are filled with graft, back-stabbing, posturing, and twirly mustaches. Pitchfork Progressives thrive on the drama. If you play up the drama, you create a talking point that the system isn’t working (this was THE primary tactic used against Gore in 2000 among the media pundits covering the race). Drive up your opponents negative favorability and then use that negative favorability as a wedge to claim you’re better.
I know it’s tiring. I know we just want it to be over but here’s my advice. Don’t take it seriously. That way lies failure.
Fix the system by becoming the system. There won’t always be a student loan crisis or a mass incarceration crisis. In years past, the crises have all been different. The solutions all required thought and care and compromise and evolution. Some of those solutions created new problems to address. Someone will be there to address them, one way or the other.
Personally, I think it should be the coalition of people who believe in and need government the most. Remember — the one constant throughout the history of the progressive movement has been the belief that science, economic policy, social institutions, technology, and government are weapons in the progressive arsenal. If you’re attacking the legitimacy of any of these things to get elected, you are weakening the very things you need to enact a progressive agenda. That way lies Tea Party madness.
If what you’re selling is that it’s all rigged against you, full stop, then you have traded your progressive agenda for a pitchfork. That way lies marginalization.
You should put down the pitchfork and rejoin the cause.