This is part 2 of 2 in a series about “wokeness” and how activism and discourse became so poisonous. You can read part 1 here.
In 2022, Maurice Mitchell, the head of the Working Families Party (one of the biggest progressive organizations in the country), thought the problem of infighting, self-centered behavior in which people claim oppressions in order to gain power over each other, and other behavior that wrecked the efficacy of lefty organizations was so prevalent and such a threat to progress that he published a public treatise on it.
In his essay, Mitchell finally made public what countless people within organizing spaces, schools and seemingly everywhere in which collective action is taken, had been privately acknowledging for years: that everyone had gone crazy.
Mitchell wrote that a “growing group of new organizers and activists are becoming cynical or dropping out altogether,” because organizations had become rife with an ideology that dictates that personal identity and moral superiority matters above all else.
“Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces,” he wrote.
The essay gives many examples that echo what I’ve seen in my life, both online and in the real world: “You may hear someone argue, “As a working-class, first-generation American, Southern woman…I say we have to vote no,’” or someone “employing the Audre Lorde quote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence…,” to give gravitas to a desire to stay home from an action or take off time that you’ve earned and deserve as a worker…or to resist taking responsibility for a larger scale intervention,” Mitchell wrote.
The result of all this selfish behavior, he argued, is the complete stagnation or even implosion of organizations trying to do good work.
Mitchell was one of the first in our modern era to draw serious attention to this problem. But in my experience, when this wrecking behavior is discussed, it’s still most often either dismissed as not the most important issue we face, or posited as a new thing, a passing trend. People talk about the overreaches of “Woke 1” or the invention of tenderqueers. But these same dynamics have been infecting organizations for decades at least.
In 1976 (that’s a long time ago!!) Jo Freeman wrote about “trashing” in feminist movements for Ms. Magazine. The article received more letters to the editor than any article in the magazine’s history, the vast majority of which relayed their own experience of harm from individualistic, identitarian overreach.
“I doubt that there is any single explanation to trashing; it is more likely due to varying combinations of circumstances which are not always apparent even to those experiencing them. But from the stories I’ve heard, and the groups I’ve watched, what has impressed me most is how traditional it is,” Freeman wrote. “There is nothing new about discouraging women from stepping out of place by the use of psychological manipulation. This is one of the things that have kept women down for years; it is one thing that feminism was supposed to liberate us from. Yet, instead of an alternative culture with alternative values, we have created alternative means of enforcing the traditional culture and values. Only the name has changed; the results are the same.”
Freeman calls trashing a “social disease” that gets masked under the language of solidarity, and, because no one wants to argue against solidarity, gets completely hidden or denied if it’s brought to the attention of the group. Acknowledgement of it would be a threat to the group’s oneness.
”Trashing is not only destructive to the individuals involved, but serves as a very powerful tool of social control,” Freeman wrote. “This is not a characteristic peculiar to the Women’s Movement, or even to women. The use of social pressures to induce conformity and intolerance for individuality is endemic to American society.”
Freeman argued that people often thought because they were in progressive spaces, they were immune from the ideology of the wider American culture, but by thinking so, they kept perpetuating that same ideology.
It was, in other words, a form of conservatism.