Democrats have a purity-test problem

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

There has been a burst of stories in recent weeks describing devastating internal conflicts within progressive organizations, the most conspicuous of which was Ryan Grim's June 13 Intercept piece, "Elephant in the Zoom: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History."

Grim's assessment resonated across the internet and was quickly followed by Molly Redden's June 17 HuffPost account, "Inside the A.C.L.U.'s Post-Trump Reckoning"; Jon Gabriel's article in the Arizona Republic on June 18, "Who needs a right-wing plot when progressives are busy eating themselves alive?"; Zack Colman's June 19 Politico column, "Justice or overreach? As crucial test looms, Big Greens are under fire"; and John Harris's June 23 Politico essay, "The Left Goes to War with Itself."

According to Grim (and those other reports), disputes over diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) — over doctrine, language and strategies — have paralyzed much of the left advocacy and nonprofit sector.

William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, has a sharp eye for what's not working in Washington and has long been a critic of those he feels are pulling the Democratic Party too far to the left. Galston e-mailed me his take on the current situation:

"In recent months I've had the chance to talk to several presidents and executive directors of established left-leaning centers and groups. They all tell versions of the same story:

"This generation gap has forced leaders to devote unprecedented time and energy to internal governance, sometimes to the detriment of their organization's mission. The left has a long tradition of turning on itself, and what I've reported is the latest chapter in a long running saga."

One high-ranking nonprofit official who has been in the middle of these battles, but who declined to be identified because of the repercussions he would face within his organization, commented by email:

"Difficulties addressing D.E.I. issues and identity politics are part of the problem, but they are symptoms as much as causes. There's a new perfectionism in our organizations that gets in the way of actually dealing with challenges in our imperfect world."

The fundamental problem, he wrote, is "the presence in every progressive organization of a small but very vocal fringe that views every problem as a sin." This hyper-moralization of internal disputes spills over into real-world but otherwise routine disagreements, he continued: "It has become too easy for people to conflate disagreements about issues with matters of identity."

Every leader of a nonprofit organization, he contended, "is struggling with the same problems regardless of the race, gender, or identity of the leader."

It is just these struggles on the left that are forcefully documented in Grim's 10,388-word investigation. Grim describes in detail a destructive workplace climate at the Guttmacher Institute, the premier abortion rights research group, where battles between staff and management meant that "the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed" in a fashion "typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America — but of other reproductive health organizations."

In addition, Grim wrote that these internal battles have been "true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time's Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching turmoil in the past couple years."

Maibe Ponet, Guttmacher's vice president for communications and publications, disputed Grim's portrayal of difficulties at the institute in an e-mail to the New York Times:

"The suggestion that we are at anything like a standstill is far off base. Guttmacher has been very actively and consistently producing evidence and analyses to help inform legislators, advocates, courts, and opinion makers about the rapidly changing abortion landscape in the U.S., and also around the globe. Our work was very present and influential during the long lead-up to the harmful anti-abortion decision delivered by the Supreme Court on Friday and we have seen a huge uptick in coverage of our work in the last year."

An executive who heads a liberal think tank, speaking without attribution in order to avoid alienating colleagues, argued in an e-mail that the tensions within organizations on the left have to be put in context:

There are other interpretations of the conflicts within advocacy groups, nonprofits and other left-liberal organizations.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, wrote in an e-mail:

"These divisions reflect larger divisions within the Democratic Party coalition, between an older (and whiter) generation that learned what works in an earlier time, has nostalgia for that earlier time, and is thus more reluctant to give up on the existing status quo (especially because that means relinquishing power to a younger generation they do not trust), and a younger (and more diverse) generation that has no attachment to and little affinity for the past, and a real sense of urgency about the need for major, transformative change across a wide range of issues. Within the Democratic Party coalition, many of the leaders are refusing to pass the torch (look at the leadership of the party), and a younger generation is impatient with the slow pace of change and eager for their turn."

Drutman said his views have been influenced by the work of Kevin Munger, a political scientist at Penn State and the author of the recently published book "Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture."

I asked Munger about the dissension on the left, and he e-mailed back:

Munger went on:

"When we talk about older people in the U.S. today, we are mostly talking about older white people. And the converse: when we talk about racial minorities, we are mostly talking about younger racial minorities. The baby boomers are the whitest generation in U.S. history (thanks to changes in immigration law and the de-racialization of groups like Italians, Irish and Jews), and Gen Z is the most racially diverse."

While Drutman and Munger focus on generational differences, others contend there are more immediate and more emotionally potent forces at work.

Last summer, in "A racial reckoning at nonprofits: Black women demand better pay, opportunities," Sydney Trent of the Washington Post reported on "a little-publicized racial reckoning that has been roiling the rapidly growing nonprofit sector — the country's third-largest employer — since the murder of George Floyd last May."

Among the areas under scrutiny, Trent wrote, is "the way White-dominated boards and leadership relate to the often poor, minority communities they serve, inequitable decision-making by foundations when doling out funding and discrimination faced by nonprofit workers of color. As with the racial reckoning among for-profit companies, concerns about bias in the workplace have been prompting more employees to voice their frustrations and advocate for change."

The impact of the racial reckoning in the nonprofit sector is being keenly felt in the nation's capital, which has the third-largest concentration of locally focused nonprofits in the United States. When national organizations are taken into account, the Washington region is home to about 50,000 nonprofits employing 600,000 people, or, to put it another way, about one in four workers in Washington are nonprofit employees, according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A 2019 Race to Lead survey of over 5,000 nonprofit employees found:

"Less than half of Black women (48 percent) (and 42 percent of Black men) said they had received a promotion in their current place of work, compared to 54 percent of other women of color, 50 percent of other men of color, 55 percent of white women, and 56 percent of white men. Black women (average of 5.6) were also less likely than other groups to say they perceive fair and equitable opportunities for advancement in the workplace, followed by other women of color (average of 5.7), Black men (average of 6.4), other men of color (average of 6.6), white women (average of 6.6), and white men (average of 7.2)."

The current factional difficulties on the left bring to mind the work of Richard Ellis, a professor of political science at Willamette University and a liberal, who wrote the 1998 book "The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America." Ellis described the transformation of the radical 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society:

"How did S.D.S. move from the nonviolence of the Port Huron Statement to the violent fantasies of the Days of Rage?" Ellis asked.

"The impulse to effect social changes was increasingly pre-empted and distorted by a desire to retain an uncorrupted honesty or purity. The S.D.S. worldview increasingly became one of 'us' versus 'them,' the good inside versus the evil outside."

A similar process overtook two subsequent movements, in Ellis's view:

"Characteristic of both radical feminism and radical environmentalism is the tendency to dismiss the choices people make as a produce of false consciousness. Under conditions of inequality, Catharine MacKinnon insists, female consent is merely male coercion concealed. Driving a car, radical environmentalists tell us, is an 'addiction,' not a real choice."

Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London and author of the book "Whiteshift" (and who pointed me to Ellis's book), argued by e-mail that a key element in the struggle of progressive groups "is the elevation of emotion and the personal over reason, generalizable data and process."

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, contends that internecine conflict on the left has become "a profound issue, particularly for those of us who are terrified that the hard woke left will enable the resurgence of authoritarian populism by inflicting damage on the moderate left and center and by driving voters to the right."

"much of the recent escalation is due to three deeply rooted beliefs of today's woke left: One is that progress comes from struggle — a good force defeating an evil force, rather than problem-solving — diagnosing the inevitable ills of something as complex as a modern society (including people and factions who disagree with you) and implementing remedies. The second is the belief that systems of oppression are implemented not in overt policies like Jim Crow laws but in subtle patterns in language and visual symbols that insidiously instill unconscious bias in everyone. To make things better, one has to root out and marginalize the perpetrators of this pervasive oppression, rather than just outarguing an opposing faction. A third, shared by their strange bedfellows on the populist right, is that democratic liberal society is unreformable — the system is so corrupt and decadent that it must be razed to the ground, because anything that rises out of the ashes will be better than what we have now."

Pinker challenged the goal of many progressive groups to "match the demographic breakdown of the country."

This, as Pinker sees it:

"is an algorithm for infinite recrimination because of an iron law of social science: nothing ever mirrors the demographic statistics of a nation. People of different sexes, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and religions will also differ, on average, in their tastes, life priorities, interests, educational histories, values, family patterns, and other cultural traits, and there's simply no reason to expect a statistical miracle in which the members of an organization will duplicate the national statistics."

Pinker agreed that "there is real prejudice, to be sure, and it must be extirpated, but there will be unequal distributions of groups even without a drop of prejudice."

The foundations, charities and nonprofits with Black leaders run the gamut, including the Ford Foundation, Alliance for Justice, the American Association of University Women, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for American Progress, Demos, Emily's List, the Tides Foundation, Greenpeace USA, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America — and this just scratches the surface.

For many of the newly promoted top executives, the Chronicle continued, these jobs have produced new predicaments: "having broken the proverbial 'glass ceiling,' they often find themselves teetering on a 'glass cliff.'" A Building Movement Project survey "found that executives of color did not have the same support as leaders as their white counterparts when they entered their roles."

Of the 1,190 executives surveyed, the Chronicle reported, "72 percent of white leaders said they received support from groups of other leaders outside their organization, while 62 percent of Black leaders said they received peer support."

In addition, "leaders of color also expressed a higher level of frustration than their white peers with aspects of the job. They reported higher levels of stress resulting from pressures to push diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the organization."

In other words, a shift in the leadership did not bring an end to — much less resolve — the internal struggles over race, equity and other issues documented by Grim and many others. The question in the wake of the Supreme Court's decisions on Roe and gun rights is whether these organizations can get their acts together before the Nov. 8 midterm elections and the end of the 117th Congress on Jan. 3, 2023, and that's before we get to the question of the momentous 2024 presidential election.