He also quotes some who worry that “overreach” on too many issues risks diluting the core mission. He quotes some activists saying the emphasis on a racial equity agenda reflects both effective coalition-building and a more sophisticated understanding of the way despoiling natural resources has occurred in close concert with prejudice against historically marginalized groups. Unlike Grim, Colman doesn’t make an argument about this. It has updated its definition of environmentalism into a lumpers manifesto, advocating for the “environmental health of all communities, especially those communities that continue to endure deep trauma resulting from a legacy of colonialism, genocide, land theft, enslavement, racial terror, racial capitalism, structural discrimination, and exclusion.” My POLITICO colleague Zack Colman covered some of the same terrain in an in-depth look inside the Sierra Club, which in recent years has broadened dramatically its traditional emphasis on conservation. “The progressive advocacy space across the board,” he argues (a bit hyperbolically, by my lights), has “effectively ceased to function,” while management and staff were “spending their time locked in virtual retreats, Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.” Grim doesn’t muffle his own perspective: These organizations are becoming dangerously distracted by internal dramas at precisely the moment their agenda is imperiled by external events, including the possibility that conservative Republicans re-take Congress later this year or that Donald Trump is returned to the presidency in 2024. These include “knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines.” Often these conflicts revolve around how racial or gender equity is practiced at their own organizations, or whether they should be working in coalition with other groups whose agendas they do not support in full. Ryan Grim, writing in The Intercept, published a long examination of how many prominent progressive advocacy groups are suffering “meltdowns” over internal debates. It is incremental gains versus no progress at all.ĭoes this sound all a bit academic and abstract? Two important stories in recent days illuminate how immediate and tangible the debate is - and how visceral the feelings are that fuel these arguments. In their view the choice isn’t sweeping progress versus incremental gains.
#Progressive liberas and war how to#
The splitters prefer to take one issue at a time, and are happy to accept an ally on, say, climate change or gun control, even if that person doesn’t share their views on abortion rights or how to remedy systemic police violence against Black people.
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