ELEPHANT IN THE ZOOM Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History brief excerpts of an Intercept story
That the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rights movement’s premier research organization has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also 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 and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.
In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society, as Politico reported in August 2021.
Twitter, as the saying goes, may not be real life, but in a world of remote work, Slack very much is. And Twitter, Slack, Zoom, and the office space, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former executive directors of advocacy organizations, are now mixing in a way that is no longer able to be ignored by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function. The executive directors largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.
“To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one concluded. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family — it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And you have to be super sensitive about who the messengers are.”
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Sooner or later, each interview for this story landed on the election of Trump in 2016 as a catalyst. Whatever internal tension had been pulling at the seams of organizations in the years prior, Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike. The institutional progressive world based in Washington, D.C., reacted slowly, shell-shocked and unsure of its place, but people outside those institutions raced ahead of them. A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist.
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One foundation official who has funded many of the groups entangled in turmoil said that having a panoramic view allowed her to see those common threads. “It’s the kind of thing that looks very context-specific, until you see a larger pattern,” she said.
Things get very ugly, she noted, and the overlapping crises of Trump, Covid, and looming climate collapse have produced extreme anxiety. Under siege, many leaders cling more tightly to their hold on power, she said, “taking shelter in professional nonprofit spaces because they think clinging to a sinking ship and hanging on as long and strongly as possible is the best bet they can make for their own personal survival.”
THREE YEARS OF post-Trump tensions crashed head-on into a pandemic lockdown and the uprising following the police murder of Floyd. Progressive organizations convened meetings to work through their response, and, like at Guttmacher, many of them left staff extremely unsatisfied. A looming sense of powerlessness on the left nudged the focus away from structural or wide-reaching change, which felt out of reach, and replaced it with an internal target that was more achievable. Read more!
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