Speaking Out

 One of the most dearly-cherished myths of my liberal upbringing was that of the ultimate importance of "speaking out." When confronted with the history of twentieth century regimes that degenerated from democracy to autocracy, it was common to ask: why did it happen? And the simple answer always came back: "because people didn't speak out." 

When we read in our history books about the collapse of liberal democratic governments and their replacement with totalitarianism, we often wondered: "why didn't anyone speak out?" I guess we assumed that if anyone had, the terrible event could not have taken place. Pastor Martin Niemöller had said as much: "first they came.... and I did not speak out": the implication being that if he and others had spoken out, it would have made the difference. 

Niemöller's famous words disclose a profound moral truth—but only a partial one. They are one man's reckoning with his own complicity; but they are not the story of every German or every inhabitant of a totalitarian regime. Because, of course, plenty of people did speak out. It's not like everyone was silent and oblivious. It's just that those who did speak out were imprisoned, exiled, deported, or ultimately murdered. 

The same has been true in every authoritarian society. The fact that democracy collapses does not mean no one sees the fall coming; nor does it mean no one marched in support of democracy or declaimed its virtues while it was fading out. 

As the Russian pro-democracy activist Nadya Tolokonnikova noted in a 2020 op-ed about how Putin dismantled Russian civil society, people saw what he was doing ahead of time and protested against it as it was unfolding. "You get angry, maybe you speak out," she observed. But the outrage itself may not have any effect. It may not be possible to sustain it—or even if it is, sustaining it still may not make any difference. In the meantime, you also "get on with your life."

This is the same bitter lesson we are all having to learn in this country. The last six years should have taught us—if nothing else would—the futility of asking "why didn't anyone speak out?" in the face of ascendent anti-democratic and illiberal forces. In writing the history of our time, I hope that future historians will record that we did speak out. Marches, protests, speeches, essays: the multiform epiphenomena that went under the heading of the "Resistance." 

It just doesn't mean we stopped it from happening. So many people saw what Trump was doing from the start: how he employed demagogic tactics to turn a relatively conventional center-right political party into a vehicle for his personal lust for power. How the Republican party was transformed into the MAGA machine. How Trump ultimately fulfilled our worst predictions and tried to overturn the results of a democratic election, and is still seeking to undermine the democratic process today. 

We protested against it. No one can say we were silent or did not "speak out." But it happened anyway. 

Of course, to anticipate a tired point, Trump is not precisely the same as Putin or any twentieth century despots, because no situation is perfectly analogous to another. But the point is that the main conservative political party in the United States has become the sort of far-right identitarian, nationalist, antidemocratic political movement that would have been unthinkable in a mainstream participant in a Western democracy prior to 2016. And it's not that we didn't see it happening before our eyes or try to call attention to it. It's just that our efforts failed. 

And once one has accepted that "speaking out" is not the panacea for our political ills, one begins to entertain an even darker possibility: namely, that "speaking out" was part of the problem. That by protesting and being outraged, or by doing so in the specific manner we chose, we were unintentionally playing in to the hands of the enemies of democracy. 

A successful autocracy, of course, that has dismantled all rival centers of power in society, will simply try to crush and stifle the opposition, such that any "speaking out" after that point becomes an act of heroism and self-sacrifice. But while they are still only in the ascendent, illiberal forces may actually find it useful to have the "outraged progressive" as a foil. 

I was thinking about this the other month, as I watched the careening escalation of right-wing political rhetoric during the nation's baby food shortage. At some point in this news cycle, the MAGA movement became aware that the Biden administration was buying infant formula (as they should and must) to feed immigrant children confined in Border Patrol holding cells, and they decided that this was an opportunity to turn the whole thing into an anti-immigrant talking point. 

Within hours, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, various other MAGA Republicans, and right-wing personalities on both social media and traditional outlets were essentially calling for the U.S. government to withhold food from immigrant children in detention. Since many of these individuals also embrace mandatory family detention, the implication of their position was the the United States should cage and then starve to death infants whose parents crossed the border seeking asylum. 

Watching Republican xenophobia metastasize before my eyes into increasingly explosive and genocidal rhetoric, I felt called to "speak out." I took to Twitter. I poured out my wrath and scorn. At a certain point, Rep. Elise Stefanik went on the platform as well and accused those of us venting our fury of being "pedo grifters." Everyone expressed their outrage about that as well. 

And at some point in this cycle, one realizes that one is doing exactly what the Abbotts and Stefaniks of the world want us to do. The only purpose of Abbott's press statement on the matter, for instance, was not to execute an actual policy—it was to elicit precisely the sort of reaction from people like me that I was giving him. It was to show that he could rile up the libs and thereby burnish his image with his own MAGA base. 

Illiberal movements don't always fear people "speaking out," therefore. Sometimes, they welcome it, if it comes in the right form from the right person, and confirms a narrative they are already pushing. Of course, in a society with a robust political center, politicians often fear the outrage of voters. But when a society has become sufficiently polarized, they may actively court the outrage of certain segments of the opposition. For someone like Abbott or Stefanik, to be able to outrage someone like me—a coastal liberal working for a progressive non-profit—can only prove to their base that they must be doing something right. 

I'm reminded of an episode in Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible—a series of journalistic sketches of life in Putin's Russia from the early stages of his ascent to autocratic power. Pomerantsev notes that, in this phase of Putin's autocracy, the regime's attitude to the media was not always overtly repressive. In some cases, rather than crushing the opposition, they preferred to channel it in directions that served their own propaganda. 

Pomerantsev describes working for a left-wing publication catering to the urban intelligentsia, for instance, called Snob. The magazine was permitted to direct broadsides against the regime and discuss various social issues—such as LGBTQI+ rights—on which Putin had taken a reactionary stance. Were they allowed to do so because the regime was not actually as repressive as people said? Or, Pomerantsev wonders, was the publication permitted to continue because it was in fact serving Putin's goals in a round-about way?

After all, did the title of the publication not make clear right away that only "snobs" cared about issues like these? Did it not confirm exactly the stereotype of Putin's liberal critics—that they were only a handful of out-of-touch urban intellectuals who hold everyone else in contempt—that the regime wished to convey? And if Putin outrages people like that—if he pisses off the self-righteous "snobs"—then isn't he doing exactly what the Russian people put him in office to do? 

I am of course not wishing to conclude from all this that liberals should stop speaking out or withhold our true opinions. I am saying that endlessly seeking to amplify our own perspective, without regard for how it will come across to people outside our own social orbits, how it is communicated, or whether it is presented in a form likely to persuade the not-already-convinced, is woefully insufficient—and maybe even counterproductive. 

In recent years, after all, many progressive advocacy organizations have turned away from trying to convince the uninitiated. This was not—as is sometimes supposed—a mere indirect consequence of people in NGOs speaking into their own echo chambers for too long. It was actually a deliberate strategy, and the arguments for pursuing it seemed unimpeachable. As a staff member of a progressive advocacy group, I formulated, delivered, and believed such arguments myself. 

After all, many of the old-school "persuasion" tactics that people used to deploy in campaigns targeting the "median voter" often seemed to amount to throwing someone else under the bus in order to advance one's preferred short-term progressive cause. You could get the public to care about "Dreamers," for instance—but only by playing up the narrative that it "wasn't their fault" that they came to the United States, portraying them as the antithesis and passive victims of their undocumented parents, who did decide to cross the border. Using this argument may have allowed for the creation of DACA, but it subsequently made it harder to win support for the rest of the 11 million undocumented in the United States. 

(A similar dynamic in climate negotiations: many environmental NGOs at one point backed carbon trading as a compromise measure to clear green legislation, even as many Indigenous groups internationally opposed the scheme as likely to undermine their land rights.)

In 2016, after the Trump election, people turned on this strategy. I was one who did so. We said: first of all, throwing people under the bus was always morally bankrupt. But secondly, it was a strategic mistake too. By selling out some members of your potential coalition, you weaken it. You turn off those who otherwise might support you. You reduce your own numbers and harm no one but your own team. And wasn't the ultimate proof of the strategy's failure to be found in Trump's election? 

So, instead of trying to convince people who hate us anyway, by offering to trade away elements of our own agenda if they agree to work with us, we should simply focus on keeping the whole progressive coalition together by working in tandem for everyone's rights and everyone's issues. This was the strategy that came to be known as "intersectionality." Progressive organizations should be advancing all progressive causes at once, because—the thinking went—a fully mobilized progressive base, of which no member felt thrown under the bus—would be numerically stronger than any opposition. 

Now, six years later, we have come full circle. The backlash to the intersectionality strategy is in full swing, and it is no coincidence that it is happening while Democrats are once again nominally in charge of government. Once progressives are no longer solely in the opposition, the question of whether and when to compromise or undertake "persuasion" efforts aimed at the political "center" becomes less academic. And we are beginning to see certain flaws in the apparently airtight logic of the argument above for cross-movement solidarity and intersectionality. 

Part of the problem is that requiring people to sign on to the entire progressive agenda in one go is likely to alienate more people than it attracts. The world is full of people who might be willing to support one progressive cause in isolation, but aren't ready to buy the whole package. If we tell those people in so many words that their support is unwelcome, tainted by their suspect loyalties on other issues, we will never have majority support for any of our initiatives. After all, how much of the country—truly—already supports every aspect of the progressive agenda? Maybe 2%?

Whereas if we welcomed people's support for one cause and trusted that it might over time (as it so often will, if unimpeded) become a gateway or wedge issue that leads them to a broader social consciousness, we might actually gain new adherents. 

Related to this is the simple problem of electoral math (as William Galston and Elaine Kamarck argued in a strategy document published in February). It may be the case that there is a relatively stable Democratic majority than can be mobilized in every national election, but—crucially—this is not the same thing as a stable progressive majority; nor is the majority of votes in the popular election, sadly, what matters to win elections under the U.S. constitution. What matters is who gets Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona. The truth is that swing voters in purple states, therefore—however few of them there may be left—do still decide elections. 

And so we do have to make some effort to persuade people who consider themselves in the political "center"—not just to hypothetical people who are already signed on to the full progressive agenda and just waiting to be activated and mobilized. 

A growing awareness of this problem and a consequent disillusionment with the progressive solidarity/intersectionality strategy is an undercurrent in several recent articles describing inside turmoil at progressive NGOs. A piece in Politico describes how a number of environmental advocacy nonprofits embraced an intersectionality strategy, only to alienate some long-term supporters. Many people who join these organizations as members or donors, after all, are single-issue environmentalists. If they are told that they need to devote equal time to other causes that they may not fully support, the organization will face attrition. 

So too, in a widely-shared article in the Intercept, the unnamed leader of a progressive NGO observed that: "Unrealistic expectations about what could be achieved through the electoral and legislative process has led us to give up on persuasion and believe convenient myths that we can change everything by 'mobilizing' a mythological 'base'." 

In other words, people had embraced the arguments I laid out above: persuasion is unnecessary, and it is better to lose some "centrist" supporters by being too left-wing than to undermine one's own strength by alienating members of one's own progressive coalition. But now they are discovering what I too had to learn the hard way: the progressive coalition is not big enough to win in the absence of outside support; nor is it located in the right states and districts to make the electoral difference. 

The result, according to both the Politico and Intercept articles, is that progressive advocacy groups have been conspicuously absent or ineffective at the very time they are most needed: when constitutional reproductive rights are being dismantled, involuntary birth is about to become the law in many states, the government's power to issue climate regulations stripped away, and the basic institutions of democracy threatened as seldom before by an ascendent American far-right.

At the very moment when progressive advocates need to be most active—persuading the unconvinced, gaining new supporters, making the case for their position to the U.S. public—they are instead talking only to themselves—using a lingo and requiring as condition of membership a full catechism of progressive ideology than only a handful of acolytes can recite in full—and those mostly people already employed as staff at progressive NGOs. The effect on outside observers, as a growing number of commentators have noted, is off-putting and deeply counterproductive to the Left's political goals.  

But okay, so if the solidarity/intersectionality strategy doesn't work, then whose issues should we sacrifice? Whose rights should we put on the chopping block for the sake of a progressive victory? Who wants to be first in line? Or who wants to tell us which of our comrades ought to be sold out? Any takers? 

"Compromise" is easy to advocate for in the abstract. It's the detail of the deal where opinions start to differ. I cited with approval Bill Galston's generalized plea for an electoral persuasion strategy focused on winning over moderates, for instance—yet when he offered a more concretized proposal for putting it into practice in a subsequent op-ed, I was appalled. It turned out that one of the issues Galston thought we should compromise on was the asylum system (specifically, he endorsed legislation seeking to extend Title 42). And that is of course one of the things that I think should be least negotiable of all. 

A strategy I was prepared to endorse in general terms was far more difficult to swallow when applied to the rights I saw as most fundamental and most important. And if I feel this way about immigration policy, I of course have to accept that this is how every part of the progressive coalition feels about its own core issue area. This, each of them says, is the one thing we can't budge on. Here I stand; I can do no other. 

And so if we can't cede ground on any substantive matter, and yet we are starting to become aware of the inefficacy of our own strategy, all we are able to do is to keep going from the force of sheer inertia. The Intercept article cited above portrays a movement of zombie organizations lurching forward through galvanic impulse operating on dead tissue. The employees of the NGOs Ryan Grim interviewed for the article seem to feel that they have no real hope of achieving anything, so they have no choice but to simply repeat themselves. 

Grim quotes one NGO leader on his sense of burnout: "I got to a point like three years ago where I had a crisis of faith, like, I don’t even know, most of these spaces on the left are just not — they’re not healthy. Like all these people are just not — they’re not doing well." Grim attributes this generalized malaise to a collective loss of confidence, starting in 2016, in our own ability to make substantive change. He writes: "A looming sense of powerlessness [...] nudged the focus away from structural or wide-reaching change, which felt out of reach[.]"

What is really happening here, I posit, is that people in progressive organizations have crossed what Milan Kundera calls (in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting) "the border"— a psychological threshold which separates activities done with a sense of purpose from the same activities performed out of a sense of rote obligation, mechanical repetition, sheer force of habit—without any real belief in their efficacy. 

Left-wing leaders are despairing of their current strategies, we see. But in the absence of a new strategy, and with all the formerly-tried alternatives on the table (throwing people under the bus, compromising on core values and human rights) seeming morally intolerable, what option do they have other than to keep doing the same things over and over again, even without any real belief that they will accomplish anything? 

Exacerbating this inertial tendency, Grim notes, is that many NGOs don't have a lot of internal or external incentives to explore more effective ways of working. As Grim puts it, paraphrasing an interviewee: "The reliance of so many organizations on foundation funding rather than member donations is central to the upheavals the groups have seen in recent years [...] because the groups aren’t accountable to the public for failing to accomplish anything, as long as the foundation flows continue."

The result is that we soon find ourselves on the other side of Kundera's "border." Our outward behavior hasn't changed. But our internal conviction has gone cold. We say the same things, write the same way, advocate for the same policies, make the same points, but without any real sense that we are acting to any purpose. (Kundera specifically conceived of this border as a state of disillusionment with political action, of the sort Grim's interviewees seem to describe, noting the number of dissidents and exiles in his circle who were theoretically willing to die for something, but only by force of habit. They had long since crossed "the border.")

How is one to ever break the cycle of repetitions? How does one step back onto the other side of "the border" and recover a sense of purpose in the work of progressive advocacy? 

Plainly what is needed is some path to take that isn't just a previously-tried dead end. We need to find ways to persuade and communicate our positions that don't just rely on the hackneyed old arguments that threw other people's rights under the bus. We need to promote our policies without attaching them to compromise proposals that sacrifice core values and human rights. And we need to do all this without expecting to awaken a progressive majority that never existed and—if it did—does not hold sufficient electoral power in key swing states and districts to decide the fate of elections, no matter how "activated" and "mobilized" they may be. 

We need, in short, to "speak out," but not simply for its own sake. We need to speak in a way that will be heard by people who don't already agree with us, but who are open-minded enough to be brought over to our side. 

How to do this without invidious compromise? Well, first off: we need to realize that compromise and openness to alternative viewpoints are not the same thing. Meeting people where they are, as a communication strategy, is not the same thing as meeting people half-way as a policy matter. If we believe that our maximalist policy proposal is indeed the best one, we don't necessarily need to give up on it. But we do need to be able to explain to someone who is not already convinced why it is the best one. We can't just treat all skeptics as presumptively acting in bad faith and still expect them to come around to our position. 

Of course, some people are acting in bad faith. Indeed, it is one of the most tragic ironies of the Trump/MAGA era that at the same time we are realizing just how many members of the Republican party really are racist, really are crudely power-hungry and grasping, really are would-be fascists and white nationalists just waiting for the chance to show their true colors—it is becoming clear as well that the only way to ever defeat this strand of the Republican party is to retain our faith that not all voters currently outside the progressive fold fall into this same category. 

Yes, there are agents of chaos and destruction on the other side, but if we are ever going to build a winning majority coalition to stop them, we need to recognize that they don't speak for all Republicans, swing voters, independents, or conservative Democrats. There are people of good will in all those categories who are still open to being convinced. The task ahead of us as a movement is to learn how to tell the difference between the two and make our case to the latter. 

To do so, we can't just start by polarizing our own position and that of our opponents into their most extreme forms. Being a member of the pro-choice movement, for example, shouldn't require believing that a fetus has no moral value whatsoever in the womb; nor should we believe that everyone who has qualms about abortion is an unpersuadable and unreachable reactionary. The reproductive rights movement has to be broad enough to include people who have moral concerns about aborting a fetus, but who also don't believe that women should be forced to give birth against their will or that the criminal law should be mixed up in medical decisions. 

This is a lesson I need to learn as much as anyone else. The fact that there are racists and xenophobes in the anti-immigration movement doesn't mean that everyone who has questions or concerns about a more open immigration system is a closet racist. I may not be open to trading away asylum rights for anything, but I also don't have to shut down and dismiss their concerns. In short, the immigration movement has to be broad enough to include not only people like me, who support some version of an open borders system of monitored but unrestricted cross-border transit, but also people who want to maintain parts of the system of restrictions we have currently, but who believe in a fair process for asylum-seekers, robust refugee resettlement, and a path to citizenship for the undocumented. 

One could go down the list of progressive issues and perform a similar analysis for each. It will be a queasy exercise, because it will involve making a plea in each case to include and welcome people with whom we differ, and whose opinions may strike us as insufficiently advanced. We need to welcome them regardless—above all for simple numerical reasons: all the progressives on Twitter in the world, no matter how passionately exercised we may feel, will not swing a key district in Wisconsin. But also we should do so because it might turn out that they have a valid point that we should consider. 

And if they don't, why should we be afraid to interact with them? And if we fear our own beliefs in their most extreme form cannot survive direct contact with theirs, how much stock do we really put in those beliefs ourselves?