In Defense Of Groups
Some groups are good, some are bad, some are real, some are fake, but having an ethos is underrated.
Democrats of all ideological persuasions have placed The Groups™️ at the center of their post-election recriminations. There are groups for everything, across the ideological spectrum, but The Groups, with capital letters, are foundation-funded progressive advocacy organizations that specialize in running media campaigns to advance issues and causes.
Backlash to The Groups is widespread but headed by an alliance of ideological moderates and frontline Democrats who believe young, over-educated progressives have too much clout in party politics, and that The Groups themselves drive the party’s toxic image by turning unpopular issue positions into litmus tests for elected officials.
It’s a target rich environment, because there are a lot of groups, and many of them do silly things or advocate bad ideas or engage in expressive-but-not-very-productive forms of activism. So there’s much to be annoyed at and it’s tempting for elected Democrats and their aides to paint with a broad brush. If they can discredit the whole universe of progressive advocacy, they can saw off a large source of intra-coalition friction.
And in the spirit of generosity and fairness, I want to say I agree with many common criticisms of The Groups.
There are too many groups representing too many realms of policy for more than a few to meaningfully advance their causes between election cycles.
For the same reason, there are many such groups that claim to speak for large constituencies that don’t actually speak for many people at all.
Group leaders often view activism as a never-ending ratchet of murder-suicide threats: Democrats better do or say [thing] or we’ll withhold support come election time.
Through this process they generate a ton of bad press for Democrats, both by attacking them to audiences of progressives, and by getting Democrats to do or say controversial things.
Democrats who outsource their thinking to The Groups and their jargon can end up sounding a bit weird, and (thus) easy to mock—a rough political double whammy.
But stipulating to all of that, this lame-duck period has offered us a glimpse of what a modern Democratic Party would look like in absence of The Groups, and I don’t think it would be an improvement. Ideally, Democrats would be an ideologically coherent party comprising self-confident members who understood their values and how to argue for them and when to make tradeoffs and why. A party like that wouldn’t need “groups,” or perhaps they’d have a healthy symbiotic relationship with a smaller set of groups that they worked with constructively—groups that could rally real people, on behalf of causes they believed in and understood dispassionately.
But the Democratic Party we have is not like that at all. In absence of organizations advocating on moral bases, Democrats would take all their cues from public opinion and Republican attacks. In a state of constant retreat, they’d stand for less and less, shedding any organizing principle in favor of a muddled, indefensible agenda.
JUMPING IN THE LAKEN
If you want to know what that world looks like, we’re seeing it take shape right now.