Activist Insanity Is Killing the Left

The recent activist implosion is a microcosm of a bigger problem

I recently wrote about an insane bit of left-wing activist drama. A tour, called the unfuck America tour, was designed to cart around some of the most influential Gen-Z activists to debate on college campuses. However, it imploded completely because the person organizing the tour was accused of a microaggression. Everything about the meltdown was idiotic. Dean and Parker, two of the most influential political advocates of my generation, groveled before an audience of tens of thousands, spoke profusely about the importance of taking accountability, and managed to sound superhumanly repulsive and sycophantic. They apologized for not throwing the tour under the bus quickly enough, in response to mere allegations of microaggressions.

Insane wokeness, which was thought to have disappeared after 2020, was dredged out of the abyss, just in time to imperil left-wing activism and make members of the left look completely insane. The entire drama was filled with endlessly discussion of deconstructing biases, lines like “this apology isn’t for you if you are white,” and “white people need to be uncomfortable a little bit more often.” The person accused of a microaggression hadn’t even behaved badly—she had just stood up for herself when the tour was criticized, and the people whom she stood up to herself against happened to be black.

In response to an article like the one I wrote, there are two sorts of critical responses one can have. The first one involves defending the cancellation on its merits. This would hold that blowing up the tour over an alleged microaggression was really a wise and strategic action, and that there’s nothing to complain about. To the best of my knowledge, no one took this route in responding to my article.

But there’s a second route that was much more common. This criticism holds that though the meltdown was idiotic, covering it is blowing it out of proportion. While occasionally left-wing organizations have ridiculous trainwrecks, this is a rare event. When it happens it’s covered endlessly just because of the spectacle, but there’s no need to make hay out of such a minor issue.

I think this complaint is dead wrong.

First of all, it’s not as if the unfuck America tour drama occurred with some no-name activists. The people involved are hugely influential. Dean and Parker are hundreds of times more influential than I’ll ever be. Millions of people watch them regularly and take their political ruminations seriously.

Thus, it’s silly to object to the drama that they’re involved in on the grounds that it’s not that common. It’s affecting some of the most influential members of my generation—people with enormous influence! Presidents getting blowjobs from interns is also presumably not very common, but people still seemed to think it was a big deal when it happened with Bill Clinton. Even if things are not statistically common, they can still be important when they happen, so long as they happen to people of enough renown.

But the more important problem with this objection is that the factual claim on which it rests is straightforwardly false. In fact left-wing activist meltdowns are unnervingly common. An article by Ryan Grim details just how frequently left wing activist drama imperils the efficacy of activist organizations. Grim notes that many different activists were “using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice.”

In other words, activist organizations arise with some political aim in mind—perhaps to combat police violence. But these organizations have a problem: they’re filled with woke people! Such people constantly launder workplace grievances using the language of social justice. Because the entire organization is filled with people who are both deeply personally litigious and extremely sympathetic to complains wrapped in the cloak of social justice rhetoric, any interpersonal drama becomes filtered through the prism of social justice ideology. If someone’s rude or expresses an opinion that another doesn’t like or the activists feel there’s an unfair pay disparity, they’ll blame it on racism or some other sort of prejudice. If anyone white is in positions of power, this is seen as deeply unfair, and lower-level staffers make complaints like the following:

“If your reproductive justice organization isn’t Black and brown it’s white supremacy in heels co-opting a WOC movement,”

This hasn’t just happened to a few activist organizations. It’s happened to basically all of them. Grim furthers:

That the institute 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.

This internal infighting ends up wasting an extraordinary amount of time. One activist, in the wake of 2020, said “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife.”

This is fairly shocking. Left-wing activism has been reduced to total paralysis, not by external saboteurs, but by overzealous internal activists. It would be like if almost every conservative organization couldn’t function because a group of rogue sedevacantists kept raising personal grievances under the guise of conservatism.

The problem of over the top left wing insanity isn’t just a talking point of the far right. In fact, those like me who are on the left should most want these practices to be expunged. Not only have they torpedoed the effectiveness of left-wing activism, reducing it to a muddle of personal grievance and infighting, they’ve also succeeded in making the left look totally insane.

It isn’t just me who commented on the unfuck America tour meltdown. So did Charlie Kirk—and he had a good laugh about it. If you’re politically influential and you act completely insane and woke your behavior is likely to be reported on.

The more left-wingers act like this, the harder it is to win elections. Wokeness, while not the only reason Kamala lost, was certainly a contributing factor. And this was despite a stringent effort to pivot to the center. Republicans ran ads of her endorsing gender affirming care for illegal immigrants, which is so insane that it sounds totally made-up—but she actually endorsed it during the 2020 election.

But it isn’t just the behavior of politicians that make it hard to vote for Democrats. Many people commenting beneath my article about the unfuck America tour said that part of the reason that they didn’t vote for Democrats was because the Democratic party is filled with insane people like Dean and Parker. Now, I obviously don’t think that people should vote this way. One should vote on policy, not on how personally unpleasant left-wing activists are. It’s idiotic to vote for a guy who attempted a coup and enacted foreign aid cuts that will kill millions because some activists on the other side are annoying.

But even though this is irrational, unfortunately lots of people reason this way. If left-wingers act like insane and overzealous woke maniacs, people will be quite hesitant to agree with them politically. The woke are just about the most hated group in America. Woke activist meltdowns that castigate normal people for totally permissible speech aren’t irrelevant internet bullshit—they, and similar events, are a major reason why the Democratic party is losing elections.

To return to the sedevacantist analogy, imagine if right-wing sedevacantists took over much of the Republican party. They got Republicans to say insane things, like that the present pope is the antichrist. They had a few high-profile public fights, where they castigated mainstream Republicans for not going along with ridiculous sedevacantist norms. Voters, repulsed by the sedevacantists, flock to the Democrats in droves. At some point, it would be reasonable to say: the Republicans have a sedevacantist problem! In fact, this wouldn’t be a problem for Democrats—it would help Democrats that the right is acting insane.

Similarly, in a world where woke activists derail almost every activist organization and so thoroughly repulse the median voter that millions of extra people vote for a man as politically dangerous and personally immoral as Trump, it’s reasonable to say: Democrats have a woke activist problem! This is a great gift for Republicans—they don’t need to do any work to make their opponents seem completely fucking insane.