"It's Your Fault I Am Unhappy"

Activism and leftist ressentiment

The Intercept, which was once a rather important investigative journalist outfit and has for the last few years become a salivating lapdog of American imperialism, just published an extremely tepid yet nevertheless important piece regarding the effects of ressentiment on the left.

Of course it’s not actually narrated that way. If you read the piece (you probably have much better things to do with your time unless studying the self-destruction of the American left is something important to you), you’ll instead see a meandering long-form essay that sounds like it’s been edited by multiple cultural sensitivity committees. Entitled “Elephant in the Zoom: How Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History,” it details the utter internal chaos at several large American left-aligned non-profit groups due to “cancel culture.” Keeping in mind that the American left isn’t really what we’d call left in the rest of the world, and that many of the groups mentioned are hardly anti-capitalist, the situations it cites regardless are typical also for more radical groups there as well:

So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bullshit that it’s had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver,” said one organization leader who departed his position. “It’s been huge, particularly over the last year and a half or so, the ability for groups to focus on their mission, whether it’s reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change.”

“My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife.”

This is, of course, a caricature of the left: that socialists and communists spend more time in meetings and fighting with each other than changing the world. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election, and then Joe Biden’s, it has become nearly all-consuming for some organizations, spreading beyond subcultures of the left and into major liberal institutions. “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops,” the former executive director said. He added that the same portion of his deputies’ time was similarly spent on internal reckonings.

As I said, the article itself is quite tepid, and the framing by the reporter is maddeningly incoherent. Whenever he begins to draw more than scant attention to the ideological formations fueling the internal strife, the reporter then quickly assures the reader that all those concerns (patriarchy, white supremacy, gender inequality) are deeply valid and must be addressed, even going so far as to write that he probably doesn’t even have the right to write the essay:

For a number of obvious and intersecting reasons — my race, gender, and generation — I am not the perfect messenger.

Again, The Intercept piece reads as if edited by committee, which of course might just mean the committees in the reporter’s head, each telling him that he is not doing enough to elevate marginalized voices and interrogate his white privilege. He’s attempting to write about how cancel culture and call outs paralyze radical movements while being paralyzed himself by every potential fault in his writing that might lead he himself to fall victim to the very same thing.

Of course, that’s exactly how you’d have to write about it for a news organization which itself has been essentially captured by the same ideology he’s writing about. The Intercept for years has spent more digital ink writing from that very framework than they have doing the explosive investigative journalism they once did. Unsurprisingly, there’s even a recent essay defending Chesa Boudin, explaining how criticism of him was baseless and anyway organized by conservatives.

What happened to The Intercept is the same thing that happened to the other organizations the reporter cites in the article: in the years after Trump’s election, they all abandoned their core values because they believed there was a rising fascist threat in the United States that must be stopped at all costs. The situation at the ACLU is probably the best known one: an organization which for decades fought for the principle of free speech suddenly found themselves arguing against free speech when it was employed by people they didn’t like.