Progressivism, Inc. dropout
I read Michael Lind’s Tablet piece on the end of progressive intellectual life with great interest:
Meanwhile, in one area of public policy or politics after another, Progressivism Inc. has shut down debate on the center left through its interlocking networks of program officers, nonprofit functionaries, and editors and writers, all of whom can move with more or less ease between these roles during their careers as bureaucratic functionaries whose salaries are ultimately paid by America’s richest families and individuals. The result is a spectacularly well-funded NGO-sphere whose intellectual depth and breadth are contracting all the time.
Welcome to my old world. I don't miss it. If I had been more pliable, I suppose I'd have kept my cushy job (what I'd have done with my independent judgment, I don't know...).
I started out in that world in 2012, age 24. I was idealistic, with wide-ranging curiosity as my main qualifier. I couldn't believe I was getting paid to dive into one policy area after another, learn everything I could about it, and write it up. But the very qualities I was praised for early in my career became the very things I was criticized for nine years later: having my own voice and perspective and analysis. Not being willing to give those up. I couldn't deploy the prefabricated language that became expected of me. I couldn't make myself believe in the profundity of empty phrases. We were exhorted to bring our full selves to work—but only the right kind of 'self.' Unable to bring myself to say the right things, I got quieter and quieter.
Meanwhile, what had drawn me to nonprofit work had been quietly and righteously smothered. We went from a curious investigation into what 'is' to an inflexible insistence on what 'ought to be.' I had loved the details, nuances, complexities, the friction that's generated between an idea and the way that idea is lived out in the world. But now everything was meant to be very simple: there was a right side of history and a wrong side.
When Trump won in 2016, I remember expecting layoffs. Surely, the funds that preserved us in our abstract theories of change and CSA boxes and mental health days and vegan lunches would shift back to the basics: healthcare provision, immigration lawyers. Instead, there was more money than ever. Where was all that money coming from? And why did we attract so much of it, when I could no longer describe what my organization even did?
We went from a small nonprofit with fairly practical aims that made small but occasionally meaningful changes to real-world policy to a religious crusade against White Supremacy that accomplished nothing whatsoever in the material realm. But it made some people feel better. And it turns out there was a hell of a lot of money in it.
I am finding it absolutely fascinating that so many intellectuals and academics of integrity are coming out at last. I have always felt myself to be an independent intellectual working on whatever I want without the need to make money from it. In recent years, as you might imagine, my opinions of academia have plummeted as I have watched erstwhile intelligent people throw all standards of reason and logic under the proverbial bus. And I have become increasingly incredulous that I have to take certain positions or claims seriously that otherwise I would ridicule or ignore.
It is as if intellectual life has been taken over by children who want to work everything out for themselves and refuse to learn from those of us who have gone before, who are as far as they are concerned, the big problem - our “cishetero” attitudes are what is standing in the way of their truth. But they have erected nodebate as the pinnacle of intellectual integrity, so nobody learns anything.
But of course we all know the situation to be much more insidious than this. The aforementioned young people are being guided by zealots and ideologues whose agenda is becoming increasingly scrutinised by mainstream common sense and which will surely crumble soon. Surely? Please!!
I am now, I suppose, what would be conservative even though I think of myself as left leaning progressive, simply because I do not believe in rubber stamping ideas that are popularly considered to be the "most progressive," which they are not. They are knee-jerk reactions to the far right conservatives because that's what our political discourse (using the term quite loosely), has become. The most frightening thing to me is that the country may never return to reasonable, thoughtful, critical thinking around any issue but especially the transgender ideology and lobby. In Michigan, what we are seeing is the worst example of policy being undermined by our divided politics where the extreme right is saying all the seeming "right" things (to me) about grooming children and sex based sport but using it as a weapon of their agenda to bludgeon the far left and to rile their religious base and undermine women's rights. And the left has decided that they must retort and speak and act in direct opposition to the right instead of urging intelligent conversation about the spectrum of issues that encompasses transgenderism and go through the complex examination of it to discern what is the best course of action in policy to protect civil rights and human rights for everyone, not just the trans community. They are all pretending that it's a black and white problem which helps no one involved, least of all women and girls whose rights are being chipped away at incrementally.