A Progressive Fork in the Road

Are we progressives getting in our own way?

“We were poised for attack, not always in the most effective places. When we disagreed with one another about the solution to a particular problem, we were often far more vicious to each other than to the originators of our common problem.” - Audre Lorde

The world has been in quite a chaotic and violent transition since Trump was sworn in on January 20th. Some of our worst nightmares are coming true. The attacks on DEI are making explicit bigotry come back in style, transgender folks have become MAGA scapegoats, federal efforts to adapt to and mitigate climate change have stopped seemingly altogether, and, overall, the political and legal systems that uphold our democracy are taking a beating. As someone who considers himself a part of a larger progressive movement to push our country and world toward equity, restorative justice, and environmental sustainability, it’s truly devastating to witness communities having to shift from proactive activism to survival mode. The foundations of our somewhat stable institutions are getting demolished.

I’ve been personally affected by this as a federal civil servant. I work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and my colleagues and I have been the target of this administration and DOGE’s efforts to drastically reduce the size of the federal government, including wantonly firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers in the process. The turmoil at the CFPB has been well documented and I’m proud to be a part of a union that has fought tooth and nail to uphold our mission to protect consumers from financial harm, abuse, and deception.

But, honestly, while all of this has caused great personal stress, the actual actions of this administration have not been what I’ve chiefly grappled with these past few months. Sadly, I expected nothing different. Their playbook was given to us. What’s been mainly on my mind has more to do with psychology and ideology than anything. This internal struggle is a bit difficult for me to articulate in a simple and clean way. So forgive my messy attempt to do so.

When I started to write this reflection, I was fixated on the idea of “reframing my values.” In times of turmoil, I tend to dig deep into my values to see if I need to change my thinking about my present reality. The current chaos being inflicted across the world, I thought, was a perfect time for me to do this again, and I have been doing so. However, as I’ve reflected, I realized that right now I’m less concerned about reframing my values and more concerned about how each of us goes about promoting our values to others. I’ve been particularly concerned about those of us with progressive values such as justice and equality — values that seek to end oppressive systems and frameworks such as misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, economic inequality, white supremacy, fatphobia, climate change denialism, xenophobia, etc. I’m concerned about how our actions to promote progressive values may actually work against us. If I had to sum up what has been bothering me in one question, it would be something like this: “Do progressive beliefs and ideals actually get in the way of progressive aims?”

My first couple years of undergrad were when I first started to learn about and understand systems of power — namely, white supremacy, patriarchy, and economic inequality. I attended and got involved in all the workshops, programs, and student organizations that would help cultivate my passion for systems thinking. It was tragically exciting because just a couple years prior, Michael Brown was murdered by police in my hometown of Ferguson, MO, and my community’s response served as a significant moment in the subsequent domination of the Black Lives Matter movement. I needed language to make sense of a system that would allow an unarmed, innocent, young Black man to be murdered without accountability — a moment to reframe my values.

Reflecting back on this period of learning and building my progressive worldview, I recognize that I didn’t always feel the greatest in those spaces I was embedded in. While they were very transformative and inclusive to those with marginalized identities, I couldn’t help but feel an undercurrent of performance anxiety. I didn’t have the language for it then, but if I can retroactively opine on what was happening, I felt like I had to always do and say the right things in order to be accepted. Well, not only to be accepted, but to be trusted. Trust gets to the core of belonging and one’s personal sense of purpose and place in society and community. Feeling that people around you don’t trust you can cause existential angst. This anxious undercurrent has followed me since.

My gut response to this revelation that I often feel performative in progressive spaces was to brush it off. Feeling the pressure of making sure my thoughts and language weren’t oppressive in any way had to be a good thing, right? So what if I intuitively thought some of the framing of progressive activism was a bit myopic and elitist? So what if I thought holding people accountable to the point of cancelling them was a bit silly? There are progressive thinkers, frameworks, and ideas that I simply needed to align myself with, regardless of how it made me and others around me feel. Marginalized people have the right to make people feel uncomfortable for the sake of progress. Right is right! Right?

I believe everyone, include myself, have ways of thinking and mental models informed by oppressive systems. And I fundamentally believe we progress when each of us confronts these ideas within us. However, many of us have been ignoring the negative internal experience that comes with feeling like our language and beliefs are being constantly policed by one another. This feeling is reminiscent of when I used to ascribe to a fundamentalist version of Christianity — if you don’t believe certain things within some theological framework, not only do other believers vehemently try to correct you, but they also will trust you less, believing that you are being deceived by evil spiritual forces. In progressive spaces I’ve been in — not all, but many — there’s a similar set up.

For example, say you are hanging with some of your more progressive friends. The topic of patriarchy is being discussed and you add: “I think men may actually suffer more from patriarchy than women.” Provocative, but you’re bantering. The reason you say this is because you may be thinking about how men can seem trapped to perform in hyper-masculine ways to measure up to a patriarchal system that cares more about men’s domination and power over men’s actual wellbeing. You didn’t say it as a definitive statement. And you weren’t saying men are more oppressed than women, you’re just working through an idea.

Someone in the group responds with something like: “What? How are men more oppressed than women? Patriarchy always coddles men’s feelings and then we wonder why men aren’t changing. We don’t hold them accountable for their misogyny. Now they’re the victim? Please.” Instead of a conversation, the response was a correction. And you may now feel ostracized, not wanting to add to conversations anymore. This is especially true if these are new ideas you are grappling with and learning. I think many Gen Z-ers and Millennials will have a story about either them correcting someone without having a conversation or being corrected about an idea that actually wasn’t all that anti-progressive. I am surely guilty of being a progressive who corrects others and have had moments of feeling like I couldn’t express what I wanted.

In trying to understand if this phenomenon is truly detrimental to progressive movements, I came across this book called Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, written by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman. In it, the authors discuss a concept they came up with called “rigid radicalism.” This idea points to the fact that many of us have taken values that are supposed to make us feel more alive — justice, equality, freedom, inclusion — and subjected them to rigidity, mistrust, and dogma. I say dogma because, as I alluded to before, progressive frameworks and the spaces they are cultivated in can feel like a fundamentalist religion. Proponents believe they know what is truly right, and everyone else is lost or blinded and they have to be converted to their way of thinking. Shame and guilt are used incessantly to bring people to the progressive side.

Now, most progressives don’t think manipulatively and are genuine in their fight and intentions for a better world. But being too dogmatic about what is right and wrong is one our major blindspots. It’s insidious, promoting anxiety and irritating so many people who align with progressive values but don’t want to identify with the progressive movements that shame them. How people are made to feel about themselves is a core part of belief formation that is often overlooked, especially because so many of the most popular progressive ideas come from intellectual places of analysis, research, and academia rather than affective places of community, relationships, and, frankly, real life.

I want to tie these reflections back into the larger landscape of our democratic institutions under attack. While our current political landscape is the result of many different, yet linked, causes — increased political partisanship, the rise of social media algorithms siloing us into ideological echo chambers, billionaire grift — I can’t help but think that a part of the crisis that the larger progressive movement is facing right now has to do with how we treat each other, especially those who probably don’t disagree with us on most things.

I want to make a note at this time that I am not advocating for making space for bigotry. Acts of racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like, that cause clear harm that should be called out forcefully. And I’m aware that even if “problematic” language isn’t linked to a visible harm, it’s a part of a larger system that harms individuals daily. But we have to acknowledge that we often blow out of proportion instances in which someone expresses a thought or opinion not rooted in progressive systems-thinking. We can hold space for the context, history, and sociopolitical forces that shape how people think. And we can be curious about that and approach people who are not explicitly a part the progressive fold by building relationships with them, living in community, sharing our honest thoughts about the world, and valuing their dignity as a person with a complex, dynamic life. I truly believe we bring more people into the fold when we reject being condescending to people we think know less than us and actually recognize that we don’t have everything figured out.

What if we are honest with ourselves about our own complicity in not actually doing the things that truly change hearts and minds, but just attempting to strong-arm people into thinking what we think — even if what we think is rooted in progressive values? While by far not the only reason, I think a part of the backlash against DEI, especially among individuals whose economic struggles are actively getting worse, is that there has been this veneer of progressive wins and increased representation of marginalized identities at the policy level and in the media, but no intentional effort to proliferate progressive ideas in the contexts of community, relationships, and curious conversations.

Though they haven’t completely solved many issues, successful policy reforms enacted this century that promote inclusion, provide housing assistance, curb climate change, combat child poverty, lessen the barriers to affordable healthcare, etc., have helped many communities across the country. But I think we’re starting to figure out that policy change is sustained and undergirded by affecting hearts and minds. While there is much need for policy change, affecting the hearts and minds of people who have as much say in our electoral politics as the rest of us is the harder work. And maybe that’s the work we need to start prioritizing right now, even as we look at the face of fascism and fight hard against it.

What I’ve written here doesn’t fully go into everything I’ve reflected on as it relates to our current social, political, and economic moment. I want to write more about rigid radicalism, ideology, and what we owe each other. I also want to explore some novel questions I have about AI, economic inequality, and community-building that have been informed by my reflections. So, I hope that you stick around, subscribe, and hear me out as I add my thoughts among many about our current moment.