Against Activist Mission Creep
Recently, the New York City Pride organizers told an organization for gay police officers they were not welcome at the city’s Pride parade. The move comes as a form of solidarity with the protests against police brutality, especially of black and brown people in the United States. The organizers say they want “to create safer spaces for the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities at a time when violence against marginalized groups . . . has continued to escalate.”
On the one hand, NYC Pride is a highly progressive group, and this isn’t that much of a surprise for them to adopt a fairly anti-police attitude given prevailing progressive thought. On the other hand, it seems like an odd move for an organization expressly dedicated to celebrating and advancing LGBT issues to exclude LGBT persons because of their occupation. How does it make sense for Pride to exclude LGBT members who want to march?
Metastatic Social Justice
A couple other instances provide a similar pattern:
A YIMBY (Yes In My BackYard) housing organization makes a stand on Israel/Palestine
The Sunrise Movement, nominally a climate organization, advocates for a Federal Job Guarantee
A domestic violence organization shares this graphic about Israel/Palestine
There’s a common theme here. Organizations that appear to be single issue advocacy groups are increasingly commenting and taking stances on issues outside of their narrow focus. Activism is becoming more global in nature – if you are an activist for one cause, you’re expected to speak up about all causes now. It’s not enough to ‘stay in your lane’, you need to be protesting and advocating for all forms of social justice. Pro-choice advocacy is now in your racial justice group. Socialism is in your environmental bills. Your LGBT organization has a stance on Defund The Police and your housing group has a stance on Israel and Palestine. Social justice is metastasizing. (1)
This phenomenon has happened on the right as well – see the NRA transitioning over time from being a somewhat non-partisan group to essentially being an arm of the GOP – but it’s especially striking in the current progressive movement. There’s a real sense in which NYC Pride is no longer an LGBT advocacy organization, but rather an overall social justice organization. That may sound like an exaggeration, but they just kicked out a gay organization (the Gay Officers Action League) to accommodate another form of social justice. It’s the internal logic behind a LGBT Pride march excluding LGBT people.
This type of mission creep in social justice risks stunting the progress on some of the issues that social justice advocates care about.
The Downsides of Mission Creep
The urge to do this comes from a reasonable place. If you care so deeply about an issue that you spend your free time (or your career!) as an activist for that issue, the odds are that you also have strong feelings on many other issues. You’re also likely to live in a bubble of activists and people who think like you, and so your conversations professionally and socially may often center around all sorts of political issues. But as an activist it’s important to remember that most people you’re trying to reach are not like you and don’t think like you. They probably have a thought process closer to this:
The typical voter is over 50 and the typical voter does not have a college degree. They also don’t think about politics all that much. They are far, far away from the mindset of a typical activist. And when they do have political opinions, those opinions are far more varied and haphazard than a committed political partisan would guess. I think a few minutes scrolling the twitter feed of the American Voter Bot is invaluable to understand how voters think. This bot takes real voters and profiles them in brief tweets. While some look as expected – a Democrat who supports gun control, for instance – many look like this:
Most people are a confusing mix of demographic signals, issue positions and partisan identification, and they rarely fit squarely within one political tribe. That’s the danger of turning a single-issue advocacy group into a generalized progressive messaging group – you’ll end up alienating a far wider group of potential allies than you realize. If Issue Group X declares loud progressive positions not just on Issue X but also on gun control, abortion, Palestine, Medicare For All, trans rights, free trade and school prayer, you’re not going to end up attracting a large diverse group of people who care about Issue X. You’re going to end up attracting a narrow slice of progressive activists who are ideologically pristine enough to agree on every issue.
What ultimately results from this is that your issue ceases to be something that people across the ideological spectrum can work together on. It becomes coded as a partisan issue, gets swallowed by the general culture war, and progress grinds to a halt as the red tribe and blue tribe learn to hate each other on this issue as well. As an example, I think by far the most likely outcome of a free trade organization making loud noises on abortion policy is not that they make any meaningful difference on abortion policy. It’s that they alienate free trade supporters with the wrong views on abortion, make free trade a more narrow, partisan issue, and undercut their own ability to make trade any freer. (2)
A Different Path Forward
In an ironic twist, this piece originally planned to hold up YIMBY organizations as a great example of issue groups that didn’t fall into this trap. A few hours before publication YIMBY Action took a public stand on Israel/Palestine (linked above), requiring some edits on this piece. But I still think the YIMBY movement has done a good job in most cases of staying narrowly focused, and that this focus has allowed them great success.
YIMBY is a far more ideologically diverse movement than many people realize. There are prominent conservative YIMBYs, neoliberal YIMBYs, Democratic YIMBYs and many left or socialist YIMBYs (although in true socialist tradition, some want to break away from the YIMBY label and create a sub-label PHIMBY). This isn’t just a feel good story about how conservatives and liberals can be friends – this has a real impact on YIMBYs getting things done. It’s part of why you see both Republican and Democratic officials at the local level working towards YIMBY solutions in different cities, and why those solutions can often pass without bitter partisan warfare. It’s why the YIMBY Act in Congress has Republican and Democratic co-sponsors, and a good chance of actually becoming law (despite Congress’s ridiculous levels of partisanship).
This sort of thing matters. YIMBYs are a big tent and they’re getting things done. It doesn’t make sense to stress too much about a single statement from a single YIMBY group, but I worry about the general phenomenon of making issue activism more ideologically exclusionary. Activists are people who are trying to make a difference, to change the world in ways big and small. It’s hard enough to change the world on a single dimension, for a single policy or a single issue. Whole movements try for years and still sometimes fail. So single issue groups shouldn’t burden themselves with having the answer to every question, with having a stance on every issue, and with having to be all things to all people. It’s ok to ‘stay in your lane’ and just work on one problem. It’s ok to try to change the world just one issue at a time.
1 – To preempt the inevitable outraged response “Are you saying social justice is cancer?!”, no I am not. Social justice is not cancer, but metastatic is the closest word in my limited vocabulary to communicate the idea of something spreading from an isolated place to many places, quickly.
2 -This is not to say that people shouldn’t have positions on many things – they obviously should. And general purpose organizations can and should tackle many issues at once. This is only to say that it’s not a great strategy for single issue groups to try to become general purpose activists.
