Maurice Mitchell has been involved with several high profile progressive groups including Black Lives Matter and more recently the Working Families Party. Today the NY Times published a podcast/interview with Mitchell in which he discusses one of my favorite topics: The crisis and failure within progressive organizations caused by identity politics.

The touchstone for this topic remains Ryan Grim’s report for the Intercept which was published last June. That story does eventually get a mention in the interview and we’ll get to that. But let’s start with Mitchell’s own take, which he put down in a lengthy essay back in November, on the “doom loop” within progressive organizing.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: At the beginning of your essay, you say, “identity and positionality are misused to create a doom loop that undermines the effort to build political power.” Can you take me inside this doom loop? Can you give me an example of what it looks like? what have you seen?

Maurice Mitchell: Sure. So I’ve witnessed identity — whether that’s somebody’s gender identity or racial identity, one’s position, whatever it is — being weaponized in ways that were not useful for the work.

For example, I’ll use myself. So like I said before, I’m the son of Caribbean immigrants. I’ve been in conversations where we would be debating ideas, and then somebody might stand up and say, well, as a Black son of Caribbean immigrants, I think the organization should support candidate A. And then that would move the room in one direction or just shut debate down completely, when —

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: But why isn’t that —

Maurice Mitchell: — the thing that we needed most was to continue the debate.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro: So if I said, as a Latina whose parents didn’t graduate from high school, I think x, why is that a problem? Am I not centering my full self? Am I not saying where I come from so that people can have a sense of — a better sense that my experience informs my opinion?

Maurice Mitchell: It is not a problem, only in how you employ it. Oftentimes, people use that phrase to do the opposite of opening up. People use that phrase to close down and to almost suggest that, because I have these identities, because I’m a Black son of immigrants, that this is a mic drop, and my identity, in itself, establishes the legitimacy of my position, whereas your identity is a jumping-off point that could create greater awareness, more connection, the possibility of deeper curiosity and solidarity.

Oftentimes, people are misusing that.

He makes the point that both he and Justice Clarence Thomas are black, therefore opening any argument with “As a black man…” doesn’t really tell you much. On this point I think Mitchell is absolutely right. Turning identity into a “mic drop” creates a kind of oppression Olympics where how you identify takes precedence over what you’re actually saying.

Mitchell goes on to criticize another aspect of modern progressive culture, which he calls “maximalism.” That’s the idea that everyone must adopt the most morally pure position on every topic:

Maurice Mitchell: So I talk a lot about this idea of maximalism. Oftentimes, we’re arguing the correctness or the moral clarity of a position. And therefore, if anybody takes any other position, they must be morally compromised. They must be selling out.

But there’s another piece of that dynamic. It’s the power that we have in order to achieve that outcome. And of course, we have something less than 100 percent of the power. So we can’t expect 100 percent of the outcomes. So that negotiation, that compromise, is actually not a decision. It is a reality. If you have less than 100 percent of the power, any fight will be a compromise.

Compromise is Politics 101, the most basic concept for living in a society where not everyone is in agreement on fundamental questions like ‘What is the good life?’ or ‘What are the most serious concern we face?’ Even for people who largely agree on those questions, there will always be disagreement about what the most moral, practical, effective approaches are to dealing with problems. The fact that so many progressives believe they have the only acceptable answers to all of these questions seems like a serious problem for them and for the rest of us who have to live with them.

When the interviewer brought up Ryan Grim’s article documenting strife within many progressive organizations, Mitchell seemed to change course and spent the rest of the interview downplaying the problems he’d just raised. For instance:

So rather than play Whac-A-Mole with the different symptoms of maximalism, some of the ways that people misappropriate identity politics or whatever else, there is a unique responsibility, of leadership, to create clarity about what our North Star is, about who we are as a political vehicle, and about the specific strategies that we’re responsible for…

I think what I find unfortunate — and I’ve said this over and over again — the central struggle, the central struggle of our time is the fight against authoritarianism, not the debate, in a workplace, between 20-year-old, recent liberal-arts school graduates and their crotchety 40 or 50-year-old bosses.

In other words, he wants the left to stay focused on the common enemy (the right) and not get distracted with intramural fights within organizations. That’s a nice idea. The problem is that it’s clearly not happening right now. Again, read Ryan Grim’s story. All of the time of leaders of these progressive organizations is being eaten up by internal squabbles. There is little energy is left for doing any broader work.

Mitchell doesn’t seem to grasp the inevitable outcome of his own analysis. I suspect that’s because he doesn’t want to present the problem as insoluble. Doing so would be very bad news for the left in general and very bad news for leaders like himself in particular. But I’m not sure the “doom loop” can be escaped, and here’s why.

Identity politics turns every fight into a grand clash over power and oppression. As such, it’s important and a fight that can’t be sidestepped. The stakes of every fight go up as the identity of every individual is the ante for becoming part of the conversation. No one can disagree with someone’s point or their personal views, instead every disagreement is attacking my identity!

Meanwhile, “maximalism” not only rejects compromise and debate at a fundamental level, it also makes the threshold for starting these internal brawls smaller and smaller. The kids attacking these progressive organizations from within don’t care whether you agree with them 10% or 85%. Unless you are in 100% lockstep, you are part of the problem. And, again, because identity is instantly involved, no one can back down no matter how trivial the grievance may appear.

Maybe some of these folks will grow out of the doom loop in time but there will be more identity politics extremists coming right along behind them. No wonder these organizations can’t get anything done.