Reservoir Progs

I t was nearly a quarter of a century ago that someone first told me, “Identity politics will eat itself.” The autophagy is ongoing, it’s delightful, and it’s hilarious.

Conservatives warned that the crybully virus that overtook the campus mindset a decade or so ago would seep into the general population, and we were laughed at. It’s just crazy college kids, who cares about their microaggression jibber-jabber? Now, those kids are pouring out of campus by the millions, and the most demanding, annoying, and hypersensitive among them go straight to work . . . for lefty activist groups. I’m glad they’ve found a suitable home.

The funniest unintended self-parody of lefty grievance-mongering you will read all year is this sorrowful can’t-we-all-just-get-along ode to progressive solidarity by progressive journalist Ryan Grim, published on the very progressive site the Intercept. Grim and the founders of the Intercept are past 30, and their generation sees political struggle as oriented around exterior, society-wide matters such as fighting racism, fighting injustice, and fighting climate change. (Incessant talk of “fighting” is a concept critical to the amour-propre of weedy fellows whose Pajama Boy physiques suggest they’d need to call in the Marines to open a jar of Smuckers.)

However, the young people enlisting in The Struggle are more intent on unionizing their own workforces, firing off complaints to HR, lambasting one another for telling jokes, or failing some arcane intersectional loyalty test. Grim reports grimly on a typical sentiment among those in the “progressive activist space” who keep saying something like this: “I’m now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?’”

The progs have circled up and trained their weapons on one another. They’re reservoir progs.

Jim Geraghty is awestruck by this “progressive grievance parade.” I merely laugh at it. The solipsism of the progressive movement has always been obvious. Conservatives think in terms of gratitude and responsibility, hence we make excellent team players. (Most of us were actual, literal team players at one time or another, since sports are largely a conservative realm.) Josh Barro contends flatly of the infighting, “Organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have various problems, but they don’t have this one.”

The me-first progressives, however, think in terms of their ever-expanding rights. They are fundamentally ungrateful, even enraged, with the way things are. By definition, a progressive always thinks we haven’t progressed far enough, and therefore is always unhappy with the state of things. The youngest progs, having been trained on campus to communicate this way, can scarcely make it through a meeting without raising their hands and announcing, “As a [fill in blank], I feel. . . ” as though their feelings are the most critical issue facing the group, rather than a matter for them to discuss with their loved ones and shrinks.

Conservatives are not only far more likely to do happiness-generating things, like marry and have children, but our happiness also is not dependent on whether someone is starving somewhere or whether anyone is being victimized by injustice. Editorial meetings at National Review are not whine-fests. Nobody ever complains of being triggered. To be a conservative is to acknowledge that the world is an imperfect place, and that understanding is key to being a grownup.

Progressives remain stuck in the angry-young-man stage indefinitely. The most eye-opening example of what Grim discusses on the left is at the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion group that barely acknowledged the Dobbs draft decision leak that would overturn Roe v. Wade and instead concentrated on its internal squabbling about whether to form a union. Like every other lefty-activist group Grim reports on, its escutcheon might as well be changed to “Entitled, Narcissistic Brats.” Maybe Latin would make it sound a little better.

Grim does get one thing wrong, though. He implies that right-wing groups have nothing to do with the turmoil on the activist left. He quotes a leader who says:

I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact . . . Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs.

Oh, but it is a right-wing plot. We designed all this with the aid of the CIA, the Koch Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Everything is going exactly according to plan. Carry on, revolutionistas. Never stop fighting . . . among yourselves.