Why Did the Groups Change?
And how can they either get sane or fuck off?
Much of the dialogue on the left right now is about “The Groups” — left-leaning Washington nonprofits — and how they pushed the Biden administration left and then called it a racist failure anyway. Matt Yglesias, Adam Jentleson, and Ezra Klein have given their accounts of what happened, and I think those accounts are largely correct. I had first hand experience with the dynamic they describe, as I held the post of Lowest-Ranking Member of the Obama Administration1 until early 2014. And I can confirm that back then, The Groups had agendas, but they could be satisfied. They were not yet behaving like a stripper stringing along some pathetic guy, nor was the administration metaphorically throwing $100 bills on stage thinking that just a little more money would make the stripper fall in love.
We all agree that things changed. But why did they change? That’s an important question if Democrats want to avoid past mistakes. I wish I could point to one simple explanation — I wish I could say “someone spilled a bucket of Woke Moron Sauce in the DC water supply circa 2015” — but of course it’s not that simple. There were impactful decisions on top of broad cultural shifts with causal arrows going in all directions. Still, I think I can point to three things that pretty clearly had an impact.
The first is the growth of left-only spaces. I’m talking about social media first and foremost — if the monoculture was on life support in the early 2010s, then around that time, social media walked into its hospital room, unplugged the machines, put ten bullets in its head and then burned the body. In much the same way that Fox News created a new type of right-wing freak, people who existed in this new, hellish blue bubble came to believe that their views were obviously correct and universally held. Which is why many activists believe that they represent a broad-based popular movement, when they actually represent a type of person that most of America would like to throw down an elevator shaft.