Andrew Yang versus the unrepresentative activists

Andrew Yang versus the unrepresentative activists

New York City Mayoral candidate Andrew Yang speaks at the "Rally Against Hate" in Chinatown on March 21, 2021 in New York City.

(Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

It detailed negative opinions of Yang from the writer Sarah Jeong, the Asian American Feminist Collective, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, and Desis Rising Up and Moving.

The author of the piece, James Walsh, writes that “for many in New York’s Asian communities, his prescription — more police funding — reads like a glib response to a deep-seated societal ill,” and that the NYPD’s Asian Hate Crime Task Force is “contradictory to the nascent defund-the-police movement, which has been gaining momentum since the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.”

If read as a literal piece of reporting, Walsh’s article is spot-on. Asian activist groups in New York see anti-Asian hate crimes through a lens of intersectional anti-racist politics that commits them to be good allies to defund-police activist groups. Therefore the idea of doing anything to bolster the NYPD’s hate crimes task force is anathema.

But the whole tone and structure of the article suggest its purpose is to criticize Yang for blowing off these activist groups. However, I think a more important point about Yang versus the activists here is that it reveals — and not for the first time — that progressive identity-oriented activist organizations often have very little connection to the groups they purport to represent. You can listen to these groups if you want to. But if your purpose in listening to them is to understand how certain communities are thinking about specific issues, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Progressive activist groups aren’t representative

Back in her 2004 book “Diminished Democracy,” Theda Skocpol details a structural transformation of American civic life. Once upon a time, politics featured a number of influential membership organizations — typically big federations of local chapters whose leaders were, in some sense, accountable to rank-and-file members. Today’s labor unions play that role to an extent. But non-labor membership groups have nearly vanished, and labor itself is greatly diminished.

Instead, a lot of political work is done by professionally managed organizations that are typically based in D.C. and funded by a handful of large donors and foundations.

Slightly confusingly, Skocpol’s book has been influential among many of the donors to these groups, which has encouraged some of them to create Potemkin membership structures. But even when they theoretically have members, they’re not actually Skocpolian membership organizations. They’re not funded by dues, and their leaders are not elected in a bottom-up process.

And in order to not strawman here, it’s worth saying that democratic accountability is not an unalloyed good. Precisely because labor unions are more democratic and accountable than most progressive activist groups, Randi Weingarten — the very reasonable and politically savvy President of the American Federation of Teachers — is often pushed in the direction of some of her constituent union’s weirder and more unhelpful ideas. That’s exactly why funders don’t like democratic accountability. The Asian American Feminist Collective prioritizes allyship with other progressive activist groups over the question of what Asian American women think or want. AFT is more accountable and therefore a more quarrelsome and more difficult ally in a way that is sometimes counterproductive to important goals.

Sometimes, the push for non-representativeness can be very aggressive. In his dissertation, Devin Fernandes reports that in the early days of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), it was based in San Antonio and the whole Board of Directors was made up of Mexican-American lawyers. But after a couple of years of operation, the Ford Foundation, which was MALDEF’s major funder, called for changes. That started with a new executive director, but more broadly, Ford’s idea was that MALDEF needed to be less Mexican-American:

Second, the review panel called for pulling the organization’s headquarters out of San Antonio, suggesting that it be relocated to Washington, DC “or some other important central city” and kept out of either of “the two main centers of [the] Mexican-American population,” disqualifying Los Angeles as well. Third, they called for a rebalancing of the board. They noted that it was “comprised almost exclusively of Mexican- American attorneys, mainly from Texas” and needed more geographic and occupational diversity. More astonishingly, they advised that it should be “reconstituted to include at least one-third non Mexican-American membership with attention being given to Anglo-membership” (Campbell, Pincus, and Stewart 1970).

The MALDEF people accepted most of these recommendations but pushed back on the idea of relocating to D.C., feeling it wouldn’t be credible to have a Mexican-American organization based in the Northeast. They eventually compromised on San Francisco which “would allow them to continue being a ‘Southwest’ organization despite having few Mexican Americans, internal documents noted, a fact that also had its advantages.”

This whole dynamic reflects a very 1970 mentality, and modern-day foundation program officers have different priorities than this. But Fernandes’ account is a valuable case study of a basic tension that remains today. Ford funds MALDEF because it wants to do Mexican-American political organizing — but it wants that organizing to reflect Ford’s vision, which means the group needs to be somewhat insulated from the views of actual Mexican-Americans.

Activist groups don’t deliver their constituents

Of course, groups that are not representative could nonetheless be influential in delivering the votes of the constituencies that they claim to represent.

But something we keep seeing is that this is not the case. For a good case study here, I strongly recommend Astead Herndon’s February 2020 article “Elizabeth Warren Has Won Black Activists. She’s Losing the Black Vote.”

There’s no politician in America who’s more closely aligned with what Skocpol calls “the non-profit industrial complex” than Warren. This cluster of progressive groups is not exactly “the establishment” (in the sense of lobbyists, revolving door types, etc.), but like Warren herself, they were sufficiently embedded enough in establishment politics that they didn’t want to back a longshot rogue operation like Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign. Then the Warren 2020 campaign was supposed to be the moment of triumph for this bridging sector of Democratic politics — displacing the establishment with a counter-establishment of academics, think-tankers, and activists.

And it worked very well at winning Warren the loyalty of (mostly white) college-educated liberals. But it also worked well at securing Warren a kind of rainbow coalition of college-educated liberal activists of many ethnicities. It’s just that Warren-endorsing groups like Black Womxn For turn out to neither reflect the views of Black women nor be influential in shaping the views of Black women. Most African American voters turned out to be moderate, electability-minded Biden supporters, and those who were not turned out to be mostly younger, anti-establishment Bernie supporters.

Julián Castro, after a successful career in San Antonio politics and the Obama cabinet as a fairly mainstream Democrat, decided for some reason to run a very Warren-esque presidential campaign, and for his trouble ended up flopping massively with Hispanic voters. This is a younger group than African Americans, so it was a Sanders demographic in the primary, but then (famously) a decent slice of conservative-minded Latinos defected to Trump in 2020.

Yang is winning handily

Andrew Yang, similarly, has become the frontrunner in the New York City mayoral election, not despite criticism from activist groups, but precisely because he has adopted normal popular opinions like “groups suffering from rising crime need more police protection.”

He’s not just in first place overall, but he has a commanding lead with Asians and a sizable one with Hispanics as well.

An Emerson poll says the same thing.

Now is Andrew Yang a good choice for mayor? I have my doubts! He has no public sector experience, doesn’t strike me as having any particularly big ideas for solving New York’s big problems, and I all-around continue to feel comfortable thinking that the lesser-known Kathryn Garcia would be a better choice.

But what’s striking about Yang is how effortlessly the combination of “he’s well-known” and “he avoids toxically unpopular left-wing ideas” has let him leapfrog past people like Scott Stringer and Maya Wiley who’ve spent years (if not decades) trying to climb the greasy pole of progressive niche politics.

And the thing about this is we are talking about a primary election in New York City, not a statewide race in Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Florida. If this style of politics doesn’t have purchase there, where does it have purchase?

The progressive blob

The answer, I think, is it serves as a cudgel that works internally in fairly elite progressive spaces.

One reason is that white progressives now operate in the context of a set of deference norms that lead them to seek out questionably representative activist groups as powerful bludgeons. Instead of one white progressive agreeing to disagree with another white progressive, the winning move is to find some activist entity that agrees with you and use that to say that the other person has an obligation to shut up. Here’s what Indivisible’s national leaders told their local members last fall about why they had to stick with the slogan “defund the police” rather than adopting some more palatable message:

3. Why say “defund” instead of [insert option here]? We hear you. During such a contentious time in our history, it might seem like we should be prioritizing strategic language at every turn. The thing is, allyship is about listening to the people who are most profoundly affected and taking their position seriously. Defunding the police comes from Black and brown grassroots organizations, like Movement for Black Lives’s (M4BL), who are rightfully at the forefront of this fight for justice. The #DefundHate Coalition, spearheaded by immigration rights organizations at United We Dream and Detention Watch Network, relates their own mission to cutting funding for ICE and CBP to defunding the police in solidarity with Black lives. As a white-led organization, it is not Indivisible’s place to make suggestions about how Black and brown activists are expressing their demands. We want to participate in the conversation, but it’s not our place to reframe it to be more palatable to the masses to people of color’s lived experiences.

Of course one reason these groups support each other is they have overlapping sources of financing. The same Ford Foundation that got MALDEF out of San Antonio backs the Detention Watch Network and United We Dream and decided to make a major investment in the Movement for Black Lives in 2016.

It’s hard to pull at these threads without starting to sound like a crazy conspiratorialist or something. Which I am not.

My only point is that these groups tend to not only lack actual members, but their staff and boards are an interlocking web of progressive nonprofits. For example, one of the co-chairs of CAAAV, Dennis Chin, is also the Director of Strategic Initiatives at a group called Race Forward. He’s also co-chair of Gay Asian Pacific Men of New York. Race Forward itself has a distinguished board composed overwhelmingly of people of color involved at high levels with various progressive organizations, but its chair is Lori Bezahler, who is also president of the Edward Hazen Foundation which, in 2009, “adopted a new mission statement making structural racism the central framework and focus of our work.”

One thing you see with that Schenectady group is the tension between representativeness and an aim to create what I guess you might call maximum intersectionality. The boast that an org is “majority LGBTQIA+,” after all, suggests either that it’s not very representative or else that you’ve simply adopted a version of LGBTQIA+ that is sufficiently expansive as to be fairly trivial.

You see something similar in the widely quoted undocumented immigrant advocacy group United We Dream which boasts that “over 60% of our members are womxn and 20% identify as LGBTQ.”

Just as Black Womxn For turned out not to speak for very many Black women, the mere fact that United We Dream is talking about “womxn” suggests a certain aloofness from grassroots politics.1

Understanding what normal people think is good

Equis Research did a big slide deck about Latinos in the 2020 election that makes a lot of points, but one of the most important ones is this kind of basic presentation they did about partisanship and ideology. The key point here is that while Latino Democrats massively outnumber Latino Republicans, most of those Latino Democrats self-identify as moderate or even conservative.

You should always be cautious about whether or not you really know exactly what other people think ideological labels mean. But there’s wisdom in the baseline reality that the marginal Latino voter self-identifies as conservative in a way that Hispanic activist groups generally don’t.

Hakeem Jefferson wrote in 2020 about the diversity of Black views on issues that is also relevant here:

Take Black Americans’ attitudes toward two issues for which they are often thought to have uniformly liberal preferences (especially in comparison to white people): crime and welfare. It turns out, Black public opinion is much more complex. On the question of whether spending on crime should be increased, decreased, or kept the same, 84 percent of Black respondents said that spending should be increased. And when asked the same about welfare spending, 28 percent of Black respondents agree that spending should be decreased while only 31 percent adopted the more liberal view that welfare spending should be increased.

This diversity in Black Americans’ preferences — not to mention the conservative bent on some of these key issues — suggests we should be wary of claims that the “Black community,” as a whole, supports any particular party’s policies.

Maya Wiley, the preferred NYC mayoral candidate of the progressive non-profit world, has been struggling, so her campaign started taking big shots at Yang including having her spokesperson refer to him as a “mini-Trump.”

Twitter avatar for @katieglueck

And I do think there is an important similarity between Yang and Trump, namely that Trump ran in 2016 by blowing off elite conservative attachment to free trade and “entitlement reform” to deliver a brand of politics that was better at catering to the base and also won over some swing voters. The key insight they share is that even in today’s polarized world, normal people are more polarized on affect toward the other party than they are on specific policy issues. So there’s an easy opportunity for “outsider” figures who are well-known to sort of waltz in, brush off the activists, and appeal to normal people.

What’s interesting to me is that so far, you don’t see very many career politicians copying that approach. At a certain level of politics that makes sense. To get from local office to statewide office, being well-liked by elite co-partisans is very, very helpful. But I think Castro would have done much better in 2016 if he’d run as “like Joe Biden, a former member of the Obama administration, but young and energetic and Hispanic.” And I think it’s odd that Kamala Harris doesn’t try harder to do some populist stuff around immigrant patriotism or a little light mockery of the most laughable Bay Area progressives. Once you reach a certain level in the game, the activists don’t have any more power over you, and in fact fighting with them can be a good way to elevate your profile and emphasize your popular ideas.