“[Moral authoritarianism] covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules… it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them… finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
Intro: Facing our demons
I don’t remember when I started identifying as a leftist. I grew up in a very liberal community. My first political awakening came when I was 13, during a televised debate for the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Out of 8 candidates on the stage, I somehow developed a fixation with Barack Obama, maybe because he was the only one whose hair hadn’t already gone completely white. I wound up knocking on doors for Obama’s primary campaign, playing the cute “I can’t vote so you’ll have to do it for me” shtick.
From that point on, I thought of myself squarely on the left edge of the spectrum. When it came to evaluating candidates, my simple rule was the lefter, the better.
I was probably in college the first time I heard someone claim that the left has an authoritarian streak. I thought this was a ridiculous claim. Leftism, as I understood it, was all about subverting power, lifting up the downtrodden, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Describing some head of state as a “left-wing dictator” seemed to be a contradiction in terms; either they weren’t a dictator, or they weren’t left-wing.
I do remember when this started to change. My first conscious encounter with an authoritarian impulse on the left came a couple years after I joined the animal rights movement. Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), the first activist group I joined, taught me what true solidarity and shared purpose felt like. It was intoxicating. My first two years in DxE were a utopian vision. To this day I’ve never felt so much hope and inspiration.
Then, one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the bubble burst. A vicious conflict tore through the organization, splitting it down the middle. It was less about any one issue than a hundred little conflicts all suddenly being magnetized into the same direction.
The resulting two factions were roughly symmetrical in terms of the number of people. But they were lopsided in terms of how much work those people had put in to build the organization. The founders, leadership team, and most of the hardest-working people were on one side. The other side was made of people who were peripherally involved, with one or two notable exceptions. There had been mistakes on all sides for things to get to this point. But by the time the split became clear, any hope of resolving the conflict constructively had long since passed.
This was the moment I came face-to-face with leftist authoritarianism. The dissident faction was demanding that the entire leadership team resign, for reasons that most DxE activists and donors alike did not agree with. When it became clear they didn’t have the power to get their way, things got ugly. Instead of leaving to start their own new organization based on their own vision and values, they explicitly decided to focus on tearing the entire organization down. If they couldn’t have it, nobody could.
I know what you’re thinking, reader: surely, this must be an uncharitable interpretation. They must have been well-intentioned. Unfortunately, I can assure you this was not the case. How? Because I was one of them! I was on the side of the mutineers! I actively participated in the group chats where we all convinced each other that DxE had to be destroyed, where we hatched plans to smear the group’s reputation with activists and donors. I even authored the first draft of the big public callout letter savagely attacking people who had been my friends just months earlier.
My first encounter with the authoritarianism of the left was in my own heart. My fellow activists and I were harboring a shadow, a drive for dominance and control that got the better of us when others in our community strayed from our ideals about how things ought to be, how people ought to act.1 That shadow led me to commit what I still consider the greatest error of my career in the movement.
Eventually, I recognized my mistakes. I reconciled with the humans in the conflict and rejoined DxE for several more years. But I’m still working to make it up to the animals.
Part 1: The argument
“The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” – Albert Camus
This conflict shook my activist identity, and my leftist identity. It was frightening to realize how easily the same activist energy that has enabled me to protest extreme forms of animal abuse could be turned against my friends and colleagues for much more minor transgressions. I made a promise to myself that I would never get carried away like that again.
Eight years later, I’m not done learning from that story. I’ve seen almost identical situations play out over and over again in other grassroots activist communities, yet I’ve been powerless to make them turn out any differently. These conflicts keep activists divided and weak, and I believe they are one of the most urgent issues we face.
There is an authoritarian streak inherent to the identity of leftist activists. We have correctly identified certain rules and moral boundaries that would greatly increase the level of justice in the world. But organizing our identity around these rules has made us overeager to make and enforce rules in other aspects of life. In part 1 of this essay, I’m going to lay out that argument in depth. Then in parts 2 and 3, I’ll back it up empirically.
1.1 Which wolf will you feed?
Inside every progressive activist are two competing forces.
The first one sees everything that is wrong with the world and is consumed with a desire to fix it. At first, this attention is turned out at the wider world, but it inevitably comes to focus on the people we are around day after day in our activist community. This side of us is the rigid radical. Every time the rigid radical sees the world falling short of its ideals, its fists clench and teeth grit together a little tighter. Eventually, it will explode.
The world will always fall short of your ideals. No amount of power can change that. The most all-powerful dictator would never be satisfied. Thanks to the narcissism of small differences, the more we succeed in making other people act like us, the less willing we are to tolerate disagreements.
The only thing that can keep the shadow of rigid radicalism in check is the other force: joyful militancy. (I’m borrowing these names from Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, whose book of the same title I’ll be discussing in part 3.) For the joyful militant, it is privilege enough to be working to make the world a little better, and to be part of a community of people working to do the same, however imperfect.
The battle between rigid radicalism and joyful militancy rages constantly, and the fate of our movement hangs in the balance. Our ability to collaborate with each other, our credibility with the public, and the efficacy of our political demands are all threatened by our own rigid, authoritarian impulses.
Across activist movements today, rigid radicalism is winning the battle. Progressive activists’ vision for the world is increasingly defined by rulemaking. The left has always been in favor of more regulation at the government level. But increasingly, this regulatory impulse is spilling over into community and interpersonal life, with strict cultural codes policing words, jokes, dating life, and private beliefs, on pain of cancellation. This has understandably earned progressives a reputation as moral busybodies driven by a desire to control other people’s lives and social interactions.
Vegans are seen as the ultimate expression of this. The general public’s perception goes something like:
First, you wanted the government to pass strong laws regulating business. Fine. But then you started to regulate comedians and tell me what I can and can’t say. Now you want to regulate what I eat?! F*#k off!
The perception that animal rights activism is seeking the ultimate form of social engineering is so pervasive that even the most authoritarian, pro-cancel-culture leftists distance themselves from animal rights, condemning us for trying to control people’s diets. Based on the two years I spent interviewing meat eaters for a public narrative study, I think this is at the root of why vegans are so unpopular. People really don’t like to be told what to do.
1.2 This could be us, but you cancelin’
It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, this perception has it totally upside down. Animal activists are trying to draw the most minimal moral boundary of all: you shouldn’t be allowed to confine and murder someone else for your own selfish reasons.
We are living in a period of backlash against attempts by both left- and right-wing cultural authoritarians to control how other people live. Poll after poll show that most Americans don’t want politics to focus on which bathroom people use or what jokes they tell. This presents an opportunity for the animal movement to seize the moral and political high ground, turning all of this on its head and gaining unprecedented credibility by saying:
Yes, rules are bad. People should not be controlling other people’s lives, and governments even less so. We should set a high bar for imposing rules. Literal violence is one of the only things laws and strong cultural norms should prohibit.
This is not just a strategic position to take. It is the progressive position, the position most likely to lead to the world we want, because it rejects coercive power and domination. Also, because it has the force of truth behind it. Rules and regulations, whether at the societal, community, or interpersonal level, are much costlier than many leftists realize. Excessive rulemaking is an ineffective way to reshape the world, and comes at a high cost that goes far beyond dollar amounts. This is especially true when it involves imposing values onto a population that doesn’t share them. This applies to both written, formal rules like government regulations, and informal rules like the political mores enforced through cancel culture.
At the governmental level, complex legal regimes give rise to governmental and nongovernmental regulatory bodies that quickly become more concerned with perpetuating and expanding themselves than with whatever prosocial purpose they were originally meant to achieve. In fact, they often disastrously undermine their stated objectives. We’ll see this across several realms of policy in part 2, but I’ll focus on one dear to most readers, showing how the largest effect of environmental regulations in the West has been to slow down the transition to renewable energy, costing countless human and nonhuman lives.
Even when regulations don’t backfire directly on the problem they were meant to address, their second-order costs add up quickly. In most liberal democracies, a vast web of local, state, and federal2 regulations have made it unreasonably difficult to build stuff. This is why sprawling chains are replacing unique local businesses; only national (and increasingly, international) chains can afford to jump through the required hoops. It’s why buying lunch in San Francisco costs $12 instead of $4, but that price difference understates the problem because you can’t put a price on the human drives for creativity, spontaneity, and beauty that are being suffocated by our choice as a society to respond to every little problem with a new rule.
Filling the world with rules takes the color out of life, turning it dull and gray. Nowhere is this more true than in the informal labyrinth of social rules governing many activist communities today. They regulate not just edgy jokes and how and when people are allowed to ask each other out, but also which organizational structures are acceptable and how much organic leadership any one person is allowed to exercise. These rules are not written down, debated, and adopted democratically. Nobody can know exactly what they include– that is, until someone decides you have broken them. They are enforced unevenly and arbitrarily via the instruments of cancel culture. This is where rigid radicalism reaches its final conclusion.
1.3 The call is coming from inside the house
Probably the most ambitious thing I aim to show in this essay is that there is a direct connection between the left’s affinity for self-defeating regulation at the government level and its self-devouring moral absolutism at the community and interpersonal levels. Both of these are an expression of rigid radicalism, that shadowy impulse to dominate others lurking at the heart of what is supposed to be a political project favoring freedom over domination.
This domineering instinct is by no means unique to the left; the religious right wants to control who you can marry, which drugs you can voluntarily take, and what healthcare you can access. But we should not deny that this instinct exists on the left, too. It is inherent to activism. Activists are the people who see the gap between how the world is and how it could be and have the courage to do something about it. That spells trouble when we don’t learn to pick our battles.
The radical activist out in the streets and the stuffy bureaucrat sitting behind a desk seem to have little to do with each other. Yet their aesthetic differences conceal a deeper truth: the goal of every activist is to become a bureaucrat, or replace themselves with one. An activist achieves victory when the government takes over enforcement of their issue. And sure enough, many of the activists in successful movements end up working for the government they once protested. Leading AIDS protestors from ACT UP wound up as social workers or patient advocates in the NIH. And after years of chaotic protests led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, the civil rights movement and many of its members transitioned into the new federal civil rights bureaucracy, the plaintiff’s bar, or the burgeoning field of corporate HR.
Being swallowed up by the government is a worthwhile goal for the most morally urgent problems. I certainly hope I’ll live to see the governments of the world banning most common practices in animal farming, or if I’m lucky, outright banning the slaughter of animals.
But when we spend years pressuring governments and corporations to adopt policies, bureaucratic thinking can creep into our worldview. We can start to see all the problems of the world as things that could be fixed with more rules. If we fail to keep it in check, this inner bureaucrat can take over not just individual activists, but entire communities and movements, miring them in a bureaucratic tangle policing each other’s actions, speech, and thoughts.
In order to be effective, an activist must eventually decide to become focused. The military genius Frederick the Great famously said “He who defends everything, defends nothing.” A government that warns about every product causing cancer effectively warns about no product. An activist who wants to force the world to conform perfectly to their ideals by imposing rules on everyone around them will come to be seen as a wokescold by the majority. This is the law of the conservation of moral credibility. In the end, nobody will listen to anything they have to say.
Animal advocates should stop identifying with regulationism at all levels of society. We should accept that we can not achieve a just world via the imposition of byzantine rules, whether formal laws or informal moral strictures. We should become the faction most committed to tolerance and pluralism. We should say, people’s choices to say, do, and be whatever they want should only be restricted in the most extreme cases; an animal’s right to life is one of those rare cases. We should set a high bar for imposing rules on each other, and gain credibility with the public by denouncing rule-mania in politics. We will only win when the world comes to see us as a movement for freedom rather than a movement for restricting freedom.
In the remainder of this essay, I will lay out the empirical basis for this conclusion. Part 2 demonstrates how often rulemaking backfires at both the governmental level, undermining the very goals it was meant to address while causing myriad other harms. Part 3 why this domineering shadow is tied up with activism itself. I’ll do this mostly by reflecting on my own psychological activist journey, with a bit of help from some unlikely sources that helped me make sense of it.
Part 2: The high cost of rules
“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.” – James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
“Cocaine is a helluva drug.” – Rick James
Bureaucracy is the standardization of human interactions. It is the adoption of uniform rules, processes, and standards of measurement that make human cultures legible to central governments. Before bureaucracy, villages within a day’s walk of each other used distinct measurements for the size of a field and the volume of a harvest, and unique strategies for group decision making. But this kind of anarchy is incompatible with a state’s desire to tax farmers and raise money for armies. States overcome this obstacle by replacing local customs with universal standards, and deploying bureaucrats to enforce them. This is a basic ingredient of large-scale modern societies; modernity would be impossible without it.
Few inventions across history have done as much to increase equality of opportunity among humans. It is thanks to bureaucracy that citizens of modern nation-states can expect their lives to be ruled more by law than by corruption, or at least dream that their children may live this way.
However, bureaucracy has its downsides. These go far beyond the notorious headache of spending a day at the DMV3 or the loss of diverse local cultural customs.
Bureaucratic regulations necessarily flatten human life down to a few simplistic dimensions. As complex as modern legal codes are, they don’t come anywhere close to capturing the nuance of our relationships and social interactions. In the past, village elders, priests, and nobles had wide latitude to adjudicate conflicts with all that nuance in mind. Of course, it was all too easy to abuse that power to favor their allies, and it’s impossible to scale it to a city of millions. The price of an impartial judicial system is that judges and juries are bound by strict legal standards determining which aspects of a conflict they may or may not take into account.
Lawmakers and regulators could never capture the complexity of social life. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying. Modernity is defined in part by the proliferation of a vast, ever-expanding system of laws and regulations. In the U.S. alone, more than one million lawyers exist to help citizens navigate this bureaucracy. Despite their length, these laws are often so ambiguous that experts can disagree entirely about what they mean in practice. The remaining 99% who are not trained lawyers cannot hope to understand their obligations under the law.
Modern bureaucracy has not delivered on the promise of a fair justice system, because no matter how detailed you get, you can never legislate a fair resolution to all the different ways humans will come into conflict. And often, the main effect of this complexity is to create more opportunities for a savvy operator to take advantage of the system.
Standardized laws, regulations, and bureaucracy are necessary to the functioning of a modern society. But all these rules come at a high cost. Lawmakers and political activists face choices about which problems to resolve with regulation. Let’s consider three reasons that progressive lawmakers and activists should exercise much more restraint when deciding whether or not to create new rules:
Regulations often backfire in unforeseen ways.
Regulations spawn corruption, creating double standards that can be exploited by well-connected insiders at the expense of everyone else.
Regulations suffocate humanity’s capacity for spontaneity, creativity, and beauty. They make our world gray and dull and prevent us from having nice things.
We’ll first examine each of these at the societal level, when governments adopt formal (that is, written) laws and regulations. In part 3, we’ll turn our attention back to the internal dynamics of social movements, especially the animal protection movement, and see the same consequences playing out on a smaller scale with informal rules.
2.1 Environmental regulations are destroying the planet
I have spent a lot of time in the climate movement. I and most of my friends have been arrested numerous times for protesting the oil and gas industry, from board rooms to construction sites. I once spent 36 hours chained to the underside of a speedboat parked in the driveway of a construction site for a tar sands oil pipeline in rural Minnesota.
If I knew then what I know now, I would have focused my protest energy on a different target: the United States National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, aka NEPA.
NEPA was a keystone victory of the early environmental movement. Originally, it was a modest piece of legislation requiring federal agencies to consider and publicly disclose the environmental consequences of “major actions.” They would have to publish a short Environmental Impact Statement addressing how the project would degrade the local ecosystem. (Climate change was not on the radar back then.)
Congress has not touched the NEPA in 56 years. Yet five decades of executive orders and court rulings have morphed it into something that would have been unrecognizable to its drafters. The bill created the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) as an advisory panel on environmental issues inside the White House. Today, the CEQ is a de facto regulatory agency with oversight over every infrastructure project in the country, because issuing permits came to be classified as a “major action.” Environmental Impact Statements became encyclopedic studies costing millions of dollars and four to eight years or more. Every statement must exhaustively analyse hundreds of factors and respond individually to thousands of public comments, all before any construction takes place.
If that were all, it’s possible that NEPA could still be net positive. But the worst impact comes in litigation filed after the Environmental Impact Statement is complete. The creeping expansion of rules under NEPA has created endless ways for neighbors of infrastructure projects to object. Court battles waged pro-bono by environmental nonprofits add further years and tens of millions more dollars to the costs that developers must pay to find out whether they can even start building. Naturally, knowledge of these obstacles stops many projects ever being proposed in the first place.
You might be thinking: all of this sounds like the point of environmental regulation. If NEPA can block wild lands from being gutted for lithium mines and delay pipelines, coal power plants, and highway expansions, that’s a win. We need to protect more habitat and burn less fossil fuel. But here’s the thing: NEPA doesn’t just apply to fossil fuel infrastructure. It also applies to renewable energy infrastructure. And as it stands right now, solar, wind, and nuclear plants all face higher rejection rates under NEPA than oil and gas projects.
The key reason for this is that NEPA only weighs the environmental costs of a project, not its benefits. Lithium is a key mineral for electrifying and decarbonizing economies; global production will need to increase tenfold by 2040 to sustain the transition to renewable energy. The richest known lithium deposit in the world is located in Maine, USA. Yet as things currently stand, it will never be dug up due to NEPA and even stricter local regulations. Leaving this lithium in the ground will cause billions more tons of carbon to be burned into the atmosphere. It also outsources lithium mining to other countries with weaker environmental protections, such as Bolivia, whose rainforest biome is home to far more animals and stores far more carbon than Maine’s.
As a tool for evaluating environmental harm, NEPA is like diagnosing a sick patient with only a microscope. At a time when our most urgent environmental problems are global in scale, it focuses only on the harm to the surrounding area.
NEPA is a central reason that solar and nuclear are not already the cheapest energy sources in most US communities. It is actively tilting the energy market in favor of fossil fuels.
In this regard, NEPA is not unique among environmental laws. Court challenges under habitat regulations have become the biggest stumbling block to renewable energy development across most of the developed world, including Canada, the UK, and the EU. Back in the U.S., Democrat-controlled California has long been the home of the environmental movement. It’s also the fourth-largest economy in the world, giving it both the means and the motive to lead in decarbonization. Yet as of 2022, Republican-controlled Texas was generating almost three times as much renewable energy as California. From Jerusalem Demsas:
Texas has become the nation’s renewable-energy powerhouse. This didn’t happen because Texas Republicans are deeply committed to fighting climate change; it happened because, in Texas, infrastructure projects are easier to build—something that can’t be said for a lot of the country, including in states led by Democrats who claim to prioritize the climate crisis.
If NEPA and its local equivalents are slowing down the decarbonization of our economy, the cost of these regulations can be measured in deaths of humans and animals alike, especially in the global south. Based on how much the price of solar and nuclear energy have dropped, we now know that society would have replaced fossil fuels with renewable energy even if pollution and climate change had never been motivations. To see this in action, simply look at China. China is leading the world in green energy, installing more renewable capacity in 2025 alone than the entire rest of the world has added up over all time (including 2025). Their buildout has been driven, not by an altruistic environmental movement, but by market forces and a straightforward regulatory environment.
It would be good to push Western countries to make that transition sooner. But the actual laws the environmental movement has gotten passed are doing the opposite of that. It is entirely plausible that the harmfulness of NEPA and other environmental regulations4 more than makes up for all the good that the environmental movement has ever accomplished in terms of protecting habitats and combatting climate change.
This is not a small thing. This is a huge thing. This is a halt-and-catch-fire kind of revelation. The environmental movement literally might have been net-negative up to this point because of a short-sighted approach to regulation.
It would be one thing if the mainstream environmental movement had woken up to this disaster and announced, “Holy shit, these regulations backfired! We need to repeal them as soon as possible!” But this is not what has happened. Instead, environmental nonprofits are often the plaintiffs challenging renewable energy projects in court. The Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Earthjustice have all led lawsuits to block major renewable energy installations, along with dozens of local environmental organizations.
This would be like if animal rights activists were the main funders of the opposition campaign against the most ambitious farmed animal protection law ever passed. (Oh, um… that happened.)
Why are environmental nonprofits leading the charge against renewable energy? That’s a perfect segway to our next point.
2.2 Regulations feed a parasitic nonprofit-industrial complex
When the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world, it became a case study in the very best and very worst of what governments can accomplish. The great success story was Operation Warp Speed, a massive effort coordinated by the U.S. government that successfully produced not just one, but three effective vaccines against a novel virus in 5 months and 25 days.5 This was an unprecedented feat of technology proof that even in the U.S., the government can still do amazing things.
The greatest failure was, well, everything else. Lockdown policies were disastrous and dubiously effective. Downright dishonest communications from government leaders fueled anti-vax sentiment domestically and globally. And the logistical rollout of the vaccine was fumbled at every opportunity. Much of this was due to political leaders trying to make themselves relevant by inserting rules into the project where none were needed. But at least an equal amount of harm came from the nonprofit industry: the ecosystem of activist organizations, unions, and special interest lobbying groups that make a business out of the regulatory state.
Patrick McKenzie was a completely ordinary California citizen who found himself at the center of the Covid vaccine rollout after pulling an all-nighter with some coder friends on Discord to solve a coordination problem that had flummoxed the government and multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies. From there, he witnessed just how corrupt the nonprofit industry can be. If you are in the mood to get very angry, I highly recommend Patrick’s interview on the Dwarkesh Podcast or his 27,000-word writeup of the entire story. Either one is worth your time and probably one of the most revealing stories I’ve ever read about how the government actually works. It’s relevant to animal advocates beyond just the topic at hand.
For now, I want to highlight one part of the story. When the first covid vaccine gained emergency approval, more than 70,000 people were dying worldwide every week. Getting the vaccine out to the most at-risk people as quickly as possible was the single most urgent problem in the world. There were, of course, not 8 billion doses of the vaccine available immediately, so they had to be rationed.
Take a moment to think: how do you think that rationing process should have worked? In an ideal case, who would make the decision, and how would they make it?
[Waits for you to think…]
Here’s what happened instead, from Patrick’s account:
California, not to mince words, prioritized the appearance of equity over saving lives, over and over and over again, as part of an explicitly documented strategy, at all levels of the government. You can read the sanitized version of the rationale, by putative medical ethics experts, in numerous official documents. The less sanitized version came out frequently in meetings.
This was the official strategy.
The unofficial strategy, the result the system actually obtained, was that early access to the vaccine was preferentially awarded based on proximity to power and to the professional-managerial class…
Consider ‘essential workers’, a concept that predated the availability of the vaccines. If you weren’t on the Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers list, you were at risk of being locked indoors and suffering economic damage, to say nothing of being deprioritized for the vaccine, and so clearly your lobbyists were very bad at their jobs. You should have had better lobbyists. The essential workers list heavily informed the vaccination prioritization schedule. Lobbyists used it as procedural leverage to prioritize their clients for vaccines. The veterinary lobby was unusually candid, in writing, about how it achieved maximum priority (1A) for veterinarians due to them being ‘healthcare workers’.6
Teachers’ unions worked tirelessly and landed teachers a 1B. They were ahead of 1C, which included (among others) non-elderly people for whom preexisting severe disability meant that ‘a covid-19 infection is likely to result in severe life-threatening illness or death’. The public rationale was that teachers were at elevated risk of exposure through their occupation. Schools were, of course, mostly closed at the time, and teachers were Zooming along with the rest of the professional-managerial class, but teachers’ unions have power and so 1B it was. Young, healthy teachers quarantining at home were offered the vaccine before people who doctors thought would probably die if they caught Covid.
Now repeat this exercise up and down the social structure and economy of the United States.
There were literal and metaphorical passwords to get priority access to the vaccine. Non-intended use of them was rampant. Stories, often told in whispers, of widespread corruption in administration of the vaccines (‘Donate $10,000 to a nonprofit hospital and get scheduled for a shot immediately’, ‘Learn a password from your brother in the FBI and . . .’ ‘Be a friend of the governor and . . .’ etc) led to crackdowns. Elected officials held press conferences to promise that unauthorized healthcare was public enemy number one.
This led to the worst of all possible worlds.
Healthcare providers were fired for administering doses that were destined to expire uselessly. The public health sector devoted substantial attention to the problem of vaccinating too many people during a pandemic. Administration of the formal spoils system became farcically complicated and frequently outcompeted administration of the vaccine as a goal. (Emphasis added)
Lives were sacrificed by the thousands and tens of thousands for political reasons.
Together, the stories of the NEPA and the Covid vaccine rollout demonstrate a fundamental fact about complex regulations. Regulations require bureaucracies to implement. But as soon as these bureaucracies are created, they take on a life of their own. Both the institutions and the people in them pursue their own logical self-interest, which more often than not is at odds with the stated purpose of the regulations.
In a word: regulations create corruption. And the more complex regulations become, the more opportunities for corruption they create.
Progressive activists are not unfamiliar with the idea that government agencies can become more concerned with expanding and enriching themselves than with the public good. The largest and most sinister instance of this is the U.S. military. The United States is one of the most geographically blessed countries on Earth. Vast oceans separate us from every other military power on the planet; fending off a military invasion would be a trifling affair. Add in our abundant farmland and natural gas deposits, and even if the entire rest of the world fell into war, the U.S. might hardly notice. Why, then, does the U.S. spend more on weapons and soldiers than the next 15 countries combined?
Anyone who’s been inside a Washington, D.C. metro station can tell you.
The DC metro is full of ads for military hardware: not just trucks but fighter jets, bombs, and missile defense systems. This might seem like an odd thing to advertise, since most riders on the subway are not on the market for multimillion dollar weapon systems. The more you think about it, the more disturbing it gets, on so many levels. Are members of congress really making military appropriations decisions based on subway ads? Does the chair of the Senate appropriations committee Susan Collins see this ad and think, “you know, we do need a few more joint light tactical vehicles!”
The point is that any fifth grader can understand how the wheels of U.S. military appropriations get greased. More than half of the Department of War budget is paid to private sector defense contractors, creating an industry worth $500 billion annually. Those contractors turn around and donate tens of millions of dollars to political candidates from both parties– as long as they don’t make a fuss about increasing the defense budget every year. Military bureaucrats see their prestige increase proportionally to the budget increases they can secure for their branch of the armed forces, and win promotions accordingly. This military-industrial complex doesn’t exist to protect us from the threat of small, minimally-developed countries on the opposite side of the world. Just the opposite: we invade those countries because we need something to do with our globe-spanning money printing machine.
The military-industrial complex isn’t full of people who get excited about the idea of blowing up weddings in the Muslim world for its own sake. It exists because it’s profitable. Given that, we should expect a similar situation any time lawmakers and regulators are making decisions with financial consequences.
The flows of money and power in the nonprofit-administrative complex are a bit more complicated. But they’re worth understanding. This complex usually kills fewer people, though as climate change worsens, NEPA could give the military a run for its money.
Regulatory agencies and nonprofit organizations, like for-profit companies, need money to survive and grow. Regulatory agencies get money by convincing lawmakers that a problem can only be solved with more bureaucrats. Nonprofits get money by convincing donors of the same, or by winning lawsuits. These incentives are orthogonal to their stated goals. Thus complex regulations give rise to a sprawling industry of nonprofit organizations, specializing in lawsuits and lobbying, subject to perverse incentives with at best a tenuous connection to pursuing the public good.
While these nonprofits grow in response to complex regulations, they are also subject to plenty of regulations themselves, as I quickly learned the first time I formed a nonprofit. Regulations essentially require activist organizations to bureaucratize more and more the larger they grow, limiting our ability to experiment with innovative organizational structures. Of course, given the bureaucratic, rule-making tendencies I’m pointing to in this essay, most activist groups would probably tend towards bureaucratization on their own. Either way, the cost is the same: as organizations grow larger, they trade the agility of a scrappy startup for the heavy machinery of HR departments, legal retainers, and layers of middle management that the system expects and requires of them. With all this overhead comes a paralyzing aversion to risk. Bold, disruptive tactics that might actually change the world are vetoed by general counsel to avoid liability or silenced by development directors fearful of spooking large donors. The organization becomes rigid and self-preserving, an end in itself, where the primary goal shifts from creating impact to sustaining the payroll.
Teachers’ unions are technically representing their members when they lobby aggressively for teachers in their 20s sheltering at home to get Covid vaccines before the sick and elderly. Even if this is outside the scope of what most people picture when they cheer for a teachers’ union, it’s not actively working against the union’s purpose. But does all this really explain why environmental groups are suing to block solar farms?
I think it does. The rules governing the creation and litigation of 900-page environmental impact statements act as a full employment program for environmental lawyers, consultants, and nonprofit staff. The institutions are incentivised to fight every imperfect solution even when the benefits to the world massively outweigh the costs. If they win a lawsuit, the court may award them attorney’s fees, and they can tout the victory to their donors. Every opportunity to lobby for even more complex regulations is both one more thing to brag to donors about and one more way to win future lawsuits. (Perverse incentives don’t cover the whole story here; there’s also a psychological aspect we’ll come back to in part 3.)
We could try to imagine a world where environmental nonprofits win revenue according to a strict determination of how many carbon emissions they prevented. But that is not the world we live in. The Sierra Club blocking solar farms isn’t corruption in the sense of taking bribes. It’s the institutional equivalent of a surgeon who unconsciously finds reasons why every patient needs surgery. These organizations evolved to feed on litigation and regulatory complexity, not to solve climate change.
This pattern repeats itself across every category of regulation. The resulting dysfunction is suffocating our planet, our culture, and our private hopes and dreams
2.3 Regulations are devouring the things that make life worth living
Reader, I have a somewhat embarrassing confession. See, I have some skin in the game with this essay. At the start, I mentioned my early political awakening. But the truth is that through my mid 20s, politics was basically a LARP for me. I had never been affected by any of the contentious political issues. I was not a woman who had to worry about access to abortion. My family was economically secure growing up and could afford to send me to a state college without loans.7 I knew I’d be on my parents’ healthcare plan until 26, and I wasn’t exactly thinking that far ahead.
Like most people in their mid twenties, I didn’t own much and I had never tried to build anything. From that vantage point, it was easy to cheer on rules and regulations that would keep other people in check. After all, people who own houses and start companies are all Republicans, so they deserve it.
What changed is that I bought a house and started a (nonprofit) company. Yes, you should roll your eyes at this. Maybe that’s not enough: you should put a big dunce hat on my head and drag me through the streets, Cultural Revolution style.
To be clear, I don’t think my sin was updating my understanding of political issues based on firsthand experience. I think my mistake was forming strong views in the first place without firsthand experience or thoughtful, well-researched reflection.
The breaking point was when I wanted to build a sauna in my back yard. I wanted to do this because I am a slut for heat: hot springs, saunas, hot yoga, you name it. Being uncomfortably hot melts all my problems away and is the only time I’m not secretly thinking about all the animals in factory farms. My one selfish dream since I was a little boy was to own a sauna so I could use it every night with all my friends. So I rented out all the other bedrooms in my house to animal activists, and I saved up the money for three years. Then came the hard part.
The plan was to order a prefab sauna kit and assemble it ourselves. All the complicated work was done by the manufacturer; the only fussy part would be supplying it with electricity from a dedicated high-voltage circuit.
I talked to an electrician who told me I’d need an expensive permit from the city’s building department. I thought, “That can’t be right, this project is too small for a permit.” So I popped over to the city website and confirmed that indeed, this was incorrect: I didn’t need one permit. I needed dozens of permits, costing thousands of dollars, to assemble a mass-produced sauna kit in my own back yard. I would need to hire a licensed architectural engineer at a rate of hundreds of dollars an hour to draft a complete architectural plan for the already existing sauna kit to prove it was structurally sound. Then I’d need to pay for inspections addressing everything from the aesthetic impact of a sauna (in my fenced backyard) to something called the “Stormwater & Flood Management Plant Investment Fee Calculation Form.”
That last one is illustrative. It’s not hard to imagine the reasonable-sounding conversation where that regulation was introduced. The area I live sometimes gets flash floods, and ground area that is paved over decreases the soil’s ability to absorb water. Fortunately, some regulator had been smart enough to realize that a 36 square foot structure was not a flood management issue and had set the threshold for requiring this permit at structures about 100 times larger. Unfortunately, some other regulator had decided that as soon as a structure requires an electrical permit, it should require literally every single other building permit in the city code, no matter how small.
I could tell similar stories about the hoops we had to jump through to do the most basic things while running a nonprofit. Making it more difficult to start and run a charitable organization means less charitable activity happening across society, especially at the small, local scale where the costs of complying with regulations becomes prohibitive.
People across the political spectrum agree that our goal should be for everyone to be able to afford to buy a house if they work and save for a while. Likewise, nobody is against the idea of $4 lunch bowls. And our communities will be more vibrant and joyful if people can build things like saunas in their yards, coffee shops in their driveways, and small nonprofit organizations in their communities.
These are nice things that we want to have. The question is why we don’t have nice things like this currently. It does not take much earnest digging to find out that overregulation is a huge part of the answer.
First, housing. Housing in American cities is too expensive. There are many reasons for this, but the largest reason very simply is that there are fewer places to live than people who want to live. And the reason for that is onerous regulatory schemes, especially zoning laws, stopping housing developers from developing more housing. Just think: if housing is so expensive in all these cities, someone could get really rich building a bunch more of it. Nobody does. And the reason is that they can’t.
In some places, including my hometown, voters and their chosen representatives are very open about the fact that this is intentional. They just don’t want more people around, especially the undesirable kinds of people who inhabit affordable forms of housing. They’ve largely succeeded. In 1924, a person could rent a room in the heart of America’s largest cities in a hotel-style Single Room Occupancy building, with shared kitchen and bathroom, for an inflation-adjusted $230 per month. That style of housing is now simply illegal in major cities, most of which have been governed by Democrats for decades. It didn’t get banned all at once, mind you, but died by a thousand regulatory cuts. (Important note: in this case, it is modern progressives leading the charge to deregulate housing, and the wealthier/liberal/centrist/whateveryouwannacallit wing of the Democratic party digging their heels in. This whole thing about regulation isn’t a liberal vs. progressive thing.)
Now for lunch. Why do I keep mentioning lunch? From Abi Olvera:
In Japan, workers rely on healthy lunch bowls for under $4. Japanese media literally tracks these prices because they’re a daily staple for working people. The Japanese media reported on a surge in their price from $2.63 to $4.25 in 2021.
In America, we track grocery prices. Restaurants are luxury goods.
The U.S. lacks this budget restaurant tier! There’s obviously demand for it. We’d buy $4 balanced meals if we had the option.
How does Japan’s restaurant market do this?
It’s not grocery prices; Japan’s grocery prices are ~18% higher than the United States.
It’s not hourly wages. Japan’s minimum wage ($6.68 an hour) is similar to America’s ($7.25).
Japan’s zoning and health codes allow tiny businesses!
Japan allows businesses that are only a few feet wide. Japanese restaurants can operate in small spaces, like one floor of a narrow single-stair case building (no wasted space or resources on a shared lobby).
Because of small setups like these, many Japanese restaurants have only one or two staff. Some restaurants are physically so small that they can only seat two to five people. In some, you even eat standing up.
A tiny restaurant staffed by just a single person, their stove, and a rice cooker can sell you lunch for a similar price you’d pay at home.
But in the US, tiny restaurants are illegal.
Our zoning laws require almost every business to:
Maintain a large building footprint
Provide 2-4 parking spaces per business
Operate at a scale that requires multiple employees
Food trucks could help if they were allowed at scale. But the restaurant industry fights to limit food trucks. On average, food trucks must handle 45 separate regulatory procedures and spend $28,276 on associated fees.
Abi goes on listing all the ways typical regulations in US cities massively raise the barrier of entry for restaurants. The effect of all this is that more and more, the only businesses who can afford to put down the money navigating this regulatory process before selling a single meal are international chains. Everyone complains about mom and pop shops being replaced by uniform chains across the Western world, but we complain with a tone of resignation, as if this is simply our economic fate. It’s not, as highly developed Japanese and Chinese cities prove. This is a policy choice.
Most people don’t start a restaurant to get rich. Running a restaurant is famously strenuous and unprofitable. If they weren’t regulated so onerously, more restaurants could be profitable, but they would still primarily be a labor of love. People dream of starting restaurants to express their creativity, to take care of people, and to make their city more vibrant. This is what trigger-happy regulators are stealing from us.
Why are they doing it?
Part 3: The authoritarian spirit
“To light a candle is to cast a shadow.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
Take a moment to dial into your emotional state, to notice how you’re feeling. Now, how does your nervous system respond when you read “solar panels” or “electric cars.” Is it a positive reaction? Do you think these are good things we should promote?
Earlier, I gave the example of a lithium deposit in Maine that won’t be mined due to local environmental harm. I also alluded to a case where the Sierra Club successfully squashed a massive proposed solar farm in Nevada to protect habitat for desert tortoises.
Your feelings about these might be a bit more complicated. Mine are. I’m all for installing solar panels until you remind me they need to be installed somewhere, and pretty much everywhere is already inhabited by animals who were there long before humans. I get less excited about windmills when my housemate who worked as a technician tells me how many dead birds he saw beneath them. And few images say “environmental devastation” more than a giant open-pit lithium mine.
I know that climate change threatens to kill far more animals than wind mills and solar farms ever could. But thinking about these tradeoffs makes me feel depressed and angry, or rather, conflicted. I hear one voice saying that these projects are undeniably good tradeoffs and we should be celebrating. But another voice can’t accept the idea that the desert tortoises should pay the price for human progress.
The first voice tries to explain to the second voice that the alternative is burning more coal, which will cause global catastrophic climate change and probably destroy the tortoise habitat anyway. The second voice responds that there’s obviously a third alternative, which is for humans to stop consuming electricity at all, and if that means most of them freeze or starve to death because they can’t sustain their gigantic population without destroying other habitats, well that’s their problem. They shouldn’t have gotten themselves into that mess in the first place.8
So when I recently came across this observation from Zvi Mowshowitz, it cut deep, like someone had found out about my dirty secret:
NEPA is a constant thorn in the side of anyone attempting to do anything.
A certain kind of person responds with: “Good.”
That kind of person does not want humans to do physical things in the world.
They like the world as it is, or as it used to be.
They do not want humans messing with it further.
They often also think humans are bad, and should stop existing entirely.
Or believe humans deserve to suffer or do penance.
Or do not trust people to make good decisions and safeguard what matters.
To them: If humans want to do something to the physical world?
That intention is highly suspicious.
We probably should not let them do that.
This is in sharp contrast with the type of person who:
Cares about the environment.
Who wants good things rather than bad to happen to people.
Who wants the Earth not to boil and the air to be clean and so on.
That person notices that NEPA long ago started doing more harm than good.
Zvi is practically mind-reading me here, with one detail wrong: I and most activists I’ve ever met have both of these characters inside of us. We’ve already met these characters in part 1. They are the rigid radical and the joyful militant.
I mentioned I’m borrowing these from the book Joyful Militancy by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, and it’s about time I let them introduce their idea. First, rigid radicalism:
There is something that circulates in many radical movements and spaces, draining away their transformative potential. Anyone who has frequented these spaces has felt it. Many (including us) have actively participated in it, spread it, and been hurt by it. It nurtures rigidity, mistrust, and anxiety precisely where we are supposed to feel most alive. It compels us to search ourselves and others ruthlessly for flaws and inconsistencies. It crushes experimentation and curiosity. It is hostile to difference, complexity, and nuance. Or it is the most complex, the most nuanced, and everyone else is simplistic and stupid. Radicalism becomes an ideal, and everyone becomes deficient in comparison.
The anxious posturing, the vigilant search for mistakes and limitations, the hostility that crushes a hesitant new idea, the way that critique becomes a reflex, the sense that things are urgent yet pointless, the circulation of the latest article tearing apart bad habits and behaviors, the way shaming others becomes comfortable, the ceaseless generation of necessities and duties, the sense of feeling guilty about one’s own fear and loneliness, the clash of political views that requires a winner and a loser, the performance of anti-oppressive language, the way that some stare at the floor or look at the door. We know these tendencies, intimately. We have seen them circulating and felt them pass through us.
When we began talking with friends about this, there were immediate head nods… Like us, they had felt it and participated in it. They had discussed it quietly and carefully with people they trusted. But it was hard to unpack... To complain or criticize it came with the risk of being attacked, shamed, or cast out… How is it that explicitly radical, anti-oppressive, or anti-authoritarian spaces—the places where people should feel most alive and powerful—can sometimes feel cold, stifling, and rigid?
This subjective description perfectly captures my own experience in activist communities. And I understand why the authors find it easier to dance around in the manifestations of rigid radicalism rather than speculate about the underlying psychology. But I think we have to go further than that, so in this final section, I will dare to speculate. I think rigid radicalism has three defining qualities:
Perfectionistic: rigid radicalism makes the perfect the enemy of the good.
Power seeking: despite its anti-authoritarian rhetoric, it is driven to dominate others.
Self hating: it reflects the implicit belief that humans deserve to be punished, especially socially advantaged groups
We will explore each of these qualities in turn, seeing what we can learn about the antidote of joyful militancy along the way.
3.1 Political perfectionism
“Every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.” – George Orwell
I keep coming back to the NEPA examples because of how well they demonstrate perfectionism. The rigid radical is the part of me that can never be satisfied with the lesser of two evils, with people making an earnest effort, or with the idea that people might process their own lived experiences in their own way and come to different conclusions than me. Perfectionism is at the heart of rigid radicalism.
Regulations are inherently perfectionistic. While it is possible with a great deal of effort to write laws that allow for nuance and flexibility, the default is to say X is permissible and Y is not. Thus renewable energy projects that would be massively beneficial to the world get blocked because they can’t be built without doing a bit of Y.
But as damaging as perfectionistic regulations like NEPA are, perfectionism creates even more of a minefield in the context of informal rules.
Everyone knows that in progressive activist communities, including the animal rights movement, there are rules about which views are acceptable to express. But unlike NEPA, there is nowhere someone can go to find out exactly what these rules are. There is no court you can appeal to if you think you’ve been wrongly accused of breaking the rules. And there is no democratically-elected congress that could change or repeal rules after deliberating on them.
What there is instead is a nebulous set of invisible lines that community members can only discover by crossing them. For new activists, this is like being an art thief dancing through a room full of motion-sensing lasers, except the lasers are invisible, constantly moving, and when you cross one, you get publicly shamed and possibly ostracized from your community. Oh, and by the way, you didn’t even know you were supposed to be trying to avoid detection in a laser room. You didn’t sign up to be an art thief! You were just trying to do some good for the world.
I’ve seen many activists suffer the bullying of rigid radicals for not declaring the right beliefs or for saying the wrong thing. I’ve been in every role: the critic, the target of criticism, and the troubled bystander too scared to speak out against it, lest I get cancelled too.
But in my 10 years in social movements, I’ve also seen the lines shift constantly. Rigid radicalism is based on a logic that there is one set of beliefs which is the only acceptable set an activist is allowed to hold. But who defines that set? In reality, as Nick and Carla observe, “It shape-shifts and multiplies itself: sometimes it appears as one rigid line, at other times as a proliferation of positions arrayed against each other. “
3.2 Hunger for power
Rigid radicalism has a conflicted relationship to power. Its rhetoric on the surface is all about tearing down power differentials. Yet it expresses itself using some of the most coercive bullying tactics in the human playbook. Public shaming and ostracization are not intended as gentle or restorative responses to conflict; they are meant to assert power.
I started this essay with a story about coming face-to-face with my own power-seeking instincts. I was part of an activist organization with hundreds of people working together towards a shared goal. Disagreements occurred all the time, but when a time came that many disagreements were polarized into two factions, we lost our ability to handle them constructively. Well, one faction in particular lost that ability, the faction I was part of. The clearer it became that we were a minority and that we weren’t going to be able to get our way, the stronger our urge became to impose our will on the majority.
Of course, that’s not how we thought of it at the time. Right through the end, we all insisted to each other that we were the victims of a toxic power dynamic. The fact that we weren’t getting our way was proof of this– they were hoarding all the power, when they should be giving it to us! The difference was that the power we were fighting against was earned through hard work by the people who founded and built up the organization over years, while we were trying to wrest it out of their hands through character assassination and bullying tactics.
When I eventually regained presence of mind, I was deeply troubled to see how this kind of power-seeking behavior had grown out of what I thought was a principled stand against power. For years, it made me stop trusting myself. That might sound bad, but I think it was a good thing. I learned that if a voice inside is telling you that you are being victimized and that you must destroy an activist or an organization to stop an abuse of power, you should by default be very skeptical of that voice.
At first, I just thought of that drive to power as a general human thing I needed to keep in check. It was only years later that I began to recognize how entangled it was with the parts of my personality that got me to become an activist in the first place.
Activists are the people who are so uncomfortable with mainstream culture that we will spend our free time trying to change it. This is a volatile personality trait. If we manage to keep it focused on the macroscopic political and industrial forces that shape our world, it can be a powerful force for good.
But it can just as easily give rise to an intolerance worthy of the most bigoted cultures– with the only difference being that our intolerance is directed at the mainstream. I can’t count how many conversations I’ve been in with progressive activists where we dump on people who don’t choose to adopt our countercultural lifestyles. Open disdain for religious practitioners is common. If progressive activists hear about a romantic relationship that has any trace of traditional gender roles, it makes our blood boil. Anonymous Substacker Cartoons Hate Her said of a brief phase hanging out in right wing culture: “it was ironically the only ‘safe space’ where I could say something perfectly normal like ‘my boyfriend likes it when I wear tight jeans,’ and nobody would try to call a domestic abuse hotline.”
I have seen people unironically scolded for suggesting that an animal activist group host a Super Bowl watch party or a March Madness bracket as a way to attract new members. I myself have often shoved my foot in my mouth after dissing one of these only to find out I just insulted the person I was talking to.
Deep down, I think most leftists wish we could restructure society to basically prohibit lifestyle choices that the majority of people make and that at least many of them are quite happy with. We usually don’t say it out loud, but then, sometimes we do: Simone de Beauvoir, one of the most influential feminist authors of the 20th century, wrote: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” Before the gay rights movement went mainstream by focusing on marriage equality, there was a more radical movement that sought to abolish marriage altogether. There is still a movement today that calls themselves family abolitionists.
Since at least the 1960s, one of the greatest stumbling blocks for progressive movements has been the tendency to direct rigid radicalism and destructive power-seeking inwards, towards our own organizations, rather than outwards at the larger social forces we come together to fight. In an article for The Intercept two years after the George Floyd protests in the U.S., the progressive journalist Ryan Grim documented several stories of “How Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.” Here was a typical story:
During the first week of June 2020, teams of workers and their managers came together across the country to share how they were responding to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and to chart out what — if anything — their own company or nonprofit could do to contribute toward the reckoning with racial injustice that was rapidly taking shape.
One such huddle was organized by the Washington, D.C. office of the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rights movement’s premier research organization.
Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy, began by asking how people were “finding equilibrium”... She talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher’s work could counter it. Staff suggestions, though, turned inward, “including loosening deadlines and implementing more proactive and explicit policies for leave without penalty”...
Behind Boonstra’s and the staff’s responses to the killing was a fundamentally different understanding of the moment. For Boonstra and others of her generation, the focus should have been on the work of the nonprofit: What could Guttmacher, with an annual budget of nearly $30 million, do now to make the world a better place? For her staff, that question had to be answered at home first: What could they do to make Guttmacher a better place? Too often, they believed, managers exploited the moral commitment staff felt toward their mission, allowing workplace abuses to go unchecked.
The belief was widespread. In the eyes of group leaders dealing with similar moments, staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice. Often, as was the case at Guttmacher, they played into the very dynamics they were fighting against, directing their complaints at leaders of color. Guttmacher was run at the time, and still is today, by an Afro Latina woman, Dr. Herminia Palacio. “The most zealous ones at my organization when it comes to race are white,” said one Black executive director at a different organization, asking for anonymity so as not to provoke a response from that staff.
These starkly divergent views would produce dramatic schisms throughout the progressive world in the coming year. At Guttmacher, this process would rip the organization apart. Boonstra, unlike many managers at the time, didn’t sugarcoat how she felt about the staff’s response to the killing.
“I’m here to talk about George Floyd and the other African American men who have been beaten up by society,” she told her staff, not “workplace problems.” Boonstra told them she was “disappointed,” that they were being “self-centered”...
The human resources department and board of directors, in consultation with outside counsel, were brought in to investigate complaints that flowed from the meeting, including accusations that certain staff members had been tokenized, promoted, and then demoted on the basis of race. The resulting report was unsatisfying to many of the staff.
“What we have learned is that there is a group of people with strong opinions about a particular supervisor, the new leadership, and a change in strategic priorities,” said a Guttmacher statement summarizing the findings. “Those staff have a point of view. Complaints were duly investigated and nothing raised to the level of abuse or discrimination. Rather, what we saw was distrust, disagreement, and discontent with management decisions they simply did not like.”
A Prism reporter reached a widely respected Guttmacher board member, Pamela Merritt, a Black woman and a leading reproductive justice activist, while the Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were going on last December, a year and a half after the Floyd meeting. She offered the most delicate rebuttal of the staff complaints possible.
“I have been in this movement space long enough to respect how people choose to describe their personal experience and validate that experience, even if I don’t necessarily agree that that’s what they experienced,” Merritt said. “It seems like there’s a conflation between not reaching the conclusion that people want and not doing due diligence on the allegations, which simply is not true.”
Again, all of this is far from unique. We’ve already seen how rigid radicalism drove the Sierra Club to fight against imperfect but beneficial renewable energy projects, so it should be no surprise to learn that rigid radicalism eventually turned inward, as detailed in a devastating investigation by the New York Times. Years of fierce internal battles over social justice and workplace culture have included the organization condemning its long-dead founder on dubious allegations of racism, over the objections of Black board members, then ousting its executive director of 12 years and replacing him with the former executive director of the NAACP, only for this new ED to also be cancelled internally and fired this year. Managers and board members describe the state of the organization being somewhere between “a downward spiral” and an “implosion.”
One progressive leader with firsthand experience of these struggles is Maurice Mitchell. Mitchell is the national director of the Working Families Party, a leading progressive electoral group in the U.S. In an article on “building resilient organizations,” he takes aim at the performative aspect of these power struggles. Activists, he says, invoke the language of harm, safety, and violence to describe interpersonal conflicts or ideological disagreements:
“Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces.”
This rhetorical escalation transforms ordinary workplace disputes or strategic disagreements into moral emergencies that demand immediate, decisive action– usually the removal or silencing of whoever has been labelled an “oppressor.” The person wielding this rhetoric gains power precisely by claiming to be powerless.
These paradoxical feelings about power coexist in our inner rigid radical. And that contradiction only sharpens the third feature of rigid radicalism.
3.3 Progressive self-hatred
After my first introduction to politics volunteering for the Obama campaign, I wanted to become politically literate. The public school curriculum wasn’t meeting the demand, so I turned to the internet. I tumbled down all kinds of political rabbit holes, but I was most drawn to learning about world history, especially the crimes of Western imperialism. So it was that during my formative, pubescent years, I could often be found reading graphic accounts of some of the most violent episodes in human history.
I vividly remember one account of a massacre in Nicaragua by the U.S.-backed Contras. A company of soldiers came upon an indigenous village where all the men were away fighting with the Sandinistas. I was probably 14 or so, and nothing in my cozy liberal life had prepared me for the things I was about to read. It didn’t help that there were no photos; vivid descriptions and my imagination more than made up. For weeks, images of the scene were all I could think about. I did not tell anyone in my life what I had read, leaving me alone to make sense of it.
For myself, I could only figure out one reasonable conclusion: men are evil. Male sexuality was one of the most evil things that could exist. I had to cut it out of myself if at all possible. A similarly detailed account of the Tulsa massacre taught me that white people are evil as well. Above all, America is evil. By the time I was 15, on my way to becoming a white American man, I understood that I was the inheritor of all this evil, and that understanding became a core part of my political identity.
It turns out this journey was not very unique. I don’t know how long self-hatred has been woven into the private psychology of leftist politics, but for the last decade it has become a central part of our message. In “The Scourge of Self-Flagellating Politics,” Angela Nagle writes:
From the gospel according to Luke, “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” If we are to take Luke at his word, then there must be plenty of heavenly exaltation in store for Jeopardy contestant turned social justice columnist caricature Arthur Chu who once tweeted: “As a dude who cares about feminism sometimes I want to join all men arm-in-arm & then run off a cliff and drag the whole gender into the sea.” Or for those who, on the morning following the election of Donald Trump, took to social media to publicly humble themselves to their followers, expressing their intense inward-turned shame and self-hatred. Typical of the style, New Statesman editor Laurie Penny wrote: “I’ve had white liberal guilt before. Today is the first time I’ve actually been truly horrified and ashamed to be white.” Others expressed their self-disgust at being straight white males and assured followers that while they of course did not vote for Trump, merely looking like those who did required some readily self-inflicted penance.
Every time a liberal conducts one of these performances of self-hatred, a predictable reaction cycle is set off. A ragtag army of nasty nihilistic right-wingers (a mixture of quasi-ironic anime-loving Nazis, celibate male separatists, and those who make it their duty to observe and report creeping Cultural Marxism) react with a flurry of anonymous retaliations. To the alt-right, this ritual confession of guilt is further proof of Western civilizational suicide. The self-flagellator is then met with a deluge of racist and/or misogynist abuse, which leaves them even more assured that their own dismal view of the West as white supremacist, misogynist, and essentially evil was correct all along. Online, stuck in an endless loop and unmoored from the cultural mainstream, niche online subcultures from right and left both reinforce their opposed but similarly depressing views of society.
All of which would be a mere curiosity, if it kept itself confined to the darker recesses of the Internet’s fetid bowel. However, since the mainstream media is always struggling to keep up with whatever the kids are into, the discourse of white self-criticism has gone somewhat more mainstream. It is now fairly typical to see ritualized confessions of white guilt. As Fredrik deBoer describes it:
“[There is] an entire cottage industry devoted to it. Similar arguments calling for white people to own their privilege have been published in places like the Huffington Post and Salon. Popular sites like YouTube and Tumblr play host to hundreds of earnest white people, eagerly disclaiming white privilege and their complicity in white supremacy. White rapper Macklemore recently released his second track concerning his own white privilege.”
Even Donald Sutherland recently felt compelled to describe his feeling “ashamed” for being a “white male.” Sutherland apparently had a moment of breakthrough when Helen Mirren, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, informed him “You are the most privileged person on Earth… You are a white male.” Damning men for their crimes and defending purest womankind, Michael Moore, author of titles such as Stupid White Men, recently tweeted, “No women ever invented an atomic bomb, built a smoke stack, initiated a Holocaust, melted the polar ice caps or organized a school shooting.’ (This is false. The Manhattan Project had its unsung female heroes, there are plenty of female oil and gas executives, and female school shooter Brenda Ann Spencer inspired the 1979 Boomtown Rats hit “I Don’t Like Mondays.” Ironically, Moore erases women’s history by neglecting its greatest villains.)
If I could talk to a young person going through a political puberty similar to my own, I would emphatically tell them that all of this is wrong. The fact that you have a Y chromosome does not in any way tie you to the war crimes of cruel men on a different continent. Your fate, what kind of person you will be, is up to you to determine. The irony of liberal self-hatred is that it is built on the same premise as the white nationalism of internet edgelords: both ideologies declare your destiny to be a product of your race and gender rather than your character and choices.
White Americans, myself included, benefit from the material inheritance of centuries of racial domination; to deny or ignore that would be delusional. But that doesn’t determine who you are or who you will be.
The world is a mess. We can each use the hand we’ve been dealt to try to make it a little better, or a little worse. The question is, how are you going to play it?
Outro: Irreverence for rules, reverence for life
The left has an authoritarian streak. The rigid radical believes humans (or at least certain categories of humans) are fundamentally bad and deserve to be punished. This fuels perfectionism, because no amount of progress or good intention is ever enough to redeem our original sin. It fills us with a desire to impose our will and our values on others, because other people cannot be trusted and must be controlled. And we crave this because of, not in spite of, a deep pain about harm caused by other people who share immutable qualities with us: our race, gender, nationality, and above all, for animal advocates, our humanness. Misanthropy is widespread in the animal movement and surely must represent the pinnacle of progressive self-hatred.
Animal advocates could be the ultimate rigid radicals. We could be the most maniacal authoritarians, trying to police every aspect of culture and society, and turning that ire inwards on our own organizations. That’s certainly how the public sees us. And given the history of conflict in the movement, it’s not a bad approximation for how we’ve been acting up to this point.
But rigid radicalism does not have to control our destiny. It is not the only way we can be. Instead, animal advocates could lead the way to embracing joyful militancy.
The rule animal advocates are calling for is the simplest moral prohibition imaginable: you cannot kill or confine another being for your own selfish reasons. Yet here’s the hard truth: even this cannot be imposed on the world through top-down coercion.
If someone gave me a button that would ban the slaughter of animals in the U.S. tomorrow, I would press it. I’d have to. But I would not expect it to go well. The immediate result would be like the prohibition on alcohol in the 1920s, that is, a quiet rebellion. Animal farming and slaughter would move underground. Large parts of the government’s enforcement mechanism (police, etc.) would simply defect, refusing to enforce a law they saw as extreme and illegitimate against their neighbors. Eventually, meat prohibition would be overturned. Getting it passed a second time would be much harder, maybe impossible– the U.S. shows no signs of reinstituting the ban on alcohol.
Even for this extreme case, where we should most obviously argue for a strong legal prohibition and work to get it implemented eventually, we cannot succeed by imposing it on people before winning wide enough support. We need rules to protect the vulnerable, but we can’t win those rules if the public sees us as authoritarian culture warriors. When we are perceived as scornful of mainstream culture, judgemental of people’s insufficiently woke relationship dynamics, and too uptight to take a joke, people learn to tune us out.
Prohibition illustrates yet another reason rules fail: if you create too many rules, people just ignore them. What do you think ended up happening with my backyard sauna? I just built the damn thing anyway without getting any of the permits! As soon as I calculated that the risk of getting caught was lower than the cost of jumping through so many hoops, it was the rational thing to do. In a similar way, if you cancel enough people for minor transgressions, eventually you lose the ability to socially stigmatize straight-up white nationalism.
So, after all this, what exactly does joyful militancy entail? Nick and Carla explain why they are hesitant to pin down an exact definition:
We do not believe rigid radicalism can be countered by inventing a new set of norms for how to behave or setting out a new ideal of what radicalism should be. There can be no instructions. This would just create a new ideal to measure ourselves against… We hope to help undo tendencies towards regulation and policing, rather than play into them.
I think this mostly sums it up: joyful militancy is about finding your own way through life as an activist, rather than trying to contort yourself into whatever shape won’t trigger the cancellation lasers. And at the same time, not shining any cancellation lasers on anyone else.
It means recognizing that we’re all flawed humans doing our best to reduce suffering in an unjust world. Celebrating incremental progress rather than demanding perfection. Treating our movement as a place for experimentation and growth rather than an ideological fortress. Being ferocious in confronting injustice while being gentle with each other’s humanity.
We cannot regulate our way to a just world. We have to build it, one relationship and one community at a time. We have to make the alternative more appealing than the status quo. We have to show people that the world we envision is worth fighting for, that it is colorful and full of laughter and nice things and is in no way miserable and gray.
For animal advocates, this means being the people others actually want to be around. We all know the importance of making vegan food seem delicious rather than like deprivation. We need to do the same thing with our movement culture. That means building communities where people feel welcomed and valued rather than judged and found wanting. It means focusing our moral energy on the literal violence of animal agriculture rather than on policing each other’s language and lifestyle choices.
Most of all, it means banishing your inner authoritarian.
That voice that says humans are fundamentally bad and deserve to suffer? Ignore it. That impulse to control other people’s choices? Resist it. That desire to punish yourself and others for being imperfect? Let it go.
The animals don’t need your self-flagellation. They don’t need your purity. They don’t need you to regulate your friends’ jokes or cancel your colleagues for ideological shortcomings. They need you to be effective. They need you to build power. They need you to win.
You can’t win if you’re treating your movement as a proving ground to be purged of all oppression rather than as a joyful rebellion against oppression. You can’t win if you’re drowning in guilt and shame instead of powered by love and rage. I learned this the hard way when I tried to destroy an organization I loved. You don’t have to repeat my mistakes.
While Nick and Carla refuse to define joyful militancy, they do clarify their use of the word joy, following from the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was an intellectual predecessor of Friedrich Nietzsche, who for me brings to mind a humble yet defiant attitude, a deep reverence for life and discovery paired with an equally deep irreverence for anyone who would try to impose rules on you or tell you how to live. I’ll leave you with their comments:
Against the grain of European thought that sought to subdue life through rigid dualisms and classifications, Spinoza conceptualized a world in which everything is interconnected and in process…
For Spinoza, the whole point of life is to become capable of new things, with others. The name for this process is joy.
Joy? What? Doesn’t joy just mean happiness, with some vaguely Christian undertones? … A joyful process of transformation might involve happiness, but it tends to entail a whole range of feelings at once: it might feel overwhelming, painful, dramatic, and world-shaking, or subtle and uncanny. Joy rarely feels comfortable or easy, because it transforms and reorients people and relationships. Rather than the desire to exploit, control, and direct others, it is resonant with emergent and collective capacities to do things, make things…
Joy is not an emotion at all but an increase in one’s power to affect and be affected. It is the capacity to do and feel more. As such, it is connected to creativity and the embrace of uncertainty. Within the Spinozan current, there is no way to determine what is right and good for everyone. It is not a moral philosophy, with a fixed idea of good and evil. There is no recipe for life or struggle.
Build on,
Sandcastles
Mantras:
We should set a high bar for imposing rules. Fortunately, animal activists are trying to draw the most minimal moral boundary of all.
The moment we try to fix every flaw in the world, we start treating each other like flaws to be fixed.
Filling the world with rules takes the color out of life, turning it dull and gray.
Rigid radicalism breaks movements long before it changes the world.
Banish your inner authoritarian.
If I’m being honest, their main transgression was not giving us more power.
Replace with the relevant jurisdictional hierarchy for your country.
For non-U.S. readers, the Department of Motor Vehicles, which issues drivers licenses and is universally understood as a user experience nightmare.
Especially environmentalists’ opposition to nuclear energy, which could have largely decarbonized the economy before anyone ever heard the words “global warming.”
This potentially understates the case and gives too much credit to the government. Moderna apparently finished designing its vaccine in two days (!!!) in January (!!) before most people had ever heard the word coronavirus.
There is a perfectly non-speciesist way to reject this claim. The reason doctors were prioritized for Covid vaccines was that they were constantly being exposed to infected patients, accepting a high risk of death in order to keep the medical system running. Veterinarians faced no such risk and were not dying in elevated numbers. And don’t forget, most vets work in agriculture.
For non-Americans: enrolling in the public university in your state is much cheaper than going to a different state.
There is a lot of literature on degrowth outlining pathways by which developed and developing countries could reduce their energy consumption by giving up various modern comforts. Whatever you think of this idea, there is very little reason to think it is actually going to happen.
Aidan, before I read, a technical question - how did you do the voiceover? Is this AI generated? Also I might just listen to this when I have a chance, didn't know this is an option :) I consume most books as audiobooks, which makes me very happy!
As a young animal activist, in both age and in the movement, this topic was so important. Thank you for sharing your life learnings and for challenging people like me in how to move forward as we advocate for the animals. Deeply appreciated, Aidan!