An altercation late last year between a progressive journalist for Media Matters of America, who labeled The Young Turks (themselves progressives) as “Kremlin Cheerleaders” is symptomatic of the quintessential progressive struggle. The Young Turks had been opposed to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton throughout the primaries and part of the election. The bitter division between “mainstream” and radical activist progressives is nothing new. The tension we saw in 2016 is unexceptional. It is also not sustainable.
We saw these tensions boil over many times before; between second-wave feminists throughout the 60s and 70s [1]; between democrats in the 1970s; during the civil rights period; the gay rights period [2]; and it goes as far back as the women’s suffrage movement in the late 1800s [3].
The divide can be best summarized as this:
Radical progressives who value ideological purity view mainstreamists as impure, conceding, apologist hypocrites. A mainstreamist progressive, in the eyes of some radicals, is in some ways worse than a traditionalist who might be opposed to the radical’s views out of ignorance rather than hypocrisy.
