The Progressive Industrial Complex needs a colon cleanse
We have met the enema …
Jeffrey Denny
As Democrats still divide over how we lost America — to the horrifying likes of Trump, no less — and how to win it back, let’s ask if we lost our way by turning our causes into capitalist cash cows.
I’m referring to the Progressive Industrial Complex. The multi-million-dollar nonprofits offering several-figure salaries, PR firms trading on Wall Street, campaign operatives and consultants who cashed in on Kamala’s record $1 billion in fundraising, and the babbling gaggle of well-paid professional organizers, advocates, activists, and hacks like me.
What was once driven by grassroots uprisings by the downtrodden has become millions of jobs and billions in wealth for the elite and privileged college-educated. Even as most Americans are sick of our medicine to make our society better, like we believe it is in Europe, yet not so much.
We stink-eye capitalism while feeding at the trough by fighting for the less fortunate (except for poor white MAGAs). Few of whom we know personally, except if they tend our homes, landscapes, and children as we head to our nonprofit management jobs.
Gone are the old days depicted in a new documentary, “Ain’t No Back to Merry Go Round.”
This was in 1960 when five Black college students and a nearby Jewish neighborhood bravely picketed under physical threat to desegregate the Glen Echo amusement park (just up the road from me).
Social justice wasn’t a college major, a salaried profession offering healthcare benefits, paid mental health and vacation leave, a healthy work-life balance, and a career path. Or a corporate strategy.
From labor to civil rights movements, protests were powered mostly by the people and their volunteer organizations and allies fighting for their rights. Surely not making a keen living from it.
That made activism purer. And thus more effective in moving public hearts and minds. The headlines were what the PR industry now calls “earned media,” making real news that inspires empathy, participation, and support. Not slick, well-funded social media and astroturf campaigns by progressive smarts and sharks. They might as well be Don Draper’s Sterling Cooper in REI workwear.
Indeed, as the 2024 “Wolves of K Street” exposé about Washington influence-peddling depicted, the once liberal activist Tony Podesta — brother of former Bill Clinton and Barack Obama top aide John Podesta — funded his notoriously lavish lifestyle rivaling Putin’s oligarchs by lobbying for Big Pharma and Big Tech while retaining his do-gooder bona fides.
Nobody likes a hypocrite, especially when they pose as holier than the hoi polloi.
Nevertheless, there’s big money in being progressive.
One leading agency I’ve worked with on CSR, ESG, and DEI-related communications last posted $150 million in annual revenues.
They’re far from alone. Edelman, reporting nearly $1 billion last year, has emphasized “its commitment to progressive and socially responsible work, integrating purpose and profit.” And how it “actively works with clients to create positive impact, focusing on sustainability, inclusivity, and social responsibility.”
Visit the lobbies of top progressive nonprofits or the law and PR firms they hire, and chances are you’ll see lavish architecture and design rivalling corporate HQs. The Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta, earning $46 million in revenues last year and posting $100 million in assets, provides such an amazing place to work.
And while many firms serve and care deeply about “under-resourced communities,” they don’t necessarily want to live there. Fenton Communications, proud “Strategists for Social Change,” operates from costly midtown Manhattan’s Film Center Building with its stunning Art Deco lobby. Not in the nearby South Bronx, with the poorest congressional district in America.
Progressive compensation is also not too shabby. National Urban League head Marc Morial banked over $1.4 million in comp last year. World Wildlife Fund and Environmental Defense Fund captains are also in the million-dollar club. Poor Patrick Gaspard helms the Center for American Progress for a mere $400,000 a year.
Even middling nonprofit jobs pay far better than the average American could imagine. Per Glassdoor, a Washington, DC, nonprofit program manager earns an average of $148,000 a year. The couple that runs Indivisible, an organizer of the June 14 NO KINGS protest, took home $200,000. That’s not rich for high-cost Washington. But pretty good for 30-somethings. And a kingly sum for the average American household that makes only $80,000, and surely for the poorest at $30,000.
Let me italicize: There’s nothing wrong with professionalizing progressivism.
Or doing well by doing good. Noblesse oblige is better than Trump screwing his poor saps.
If the Progressive Industrial Complex can leverage capitalism to compete for the best and brightest talent and use the corporate political and PR playbook against its more powerful enemy, then mazel tov. Even if progressive-branding firms need to shark-sucker corporations by inking lucrative virtue-washing gigs.
All to say the progressive David/Goliath, little-fellers-fighting-the-Rockefellers act doesn’t play in Wichita.
Not when the new Rockefellers are show-running. Not when it comes down to industry sectors fake fighting — “coopeting” — like the WWE for the win-win. Not when it divides Democrats.
Not when the radical chic are more woke than the marginalized they self-appoint to represent, and poor whites barely register because, with white privilege, it’s their fault.
And not when protests make zero to negative political difference (see every anti-Trump march), and come across as hoary glory days cosplaying with clever signs and slogans, rhyming chants, and beating drums, organized by professional activists. While Trump triumphs by beboppin’ and scattin’ all over the left like Jason Hanky insulting George Costanza’s “rather bulbous head.”
Let’s take our Health Plus Super Colon Cleanser, quit shit-talking down to normie Americans, and ask ourselves if we’re really making a difference for the downtrodden, including poor whites. Or if we’re primarily advancing our enlightened careers.
If we’re going to be corporate, let’s take the ROI view, like focusing all our resources and energies on local races to take back Congress at the midterms to stop and reverse Trump’s reign of regression, send him to defeated exile at Mar-A-Elba, and advance our causes. All else is just noise for money.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
