(Progressives are looking for ways to effectively oppose American fascism and regain the trust of a broad cross-section of the American people, including some of Trump’s base.  This piece addresses one of the challenges facing progressives today.)

A friend told me that in the non-profit where she worked for many years, people came up with a term for one group of activists, whom they called the FANGS. These were the people who were Former Activists who were Now in Government.

I know many FANGS. Every one of them is brilliant, driven, and following the lode star of their social justice-rooted moral conscience. They are truly public servants in the best sense, who went into government (often after law school) because they wanted to find ways to devise and use levers of power (i.e. to make and enforce policy) to benefit the marginalized populations out of which many of them had come as movement activists and community members.

I think the term FANGS should also include activists who choose to go into any institutional setting to be social justice advocates. This includes the many activists who became professors, as well as health care workers and social workers, to name a few.

I primarily saw my academic job as being a civil rights activist, both as a cheerleader for students who wanted to work for social justice and as a writer of academic books and articles as well as newspaper pieces. In this broader definition I too was a FANG (or, more precisely, I guess, a FANA (in the Academy).

I fear that despite our good intentions and good work, FANGS may have made a serious mistake, one that has been exposed by the ferocity of the current right-wing attack on equity and inclusion, indeed on the institutions of the democratic state.

The mistake was this: we forgot that effective change requires not only powerful state actors (elected officials, judges, lawyers and professors advocating anti-racist laws and policies) but also the presence of a massive and powerful social movement capable of empowering these laws and policies. Put another way, FANGS forgot to define our role in building and maintaining social movements. This is a central task of building the beloved community today.

One of the most important political lessons of the 1960s Freedom Movement was grasping the connection between laws/policies and movement building. For a time (1963-1975) the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in linking the power of mass movements with state power. This link was powerful enough to bring down an entire racial system (Jim Crow) and to begin to lay the foundations for a democratic, inclusive and non-racist society (the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, numerous court decisions upholding affirmative action, etc.) It also played an important role in ending the Vietnam War.

The first generation of FANGS (including myself) were young people who had been activated and trained by the Freedom Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movements in the mid to late 1960s. In the 1970s, many of us decided to get professional degrees because we wanted to be more effective at pursuing the movements’ agendas. By the 1980s, many of us had gained access to institutional positions and were gaining power and influence in these settings. There’s no denying that we activists were very successful within these institutional settings.

But at the same time, we were experiencing the ebb and eventual disappearance of the massive movements out of which we had come.

Of course, we FANGS did anything and everything we could to work with newer social movements (South Africa, Central America, labor, LGTBQ, women’s rights, etc.). But in the increasingly harsh realities of those decades, movement-building was difficult and required a long-term commitment to community building and empowerment. We FANGS were certainly not the ones to do this, we said. We could not squander the institutional influence we had won, we reasoned. Community empowerment through movement building was the job of community leaders, we said. We argued for a division of labor between activists and FANGS, a separation that rarely succeeded.

The gulf between FANGS and activists was often quite wide, with both sides casting suspicions on the other. Activists accused FANGS of elitism, and FANGS accused activists of being naïve about what it takes to have power.  More and more, FANGS, determined to use our hard-won positions and influence for social justice, felt that we had to do it on our own. The fact that us FANGS were making high incomes, and had prestigious jobs, while many activists were poor created a class conflict that also contributed to the tension between FANGS and movement activists.

In the 2000s, FANGS were successful at gaining significant influence in their institutional settings. The Black and Progressive Caucuses of the House of Representatives grew, had real clout and were well on their way to establishing a center-left majority in Congress in the 2010s. Obama and Biden expanded Federal DEI-related rules, and the courts largely let them stand. Progressive academics redefined a number of social science disciplines and made real inroads in STEM fields, and progressive administrators (many themselves former activists) redefined campus life and faculty and staff hiring procedures. Students from top schools entered Silicon Valley jobs with the intention of doing social justice work in tech workplaces.

A final note on this history: most progressive legislators, judges, lawyers, professors, doctors and nurses today are too young to have experienced the powerful connection of social movement and state power manifested in the 1960s and 1970s. They are motivated by progressive ideals but have very different movement experiences, ones in which movements had little power, on which to draw. Their idealism, less tempered by the practical political work of building coalitions, made these progressives more likely to make alliances only with those who shared their ideals, a tendency that made them seem even more elitist.

Even as progressives won important gains, the ground was shifting in civil society. The two red flags, I think, were these: First, the major social movements of the era, Occupy Wall Street and the George Floyd Defund the Police movements, were impressive in their numbers and breadth, but both vaporized in couple of years, with real consequences. The disappearance of Occupy undermined Congressional efforts to rein in the banks (the passage but eventual gutting of the Dodds-Frank Act). And the Defund the Police movement’s decline left dozens of newly elected progressive District Attorneys vulnerable to right-wing attacks, which took down many of them in 2022-2024. The second red flag was the limited capacity of community empowerment efforts to propel candidates into higher offices, most notably Stacey Abrams’ two failed efforts (2018 and 2022) to become governor of Georgia, although Georgia community empowerment work did lead to important local and Congressional election victories.

Most fundamentally, unsustainable social movements and relatively limited community empowerment efforts are unable to broadly impact the culture of civil society. I believe the success of the 1960s Freedom Movement and anti-Vietnam War movement was not primarily their political and legal impacts, as important as those were. These movements were broad enough and sustained for long enough to change the culture of American society, and indeed impact many other cultures around the world. The George Floyd movement was, sadly, unable to produce such long-term change.

Without deeply rooted, well-organized and sustainable social movements, FANGS run the risk of becoming social engineers, trying to change the society from above.  And, as the right wing successfully organized people resistant to progressive policies, FANGs’ isolation from social movements made them easy targets.

The prime example of this dynamic, I think, is the current attack on DEI, and especially affirmative action policies.  Affirmative action programs are a set of legal rules and institutional policies that required employers and schools to demonstrate that they are making demonstrable efforts to increase access and advancement for underrepresented minorities, women and people with disabilities. Advocates of affirmative action have long argued that once a critical mass of previously underrepresented people establish themselves inside these institutions, they would be able to change the culture of the place from within.

Affirmative action policies arose in the 1970s and 1980s in the immediate aftermath of the massive civil rights movement that had eradicated Jim Crow in the 1960s. The first-generation advocates of affirmative action, including myself, were veterans of the civil rights movement, and were young people who had gone to graduate and law schools in the 1970s for the express aim of implementing the civil rights movement’s vision.  By the 1980s, we were beginning to have real influence over public policy, even while the government (Reagan and the U.S. Supreme Court especially) grew increasingly hostile to our efforts. We deluded ourselves into thinking we could make real change “from above” even as the social movements out of which we came were vanishing.

I fear that we advocates made a mistake even then: we thought we could reshape American society by enacting new laws and making new rules but we underestimated the forces standing in our way: first, many people with a vested interest in their institutions resented our efforts at behavioral modification and had many formal and informal ways to resist DEI efforts; and second, efforts to create equitable practices were undermined by the neo-liberal hyper-inequality that was weakening state institutions and civil society alike. (For example, what did it mean to fight for inclusion in an urban school district experiencing long-term disinvestment in per pupil spending and a growing housing crisis?)  Most fundamentally, we FANGs forgot that it takes massive social movements with real community-based power to effect significant change.

And so, as well-meaning as we were and still are, FANGS were becoming elites in a country (indeed, a world) in which neo-liberal globalization was rapidly making them less and less relevant.

So, what should FANGS do? This analysis clearly provides the answer: professionals and government actors must learn how to do their work in a way that builds community and social movements based on community power. (For some examples, see Barlow (ed.) Collaborations for Social Justice). This is easier said than done: to do this will mean a fundamental change in how progressive lawyers, professors, doctors and legislators do their work. In some ways, they will have to step away from institutional power to do so as they adopt methods of professional conduct that are better suited to movement building and community empowerment among marginalized populations than professional advancement.

For example, teachers at every level will have to choose to work in ‘undesirable’ jobs in low-income minority communities, deploying a pedagogy and course content focused on empowering students.

I have great admiration for the hundreds of thousands of young people who continue to strive to become professionals to advance social justice. What we need now more than ever is a clear vision of what we mean by the practice of professional power for social justice, one that clearly grasps the connection between policy/law making and movement building.