The Debate Inside Progressive Politics with Maurice Mitchell

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2023

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“My argument is because [right wing authoritarianism] is the central struggle of the day, we need the most effective, principled and impactful progressive organizations that are seeking to challenge that,” says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. Mitchell is also an activist and co-founder of Blackbird, an organization that has provided infrastructure support for the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups around the country. The social movement strategist wrote a 6,000-word article for The Forge called “Building Resilient Organizations,” in which he described and shared potential solutions for overcoming some of the biggest problems within progressive spaces. He joins WITHpod to discuss the piece, roots of the longstanding political and social tensions within movements on the left and strategies for resetting.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's clear to anybody with eyes that the central struggle of our time is this re-assurgence
0:07.2	of right-wing authoritarianism, this re-assurgence of this neo-fascist, re-assurgence globally.
0:15.4	And my argument is because that is the central struggle of the day, we need the most effective,
0:22.2	principled, and impactful progressive organizations that are seeking to challenge that.
0:29.6	Hello, and welcome to Wise Is Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
0:36.0	The New York City has a weird off-year election cycle, so the mayor elections are the year after
0:49.6	the presidential.
0:50.6	So, 2021, there's three big elections in America in the off years.
0:54.5	It's the Virginia governor, the New Jersey governor, and New York City mayor.
0:57.6	And in 2021, there was a very crowded field of candidates, one of whom was woman named
1:03.0	Diane Morales.
1:04.5	Diane Morales is a born in New York.
1:06.9	She went to Stuyveson High School, which is a very difficult selective public high school
1:11.1	in the city.
1:12.4	She went to state university and then she became like a...
1:15.8	She worked in the New York City public schools.
1:17.9	She ran a nonprofit and she was at the beginning of the campaign scene as a real kind of one
1:22.6	of the big progressive primary candidates.
1:26.4	And what happened over the course of that campaign was this sort of interesting microcosm of a
1:30.9	lot of the tensions and complications of modern left spaces, which is basically that the
1:39.0	campaign sort of folded in on itself in increasing recriminations and frustration by the people
1:45.4	working on the campaign who ended up calling for a union to unionize the staff of that campaign.
	...

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