How Social Justice Activists Lost the Plot.

• Author: Green, Joshua
• Position: Fredrik DeBoer's "How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement"

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

by Fredrik DeBoer

Simon & Schuster, 256 pp.

The leftist writer Fredrik DeBoer's new book is an entreaty to white, college-educated progressives: Stop obsessing over identity and language and start fighting for working people.

George Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 sparked nationwide protests bigger than anything anyone had seen since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It wasn't just Democrats who were upset. Researchers at Stanford found that feelings of anger across the U.S. population increased by about half in the week following Floyd's death. Most Fortune 500 companies and other large corporations felt obligated to make public pronouncements lamenting racial injustice, often accompanied by vows to increase minority hiring. Some even made showy displays of their newfound corporate social conscience. PepsiCo, for instance, retired its Aunt Jemima syrup and pancake-mix brand. It felt like an important societal shift was happening in real time.

Three years later, the officer who asphyxiated Floyd is in prison. Dubious brand campaigns and racially inflammatory sports mascots are much rarer. A striking mural graces the intersection where Floyd died, now renamed George Floyd Square. But nothing major has changed. A national police reform effort sputtered. Several local reforms that did pass were later rolled back. In Minneapolis and elsewhere, calls to "defund the police" or drastically cut their resources were spurned, including by the city's mayor. A year after Floyd's death, Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot measure to overhaul policing.

The questions of how the political left, which seemed to have unstoppable momentum, failed to produce reform on this and other issues, and who is to blame for that failure, is the subject of Fredrik DeBoer's new book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.

As his title indicates, he believes he has fingered the culprits.

For those unfamiliar with him, DeBoer is a middle-aged Marxist and veteran blogger--now Substacker--whose life experiences (he was raised by communists) and heterodox views consistently make him a more interesting analyst and commentator to readers outside the far left than "Marxist blogger" might suggest. Although his new book isn't billed this way, it is essentially his "Letter to a Young Activist." A grizzled veteran of the anti-Iraq War movement who has spent years working to advance tenants' rights in New York City...