The Everything Bagel Problem

Okay, let me try to put this into words. It’s something I’ve been wrestling with, but having trouble articulating. Over the last few years I've been on left-leaning cryptocurrency policy activism, and the experience has been a perfect exemplar of what Ezra Klein aptly termed the "everything-bagel problem" of contemporary liberal activism.

I saw the clear and present dangers: the malinvestment, the rampant scams, the environmental costs of certain consensus mechanisms, the potential for exacerbating inequality, the regulatory arbitrage and democratic capture. It seemed crucial, vital even, for the left to engage critically and constructively, to shape policy rather than just reacting with blanket dismissal or, worse, letting the loudest corporate libertarian voices dominate the narrative entirely.

So, I started reaching out, joining calls, trying to build coalitions within primarily (althought not exclusively) left-leaning circles. The goal was seemingly straightforward: let's figure out a shared understanding, identify key policy pressure points, and maybe draft some letters to Congress or regulatory agencies, advocating for sensible rules that protect consumers and mitigate the negative externalities. Simple, right?

Wrong. Almost immediately, I slammed headfirst into the everything bagel. The initial conversations were promising, finding others who shared a baseline concern or curiosity. But the moment we tried to move towards concrete action, the dynamic shifted. Suddenly, discussing, say, stablecoin regulation wasn't just about financial stability or consumer protection. It became implicitly, and then explicitly, tangled with everything else.

The first hurdle was the purity test, a seemingly inescapable feature of these spaces. It wasn't enough to agree on the specific crypto policy point at hand. Every potential ally, every proposed statement, even the technology itself, was subjected to an intense, almost impossible, ideological vetting. Does this organization have the perfect stance on climate change (even if unrelated to the specific crypto issue we were discussing)? Does this individual use precisely the right, up-to-the-minute terminology on gender identity? Has everyone involved publicly disavowed every problematic figure loosely associated with the broader crypto world? The standard wasn't just "are you broadly aligned with progressive values and willing to work on this specific issue," but "do you perfectly embody every tenet of every conceivable progressive cause, right now, without exception?" Failure on any single point, however tangential, could be grounds for dismissal or distrust.

Then came the riders, the endless additions required before we could even agree on the core message. We’d be trying to draft a simple letter outlining concerns about, perhaps, the lack of investor protection in DeFi lending protocols. Before we could finalize a paragraph, someone would insist, quite reasonably in isolation, that we must include language condemning the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining. Okay, fair point, though perhaps a separate issue from DeFi lending. But then someone else would chime in: "We can't send this without explicitly mentioning the need for stronger protections for trans individuals in online spaces." Another valid concern, but... what did it have to do with financial regulation specifically? Then came demands to address broader gender pay gaps, systemic racism in venture capital funding, the situation in Palestine, Uighur forced labor ... the list grew exponentially.

Each issue, taken alone, was important. Each cause represented a valid and often urgent progressive priority. But the insistence that every communication, every action, every policy recommendation must simultaneously address all of them created an impossible knot. Our targeted letter about financial regulation ballooned into a sprawling manifesto attempting to solve every societal ill. It became unwieldy, unfocused, and ultimately, unsendable. The specific, actionable point about crypto policy was drowned in a sea of everything else.

This is the paralysis Klein described. The need to solve all problems before you can solve one problem means you solve no problems. The desire for a perfect, unified front that satisfies every single constituency and addresses every single injustice, right now, prevents any forward movement on discrete issues. We couldn't agree on a letter about crypto policy because we couldn't first achieve universal consensus on the entire progressive platform, and frankly, on the fundamental nature of society itself.

And that touches on the final, frustrating reality: the modern American liberal coalition, and the Democratic party it often inhabits, is incredibly big tent. It stretches from centrists who might feel more at home with European Christian Democrats, through Obama-era neoliberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, all the way to staunch anti-capitalists and even some Marxist-Leninists. Forging consensus on anything specific is hard work. Forging consensus on everything, simultaneously, as a prerequisite for action on anything, is functionally impossible. And if that's what you have to do these days, I just give up. It's impossible.

In trying to be everything to everyone, in demanding that every single action perfectly embody the totality of an ever-expanding and sometimes contradictory set of ideals, we achieve nothing. We make no one happy because the perfect is the enemy of the good, and in this environment, the "perfect" is an infinitely receding horizon. My attempts to organize around crypto policy weren't derailed by lobbyists or powerful opponents in those initial stages; they were stalled by the internal dynamics of the very movement I sought to engage. The everything bagel, stuffed with every conceivable issue and identity concern, became too dense. And I fear this dynamic isn't unique to financial policy; it's a fundamental challenge hindering progressive action on countless pressing issues that require focused, albeit imperfect, steps forward.