So I’m scrolling along at Docudharma, and I find (and promote) this great essay by Pico, Fragile Coalitions: Lessons from ENDA and McClurkin, part 1. A number of us have been thinking about coalitions lately, and many of us have witnessed the recent flamewars over at the Big Orange on the Obama/McClurkin fiasco as well as the ENDA fiasco (which Robyn has written about as well).
Pico asked some good questions on how we can go from splintering factions to real coalitions:
I’ll have more to say in the second half of this post. In the meantime, some questions for you all:
What interest groups and/or ideological groups do you think pose the greatest challenge to unified party fronts? Are some more polarizing than others?
When the opportunity arises to meet the demands of part of a coalition group, is it better to fight for who you can or to maintain group solidarity (basically, do you agree with Frank’s argument for incremental change, or with his opponents)?
While each coalition can flame out in its own spectacular way, are there overall strategies for getting non-aligned groups to work together?
I think these are excellent questions to consider, especially in light of the next essay to arrive on the front page, Armando’s Why I Concentrate My Critiques On The Non-Clinton Candidates. Armando urges us all to press the candidates on the issues:
That is why I focus my attention on her rivals. That is why I support Chris Dodd. He has paid attention to the issues that matter to me. He has brought them to the fore. He has made his rivals move on those issues. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has moved NO ONE on any issue since he became a Senator. From my perspective, his candidacy has been an utter failure. I think from his perspective, he wants to win, it has been as well.
I deplore this focus on “doubletalk” (as if all them do not engage in it.) Press Clinton on the issues. Indeed, press Clinton’s RIVALS on the issues. Asking them why they want to be President is not only a waste of time, it distracts from what I think most of us want – attention to the issues we care about.
I see a real connection between these two essays. In Armando’s essay there’s a lot of talk about candidates “pandering” to different groups of voters; whether or not they will ultimately honor their many promises if elected is not so easily known. But he’s right insofar as getting them on the record, over and over again, as to their positions on issues that are important to us.
Problem is, we have so many issues! Women’s rights, the environment, restoring the Constitution, racism and social justice, poverty, labor, you name it! And within those issues there are many differing stands taken by Progressive voters.
So how do we find some unity in such a complex situation? I think it is actually helpful to read some of the flamewars at Daily Kos — there’s ones on immigration policy, GLBT issues, race issues, and we see a lot of factions holding tightly to their points of view. How can we turn those factions into coalitions that work together to pressure our candidates and our legislators both local and federal, to take a stand and say what they are for, what they are against, take a stand we all can hold them to, over and over again?
I think Pico’s questions are a good starting point. And I think Armando’s essay is a good framework for the answers to those questions. Ultimately, we need to grow bigger and stronger to make our representatives in government truly represent us. In order to do that we have to strongly debate the issues that are important to us and come to some agreements with other coalitions, to educate ourselves and others, to realize we are stronger together than we are apart. That won’t be easy. I suggested to Pico we start doing the Thunderdome debates that Buhdy brought up a while back — and I think we should invite knowledgeable folks on either side of an issue to come here to Docudharma and have it out.
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… of ponies .
I don’t have any ideas on how to get everyone working together, but I think once we get everyone together to talk we will be closer to finding the answers to the questions. How can we speculate on what would work with different groups, if we don’t know exactly what all their group represents?
Once we find that out, we can work together to try and find our most common grounds, and how we can help each other.
But until the Center/Left learns how to deal with the Left/Left we are in trouble.
They have no trouble making deals with Republicans….but when it comes to the issues of the Left/Left, we get nothing but dismissed and ignored.
And that is the problem with your excellent Thunderdome idea….who from the Center will debate?
It is “lowering themselves” to debate us in their eyes, but really they just know that on the issues we are usually right, there big argument is pragmatism.
“We can’t DO that!”
But they NEVER actually try to!
Seven years into Bushco the Center Dems are still trying for Bi-partisanship….while ignoring their Base. And they set the tone for the bloggers on ‘their side.’
In 30 years of observing politics, it has always been thus.
Then…ten years later or so, they enact the policies we suggest and pat themselves on the back for coming up with them.
But as I say…I am prejudiced.
…in these discussions. Alas, it will probably be several days before work will allow that.
Watching GOP anti-war candidate Ron Paul raise over $2 mil in grassroots donations in a single day has really got me thinking about the reasons we can’t stop the War.
We on the anti-war Left forget that there is a huge reservoir of anti-war sentiment on the Right as well, and that our differences on other issue prevent us from exploiting our combined numbers on this, the most important issue of all.
70+% of Americans, a super majority, want us out of Iraq, yet when this overwhelming consensus is split into into ideological parts, each part manages barely a pluralilty.
This split severely dilutes the ability of broad based anti-war sentiment to bring about change and allows the remaining warmongering quarter to rule by fiat.
I’ve suddenly realized that, unlike Viet Nam, the Left will never be able to stop this war on its own – and that we simply have no choice but to create an anti-war coalition with the Right if we ever hope to stop the madness to which this country is descending. (That goes for civil liberties too.)
Bottom line: I think its long past time we on the left stopped talking only to ourselves. Won’t be easy I know, but we need to do it.
…inclined to further coalitions? Or will we still remember these fights when we’re digging latrines in the woods?
I agree totally about the usefulness of dkos at illuminating these things, but it often seems more like a shadow from the flash than anything else. I think it’s very representative, but once you’ve seen it explode, gotten the map in sharp relief, then what? Does the result move to synthesis or just an exhaustion to absurdity?
This is stuff parliamentary democracies do way better than the US. Think you and pico have it right, it’s the central question, how to cooperate in our weird arrangement.
to soften the hard left, you will lose it. Look at the leech in whore’s drawers that is the “New Labour Project” in the UK. See a Nye Bevan? See a Tony Benn? See a Claire Short? Course you don’t. There are three rows of scrubbed shiny faces who know no other way than to kiss the Downing Street arse – and Downing Street sees some of your more unsavoury Democrats as role models. The left here have not had anybody to vote for nationally since ’97. I tore up my card in ’98.
We are fucked. You still have remaining vestiges of manufacturing industry and working people who cannot afford to get sick. They don’t need corporate sponsored mouthpieces. They need healthcare which is free at the point of delivery and so do their kids and the poor bastards whose jobs are now being done thousands of miles away, for peanuts and some cantankerous old bastard’s stock dividend.
I’m not suggesting that in your system – which I still don’t fully understand, that you shouldn’t seek out alliances, but if you really have to thrash around the political divan with the centre, then for heaven’s sake use protection – or you might catch something that’s not easy to get rid of. Like we did.
Brief ramble:
I think part of our problem, which is understandable because of our focus on national politics, is that we’re always looking for big solutions instead of focusing on the very local. Granted, if we want to talk about federal non-discrimination law, it’s hard to avoid the national scene – but what can we be doing, concretely, at the local level, to build the kind of framework we need so we don’t have to rely on grand coalitions.
(Incidentally, this is why there’s much less overlap between activists and bloggers than we’d like to believe. They’re doing locally while we’re talking nationally.)
The presidential debates are a good symptom of that. We grill them on a thousand issues, some of which they have little control over. Yes, I want to know my candidate’s stance on gay marriage, even though his/her only real power in the gay marriage debate is figurehead status and a potential veto – although the only legislation possible is an overturning of DOMA, since everything else is either at the state level or at the constitutional amendment level.
Like the ENDA debate: HRC shouldn’t have been the center of that, void of leadership notwithstanding. I don’t need HRC giving press releases, I need the names of representatives willing to vote for ENDA only if gender protections were removed, then I need their phone numbers and contact info of activist groups in their state. In the meantime, we need to be pushing the states that don’t have employment non-discrimination acts to develop them. Push it, and don’t invest hope in a regime change as the cure-all.
I’m not saying the debates over Big Things and presidential candidates aren’t important, but that we can sometimes get so focused on them that we forget where we do have power for smaller, direct coalition-building.
How y’all doin? I’m back from a major digression through the tooobz. Amazing rants and raving out there … I promise, you will never see Stoller promoting Field Negro at the GOS. bwah!
Here are my questions: Having skimmed the two bills, H.R. 2015 and H.R.3685, I wondering, why neither bill simply emends the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identification” to Titles I-VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
By promoting a “separate” and, to my mind, inferior* legislative strategy for 15 years, has not HRC single-handedly fomented the deconstruction of a liberal, civil society we all hoped to avoid? Where’s the political memory among these 2007 advocates? I’d like to know, because I know I missed that convo.
I’m kinda appalled to realize that organization as been allowed by G(LBT) leadership to replicate the internecine politics of 1974. And I’ll refrain from commenting on the race and religion diversionary tactics. Dayam.
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* ENDA reads just like Title VII with notable exceptions, e.g. religious, clubs, schools, commerce, quota, and military, and complex language attempting to detail wardrobe and perceived variants of gender identity. The latter prosciption does nothing but transfer affirmative burdens to anyone who might arrive at the office on a bad hair day in last night’s leisure suit. WTF?
I take back the above, because this polemic failure is just too ridiculous in light of the ‘Clurkin spectacle that helped expose the wound. Has anyone in the GLBT action echo chamber countered the evangelical hatin with equal opposing reaction, that RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS are exempt from ENDA discrimination prohibitions, such as they are?