Listening to the Majority 54 podcast, and I can't help but notice this same tired argument being trotted out by the Never Trumper types... "The Democrats need to embrace being a big-tent party! Enough with all the purity and litmus tests!"
The problem is, that's not how the left sees it. You're talking past them. The left thinks that they are building a big tent, and in fact, that's what the litmus tests are about. Support for LGBT rights and every single other intersectional identity, the shambles we saw of the “pro-decision” rollout post-Dobbs, demands for affordable housing to be included with housing reform — it’s all part of this ideology of allyship.
Now, to be fair to the Never Trumpers, all of that is way counterproductive. But it's not that the left doesn't recognize the need to be a big tent. They just have an insanely warped vision of how to go about that. At the individual moral level, allyship may not be half-bad of a way to repackage old ideas about basic human decency for the 21st century, but in politics, it’s putting the cart before the horse. In our legislative system, no one can afford to demand purity before the voting actually starts; rather, you assemble the largest possible coalition and then build internal consensus towards some policy outcome that satisfies the largest majority you can assemble. Absent the filibuster, things might not be that way, but they are that way today, and there’s no getting around that.
In other words, allyship makes for great allies, but terrible partisans, and is therefore no reasonable substitute for actual partisanship.
This is what the left needs to get through their heads in order to be effective. Allyship may make you a good person in real life, but in politics it makes you a backward asshole and undermines everything you care about in real life.
That’s not to say Democrats need to just go around being dicks to LGBT people because “something something allyship does not equal partisanship”. But it’s to make the observation that Joe Manchin doesn’t have to actually love LGBT people in order to caucus with and vote for the party that wants their rights to be protected. And at the end of the day as an ally, I care more about their actual rights than I do about whether Joe Manchin loves them right this very moment. Moreover, if Joe Manchin keeps voting for their rights because of his own rank partisanship, that experience can help build up his personal commitment to good allyship.
It makes me think of the old saying, "close enough for government work." They really need to think about that aspect. If you are trying to hold onto power in government and you need to form alliances and coalitions, just expect to only get close to what you want. Plus, whoever gets everything she wants, even at the best of times?
On the other hand, I think there are real and valid complaints in the progressive struggle that explain why the left settled on "allyship" as the solution.
I mean, they're not exactly wrong about various historical injustices where Democratic kowtowing to the South literally cost Black lives *and* led to policies like Social Security being fundamentally unequal at the actuarial level. And that's just off the top of my head! The consensus seems to have been that the left's major victories rang hollow for an increasingly diverse coalition. And that coalition demanded that White lefties quit selling out minorities for net gains -- and it was framed in terms of "being good allies", because after all, good allies don't sell out their allies.
Which is all good and well! It's really hard to argue against on a moral level. But again, it makes for political malpractice in the real world if you're going to insist that every ally always show up for every fight AND that you're going to fight on all fronts at all times. (ed: It's the extrapolation from the concept of "Democrats utterly failed at allyship in the past" to the more extreme "Allyship is the most important ingredient to movement solidarity going forward" that is the problem with this mindset. It's just not sustainable!) Just like in war, your allies can't be everywhere at once, and fighting on too many fronts spreads your resources too thinly. We're now stuck in a place where the mere act of declaring priorities and values is considered "bad allyship" if it doesn't nod to an entire litany of allies.
(ed: Which is why the left increasingly sounds like that scene from the 300 movie where Xerxes impotently rattles off his list of allies.)
To be fair, I think there's also a problem that the American political system fundamentally forces us to form coalitions BEFORE we vote. Which means that when the *American* left looks around at how to build its coalition, they always try to make sure they've got the most cohesive, purist coalition possible, because once you get up the Sisyphean hill of the filibuster, you don't want "politics" to force the entire coalition to sell out even a single ally. Not only is that a cardinal sin; those allies *remember* betrayals and those betrayals become yet another part of their struggle narrative and justification for the demand for future allyship.
A better coalition-formation system would obviously really help this by letting us build coalitions AFTER elections; but it'd also solve a lot of other, more fundamental problems that perennially stymie the left. Multiparty politics, for instance, would make the left's political choices pretty stark and clear, and would allow for legislative coalitions to rise faster without having to spend political capital on long-term ally-building. But it's kind of a catch-22 - if we'd ever had a healthier politics, the left wouldn't have gone down this particular unhealthy rabbit-hole.
It makes me think of the old saying, "close enough for government work." They really need to think about that aspect. If you are trying to hold onto power in government and you need to form alliances and coalitions, just expect to only get close to what you want. Plus, whoever gets everything she wants, even at the best of times?
On the other hand, I think there are real and valid complaints in the progressive struggle that explain why the left settled on "allyship" as the solution.
I mean, they're not exactly wrong about various historical injustices where Democratic kowtowing to the South literally cost Black lives *and* led to policies like Social Security being fundamentally unequal at the actuarial level. And that's just off the top of my head! The consensus seems to have been that the left's major victories rang hollow for an increasingly diverse coalition. And that coalition demanded that White lefties quit selling out minorities for net gains -- and it was framed in terms of "being good allies", because after all, good allies don't sell out their allies.
Which is all good and well! It's really hard to argue against on a moral level. But again, it makes for political malpractice in the real world if you're going to insist that every ally always show up for every fight AND that you're going to fight on all fronts at all times. (ed: It's the extrapolation from the concept of "Democrats utterly failed at allyship in the past" to the more extreme "Allyship is the most important ingredient to movement solidarity going forward" that is the problem with this mindset. It's just not sustainable!) Just like in war, your allies can't be everywhere at once, and fighting on too many fronts spreads your resources too thinly. We're now stuck in a place where the mere act of declaring priorities and values is considered "bad allyship" if it doesn't nod to an entire litany of allies.
(ed: Which is why the left increasingly sounds like that scene from the 300 movie where Xerxes impotently rattles off his list of allies.)
To be fair, I think there's also a problem that the American political system fundamentally forces us to form coalitions BEFORE we vote. Which means that when the *American* left looks around at how to build its coalition, they always try to make sure they've got the most cohesive, purist coalition possible, because once you get up the Sisyphean hill of the filibuster, you don't want "politics" to force the entire coalition to sell out even a single ally. Not only is that a cardinal sin; those allies *remember* betrayals and those betrayals become yet another part of their struggle narrative and justification for the demand for future allyship.
A better coalition-formation system would obviously really help this by letting us build coalitions AFTER elections; but it'd also solve a lot of other, more fundamental problems that perennially stymie the left. Multiparty politics, for instance, would make the left's political choices pretty stark and clear, and would allow for legislative coalitions to rise faster without having to spend political capital on long-term ally-building. But it's kind of a catch-22 - if we'd ever had a healthier politics, the left wouldn't have gone down this particular unhealthy rabbit-hole.