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?
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?