Building Wide and Deep Coalitions

How do we become effective idealists?

I’m doing a series of events with Happy Women Dinners late Summer and Fall—two in California and one in Chicago. To reserve a seat, email jill [at] happywomendinners [dot] com. The ticket ($150) includes a signed copy of the paperback of ON OUR BEST BEHAVIOR, a signed copy of CHOOSING WHOLENESS OVER GOODNESS, dinner/brunch, a Q&A with me and Courtney Smith (just me in Chicago), and some hang time with other women.

SAN FRANCISCO: Sunday, August 24th, 12pm-2:30pm (private home in San Rafael)

LOS ANGELES: Sunday, September 7th, 6:30pm-8:30pm (private home in Encino)

CHICAGO: Sunday, September 21st, 12pm-2:30pm

There will be other events to come!

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I’m back on a horse in Montana this week—going fast and not breaking things—which means I’m getting to spend four hours a day talking to people who are not part of my immediate circle. Podcast listeners have probably heard me talk about these rides, but I treasure them, as they’re a too-rare opportunity to engage with people who sometimes see the world in the same way that I do, and sometimes don’t. I don’t know if our nervous systems are being recalibrated by being in nature on horseback, but despite political differences, we usually find a pretty substantial Venn diagram of shared values and friendliness—and not by avoiding the issues. Maybe it helps that I have yet to hear any of the conservatives in my midst this week even attempt to offer a defense of this administration—everyone seems to be concerned about cruelty, autocratic tendencies, and over-reach—but these weeks always remind me that there are broad swaths of overlapping agreement for almost all of us if we can only talk to each other IRL.

Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly in Mrs. America

A couple of weeks ago, I made a video on Instagram about the need to build wide and vast alliances—to form a coalition of resistance. This is something that we’ve struggled to do on the left in recent years, choosing to alienate and exclude people who are not in perfect lock step with us on every issue. In times like these, purity politics won’t cut it—we don’t have to agree on everything to agree on most things, or even enough things. Collectively, we need to grow ourselves up to both see and embrace this. Not only is it possible to work with people who don’t hold the same views as us, but we must.

In the video, I talked about Rutger Bregman’s book Moral Ambition—Rutger’s episode of the podcast is coming out in a few weeks—and how idealism is typically a losing strategy. It’s not effective unless you’re willing to compromise, collaborate, and do what you need to get the ball down the field. As he explains, “The only kind of person we can’t use in this fight is the fool who thinks good intentions are enough. Someone whose clear-eyed convictions put them squarely on the right side of history, but who achieve little in the here and now.” It might be hard to hear, but I get it. I do think that many of us engage in a type of social narcissism—that our own rightness and moral perfection is a more important measure of our lives than pragmatically and flexibly pushing and acting to leave the world in a better place than we found it, even if it falls a little short of our ideals. You know, progress over perfection.

Bregman makes this point with a story I had never heard, about the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson who managed to persuade the British empire to end its involvement in the slave trade. He wasn’t able to accomplish this by convincing the powers-that-be that enslaving people is monstrous and immoral; he tried that for a long time without success. Clarkson ultimately succeeded by moral reframing. He shifted his approach to focus on and publicize what was happening to the sailors on the slave ships. Yep. He managed to win people over to his cause by talking about the victimization of the perpetrators.