Stand Your Ground. Plant Some Flowers On It Too
You know who's doing great organizing for us right now? Elon Musk and Donald Trump, that's who. By attacking and alienating more and more swathes of the American public, they're handing us the possibility of a coalition bigger and broader than maybe anything we've ever seen in this country before. A gift, if we take it and do something with it. Friday veterans marched to the nation's capital and state capitals all over the country, from Alaska to Arizona, from Florida to Maine, in an event called by a group I hadn't even heard of before called Fourteenth Now.
The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reports, "Disabled veteran Don Carter rode shotgun in his son’s Chevy pickup truck for 11 hours from Illinois to the nation’s capital to take part in a political protest for the first time in his life. Carter, a 92-year-old Korean War veteran, and his son, Larry, joined a crowd of nearly 3,000 for a two-hour national veterans’ rally Friday on the National Mall to protest cuts by President Donald Trump to veterans’ federal jobs, services and benefits." Veterans are a powerful constituency in part because it's pretty hard to call them unpatriotic woke wimps and things like that. Newcomers and first-timers are a sign that an anti-Trump anti-coup movement is ready to grow.
Every cruel and destructive action by the Trump Administration is a recruiting opportunity for the opposition. Add up who's impacted by the attacks on immigrants, trans people, people reliant on social security and Medicare/Medicaid; include people who care about free speech and the first amendment national parks and national forests; people who work or worked for the federal government who've been impacted by the slash-and-burn attacks on so many departments; people who care about Ukraine and Palestine and about the millions of people around the world that USAID was providing medical care and nutrition for until Marco Rubio and Musk barged in with their wrecking ball; AIDS activists, medical workers, public health experts, and the rest of us horrified by the failure to respond appropriately to the measles outbreak and the sabotage of public health measures under RFK's sinister jurisdiction; people who care about farmers, businesses trashed by tariffs and shutdowns, hungry children here at home, higher education, and research; people who like safe air travel, clean air, clean water, food safety; people who don't like the threats against Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and Panama.... Add them all up and you have a huge majority ready to act if and when they're not already, like Friday's veterans, being mobilized, and you start to see some possibilities.
Possibilities are not inevitabilities. They're invitations of a sort we need to seize and make the most of. And building broad coalitions raises a crucial question in political life: to whom do you reach out, how do you reach out, when are you compromising and when are you organizing? There seem to be two extremes out there, and I think the most viable approach lies somewhere inbetween.
At one extreme is something centrist Democrats often exemplify, the idea that if we're nice to the other side they'll meet us halfway. But that reaching across the aisle business that maybe worked at some point in the twentieth century has too often in this century morphed into selling out and caving in. As it was with Chuck Schumer's surrender on the budget last week that has led Indivisible and others to call for his replacement as Senate Minority Leader.
But the claim of meeting halfway is often an excuse for doing all the reaching out or selling out. For accepting the unacceptable, giving without receiving, pretending the opposition plays by the same rules (or any rules) when the evidence to the contrary is abundant. As has often been said lately, bullies perceive concessions as weakness and the basis for more concessions. But there's also the question of when you're reaching out to offer or demand or negotiate and when you're just giving in.
No one now thinks that if some version of the opposition was nicer to Nazis in the 1930s they would have stopped being Nazis. The Third Reich wasn't caused by a niceness shortage, and neither is the stupid coup and the far-right authoritarians behind it. It's a war of sorts, in which self-defense is vital, and recruitment is a possibility, but surrender is a mistake. Too, a lot of people on the right who think that queer-positive multi-ethnic feminist America hates them and poses a threat to them do not for the most part believe that because of what we do and say. They believe it because their news media, chief propagandists, and elected officials have had them on an IV drip of these ideas for decades.
That centrist position is too often a right-pandering position in which the feelings of, for example, white supremacists and transphobes are treated as somehow more important than those of the people they target. When's the last time you saw legacy media rush out to find some urban Black women to interview about how they feel about what the right's doing or where the country's headed? This pandering version of centrism legitimizes the viewpoint that some of us matter more than others, are more "real Americans" than others: white than nonwhite, native-born than immigrant, straight than queer, Christian than non-Christian, male than female, rural than urban, that the latter in all these pairs has to tiptoe around and accommodate the former even if the former wants to take away their rights and otherwise harm them.
I believe you can reach out to people who do not share your core values while standing firmly (but sometimes maybe diplomatically and strategically) on those values, that you can invite them to join you, and that this must never be confused with joining them or getting muddled somewhere in the middle. The history of this country is full of people who led what were seen as radical campaigns in their day--to abolish slavery, to secure votes for women, to defend and expand human rights, to protect the environment and the climate. Their unwavering integrity was part of what encouraged people to rethink their own position and ultimately prodded whole societies into shifting their norms. They moved ideas from the margins to the mainstream and from being only ideas to becoming actualities, in part by being unwaveringly committed to those ideas.
The mushy middle can be too welcoming to the right, but the puritanical part of the left has a perpetual unwelcoming committee for people who are not in perfect agreement or all up on the terminology and stuff. If organizing consists of building movements through finding common ground and motivating people with a sense of confidence and possibility, this is pretty much a tactic of disorganizing, of coalition prevention and driving people away by making them fearful of getting anything even slightly wrong. It can be a conscious technique of sabotage, but I believe it's most often an unconscious technique by people who think the assignment is to be perfect rather than to be powerful. By powerful I mean achieving your goals, realizing your hopes, and that's most often done incrementally, imperfectly, and by working with people who don't agree with you about everything. Maybe getting them to agree with you through an exercise of skill and even compassion.
Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party wrote a few years about about what he called maximalism, which he defined as "considering anything less than the most idealistic position as a betrayal of core values and evidence of corruption, cowardice, lack of commitment, or vision. Relatedly, a righteous refusal to engage with people who do not already share our views and values." He notes that it's a problematic strategy or maybe the antithesis of one because "The simple reason is that there are not enough people who are already 100% aligned. Our organizations and movements need to grow. Holding on to tactics and overly idealistic demands that keep us small but pure ignores the basic strategic imperative of building power. Maximalist thinking is particularly pernicious when it is used to justify not doing the basic work of organizing: talking to lots of different kinds of people on the doors, in their homes, and in their workplaces. We need to meet people where they are, build relationships, and move them into action."
We are at a turning point for this country's future, but also its identity, its coalitions, its possibilities. A lot of people, even people who voted Republican in November, are turning away from what the Trump Administration is doing. I believe there's a possibility of building a huge coalition and welcoming in people who were more centrist, more status quo, who voted for Trump or sat out the election because they were misinformed or uninformed, who are ready to reexamine their ideas (and their information sources – surveys after the November election found the more misinformed people were, the more likely they were to vote for Trump). Who are ready to oppose this administration fiercely.
I fear that in some quarters they will be reviled and rejected. On February 27th, the Washington Post ran a profile of a young forest service employee in rural Michigan who voted for Trump in the hope he meant it about free IVF treatment. Instead, his hackers eliminated her job and her hopes crumble. She had voted for Biden in 20202 in the first presidential election she was old enough to vote in, although she was living in a red region and from a right-wing family. It was a strangely written story, playing up her emotions and her conflicts in a way that just seemed to set her up to be hated. Many of the more than 13,000 comments the story received were harsh and hostile. A friend of mine who's a minister in a nearby community remarked to me that if this former forest service employee reads those comments, she's not going to feel encouraged to join the Democrats or the resistance or anything else. It's people like her I'm thinking about.
Another story from this volatile moment. This month, when legislators in Wisconsin were debating a piece of anti-trans legislation, an old man with white hair under a camo cap spoke to the public and the politicians, saying: “First of all, I’d like to apologize to you people. I was invited here to give my support for Bill 104. I have a very little knowledge of gay people and things like that there. So when I came here, my eyes were opened. I was one of the critics that sat on the side and made the decision there was only two genders, so I got an education that was unbelievable. And I don’t know just exactly how to say this but my perspective for people have changed. So I don’t want to take up no more of your time." As he finishes, he brings his hands to his hear as he says "I’d like to apologize for being here and I learned a very lot about this group of people.”
I'm not saying everyone has a responsibility to go on a diplomatic mission, and those with a history of being targeted have reason to protect themselves first – but someone in that waiting room or someone who spoke in the hearing found a way to reach this guy. Meanwhile in Montana, powerful speeches helped defeat two anti-trans bills, with the help of Republicans apparently swayed by what they heard. You don't have to join people but maybe you have to be ready to welcome them when they're ready to join you. And I'm not saying I'm particularly good at this--coming from the Bay Area it's easy to assume everyone shares certain assumptions about what's good and true, and I can fall into the habit of thinking the point is to be right, not persuasive, or understand where people are coming from. But I try, when I have my eyes on the prize.
The writer Lawrence Weschler covered a number of human rights crises, including the aftermath of the Bosnian War of the early nineties. He once told an interviewer, "There’s a striking thing in interviews with people who have been part of a conflict, for example, in Rwanda, or for that matter, in Bosnia. When you ask people 'What the hell? You just killed your nanny who’s been with you for 20 years, or your neighbour; why’d you do that?,' the answer you get over and over is, 'You can’t understand what it was like, it was like a nightmare.' Such that when people say: 'it was like a nightmare,' it means they had entered dream time, where all sorts of unimaginable things could happen. ...It seems to me that the ones that are criminally liable are the ones who are outside the dream and were provoking the dream, and manipulating the dream."
That's always felt like an important distinction to me. There are those who make the nightmare, those who have the nightmare, and those who suffer the results. Trump, Musk, Bannon, RFK are the architects of nightmares, by which I mean producers of fears and instigators of hates, spreaders of lies and false promises and threats that capture some people's minds and get them on board with the destruction, whether or not they know what's what they signed up for.
May we welcome people waking up from their nightmares to come share our dreams.
p.s. The magnolias here are an experiment – when I first imagined a newsletter titled Meditations in an Emergency I imagined more lyrical and literary content, but we're in an overwhelming emergency, so the latter part of this newsletter's title seems to be getting the lion's share of my attention. I thought perhaps I could keep more of the meditations in here through images (and I am a great believer in beauty and pleasure as part of what keeps us going while we face their opposites).
p.p.s. I've been listening to Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown's podcast How to Survive the End of the World and they manage to be lovingly critical of the left, deeply insightful about the private life of our emotions, desires, and fears that underlie public life, to be visionary, hopeful, tough, personal, funny and really illuminating to listen to, and I thought I'd recommend it here.
