The Complexities of Coalition

...Ignoring such differences risks reproducing the old left's marginalization of important segments of the working class...

...This history leads me to claim that "politics of identity" is today largely a misnomer...

...Learning from Difference Critics of the politics of difference assume that specificity in public life is necessarily only the expression of narrow and rigidly defined group interest...

...In the 1970s each of these movements did champion a "politics of identity...

...From the beginning, however, identity politics was unstable, and- its project was toppled by the force of the movements themselves...

...This inward-looking pressing of interests, according to them, is precisely why the politics of difference makes coalition unworkable...

...In his recent book The Twilight of Common Dreams, Todd Gitlin similarly bemoans what he regards as nearly three decades of wasted effort on the left...

...WINTER • 1997 • 65 Complexities of Coalition Today, I would assert, these group-specific political tendencies draw less rigid boundaries around themselves than they did twenty years ago, and recognize a wider range of internal differences...

...We need to wake up to the challenge of understanding across difference rather than keep on dreaming about common dreams...

...Without a doubt...

...Despite the dominant rhetoric in this country that depicts poor people as a group of lazy and irresponsible black single mothers, the real circumstances of poverty are variable, and analyses from social-group perspectives are important for understanding that variability...

...The Rainbow movement had many problems...

...People within these movements have been among the first to criticize tendencies toward "essentialism" that marginalize some people and wrongly polarize individuals and groups...

...If each of these constituencies does not communicate its specific situations to the others, then the ruling powers can continue to coopt one by using another as scapegoat...

...In this general respect many people have reason to unite behind programs for economic security and meaningful work...

...Dozens of organizations were represented there, but the Greens and several state independent parties were the most active participants in the National Slate of Independent Candidates that the Network coordinated in the fall...

...If it is not unthinkable today, that is because the movement for gay and lesbian rights has succeeded in changing many people and institutions...

...Unity and understanding for a new people's movement will not come from pretending that group differences do not matter, but rather from understanding precisely how they do matter, and so forging an inclusive picture of our social relations...

...A more sensitive appraisal of the history of these movements since the 1960s would, I think, find an initial hardening of boundaries, followed by a reflective questioning of boundaries, and then increasing interaction, fusion, and exchange...

...Yet many of these groups themselves tend to be inward looking and fragmented...

...Feminists struggled with labor organizations, socialist groupings, Black Power leaders, and American Indian activists to persuade them not only to take women's issues seriously, but to change their internal practices to include women as speakers and leaders...

...One of the most important organized responses to the recent welfare cuts, for example, has come from feminists...

...This would require a coalition that draws on particular experiences and perspectives to construct an enlarged understanding of the depth of society's injustices and the existing possibilities for addressing them...

...But this way of putting things poses alternatives too starkly...

...The Independent Progressive Politics Network emerged from a meeting in Atlanta last April aimed at bringing together representatives from local, state, and national organizations in the United States working on progressive politics and interested in independent political work...

...Jackson won seven million popular votes in 1988, more than the primary victor Walter Mondale had won four years earlier...

...This history falsifies Weinstein's claim that there has been no significant left electoral activity because the particularist social movements have hopelessly paralyzed us...

...Since the 1960s, however, a "politics of difference" has torn apart America's common fabric, with groups claiming that they are oppressed, and demanding to be noticed in their social difference and cultural specificity...

...Any future left-wing electoral movement will have to assemble a similar coalition of groups and encourage a similar mutual recognition...

...In doing so we risk further marginalizing those who increasingly serve as scapegoats in American politics...

...In his recent book, The Affirmative Action Fraud, for example, Clint Bolick calls for a restoration of the Founding Fathers' "civil rights vision...

...America is a big and complex society whose members have precious little shared experience other than what appears on their television screens...

...It is laughable to portray today's protest groups as the creators of conflict over race, gender, and class to which their movements are in fact a response...

...The only hope for a renewed left is 64 • DISSENT Complexities of Coalition the transcendence of difference—a common battle for a decent life for all...

...But this is absurdly false...

...Politically correct calls to have women, African-Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, or people with disabilities represented, and their issues addressed, in all movement gatherings, have produced only bickering and hand wringing, and no significant left electoral activity since the 1960s...

...Each had to struggle to have this analysis taken seriously by the others, and by a left smugly convinced that all other oppressions could be reduced to that of the universal working class...

...The only alternative to such divisive bickering, they suggest, is for the majority ofAmericans harmed by global economic restructuring and neoliberal policies to transcend their differences of culture and social position and unite under the wide banner of "people before profits...

...The left should not play into this divide and conquer game by suggesting that AfricanAmerican-specific, or women-specific or gayspecific or American Indian-specific or immigrantspecific issues divert attention from capitalist domination...

...Left critics of the politics of difference have their history wrong, I want to argue, when they claim that public attention to group specificity has led to increasing division among Americans and a paralysis of political action...

...But by the early 1980s it was possible for the diverse groupings of old and new leftists, environmentalists, feminists, African-American activists, and other progressives who had persuaded one another of the importance of their issues to come together...

...Each aimed to construct or recover a core set of experiences, values, and forms of community that specifically defined women, or African-Americans, or Chicanos, and so on...

...There is a third way between interest-group competition and a differencebracketing commonality...

...The critics of the politics of difference may have something right, however, insofar as attention to the many ways that people are damaged by economic and policy decisions can make it difficult to find priority issues around which to form coalitions...

...These groups call for "special rights," like affirmative action, comparable worth, ordinances forbidding discrimination against gays and lesbians, Indian fishing rights, and protections for labor organizing...

...The Jackson message concentrated on issues of economic hardship and inequality, but also named the specific oppressions of racism, sexism, and homophobia...

...Similar reasoning applies to that quintessential class issue, decent jobs at decent pay...

...movement activists said this to themselves and each other by the late 1970s and early 1980s...

...To a significant degree, however, this is a sign of the success of progressive movements, rather than the failure of a fragmented left...

...Electoral Politics and Difference I am not so sure that the electoral arena is the only or best place to assess the strength or weakness of left influence on U.S...

...The Citizens party was an important experiment, abandoned by left organizations who decided, mistakenly in my opinion, to work within the Democratic party instead...

...Contemporary economic restructuring surely has made good jobs more scarce, and forced many people out of work, or into low-paying jobs, or into two jobs...

...1] WINTER • 1997 • 69...

...This was only eight years ago...

...It intends not to be a party or even an organization, but only a coordinated coalition...

...This is the measure that Weinstein and other left critics of the politics of difference use, however, and then they get their history wrong in claiming that this politics has meant impotence in the electoral arena...

...Working-class women challenged the class bias in feminist definitions of women's experience, African-American gay men challenged the black movement's definition of manhood, and so on...

...Conservatives attack affirmative action, for example, partly because its principles are now embodied in the practice of many corporations and nonprofit institutions, and not only in the public programs conservatives wish to end...

...By any measure, this was one of the most significant progressive electoral campaigns since World War II...

...Racist anti-immigrant sentiment and sexist calls for "family values" focus attention on blaming other poor and disadvantaged people for shrinking labor markets and increasing social costs, thus setting America's working people against each other...

...They needed separate organizational and cultural space to withdraw from such arguments, develop solidarity with one another, and create alternative institutions to organize and provide services to their constituencies...

...It only further confuses a project of progressive alliance, however, to judge much of the thought and action of committed progressives for the last twenty years as One Big Mistake...

...Latino and Asian movements and groups can explain and interpret one face of poverty, feminist analysis shows another, a rural perspective another, African-American experience of racist exclusion another, reservation Indians another, older working-class white men in the former in68 • DISSENT Complexities of Coalition dustrial heartland yet another...

...It is more disturbing, however, to hear respected leaders and writers of the left singing a similar tune...

...Increased Understanding, Not Increased Polarization The left's historical revisionism about the politics of difference is almost as seriously distorting as the right's...

...Its publications express many generally good ideas, but its policy of sometimes supporting Democratic party candidates and its rhetorical distancing of itself from older socialist or even New Deal traditions keeps its vision elusive...

...According to Bolick and other conservatives, commitment to race and gender blindness was ensconced in the Constitution in 1789...

...With the exception of the Campaign for a New Tomorrow, a predominantly African-American grouping, they all seem to be the class-oriented organizations that critics of identity politics are looking for...

...Reduced to "rearguard damage control" in which each fragmented group tries to defend its own turf, the American left has been "mired for the past decade in the self-defeating morass of identity politics...

...It may be true, as Weinstein says, that too much of their energy has been directed to such "rearguard damage control...

...It seems to me that there is less organization and energy directed at working for economic and social equality today than at any time since the 1950s...

...Fragmented Left Weinstein, Gitlin, and others are surely right that we are a long way from mass organizing on such issues today...

...Conservatives certainly exploit gendered and racialized rhetoric as a way of diverting attention from the economic restructuring that has been hurting most Americans...

...Although King did not win the primary, he showed much more strength than the pundits predicted, proving to many that out-front leftwing positions could win significant numbers of votes...

...Even the most Orwellian imagination would not have dreamt of a Defense of Marriage Act in 1975, because the idea that gay men and lesbians might have the same privileges as heterosexual couples was unthinkable in mainstream America then...

...Perhaps we lack commitment to the work that careful coalition building requires...

...But the Rainbow really was a coalition of constituencies differentiated by social position and experience of oppression and disadvantage, where each recognized and affirmed the specificity of the others and the need to work together...

...WINTER • /997 • 67 Complexities of Coalition As Weinstein notes in his February In These Times piece, in the last few years there have been new and interesting electoral efforts that potentially include all those who wish to challenge the hegemony of corporate interests...

...Only by listening to the voices of differently situated groups can a potential movement united for the sake of meeting people's needs have a clear sense of what those needs are...

...while American practices did not always live up to these ideals, a steady progress brought us as a nation to real equality...

...The coalition was possible precisely because the different groups had gotten beyond an identity politics in which each is worried only about its own situation...

...In an article on third-party movements in the United States in February of 1996, In These Times editor James Weinstein asserts that the left has been impotent since the 1960s because it has fragmented into gender, racial, and ethnic groupings...

...This had changed by 1988...

...In the decade of the 1980s this formation was called the Rainbow Coalition...

...There remain other fields in this treacherous political terrain, and some roads not taken far enough...

...We must be careful not to interpret all roads as leading to the reactionary political field in which we find ourselves today...

...The New party, on the other hand, which has had a number of successes in local elections around the country, seems politically amorphous...

...Both Jackson and the campaign made many mistakes, some of them shameful, and there was not enough real grassroots organizing to reach the diverse constituencies needed for electoral success...

...People associate this name so closely with Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns that they fail to credit the earlier campaigns for which the concept was invented...

...There is no doubt that the last twenty years has seen backlash on many fronts, and increasing organization among people who would reverse the reforms of the sixties and seventies, and even of the thirties...

...But I contend that its appeal also derived from its diversity—and from the fact that the different parts of the coalition organized their distinct constituencies...

...Gitlin's account suggests, for example, that so-called identity politics has led to an increasing "hardening of the boundaries between groups" in the last twenty-five years...

...We have forgotten, perhaps, how much work it took for each of these social movements to acknowledge the others as important, and for more traditional left organizations to regard any of them as important enough to change their own analyses and practices...

...As the above examples show, however, the fragmentation of progressives seems more attributable to a free-for-all spirit than to turf defense or ideological disagreement...

...Although jobs matter to each of these groups, their job needs are different, the constraints on their lives are different, and these differences are structured by racist, sexist, ageist and ableist biases and privileges, as well as by class and education...

...An inclusive movement cannot emerge from the search for a common good, however, but only from careful attention by each vulnerable social segment to the specific experience and vulnerabilities of the others...

...The Labor party has a very strong and comprehensive program, but its leaders want the party to be tied so closely to labor organizations that they have forbidden local chapters from running candidates and indeed make it difficult for persons not affiliated with labor organizations to work with them...

...We should reject this false dichotomy between attending to group specificity and organizing in response to the job insecurity, increased inequality, and decreased access to health care and housing that these many groups all experience in different ways...

...To be sure, the mass interest it elicited is partly attributable to its being a primary campaign with 66 • DISSENT Complexities of Coalition significant media attention...

...politics...

...In retrospect, I look upon the 1984 Jackson presidential campaign as a trial run for the next one...

...It would seem more appropriate to praise them for recognizing the damage, however, than to hold their woman-centered politics responsible for relegating all of us to the rearguard...

...The decade of the 1970s saw some electoral success for African-Americans, but otherwise there was little significant activity bringing progressives and leftists together...

...America can only be put back on the road to happiness and prosperity if we restore the ancient "civil rights vision" that ignores differences of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or class...

...According to Gitlin, political movements beginning in the late 1960s that asserted the specificity of gender or race oppression and the need to attend to these specificities to combat oppression, were "a very bad turn, a detour into quicksand!' While African-Americans, women, gays, and Latinos all legitimately complain about exclusion and discrimination, the emergence of group-based political enclaves has eroded the unified left's commitment to equality and its ability to organize Americans against capitalist greed and misery...

...The text of the founding principles of the Labor party adopted in Cleveland in June 1996 would have been unlikely for a group of labor activists in 1970...

...Neoconservative amnesia about slavery, the Civil War, exclusion of women, extermination of Indians, discrimination against Jews, suppression of Chicanos, is certainly disturbing...

...Have there been mistakes and excesses within and among the movements attending to group difference...

...Many people claim, for example, that America is more racially polarized today than it was during the civil rights era, and blame assertive movements of African-Americans or Native Americans or Latinos who claim equal economic opportunity and full political participation at the same time as they assert cultural affinity and reject assimilation...

...Gitlin and others suggest that identity politics is at least partly responsible for these attacks on labor and the poor, because in their quest for cultural selfrealization groups abandon concern for nuts-andbolts material issues...

...The "hardening" of group boundaries was born from the frustrations of dismissal and the more-oppressed-than-thou competition...

...The result has been an irresolvable tension between the recognition of the generalities of social position and the affirmation of the multiple positionings of each particular person...

...In the meantime, the labor movement and more traditional left organizations have recognized the specificity of gender, race, and sexual oppressions, and modified their analyses and programs accordingly...

...Progressives are certainly fragmented, but it is disingenuous to lay blame for such fragmentation on the politics of difference...

...The Harold Washington campaign in Chicago learned from this near success, brought together a similar coalition of groups, and in November 1983 elected the first black mayor of Chicago under the Rainbow Coalition banner...

...A genuine coalition of hardworking African-Americans, labor activists, environmentalists, farm activists, Latinos, Native Americans, feminists, socialists, and gay and lesbian activists fueled a blazing primary campaign...

...We did not need to wait for a Weinstein or Gitlin to recognize that group identity can be wrongly essentialist and therefore exclusionary...

...Chief among them were leaders afraid of the grassroots and an ultimate commitment to the Democratic party...

...Yet, despite some interconnections and communication, both the New party and the Labor party, two of the biggest progressive third-party efforts, have not become actively involved...

...Identity politics leads to a spiral of multiplied identities, to essentialist definitions of the group that suppress differences within, to the comforts of enclosed marginality, to a relativism in which no claims to truth and rightness have meaning, and finally to backlash...

...A comprehensive program for work and income, however, needs to develop its specifics from knowledge of the structurally different situation of people with respect to their abilities, proximity to employment, and the demands of their everyday lives: from young inner-city African-American men, to newly arrived legal or illegal immigrants, to low-skilled single mothers with little access to child care, to suburban married women with young children and large mortgages, to able-bodied old people with small or non-existent pensions, to people who move in wheelchairs...

...People of color struggled with feminists, socialists, and labor leaders to have racism taken seriously, and gays and lesbians struggled with all these movements even to be recognized as part of them, let alone to have their own oppression taken seriously...

...Each group developed an analysis of the structural workings of its own oppression or exclusion...

...The first Rainbow Coalition formed in 1983 in Boston to try to win the Democratic party mayoral nomination for Mel King...

...Conservatives today have set their well-organized, well-funded sights not only on reversing the gains of identity politics, however, but also on targets the left has regarded as strictly class matters, such as the welfare safety net and labor's ability to organize and bargain...

...The coalition included AfricanAmericans, Latinos, white labor leaders, leftists and progressives, feminists, and gay activists...

...Gender, race, ethnic, and ablement-specific movements arose in the late sixties and early seventies as people in the larger left reflected on their own specific experience of oppression...

...The ideas and politics of the Rainbow Coalition had significant appeal with the American public...

...Proponents of a politics of difference insist that individuals are no more than their labels, and elevate diversity to religious heights...

...Beating Back Backlash It's commonly said that recent social movements have further polarized American life because they have motivated backlash...

...American society certainly needs a progressive movement of those with no interest in enlarging corporate power, a broad movement of working and poor people that crosses gender, race, citizenship status, sexuality, and age...

...This kind of fragmentation cannot be laid at the door of so-called identity politics...