On Complexity and Coalitions
Gitlin, Todd
Iris Young ("The Complexities of Coalition," Winter 1997) admits that the left is electorally feeble, but within her framework, it seems to me, she cannot explain the feebleness. Her...
...Similar examples are legion...
...She is enthusiastic about the fact that the 1988 Jackson campaign won more primary votes than Mondale won in 1984...
...It is not good will that concerns me, it is efficacy...
...Group hubris detracts from the effort...
...At the risk of repeating an argument of my 92 • DISSENT Arguments book, let me say that the achievements of identity politics are many, considerable, and overdue...
...Intellectual honesty requires that we, all of us, recognize the price and the limits of our victories...
...Moreover, the picture she paints is seriously incomplete...
...Without his commitment, it crumbled...
...The same goes for the tens of millions in the anxious middle classes, female and male, of various races and ethnicities, who are culturally to the right of Young and me...
...If the objective of the left is actually to change policy—to shrink class inequality, open up universal access to decent medical care and housing, control depredations of private power, and yes, redress the burdens of group oppressions—then the Rainbow efforts demonstrate how fragile was the sort of nominal coalition she advocates...
...SPRING • 1997 • 93...
...Compiling a list of marginal groups does not a majority make...
...To condemn backlash is easy, to take some responsibility for it, hard...
...and I agree with her conclusion that "the key question . . . is whether we conceive of multiculturalism as required by considerations of equity or as derived from a thesis about culture as a primary good...
...Young and I both deplore the false dichotomy between organizing for group recognition and organizing for more economic and health equality...
...Iris Young may be right that some identity boundaries have been softening recently...
...Her enthusiasm for the remarkable Jesse Jackson efforts of the eighties may provide a key...
...The Rainbow Coalition was hostage to the moves of one gifted individual...
...There was no Million Person March to avert the further impoverishment of the poor...
...The point is that there were not nearly enough activist feminists, and they (and the rest of us) did not do nearly enough to prevail over a Republican Congress and a president swinging right...
...In The Twilight of Common Dreams I argue that one—not the only—reason for that sort of collapse is that, for the past generation, very little energy on the left has gone to promoting visions and projects that might bring together a majority...
...What shall we do about these retrogrades...
...Does no legitimate goal ever have to be sacrificed, muted, or postponed in politics...
...The politics of identity affirmation, while useful for certain purposes, has been helpless to avert attacks on labor and the poor (though I hardly assert that "identity politics is at least partly responsible for these attacks...
...How much of history consists of good things turning into intellectual and literal prisons...
...But the imbalance between the two goals has been, shall we say, severe...
...So does the cant of "culture" and "identity" now entrenched across the academy and the art world...
...As if the objective of politics ought to be scoring high in a losing cause rather than winning real results for real people...
...In particular, roughly 37 percent of the population consists of non-Hispanic white males...
...The fact that feminists opposed the awful welfare bill is beside the point...
...But the tactics and rhetoric that were valuable for certain purposes in 1969 or 1975 do not suffice on a vastly different political terrain in 1997...
...In this light, I think Anne Phillips makes a constructive contribution in her article in the Winter issue ("Why Worry About Multiculturalism...
...In my book, I tell the story of how the Oakland school board dissipated reform energies in an absurd moremulticulturalthan-thou assault on the most multicultural textbooks California has ever seen...
...Do we get to have it all...
...And even the groups she lists were more fragile than she acknowledges...
...In the Winter issue of Dissent, for example, Zelda Bronstein gives an all-too-typical example of how a certain feminist dogmatism obstructed the campaign for health care reform in California ("Feminism and the Common Good: The California Health Care Case...
...if the identitybased left writes them off as an oppressor bloc, surely other political forces do not...
...If so, amen, and let's see more of the same...
Vol. 44 • April 1997 • No. 2
