What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting
At Pride marches in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., organizers turned away or expelled participants because they carried rainbow flags with a Star of David. At an anti-white supremacy rally in Cincinnati, a rabbi was barred from speaking because, according to organizers, “allowing Zionists to participate undermines the original purpose of the protest,” despite the rabbi’s vocal criticism of the Israeli government. People have been excluded for other reasons: At Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, an event called Day of Absence, featuring discussions about racism, was canceled after organizers asked white people to stay away from campus.
Harvard sociologist Liz McKenna told me that movements are most successful when people feel welcome. A movement becomes sustainable when its members feel empowered and find friends. “The left loves big protests, but protesting is a tactic in search of a strategy,” she said. There must of course be fundamental values shared between the members of a movement, but the requirement cannot be that. each value is shared. “Making space for difference is not a pleasant thing, it’s table stakes,” she told me. “Gatherings are a byproduct of community, not a goal. » Above all, while anger can be helpful, movement should also bring joy. “The Trump rallies are fun,” McKenna noted. “Turning Point campus debates are fun. ” For a long time, she said, the left was less fun and more angry, “and so the right was over-organizing them at every turn.”
In 2015, in Alamance County, North Carolina – where a Confederate statue stands in front of the courthouse and where Republicans have won every presidential campaign since 1979 – Thirty-eight-year-old Dreama Caldwell, executive director of a daycare, was arrested after one of her employees accidentally left a child on a bus. The child was not injured, but Caldwell was found criminally responsible, even though she was not present at the time of the abandonment. The county magistrate set her bail at forty thousand dollars, which she couldn’t afford, so she accepted a plea deal that allowed her to avoid a felony conviction but required a few days in jail.
Caldwell had a college degree and had been a professional her entire life. But now, as a convicted criminal, she couldn’t even get a job at a fast food restaurant. When she saw a Facebook post that a new group was looking for people to organize rural communities, she signed up. An organizer told him that “they needed people to interview farmers and politicians,” Caldwell said. “And I said to myself, ‘You want a black woman and a convict to make the white people of Alamance open up? Good luck!’ »
The group, Down Home North Carolina, was created by Todd Zimmer after Republican state lawmakers voted to deny federal Medicaid funds. “That money would have helped people see doctors,” Zimmer told me. “But they wanted to send a message about Democratic overspending.” Zimmer has fairly liberal views, at least on national issues. “But in rural areas, people are thinking about their neighborhood school, whether hospitals will stay open and how much groceries will cost,” he said. Most of North Carolina’s left-wing organizations were concentrated in large cities like nearby Durham, where Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one. Zimmer believed that if he could build a coalition of voters – progressive and right-wing – who might not agree on national candidates but were aligned on local issues, they could become one of the most powerful blocs in the state. “You can’t pass a bill in North Carolina without rural areas,” he said. “That’s a fact. And so if these places organize, that’s where the power is.”
