In liberal politics, principles act as coordination points around which activism can bubble up and coalitions can form. But coalitions take different forms, and these forms affect how the ideas of a coalition’s members are shaped within and by their collaboration. Fellow Liberalism.org contributor Matt Zwolinski recently emphasized that “tribes,” notionally formed by family, peers, or shared core values, may significantly define the ideas of their members. While this is true for most members of any political coalition, I want to explore how the form a coalition takes affects the ideas that it encourages its members to adopt.
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Political coalitions might be loose, defined by nothing more than shared principles or broad goals, toward which many people and groups work in parallel. For instance, one environmentalist group might use deliberate law-breaking, while another publishes research and reports as strategies to raise awareness of environmental damage done by oil companies. On the other hand, coalitions might give rise to and be sustained by persistent and integrated institutions for training, messaging, and political action, as when the groups constituting the American Civil Rights Movement came together to fight segregation and to secure voting rights in the southern United States. Between those poles are coalitions that can form contingent partnerships around specific political goals, without the expectation that coordination will outlive the fight for that goal. Examining these coalition configurations creates an opportunity to think about their trade-offs for overall political effectiveness and for defending specific ideas.
Loose Coalitions: “The Only People We Hate More Than the Romans…”
I think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The People’s Front of Judea sketch pokes fun at left-wing and revolutionary politics by parodying the extent to which the political left prioritizes getting a single right answer over political pragmatism or cooperation across groups. Disagreements between the Popular Front (“Splitters!”) and the People’s Front of Judea prevent the groups from working together at all because they hate each other more than they hate the Romans.
The extreme is illustrative, but what’s more normal in politics is that groups can agree on one goal, like expelling the Romans from Judea, but they can’t agree on specific steps or ultimate goals. Other times, groups might not be able to work together because of their different contexts. In the movement for criminal justice reform in the United States during the 2010s, social justice messaging was effective in Northern cities, but entirely the wrong approach in more conservative states. Whatever the reason, sometimes, different political actors can work parallel to and in the same direction as one another, but they can’t work effectively together.
There’s an obvious advantage to this strategy for those driven by beliefs about how the world ought to work. When there is no need to work across groups, there is little need for compromise. Groups and individuals are free to pursue ideals without pressure to alter their messaging, vision, or beliefs.
This type of loose coalition can be important when pursuing far-ideal goals, like large swings in public opinion, where the message to move the needle isn’t known yet. Loose coalitions can also help groups cast about for salient political principles around which more structured organization can start to form. In both cases, the variety of visions and the purity of their ideas are features, not bugs, in a discovery process to identify the issues, principles, and messages that will motivate political action.
We can also imagine issues where any progress is good progress, such as when what’s underway is the slow extension of rights to, or the erosion of old prejudices against, a group. For a while, it might not matter so much where the advancements happen, so long as they’re happening.
When there is a specific goal, or when faced with organized opposition, the benefits of extremely loose coalitions are less suited to the moment, and the downsides start piling up. Pure, specific visions can inspire, and a variety of approaches can find one to capture every activist’s imagination. But at some point, pragmatic politics starts to matter. The inability to mobilize in large groups or to come together around an easily understandable goal is often a real disadvantage when it comes to reaching a critical mass of support or getting voters to the ballot box.
When a goal is clear and shared, or an idea or group is targeted by organized political opposition, the costs of being scattered across uncoordinated factions overwhelm the benefits of inspiring visions or discovery through diverse trial and error. This can also happen when the change required is sufficiently urgent, as when there is an opportunity to end institutionalized oppression.
An activist might not know it, but this is Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm, applied in the spontaneous order environment of liberal politics. Sometimes, the benefit of coming together and coordinating outweighs what’s given up by joining together. That’s when a firm—or a political movement—tends to form.
Political Movements: “Yes. We Are All Individuals.”
At the opposite pole from a loose coalition is one coherently governed through coordinating political institutions. Call this a political movement.
Thomas E. Ricks’s Waging a Good War applies lessons from his career in military reporting to help explain the success of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The defining traits Ricks outlines that help differentiate a movement from a looser coalition are shared and coordinated efforts toward recruitment, training, logistics, tactical planning and responses, and communications. Movements also share resources and information, including about the next moves by the opposition and lessons learned after a particular action or campaign.
In Democracy for Busy People, Kevin J. Elliott identifies an important role that political parties can play: Parties simplify politics by supplying a narrative that defines the values of each side. This can make politics tractable even for people who do not have the time or inclination to study it deeply. When it comes to an electoral coalition, parties are the most likely actors to play this role with the stories they tell voters about the problems that need to be solved, as well as about themselves and their opposition, during election cycles. But they’re not the only option. The narrative can also be set by protest movements, such as the Movement for Black Lives (“Black Lives Matter”), or the sustained campaigns to legalize same-sex marriage.
For the average person motivated to join a movement or throw their support behind a party, this is a benefit of defining a common goal and narrative. The movement can provide an understandable story of politics, or of a specific issue. The party, then, may choose to pick up that story and amplify it. This is one important way that political tribes, those held together by shared core values, can spread beliefs more widely.
But for anyone motivated by their own vision of how the world should work, there is definitely a cost. Coordinated action by large groups of people requires specifying coherent goals, even if those goals aren’t exactly what those working toward them want, but only the best the group can agree to. It also requires setting aside distractions and issues of disagreement, even when those issues are important in their own right.
By working as part of a directed whole, the movement benefits from the division of labor and specialization, and it drops the messiness of trial and error and mismatched efforts. Each organization contributes to a discrete portion of political action (say, recruitment, training, messaging, or mobilization), trusting that others will coordinate subsequent steps toward the shared goal. For followers of a closely coordinated movement, common goals can be useful or a challenge.
Looser political coordination is less likely to achieve gains from specialization. It’s difficult to create a talent pipeline or craft messaging across organizations without having shared (or at least common-enough) goals. In ordinary liberal politics, a movement’s goals will be emergent at first. Goals might be shaped by an exogenous political opportunity or threat, or they could result from the coalition itself, shaped by the beliefs, commitments, and persuasiveness of its reflective members, and by the context of their political realities.
Once a movement has a coherent leadership, it can police membership and messaging to manage the public’s perception of the movement, the leaders themselves, and their political goals. This can, when done well, improve their persuasive efforts. Either way, it imposes a much more purposeful design on the movement.
One important difference between political movements and military campaigns is that militaries are held together by force and law. Politics isn’t like that, even when movements are very coordinated and effective. They’re held together by the commitment of their members, the charisma and persuasiveness of their leaders, and their use of resources. Those factors can also influence when a movement declines or disintegrates.
You Don’t Need to Follow Anybody
So much time is spent thinking about what coalitions can and should be formed. But it is normal and good that coalitions also end.
Ricks writes about how success in a campaign leads to new problems, and for realistic political reasons. “As the danger presented by the enemy recedes, allies lose much of the incentive they have had to submerge their differences. Instead, they begin to focus on them.” (275–76) Thinking of these as problems of success, and not as problems of obsolescence, helps to pinpoint where the trouble for successful movements begins.
In Ricks’s telling of the history of the Civil Rights Movement, these problems began not with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., but years earlier, during the triumph of the Selma campaign. After the successful mass protests of the Freedom Summer and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Movement turned to concentrated direct action for Black voter registration in Selma, Alabama, in January 1965. Movement organizers held the strategic initiative through the campaign in Ricks’s telling, drawing national attention to the danger that Black citizens in the South faced when trying to exercise their constitutional rights. But even in the midst of this disciplined campaign, King drifted from the message, making a public statement against the Vietnam War for the first time the Tuesday before Bloody Sunday, the law-enforcement riot against marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The Tuesday following Bloody Sunday, King led a march back to the bridge, but turned back because the protest would otherwise violate a federal court order. Despite its effectiveness, the decision to turn the march around enraged more confrontational activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC typically pushed from within the Movement for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to undertake more aggressive direct action, while other groups, like the NAACP, urged more moderate action.
The week after King turned protesters back at the bridge, President Lyndon Johnson used the famous Civil Rights slogan “We shall overcome” on national television while vowing to institute the Voting Rights Act. Hearing the president use the slogan, Ricks reports that King wept with joy and relief, while SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael said he felt “like vomiting.” What had once been productive tensions were becoming fractious. After they finally marched to Montgomery, several activists reflected that the Movement, as it had existed, was over.
A movement can always fall apart. It isn’t held together through contracts, like a firm, or force, like a military. Coase can help us understand why a movement comes together and starts coordinating—circumstances arise where the benefits of coordination outweigh the costs of cooperation and shared action. As that formulation implies, Coase should also help us remember that coalitions have costs.
The costs of belonging to a movement may be most obvious for those who must compromise their dearly held political visions to participate. But when the motivating principle behind a coalition’s formation loses salience, the costs of disagreements or priorities set aside for the sake of cooperation are bound to become more noticeable.
Even members who largely adopt the viewpoint and goals of their political tribe usually have other concerns. Politics always has an opportunity cost. Some who join a movement are only politically active at all because the goals of that movement inspired them to mobilize. In the case of the Civil Rights Movement, laws that gave teeth to the promises of the Reconstruction Amendments met that criterion in the eyes of a critical mass of activists. When the movement had achieved the end of formal Jim Crow laws and substantial minority voting, many people returned to their lives.
Despite all this, the Civil Rights Movement did not simply come to an end. It had institutional inertia through personal relationships, organizations, and even the jobs that activists held in the movement. These, too, create incentives: to continue finding ways to work together, to find a new cause—or a new enemy.
In the case of the Civil Rights Movement, post-success inertia relied heavily on its strong personalities, as evidenced by how abruptly the nonviolent protest movement ended after King’s assassination. Movements might also be sustained by institutions that persist beyond the departure of their big personalities. This impersonal persistence creates different pressure and incentives, and can be accompanied by money, jobs, and even physical infrastructure.
In the closing chapters of his book, Ricks observes that the dissolution of the Civil Rights Movement represented a real loss for many of its members. Some spent the rest of their lives adrift without it. The activists of the Civil Rights Movement had literally put their bodies and lives in danger, being jailed and beaten together for the sake of their cause. Together, they had mourned those who took the risk with them and were killed for their activism. It’s no surprise that this shared trauma connected them, and that so many struggled when that connection dropped.
Bonding through the trauma of physical danger is an extreme example. People can also find deeply held personal meaning, belonging, and identity in the camaraderie of and commitment to a shared cause. This creates pressure from those who are bound by those experiences to ensure the institutions of a movement persist beyond the achievement of its goals, so as to preserve the relationships and institutions into which movement followers had poured themselves.
Speaking in 1996 about political-ideological organizations, the libertarian activist Benjamin Rogge said that the “danger to an organization of this kind is not that it will simply disappear, but that its form will long survive its soul.” Not every group or organization that participates in a political movement also owes its existence to that movement. Some groups will simply go back to looser coalition action, or to activism for their own particular goals. Their soul doesn’t depend on the coalition.
Movement institutions, though, are sources of and tools for human-political capital. The division of labor in a movement lends its component parts a certain flexibility. They might be repurposed by those whose political goals have not yet been realized. A movement might also permanently change the character of an organization that pre-dated the coalition. The “soul” Rogge spoke about is always partly a product, not only of the political circumstances of the moment, or of the movement, but of the people involved. Yet all of those things change.
The pressure that Ricks identifies on a successful coalition also affects the people in movement organizations. To persist beyond a movement’s natural end, organizations and individuals must adapt. Internal pressure, such as institutional culture that downplays the friction of a dissolving movement, becomes a protective factor for an institution’s survival. So does a timely personnel change that lessens the friction. In short, the institution can capture its members, and set their mission, using the movement’s leadership structures.
All of this can turbocharge the pressure to compromise that strong coalitions put on their members, while untethering that compromise from the now-accomplished goal. Social ties within and among organizations can make it harder to catch what’s happening, and make it socially or professionally costly to push back. This is a recipe not only for compromise unmoored from political principles, but for friend-enemy categorizations, imposed to make sense of old allies and opponents in the absence of the political context that first pitted them with and against one another.
A Fighting Creed
This is all awfully abstract. Yet these problems have plagued liberals through many political coalitions. To defend liberalism within coalitions, we should heed the advice of Michael Ignatieff, toward which fellow contributor Jacob T. Levy also pointed readers. Ignatieff says, “Liberalism won’t begin to be credible, even to respect itself again, unless it respects its enemies, unless it sees itself for what it always was, not a bland managerial consensus, but a fighting creed.”
Ignatieff observed that liberalism falls on its face when it tries to erase its differences with its allies. Notes Ignatieff, “In 1950, Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination that ‘liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition’ in the United States”—before the end of Jim Crow segregation and subjugation of Black Americans. In constructing the British Third Way, Ignatieff recounts that Tony Blair insisted there was no conflict between liberalism and social democracy.
But, of course, liberalism rejects any ideology that can support an entrenched hierarchy with second-class citizens, and it recognizes the danger inherent to the state power about which social democrats are so enthusiastic. By suppressing the fights that liberals should have had in light of these disagreements—within a New Deal coalition that included Southern Democrats, or within a midcentury conservative coalition that opposed Civil Rights—liberals who compromised found themselves defanged when those issues became salient. In fact, the problem is more insidious. Some liberals became too comfortable in their coalitions, or too focused on what those coalitions had once accomplished to remember that those coalitions, by their nature, require compromise. They forgot they had any reason to fight. And so, liberals ceded the initiative to those who hadn’t suppressed their fighting spirit for the sake of a once-effective partnership.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Coalitions have never needed to suppress every disagreement, just like markets don’t have to lose their advantages for firms to form. Coalitions only need to make cooperation worthwhile despite disagreements.
It’s good when coalitions form around worthy goals, provided there are opportunities that make them worthwhile. And when a goal is accomplished, or when the opportunity slips away, it’s good that coalitions can end, so that the competition and discovery process of liberal politics can reemerge, and the ideals around which our politics are organized might reassert themselves. The issues that bind liberals to our allies are temporary, but political problems like power and cruelty are always relevant.
Liberals can be clear-eyed and principled about the ideals that move us, and responsive to the diverse, dynamic reality of democratic liberal politics. When they are, they will also be more ready to defend liberalism, wherever it’s challenged.
