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.
Rebecca Solnit bringing the perfect coda to yesterday’s post via her newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency. Makes me think of Mariame Kaba talking about “the Lefts” during that For the People call I attended back in December. It was such a small shift in language but it did so much to embody the kind of thinking Solnit calls for here.
You don’t have to join people but maybe you have to be ready to welcome them when they’re ready to join you.
