The Left dragging every ‘advocacy’ group together and pretending it’s working has been a colossal failure. The worst and most egregious case is environmental advocacy which completely flops by taking the low salience ( to most voters) issue of the environment and climate and tying it to a whole bunch of advocacy organizations which aren’t popular (like defund the police)
When you stick to a single issue, you can make common cause with everyone who agrees with you on that issue even if they disagree about other issues. When you do multi-issue advocacy, you limit your allies to the people who agree with you about all of them.
When you stick to a single issue, you don't have problems with competing priorities. All your resources go in one direction. It's easy for donors to see and appreciate how their money will be used. When you are multi-issue, spreading your resources and juggling multiple priorities makes you less effective at everything you are trying to do, and makes you less appealing to donors who don't know how you are going to allocate the money.
Paying too much attention to extremely vocal online extremists who tweet groundless accusations at you is a great way to alienate the silent majority. Have enough discipline to not let yourself be disciplined by idiots.
What happened to the ACLU is a tragedy. They abandoned their core principle of defending all speech equally, and now they are advertising in the New York Times seeking donors - a pretty clear sign that a lot of their previous donor base has quit them. It's not surprising - if you destroy the reason that people liked you and respected you in the first place, people will leave. To be sure, a lot of people hated them for it as well - but they never let it bother them before.
Some solidarity, communication and coordination among left groups is not a bad thing, but it needs to be low-key. That's what conferences, conventions and group chats are for. Social media is for public-facing communication, and each group should stick to its own core issue to maximize their coalition, donor appeal, and overall effectiveness.
I don’t think it’s accurate that a tweet like that is motivated by fear of headaches from one’s coalition partners. I think it’s more that many relatively privileged lefties, especially racially+class priviliged lefties, are very very bought in on the goal of helping people with less privilege, and often actively uncomfortable with expressing a “me me me” vibe … even if personal self-interest is also part of their motivation. Those are the folks that the ACLU wants & gets likes & donations from when they frame their work in that way.
It’s actually coming from a good place, imo. But it does lead to garbled messages and sometimes to a false consensus about what would benefit people in the less privileged groups.
The Left dragging every ‘advocacy’ group together and pretending it’s working has been a colossal failure. The worst and most egregious case is environmental advocacy which completely flops by taking the low salience ( to most voters) issue of the environment and climate and tying it to a whole bunch of advocacy organizations which aren’t popular (like defund the police)
And yet the Left dominates almost every significant institution in our country. Maybe the point is not the goal, but the dominance.
When you stick to a single issue, you can make common cause with everyone who agrees with you on that issue even if they disagree about other issues. When you do multi-issue advocacy, you limit your allies to the people who agree with you about all of them.
When you stick to a single issue, you don't have problems with competing priorities. All your resources go in one direction. It's easy for donors to see and appreciate how their money will be used. When you are multi-issue, spreading your resources and juggling multiple priorities makes you less effective at everything you are trying to do, and makes you less appealing to donors who don't know how you are going to allocate the money.
Paying too much attention to extremely vocal online extremists who tweet groundless accusations at you is a great way to alienate the silent majority. Have enough discipline to not let yourself be disciplined by idiots.
What happened to the ACLU is a tragedy. They abandoned their core principle of defending all speech equally, and now they are advertising in the New York Times seeking donors - a pretty clear sign that a lot of their previous donor base has quit them. It's not surprising - if you destroy the reason that people liked you and respected you in the first place, people will leave. To be sure, a lot of people hated them for it as well - but they never let it bother them before.
Some solidarity, communication and coordination among left groups is not a bad thing, but it needs to be low-key. That's what conferences, conventions and group chats are for. Social media is for public-facing communication, and each group should stick to its own core issue to maximize their coalition, donor appeal, and overall effectiveness.
I don’t think it’s accurate that a tweet like that is motivated by fear of headaches from one’s coalition partners. I think it’s more that many relatively privileged lefties, especially racially+class priviliged lefties, are very very bought in on the goal of helping people with less privilege, and often actively uncomfortable with expressing a “me me me” vibe … even if personal self-interest is also part of their motivation. Those are the folks that the ACLU wants & gets likes & donations from when they frame their work in that way.
It’s actually coming from a good place, imo. But it does lead to garbled messages and sometimes to a false consensus about what would benefit people in the less privileged groups.