The Danger of Coalitionism
When Coalition Partners Demand that You Say Things Rather Than Do Things
All social movements and all political parties work based on coalitions. This is especially true in a two party system such as the United States, where the only way you really get things done is by dealmaking within at least one of the two parties (historically sometimes both parties, but that has become less common due to political polarization), where other coalition members agree to support your goals while you support them.
This tends to work very well much of the time. So, for instance, in the Democratic Party you have labor unions who have various goals, environmental activists with their own goals, civil rights activists with their own goals, etc. And then logrolling occurs— civil rights activists agree to support measures to promote unionization and labor unions agree to support civil rights priorities. It all works reasonably well.
And ditto in the Republican Party— indeed, the logrolling there is a lot more obvious. Rich people who want tax cuts may not be very religious, and religious people who want stricter abortion laws and carve-outs from various legal obligations for conservative Christians may not really care about supply side economics, but they each support each other’s goals as a form of coalitional solidarity.
So far so good. You may not agree with either side’s particular mix of coalitional positions, but you should at least understand intellectually that this sort of dealmaking is how you get stuff done and get your issues addressed.
But there’s a specific sort of coalitionalism that is a lot more pernicious. It involves when coalitions require their members to say things— or not say them— rather than to do things. It has to do with the fact that a lot of activist groups really don’t care about the truth very much.
I’ll start with an example on the Right— global warming. If you are reading this in 2023 and still deny that humans are causing the planet to warm and that left unchecked this has led and will lead to disastrous impacts and significant loss of human life, I don’t know what to tell you. We have both extensive theory and extensive empirical evidence that demonstrates both the relationship of greenhouse gas emissions to global warming and the catastrophic harm that results from it.
But nonetheless, on the Right, there’s a lot of people who aren’t allowed to say this. There are professional consequences for saying it. You can lose your job if you say it. You can face a primary challenge if you say it. You can lose funding from wealthy donors if you say it. Simply put, the Right coalition demands that you deny the existence of harmful human caused global warming, just in the same way it might demand that a coalitional group of rich people oppose abortion rights.
And this is very harmful. Because it puts all of the power of political coalitions behind lies. This is very different than putting the power of a coalition behind a policy goal. If Republicans want to cut taxes and put their coalitional muscle behind it, Democrats can respond by arguing why tax cuts are bad, call for taxes to be raised and/or raise them when they are in power, and try to win over the public for their policies. That’s how democracy works.
In contrast, requiring that members of a coalition buy into a lie gives the lie extra currency and spreads it. You can see exactly how this works in the conservative movement on the issue of global warming. Once it was decided (most likely at the behest of the energy sector, a major player in conservative politics) that the movement would lie about global warming, the word went down to think tanks, the staffers of politicians, pundits, talk radio hosts, etc., that they must all repeat the approved language on global warming. And that creates the illusion that the issue is unsettled and seriously debated, and further sends the signal to low information voters that the “experts” on their “side” reject global warming. So you then end up with a situation where it is impossible to have a real debate on what to do about global warming, because the moment it starts everyone on the Right side of the fence in the discussion will immediately start spouting denialism.
We see this over and over again on both sides of politics. Take the now infamous case of David Shor. He lost his job for tweeting about well-supported research that non-violent civil rights protests persuade people whereas violence turns the public against the civil rights movement. He told the truth, of course, but Lefty anti-police activists and various other Left types love and romanticize street violence for various complex ideological reasons and decided to make it a coalitional demand, during the Summer of George Floyd, that everyone adopt the attitude that a riot is the voice of the unheard and that street violence must either be cheered or blamed on the police (or sometimes both). So you couldn’t tell the truth about what tactics of civil rights protests are effective.
And of course, the Left paid a dear price for that insistence that the coalition must not tell the truth— almost no significant police reforms came out of the George Floyd murder. Bills to abolish “qualified immunity” and allow citizens to sue the police? They failed. The much ballyhooed “George Floyd Justice In Policing Act”? Didn’t go anywhere. The Left took over a city center for a period of time (Seattle), allowing crime and mayhem to fester, and attacked government buildings in two more cities (Portland and Minneapolis), but in terms of actually doing something about Black people getting harassed or attacked by the police? Nada. Maybe, just maybe, if they had listened to David Shor and stuck to the truth, they would have been more successful.
This problem, in fact, is getting worse and will continue to get worse. Because the problem is that the activist world works on deliverables, and rhetoric is an easy deliverable. What do I mean by that? Well think about how hard it is to pass a bill in this era of polarization. If you are promising your donors legislation, you are going to leave them empty handed a lot of the time, and many of them may stop donating.
But language is a really easy deliverable. We’ve seen this in a related issue, which is the ridiculous lengths that Left activist groups go to propose new terminology and change the way governments and institutions speak. This is easy to do, because nobody wants to be called a racist and everyone wants to use the latest jargon. So if you want to convince Planned Parenthood and a bunch of Left-leaning bureaucrats to say “pregnant people” instead of “women”, you have given yourself a very easy task. And then you can tell your donors you got them to do this.
And a very similar dynamic occurs with respect to getting your coalition partners to lie. Go back to my first example, the Republican rich donors who want tax cuts and talk up religion. Many of them certainly don’t believe in any sort of religion and see the entire enterprise as BS, but they see it as harmless BS. You can imagine their reasoning. “So what if I pretend to believe in God and Christianity. It’s harmless, it doesn’t mean anything anyway, and I can get these folks to support tax cuts that will grow the economy.” It makes perfect sense. The coalition partners are happy because they can go to their constituents with the deliverable, and you can get the policy outcomes you want.
Only it isn’t harmless. All the conservatives who know that global warming is real but who don’t say so for coalitional reasons have succeeded in creating an environment where half the public will reflexively oppose any attempt to do anything about global warming, making the margins narrow even for the most moderate legislation, and encouraging Republican Presidents to dismantle measures to fight global warming to play to the ignorance of their coalition.
And on the Left, where this really is starting to have bite is on gender issues. To be clear, this is a fraught topic. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a youth with gender dysphoria. And I think that doctors and parents should have full societal support in considering what course of action to pursue when a kid comes in presenting this condition. I think the attempts to ban youth gender medicine are profoundly misguided and a gross interference with the doctor-patient and parent-child relationships.
But nonetheless, much of the role of trans activists in the Democratic Party coalition in this day and age seems to be to demand that people utter complete BS about gender issues. Here are some highlights:
Democrats are expected to say that there is no such thing as a peer effect with respect to reported youth gender dysphoria. The only reason why more kids are transitioning now is because of the stigma against transition is lifted. (In fact, we know there is a peer effect— Lisa Littman’s studies documented this— and we also know that it is not just a matter of the stigma being lifted, because almost all of the increase in youth transition has been among assigned females— i.e., formerly teenage and pre-teen girls transitioning to become boys or non-binaries or transmascs— whereas the stigma was presumably lifted equally.)
Democrats are expected to say that assigned males who transition have no advantage in competitive sports, and that the only reason why women’s sports was created as a separate division was because men didn’t want to have to compete with women. (Women, in fact, are on average significantly physically disadvantaged in most sports, and the creation of vibrant separate women’s sports is one of the greatest accomplishments of American feminism, and is entirely necessary if we want women to excel and win in sports competitions on a regular basis.)
Democrats are expected to say that every person has a unique “gender identity” that is sort of like a soul, and that we perceive this gender identity as a kid and when it mismatches with our assigned sex at birth, this is what leads to transitions. (In fact, there is no proof that a gender identity exists and many, perhaps most, people do not experience one. Transitions occur for the most part as a mechanism/treatment to alleviate gender dysphoria, which in turn has multiple documented etiologies. In addition to the peer effects associated with assigned females and youth transition, people can become dysphoric due to trauma, and especially due to certain sexual orientations that cause them to be more comfortable presenting as the opposite sex. One of these sexual orientations— the erotic and romantic attachment to being or becoming a woman— is responsible for the majority of transitions of adult and teenage assigned males to become trans women.)
As a result of this stuff and stuff like it, and equivalent and opposite shibboleths on the Right, we basically can’t have any sort of an intelligent political discussion gender issues and trans people in this country, even though they present massive civil rights issues AND complicated health care policy issues AND complicated issues on youth gender medicine and the mental health of teenagers. The talking points require that we can’t acknowledge reality, nobody does, and we end up just talking right past each other.
But to be clear, it’s not just gender issues by any stretch of the imagination. This is a dangerous approach to coalitional politics on ANY issue. And because it allows coalition members to easily obtain deliverables that they can present to their coalition, it promises to get worse and worse over time.
What can we do about it? Well, this is an issue that requires leadership. It requires that party and coalition leaders do the one thing that they hate doing more than anything— taking their own constituent groups to task.
To be fair, a bit of that happened on the Left after the Shor firing. At the very least, a lot of people did come out and say that in fact Shor had a right to say what he said. I should mention, though, that even that was a partial victory— not only did Shor not get his job back (which means the precedent stands for anyone in the future who decides to go off the reservation), but few actually went so far as to say that not only should Shor not have been fired, but that he literally told the truth and that Left wing violence is bad for Left wing causes.
And that’s the best example of anyone doing close to the right thing. We’re a long long way from anyone with an important donor-funded job on the Right saying that global warming is real. Heck, it’s hard to get people on the Right to say that Biden legitimately got more votes than Trump in 2020. And over on the Left, you will get called a transphobe and you will lose your position and your clout if you say truthful things about gender— there have been several cancellations over such issues.
If there’s any hope I can offer it is this— it is perfectly obvious that this stuff is actually harmful for coalitions to engage in. The Republican Party almost certainly loses votes overall and looks like complete douches when they deny global warming. As I said, the politics that produced the Shor firing actually helped torpedo police reform. And while voters correctly perceive that the gender stuff is not the most important thing in the world, at the same time there’s no way that Democrats are helping themselves electorally by refusing to say that, for instance, males have an advantage over females in sports.
So perhaps, someday, party leaders will recognize the problem here. It’s fine for coalitions to horse-trade— you support my policy and I support yours. But it’s not fine to ask someone to lie, and conditioning coalitional support on lying is both bad for the coalition and bad for the country.
>I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a youth with gender dysphoria. And I think that doctors and parents should have full societal support in considering what course of action to pursue when a kid comes in presenting this condition. I think the attempts to ban youth gender medicine are profoundly misguided and a gross interference with the doctor-patient and parent-child relationships.
As someone apparently more empathetic, I would ask you to consider why the practice of "youth gender medicine" is apparently the unquestioned default, when it became so, why it became so, and why, apparently, to you, no amount of data or theory on this particular subject - unlike that of global warming - merits "interference with the doctor-patient and parent-child relationship."
This is odd, to me, because the typical practice of medicine, if you've forgotten, is "first do no harm" - and it usually involves only embarking on treatment programs that have demonstrated evidence of benefit. Yet with this particular medical question, you hold that *not even demonstrated evidence of harm* could affect whether or not this particular treatment program should be considered evidence-based medicine in good standing. As I said, I find that odd. I would expect the null hypothesis to be refraining from serious unstudied interventions until there is - at the very *least* even setting aside all other ethical, moral, & social considerations - evidence that it benefits people. (You may note, however, that Andrew Long Chu's recent article officially declares a break from the notion that evidence of benefit matters in this question - coincidentally, this comes just as evidence of harm, rather than benefit, seems quite rapidly to be emerging.) Thoughts? I would say that at the very least such assertions place these beliefs quite outside & independent of medicine, which is plainly true, and I am in a way glad that it is now being admitted, even if it is in an attempt to bulldoze criticism of (and rational horror at) this set of unevidenced practices.
The conservatives, whose opinions on global warming you bemoan, do, in my experience, on occasion have a more nuanced opinion on the subject than the one you present. Such a conservative might say that no amount of theory or data justifies the attempt to ban or restrict fossil fuels or any particular environmentally harmful technology, as that would be interference with his liberty & pursuit of happiness, a quite serious thing, and your justification for impinging on that right - though I, to be clear, agree with it - is, you must admit, rather more complicated and nebulous, compared to its immediate consequences, which are often simple and concrete.
What I'm saying is, heal thyself, because you're standing on half a leg at best. Here's an interesting thought exercise: When you encounter any material on the subjects you mention at issue on the left, start by highlighting every word, notion or piece of "evidence" invented by, deriving from or related to Psychology & its variety of derivative fields of "study." Go highlighted bit by highlighted bit and look into the origins of that word, notion or piece of "evidence."
This is an important exercise that will help you understand how the purportedly pro-free-speech, pro-civil-liberties "Left" got to where it is today - that is, to direct opposition to those notions where they are perceived to impinge upon the subjects you mention. Most of the "Right" - and certainly the Trumpian "Right" - does not claim to adhere to notions of fairness, equality, or an open and free society, but the "Left" does. So how did they end up where they are? Entirely via the notion of "psychological harm." The things you say must not be said have been declared so because uttering these things "puts people at risk" and is thus "violence." These are their words - from the NYT letter in response to Cotton's editorial, for example, & as I think we've seen, it's the same whenever someone tries to say any of the inconvenient truths you mention.
> get these folks to support tax cuts that will grow the economy
Whether it does that or not, the rich folks primary concern is of course that it cuts _their_ taxes.