Kate Bouchard, writing in the Maneater (Missouri’s student paper), laid out a simple case: the left keeps losing ground because it’s too busy fighting itself. While moderate and progressive Democrats argue over identity politics and litmus tests, the right gets stronger. Grassroots organizing aimed at one target. Meanwhile we’re aiming at each other.
I read that and thought: Yup. That’s it.
I come from a union family, Longshore dockworkers going back about four generations. The labor movement is a focal point of my political identity. I guess I’m what you’d call a Social Democrat. I don’t see much redeeming value in the unregulated, anarcho-capitalist Idiocracy we find ourselves in today, and at the same time it’s not something we’re going to fix overnight. We chip away. The struggle is the thing.
Despite believing in social programs, I don’t agree with my DSA siblings on everything. Despite believing in pragmatism on some issues, I don’t agree with the liberals or the moderates on everything either. Some days I don’t agree with any of them on anything. That’s fine. That’s what a coalition is. It’s not a friend group or a book club. It’s an alliance between people who share a common cause.
And right now, while we litigate our disagreements in public mostly for an audience of people who already agree with us, the right is dismantling the things we actually value. Not slowly, either. This is happening right now.
People are losing healthcare. Getting swept up and disappeared by ICE with no due process. Priced out of housing. Suffering because the safety net keeps getting cut while the loudest voices on the left spend their energy on each other.
That’s the part that gets lost in these debates. This isn’t an academic exercise, or a vibes contest about who’s the most righteous leftist. It’s about whether people eat, whether people have a place to sleep, whether people get to grow old.
The purity test, whether from the liberal or the progressive is a mark of privilege. If you’ve got a safe job, a stable home and citizenship papers nobody’s questioning, you can afford to spend your political energy picking apart your allies for insufficient ideological rigor. The people actually getting hurt by the right’s agenda don’t have that luxury, they aren’t vacationing in the struggle. They need a coalition that shows up, not a coalition that’s still arguing about who gets to be in it.
None of this means we stop disagreeing. Disagreement is healthy. It’s how a coalition figures out what it actually wants and holds itself accountable. The DSA folks pull the Democrats left, and they should. The moderates push back on tactics that might cost us races we need to win. That friction sharpens the coalition.
But there’s a difference between “I disagree with your approach” and “I’m going to spend my platform tearing you down instead of the people actually doing harm.”
Bouchard’s piece is right that the right figured this out a long time ago. A Faith and Freedom Coalition volunteer and a Turning Point chapter president don’t agree on everything either. They agree on enough though, and they show up together.
We can do that. We used to do that. We built the New Deal coalition out of union members, urban liberals, and southern Democrats who agreed on almost nothing except that they needed each other to win. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
I don’t need my DSA siblings to become moderates and I don’t need the moderates to become socialists. I need all of us to remember who we’re actually fighting, and who we’re fighting for.
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Rob Richards is a Navy veteran and former congressional staffer who has been an active community member in Thurston County for over two decades. To submit an opinion to the Thurston Chronicle, email news@thurstonchronicle.com.
