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After the Future

It’s OK to be Tribal . . .

. . . so long as you're willing to work with other tribes on issues of mutual concern. Your tribe is the group with whom you feel comfortable because there…

. . . so long as you're willing to work with other tribes on issues of mutual concern.

Your tribe is the group with whom you feel comfortable because there is an assumed shared world view. People from different tribes can get along with one another, even be curious about one another, but they live in different mental worlds or different soul worlds, if you will. Your tribe is where you feel at home, and everyone needs a home. But you also need to get out a little. And you need to let bygones be bygones when there's been some "history."

People from different tribes can unite around issues where they share common ground. When they do so, they form coalitions, not tribes. So what I'm talking about is inter-tribal coalition building. Effective coalition partners recognize that when you're talking with someone from a different tribe, you respect the differences and keep discussion focused on shared objectives; you don't let yourself get sidetracked into arguments about issues where you know you disagree–like abortion or gay rights, or whatever.

Each tribe might feel very strongly one way or the other about those issues, but it's counterproductive to talk about them. Coalition partners should have no expectation of agreement on any issue except the one around which the coalition is built, and they are careful not to offend coalition partners in the other tribe concerning their cultural beliefs no matter how much you hate those beliefs.

As I've been writing here for some time, this kind of coalition building is essential; it can only happen if culturally conservative tribes find a way of working with culturally liberal tribes, and vice versa, about issues in the economic sphere that are critically important to all.  They need to understand who the real enemy is, and use the power of numbers to defeat it.

It's pretty clear to me that the two-party system in this country is dead.  It's worse than dead.  It's like one of those entitities from "Ghostbusters" that slimes everything it comes in contact with. It's become a dysfunctional joke. The only solution in the long run is for these parties to break up and for smaller parties to form as they do in countries with parliamentary systems, and then for those smaller parties to form coalitions. 

It's not a perfect solution; nothing is. But smaller parties will be clearer about their objectives and more responsive to their constituents, and they will have to bargain in good faith with people from other parties.  They could never get away with the kind of nonsense the Republicans have been pulling lately. They have too much power too gum things up even when they're a minority, and they don't have to bargain or compromise. They win by just throwing a wrench into the machinery because they don't want the machine to function. It's in their interests that it doesn't. 

I think most of us can live with a system that works on compromise, but one in which the compromises are negotiated in good faith (for the most part).  We cannot live with a system that is bought.  When the system is bought, there is no real compromise no bargaining in good faith; the highest paying customer always gets what he paid for behind closed doors. 

Comments

5 responses

  1. Eli Avatar
    Eli

    Why should “the left” throw women and gays under the bus for the sake of “mutual concerns” when “the right” is clearly NOT interested in pushing back the power of Wall Street, but instead committed to permanently dismantle any remaining vestiges of opposition to the interests of big money?
    Isn’t asking people to drop “cultural issues” from the agenda a de facto defense of the status quo – oppressing women and denying gays their constitutional rights? How is that different from saying that people should have just worked on their mutual problems instead of bringing up that divisive cultural issue of slavery all the time?

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  2. Jack Avatar
    Jack

    Eli–
    I guess my question is what do you think is more important for Democratic branding: its affiliation with the cultural left or the economic left? If, say a smart, tough, pro-life Catholic, with roots in labor and a strong record of commitment to economically left issues was running against a corporate whore like Diane Feinstein, who would you vote for? For Feinstein because she’s the cultural liberal? If so, then we have a long time to wait before anything is going to happen.
    Look, the whole thrust of my posts the last few weeks has been about understanding that there’s a whole American stream of political action that combines culturally conservative attitudes with economically left attitudes–the most prominent being populism and labor movement. The Dems have lost both these groups on the rank and file level because that rank and file doesn’t see the culturally left ethos of the Dem party as their ethos, and they see Dems as tools of Wall Street. Until the Dems win them back or until both parties break apart and new coalitions start forming, nothing happens.

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  3. Eli Avatar
    Eli

    I don’t live in the US, so this is hypothetical for me, but as far as I can tell from here, the Democrats have become the default party for anyone who is culturally progressive because the Republican party has fully adopted the culturally reactionary agenda. What I don’t understand is why you’d think progressive and leftist politics are mutually exclusive. Can only corporate whores be progressive? Should the Democrats ditch the progressive voters in order to appeal to a hypothetical block of conservative commie voters?
    What you call “cultural” issues affect real people’s rights in significant ways. It’s easy to dismiss equal rights as a cultural issue when you’re one of the privileged. Also, I believe the cultural is political, and conservative culture is the breeding ground for rightist economics (as pointed out by Reich and Marcuse &c).
    So if your Catholic pro-life politician is anti-choice, anti-freedom, anti-education, pro-discrimination, pro-ignorance, and set on enforcing his personal religious morals through law, then I could not vote for him, because any possible short-term economic benefit would be outweighed by the long-term cultural harm. The lesser of two evils, etc. But I would vote for your Catholic if he can keep his church separate from the state and is not a hypocrite.

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  4. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Eli–The reason I set up the choice between a blue collar Catholic with strong economic justice stance vs. a corporate Dem like Feinstein illustrates the dilemma that we’re facing. Feinstein gets a pass because of her pro-choice pro gay stances–She’s thought of as a Liberal by the media–and she is on cultural issues. But the media therefore assumes that she’s ‘left’ on economic issues, and so therefore does an undiscerning electorate. She rarely gets called out for being the sell out that she is, because she’s safe on the cultural issues, and it becomes terribly hard to dislodge her because the core of the Dem establishment gets to hide their whoring behind the culturally progressive mask.
    Back to my argument: It’s not either/or. That’s the whole point of coalition building. You don’t force coalition partners to buy into your social agenda as a precondition for working with you on an economic agenda. You can work with another coalition partner on cultural issues. But the Dem base in this country makes hardly any effort to reach out to people it considers socially conservative even if it’s possible to partner with them economic issues. I think that’s because the cultural issues are more important for the Dem base than the economic issues, just as they are for the cultural right.
    My point is that nothing changes on the economic front because the power of numbers isn’t there unless there is some more aggressive efforts to form coalitions that disregard the social issues, and that won’t happen until the country wakes up to the fact that wealth aggregation and the extreme stratification we’re seeing in this country hurts everybody equally–gays, homophobes, pro lifers, and pro-choicers. If they want to argue what I believe is essentially the inarguable, then fine. But we do so while we’re getting robbed by people who are quite happy to see us so preoccupied as not to pay attention to their thievery.

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  5. Eli Avatar
    Eli

    But is there anyone with any actual political clout who is “left” on economic issues? I think someone like Dennis Kucinich doesn’t have a chance because he IS “left”, not because of some culturally divisive issue… or rather, it seems to me that leftist economics *are* a culturally divisive issue as much as anything else.
    Isn’t your point just another variation of making the economic issue dependent on the social one? Isn’t asking to disregard social issues before fixing the economy as unrealistic as asking to resolve them first?
    I think that asking people to vote for a candidate who wants to oppress them just because he has some good ideas about the economy is asking the impossible. That’s like saying the Christians should support Diocletian for emperor because he’s such an organisational talent, and not be distracted by “inarguable” cultural issues like the great persecution…

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