In this commentary, Professor Leslie McCall discusses the Stone Center’s recent Conference on Coalitional Democracy.
 
In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 U.S. elections, the words “divided” and “polarized” seem to be featured in the media more prominently than ever (if that’s even possible). No doubt this is owing to tight races in several large, consequential states. In addition, the national tally reflected a record number of voters for both the Republican and Democratic Party presidential candidates. In the brief for a “polarized America,” there was, lastly, the fact that Republicans strengthened their representation in the House and potentially maintained their edge in the Senate, even as the presidency was handed to the Democrats — a recipe for further legislative gridlock.
 
It’s a bleak picture in the midst of a raging pandemic that has taken more than a quarter million lives in the United States thus far, a coronavirus-induced economic downturn second only to the Great Depression in its unemployment toll, an intensifying climate crisis, and urgent demands for racial justice put forward by the largest social mobilization in U.S. history.
 
A bleak picture indeed, but perhaps not exactly for the reasons of division and polarization. Back in the spring of 2019, with an eye toward the 2020 elections, the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality partnered with the Graduate Center’s initiative on the Promise and Perils of Democracy, funded in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to better understand the role of political forces and trends in reinforcing or reducing longstanding patterns of inequality in the United States. After being postponed from its original date of April 21, 2020, the conference took place virtually on October 2, 2020.
 
The goal of the conference was to be forward-looking, seeking in particular to confront the ubiquitous narrative of division and polarization with an assessment of its seeming antithesis — coalition — about which we hear far less.
 
The catalysts for the focus on coalitions were two remarkable campaigns in 2017 and 2018: one by Doug Jones, who narrowly won his bid for U.S. Senate in Alabama, and the other by Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost her bid for governor of Georgia. Both were underdog Democrats in Republican strongholds yet were lifted by massive mobilization drives targeting Black voters. As conference participant and Emory University Professor Andra Gillespie explained, the drives were spearheaded by the campaigns themselves as well as by local grassroots organizations such as Black Voters Matter. White liberals and moderates, the small but growing Latinx and Asian-American populations in these states, and young voters were all targeted by these mobilization drives as well.
 
The Jones and Abrams campaigns demonstrated that successes like these could not be chalked up simply to routine shifts in midterm Congressional elections against the incumbent party. Challenges were often coming from within the Democratic Party itself — as in the case of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s challenge to a powerful incumbent Democrat — as well as from outside it, and in response to local and state issues. For instance, Johns Hopkins University’s Hahrie Han explained how Arizona’s 2010 anti-immigrant law (Arizona Senate Bill 1070) galvanized a Latinx-led movement for immigrant rights that has crucially contributed to that state’s recent blue shift.
 
Along similar lines, Nelini Stamp of the Working Families Party (WFP) described the long-fought victories of WFP candidates against a group of Democrats in the New York State legislature who had formed an alliance with Republicans and Governor Cuomo to block broadly popular policies, such as higher taxes on wealthy individuals in order to expand funding for education and healthcare. Importantly, the WFP had undergone a deliberate transformation from white to Black leadership in the spring of 2018, which coincided with a stronger emphasis on mobilizing new constituencies and candidates of color in coalition with labor and a wide range of community organizations.
 
The more one looked, in fact, the more one saw similar success stories, often with women, and especially women of color, leading the charge in many of the most visible campaigns to the point where, as Kelley Robinson of Planned Parenthood put it in her remarks, Black women were now considered the “soul of the Democratic Party.”  
 
A theme is emerging here, as it did in the conference: political mobilization, on a coalitional scale, for the public good. What Stamp, Robinson, and other presenters, including the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis of the Poor People’s Campaign and New York City Council Member Carlos Menchaca, argued was that engaging discouraged, suppressed, and anti-partisan voters about issues they care about had not been undertaken by the Democratic Party since the 1980s and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Meanwhile, as Columbia University’s Alexander Hertel-Fernandez explained in his presentation, conservatives have long been assiduously building coalitions among their ideologically diverse constituencies, albeit not primarily through mobilization, with the exception of the Tea Party, but instead through successful elite-level organizations formed to influence policymakers.
 
The critical role of conservativism in contemporary politics was raised in other ways throughout the conference’s three panels, which discussed the work of coalitions not only with respect to political parties and electoral politics, but also across and within advocacy organizations and social movements.
 
According to Allyn Brooks-LaSure, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR), the growing diversity and power of the LCCHR’s coalition of advocacy organizations has been met with stepped-up conservative opposition to their policy agenda around immigrant rights and gun reform, for instance, despite the fact that both policies often enjoy majority support. Similarly, as protest movements have gained strength, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and Poor People’s Campaign, so have attempts to delegitimize them and their representatives as naively out of step with mainstream views or otherwise not up to the task of shaping the political agenda and sharing political power.
 
Yet, despite such opposition from across the political spectrum, these and other movements have concretely shifted the political discourse and policy terrain on issues such as criminal justice, sexual and gender violence (the #MeToo and LGBTQ rights movements), and economic inequality (the Fight for $15 and the Occupy Wall Street movements). And, coming full circle, the Graduate Center’s Ruth Milkman described how some once conservative-leaning unions eventually came to embrace causes they initially saw as threats, such as immigrant rights and environmentalism.
 
As these further examples illustrate, drives for greater equality certainly do not always begin with popular ideas and platforms; nor do they always succeed or win. Quite the contrary. But what nearly all conference participants emphasized was the necessity of respectfully airing differences and conflicts of interest on the road to building new and durable pathways toward a more just and humane future. Dara Strolovitch, of Princeton University and a co-organizer of the conference, opened the day’s discussion with a description of the contemporary roots of this expansive coalitional vision in Black feminist organizing of the 1970s and 1980s.
 
Put simply, there is no mythical society without divisions. Group identities and differences are essential to social and psychological existence, as Jennifer Richeson of Yale University explained in her remarks, but they need not result in harmful and violent divisions. Nor, as author and journalist Sarah Smarsh argued in her description of white working-class progressives, should group identities be taken for granted as indicative of an individual group member’s political orientation or potential orientation. For the same reasons, we should not expect a Democratic demographic shift to come about naturally and automatically, as Princeton’s Paul Frymer was at pains to emphasize. Only the hard work of deliberate political negotiation, engagement, and mobilization will accomplish that end.
 
Although commentators often talk about this or that coalition patched together to form a Democratic or Republican majority, they are talking about pluralistic combinations of groups and not coalitions that are engaged in this kind of collaborative work. Grassroots organizations and movements are gathering steam and filling the leadership vacuum left by the national two-party structure, a structure that in turn is undergirded by several undemocratic institutions that are conservatively biased, as Daniel Schlozman of John Hopkins University described, such as the Electoral College, Supreme Court, and U.S. Senate.
 
As time passes, and the popular will on many key issues is continually and visibly thwarted, distrust intensifies and oppositional coalitional unity is easier to achieve, as Kelley Robinson and several others argued. Indeed, undemocratic institutions themselves have become credible targets of reform for perhaps the first time in this country’s history. Ironically it may be more challenging, as Robinson, Schlozman, and the Graduate Center’s John Mollenkopf noted, to maintain that unity, and achieve real substantive progress, as political power shifts nominally in favor of the Democratic Party, which simply does not have a genuine coalitional structure upon which to forge a small-d democratic public policy agenda. Participants provided many examples of how this is changing, but also cautioned that the work has only just begun.
 
Resources from the conference and conference participants are available on the Coalitional Democracy Conference page, including links to the videos for each panel and short highlights of each participant’s remarks, and links to the participants’ websites.  
 
Suggested reading and information on the activism and research of the conference participants:
 
Allyn Brooks-LaSure and the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights: “Why do you all push us around?“, Tedx Talk, 2015; Podcast for the Cause, 2020.
 
Paul Frymer: “Labor Unions and White Racial Politics,” American Journal of Political Science, 2020; Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America, 2010 (Second edition).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Kelley Robinson and Planned Parenthood: “Planned Parenthood’s Kelley Robinson on Reproductive Rights” Bad on Politics Podcast, 2020; “Planned Parenthood’s Plan for Amy Coney Barrett,” New York Times, 2020.
 
 
Sarah Smarsh; Heartland, 2019; “Liberal Blind Spots are Hiding the Truth about ‘Trump Country’,” New York Times, 2018.
 
Nelini Stamp and the Working Families Party: “2020 and the Party We’re Building Together,” the Working Families Party, 2019; “WFP’s Nelini Stamp on MSNBC,” MSNBC, 2020.
 
Dara Strolovitch: Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics, 2007; When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and the Political Construction of Crisis and Non-Crisis, 2021 (forthcoming).
 
Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis and the Poor People’s Campaign: We Must Do More Campaign; Unleashing the Power of Poor and Low-Income Americans Report, 2020.