We Need a Much Bigger Tent
On coalitions, discomfort, and the defense of democracy
Welcome to Briefings, a newsletter on organizing and strategy by L.A. Kauffman. Here I'll offer insights on the current pro-democracy movement and how everyday people can take effective action to promote freedom, dignity, and democracy amid rising authoritarianism. Please consider a paid subscription to support my work.
Throughout the assaultive first months of this administration, my thoughts kept turning to an essay I hadn't read in decades: Bernice Johnson Reagon's “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.”
Reagon, for those who don't know her, was a profoundly influential scholar, composer, performer, and civil rights activist: “a major cultural voice for freedom and justice,” in the words of her personal biography. She was a founding member of the Freedom Singers, the legendary touring musical group sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose stirring performances both publicized and helped build the civil rights struggle. She went on to found the celebrated a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. If you're not familiar with their music, do yourself a favor and give them a listen – you could start here:
The essay that was ringing in my head was adapted from a talk that Dr. Reagon gave at the West Coast Women's Festival in 1981, and published in the pioneering 1983 black feminist anthology Home Girls, edited by the great Barbara Smith. That's where I encountered it, as a young activist in the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
That moment in U.S. history had striking similarities to the era in which we now live. Between Reagan's sharp and radical attacks on marginalized groups, his administration's rapid shredding of the social safety net, and the elevated threat of nuclear war, it was a time of widespread fear and existential dread.
And Dr. Reagon, speaking as both the federal government and the national culture were being reshaped by President Reagan, took that moment to ask her audience to give up the sense of safety that came with being in a like-minded community, in order to build the power it would take to win.
The festival was held at Yosemite, and referring to the thin mountain air, Dr. Reagon confessed, “I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die.” She continued, “That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing.”
The essay is well worth reading in its entirety, but the lines that stuck with me after decades had to do with that feeling of extreme discomfort. Because, quite frankly, we need it now, and badly.
There is a great deal of vital and creative organizing underway to oppose the Trump onslaught. In the last issue of this newsletter, I wrote about how truly historic the scale of grassroots protest mobilizing has been since Trump returned to office, to take the most visible example.
But the response to Trump's sweeping attacks on the Constitution and the institutional foundations for democracy remains strikingly siloed – sequestered in many separate networks and alliances and coalitions. Some of these coordinating structures are issue-specific, others organize particular constituencies, and some are focused on a particular sector, like universities or philanthropy. Many have bigger ambitions, and many overlap. I know of at least two different ones that call themselves the “Big Tent.”
All are important. But none are nearly as broad as the moment demands.
We need a much bigger tent. There is as yet no coordinating body where people are crafting and implementing action strategy for the pro-democracy movement writ large. There isn't even a single structure bringing together progressives, Democrats, independents, and Republican defectors into a single conversational space, much less a coordinating one.
One key example of what such an effort might look like is Brazil's Pacto pela Democracia, a coordinating body that brought together more than 200 civil society organizations from across a wide ideological spectrum to defend Brazilian democracy from the “Trump of the tropics,” Jair Bolsonaro. The coalition includes not only obvious pro-democracy players like human rights, feminist, indigenous rights, LGBTQ, and climate justice organizations but also representatives of the country's conservative business and banking sectors. They employed a diverse array of tactics, including lawsuits, election monitoring, a vast petition drive, and massive street mobilizations.
This short film from the Skoll Foundation gives a good overview of Pacto's breadth, work, and impact – as well as just how challenging it was to bring groups who profoundly disagreed with one another together for a common aim. Pacto pela Democracia succeeded in significant part because of its willingness to navigate discomfort.
The coalition's coordinated defense of democracy is a major reason why Bolsonaro's efforts to overturn Brazil's 2022 election failed much more resoundingly than the Trumpist insurrection of January 6 – and why Bolsonaro is currently on trial for his actions, while Trump not only managed to evade any accountability, but to retake power.
“The reason we are stumbling,” Dr. Reagon declared all those years ago, “is that we are at the point where in order to take the next step we’ve got to do it with some folk we don’t care too much about. And we got to vomit over that for a little while. We must just keep going.”
That kind of broad alliance-building didn't happen in the Reagan years, a failure whose consequences we're still feeling today.
Does the current pro-democracy movement, facing even graver threats, have the capacity to do better? Can we vomit over the prospect of working with groups we dislike or even distrust, and then go ahead and do it? It's a little hard to imagine who in our current political landscape would have the moral authority, political relationships, and institutional stomach to convene an overarching action coalition like Pacto pela Democracia in the United States – but I for one will applaud anyone who tries.
Speaking of the 1980s and missed political opportunities, I was digging through some old files and found a proposal from roughly 1986 that I co-authored (with Micah Sifry, among others) for the creation of a Center for Student Journalism. It makes for a painful read.
We noted – way back then – that the national right was pouring vast resources into the establishment of right-wing campus media, from coaching and mentoring to hundreds of thousands of dollars of seed grants. “Understanding that early political allegiances often become lifetime commitments, conservatives have made college students a key political target,” we wrote. The right-wing newspapers, we wrote, “divide campuses by attacking the most vulnerable members of the community, and have helped legitimize conservative views. Most importantly, they function as ideological shock-troops: even where they fail to win a majority of students to their positions, they help shift political debate substantially to the right.”
We proposed to create a center to support and strengthen progressive campus newspapers, and to establish a national network of progressive student journalists. We an excellent steering committee lined up, use of a free office space, and a detailed plan for our first year. Our budget was a mere $42,000. Granted, we were young and had limited connections to potential donors, but there was little appetite in those days for building progressive infrastructure. We couldn't find even that modest level of funding, and the effort failed.
Sigh.
I have to wonder how many other infrastructure-building efforts like ours failed for lack of resources over the four decades in which the Right continued investing deeply in its own media and advocacy institutions.
But to end on a better note, one hopeful sign in the current moment is the sense that many in the progressive funding world are beginning to adopt a longer view of their role. A large number of foundations have pledged not only to increase overall giving but to prioritize multi-year institutional support. This is an important step. The broad pro-democracy movement has a lot of building and rebuilding to do, and it will require not just major resources but organizational stability, which is impossible to maintain if you're constantly scurrying after funds.
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