Leftism vs liberalism

Thoughts on coalition building

The First Step Act, signed into law on December 21, 2018 by Donald Trump, only happened after years of bipartisan frustration with an overly punitive federal prison system. The act had three major structural components: correctional reform, sentencing reform, and reentry support.

Most interesting is the varied list of supporters: the ACLU, the Koch Brothers, Van Jones, Kim Kardashian, evangelical Christians, and the Trump Administration—strange bedfellows no matter how you cut it. Speaking of strange, the ACLU joined forces with another unexpected acronym, the NRA, six years later to protect free speech as well.

Reform is slow in a bureaucracy. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin introduced a precursor to First Step in 2015, proposing significant changes to mandatory minimum sentences. Though receiving overwhelming bipartisan support, the bill was blocked by Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Jeff Sessions.

Then Donald Trump was elected on his “law and order” platform and Sessions was appointed Attorney General. Many believed the bill dead. Yet within two years, an unlikely coalition pushed the bill further than it had gone before. Eventually, it passed.

The bill had many problems after passage:

• It only covers federal prisoners, less than 10% of the US prison population

• The assessment tools used for credits has documented racial biases, made worse by the fact that the prison system has documented racial biases

• The exclusion list is said to have locked out 59,000 inmates

• Immigrants were explicitly excluded

• Implementation was mismanaged

• The entire project was underfunded

Yet as of 2024, over 44,000 inmates had been released due to this act. Some level of progress was made.

I started thinking about this legislation after watching the online discourse over Hasan Piker. I’m not going to discuss him because I don’t watch streamers enough to offer any sort of analysis. But I’m noticing tons of people from center left to leftist talking past each other, which gives me a lot of concern about the midterm elections and beyond. Instead of engaging with structural ideas (with realistic solutions) of how to make progress on shared ideologies, terms like “leftist” and “liberal” are being hurled as slurs, which is not going to result in what is often a stated goal of coalition building.

Traditionally, the term “leftist” meant someone who supports reducing social and economic inequality, typically through collective or state action, while regarding social welfare as the most important goal of government. There have always been debates about how that can be accomplished, which is good when a diversity of voices weigh in. Historically, the broad left included liberals, social democrats, and labor reformists, but in certain discourse “leftist” signals something more radical than liberal progressivism. Some thinkers believe it represents a scientific analysis that transcends the conventional left-right spectrum (which I find an egregious use of the term “science”), but this gets confusing for people not steeped in this discourse and who, in everyday conversation, equates the term “left” with social progress.

Some online discourse is noise. Some, foreign actors sowing discord in our national politics. But some presents as real disdain, born out of whatever personal grievances each individual holds; born out of tribalism humans are unlikely to escape; born out of a shared frustration that things have gotten this bad in America.

And things are bad. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act should be a real wake-up call for anyone interested in civil liberties. That 1965 legislation followed in the wake of the Civil Rights Act one year earlier, and there too a strange coalition of Republicans and Democrats united against southern Democrats, who were using a filibuster to block the bill. I’m no fan of Everett Dirksen, but the law only became reality through his support.

Here we are, three generations later, watching the progress made through a bipartisan effort being stolen right in front of our eyes.

I’m not interested in bipartisan efforts while this administration is in power. That’s a futile project. I cringe when seeing Democrats embrace MAHA or consider MAGA a populist movement. But I also know that out of the Depression came New Deal reforms. At some point we’re going to see the balance of power shift.

A few years? Decades? Nothing is certain. Right now, I’m most interested in how coalition building has worked, because sometimes it actually does. Such work requires sacrifice, understanding, and communication.

The big tent bickering I’m watching devolve into cults of personality and finger-wagging is not going to build anything of value.

The gutting of the Voting Rights Act hit me hard.

It also further crystallized social media hygiene practices I’ve been developing over the last few years.

Like most people, I have thoughts on a range of topics. What has become clear to me, especially since starting work on Conspirituality six years ago, is that the public doesn’t need to hear all those thoughts. I’ve continually narrowed my scope of online work to home in on what I care about most: health and science. Sure, not only these topics, but most of what I write about falls into these categories.

I have a lot of thoughts about geopolitics, but it’s not my field of expertise. I read, learn, and assess, but have no reason to make all these thoughts public because it’s just adding noise. I feel confident about my signals when it comes to health and science; less so on other topics. Which is why I feel no need to discuss Hasan Piker. Doesn’t mean I’m not considering analyses. Just means I’m not invested enough to pontificate. If he starts chiming in on MAHA, I might.

The Voting Rights Act is different. After the SCOTUS decision, I reached out to one of my oldest and closest friends, Dax-Devlon Ross, for a Substack Live. Dax is a lawyer who has spent decades working and consulting with nonprofits and a range of other organizations, mostly around social justice initiatives. We were both columnists for the daily newspaper at Rutgers in the mid-nineties. We both protested against the university president, Fran Lawrence, for supporting the Bell Curve. We were very engaged in civil liberties at that time. Dax has made a career fighting for these rights.

During our conversation, I asked what he thought about the fact that John Roberts has been trying to gut the Voting Rights Act since at least 1981, and now, 45 years later, he achieved his goal. Here’s what he told me:

Dax is not steeped in social media and online discourse; we joked that the only platform he regularly uses is LinkedIn. Social media often has nothing to do with reality, however. Dax is working directly with organizations attempting real-world change through legislation and social justice projects, not riffing on the ills of society by posting on Threads. That is, he’s doing something about problems with people in a position to affect legislative change. So the clip above is what he’s noticing in those spaces. He’s worked with hundreds of organizations and watched the impatience he describes play out over and over.

While jumping from issue to issue is indicative of at least some on the left, the right funds activists spending a half-century on one cause. More will soon follow: a total ban on abortion pills; the end of gay marriage; reversing no-fault divorce. These are also well-funded objectives from the right, with activists dedicating their lives to overturning them. They’re not moving on to another cause, but working squarely within them.

Which brings me to the second part of what Dax said: I don’t know if I’m a leftist or a liberal, but I’m progressive. He recognizes that while some things have gotten better, laws are tenuous and subject to being overturned, as we’re watching every week with this administration. He’s on the big tent side of such issues, working directly with people pushing back on the tide washing our rights away.

Bickering over what brand of left one is (or whether one is left at all) is one of the most toxic behaviors I see online, mostly Threads thought it persists across the feeds I monitor. In terms of politics, I mostly align with democratic socialists, meaning I want a lot more socialism in America, but not to the point of communism—itself a rift in that ideology. These are policy issues, however, and what passes for activism online often doesn’t involve things like regulations and legislation. When discussed, they’re often in the abstract, like X or Y should end. Not much is offered about politicians putting forward bills to make it happen because, according to this cohort, engaging with our current political structure is antithetical to progress; apparently, only a revolution is acceptable, with vague contours (if any) of what that entails offered.

Not always, of course. That’s usually at the fringes. I was a fan of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. Now he’s making actual legislative progress in the city I love and lived in for a dozen years. He wants free bussing. The city council is pushing back with an income-based policy for this; there might be some compromise in the end. The same is happening with free childcare. My hope is that both become reality. In terms of this conversation, Mamdani critiques and puts forward legislation to back those critiques, which is what this country needs a whole lot more of.

So I like the term progressive, as it implies forward movement. Not lamenting over a bygone time that certainly must have been better than today or a vague picture of a better tomorrow with no policy ideas of how to get there. Actually voting for and fighting for legislation that protects the rights of Black people, women, the trans community, immigrants, and all other groups who only desire a fair chance and access to the same opportunities that the dominant white population in America has.

I’ve talked about Loretta Ross often over the years (no relationship to Dax).

She developed a concept called “circles of influence” which became a north star for my own thinking ever since reading about her in Anand Giridharadas’s book, The Persuaders. The basic idea is that you have to choose who to work with and for what cause based on how much disagreement you can tolerate.

Ross found that a lot of disagreement can happen between people who agree 90% of the time on issues. She says real problems happen here because it mistakes a tree for the forest. Giridharadas writes,

Ross defined her 90-percenters as people who shared most of her general worldview: “that capitalism is problematic, that racism and homophobia and transphobia and anti-immigrant bias are bad,” and so on and so forth. The problem she observed with one’s 90-percenters is that instead of focusing on the vast area of overlap, they fixated on the 10 percent divergence. “I might work on reproductive justice, while someone else works on immigrant rights or trans rights or whatever,” she told me. “I think that the 90-percenters spend too much time trying to turn people into 100-percenters, which is totally unnecessary. I mean, there’s certainly enough oppression to go around that we can all work on it in our own different ways and never run out of oppression.”

A lot needs to change right now. Whatever infighting is occurring on whatever left of center scale is being used to weigh ideologies, I’m more interested in facts:

• Women have lost the federal right to have an abortion

• Black people, already disenfranchised, were kicked back to pre-1965 districting laws

• America’s public health system, once a beacon for the world, is a conspiracy theory pseudoscience clearing house

This administration handed the keys to a sociopath who will likely be the world’s first trillionaire when his company IPOs next month. His cuts to USAID have already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.

These aren’t theoretical, this is what’s happening, and we still have years of this administration to endure. So I look to the past to find times when people got over themselves and worked together to bring some level of progress, even when they had to hold their nose doing so.

The First Step act was only the first step; more are needed. Other examples exist. The American Indian Movement worked with Richard Nixon to pass the Indian Self-Determination Act and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which reversed biased policies and provided recognition and funds to Indian tribes. The ACLU and the NRA fought against government overreach and censorship in NRA v Vullo in 2024.

I understand these acts have never gone far enough to ensure full equality. I also realize the only reason each party joined forces with opposing groups was out of self-interest. That’s fine, if that’s what progress takes.

It just feels like a whole lot of selves are only interested in feeling right, not progress, at this moment. We’ve already experienced so much collateral damage as a nation (and a world). I don’t see it getting better in the short term.

Getting somewhere over time requires a loosening of the terms being used to define the lines and recognizing what can actually be accomplished. Otherwise, there’s going to be nothing left worth fighting for.