Dream bigger
“When does a political fight over some people’s rights feel like some people’s fight — and when does it feel like everyone’s?” asks Anand Giridharadas at The Ink. His topic is “de-siloing” our struggle for rights for specific groups and instead universalizing their struggles.
We are too easily trapped in our own narrow narratives and sucked into right’s.
Special counsel Robert K. Hur knew he would catch hell from MAGA Republicans for his investigation concluding without indicting President Biden for his retention of privileged materials. So on Thursday Hur redirected the public narrative away from “no criminal charges are warranted” to Joe Biden is senile with a few poisoned adverbs and adjectives. No one will talk about Biden’s innocence now, or the remarkable achievments of a great president. They’re too busy stomping around in the right’s “he’s too old” framing.
What the left must do to de-silo their defense of liberties is less rhetorical jujitsu than speaking in terms that bring everyone into the fight. MLK chose the Lincoln Memorial for preaching his dream for a reason.
Take the fight for reproductive rights. Democrats avoided the A-word for years. “And, historically, there had been a choice to argue Roe on privacy rather than equity grounds,” Anat Shenker-Osorio writes. That left the right dominating the political battle space and made the issue a private one. The emphasis, she believes should be on generalizing the issue to freedom, something to which every man and woman of every age can relate:
So now here we are talking about freedom, and some people would say, “but that’s right-wing, too.” I strongly disagree with that. I think that freedom is a squarely contested concept and there is absolutely a left-wing instantiation of that concept that we have seen, with F.D.R., with the freedom to marry, with the civil rights movement. So now that abortion sits in this freedom frame, what I would argue it’s allowed us to do is, number one, make men understand how this is also going to rope them in.
Because what it does is it presents abortion not as off on its own but as something that is important to us all.
Now, this is a mistake we make a lot. We try to protect or defend or guard abortion or we try to protect and defend and guard immigrants or we try to protect and defend and guard trans kids or you name it, thereby helping out in the siloing of that issue.
Somewhere amidst electrons collecting dust there is an old post by Markos Moulitsas that almost gets here. He was criticizing the women’s movement for insisting that the right to an abortion was a fundamental principle of the Democratic Party. “Like hell, it is,” he wrote (IIRC). No, it’s the right to privacy, something more universal. Shenker-Osorio goes broader still. It’s freedom.
Get away from “my body, my choice” and make reproductive freedom everyone’s fight.
Here’s Anat’s reframing on that:
Hi friends, I know you thought that we were Chicken Little screaming, “The sky is falling!” when the sky was not falling. Guess what? They took a giant piece out of the sky. They really did. It was called Dobbs. And we promise you that this is their whole agenda. Their agenda is to take away your freedoms.
Today it’s abortion. Tomorrow it’s condoms. The next day it’ll be speech. Somewhere along the way it’s already books. After that, it’s whether your kid can go to school looking the way that they feel comfortable. Somewhere along the road it’s going to be your vote. It’s going to be your right to join together in a union. It’s going to be your right to wear the T-shirt that criticizes government.
Or — and I mean to get a little pointed here — it’s going to be your ability to yell when a political leader is giving a speech. If you disagree with what they’ve done and you speak out about it, do you get put in the gulag?
So that’s what this change in framing has allowed. It’s turned abortion from “We should care about abortion because abortion” to “We should care about abortion because abortion, and because this is an example of the agenda. This is the tip of the spear and the spear’s going to get you.”
Let the right rant about “they’re coming for your guns.” The left’s rallying cry should be “they’re coming for your freedoms.”
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.