Part IV. The Alternative
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Vote Synergy Or Die: Pluralist Survival Beats Purity Politics
- “In the absence of insight into future possibilities, growing awareness of the scale of oppressions and their tenacity breeds cynicism and not resistance [...] Oglesby [...] railed at liberals and named imperialism, not just bad policy, as the real culprit in Vietnam [...] It is as if to celebrate progress, or to even admit progress, is to somehow negate our critiques. [...] It won’t do to say that everyone will be better after the revolution. People need better conditions now, on moral grounds and also to have any faith in future prospects. [...] Non reformist reforms, he said, are gains in the way people live, in laws, in structures, in consciousness, in our own organization, which improve peoples lives but also create a new platform from which to fight for still further [...] People need to deeply believe that you can fight city hall and win, and that what you do win won’t be more of the old crap [...] [T]he left is largely still trying to convince the public that all is not well with society and that the cause of problems lies in ‘the system’ and its institutions. Yet, by and large the public knows this already [...] I spent years, as have you, working at an institution with completely different values, norms, and structure than typical institutions in society at large, and we are both critical of mainstream workplaces and have something we prefer. But it didn’t make me and I bet it hasn’t made you critical of people who work at typical jobs [...] [A]lternative institutions [...] provide models to instruct our critiques and our strategies, then presumably they have to address racial and sexual and gender and power and also class hierarchies, offering alternatives [...] But to attract and retain people we also have to ask do our projects, movements, and organizations, and does our language and our personal style lend itself to new people, welcome them, respect them, comfort them, fulfill them—or does it shock them, denigrate them, literally block them from coming toward us or sticking with us?” (Albert, 1998).
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Figure 15: Pluralist synergy synthesizes specific affirmative plans within broader critical movements.
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We should never fracture support for sensible policies based on whose -ism is truer: "A better strategy is to promote agonistic […] selective coalitions on specific political issues. […] The specter haunting the Left today is an unattractive set of internal struggles for hegemony in which each party calls the other names that give ammunition to the cultural Right. […] [S]ynergy on the Left, then, may reside in [...] letting go of the fantasy of defining a hegemonic position to which all true leftists must subscribe. The need today is, rather, construction of a series of alliances across multiple lines of difference in assumption, priority, ethical source, and modes of politics. As we establish relations of agonistic respect across differences, we can also hope to strengthen our hand in the academy and improve communications with sympathetic parties in the media, churches, street movements, and labor groups." (Connolly, 1999). Even if mindsets are mutually-exclusive in theory, in practice that means creating a "greater whole than the sum of its parts" to unite society better by adding a third element to resolve the tension of that exclusivity, which is the starting point for their movement. Pluralist society allows defending many justifications for advocacies, even if self-contradictory: "Antiwar generals, corporation executives fostering workers' control and top politicians promoting local self-reliance play a useful role in efforts for social change, especially to the extent that they work with social movements and refuse to play all the 'rules of the game'" (Martin, 1990). "With very rare exceptions, the right things are done for the wrong reasons. It is futile to demand that" our leaders or activists "do the right thing for the right reason"; instead, "the organizer should know and accept that the right reason is only introduced as a moral rationalization after the right end has been achieved" and in order to persuade state opposition one "should search for and use the wrong reasons to achieve the right goals" (Alinsky, 1971, p. 66). Synergy of “practical utopianism [...] would enable us to once again instill human society with purpose, rejuvenating human culture around a coherent, yet pluralistic, framework of ideals" (Bisk, 2002). The case is trying to convince one-at-a-time that society should change in some way, but that same literature field often advocates ethical movements, business, and international engagement. The affirmative retains the ability to support the others in a general sense by advocating their solution unrelated to the plan, without claiming benefits this round. The permutation does not “co-opt” using the movement when it simply shows the public can see the two causes as unrelated.
- Their critique is already being read and applied in society: state leaders, scholars, media analysts, and diplomats collaborate to check assumptions of other mindsets. For example on security rhetoric, scholars would not want to be used to imply that case impacts are accounted for as constructed threats so as to ignore statistics on escalating casualties in a region. Leaders conducting accurate threat assessment would look to detailed facts and already know from history the cliche to avoid demonizing another as an apocalyptic enemy. Legislation passes when a party builds coalitions across mindsets using two-faced contradictions (Malhotra, 2015). One can appeal to those who think immigration can help or hurt jobs, support or oppose free trade, or those who use race, class, or gender as starting points. One can agree on capitalism’s flaws and inequalities, but still find some value in innovation. So pretending to put first the debate over if capitalism has been used more for good or for bad is a meaningless oversimplification, and it forces one to look to the specifics in a situation. Reading authors saying that democracy or economic growth can be bad does not dissuade support of the plan. The state can use the plan as a global model for democracy, while recognizing it as bad in some places to not use it there. Even if economic planning shifts to minimal sustainability instead of industrial growth, that mindset would still value most plans as necessary short-term and to avoid war and safety risk. “Turning” an impact value of concern does not work in real-world persuasion like debate misteaches: simply introducing a few quotes of those counter to mainstream values just means leaders would see society has many views. Even Marxists would understand using appeals to capitalist gain to gain support for a sensible policy to save lives now from poverty and war.
