Unity Without Solidarity Is Fascism

Marginalized people are not the barrier to a big tent.

As the Democrats continue their endless exercise in self-recrimination, one common talking point is that the party needs to be a bigger tent. We cannot criticize California Governor Gavin Newsom for abandoning trans people—to do so is purity politics which will undermine our chances of electoral success. We cannot criticize Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner for having a Nazi tattoo, for that will drive away the huge number of working class voters who have Nazi tattoos and are just waiting to be told that those tattoos are cool to vote D.

The force of these arguments—whichever faction of the party is making them—is that marginalized people asking for rights, recognition, or respect are creating division. They need to understand that normal people—cishet people, white people, male people, abled people—don’t care about their issues, their lives, or their identities. A winning coalition is a coalition that focuses only on the concerns of the majority, and which pushes anyone who is not in the majority off to the side, and/or under the bus.

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This is a familiar argument. Betty Friedan in 1969 referred to lesbians as “the lavender menace”—by which she meant that addressing lesbian issues, or acknowledging lesbian existence, would divide and marginalize the women’s movement. James Baldwin in the essay “Journey to Atlanta” wrote about how the progressive party promised Black people the world, and then attacked his brother as divisive and ungrateful when he asked to be paid for a singing engagement the party had contracted for. Women who pointed out the misogyny in the Black Panther party were often accused of selling out to white feminists.

And of course post-Reconstruction in the US, narratives such as Birth of a Nation suggested the unification of the country, required whites, North and South, to join together in oppressing Black people. Somehow it is always marginalized people who destroy unity by existing—never bigots who create conflict by subordinating or insulting marginalized people.

In her 2013 book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Julia Serano neatly summarizes these dynamics as they affect trans women in queer women’s spaces.

The word “divisive” is a red flag for me. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have heard trans women, or allies of trans women, called “divisive” when we call out people on their transphobia or trans-misogyny. In contrast, I have never once heard anyone use the word “divisive” to describe cis queer women who make trans-misogynistic comments, or who organize or attend queer women’s spaces that exclude trans women. The fact that acts that marginalize trans women are not typically described as being “divisive” implies that there is a presumed and unspoken “one-ness” that exists in queer women’s communities that implicitly precludes trans women.

A variation on this “presumed and unspoken ‘one-ness’” is also hovering around these Democratic big tent arguments. The assumption is that there is some pure, true, untrammelled unity which would manifest in a flash of light and bonhomie if only Black people, or queer people, or women, or trans people, or Jews, or disabled people, or fat people, or Muslims, or Palestinians, would just shut the fuck up and get onboard with the Democratic party/the working class/whatever. The problem is always these loud-mouthed non-normative distractions with their non-normative bodies and concerns. Silence them, and we would all speak with one voice.

But when you start silencing people and telling them that they are the cause of all that is wrong in the tent, they tend to feel they are not welcome in the tent, and then they leave. Finding common ground, creating coalitions, is more complicated than just spitting on and insulting everyone whose identity makes you uncomfortable. It involves actually creating a movement for everyone—which means listening to marginalized people and trying to fight for everybody, not just the people you think some median voter will be comfortable with.

I’m not saying that you can never make compromises. Sometimes you have to ally with murderous sociopaths like Stalin and Churchill to defeat Hitler; sometimes you pass the ACA without the public option because you don’t have the votes and want to help who you can. Politics can suck—but if you are going to make shit compromises, you can at least be clear that the compromise is the shit part, not the people who are pointing out that the compromise is shit. Don’t tell people you’re going to use them as mulch for the new world and then demand that they thank you as they’re ground underfoot. If we’re fighting for everybody, we fight for everybody—and if there are setbacks, if there are losses, we acknowledge that they are losses for us all, rather than scapegoating the people with the least power and the most to lose.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said he wanted a peace of justice, not a peace of “stagnant complacency.” He could have said the same thing about unity. A unity achieved through the forceful silencing of dissent or through trampling marginalized people is not solidarity. It’s fascism. And hopefully we all agree that we have enough fascism in this country already without setting it up as our own tent, big or small.