BroadSnark

Last week, I was invited to an awards ceremony at the Kennedy Center. The event was put on by an organization called Vital Voices, an NGO that “trains and empowers emerging women leaders and social entrepreneurs around the globe, enabling them to create a better world for us all.”

Sunitha Krishnan, won the human rights award. Liron Peleg-Hadomi and Noha Khatieb won the Fern Holland award. Even a cynic like me finds it difficult to watch the linked videos without being a little inspired. In Sunitha’s case, that is despite my generally negative view of people in the rescue industry. (Just count how many times Sunitha says “I” and “rescued” in this TED talk).

But it isn’t the messianic complexes of so many in the non-profit world that really made the event horrific. That I could deal with. The real problem was who put on the event and what their agenda is. You see, Vital Voices was started by Hilary Clinton and Madeleine Albright back when Clinton was first lady. The organization still receives government funding. They also receive funding from a smorgasbord of some of the most hideously destructive private corporations.  If you want to get an idea of who this organization is built to serve, take a look at their board list.

So there I was, watching a splashy awards show that cost who knows how much of the organization’s multi million dollar budget. (They pulled in over 12 million dollars in 2009.) There I was watching Hilary Clinton march up on stage to introduce an event that honored women in countries like Afghanistan and Haiti – countries Clinton and her closest pals played a large part in fucking up.

I had to watch as they honored Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a woman who never met a war she didn’t like and who was rated 100% by the Christian Coalition and 0% by the HRC. Her voting record is just anti-human. And what about some of the other presenters/agents of misinformation. Wolf Blitzer? He may as well be paid by the Department of Defense. He does their work for them. Cokie Roberts? She robotically spews conservative talking points on trade and uncritically accepts conflating Iraq with terrorism.

Even worse was the sponsorship.  Much of the time the event felt like an ad for Goldman Sachs. Fatema Akbari, who won the entrepreneurial achievement award, actually thanked Goldman Sachs during her speech. Yes. Thank you Goldman Sachs.  Thanks for helping to blow up the world economy. Thanks for gambling on food and energy futures. Thanks for so generously letting all your employees work in the government. Everything is all better now that you supported a woman’s business in Afghanistan.

I wanted to punch somebody.

Much like my experiences working at that hotel in Miami, the Vital Voices event made abundantly clear how elites in politics, media, and corporations all merge into one amorphous blob of self-congratulatory power. And I have little doubt in my mind that most of them actually believe that their little philanthropic show makes them upstanding people, fighting the good fight. The delusion is infuriating.

So what do we do when social justice is co-opted by power? How do we compete against a money drop by Goldman Sachs when we can barely scrape together money to bring coffee to a meeting? How do we confront the people who use justice for women as a front for wars and crooks? How do we deal with the twenty-something girl who thinks Hilary Clinton is some kind of hero? How do we break the illusion?

Political parties and broad categorizations have warped the way we think about issues and problem solving.

We may think that we cannot work with a conservative on anything.  But which conservative do we mean – the Christian conservative from Focus on the Family or the follower of Buckley?  We may think we cannot work with a liberal on anything.  But which liberal do we mean – the liberal, gay man who wants low taxes and small government (but also wants to marry his partner) or the liberal, homophobic union member who thinks larger government can protect him from his boss?

People attach themselves to a certain label based on what they perceive that label to mean.  But that is often not going to be what you think it means.  Pro-life is a good example.  A recent survey found that 51% of people identified as pro-life.  Now to me, that means anti-abortion.  When I hear pro-life, my first thoughts are of rape and incest and putting women’s lives at risk.

But closer inspection of that poll reveals that only about 22% of respondents thought abortion should be illegal in all cases.  So the label pro-life tells you that a person thinks that some abortions performed are wrong.  And while 42% of those surveyed identified as pro-choice, only about half of those think abortion should be legal in all cases.  So the label pro-choice also likely means that the person thinks some abortions performed are wrong.

Not only does our political system encourage us to focus laser-like on those issues that are most divisive.  It discourages any meaningful conversation about what those labels actually mean to the people who embrace them.  And that is just one more thing that keeps us from being able to work together on those issues that we do agree on.

People are understandably skeptical when I speak of working together with “the other side.”  Self-described liberals or progressives, for example, usually bring up white supremacists or Christian extremists or just the people who still think Dubya was a good president.  But they miss the point.

We need to stop looking at the entirety of people’s beliefs and start focusing on the issues – one issue at a time.

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) has done an exemplary job of this.  Ethan Nadelmann found that his fellow liberals were not always his best allies in the fight against drug prohibition.  So he has gone about building a coalition of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians who all think the drug war is a bad idea.  Nadelmann will appear at the CATO institute on one day and the NAACP on another.  And DPA is happy to show that even many seemingly ideological enemies agree with them.

DPA’s “big tent” is one of the reasons why there is such movement right now in the area of drug policy reform, especially regarding marijuana.  And they show us that people on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum can work on an issue without compromising their ethics and with a lot of success.

So instead of trying to find the overarching category or political party that you perceive to be closest to your set of beliefs, why not focus your energies on an issue?  Or two issues or ten issues.  A web of groups, each focused on a clear issue with clear goals, has a much better chance of success than large groups of people who have to spend all their energies trying to be all things to all people.

And there is no telling what unexpected benefits we might realize from these kinds of issue based coalitions.  Perhaps the interactions might change some participants views on other issues.  Maybe nobody would change their ideas at all, but would walk away with a deeper understanding of what “the other side” really thinks.  People who work together toward a common goal, even those who don’t like each other, will often develop a mutual respect.  And mutual respect would be a very good start.

Conservatives like to talk about personal responsibility.  By that they mean taking responsibility for your own well being and perhaps that of your family and community.  But if you are not within the circle, what that comes down to is “fend for yourself.”

Liberals talk about taking responsibility for the less fortunate.  By that they mean donating time or money to organizations (that employ other liberals) and letting them help people in need.  But that creates dependency and doesn’t question the privilege underlying their altruism.

Anarchism, as a system based on cooperation, addresses the weaknesses in both liberal and conservative philosophies.

Like conservatives, anarchists think we should be taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our communities.  But where conservatives want to put up a wall, beyond which their responsibilities don’t go, anarchists have always understood that resolving our problems requires taking responsibility on a worldwide scale.

Like liberals, anarchists are concerned with the vast majority of people who struggle to have even the basic necessities of life.  But anarchists don’t want to install themselves in positions of power where they can met out drips and drabs of whatever liberals have been willing to give up.  Anarchists want to work side by side with people, questioning the hierarchies and privileges that cause those inequities.  We are not creating dependency, we are recognizing interdependency.

And anarchist principles work.

Worker managed coopertives are more productive than hierarchical models.  Community policing is more effective than conservative models.  Community involvement in schools means better results for kids.  Community involvement in budgeting means better allocation of resources.  The more people around when a conflict begins, the less likely that conflict will escalate.

These examples aren’t perfect representations of anarchism by any stretch of the imagination, but they do exhibit anarchist principles of responsibility and cooperation.  They demonstrate that we can solve our own problems.

Its easy to sit here and criticize our “leaders”.  But what did we expect?  Did people think we could just pull a lever every few years and then go back to watching American Idol?  If we want problems to be solved, we need to take responsibility for solving them.  And anarchism is a philosophy built around taking responsibility.

Ideas don’t know boundaries of time and place.   They can be disproven or discredited.  They can be hidden or forbidden.  But they will still manage to seep into unexpected areas and pop up at unexpected times.

I was watching a program about James Baldwin once (my favorite author).  One of the guests was a professor speaking about the influence of Russian Jewish thought on Baldwin’s writing.

I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if my adopted family was Russian.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if one of the reasons that Baldwin’s writing spoke to me so strongly was because we had both absorbed some of the same ways of looking at the world – he by going to school with Russian Jews, me by being adopted by them.

My father never spoke about his family’s background.  He was from the Bronx and that was that.  His father died when he was only eleven.  He didn’t talk about him, presumably because he didn’t remember much.  He spoke about his mother, but never about where she originally came from.  But I did remember a cousin of his saying something about Russia once.

Happily, in the age of the internet, I was able to solve the mystery a few moments after it popped up.  There it was on the 1930 census.  My father’s father was Russian.  My father’s mother’s parents were also Russian.  Practically the entire building in the Bronx where my father lived was Russian.

And I thought, how cool.  How cool that I could feel such a strong connection to someone with such a different background and life experience.  How cool that we are connected by thought.

I tell you this because I have been thinking a lot about thought, about world views, about debate, and about writing.  I’ve been thinking about how frustrating it can be to butt up against people whose ways of seeing the world are so fundamentally different than your own.  And I’ve been thinking about how it sometimes feels like an effort in futility to argue.

I have a particularly hard time arguing with people who accept authoritarianism.  In fact, many people seem to relish it.  Alicia over at Last Left Turn before Hooterville has a great post about the authoritarian tendencies of the republican party.

In the comments of Alicia’s post she says that she doesn’t think that die hard conservatives are amenable to liberal arguments and she prefers to spend her time trying to get progressives to become more active. That is a completely rational view from a liberal/progressive standpoint.  There are many others liberal/progressives out there.  You have a wide audience.

When your political views are more radical, the options are more limited.  After all, the changes I would like to see are as drastic for most liberals as they are for most conservatives.  At times it can seem hopeless.

But then I remember that you never know where an idea can go, once you put it out there.