Cory Doctorow
Winning an election is easier than it looks: all you have to do is convince a bunch of different groups that you will use power to achieve their desires. Bonus points if you can convince groups with mutually exclusive goals that you'll deliver for them - the coalition of "people who disagree about everything" is hard to assemble, but it sure is *large*!
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Cory Doctorow
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder
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Cory Doctorow
Politically, a "conservative" is someone who believes that there is a small group of people who were born to rule, and a much larger group of people who were born to be ruled *over*.
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Cory Doctorow
As Corey Robin writes in *The Reactionary Mind*, this is the one trait that unifies all the disparate strains of conservative thought: imperialists, monarchists, capitalists, white supremacists, misogynists, Christian nationalists, Hindu nationalists and supporters of Israeli genocide in Palestine:
https://coreyrobin.com/books/the-reactionary-mind/
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Cory Doctorow
These groups all agree that power should be hierarchical, that your position in a hierarchy is something you're born with, and that letting people who were "meant" to be at the bottom of the hierarchy rise to the top puts society so out of balance that it's actually a threat to human survival.
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Cory Doctorow
That's why conservatives of all stripes get so furious about "DEI" - any kind of affirmative action program serves as a defective sorting hat, putting the incompetent and unsuitable into positions of power over other peoples' lives. It's why "DEI" is the go-to scapegoat for any kind of disaster, including giant ships crashing into bridges:
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Cory Doctorow
But while conservatives all agree that some of us are born to be in charge and others are born to be bossed around by our innate superiors, they have irreconcilable differences about *who* is meant to be in charge. British imperialists who pine for the Raj have views that are fundamentally at odds with the views of Hindu nationalists. They're both "conservative" movements, but they're actually bitter enemies.
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Cory Doctorow
For a conservative movement to win power, it has to convince the people whom it would relegate to the bottom of the hierarchy to support that goal (AKA "getting turkeys to vote for Christmas"); and it must convince other conservatives that they will be able to esablish a hierarchy that accommodates *multiple*, co-equal ruling elites.
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Cory Doctorow
The first tactic is well-established. LBJ summed it up neatly:
> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
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Cory Doctorow
The second one requires far more tactical thinking. Some elite groups are able to form coalitions by carving out exclusive zones: think of the friendly feeling among Modi, Orban, Erdogan, bin Salman, Trump, Milei, et al. These people all aspire to dictatorship, all espouse their superior blood - a source of personal and racial superiority - and hypothetically all believe that the world would be better if everyone (including their foreign counterparts) would take their orders.
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Cory Doctorow
One way to resolve this tension is to carve up the world geographically, which is why so many despots who seized power by promising to build ethno-states can co-exist with one another and even cheer one another on. Let Orban have Hungary, give Turkey to Erdogan, and let Bibi Netanyahu annex all of Gaza.
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Cory Doctorow
Sure, in their secret hearts, each of these men secretly believe themselves to be racially and personally superior to the others, but so long as they all stay out of one another's turf, there's no reason to make a big deal out of it.
Another way to resolve this is to carve up the world *temporally*: think of the alliance between Christian nationalists and Israeli genocidiers. In the US, "Christian Zionists" outnumber Jews who identify as Zionists:
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Cory Doctorow
But Christian Zionists aren't philosemites. They *hate* Jews and believe that we are all going to hell for murdering Christ. Their support for Israel isn't grounded in a belief in the necessity of a Jewish ethno-state - it arises out of the apocalyptic belief that Christ will return once Jews "return to the Holy Land" - albeit only briefly, before being cast into a lake of fire for all eternity.
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Cory Doctorow
Like British imperialists and the Hindu nationalists, Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists are *not* on the same side. However, *unlike* British imperialists and Hindu nationalists, Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists want the same thing...for a while. Both groups support the establishment of a Jewish entho-state in Israel, they just differ sharply as to what happens *after* that comes to pass.
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Cory Doctorow
So long as they don't dwell on that moment in the future, they can stand shoulder to shoulder, fighting together for an Israeli state that operates with absolute US support and total international impunity.
Coalitions who defer the question of how they'll use power to *after* they've gained power are using time (rather than space) as a buffer that keeps their differences from smashing together until they shatter.
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Cory Doctorow
But time and space aren't the only buffers for the differences between coalition partners - there's also *class*.
"Class" has been the most important, most useful buffer for conservativism since the Reagan revolution. Reagan came to power by forging an alliance with evangelicals, whose cult leaders had historically demanded that members focus their energies (and cash donations) on the church, while avoiding politics as "worldly."
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Cory Doctorow
Reagan promised the Christian right a ton of culture war - bans on abortion, punishment for uppity women and racial minorities, prayer in school, segregation academies, etc - that his financial backers didn't give a shit about. By all means, let working class evangelicals homeschool their kids and teach them that the Earth is 5,000 years old, it doesn't matter to Wall Street, who will reap a giant tax-cut and also send *their* kids to private schools with rigorous curriculum.
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Cory Doctorow
Bankers' wives and daughters will always be able to afford to fly out of state (or across the border) for abortion care, they will never die of AIDS in the charity wing of a community hospital, their daughters won't be trapped by bans on no-fault divorces.
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Cory Doctorow
For the past 40 years, American oligarchs and would-be oligarchs have entered into enthusiastic coalitions with virulently racist, sexist and homophobic groups, and maintained peace within their coalition by passing punitive, cruel laws that the rich can buy their way around.
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Cory Doctorow
For many self-styled libertarians, the most important liberty is "not paying taxes" and this subordinates all other liberties, such that a "libertarian" will vote for a coalition whose platform promises to ban abortion, birth control, "interracial" marriage, and queer sex, so long as it also promises tax cuts. It's a weird kind of pro-freedom ideology that happily trades away (others') freedom for (your own) tax cuts:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism
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Cory Doctorow
Remember, Trump's first CPAC speech was sponsored by Goproud, a group of "fiscally responsible" gay Republicans who believed in gay rights, sure, but not as much as they believed in getting so rich that even if poor gay people were ground into dust, they could float above it all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOProud
Class is the third buffer between the oligarchs of the right and the mass movement that provides the bulk for winning elections.
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Cory Doctorow
After all, laws are for the little people, so by all means, we can promise - and even deliver - laws that we would never submit to, because we don't have to submit to them. This is Wilhoit's Law in action:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit#Wilhoit's_law
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Cory Doctorow
In a hierarchical society, class separates groups of people just as rigidly as time and space, and is every bit as useful a buffer as the other two forces.
Until it isn't.
Eventually - once you've banned abortion, once you've taken all the "controversial" books out of the library, once you've made affirmative action illegal - you reach the layer of non-negotiable culture war demands that the rich *can't* buy their way out of.
Like immigration.
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Cory Doctorow
Let's start with this: immigration doesn't *have* to result in wage suppression. Couple immigration with strong unions and a muscular labor rights regime and workers do just *great*. The more the merrier! America *needs* workers of every kind. What's more, the unions and labor laws in America owe their existence to immigrant workers, so there's nothing about immigration that is necessarily incompatible with winning rights for workers.
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Cory Doctorow
But the possibility of importing some overseas union organizers isn't what motivates the finance wing of the conservative coalition to demand "guest-worker" programs like the H1B visa:
https://twitter.com/RobertMSterling/status/1873175206073626660
H1B visas are "non-immigrant" visas, meaning that they are designed not to offer any path to permanent residence or citizenship.
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Cory Doctorow
You can live in the US for a long time on an H1B, but you are bound over to your employer like a serf bound to a feudal estate: if you lose your job, you lose your right to abide in the country. That can mean losing your house, your car, your kids' school and friends. It can cost your spouse *their* job, because if you're kicked out of the country, they might well leave along with you, rather than remain alone here.
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Cory Doctorow
H1B tech workers are the workers that tech-barons have dreamt of for decades. An H1B worker can't job-hop, and so needn't be lured to work with gourmet cafeterias, luxury gymnasiums, or other perks of the whimsical tech "campus." H1B workers can't quit if they don't like their stock-options packages:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
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Cory Doctorow
Tech bosses *hate* tech workers, and they always have. It's not affection that causes Jeff Bezos to allow his coders to come to work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand, while his delivery drivers piss in bottles and his warehouse workers are injured at three times the national average.
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Cory Doctorow
Jeff Bezos neither cherishes his coders' kidneys, nor is he especially hostile to delivery drivers' need to pee - he just squeezes any and every worker in any and every way he can.
Same for Tim Cook: the accomplishment that prompted Apple's board to elevate Cook to Steve Jobs' CEO office was the successful transfer of iPhone manufacturing to China.
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Cory Doctorow
Specifically, Cook figured out how to work with his primary supplier, Foxconn, to create a working environment that produced reliable, precision-manufactured mobile devices, and all it took was creating working environment so brutal that the company had to install suicide nets to catch the factory workers who couldn't stand it any longer:
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Cory Doctorow
Apple's tech workers aren't worked to suicidal desperation, sure - but not because Tim Cook likes coders and hates factory workers. It's because he's afraid coders will quit, and he's not worried about replacing factory workers after they jump to their death.
The point of the H1B program is to create a tech workforce that bosses no longer have to fear.
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Cory Doctorow
Recall that when Elon Musk took over Twitter and circulated a mandatory "extremely hardcore" pledge that demanded that workers promise to subordinate their health and wellbeing to his profits, it prompted a mass departure, with the notable exception of workers whose immigration status (and/or insurance for serious health issues) depended on their ongoing employment at Twitter:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/16/23462026/elon-musk-twitter-email-hardcore-or-severance
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Cory Doctorow
When Musk's cronies gloated about shedding 20% of Twitter's workforce on "day zero," the workers they had in mind were the ones who didn't fear their bosses and wouldn't frog when the investor class shouted jump. "Sharpen your blades, boys" means we're slicing off workers who are laboring under the misapprehension that they are entitled to a say in their working conditions:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/
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Cory Doctorow
After all, America does *not* have a tech worker shortage. The US tech sector fired 260,000 skilled workers in 2023, and more than 150,000 were shown the door in 2024. When Musk and his fellow tech bosses complain that they need more "talent," what they mean is they need workers who are so terrified of being deported that they'll accept low wages, sleep under their desks, refuse to talk to union organizers, and, above all, do as they're told:
https://youtube.com/shorts/N0FkyXFhmpo?si=GCh6bFqd31prazhz
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Cory Doctorow
Trump won by promising mutually exclusive outcomes to different parts of his coalition. To the nativists and bigots (and workers who'd bamboozled into thinking that their low salaries were the fault of other workers, not their bosses), he promised a halt to immigration. To the plutocrats, he promised a large and pliable workforce - of low-waged agricultural workers *and* of precarious H1B tech workers who'd discipline America's "entitled" tech workers:
https://prospect.org/labor/2025-01-02-president-musk-american-workers-h1b-visas/
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Cory Doctorow
Now, he has to figure out how to keep everyone happy. Literally: the Speakership of Congress is only nine votes away from collapsing at any time (and until last week, it was just *one* vote away), and without Congress, Trump's ability to govern will be severely curtailed (see, for example, 2018-2020).
Immigration isn't an issue like abortion: oligarchs can support abortion bans and still procure abortions when *they* need them.
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Cory Doctorow
It's much harder to support an immigration ban and still procure precarious, low-waged workers for your business. It will take many years for American-born workers to be so brutalized and broken that they capitulate to the working conditions that American guest workers and undocumented workers accept, and bosses are impatient.
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Cory Doctorow
It's hard to put on a convincing performance of banning immigration, as the UK's New Labour discovered. In the years leading up to the 2010 election, Labour - under Blair and then Brown - made a big show of "cracking down on immigration." At one point, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced that she was axing *dozens* of UK visa categories, while carefully not mentioning these were so niche that hardly anyone qualified for them.
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Cory Doctorow
This created chaos for the people affected and their families - I lost my own "Highly Skilled Migrant" visa at this time and we had to move our wedding plans up by eight months so I could stay in the country with my British partner and our daughter - but it didn't do anything to quench the xenophobic rage that UKIP and the Tories had been stoking, and Labour lost its next election.
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Cory Doctorow
American conservatives are rightly proud of their ability to form coalitions. They trumpet their ethic of "no enemies to the right" and contrast this with the "cancel culture" of progressives:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-year-democrats-lost-the-internet/
It's true that purging your ranks of coalition partners who disagree with you at the margins is a severely self-limiting move. It's also true that the broader your coalition is, the easier it is to win power.
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Cory Doctorow
The right has built a coalition of people who want opposite things. Infamously, Project 2025 isn't just a collection of terrifying ideas for running (and ruining) America - it's a collection of *mutually exclusive* terrifying ideas for running and ruining America:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual
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Cory Doctorow
Trump's top health picks - RFK jr, Weldon, Oz, Makary, Bhattacharya, Nesheiwat - want mutually exclusive, irreconcilable things that are as impossible to compromise on as "banning immigration" while simultaneously "expanding the H1B program":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/20/clinical-trial-by-ordeal/#spoiled-his-brand-new-rattle
Big, diverse coalitions of people who normally oppose each other are great for winning power, but they're very bad for *wielding* power.
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Cory Doctorow
Trump's majorities in Congress and the Senate are razor-thin, and while the Democrats had to suffer under the Manchin-Synematic Universe, the GOP's Klown Kar of Krazies has *dozens* of swivel-eyed loons who will happily blow up "must-pass" bills just for shits and giggles.
What's more, the GOP has spent *decades* installing easily blown circuit breakers into the American legislative and administrative systems, from the filibuster to the debt ceiling.
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Cory Doctorow
By design, these allow small groups of lawmakers to kill bills and hamstring presidential power. Trump's first attempt at removing one of these breakers - the senseless kabuki of the annual debt ceiling showdown - was a total failure:
Musk thinks he can ram through policies that sizable portions of the GOP coalition would rather die than support.
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Cory Doctorow
So far, Trump has proven a pliable puppet for Musk's ambitions. But the Musk-Trump coalition is every bit as fragile as any other in the GOP, and Trump is notoriously sensitive to accusations of weakness. Musk can threaten to primary any GOP lawmaker who gets in his way, but as the Kochs discovered after they unleashed the Tea Party, grievance-fueled, paranoid, heavily armed cults are hard to keep on a leash.
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Cory Doctorow
The coming months are sure to be an all-out war of GOP infighting as the coalition must wield power without the useful buffers of space, time and class. They'll be an object lesson in the dangers of a coalition that's so broad that *everyone* is welcome, even people who'd happily line you and yours in front of a firing squad.
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Cory Doctorow
But just because the right's attitude to coalitions is to have a mind so open its brains fall out, that doesn't mean the left should pursue a program of overwhelming ideological purity. Trump is a stupid guy with incoherent ideas, but look at how far he got by erecting such a big tent that *anyone* fit underneath it (even actual Nazis).
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Cory Doctorow
The progressive coalition doesn't need to be that big. We *can* have enemies to the right. The hugs Kamala Harris bestowed on ghouls like Liz Cheney didn't win the election, and the medal Biden just gave her won't help either:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/us/politics/presidential-citizens-medal-liz-cheney.html
Manchin and Synema can "fuck off until they come up to a gate with a sign saying 'You Can’t Fuck Off Past Here,' Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever":
https://michaelmarshallsmith.substack.com/about
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Cory Doctorow
But the fact that *some* people don't belong in a progressive coalition, it doesn't follow that there's no room to make the coalition looser and broader. Sure, a big coalition makes it hard to wield power, but without that coalition, we'll never *win* power.
eof/
GhostOnTheHalfShell
Coalition of negatives 101! :ablobcatknitsweats:
Plus, I have to appreciate an absolutely stellar illustration.
You must pay the artist very well for all this wonderful work. ;)
Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary
@pluralistic My concern, really, is that the Republicans' infighting *won't be enough*. I fear it'll create space for the oligarchs to just make things worse and worse unchecked.
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