How the left can win: Drop the statistics and tell real people's stories

Why do progressives seem so bad at building coalitions, while the American right — which has its own share of internal divisions — has done so effectively? That’s been the subject of endless debate over the years. But in late February, sociologist Jessica Calarco — author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net” (Salon interview linked below) — boiled the essence of the problem down to a few key points in a Bluesky thread:

The right has united around a rejection of government as the solution to social problems. Which means they can generally agree to block new policies and programs. The left is united in its desire for government solutions. But that means they have to face the harder task of agreeing on what to do. 

For related reasons, the right can also unite people around shared enemies. Because even if people don't trust government to solve their problems, they still want someone to blame when they're struggling. And the right gives them scapegoats in spades. 

The right also blocks the left's efforts toward solidarity. Because if the right's default is to block everything, then the left has to make harder choices about what to try to push through. Which means there's only money/time/energy for some factions to get the new programs/policies they want. 

And notably, where the right does agree to implement some new program or policy, it's usually a policy or program that: 1) attacks the scapegoats they've built their solidarity around, and/or 2) pushes the cost onto those least able to fight back. 

One could argue that many other factors are involved: The right has enormous financial resources and plenty of institutional support, for instance. But that advantage has been present for decades,long before it was structured within the framework that Calarco describes. 

Struck by the simplicity and power of her formulation, Salon reached out to Calarco for further elaborate on the basic dynamics she describes. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In response to a question about ‪why progressives are bad at building coalitions, in contrast to the right, you wrote a brief thread that goes to the heart of the issue. What you wrote wasn't necessarily new, but it was concise and well constructed, and made points that are commonly ignored.I'd like to go through it point by point. You start by observing that since conservatives have “united around a rejection of government as the solution to social problems,” they find general agreement around blocking any and all new policies and programs. How does that shared goal help them unify?

The right oftentimes breaks out into two core groups, the religious right and the business right. On the religious side, churches often want to play that role of social safety net, instead of the government. They want either families or churches to be that protection, that source of solidarity and support for people in navigating their day-to-day lives, in part because there's money to be made there.  

On the business side of the equation, it's more wrapped up in not wanting to pay for the social safety nets that many other countries put in place. Funding large-scale social programs typically demands fairly high taxes, especially on wealthy people and large corporations. So the different sides of the right can come at this rejection of government for very different reasons. Yet if the goal is simply to block new and expensive programs — especially social safety-net programs that will provide people with a sense of security and stability — that's the easiest place for them to agree.

In contrast, you observe that liberals and progressives are united in a "desire for government solutions,” but often do not agree on exactly what to do. That difficulty is multilayered: It's always harder to do something than nothing, and harder to define what needs doing. Could you talk about the different kinds of difficulties involved? 

This is absolutely a multilayered problem. One thing I always tell my students is that, at least from a sociological perspective, causes imply solutions. When we are looking to solve social problems, first we have to agree that a problem exists. Even just deciding on what counts as a social problem, one that’s causing significant harm that is worth addressing, there can be disagreement around that on the left side of the aisle, in terms of what degree of harm, how many people have to be affected, at what severity, over what duration — all these factors people can disagree about. 

The second piece is to agree on where that problem is coming from. This is also where the left gets into trouble, because there are differences on whether these are individual causes versus primarily systemic or structural causes. Consider a problem like obesity. Before any solution can be implemented, there has to be agreement that obesity is in fact a problem, and a problem big enough to warrant trying to solve. Next they have to agree on where the problem is coming from.

Some policymakers might view obesity primarily as an individual problem, rooted in a lack of knowledge regarding the importance of eating a "good" diet and getting exercise, or in the lack of willpower to make those "good" choices. Other policymakers might instead view obesity primarily as a structural problem rooted in the features of people's physical environments — food deserts, lack of safe places to exercise — or the conditions of people's lives, such as the lack of resources to afford healthy food or time to exercise.

Those different understandings point to different possible policy solutions. Individual explanations might suggest that the problem can be solved with education campaigns to address gaps in knowledge, or with sanctions for "bad" behavior and rewards for "good" behavior. Charging higher health insurance premiums for people who are obese, for instance. They might even suggest that it's not worth trying to solve the problem, because if people don't have the will to make "good" choices, they don't deserve to be helped.

Thus, even if policymakers agree that obesity is a problem worth solving, they may still find it difficult to agree on solutions. And then there's the problem of where to spend political capital — which problems to prioritize, given how unlikely it is (in the context of right-wing opposition and internal opposition on the left) to get anything through.

That seems like the real choke-point.

Democrats and people on the left often have very little leeway. You might be able to get one thing through. A lot of political capital has to be spent to pass anything, so there’s disagreement about which problems to prioritize first. Do we focus on universal basic income or do we focus on child care? On raising the minimum wage or on health care? I would argue that any one of these in isolation, especially given what we know about the structural roots of social problems, is often not enough on its own to really make a difference. 

That's part of the problem as well. If we really want to address the biggest challenges that we face as a society, we need not only a single structural solution but layers of structural solutions. For example, you could create a mandate that every child has to have access to affordable child care. The problem then becomes that if that program is not sufficiently funded, it will underpay workers, as we have historically seen. Then the system becomes unsustainable because if you can't hire enough staff or keep staff at those low wages, or without offering health care benefits — which most child-care providers don't currently have — you have this mandate in place, but you're not able to sustain it. 

Often these have to go together: You need to raise the minimum wage and ensure access to health care and guarantee free or low-cost child care to everyone to be able to solve this problem. We need these multilayered solutions to avoid just pushing the problem somewhere else instead. 

The contrast you discussed is similar to the party-based analysis by Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins in "Asymmetric Politics" (Salon review here). They call for “renewed respect on both sides for the views and objectives of the opposition," which assumes the possibility of good-faith debate and reasonable ideas on both sides. That's not your perspective at all. 

I have not read this book, but I think there's something to the idea of understanding where the opposition is coming from, how they are conceptualizing the problem. I don't necessarily think that has to lead to a respect for the decisions that are made or the tactics that are being used. I think this kind of understanding mainly comes from a bygone era of conservative policy-making where it was more about how much money to spend on government services. 

The divide between left and right a decade or so ago was closer to the divide that now exists within the Democratic Party, between individual and structural solutions. Historically, Republicans or those on the right have been willing to see some role for government, but primarily in terms of the more individualistic, more libertarian ideas: We'll do things that can help people to be educated or to provide some opportunities, but we’re not going to tackle deep systemic issues. That historic left/right divide has moved more into the left, whereas the right has become increasingly solidified in its outright rejection of the role of government in solving problems more generally. That's where respect for both sides, I would argue, starts to fall apart. 

Grossmann has told me that he hopes that "liberals will learn the need to offer a broader symbolic message about the role of government in society and to accept that they are behind on this front.” Your book seems to makes a similar argument around the politics of care. 

Yes. I think this is absolutely a place where those on the left can do a much better job of helping to articulate ways that governments can help people. Ronald Reagan didn’t start this, but he helped to solidify anti-government messaging that has generated broad distrust in government. That has also created a feedback loop situation, in the sense that the more Americans have been persuaded to distrust government, the easier it has been for those on the right to ratchet back the role of government, to defund key programs or to limit key regulations in ways that make government support less effective. 

That has made it harder for those on the left to make a strong case that government is good, because government has gotten less effective at solving people's problems. You have to make the case that this is the product of under-investment and that those on the right are the ones who have driven this under-investment in government programs that can help people, but only if they are fully funded. 

Care work can can make this very apparent, whether it's child care or education. You can put in place universal public education, but if it's not sufficiently funded, you're going to start seeing the erosion of the quality of public education, which is what we've seen in many parts of this country.

You say that the right "can also unite people around shared enemies.” People generally “want someone to blame when they're struggling,” and conservatives offer them “scapegoats in spades." In fact, distrust in government correlates with distrust more generally, doesn't it? So feeding distrust in government primes people to look for scapegoats. It's like they're generating a somewhat coherent worldview populated by threats. 

Absolutely. There is a long history of conservative fear-mongering. Fear is an incredibly powerful motivator. It is one of the best ways to spark people to action and also one of the best ways to push people to inaction if you don't want them to operate. You have to give them something to fear, and something to do about what they fear, which is sometimes to do nothing. Fear-based messaging is incredibly effective and once you start to see a fear, it becomes very easy to see fear in more places. 

The research on moral panics is a good example. The Satanic panic of the 1980s started in one small sphere, with child care workers as the supposed source of Satanic abuse, and expands outward to K-12 schools and then to media. Once you start to see bogeymen in one place, it's easy to see them everywhere. And it's easy to piggyback on this kind of messaging and then manipulate that. 

One common response to fear is the fight-or-flight response. When it comes to policy, the flight response is often to hide and do nothing. This fits comfortably with the conservative bent toward not changing social policy, toward keeping things status quo or avoiding efforts to build new programs that can help people.   

You go on to say that the right “blocks the left's efforts toward solidarity.” If the right’s default setting is to block everything, “the left has to make harder choices about what to try to push through.” This seems central. As you described earlier, it’s difficult enough to make hard choices in trying to solve complex problems, but the right intentionally makes it much harder. 

Absolutely. If Democrats could reliably count on getting some Republican votes for any policy that they tried to pass in Congress, that would open the door to forming varied coalitions around varied issues.  As the right has increasingly lined up against all new social safety-net programs, that means there's so much less wiggle room for those on the left to pass anything, and there can't be any ideological disagreement on the left around which issues to pursue, because you have to focus on those issues where you have the strongest, most unified agreement. You need everyone, and you also need solutions that are uncontroversial or low-cost enough that you can potentially attract votes from the right as well to overcome things like the Senate filibuster, or not being the majority party in Congress. 

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This complicates the decision-making process around policies in myriad ways, and creates frustration not only among policymakers but also among people on the left. It then becomes very easy for anyone on the left to say, “Well, I have this really important issue and policymakers are not addressing my important issue — they're addressing this other person's issue instead.” So it becomes a way not only to deepen the right/left divide, but to generate resentments from people on the left toward policymakers on the left because they are not able to address all the issues that are most pressing to each group they serve.

Finally, you say that on the occasions when the right agrees to implement a new program or policy, it’s usually one that “1) attacks the scapegoats they've built their solidarity around, and/or 2) pushes the cost onto those least able to fight back." What's an example of this?

When talking about attacking scapegoats, look at policies like strengthening border protections, which is costly, like the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, not that it actually happened. But stricter enforcement of immigration rules is a clear example of attacking the scapegoats that they built their solidarity around. These kinds of defense-based or protection-based policy initiatives, such as policing more generally, are often a place where the right is willing to spend money. They'll spend money on policing, but not on education or on health care. They’ll spend money to punish the scapegoats.

On the other side, it's about pushing the cost onto those who are least able to fight back. This is often about where the money is coming from. If they are passing additional defense spending, they're not going to do that by raising taxes on billionaires and big corporations. They're going to have a regressive tax structure or, at the very least, a non-progressive tax structure. They’re going to deregulate corporations in ways that push the cost of what government is doing disproportionately on to those who are less privileged. 

Or with defunding the IRS: It is incredibly expensive to investigate people who are wealthy, because they have teams of lawyers and accountants who can help them hide their money, so this can mean months-long, even years-long investigations. Investigating someone who makes tens of thousands of dollars a year who might have made a mistake on their tax forms is much simpler. This is a much lower-cost way of utilizing the IRS, so that's another example of pushing the cost onto those least able to fight back. 

I’m thinking here of the distinction Karen Armstrong makes between “mythos,” which makes sense of the world and our place in it, and “logos,” which makes sense of how things in the world work. Solving specific problems, at bottom, is a matter of logos. But as you say, you have to make sense of the world even to agree on a problem. So mythos is there in the background, at the very least, and the right pushes it into the foreground with their argument that the problem is really government in the first place, and all those people they scapegoat for trying to get something from government.  Does that make sense to you?

Absolutely. This gets back to what we were talking about before, in the sense that one of the first challenges in policy-making is deciding what counts as a problem. And that is where the modern left and the modern right are at loggerheads, in the sense that the left sees government as a solution, and the right sees government itself as a problem. 

I think that is the fundamental tension that has become almost insurmountable, and I think helps to explain the extreme gridlock that we've seen in Congress in recent years, and in policy-making more generally. Because if you have a fundamental disagreement about whether government is the problem or a solution, there's almost no way to move forward, or to work in a bipartisan way to do anything in government. The right is always going to frame the problem in ways that involves less government, or that sometimes involves punishment, and the left is almost always going to see government as the potential solution. It's just this fundamental incompatibility that stems from whether government is the solution or the problem. 

There seems to be a natural affinity between “mythos” on the right and “logos” on the left. For example, the right tells simple stories of praise and blame, resists the complexities of real history and assumes there are simple solutions to problems, however complex. Meanwhile, the left relies much more on facts and analysis, but as Matt Grossmann said, there's a need for more attention to “mythos” on the left, for creating a shared reality that helps us understanding the problems we want to solve, and helps us communicate it to the public at large. Your book suggests that care can play a key role in doing this. What are your thoughts on how we might start doing that?

This is a great question. In terms of what's happening on the right, stories, narratives, lend themselves to individual explanations to social problems. If the right is saying that the government is complicating things, they're often saying that individuals can solve problems for themselves, it's a very easy, uplifting story to tell. You can almost always find someone who has overcome adversity, whom you can then hold up and say, “Look, people don't need support, they can do this all on their own.” This is “The Little Engine That Could.” It's an easy kind of story to tell. And it makes sense, intuitively, to people that if you just try hard enough you can overcome these problems. You don't need government support. 

If on the left you're saying instead that the problems people face in their lives aren't just about bad choices and aren't just about the government doing bad things, but are deeply rooted in historical and structural inequalities and systems, it's often much harder to show that kind of harm. This is part of the challenge of sociological research, that people often aren't aware of the structures that are operating in their own lives. We may not be fully aware of the way that the socialization we received as children, or the kinds of opportunity structures available to us, are shaping our choices in ways that we can't fully articulate and aren't fully aware of.  

Because of that, the left has increasingly leaned on statistics, on data, to show, “Look, there's disproportionality here,” that we have these deep racial disparities, deep economic disparities and persistent gender inequalities, that we can show systematically that it's not just one person, but this is affecting people in patterned ways across all of society. 

Numbers help to demonstrate that those problems are real and likely have structural causes. But numbers are not great for persuading people. If we say that women do almost twice as much care work as men do, for example, that’s a powerful statistic, but it doesn't necessarily motivate men to change their behavior. And itdoesn't necessarily give women a lot of solace or a way forward to solve that problem. You can easily push back and say, “Well, OK, but what if that's what they're happy doing? Maybe that's just the way it's supposed to be.”

Numbers alone can only tell part of the story. They can show the breadth of a problem, but they can't show its individual consequences, and they can't show how those deeper systemic forces play out in people's lives. I think the left has underutilized qualitative data in telling stories that help to trace those threads, that show how people's challenges are deeply rooted in these historical forces, in these structural forces, in these systemic inequities. Being able to help people see those threads can be really powerful in convincing people that a problem exists and that it needs to be addressed. 

We see this in terms of the trickle-down effect of illness, in the sense that care is also what allows us to take care of other people when they are sick. The same way that sickness can pass, like a COVID infection, not only to the first people who were closest but to secondary connections, care works in similar ways. It's not just the first-order effects. The second and third and fourth and fifth-order effects of breakdowns in care in any part of the system can put a strain on the system in ways that ultimately affect all of us, even if we're not entirely sure where that strain is coming from. Helping us to understand how care links our fates can be a way for us to have a sense of solidarity. Stories can play a key role in that.