Op-Ed: Why We Lost

Editor's Note: Aneurin Canham-Clyne is a former News Editor at the Tufts Daily.

Over the past two years, the Tufts left has frequently lost when we ought to have won. Abolition of Greek life? An abject failure. The "Students Advocating for Students" free speech incident? It got national media coverage. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) resolutions? Passed, but barely, and under circumstances that permanently alienated our allies in liberal and Jewish groups. The Disorientation Guide? Removed and consigned to ignominy because of two words. In the last year, we managed to alienate basically everyone who didn’t already agree with us.

The idea guiding our conduct in those fights was a faith in our obvious righteousness, and in the ability of our social circles to behave like a political movement. That idea is wrong. A friend group is not a mass movement. A hot take is not organizing.

To contextualize the defeats of the left in social fights, let us consider its successes in the last couple of years: Tufts stated its mission to protect undocumented students, the administration caved to the adjuncts' demands, Tufts and C&W backed down and met most of the janitors’ demands, avoiding a strike, Tufts adopted Indigenous People’s Day, and the Republicans withdrew their invitation for Ben Shapiro's 2017 visit. All these fights have three things in common: a specific, planned out program, achievable material goals and the ability to enlarge the coalition.

The labor fights, where the bosses have a real interest in winning, can serve as a guide. But even on these issues, it’s easier to mobilize people to fight for a living wage than to abolish a social institution. This doesn’t mean we should relinquish the goal of ending Greek Life. It means we need to fight responsibly, and in a way which builds our coalition. Ultimately, the solidarity between people is what gives movements power. Our political opponents will try to fracture it, to render us small, closed off, and insular. We must fight against that tendency.

There was a moment last year where we very well could’ve ended Greek Life. We pursued a strategy that felt good at the time but makes no sense in retrospect. The left could have organized the people who decided to quit Greek Life to time their defections with a messaging campaign, speak-outs and teach-ins on Greek Life, and put forward a robust alternative program for a transition away from Greek life. Instead, we chose to indulge in a round of bitter, if theoretically correct, and morally righteous op-eds and Facebook posts, followed by demonstrations against Greek organizations after we had already lost the battle for public opinion and allowed too much time to pass without building momentum. So we lost. We were right, absolutely right, in our critiques. But we lost because none of this is about being right or having the hottest take.

Political life is about building and exercising power. It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It matters if you can build a coalition for your vision. I don’t want to talk down to anyone, or tone-police, but I’m going to do exactly that. If we want to win, we need to be cool and collected, we have to approach people we don't like where they are and bring them into the fight for justice. We have to hold each other accountable when we screw up and do that in a way that isn’t alienating, insulting or acrimonious. We have to stop being such a cliquey little social circle. The left needs to win. The world needs us to win. Put in plain words, left-wing proposals are enormously popular, like Medicare for all, truly universal suffrage and the dismantling of our inhumane prison system. But our views and positions are deeply unpopular when expressed in terms and ways that most people find off-putting or laughable.

To most outsiders, the left is a self-absorbed, hyper-specific social scene full of humorless people where you can get called out for anything, regardless of the validity of the critique. We have to be funny, expansive and welcoming, but also calm and dignified. It’s impossible to agitate someone effectively if you’re already as pissed as you could ever be. It’s impossible to be an effective organizer if you come off as smug, arrogant and hostile which, frankly, most of us do. Getting people to be mad at us instead of mad at power is the exact opposite of effective agitation.

Changing this doesn’t mean abandoning any of our beliefs or positions. It means finding a way to bring them to everyone else, and it means acting in a strategically responsible manner. The alternative, continued defeat where the bulk of people support the core of our program, is not sad, or unfortunate, or the fault of forces arrayed against us, it’s monstrously irresponsible. We lost those fights by making the wrong choices at the wrong time.

What we need to do, in my opinion, is to find a way to express what we know to be true in clear ways. It means switching “capitalism,” for “rule by the rich,” and “the neoliberal white cis-heteronormative patriarchy,” for “the corrupt, racist, anti-gay, anti-trans government.” “Imperialist genocide,” is a lot more understandable when you call it “war,” “murder” or “a rich man’s fight.” Instead of attacking our opponents based on immutable characteristics, which is a real problem that many on the Tufts left is guilty of, we have to address the material effects of what they do. A white guy who wants to end public schooling thinks he’s doing the right thing. It takes work and it feels shittier to explain to him why he’s wrong, and why ending public schooling will only hurt black, Latinx and poor people. However, it undermines his belief system and forces him to examine the internal flaws in his thinking in a way that calling him racist and leaving it at that never would, and it does the same thing for observers.

Of course, the burden of this discourse ought to fall on those who are insulated from its worst effects. Maybe. White people, particularly cis-white people need to be out there leveraging their access to social spaces and institutions to agitate, educate, and organize. But the movement can’t and shouldn’t be led by comfortable people. Fights for liberation have never been led or won exclusively by the privileged. The vanguard needs to reflect the dream of a new society, not the nightmares of the old. Workers, students and oppressed peoples must all lead the fight in one coalition.

To build this we need to reach out to people beyond our clubs and social groups, talk to them in ways they can understand and listen to their complaints. Nearly everyone suffers under this system, we need to put forward an alternative. We need to talk about green energy, the quality of work, socially necessary labor, health policy, overdoses, how the cops screw over everyone, electing your boss, owning your workplace and participatory planning. We actually have to lay out a vision for the new world in relation to the old. This means having faith in each other, in justice and in the possibility of something greater than this boring dystopia. If you don’t believe we can win, you won’t fight for it, and no one will stand with you.

Otherwise, we're just complaining to each other and holding signs against something we don't really want to replace. For too long we've been right in an off-putting, stand-offish way, and we've fought like we were already going to lose and the only thing left to do was register some obscure objection and wilt at our inevitable defeat. The point was never to describe what was wrong, or to be correct all the time, or to find other people who understood our jargon and shared our despair. The point is, and always has been, to change the world.