At pride marches in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., organizers have refused or ejected participants because they were carrying rainbow flags with a Star of David. At a Cincinnati anti-white-supremacy rally, a rabbi was prohibited from speaking because, organizers said, “allowing Zionists to participate undermines the original goal of the demonstration,” despite the rabbi’s vocal criticisms of the Israeli government. People have been excluded for other reasons: at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, an event called a Day of Absence, featuring discussions about racism, was cancelled after organizers asked white people to stay away from campus.
The sociologist Liz McKenna, of Harvard, told me that movements succeed best when people feel welcome. A movement becomes sustainable when members feel empowered and find friends. “The left loves big protests, but protesting is a tactic in search of a strategy,” she said. There must be some shared core values among a movement’s members, of course, but the requirement can’t be that every value is shared. “Making room for difference isn’t a nice-to-have thing—it’s table stakes,” she told me. “The rallies are by-products of the community, not the goal.” Most of all, even though anger can be useful, a movement also needs to provide some joy. “Trump rallies are fun,” McKenna noted. “The Turning Point campus debates are fun.” For a long time, she said, the left was less fun and more angry, “and so the right was out-organizing them at every turn.”
In 2015, in Alamance County, North Carolina—where a Confederate statue stands in front of the courthouse and Republicans have won every Presidential campaign since 1979—Dreama Caldwell, a thirty-eight-year-old executive director of a child-care center, was arrested after one of her employees accidentally left a child on a bus. The child was uninjured, but Caldwell was deemed criminally liable, even though she wasn’t present when the abandonment occurred. The county magistrate set her bail at forty thousand dollars, which she couldn’t afford, so she accepted a plea deal that allowed her to avoid a felony conviction but required a few days in jail.
Caldwell had a college degree and had been a professional her entire life. But now, as a convicted criminal, she couldn’t even get a job at a fast-food restaurant. When she saw a Facebook post mentioning that a new group was looking for people to organize rural communities, she signed up. An organizer told her that “they needed people to interview farmers and politicians,” Caldwell said. “And I was, like, ‘You want a Black woman, and a convict, to get white people in Alamance to open up? Good luck!’ ”
The group, Down Home North Carolina, had been created by Todd Zimmer after the state’s Republican legislators voted to refuse federal Medicaid funds. “That money would have helped people see doctors,” Zimmer told me. “But they wanted to send a message about Democratic overspending.” Zimmer holds fairly liberal views, at least on national issues. “But, in rural areas, people are thinking about their neighborhood school, and whether the hospitals will stay open, and how much groceries cost,” he said. Most of North Carolina’s left-leaning organizations were focussed on big cities such as nearby Durham, where Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one. Zimmer figured that, if he could build a coalition of voters—both progressives and right-wingers—who might not agree on national candidates but were aligned on local issues, they could become one of the most powerful blocs in the state. “You can’t pass a bill in North Carolina without rural places,” he said. “That’s a fact. And so, if those places get organized, that’s where the power is.”
