The Fragility of Victory

 "You have to keep living." I was on a zoom for LGBTQIA+ United Methodists and their allies earlier. The Bishop of our conference formed a ministry team to address the needs of queer folk in our state. We face the happy conundrum of deciding what to do and how to advocate after a systemic victory. The last General Conference (the quadrennial meeting of worldwide United Methodists) vaporized sections of the Book of Discipline (the polity and policy document for the UMC) that were gay-exclusionary and homophobic. Each conference can tailor regulations to fit its culture best. (This was primarily with a nod to UMC conferences in African and the Philippines.)

So we won! After decades of struggle, we had achieved some degree of equality. What now?

I've argued elsewhere that one primary mode of activism aims to put activists out of work. Suffragists succeed when there's no more need for suffragists. Abolitionists win when they no longer need to be abolitionists.

Social movements achieving such victories have two basic paths before them. They can go out of business, switching to the Next Great Cause. Or they can shift the quality of their work from oppositional change to something more like a church. They might deepen and widen their cause to embrace other struggles. They might adopt a maintenance and preservation mode, solidifying their victory as hegemonic.

I use hegemonic in the good sense here. When Antonio Gramsci (the first theorist of political hegemony) wrote about this term, he meant it not as the Big Bad System to fight but as a name for the mutually buttressing functions of consent and coercion that maintain a political status quo. Social movements (parties, in Gramsci's writing) want hegemony. They want their (initially minority) views of what Ought To Be not only to prevail in a single election. They want these views to become the political common sense of the whole society, so integrally part of the political sense of normalcy that the views cease to be political (in the sense of "contested") at all. 

Women's suffrage is a good case in point. The right of adult women citizens to vote in the US has for decades been hegemonic. It enjoys widespread consent (most people think it a good thing that women won the right to vote), and it's protected with the armor of coercion. If someone blocked a woman from voting, some kind of state force--lawyers, judges, police, or, beyond that, the armed forces--would enforce her right to vote. And, up until recently, to seriously call into question whether women should be allowed to vote is to mark yourself bizarrely out of step with political consensus.

And yet.

Political realities are inherently unstable, discursive. A political victory, however solidly won, is not eternal. Women have the right to vote--anyone has the right to vote, for that matter--only so long as there's a system of consent-coercion strong enough to recognize and enforce that right. 

This is a hard reality for some. I read a post on Bluesky that asserted that any right that could be taken away was not in fact a right at all, and that the aim of activism should be to create a system where rights become truly unquestionable.

But this just isn't how human societies work. How could they? There's inevitable disagreement and friction about exactly how to define, apply, and delimit rights. Systems that ignore or quash such disagreement tend to be totalitarian, stuck in a singular, frozen vision. They eventually lose some vital hegemonic element--consent, coercion, or both--and fall apart.

I write this because so many of the victories we thought won--specific rights for queer folk, but deeper and ostensibly more durable political systems as well--are proving perilously fragile. Trump seems to be hijacking many of the coercive systems of the state, forbidding them from defending certain rights formerly protected and directing them to enforce other rights--the rights of "bullies and billionaires" to use the phrasing of activist Anat Shenker-Osorio. 

Gramsci would hardly approve. Aside from being an ardent foe of fascism (Mussolini's OG Fascist party threw him in prison), Gramsci would note that the Trumpian wrecking ball of coercion seems to be losing popular consent. This lays a lethal groundwork for some pretty awful and bloody conflicts between segments of the armed forces and executive branches loyal to Trump and, well, everyone else. But history suggests that pure coercion alone rarely holds for long. 

I hope it doesn't come to that even. I hope folk can realize the bullies and billionaires only hold power as long as everyone else gives them power. I hope we take it from them soon.