Noam Chomsky
There is just no choice. This matter is so urgent, as is nuclear war, that you have to make whatever alliances you can. There was an interesting op-ed article in The New York Times a couple days ago by an evangelical Christian professor who was describing the kinds of tactics that she uses and she thinks ought to be used to try to bring the evangelical community to recognizing the importance of doing something urgent about global warming.
She said, OK, we all believe that the Second Coming is not very far off, maybe in our lifetimes. When Jesus returns to Earth, we want to demonstrate to him that we have taken care of God’s creation. We haven’t destroyed it, we’ve cared for it, it’s in good shape.
Let’s approach evangelical Christians that way. Overcoming the environmental crisis is going to have to be done within some form of existing institutions. It doesn’t mean that, on the side, you shouldn’t be trying to change them. But this [climate crisis,] along with nuclear war, overwhelms everything.
Chris Hedges
If we are to succeed we will have to make alliances with people and groups whose professed political stances are different from ours and at times unpalatable to us. We will have to shed our ideological purity. Saul Alinsky, whose successor, Ed Chambers, was Gecan’s mentor, argued that the ideological rigidity of the left—something epitomized in identity politics and political correctness—effectively severed it from the lives of working men and women. This was especially true during the Vietnam War when college students led the anti-war protests and the sons of the working class did the fighting and dying in Vietnam. But it is true today as liberals and the left dismiss Trump supporters as irredeemable racists and bigots and ignore their feelings of betrayal and very real suffering. Condemning those who support Trump is political suicide. Alinsky detested such moral litmus tests. He insisted that there were “no permanent enemies, no permanent allies, only permanent interests.”
“We have to listen to people unlike ourselves,” Gecan said, observing that this will be achieved not through the internet but through face-to-face relationships. “And once we’ve built a relationship we can agitate them and be willing to be agitated by them.”
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Institution building is possible only if you “engage institutions or create newer and better ones—whether it’s churches or civic unions,” he said. Without these, the power in the other two sectors—corporate and governmental—dominates.
The state, he said, has learned how to manipulate familiar protest rituals and render them impotent.
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“Can we rebuild unions?” Gecan asked. “We can. It takes time. And we’re doing it in some parts of the country. Can we rebuild civic life in our cities? We have and will do more. Can we take these people on? I know we can. But it will take different tactics. It will take some very unconventional allies that will surprise people.”