Learning solidarity from the far right

This past week, in Westlock Alberta, voters agreed to ban rainbow crossswalks and flags flown by town council that aren’t town flags. The vote narrowly passed and despite the council being united in its opposition to such idiocy, a group of motivated citizens came togther to organize. The organizing enabled them to defeat the joyful, playful public art done by teenagers last summer under the guise of “neutrality.”

One of the organizers is Stephanie Bakker. She’s a very good spokesperson: by framing everything around neutrality, she says very little that anyone can disagree with: our town is for everyone, no particular interest should be supported, and so on. Nevermind that this is a fundamental attack on the free will of an elected individual to carry out their mandate, but anyway …

Bakker, who is Black, joked that she had wished that she was dealing with a Black Lives Matter crosswalk rather than a rainbow crosswalk as it would be even easier for her to show the townspeople why it’s so important that no political messages be painted on any roads anywhere in town.

Now, it’s where she joked about this that is the point of this post. Bakker was talking on a podcast hosted by two men with the same Dutch last name. I don’t feel like finding it again or linking to it. I assume it’s a father/son or uncle/nephew combo, but it doesn’t matter. They had gotten wind of Bakker’s struggle and invited her on the show to talk about it. The episode, posted to Rumble, had several thousand views.

The men are religious; one making mention of how one of the proponants of the crosswalk used to hold a leadership position in their church. They are plugged into this network and no doubt, use their religious implications to leverage support for their podcast. And by inviting Bakker on, they introduce her to their base.

If you don’t know what solidarity should look like in The Year of Our Lord 2024, look no further than the Far Right. And this episode featuring the neutrality issue is the perfect example. These far-right video shows are a dime a dozen but also, they’re popular, networked and fed into by organizing that’s happening on the ground. The Left could only be so lucky.

First, let’s consider how this ecosystem operates. It has a few backbones: religious communities, certain professional fields and regions. Each of these has a combination of leadership and the faithful who will go where leadership leads them. Every church council has a congregation. Every farming organization or business group has its members. Every region has town councils, regional councilors and other structures. Now, not every single religion or small town or business is right wing, of course. Westlock is the perfect example. But the ones who are know how to network and leverage their audiences to build a real movement.

We on the left, we don’t have anything like this. Sure, in the indy media space, we all do what we can to promote each other, invite each other on our shows, and so on. André Goulet’s Unrigged network is a great example of creating a space like this, where each group can access other groups’ audiences.

But indy media is not the backbone of the broad social democratic left in Canada. The backbone of the left is labour — the thousands of unions who have hundreds of thousands of contacts to their membership. And for some reason, labour has not figured out, in the neoliberal era, how to be that networking force to build a left-wing ecosystem that could rival the Right.

I say “for some reason” but I know why. Despite the exentential questions that face us all, labour remains fragmented and far too inward-looking. Labour, when attacked, turtles. Despite the fact that Sandy and Nora has existed for seven years, for example, not once has a union reached out to us to discuss ways to share our content among their members, despite the fact that our content is exactly what their members need (and that unions everywhere struggle to deliver). I imagine other leftwing media groups have the same story. The extent of union support tends to be in donations, if you’re lucky (I believe we received a union donation once), and now, increasingly, in sponsorships or ads.

There are no national spaces for labour leadership to come together to strategically discuss how to support and promote left-wing media, bring new initiatves to union members, expanding audiences, popularizing critical journalism, creating spaces for popular education and so on.

The far right understands that it must organize to change opinions and I think that too often on the left, we assume that something “makes sense” or that “fairness is fair” or whatever and all we need to do is present someone plain and neutral facts. But where does that leave us? Nowhere. Certainly nowhere useful. So while those of us with the least amount of power and the fewest (read: no) resources network ourselves into audiences that might fill a union hall, our collective strength continues to collapse under the weight of all that we struggle against.

There is no time for pettiness and infighting, turf wars or inaction. There’s no time for protectionism or gatekeeping. The Right knows this and their strength and capacity is proof.

Networking, sharing resources and leveraging our strength isn’t only necessary to boost our audiences or reach. These things also brings us all together — allow us to meet and work together, all which will pay off enormously when the next time comes around that we have to work together to fight for something. If we’re thinking as organizers, all of this stuff couldn’t be more obvious. The problem is that the broad Left long ago stopped thinking like organizers.