I've been reading about how much money is moving into what's now called "bridge-building,” which is when progressive funders give money to right-wing organizations. Philanthropy has spent nearly a billion dollars on this bridge-building in a single year, a 36 percent jump from the year before. According to Chronicle of Philanthropy, foundations that have spent decades funding justice work are now also funding “across the aisle”, on the theory that anything durable needs buy-in from both sides. One foundation president has asked her staff to evaluate every grant through the eyes of someone with the opposite politics.

I have nothing against talking to people who disagree with me. Or listening to them, or being engaged with them. I've done it my whole career, often in rooms where I was the only one who saw the thing the way I saw it. Some of my best wins came from people who were never going to vote the way I vote. Every campaign win I have been part of has that story somewhere inside it: a negotiation, a relationship, and progress that came through that engagement.

What I’m concerned with is how we think about bipartisanship as strategic. Bipartisanship is an idea. But its not a strategy.

Bipartisan is a legal ethos. What it does is describe how a vote gets counted or who signed onto a bill. Nonpartisan is a rhetorical ethos, and sometimes a tax status; it describes a posture you hold in public. And then most of us carry a third thing, a moralizing ethos, about being fair and hearing everybody out.

But notice that we can be all three of those things at once and still not have answered a single question about how we actually win. We are so busy being legal, being rhetorical, and being moral that we never get around to having an ethos for our strategy. Bipartisanship is being asked to do the work of one, and it can't.

How can you be bipartisan and nonpartisan at the same time? One means both parties. The other means neither. We use them interchangeably, in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence, which is a pretty good sign that neither one is describing a plan. It's describing a feeling about ourselves. It’s a sign of risk-aversion, not principle. I am nonpartisan, which means I do not cross certain legal lines. I am bipartisan, which means nobody can say I am captured by one side. Both of those can be true, and both can be useful. Neither one tells you what you are going to do on Monday morning.

In my book From Presence to Power I write about what I call the traps of magical thinking: when we fool ourselves into thinking that what we want to be true is the actual truth, ignoring all the evidence to the contrary. I chose an example that still sticks with me to this day.

At the end of 2016, in the White House, Loretta Lynch, still attorney general for a few more weeks, was doing a fireside chat about everything they'd accomplished on criminal justice reform, and to announce a few new executive orders around prison education just months before Obama left office. Trump had won and everyone knew there would be a new administration soon. When the mic came to me, I asked what it would take to protect any of it: what funding, what enforcement, what organizing would be required from the people in that room.

Attorney General Lynch she said the initiatives would live on because the structure had been set in place, and she said that reform advocates knew how to make their voices heard even out of power, because bipartisanship was possible — the reforms were sensible.

It was all very reasonable language coming from a very smart and well-respected leader. It was also, to me, delusional. Within months, the new attorney general had fired the person running the prison education programs and rolled back essentially all of it. Private prison stocks had already spiked before the inauguration.

The magical part wasn't the optimism, which has its place. It was the belief in a referee, that an official who checks whether a policy is sensible, and fair. That is the assumption underneath a lot of bipartisan talk, and it is the assumption I most want us to give up. Injustice is big business with enormously diverse revenue streams. Nobody is going to step in and declare us the winner because we were right and reached across the aisle while being right.

What worries me about the current version is what we're telling ourselves it accomplishes. We reach for these words partly to signal what we're not - not partisan, not ideological — because we don’t want to be a caricature. But the label is not the thing hurting us, and another won’t save us. Obama bailed out the biggest banks in the country and they called him a socialist anyway.

The label was never earned and it was never going to be avoided. So we end up playing on a field we didn't build, in a uniform someone else picked out for us, running plays designed to prove we're not what they said we were.

One of the things they have on the other side is pride. They wear the hat. They turn the channel to Fox News on purpose and tell you they did. They show up to the school board meeting loud and wrong. They double down on positions most Americans don't hold, and they double down BECAUSE most Americans don't hold them, and over time the water changes. Institutionalists either convert or are moved out. Meanwhile our beliefs are more fragile, we are often whispering them. Watch how fast institutions dropped three letters — DEI — the moment holding onto them got controversial.

And don’t forget, what counts as bipartisan is not fixed. Bipartisanship is determined by whoever is willing to hold ground, which means they move the floor and they move the ceiling: what is acceptable to say about our communities, and what is acceptable to do to them. A bipartisanship measured against a line the other side keeps redrawing is more like a lagging indicator than anything.

Pride was the engine of the queer movement ( it was literally the name). Think about “Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud” which was less about self-esteem and more about courage and defiance. What pride actually gives you, politically, is fearlessness. And fear cannot produce strategy. Fear produces vocabulary, sure, but not strategy.

Here’s what to ask in the room instead of "is this bipartisan?":

What rule does this change?

Who has to move for that rule to change?

What would make that person move?

What do we have that makes them move?

If a project can answer those four questions, I don't care who's sitting at the table or how they vote. If it can't, adding a conservative to the letterhead doesn't fix it.

None of this is an argument against talking across difference, to be clear. But it IS an argument against mistaking a posture for a plan.

MARGINALIA

Since I asked last week, the photos have been coming — underlined passages, folded corners, arguments with me in the margins. Keep them coming. And for this one specifically, I want to hear from the people who sit in these rooms: where have you watched one of these words get used as a substitute for a strategy? What happened? Write back, or post it and tag me.

WHERE I'LL BE

September

• Sept 10 — Austin with Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez · LBJ School of Public Affairs, 5:00 PM
• Sept 11 — Houston with Kendrick Sampson · Kindred Stories, 7:00 PM
• Sept 14 — Dallas with Dr. Frederick D. Haynes III · Friendship-West Baptist Church, 6:30 PM (livestream available)
• Sept 18 — Washington, DC x SEIU with April Verrett · MLK Library, 5:00 PM
• Sept 20 — Baltimore with Michel Martin · Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 12:00 PM
• Sept 22 — New Orleans with Charles Blow · Baldwin & Co, 6:00 PM
• Sept 24 — Atlanta with Michael Harriot · Auburn Avenue Research Library, 7:00 PM
• Sept 28 — Brooklyn with Heather McGhee · Center for Brooklyn History, 6:30 PM

October

• Oct 7–8 — Buffalo · Banned Book Week (details coming soon)

Tickets, details, and new cities as they're announced are at https://book.rashadrobinson.com/events

Come out, and bring somebody with you.

Rashad

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