Building Power Through Alliances: Lessons From This Presidential Administration
This blog is a follow up to our first reflection on this new presidential administration in which GIA encouraged you to not be distracted by the flurry of outrageous activity and to continue to your values-rooted strategic support for impacted communities.
I believe there are lessons to be learned from this administration and its approach. The lesson I’d like to focus on is to build alliances to heighten power.
At the start of the first version of this presidential administration, the campaign – and then administration – built alliances with Christian Nationalists, which now are central to their coalition. Over time, the administration grew to increasingly overtly court white supremacist and hate groups like those represented at the Unite the Right Rally in 2017. Now this presidential administration has pardoned all those convicted of attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including the members and leadership of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
The corporate community, Christian Nationalists, white supremacists, and other factions that make up the current presidential administration’s power-base don’t agree on everything. Whether the right is united or not, it has deliberately built power. And we can, too.
The cultural community has done great work building collaborative relationships. These collaborative relationships can build power through the support for and participation in advocacy for changes in our government. As we explain in this blog post, advocating to the executive branch (including this presidential administration) does NOT count as lobbying. Lobbying is exclusive to opposing or supporting proposed legislation. The executive branch does NOT legislate, they execute (hence the name). Opposing or supporting an executive order or ANY action by any executive agency at the federal, state, or local level is advocating, NOT lobbying.
GIA’s explorations of the intersections between art and other social change efforts have been supported by such leaders as the Barr Foundation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation and has resulted in the Cultural Policy Learning Series & Action Lab, which includes discussions of the integration the arts into such fields as infrastructure, education and workforce development. These efforts have evolved into our emerging GIA Public Sector & Cultural Policy Committee.
GIA’s members have also supported GIA’s engagement with the solidarity economy – part of our advocating for economic justice for all workers, including artists. This work has influenced inclusion of the artists by such economic justice advocates Economic Security Project, Sustainable Economies Law Center, US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, Freelancers Union and several city and state governments. The economic justice’s field’s embrace of artists transcends ideology from guaranteed income, which is traditionally a progressive position, to portable benefits for gig workers which has support from progressives, conservatives, and libertarians in states as diverse as Washington, Utah, and Alabama. Collaborative advocacy is a part of developing collective political power for economic justice that includes artists but is not exclusive to artists.
GIA’s members have also supported our collaboration with Community Opportunity Alliance (formerly National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations). Community Opportunity Alliance mobilizes support for community development organizations’ work. Community Opportunity Alliance’s research identified community organizing as an essential but increasingly overlooked part of community development, one for which artists are uniquely positioned. Community Opportunity Alliance has increasingly integrated engagement with artists into their work to influence the nation’s community development field.
Organizing is not just a discrete field. We are all being organized all the time. Corporate media organizes us into support for corporate interests constantly without our noticing it. We are too often being organized to settle for less than we deserve, pitting us in a race to the bottom. A case in point is how we’re organized to settle for our nation’s two-party political system. If the two-party system worked, the current presidential administration would not be in office. Central to effective organizing is recognizing who is organizing us and who we want to be organized by.
“Ideological purity refers to the strict adherence to a specific set of beliefs or principles, often associated with political or social movements.”
The cultural community can build power across political parties, fields, and foci. As the right has done, we can acknowledge our differences without dismissing allies who fail our tests of ideological purity. We need not be hemmed in by random categories. We all have had colleagues dismiss potential allies saying, “They’re not an arts organization.” We all have colleagues whose primary focus seems to disparage one another, behaving like the characters in this Monty Python bit.
But we also have colleagues who transcend categories, binaries and differences to build collective power. GIA has actively sought to be organized by colleagues whose primary focus is vulnerable people.
Our field is ripe for power-building for artists across fields such as health, gender justice, disability justice, economic justice, and community development, among others.
We’ve put in the work. We can now build the power.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eddie Torres is president & CEO of Grantmakers in the Arts
