WHEN POLITICAL activists are successful, even minimally successful, they not only add members to their own organizations; they also bring other organizations into action. The people they find are not facsimiles of themselves: they have, or many of them have, different interests and loyalties, different notions about appropriate channels. If they are to become active, they will probably do so only within their own groups. Some of these are established groups, their leaders suspicious of the movement, sensitive about their own prestige; some are as new as the movement itself, their members equally hopeful, but with some scheme or plan all their own. Some of them have only a peripheral interest in the cause; some are ready to take it on, full time, at least for a while. In any case, the movement must now consider the relative advantages of the many different kinds of cooperation, alliance, and coalition.
With all the good will in the world, cooperation is not easy, and in practice one must make do with considerably less good will than that. The crucial problem is that the different organizations compete with one another. They find themselves fighting for a limited supply of members, money, media coverage, and so on. To some extent, the single-issue movement can reduce the intensity of these fights and save itself a lot of trouble if it sticks to its own issue, promising, in effect, to go away once the cause has been won. Then it is less of a threat to ongoing groups, such as labor unions and political parties, whose leaders can now hope, if they cooperate, to inherit some of the people mobilized by the movement. But there is bound to be conflict, perhaps especially among groups with more or less similar or overlapping goals. They will disagree about strategies, aim at different constituencies (but compete in practice for the same core of activists), accuse one another of stupidity, fearfulness, and even betrayal.
For all this, alliances and coalitions are possible and necessary. The familiar maxim about strange bedfellows is, in fact, an injunction: it is the aim of political action, of day-to-day argument and maneuver, to get people into the same bed who never imagined they could take a peaceful walk together. But there are political (and moral) guidelines to be followed in establishing these peculiar intimacies, and citizen activists don’t always succeed in plotting the appropriate course between puritanical fastidiousness and eager promiscuity. It is mostly a question of time and place, but also, as in moral life generally, of character. Some groups put themselves beyond the pale; sometimes it is necessary to say that with this or that organization, whose official policy requires, say, a defense of Nazi or Stalinist terror, no alliance of any sort is possible. This announcement is itself a political act, which lets people know something they have a right to know about the character of the movement. But when the questions at issue are of lesser moment, citizen activists ought never to make public display of their virtue. With ordinary corruption and opportunism, as with disagreeable opinions, they can deal—and they had better deal with them. The only question is on what terms.
The movement is best able to handle temporary alliances, planned with specific ends in view. Movement leaders should take the initiative in proposing particular actions, for which they can solicit particular kinds of help. They must expect, of course, to pay some price for the help they get and should always calculate in advance the various prices they are willing to pay for the gains they hope to make. Cooperating organizations will probably want to contact their own members, distribute their own literature, have a speaker on the platform, and so on. This is fine if, in return, they can turn out so many people, provide so many marshals, raise so much money; but it is a serious mistake if the “so many” and the “so much” are too little. Even with groups that can really help, negotiations are bound to be tricky. The movement is torn between the desire for unity and success and the (legitimate) fear of being misrepresented or even overwhelmed in a welter of dissident groups and programs, sectarian slogans, and irrelevant speeches. Obviously, decisions here must vary with cases, but it is worth warning against one very common form of blackmail.
Movement leaders are often afraid to break with groups to their left—even if small, undisciplined, and of little likely help—and so they are sometimes dragged into actions considerably more militant than those they had planned. The fear is not entirely senseless: far-left militants look more committed, ready to work longer hours and take greater risks; they evoke a naive kind of awe from many new activists. To say no to them appears either cowardly or half-hearted. Yet it is often necessary to say no—for three reasons which may serve as guidelines for coalition-making in general: to preserve the identity of the movement; to keep open the possibility of future alliances with the largest available groups; and to continue to attract citizens presently uncommitted or advancing cautiously toward new political positions.
The important business of building long-term coalitions is probably best left to political professionals. It requires some delicacy and an almost endless capacity for compromise, and neither of these is (or ought to be) a strong point of citizen activists. Ongoing cooperation is only possible if the various movements with their different constituencies can be drawn into an organization that is greater than any of them and promises gains to all of them. The appropriate organization is the mass party, whether newly formed or old and established.
The promises are recognizably those of men seeking office. Citizen activists should aim at mobilizing their constituency so that this or that party will want to incorporate it and this or that office-seeker will want to make promises to it. Activists win most often by forcing their single issue into the platform of a major party, and then delivering their constituency at the polls. But they also lose, sometimes, by getting absorbed in party politics before they have mobilized a constituency of their own. Professional politicians prefer to bargain in the vaguest possible way with the largest possible groups. Movement activists must hold off until they can demand terms as specific as possible.