VAN JONES COULD easily have been the Luke Skywalker of the resistance. His CNN comments on the night of the 2016 election, characterizing Trump’s victory as a “whitelash,” went viral. And he wasn’t exactly an unknown before that.
For many years he’s been one of the most highly respected progressive activists in the country, building institutions and leading campaigns around racial equity, criminal justice reform, and a Green New Deal (yes, he was on it before Ocasio-Cortez).
So it was fascinating for me to read about the partnership that Jones has forged with the Koch network on criminal justice reform.
Here is how Jones (who I know personally and regard as a friend) explained why he’s working with the Koch network—the very people who tried to get Jones fired from his role in the Obama administration and whose conference Jones once protested. “There’s a lot of stuff that we’re going to keep fighting on in America,” Jones said. “I have no problem with that! The problem is there’s a lot of stuff we do agree on that we aren’t working on together at all ... And if we start working on that, a lot of stuff is gonna get better.”
The symbol of the moment for many of those in progressive circles is the fist in the air. But, as both an educator and an activist, I’ve learned to prefer the concrete, imperfect improvement to the grand ideological gesture. That’s how I view the criminal justice bill that Van Jones and the Koch network worked on together, as something that does measurable good in the world rather than simply makes for a striking image on a poster.
Come to think of it, the manner in which it came together is not altogether without symbolic weight, and what the partnership communicates is something very different than the image of a fist in the air: a hand across the aisle.
I think the substance and the symbol is remarkably important. In a diverse democracy we can disagree on some fundamental things and still work together on other fundamental things.
Are there lines that I’m not willing to cross in the pursuit of that type of cooperation? Yes. I’m not writing checks to the KKK.
But funneling money to the KKK is obviously not a mistake progressives are making right now. Rather, our mistake would be assuming that anyone who disagrees with us on anything is hiding a hood in their closet.
The truth is that we are living at a time of great opportunity when it comes to building partnerships with intellectuals of diverse worldviews. Trump’s racism has been so obvious and abhorrent that a huge number of center-right intellectuals have publicly distanced themselves from him and that worldview. Here is a partial list: George Will, Bill Kristol, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David Frum, David French, Max Boot, Kathleen Parker, Megan McArdle, Pete Wehner, Russell Moore, and Arthur Brooks.
In my mind, this is a whole set of new partners with whom progressives can make common cause, in the manner of Van Jones and the Koch network.
Eboo Patel (@EbooPatel), founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, writes about social justice from his perspective as a Muslim American of Indian heritage.
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