Coalition or Collapse: Progress Isn’t Political Cosplay

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Written By Emily Phelps

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it because we can't stop rage-posting. Diversity is not only a strength; it’s fundamental to meaningful, positive change. But we also have to recognize the reality. Diversity makes it harder to form coalitions and compromise, especially when you’re living in a polarized, political climate where the system itself is increasingly fragile.

Whether you’re organizing around climate science, racial equity, economic reform, civil rights, or even political campaigns, there's a hard truth we need to sit with: you can’t build real change without compromise. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

Diverse coalitions are messy. They require patience, trade-offs, and perhaps most annoyingly, a willingness to share the stage. That’s the price of pluralism. And if we don’t pay it, we lose ground to the forces that never had to listen to different points of view in the first place.

Diversity Is Powerful. It's Also Hard.

It’s easy to romanticize diversity. It makes us stronger, smarter, and more creative. But let’s be honest: it also makes everything harder. When a coalition includes people of different races, faiths, incomes, identities, life experiences, and political leanings, you’re not going to agree on everything. You won’t necessarily even agree on how to prioritize the things you do agree on. And that’s the point. The goal isn’t to flatten those differences. It’s to manage them so the group doesn’t self-implode before positive change can be made.

Diversity inspires creative problem solving. It drives innovation. In a world where “This is how we’ve always done it” is the kiss-of-death to advancement, it’s no wonder we benefit when we engage people with different backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, experiences, and ideas. I mean, do we want to be The Borg or the crew of the Starship Enterprise? Or a less nerdy example that you can come up with. Either way, you get the idea. Homogeneity may be more efficient, but all we’re doing is more efficiently getting to worse outcomes. And this is true even for the most homogenous groups among us:

  • According to a Harvard Business Review study, diverse teams make better decisions with fewer blind spots. Exposure to different groups helps avoid getting swept up in groupthink, resulting in more objective, fact-based analysis and better financial returns. Is there any doubt this would be beneficial for policymaking as well? (Spoiler alert: NO.)

  • Diversity literally saves lives. In Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women, she illustrates how the lack of gender inclusivity has created truly dangerous conditions for women. Airbags, for example. I’m short. I have to sit close to the steering wheel. Airbags were tested on men-sized people. An airbag deployment could injure or even kill me. Women are also often misdiagnosed when having heart attacks because studies have focused on men, and symptoms for women look different. When groups are underrepresented (gender, race, or otherwise), trust erodes. This is true in the private sector. It’s true in the medical field. It’s true in politics and public policy.

  • Accessibility policies don’t just help individuals with disabilities. Curb cuts are built to provide wheelchair access, but we all benefit: shoppers with carts, parents with children in strollers, travelers with luggage, etc. Accessible public transit relieves congestion; helps seniors, parents with kids, and people with injuries; improves speed and usability for tourists and first-time riders; and makes cities more navigable and efficient for everyone.

Whether it’s the progressive left, an activist collective, or a community organization, this truth stands: you can’t make meaningful progress when you’re fighting your own team harder than you’re fighting for the outcomes you want.

Homogeneity Is a Helluva Drug

Whether we like it or not, groups with similar backgrounds, ideologies, and lived experiences have an easier time staying “unified.” Birds of a feather, as they say. Homogenous groups don’t have to navigate the same kind or level of cultural, background, or ideological differences, so they can move fast. That doesn’t make their cause more valid. It makes it more efficient.

If you look at the U.S. Republican party, the homogeneity is strong. While it would be inaccurate to say the republican party hasn’t grown more ethnically and racially diverse over time, the Pew Research Center data shows it hasn’t experienced as much diversification as the democratic party. Additionally, the republican party has seen its base grow older while forming conservative coalitions. The democratic party, on the other hand, has coalitions that “are split between liberals and moderates.” Why does this matter?

The makeup of each party matters because some political movements succeed despite broadly unpopular ideas. Are Republicans rigging the system? Absolutely. But they’re not the only ones with their hands on the scale. Gerrymandering, information manipulation, and shady backroom deals are bipartisan pastimes. And no one’s rushing to pass the less-sexy-but-essential reforms that would actually protect fair elections. Yes, voter suppression disproportionately targets left-leaning voters—but when left-leaning politicians scream about it, it’s fair to ask if this is righteous outrage or just strategic panic? Here’s the thing: conservative coalitions are demographically narrow. When your base mostly looks like you, prays like you, and sees the world the same way you do, it’s easier to stay on message and move as a unit. You don’t have to make space for difference. You don’t have to think strategically about incremental change and how priorities will impact constituents differently. 

Diverse groups don’t have that luxury, and they shouldn't. But it has real challenges that when ignored, create a recipe for failure. Compounded by pervasive advocates of ideological purity, even small disagreements can spiral into full-blown fractures. Instead of building coalitions, we build echo chambers. Instead of compromise, we get call-outs. No shared agenda, no unified action, no progress—just a lot of people shouting over each other while the opposition quietly passes laws and consolidates power.

This sameness makes it easier to unify around a candidate, especially if that candidate offers a simple, grievance-based narrative that doesn’t challenge their worldview too much. After all, it’s a lot easier to sell “they’re taking what’s yours” than “we all have different needs, so let’s build inclusive policy based on equitable principles and—” sorry, they already checked out.

The Cost of Coalition Chaos

When diverse coalitions don’t learn how to navigate disagreement, the fallout isn’t just internal—it shows up in turnout, policy failures, and public trust. According to Pew Research, most Americans see political division and infighting as one of the biggest problems in our system today. And when that fighting is coming from inside the house, not just between parties, it’s more corrosive. Here’s what that dysfunction looks like in practice:

  • Voter apathy or movement fatigue when people don’t feel heard.

  • Internal conflicts get more airtime than the cause itself.

  • Policy paralysis because no one wants to budge an inch.

  • The most vulnerable people get left out… again.

Then of course, the louder the group, the harder it is to keep people inside it from turning on each other the moment someone makes an imperfect decision. If everyone’s walking on eggshells, nobody’s marching forward.

In 2014, voter turnout hit a brutal low—just 36.4%, the worst since 1942. And it wasn’t random. Young voters and people of color, core parts of Obama’s coalition, largely stayed home, fed up with stalled progress on things like immigration, police reform, and income inequality. And honestly? Fair. But sitting it out didn’t help. Republicans swept the Senate, padded their House majority, and took over more governorships and state legislatures. That one election set progress back years, and we still seemingly haven’t learned our lesson.

Compromise Isn’t Selling Out—It’s Strategy

If you’re part of a movement, coalition, or community working for progress, ask yourself this:

Am I fighting for outcomes or just for my version of the process?

Because being principled isn’t about never compromising. It’s about knowing what’s worth negotiating and what’s not. It’s about knowing compromising on how isn’t compromising on what. It's about showing up even when the process is messy. It’s about recognizing that discomfort is not betrayal, and unity doesn’t mean uniformity. And it’s about the reality that sometimes the right actions aren’t always what intuitively feels right.

Change doesn’t happen because you shot off the perfect online takedown or refused to sit on a panel with someone who didn’t pass your vibe check. It happens when people with different priorities find common ground in the face of these differences so we can move forward.

Cosplay vs. Coalition

It’s tempting to perform for politics. And look, even performative politics is often rooted in good intentions. But it’s easy to retreat into ideological silos or call out everyone who doesn’t speak in your exact dialect of justice. But that’s cosplay. That’s posturing over progress.

The real work is organizing. It’s compromising. It’s getting comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s building relationships with people who might not agree with you on everything but who want to move in the same direction and get things done. 

Think about the civil rights movement. It didn’t happen because everyone agreed on everything. It happened because different groups—Black churches, Jewish organizations, labor unions, student activists—found common ground and marched forward together.

And if that sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. But what is the alternative when facing increasingly authoritarian leaders?

Get in the Room. Stay in the Room.

If your goal is to make sure everyone agrees with you 100% of the time, congrats—you’re not a progressive. You’re just an authoritarian with a more diverse vocabulary. If your community or movement is truly inclusive, it will be uncomfortable sometimes. That’s part of the process when you want to accomplish important things for a diverse group of people.

You don’t have to agree on everything. You don’t have to love everyone in your coalition. But if you’re not willing to collaborate with people who see the world differently than you do, you’re not building change. You’re auditioning for a lead role in a movement that will never get past rehearsal.

The homogenous groups are playing to win. They’re not worried about nuance or contradictions or infighting. They’re unified even if it’s around the most toxic ideas imaginable.

We can keep arguing about who is woke enough or we can do the work of building something to be proud of. So yeah. Coalition or collapse. Pick one.

Additional Resources

Emily Phelps
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