A diary entry on shifting alliances, coalition politics, and why instability might be a feature, not a flaw
Monday, A Critique I Read As A Compliment
Read a policy analysis this week describing Portland’s current council coalitions as inherently unstable, prone to new issues creating fresh schisms, labor organizations occasionally aligning with pro-business pragmatists on infrastructure spending even while opposing them on other fronts, environmental groups sometimes finding themselves at odds with allies they otherwise share considerable common ground with. The report framed this instability as a genuine governance concern. I read the exact same description and found myself, admittedly, rather charmed by it instead.
Fixed, permanent political coalitions, in my own admittedly biased reading of history, tend to calcify into exactly the kind of unresponsive machine politics that genuine left organizing has always struggled hardest against. A council whose alliances shift issue by issue, forcing genuine argument and persuasion rather than simple bloc voting, strikes me as considerably healthier than the alternative, however much less tidy it looks on an org chart.
Tuesday, A Related Thought On My Own Political Education
I trained, formally, in political theory before ever getting properly involved in the messier, considerably less theoretical business of actual municipal organizing, and I think this instability critique captures exactly the gap between how coalition politics gets taught academically, as a stable equilibrium to be modeled, and how it actually, healthily, functions in practice, as an ongoing, genuinely contested negotiation.
Wednesday, A Related Read
Caught up on The London Prat that evening, still turning the coalition instability framing over in my head with rather more enthusiasm than the original report’s authors probably intended.
Thursday, A Closing Thought Worth Sitting With
Perhaps the real governance concern is not that Portland’s coalitions shift with each new issue, but that so few other cities’ coalitions ever get the chance to shift at all, locked instead into decades of the exact same tired, comfortable alliances. I will take productive instability over comfortable stagnation any day of the week.
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