When our streets are flooded with militarized forces, the argument about what comes after victory is a luxury we cannot afford.
I. The Concrete Hour
We share the longest undefended border in the world with an increasingly authoritarian regime. They want us fighting over who's the better Canadian while they redraw the map.
On January 3rd, 2026, the United States bombed Caracas, captured a sitting head of state, and announced it would "run the country" until further notice. That was two weeks ago. It already feels like background noise.
Since then, Trump has threatened to take Greenland "the hard way" if Denmark refused to sell. The Danish Prime Minister responded that such an attack would mean "the end of everything" - NATO, the postwar order, the basic assumption that allies don't invade each other. European nations deployed troops to Greenland in solidarity. Trump responded with 10% tariffs on eight NATO allies, threatening 25% by June. In a message to Norway's Prime Minister, he explained that since Norway "decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize," he "no longer feels an obligation to think purely of Peace." Asked if he would use force, he replied: "no comment."
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, three thousand federal agents flood residential neighborhoods. Residents describe it as feeling like an invasion. An ICE officer shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who was serving as a legal observer. She had no criminal record. When protests erupted, the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act - deploying the military against American civilians in an American city.
The hour is no longer theoretical. The authoritarian project has announced itself in bombs dropped on foreign capitals, in threats against treaty allies, in the militarized occupation of American streets. What remains to be seen is whether those who oppose it can set aside their differences long enough to mount a response - or whether they will repeat the tragedies of history, arguing about the shape of the post-victory society while the victory itself slips away.
II. The Price of Purity
In November 1932, Germany's two major left parties - the Social Democrats and the Communists - received 13.2 million votes between them. The Nazis received 11.7 million. On paper, the workers' movement had the upper hand. Within three months, Hitler was Chancellor. Within a year, both parties were banned, their leaders murdered or imprisoned, thirty thousand Communists executed, one hundred fifty thousand sent to concentration camps.
What happened?
The Communist International had declared social democracy to be "social fascism" - a variant of fascism wearing a worker's mask. The Social Democrats were named the "primary enemy," more dangerous than the Nazis because they confused the working class with false promises of reform. Communist leader Ernst Thälmann warned against "opportunistically overestimating the danger posed by Hitler-fascism." In 1931, the Communists joined with the Nazis to support dissolving the Social Democrat-led Prussian government. During this campaign, some Nazi Brownshirts were referred to as "working people's comrades."
The Social Democrats, for their part, placed their faith in institutions. The police would protect them. The courts would uphold the law. President Hindenburg - a conservative, but surely a man of order - would never hand power to the extremists. They built their own anti-fascist organization, the Iron Front, with 3.5 million members. The Communists built theirs, Antifaschistische Aktion. Both fought the Nazis. Neither would fight alongside each other.
Trotsky, watching from exile, made a desperate appeal: "The policies of our parties are irreconcilably opposed; but if the fascists come tonight to wreck your organisation's hall, we will come running, arms in hand, to help you. Will you promise us that if our organisation is threatened you will rush to our aid?" The appeal was rejected. The Socialist Workers' Party begged both sides to recognize that "the divisions in the labour movement run deep, but not as deep as the desire, in this hour of imminent danger, to temporarily overcome these divisions." They too were ignored.
Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933. The rest is history - and history's verdict on ideological purity under authoritarian pressure is written in the ashes of Europe.
III. The Coalition Victories
The story is not only tragedy. There are victories too, and they share a common structure.
In South Africa, the African National Congress was never a party - it was, as Mandela explained, "a parliament of the African people... a coalition of people of various political affiliations. Some will support free enterprise, others socialism. Some are conservatives, others are liberals. We are united solely by our determination to oppose racial oppression." The ANC worked with Communists, liberals, religious organizations, trade unions, and white allies. The United Democratic Front united over 600 organizations under a single slogan: "UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides." They did not agree on what South Africa should look like after apartheid. They agreed only that apartheid must end. That was enough.
In Poland, Solidarity brought together workers, intellectuals, Catholics, students, and peasants - people who agreed on almost nothing except that the current system was intolerable. Earlier Polish opposition movements had failed precisely because they couldn't bridge these divides: in 1956, workers demonstrated alone; in 1968, students protested while workers watched; in 1970, workers struck while intellectuals stayed home. The breakthrough came in 1976 when intellectuals formed a committee specifically to defend arrested workers. That bridge - built before the crisis - made everything possible.
The American Civil Rights Movement united Black churches, the NAACP's legal strategy, SNCC's militant youth organizing, CORE's interracial nonviolence, Jewish organizations, Catholic activists, Communist Party members, and white Protestant ministers. Different organizations played different roles. The NAACP filed lawsuits. SCLC organized direct action. SNCC registered voters. The movement was, as scholars note, "a political movement. But it was also a religious movement."
What these victories share: a clearly defined common enemy, minimal programmatic demands beyond defeating that enemy, respect for the autonomy of coalition members, and the discipline to focus outward rather than turning inward. None of these movements achieved ideological unity. All of them achieved victory.
We're watching it happen now. A bipartisan congressional delegation flew to Copenhagen this week to tell Denmark that America's elected representatives don't share their president's appetite. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said Greenland should be treated as "our ally, not as an asset." Democrats and Republicans, standing together in a foreign capital, contradicting their own president. That's what coalition looks like when it matters.
IV. The Spiral Inward
There is a name for what happens when movements turn their energy on themselves: the purity spiral.
A purity spiral occurs when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value with no upper limit and no agreed stopping point. Competition emerges - not to achieve the movement's goals, but to demonstrate superior commitment to its principles. Those who express nuance are suspected of insufficient dedication. Those who counsel pragmatism are accused of betrayal. The result is "a moral feeding frenzy... a process of moral outbidding, unchecked, which corrodes the group from within, rewarding those who put themselves at the extremes, and punishing nuance and divergence relentlessly."
Freud called a related phenomenon the "narcissism of small differences" - the tendency for communities that are closely related to engage in constant feuds, magnifying tiny distinctions into unbridgeable chasms. When we encounter someone almost entirely alike, their minor differences threaten our sense of uniqueness. We seek out any distinction we can find and inflate it into a fundamental divide.
This is why closely allied political factions often fight more bitterly than ideological opposites. The 20% disagreement becomes more salient than the 80% agreement. As the saying goes, the person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend - not a 20 percent traitor. But under purity spiral conditions, that 20% is precisely what gets weaponized.
The purity spiral is the opposite of organizing. It shrinks the coalition at exactly the moment it needs to expand. It turns potential allies into enemies. It hands victory to the authoritarian by default - not because the authoritarian was stronger, but because the opposition was too busy fighting itself.
V. The Choice Before Us
The concrete hour is here. The only question is whether we face it together or apart. The person who agrees with you 80% is not a 20% traitor. Right now, they might be the only ally you have. I am not asking you to abandon your principles. I am asking you to recognize what the current moment demands.
The Popular Front strategy adopted by the Communist International in 1935 - too late for Germany, nearly too late for everyone - was not about ideological surrender. It was about recognizing that the immediate threat required immediate cooperation. Georgi Dimitrov put it plainly: "We must find and advance those slogans and forms of struggle which arise from the vital needs of the masses," not "bare appeals to struggle for proletarian dictatorship." The time for debating the post-victory society is after victory. First, you must survive.
This applies whether you are a socialist, a liberal, a progressive, a conservative who still believes in democracy, a libertarian who opposes state violence, or simply someone who thinks that bombing foreign capitals and threatening martial law against American citizens is wrong. The coalition that defeated apartheid included free-market liberals and Communists. The coalition that ended communist rule in Poland included Catholics and Marxists who rejected Soviet orthodoxy. The coalition that won civil rights included people who disagreed about nearly everything except the fundamental injustice they were fighting.
What would such a coalition look like today? It would include everyone - left, center, and principled conservatives - who opposes military invasion of sovereign nations, militarized occupation of American cities, presidential threats of martial law, and the use of economic warfare to coerce allies into submission. It would not require agreement on healthcare policy, immigration reform, tax rates, or the proper role of government. It would require only the recognition that what is happening right now is intolerable, and that tolerating it guarantees worse to come.
In Canada, a recent poll showed that 47% of conservatives would make concessions to American annexation pressure. That's the fracture authoritarians exploit - the hope that compliance will buy safety. But 90% of Canadians oppose annexation outright. The coalition already exists and it crosses party lines. It includes people who disagree about nearly everything except this: we are not for sale. That has to be enough.
Militarized forces are in American streets. The threats against allies are not hypothetical; European troops are deploying to Greenland as I write this. Trump has announced, in plain language, his willingness to use military force against American protesters. This is not a drill, nor is it a warning about the future. This is the present tense.
History will record what we did in this moment. It will record whether we found a way to work together despite our differences, or whether we repeated the tragedies of the past - arguing about the shape of the world to come while the world that exists was taken from us. The choice is ours, the hour for choosing is now.
References
This essay draws on:
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Historical analysis of the German left's failure to unite against Hitler
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Poland's Solidarity movement and cross-sectoral alliance building
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Jane McAlevey's work on deep organizing
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Research on coalition formation and civil resistance
Current events reporting from PBS, NBC News, CNN, Al Jazeera, CBS News, and the Minneapolis city government.