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The First Step act, signed into law on December 21, 2018 by Donald Trump, only happened after years of bipartisan frustration with an overly punitive federal prison system. The act had three majoral structural components, correctional reform, sentencing reform, and re entry support. What really interests me about this act is who supported it. The aclu, the Koch brothers, Van Jones, Kim Kardashian, evangelical Christians, and the Trump administration. Strange bedfellows, no matter how you cut it. In fact, the ACLU would join forces with another unexpected acronym, the nra, six years later to protect free speech. As we know, reform is slow in a bureaucracy. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin introduced a precursor to this act in 2015 that proposed significant changes to mandatory minimum sentences. While it received overwhelming bipartisan support, it was blocked in 2016 by Republican senators Tom Cotton and Jeff Sessions. Then Donald Trump was elected on his law and order platform, and Sessions was appointed Attorney General. Many believe the bill to be dead. Yet within two years, an unlikely coalition pushed the bill further than it had gone before, and they got it passed. I'm not here to make a kumbaya statement. Even after it became law, the bill had many problems. It only covers federal prisoners, which represents less than 10% of the U.S. prison population. The the assessment tools used for credits has documented racial biases, which is kind of fucked, since the prison system also has documented racial biases. The exclusion list is said to have locked out 59,000 inmates. Immigrants were explicitly excluded, which isn't surprising given it's the Trump administration. Unsurprisingly, the implementation was mismanaged and the entire project was underfunded, so it had problems across the board. Yet as of 2024, over 44,000 inmates had been released due to this act, and I don't think it's healthy to discount wins when they appear. I started thinking about this piece of legislation and a few others after watching the online discourse over Hasan Piker. I'm not going to talk about him because I don't watch enough of him to offer any sort of analysis, but I'm definitely noticing tons of people from center left to leftists talking past each other, which gives me a lot of concern about the midterm elections and beyond. Instead of engaging with structural ideas of how to make progress on shared ideologies, terms like leftist and liberal are being hurled in all directions as slurs, which is not going to result in what is often a stated goal of coalition building. Traditionally, the term leftist meant someone who supports reducing social and economic inequality, typically through collective or state action while regarding social welfare as the most important goal of government. There have always been debates about how that can be accomplished, which is good when a diversity of voices weigh in. Historically, the broad left included liberals, social Democrats, and labor reformists, but in certain discourse, leftists signals something more radical than liberal progressivism. There are also thinkers who believe it represents a scientific method of analysis that transcends the conventional left right spectrum, which I personally find to be an egregious use of the term science. But this is where it all gets confusing for people not steeped in this discourse and who in everyday conversation equates the term left with social progress. And yes, some of the online discourse is noise, some of it foreign actors sowing discord in our national politics. But some of it comes off as real disdain, born out of whatever personal grievances each individual may have borne out of tribalism that I'm not sure humans will ever fully escape, but also borne out, at least in part, by a shared frustration that things have gotten this bad in America and things are bad. The gutting of the Voting Rights act should be a real wake up call for anyone interested in civil liberties. That 1965 legislation followed in the wake of the Civil Rights act one year earlier, and there too a strange coalition of Republicans and Democrats joined together against Southern Democrats who were using a filibuster to block the bill. I wouldn't call myself a fan of Everett Dirksen by any stretch, but the law only became reality due to his support. And here we are three generations later, watching the progress made through a bipartisan effort being stolen right in front of our eyes. I'm not interested in discussing bipartisan efforts with this administration in power. That's a futile project. And when I see Democrats calling for short shared support around RFK Jr or to take MAGA seriously as some sort of populist movement, I cringe. But I also know that out of the Depression came New Deal reforms, and at some point we're going to see the balance of power shift. A few years? Decades? I don't know. Nothing is certain. I just want to talk about how coalition building has worked, because sometimes it actually does, and that requires sacrifice, understanding and communication. And the sort of big tent bickering I'm watching devolve online is not going to build anything of value. I'm Derek Barris, and you're listening to a Conspirituality bonus episode. What's left? You've been listening to a Conspirituality bonus episode sample. To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com conspirituality where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing. 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