Recent Op-Ed Misrepresents Pluralists and Deepens Rifts
People rarely fall into tidy ideological boxes, as the authors suggest.
July 1, 2025
To the Editor:
Julia Roig and Rinku Sen’s recent op-ed “In Defense of Noisy, Disruptive Movements” (June 24) presents a false binary between two approaches — progressive left protests on one side and bridge
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To the Editor:
Julia Roig and Rinku Sen’s recent op-ed “In Defense of Noisy, Disruptive Movements” (June 24) presents a false binary between two approaches — progressive left protests on one side and bridge-building on the other. In reality, they’re far more nuanced than the authors’ framing allows.
Illustration by Elizabeth Haugh; iStock
In Roig and Sen’s view, pluralism advocates “evince a curiosity about the views of the MAGA faction and reach out to its adherents in efforts that feel like a recruitment drive to win over President Trump’s supporters.” The authors say pluralists aren’t interested in engaging social justice leaders though, and that “social movements for racial, gender, and environmental justice are vilified as too divisive.”
This portrayal characterizes pluralists as indifferent to justice while painting both Trump’s base and the progressive left as monolithic. This bears little resemblance to reality. By creating a straw person out of each side, Roig and Sen inadvertently deepen the rift among people who likely share some values.
Most people don’t fall neatly into any camp. I, for example, support many of the progressive movement’s goals. But I feel alienated frequently by the left’s often maximalist mindset and the “confrontational” tone that Roig and Sen seem to consider necessary. Out of fear of being shamed for saying the wrong thing, even with good intent, many left-leaning people remain silent.
Speaking recently on the Ezra Klein Show, Democratic Representative Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first openly transgender member of Congress, said the left’s approach has created a mentality that leaves no room for mistakes and labels people bigots for not using perfect language. “When you create a binary all-on or all-off option for people, you’re going to have a lot of imperfect allies who inevitably choose the all-off option.”
At the end of the interview, McBride uses a word that’s almost vanished from public discourse: grace. In politics, she says, grace means “assuming good intentions, assuming that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren’t automatically hateful, horrible people…[and] creating some space for disagreement within your own coalition.”
If extending grace to Trump supporters — a vastly heterogeneous group — is too much, then let’s at least practice it with people who agree with us 80 percent of the time. Because without them, we risk ending up with a movement that is 100 percent pure — and completely irrelevant.
