Across Colorado Springs and beyond, left-leaning groups are buzzing with energy. We have people ready to fight for fair wages, racial justice, environmental protection, and reproductive rights. Yet, time and again, we trip ourselves up. A coalition forms, then unravels. A meeting starts with momentum, then collapses under the weight of internal disputes. The cycle repeats, energy that should confront power instead devours itself.
If you spend too much time scrolling online, you might walk away convinced that the American left is locked in constant battle with itself. Arguments over strategy, ideology, or identity quickly turn into all-out disputes where winning the point seems more important than winning change. From the outside looking in, it can appear that progressives are more committed to policing one another than challenging the structures we claim to oppose.
The truth is less flattering. Yes, algorithms amplify conflict, but they only succeed because enough of us are willing to play into it. Outrage gets clicks because we feed it. Purity tests catch fire because we participate in them. The responsibility lies with us, not just with Silicon Valley. By indulging in combative habits, we allow energy meant for collective struggle to be siphoned off into endless internal battles.
And here is what makes it worse: we confuse organizing with mobilizing. The left in this city knows how to organize, how to form committees, draft mission statements, and hold meetings. What we have not done is mobilize. Mobilizing means moving people in numbers, out of their living rooms and into the streets, workplaces, and voting booths. It means transforming relationships into action at scale. Without mobilization, organizing becomes insular, circles talking to themselves rather than movements shifting the ground beneath them.
Layered on top of this is the dominance of white leadership and culture in left spaces. Black culture, by and large, is rooted in conservative traditions of family, faith, and responsibility. Radical ideological frames coming from white progressives often miss that mark completely. Instead of building bridges, they widen gaps. In Colorado Springs especially, there has been no sustained effort to build genuine coalitions with Black and Latino communities, no matter what national organizations or local chapters claim. The disconnect is glaring, spaces claim to speak for the marginalized while doing little to actually engage, listen, or share power with them. If you are not building with Black and Latino communities in this city, you are not building a movement at all.
And yet, examples of real leadership exist. Our women comrades have been reclaiming their power, insisting that movements respect their voices, and reshaping the culture of activism itself. This is not division, it is growth. When feminism within the left demands accountability and respect, it sharpens the movement rather than splintering it. But when those demands are met with defensiveness or factionalism, we undermine both gender justice and our broader solidarity. The choice is whether we embrace these shifts as part of our collective strength, or resist them and fracture further.
“Systems of power depend on infighting to destroy opposition. And every time we beat ourselves at their whim without even knowing it. They don’t have to fight us when we’re too busy fighting ourselves.” ~ Mary Coleman
True solidarity is not about agreement on every issue. It is about commitment, a willingness to stay at the table, to argue without annihilating one another, and to prioritize collective progress over individual status. History shows us that the strongest movements, whether civil rights, labor, or neighborhood based campaigns, succeeded not because they were free of tension, but because they developed norms and structures to handle disagreement without falling apart.
This is a lesson we need badly in Colorado Springs. We live in diverse communities, with varied experiences and competing needs. If our first impulse is to turn differences into division, then the movements we care about will never reach their potential. What is required is less performance, more patience, less purity testing, more practical cooperation.
The choice is ours. We can feed the spectacle of infighting that platforms profit from, or we can build a solidarity rooted in real relationships, shared responsibility, and the humility to know that none of us wins alone.
Shaun Walls is a board member of the Pikes Peak Bulletin. He is not paid for his writing in the Bulletin. The views expressed are his alone.
