Ed. note: This is Part 2 of Nicole’s series on post-partisan change. You can read Part 1 on Resilience.org here.
In conversations about post-partisan politics, I’m often asked some version of the same question: “If we move beyond fighting along partisan lines, does that mean we stop resisting altogether?”
The answer is no.
Post-partisan does not mean passive; it means discerning. It means recognizing that real change depends on an ecology of responses including resistance, building, healing, and culture work. Each is necessary, but none is sufficient alone.
When Resistance Protects Life
There are moments when resistance is the only moral response. When communities are poisoned, silenced, or stripped of dignity, neutrality becomes complicity. Resistance is how life protects itself. It is democracy’s immune response, the collective act of saying “This is not acceptable.” I’ve seen this in movements opposing factory farm expansion, where residents, farmers, and environmentalists joined forces to defend their air, water, and livelihoods. Their stance wasn’t partisan; it was protective. The same is true when immigrant families face unjust deportations or when corporations rewrite public health policy for profit. Resistance, in its pure form, is care for people, place, and future generations.
The kinship worldview helps clarify this. Indigenous scholar Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and psychologist Darcia Narvaez describe kinship as awareness of our profound interdependence with all life, a contrast to the domination worldview that sees reality through hierarchy and control. Fierce protection is part of kinship, not opposed to it. Think of a mother bear shielding her cubs: she acts from kinship consciousness, honoring dependence, using necessary force to stop harm. She doesn’t debate the threat; she defends. Human communities grounded in kinship have done the same by protecting land, people, and ways of life as expressions of care.
The question is never whether to resist, but how: from what consciousness and toward what ends. Resistance shaped by separation dehumanizes opponents and mirrors domination’s tactics. Resistance shaped by kinship names harm clearly while recognizing the humanity of those causing it. It uses force when required, yet seeks to transform the conditions that breed harm. When we resist from separation, we strengthen the worldview we claim to fight. When we resist from kinship, we challenge domination while modeling its alternative.
The Ecology of Resistance and Building
If all we do is fight, we begin to resemble the systems we oppose by becoming rigid, defensive, and afraid. Building is the necessary counterpart: the slow, patient work of creating conditions where justice and belonging can take root. Every enduring movement needs both the resistor and the builder, sometimes within the same person. One protects the present; the other tends the future. One says “no” to what harms; the other says “yes” to what nourishes.
In food and health systems, this ecology is visible everywhere. Groups resist corporate control of agriculture by challenging pesticides, monopolies, and policies that concentrate power. Without them, harm accelerates unchecked. At the same time, communities build alternatives with regenerative farms, cooperative groceries, farm-to-school meal programs, and local food councils that democratize decisions. Without them, there would be no proof that another way is possible.
The resistors buy time and space for the builders, the builders give the resistors something worth defending, and together, they feed each other.
When Building Requires Resistance
We can’t build kinship-based alternatives at a small scale while extractive forces dominate larger systems. A restored watershed can be poisoned by upstream pollution; a local food network can be erased by federal subsidies favoring industrial agriculture; a community health initiative can be dismantled by profit-driven policy.
That’s why organizing must happen at multiple scales, each supporting the others:
- Local and bioregional: Build kinship-based alternatives, meet immediate needs, demonstrate what’s possible.
- Regional and national: Protect those experiments through policy and coalition-building.
- Global: Challenge systems that undermine local sovereignty.
Bioregional building offers vision and larger-scale resistance defends the space to pursue it.
Discernment: When to Bridge, When to Resist
Post-partisan practice doesn’t mean working with everyone. It means discerning where kinship can take root, and where it must draw a boundary.
Kinship consciousness recognizes that some systems and ideologies are fundamentally incompatible with life itself. White supremacy, authoritarianism, and fascism are not differences of opinion; they are architectures of domination. They must be actively opposed, sometimes with force. But how we oppose them matters. To resist from kinship consciousness is to act in defense of life, not in dehumanization of opponents. It is to hold a vision of what we are building toward, not merely what we oppose. It is to address root causes while stopping immediate harm, and to refuse to mirror domination’s tactics, even in moments of fierce defense.
This is the paradox at the heart of kinship work: we need fierce boundaries and deep interdependence. Boundaries keep the field of kinship intact, while interdependence reminds us that most people are not ideological authoritarians—they are navigating conditions that make authoritarianism seductive, including economic precarity, loss of belonging, institutional betrayal, and unhealed trauma. When we can see this clearly, we become more strategic in our resistance and we learn to distinguish between those captured by domination systems and those profiting from them. We can build coalitions across difference to confront corporate capture, extractive economics, and institutional failure, without confusing collaboration with capitulation.
Working at Multiple Scales
Because domination operates at every scale, kinship practice must as well. There is the immediate work of stopping harm and protecting the vulnerable; the systemic work of addressing the conditions that feed domination—inequality, alienation, institutional decay; and the prefigurative work of building kinship-based alternatives that meet real needs, so that belonging and meaning are no longer monopolized by domination narratives. To resist only the immediate harm without addressing its roots is to fight forever and to build alternatives without protecting them from capture is to plant gardens in a storm. Transformation requires all three—defense, repair, and creation—in ongoing rhythm.
The Work of Boundaries and Generations
Kinship consciousness is not without edges. We must set firm boundaries against ideologies that would destroy the conditions for kinship. Yet even as we resist, we remember shared humanity. Our aim is not annihilation of the other, but transformation of the field that produces harm. This is generational work which we will not see completed in our lifetimes. But every act of resistance that refuses to replicate domination, every experiment in kinship that offers a glimpse of another way, creates the conditions for transformation. And the work itself must embody what it seeks to bring forth. We cannot challenge domination while reproducing it in our movements. We must center authentic solidarity rather than saviorism, and create conditions where healing and transformation become possible, not as abstractions, but as lived realities.
To practice kinship is to act with both moral clarity and relational depth: to oppose fiercely, to love fiercely, and to remember that even in opposition, we belong to the same fragile body of Earth.
What It Looks Like on the Ground
Consider a community facing a proposed industrial hog operation. The company promises jobs, officials prepare to approve, and most residents oppose it but feel powerless. The first layer is resistance as neighbors organize across political lines to block the permits and farmers, environmentalists, health advocates, animal welfare groups, and residents join forces. They use every available tool, including legal action, public pressure, and direct engagement to hold the line. At the same time, the community begins to build. They expand local farming infrastructure, develop regional markets, strengthen cooperative ownership, and prove that another rural economy rooted in health and dignity rather than extraction, is possible. And as they resist and build, they also turn inward to address the deeper causes of vulnerability: decades of economic decline, loss of local control, land consolidation, and erosion of democratic trust. They begin experimenting with participatory budgeting, community land ownership, and new forms of civic leadership. It’s messy, nonlinear, and slow, but this is how transformation happens through layered, relational work that heals the conditions which made harm possible in the first place.
The Culture Work
Resistance stops harm and building creates alternatives, but culture determines what people can imagine and desire. Corporate food systems not only control production, they also shape appetite and identity, teaching that disconnection and ultra-processed convenience are inevitable. Culture work rewrites that story. It happens when people taste food grown with care, meet those who produce it, cook together, and remember where nourishment comes from. Shared meals, gardens, cooking classes, and food traditions are not side projects; they’re how kinship consciousness becomes lived experience. The same is true in health: when care is grounded in relationship rather than transaction, it reshapes what people expect from institutions. Culture work makes kinship a felt reality.
Holding the Tension
Some days, resistance feels urgent and building feels impossible. Other days, creation feels like sanity and resistance feels exhausting. The work is to hold that tension without collapsing into either side. Not either resistance or building, but their ecological dance. The resistors and builders need each other. When we understand this, the infighting over “right strategy” dissolves and is replaced by coordination and care. The bioregion—the watershed, foodshed, and community where you live—is where this ecology becomes real. It’s small enough to see connections and large enough to matter. Here you can resist specific harms, build alternatives, transform culture, and do it with people who may vote differently but share your air and water. The river doesn’t care about political identity and neither will your neighbors when the flood comes.
An Invitation to Discernment
So when someone asks whether post-partisan means we stop resisting, I ask instead:
- What needs fierce protection right now?
- What alternatives are we building?
- What conditions give rise to the harms we face?
- Who shares our material interests, even if not our ideology?
- What does the land, the water, and the community actually need?
The ecology of response calls us to be strategic rather than reactive, and generative rather than merely oppositional to protect what we love while building what we need. To act from kinship, knowing our wellbeing is collective. From that awareness, resistance and creation become one motion—life defending and renewing itself through us.
