Our Future Depends on Each of Us and One Another: How We Must Find A Way to Talk Across Difference from Queers to QANON.

Preface: A Darkening of Political Possibility

I’ve worked in politics and organizing for more than 20 years and I have seen and experienced many strange and seemingly impossible things: equal turns of seemingly unthinkable displays of solidarity and courage and displays of small mindedness and betrayals. I can comfortably say that these are the strangest times I’ve ever lived though. Although my politics squarely locate me on the left, I’ve always identified as a fairly ‘liminal’ person, someone who moves between different communities that transcend any formal political spectrum. As an organizer, this makes sense. My work is about moving people who are not already with us. But my liminal orientation goes deeper than my professional calling.

The greek word nostalgia speaks to a ‘deep yearning for home’ but I feel as though I’ve spent most of my life yearning for a home I’ve never known. I’ve gleaned something like it on the edges of radically different spaces and communities. I have found beauty, hope, grief, and pain that felt familiar in people and formations opposed — sometimes passionately — to one another's beliefs, practices, and worldviews. I’ve seen pieces of myself in each of them. For most of my life, that beauty, hope, grief, and pain and ultimately that sense of of recognition, has given me faith and fueled my belief in what is possible across difference. I’ve wondered if all of us have pieces of ourselves that we do not see reflected in our chosen homes, communities, and tribes. I’ve wondered if all of us excise pieces of ourselves to belong. And I’ve wondered about the greater possibility of belonging more completely and more fully and if the work of accepting the ‘other’ is much more about the work of accepting ourselves.

But lately, something profound has begun to shift. It feels like a sort of darkening; as though the collective aperture of possibility is narrowing; and the borders between us becoming less and less permeable. I don’t think Trump or the pandemic are to blame - not at the root of things. Rather, I believe they acted as sort of catalysts for undercurrents that have been gathering strength in the U.S. and around the world for a long time. The idea of tribe seems to have become more insular — even as the requirements of allegiance and the cost of belonging have become higher and more demanding. Republican v. Democrat. Real Republicans v. Republicans. Democrats v. Real Democrats. Red. Blue. Woke. Free. Cancel culture and Libtards. Deplorables. And on and on.

Laughing At Our Dead

More and more, in our public debates — formal and informal — it seems as if we are talking past each other; grounded in increasingly different worldviews; holding fast to different reference points that anchor us in what we believe is real. During the pandemic, many of these conversations played out across heated fights — ostensibly about masks and mandates. But it seemed clear that these were proxies of deeper meanings, fears, and animosities.

But it was what I found in common across the political chasm that chilled me most.

In each of the rather disparate communities I move in— loosely located across the spectrum of right and left — laughing over the deaths of the ‘other side’ became commonplace. More than a few folks laughed. On the left, the anti-vaxxers were getting their ‘just cumpuence.’ On the right, the left was ‘reaping what they sowed’ as their bullish but ultimately false trust of ‘universal science’ and the ‘nanny state’ failed them, as they died along with the rest of us, despite their vaccinations and boosters.

This - to me - is nothing short of profound and frightening. It reinforces the data Ezra Klein and others have lifted up around the shifts in partisanship and tribalism over the last decade. As Klein reports in his book, “Why We’re Polarized”, “A 2016 Pew poll found that self-described independents who tended to vote for one party or the other were driven more by negative motivations. Majorities of both Republican- and Democratic-leaning independents said a major reason for their lean was the other party’s policies were bad for the country; by contrast, only a third of each group said they were driven by support for the policies of the party they were voting for.” None of this this is fueled by greater love for these Americans’ own political party, but rather the growing hatred and fear of and for the other (so called ‘negative partisanship’).

Something different and dangerous is at work. I've come to believe that in this moment - whatever node of the so-called political spectrum we find ourselves on - we have to pay attention and figure out how we can engage across our differences in a way that does not continue to undermine one another’s humanity. I’m not suggesting we water down our truths, if anything, I think we need to bring fuller, more nuanced, more vulnerable versions of our truth to one another. I am arguing that we must find ways in which we do not allow our passion and conviction for creating a more beautiful world to be a part and parcel of a process through which we undermine the possibility of having a world to contend over.

It’s tricky stuff. I don’t know the answer. I’m sure I’ll be roundly critiqued as naive. But I’m someone that has helped build what was the largest PAC in the U.S. at the time, someone who has won tough political campaigns, someone who has been a part of a lot of the things we consider ‘winning’ these days. And I can say with total certainty and conviction that what we are doing now is not only insufficient but moving us in a direction that cannot fail to result in violence and disaster. I’m writing because I believe the way we are doing things - right, left, and center - is tearing us apart. I believe if we don’t change things, then there'll be no one left to build a more beautiful world to live in. I’ve spent my whole life trying to tamp down the hyperbolism of politics - but I find myself trying to find a way now to sound a real alarm; to find others that want to figure out together how to shift these dynamics and to realize what’s possible; to help us turn around before it’s too late.

Erick Godsey is a friend of mine and someone deeply interested in this work. His politics and my own are different in many ways but on this, we agree: this is a dangerous moment and one filled with possibility. It’s up to all of us to seize that possibility. We spent a few hours muddling our way towards how to realize some of those practices and I hope you’ll check out our first crack at it in our podcast.

In the meantime, below are the beginning of some thoughts on where we are and some ideas around guideposts of how we might future out where we go from here. As always, I’d love your thoughts.

The Short, Messy Arc of Origin of My Politics

I’ve spent my entire adult life on the project of building a stronger and more powerful left flank. To me, this has meant the work of building the power and capacity of a movement whose aim is to ensure every person could live a life of respect and dignity; a life where no one worried about their basic needs and everyone was free not just to dream but to pursue those dreams; a world in which power was shared; a world in which so much of the unnecessary and profound suffering that are the hallmarks of modernity are a distant memory of a barbaric past; a world in which we could find intimacy and belonging across difference.

As an organizer, I often tell the story of what moved me to do this work with something like a clean narrative arc. I usually locate the story in some combination of the following true facts: I grew up in the working class, immigrant community of East Boston, Massachusetts. I was raised in a family where love and violence seemed to co-exist so closely, that at times, it was hard to tell them apart. But my family wasn’t so different from those of my friends and the ways in which chaos and fear marked our lives seemed unremarkable at the time. But by the time I turned 18, the different ways in which chaos, violence, and poverty had impacted our lives became starkly apparent. That summer, I was preparing to attend Brandeis University on scholarship. A lot of those kids that I had grown up with were missing, in rehab, dead, or in jail. I’d spend the next twenty odd years of my life trying to understand and disrupt the dynamics that led to people’s lives being so profoundly constrained and so shot through with unnecessary pain and suffering. The truth is messier. A mashup of scenes of the lids of coffins closing of too young queer and trans people (many Black and Brown, many closeted by their families and denied dignity even in death); of the thousands of ways that fear and shame and violence have warped the lives of people love and people I will never know; and moments where people, against any reasonable odds, came together — across difference — and showed again and again, the profound good we are collectively capable of together.

I’ve spent the last two decades in a variety of executive leadership roles at the intersection of politics, civic engagement, and social transformation. From these radically divergent perches on the left, I had the opportunity to — along with my peers — play a key role in policy and electoral wins at the federal, state, and local level. Often, the results not only created real, material relief that made a palpable difference in people’s lives but shifted the broader contours of power and made — I believed — greater victories possible. And even when we lost, we walked away with insights and greater strength for the next fight.

Demoralized About Winning:50% +1 Will Not Keep Us Safe

And yet a few years ago, I found myself demoralized, exhausted, and feeling hopeless. I began to experience the ‘wins’ as increasingly hollow. My concern crystalised the morning after we won an incredibly challenging campaign to protect trans youth in a local fight that not only mattered in and of itself but that we saw as a national test case. The odds were stacked against us and we were dramatically outspent. We won anyway. As a trans man who has attended the funerals of far too many young trans people, I should have been ecstatic. And yet that morning as I replayed the scenes from the campaign. including the victory party and the protests of our opposition, I wondered if even with the legal protection in place, if we had really made anyone truly safer.

It is good and necessary to contend in an electoral context and it is good and necessary to work to pass and preserve laws that help keep people safe and ensure rights. It is just that this work alone is profoundly insufficient. The promise of the rule of law is crucial — but the community that those laws govern — the belief of those community members and one another’s humanity, especially across difference, is (in my estimate) the far more important factor. When I left that community, the parents and community members who had ‘lost’ a fight that they believed (wrongly, in my opinion, but earnestly), believed they had failed to protect their children from a threat. They felt angrier, more confused, more afraid. They had been branded hateful bigots. Many of the parents and community members who saw this fight (rightly, in my opinion) as a matter of protecting trans kid and keeping all kids safe, felt proud of a victory and had a sense of their own power. But many often believed even more concretely that the ‘other side’ were hateful. And most were sure that they had to keep a watchful and wary eye on people who did not accept or support or love their children and their families. Rendered broadly, we left behind a community that believe two stories: a story about woke, gender bending liberals who would rather be politically correct than keep our children safe; and on the other, a mob of hateful bigots and bullies with a backwards belief system. The community was more polarized and divided than ever. And it was no one’s job to do anything about it except stay vigilant for the next fight. Were those kids really safer? Were we truly better off?

Where to Go From Here: Initial Thoughts

Over time, I arrived at the conclusion that the problem was not about how we ran campaigns alone but also about who we had allowed our movements to become. I had become increasingly convinced that our failure to take seriously the maxim of prefigurative politics — in short — that the change you make in the world will only be as healthy and sustainable as the movement that drives the change — had been a profound strategic mistake. The closer I examined the dynamic, the clearer it became to me that our failure (and mine) to address the profound and unhealed trauma so many of us in the movement carried with us, had created a dynamic in which that trauma would be multiplied and amplified in our teams, our culture, our organizations, our movements, and the campaigns that we ran. We had — inadvertently — replicated and baked into the DNA of our organizations the very underpinnings of the same systems of oppression that our entire purpose was to challenge and dismantle. If we believed in our own lives that people were either good or bad than we would construct movements were people — and the groups they formed — could only be one or the other.

I also came to believe that we had not centered some of the deeper elements of our work that was harder to explicate, measure, and track than getting to 50% + 1 on the organizing drive or on election day. Underneath all the metrics of modern campaign and that under the surface of warring theories of change, is the same profound and sacred work unfolding. Everywhere, it is the work of individuals and communities excavating the stories others have used to define them to the world; examining the ways in which fragments of those stories have lodged themselves — explicitly and implicitly- into their collective consciousness and played a role in shaping something as intimate as their own sense of self, and in doing show, defined and narrowed the borders of possibility with more exacting brutality than any external and demonstrable show of force. And it is the work of people discerning and imagining new narratives rooted in their own conscious desires and hopes, and in doing so, redefining what is possible for themselves and all of us. It is through these observations that I came to believe that the deepest, most profound, most impactful way in which the world is changed for the better is rooted in the work of individually and collectively changing ourselves.

Over the last few years, I’ve tried to figure out what any of that means for the type of work that I do. Without question, it’s changed the way I do the work with the progressive movement. I’ve come to believe that process truly does matter as much — sometimes more — than the outcomes. The outcomes are always short term and the process determines what is possible for the long haul. I’ve delved more deeply into holistic health, going on my own journey of physical fitness, mental, and spiritual fitness. I became a nutrition and wellness coach and got deeply engaged with the (sometimes called a cult) Fit for Service community, even as I continued to work in politics and organizing.

At the core, I began to believe that a few ideas were crucial to the way we do the work:

1. Internalization of prefigurative politics, a coin termed by Carl Bogs to mean a commitment “within the ongoing political practice of a movement […] those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal” Or to put in the parlance of 12 steps groups, ‘we can’t give away what we don’t have.’ That meant the work of getting healthy — in the broadest and deepest sense — at the individual, group, movement level — was required to make deep, broad, and health change in the world.
2. Externalization of our commitment to hold fast to the humanity of others: in other words, it is crucially important that even across the most charged discourse, we had to hold fast the humanity of ‘the other side.’ This does mean we have to water down our rhetoric or be anything short of truthful and unapologetic. But we must do so in a way that holds — that the humanity of our ‘opposition’ reflects our moral and strategic analysis of the world. The work we do to undercut that humanity — the work we fail to do to stop it — is not only wrong but hurts all of us in the long term.
3. “We need a new story.” Charles Eisenstein wrote in, ‘A More Beautiful World’ , about the idea that we have ‘fallen out’ of the old story that helped us all make sense of the world and ourselves for a long time. This resonates with me — in politics and in my day-to-day life. We can see the evidence of the salience and power of the old story decay as we watch hundreds of thousands of people rally against the norms of politics and news. While we find the narratives they gravitate towards baffling, we should not be surprised they would search for new ones. It seems to me the logical outgrowth of decades of reducing our complex and messy world to a two dimensional stage with in clear villains and heroes and no gray area in between.

I am still not sure what to do with any of this to be honest. But as Olga Broumas writes in her poem Artemis:

“I am [someone] who understands the necessity of an impulse whose goal or origin still lies beyond me. “

I suspect we all do. I think at a deep level, most of us know that something new is required. I suspect it has something to do — perhaps — with a politics rooted in a sort of orthopraxy (a set of practices) rather than an orthodoxy (a set of beliefs). To put that another way, I think it’s more important that we have a set of agreed to ways around how we engage than an insistence that we all must toe one party line or another. I think these practices involve something like radical truth and vulnerability and grace.

Make no mistake, I understand what’s on the line. It’s because of that clarity that I have come to believe that if we don’t change the way we struggle and if we don’t redefine what it means to win, we will lose in such a profound way that all of our wins will be for naught. Erick Godsey and I take a crack at beginning to flesh out such a practice here. I hope those of you interested in this work and thinking will reach out to Erick and I to conspire.

I still believe in the values and vision — in the worth of the human beings that first animated my work in politics. I have come to also believe it’s at least equally important that we find ways to hold each others humanity across difference — so that there’s a world of us with dreams left to keep fighting for. This is a moment of great possibility, a time in which we can define a ‘new story’, and create a profoundly beautiful future together. But this is not truth to be revealed but to be made; this is not an inevitable future’ but a possibility. As Broumas closes her poem Artemis, she writes about:

‘“..a mind stunned at the suddenly possible shifts of meaning and who, like amnesiacs in a ward on fire, we must find words or burn.’

We must — and we can — find a new way forward — together.