After the Love Has Gone: Radical Community after the Election
Susana M. Morris
If you’re like me, you’re probably geeked when election season is finally over. I mean, now we can turn all of our attention back to important things like Game of Thrones, Scandal, and The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Finally!
Sure, I love a giddy Rachel Maddow gushing on MSNBC. Sure, I like the idea of chastened, sullen, defensive conservatives whining and licking their wounds, embarrassing themselves by saying increasingly stupid, pitiful, and asinine things, all the while revealing to anyone with good sense that their ideology and policies are out of touch, retrograde, wack, and shamtastic. (Their tears are delicious.) So, yes, I’m not above putting the shade back in schadenfreude.
Mostly though, I’m really ready to be done with the infighting among the radical Left. The radical Left is not a monolithic entity but rather a diverse set of communities that approach the realization of justice in a variety of ways. I’m not suggesting that we become more alike, but I am concerned that the way we talk about our differences is not only unproductive but oftentimes a violent distraction from our shared goals.
While some folks are still popping bottles and dropping it like it’s hot to Jeezy’s “My President Is Black” and looking forward to celebrating the first woman president in the White House, others are shaking their heads at the complicity of supposedly progressive folks with the imperialism of the state.
Between Obama’s two terms and the dustups between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, progressive politics feels like a family reunion gone terribly wrong. Folks get drunk and start arguing, secrets get exposed, proverbial dirty laundry gets aired, people choose sides, and nothing gets solved. Then we do it all again in a couple of years. It’s not that we don’t love each other—we just got some major ish to work through. So let’s work through it. What follows is not an exhaustive list, but a few ideas to the get the conversation started.
1. Let’s reject binaries: good/bad, Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative, revolutionary/Uncle Tom. I think we experience and engage politics on a spectrum and trying to take a snapshot of someone’s beliefs from one action (e.g., voting and not voting) and then running around being like, “Ah-ha! You’re not quite right because you believe in xyz!” is neither cute nor productive.
2. Along those lines, let’s rebuke authenticity wars. I think the most recent fissures in the radical Left should invite us to consider the ways in which the organizing and ideology coming out of the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s challenge/inform/undermine our current work. I see some folks wanting to eschew the call to honor the legacy of the civil rights movement, finding such calls often mean shutting up about their concerns in order to appear legitimate. Other folks warn that if you completely abandon the ideology and action of what came before us, you are doing a disservice to history and not wanting to connect authentically to the struggle. I don’t think these conversations are completely at odds, but reducing the convo to one about legitimacy just doesn’t serve us well.
3. Let’s reject elitism and navel-gazing. We are a part of complex communities, and we don’t deserve to be leaders simply because we have degrees or work at certain organizations. Yet some of us treat our family, friends, and neighbors with condescension and disdain, acting like we are radical evangelists among ignorant heathens. That’s why sometimes the folks we work with and serve don’t like and, more importantly, don’t trust many of us.
4. Let’s be nuanced in our discussion of respectability politics. I’m all about calling out investments in dominant notions of what is normal and acceptable as a way to harness power, especially in communities of color and among queer folk. But, sometimes the zeal in calling out respectability politics fails to recognize the complicated, ambivalent ways in which folks adhere to and/or reject what it means to be respectable. Also, see #3.
5. Let’s recognize that pretty much all of us have some type of privilege and we should make pains to interrogate our ish and really listen to one another. Also, being an expert on racism, for example, doesn’t mean you always get the nuances of, say, ableism. But, thankfully, you—we—can learn. Our brains are awesome like that.
6. Unless someone is being violent, let’s passionately disagree with one another without eviscerating each other’s humanity. For real.
Ultimately, my thoughts are that we need to have difficult dialogues without cannibalizing each other. Let’s embrace our diversity in the movement and not call for a unity that steamrolls over dissension. We see how the Far Right is imploding, but the difference between us and them is that they have boatloads of cash and no scruples whatsoever and we have an abundance of ethical concerns, passion, and student loans we cannot ask our parents to pay for. They will rise again, but if we become too fractured it might be a different story for us. This is a call to keep our eyes on the prize—it’s not just about being right, it’s about working together for justice.