people standing and holding flags during daytime
Progressives say we want to win elections and shape the future of our country. We say we want to create greater equity and broad prosperity, and we worry that climate change may swamp the whole boat. But honestly, when we talk about (or to) people who disagree in the slightest, we sure don’t act like a better future is what we’re after. We act instead like people who have given up—who have so little hope of bringing others along that we can dump on them without consequences. We act like the married person who says they are trying to fix things but who in their heart has abandoned the effort and settled on divorce and now only talks with friends who agree that the soon-to-be ex is horrible (and always has been).
When Hillary Clinton made the comment that took her down, she was trying to say that most Americans on the right half of the political spectrum aren’t deplorable. Right-wing media edited and spun it the other way—with enormous impact—because people hate being sneered at. We hate, hate, hate it! Having someone see you as deplorable is a deal breaker. It creates a rift that may never be bridged. Marital researchers at the Gottman Institute discovered that even subtle expressions of contempt can predict which relationships will end badly. How is it, then, that activists who claim to be invested in the future, who think our causes are worthy, who say people should donate and volunteer and vote our way, have adopted the posture of denigrating, deriding, and even dehumanizing anyone who doesn’t think exactly like us? As a recruiting tactic, telling people they are stupid and immoral is an epic fail. A mean-girls strategy may pull people into line if they are already in your orbit, but from the outside it is repellant.
Let’s be honest.
Since the time that Clinton’s words were twisted so effectively to foster resentment and deepen America’s political divide, things have gotten only more fractious. Fox-clone media and self-interested politicians own the bulk of the blame for this. But while I find right-wing postures and priorities and lying and the whole MAGA phenomenon to be horrifying, we progressives often make things worse instead of better. We pretend, when they sneer and call us woke, that they are just hating our awareness, compassion and diversity. We pretend not to know that with good reason the word woke now connotes—even among many on the left—smugness, sanctimony, an attitude of intellectual superiority, and an eagerness to impute the worst possible motive to anyone who disagrees. We pretend not to recognize that we regularly use words like white and Christian and male and straight as slurs, as ways of conveying that a person is less of a person to us, and more of a symbol, and that we aren’t really interested in their thoughts or fears or pain or dreams. We spend time in activist spaces and online forums trash-talking and othering whoever isn’t in the room. And then we say they should join our movement.
No thanks.
It shouldn’t take a psychologist to say this, but few people, regardless of race or sex, have so much spare mental health and resilience that they can afford to join clubs that shit on them. Any cadre of Mormon or Evangelical missionaries could tell you that’s not the way to win converts. Wait a minute, you might say. Don’t Christian missionaries tell prospective converts that they are sinners from birth, “utterly depraved” in the words of John Calvin, and in need of salvation? Yes, they do. But they also pair that with instant absolution.
To be clear, I’m not a fan of religious missionaries. We are talking about people whose worldview requires them to treat questions as hooks and relationships as a way to reel people in. Missionary work, in other words, is a long way from actual deep listening and mutuality, from risking that the other party in a conversation might change you. Instead, missionaries often fake humility and interest and friendship or cultivate these interpersonal dynamics in a way that is conditional and has an ulterior motive—a harvest of converts. (Yuck.) But much of the time, we progressives can’t even seem to get that far.
What is going on?
I think that a lot of progressives feel deeply hopeless about a better future, which is why many have seemingly little interest in constructing a theory of change. When people have confidence in their ability to figure things out, they set reachable goals and work on getting from Point A to Point B. By contrast, when people lack hope and confidence, they tend to shoot for the sky—I’m going to be a rock star, a race car driver, an astronaut, a billionaire—but they take few steps toward those goals. That is because trying to map a path from A to B would surface the huge chasm of unreality that lies between where they are and where they want to be. There is a huge chasm of unreality between where progressives are and where we want to be. And it is filled with the lives and loves of people who are different than us.
I’m not talking about the usual checkboxes—race, immigration history, sexual orientation, and so forth. I mean people who, at least right now, have different fears and worldviews than we have and, consequently, different ideas about how to get to a better future, people who aren’t a part of our club and who think they wouldn’t want to be a second-class member.
Satisfying snark kills hope.
Posting snark and righteous memes on social media to an audience of folks who already think like us and denigrating those who “get it wrong,” or focusing our ire on words and symbols (which are easier to change than are conditions in the physical world), may help fend off despair temporarily. But in the long run, cynicism about the past and despair about the future are self-reinforcing. For example, some idealists see gaps in racial equality and deny that the Civil Rights movement made any real progress. One frustrated friend in college commented that things are no different now than they were under slavery. This kind of story, one that treats slow or incomplete change as inconsequential, one that erases the efforts and triumphs of past generations and flattens the moral arc of American history, also flattens the future. It beats down the hope that our own actions matter. It makes people more emphatic and absolutist in their demands for change but also less able to tap into the curiosity and empirical analysis and passion and stamina that can solve problems and improve lives in the real world.
In a movement that is about problem solving, being able to construct a multi-dimensional map of reality including potential causes and effects and unintended consequences is key. Lived experience, what philosophers call standpoint epistemology, can be part of this, but only part. We humans have many ways of discovering, learning, analyzing, and problem-solving, and if we want the benefit of this multitude, they have to be at the table. That means they have to be welcome.
We can do better.
Real world change takes bridge building, deep listening, and taking the risk that we might learn something from someone we think of as other. The following may sound odd coming from a critic of Christianity, but two Seattle ministers, Jim Henderson and Jim Hancock, have come up with the best three practices I’ve ever seen for broadening engagement and community:
- I’ll be unusually interested in others.
- I will stay in the room with difference.
- I will stop comparing my best with your worst.
Their motto is curiosity trumps certainty. And their ministry, if you can call it that, is about bridging difference divides.
There are progressive organizations that operate from the same mindset. Dream.org, founded by Black American commentator Van Jones, builds equity by making structural change at scale in low-income communities. One team works on getting incarcerated people who don’t represent a community hazard out of prison and rehabilitating them, and building alternatives to incarceration. Another works on bringing high-tech skills to inner city kids, so they won’t be left out of technical revolutions. A third works on green collar jobs in marginalized communities to ensure a just transition away from fossil fuels. They do all of this through a lens of bridge-building, finding common cause where they can, including with people across the political aisle. And it is working: Tens of thousands of people are now out of prison because of their advocacy and partnerships (including with Newt Gingrich!). Their motto is “We will work with anyone to make the future work for everyone.”
Work like this is grounded in a doggedly hopeful worldview, one that has gotten beaten down in many of us but that is worth cradling and nurturing if and as we can: People who aren’t part of our ideological circle aren’t all our enemies. Those who don’t think like us can fill in the gaps in our partial truths. Our shared humanity runs deep. There is common ground to be found if we humble ourselves to seek it, and bridges worth building. We are capable of conversations that are much, much richer than mere posturing and commiseration.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings. Her articles about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society have been featured at sites including The Huffington Post, Salon, The Independent, Quillette, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, AlterNet, Raw Story, Grist, Jezebel, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Subscribe at ValerieTarico.com .