I have a confession. For a long time, the notion of a political “moderate” would make me uncomfortable. Worthy of an eye-roll or two.
Moderation struck me as the path of the undecided — or the fainthearted who would take the middling road over the high road. In a world full of injustice and existential threats whose reckoning are long past due, moderation felt like a privileged position from which to conclude that nothing radical needs to change. Screw that.
Climate change has been worsening, and some argue we’re already past the point of no return. Black people in the United States have been waiting for justice for over four hundred years, and they still don’t have it. Wealth inequality has reached record highs, misogyny endures as it has for millenia, and it feels we’re fighting a pandemic as ineffectively as our ancestors did a hundred years ago. The world is on fire, and no moderate, pea-shooter water gun is going to put it out. We need some radical, honking firehoses.
At times, I’d even feel more respect for conservatives than moderates because at least they stood for something — something I disagree with, but something — whereas moderates seemed to be watching on the sidelines while the rest of us were in the fight. Cue the scene from Hamilton where he backs his political enemy with these words, “I have never agreed with Jefferson once; we have fought on like seventy-five diff’rent fronts, but when all is said and all is done, Jefferson has beliefs, Burr has none.”
And so it goes with moderates, or so I felt.
And in this, I have not been alone. When I became re-engaged with social justice after a year abroad and better informed by fellow BIPOC, I also began to sense and witness how the fight between the right and the left was in of itself cultivating new forms of abuse.
All across our country, Americans have become radicalized, with people from both ends of the political spectrum increasingly willing to shame, cancel, and even compel others to see the light — our light — by any means necessary. And we’ve put on armor to protect our self-righteousness, too, rejecting much introspection by arguing that there’s a false equivalency between the abuses of the other side and ours. Be that as it may, the end result is the same: we’ve compromised our values, excused away our own abuses, and begun to more closely resemble that which we’re fighting.
On the radical right, fragility and fear fueled repeated efforts to refocus the national debate on anything other than systemic and institutional racism, as well as the complicit silence and support of police violence against largely peaceful protesters. White fragility have made “snowflakes” out of the very people who charge that others are emotionally fragile. Ardent 2nd Amendment rights advocates who fear government overreach were conspicuously silent when unidentified federal police snatched up protesters on the street in Portland. Religious leaders whose entire identity is built on having the moral high ground excused one lie or hateful tweet after another by Trump because they liked his policies. Radicalization turned into hypocrisy.
On the radical left, similar emotional forces — fragility and fear — have given rise to abuses too, often in the name of fighting them. Doxxing and intimidating people at their homes became excused as fair forms of political protest. A police officer in Seattle was widely named and shamed on social media for pepper spraying a child — only to have it later revealed that they had named the wrong person. Cancel culture targeted people who held racist views, but also empowered individuals with social capital to settle personal scores in unethical or abusive ways. Accountability matters to the left, except apparently when it doesn’t.
A young Canadian named T.A. Eady wrote a powerful article in which she observed that within her in-group, “everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues… there is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics.” She was writing about the radicalization of the left, but her wisdom could just as easily be applied to the right. When the extremes begin adopting and excusing abusive behavior in classic horseshoe fashion, and it becomes harder to tease apart abuser from the abused. Nearly six years after she wrote her piece, many of us only moved further down that road. I recognized myself in that article, and I realized I needed to get out.
I begun to realize I want no part of such radicalization, certainly not on the right but not on the left either. What’s more, I didn’t want to raise my children in an environment that normalized such abuse and loss of integrity in the name of fighting abuse. There’s an old adage that we become what we surround ourselves with, so I knew this shift would cost me my in-group belonging which is the hardest part. But there had to be a different way, a better way.
Martin Luther King famously said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It never happens as quickly as we’d like. And that’s really hard to accept as a BIPOC when we’ve already been marginalized for so long and injustice is perpetuated against us every day. I want to see justice yesterday, not tomorrow. Black people, especially, have waited over 400 years for justice. They should not have to wait one day more. That alone radicalized the changes I demand from my peers and elected leaders.
And yet, despite everything he has done, over 40% of Americans still approve of Trump. Shall I burn them all in a dumpster fire in the name advancing racial equality? Shall I stop listening to their feelings and perspectives, as we believe they have done to ours, in the name of justice? I don’t believe that’s the way, and if that gets me cancelled — or worse, branded as a moderate — then I’ve learned to be okay with that.
We don’t get to a democracy by reallocating power from one one oppressive group to another, no matter who is in the right. We don’t get to a democracy — let alone a common humanity — when we allow conservatives to dismiss 40 million black people in this country any more than if we allow the left to dismiss the 100 million who approve of Trump. No amount of wishful or self-righteous thinking by radicals on either side is going to erase the fact that hundreds of millions of Americans are not in agreement with the facts let alone what the other side insists is the obvious answer.
Public approval of Congress is at an all-time low, yet our own communities and families are microcosms of how many of us have been unwilling to consider in a humane way why so many adhere to a different perspective than we do, to find compromise, to engage in emotionally difficult conversations, or to hold our own accountable for excesses that perpetuate cycles of abuse. So many of us have chosen to wage war and cancel the other side, and our political heroes on the left and the right reflect that. We are, in a sense, reaping what we’ve sowed.
This is not to say that I now hold moderate beliefs. Not at all. Or that I’m okay with the fact that our presidential candidates are, once again, two old white men without terribly imaginative ideas. Nor do I need to accept racist views or even compromise with them, but the work of a democracy is more than raging against those I disagree with. It’s even more than advancing equal voting rights, laws that protect minorities, and institutional reform which are sorely needed. It is also the work of engaging with our fellow citizens to change hearts and minds, as hard or as chilling as that may be at times. It is the work of holding our own accountable so that we may become part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
Many of us are emotionally exhausted, and this is more of a pivot than we care to make. And for those of us who have adopted radicalized attitudes that compromise our basic principles, it’s hard to admit that we’ve lost something of ourselves along the way. What’s more, with our rugged individualism, it’s a distinctively American attitude that we should never have to give our “emotional labor” except when we’re feeling emotionally gracious and energetic enough. But for real change to happen, we have to make such care and engagement with our community part of our core values and civic responsibility, no matter what their views. We have to be willing to put in the work where it’s hardest.
A move away from radicalism means that the fight for justice is going to be longer, harder, and less emotionally cathartic than any of us would like. Especially for BIPOC, who bear the brunt of the slow pace of change. But to you privileged white people I say, if we can do it, so can you. I haven’t given up how passionately I feel about these issues. But I have chosen to take a different path — a more moderate path, one might say — with how I engage with it.
When John Lewis died, he left behind powerful words on what it means to spend a lifetime fighting for what one believes in. “Though I may not be here with you,” he wrote, “I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”
In today’s angry, judgmental and divisive world, his measured voice calling for justice with love is one seemingly radical notion I can get onboard with.
We Can't Go Back 