in the simple foundation

In 1918, before being sentenced to prison for opposing the hideous and pointless destruction of the first World War, Eugene Debs addressed the judge. His speech was one of the great moments in the history of American oratory. And he began it like this:

“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

That statement — the notion of radical equality, of radical egalitarianism, of the refusal to define oneself as part of an elite or an elect — that is the beating heart of socialist philosophy, the mission statement of any authentically left-wing practice. The goal is to tear down all forms of human hierarchy. We want to kill God, smash capitalism, and dismantle the state, and we want to do so in order to achieve a world of true human equality. Things don’t get better unless they get better for everyone. That is the purpose of our political engagement: to show people that, in the end, their seemingly conflicting political interests are one and the same, that someday we’ll build a better world for everyone, even those who don’t recognize it as a better world yet.

The point is not to say “no judgment.” I called Trump a monster yesterday; I’ll call him one today. He’s a terrifying presence in American politics. But I refuse to act as though every one of his millions upon millions of followers is an irredeemable soul. Writing off millions of people who you see as beneath you is a terribly ugly thing to do. Are there are people within Trump’s coalition who are just deeply racist and hateful and can’t be moved? Of course. But to declare all of one’s political opponents to be beyond saving seems to me to be a profound type of moral surrender. Today on Twitter Jeet Heer said that “Trump voters are not persuadable.” And my response to that is to say, if that is really true for so many millions of people, what is the purpose of politics? That’s a declaration of surrender. Demagogues have manipulated the fears of otherwise decent people for centuries. I have to believe that there is hope, not just for Trump supporters, but for the vast swaths of humanity who believe terrible things.

That’s not even to get into the fact that Trump could actually win this election, and then where does “his voters are unpersuadable” leave us? What will liberals do, when they finally discover that there are more people outside of their definition of the Good People than inside it? How do they respond to a world that is controlled by people who they see as too far beneath them to bother trying to convince?

Heer, of course, accused me of saying that racism isn’t real, or that we shouldn’t try to fight it. That’s willfully dishonest nonsense — he doesn’t actually believe that’s what I think, it’s an argument of convenience — but I’m afraid it’s a common response. The claim is that caring about the fate of the white working class, and believing that the only way to secure a just and equitable future for everyone is by persuading members of all racial and demographic groups, is ipso facto an argument to excuse racism. I simply cannot follow that logic, at all, and I doubt even Heer would recognize any logical connection between them, were he to see beyond his own ponderous didacticism. No, I don’t think racism is merely a function of social class, nor do I think only economic means will solve racism. I have never doubted that racism is abundant and toxic, nor have I questioned the existence of entrenched and powerful white supremacy. I happen to believe — I happen to know — that ending racism must, by very definition, involve the efforts of all people, including the white working class. We fix the world by fixing it for everyone. There is, truly, no alternative. In their indifference to the economic insecurity that history tells us fuels bigotry, too many of those who decry Trump’s racist politics themselves share the blame for the rise of Trump and all of his abundant and terrible prejudice. Including the ones who worship their own superiority, like Jeet Heer.

My many unhappy debates with liberals have demonstrated to me that, for every one of them that is motivated by a sincere desire to help everyone, another is motivated by the base instinct to place him or herself above others on the hierarchy of righteousness. American liberalism has become so deeply habituated to the practice of ceaseless and totalizing moral judgment that it seems incapable of expressing itself with any other kind of vocabulary. And the inevitable outcome of a politics of personal righteousness is an ideology made up only of commissars, an army of inquisitors who must by necessity believe in a vast throng of sinners and a small band of saints, with themselves standing as the greatest among this latter group. That’s the opposite of what I’m interested in. I’m not invested in politics out of a desire to be one of the elect. I am invested in politics because I want to destroy the concept of the elect.

But I think that it’s really past time I come around to the fact that this kind of engagement just doesn’t have much purpose or value; it’s just too out of step with conventional politics, at this point, for it to be of much use. Or, as a friend who’s been trying to convince me to give up writing about politics for ages puts it, “there’s no use yelling anymore.” What I’ve wanted is a politics that exists entirely outside of the obsessions with teams, but I have to be realistic and acknowledge that teams are simply too inherent to the popular conception of politics. So I think I have to find a new way of engaging with the world, to come at it from an angle, and in some way advocate for a space beyond the cramped, Manichean boundaries of the cancer that is modern liberalism.