I wrote this and posted it on social media shortly before the 2024 presidential election. Looking back on it, I’m disappointed by how often I slip into the prissy, lecturing tone of the very discourse I’m criticizing. Social media really does exert an enormous force in the direction of the twee and the knowing. Still, despite its shortcomings, this seems right to me. I have grown only more convinced that my generation–whatever injustices we have experienced compared to our parents–needs to find a way to look to the future and take care of the kids. Age-based interest groups are mad in a peculiar way: you are lobbying against either who you once were or who, with any luck, you will someday be.

I’m voting for Kamala Harris, because I do not want to hand the United States government over to a crew of Christian Nationalists and authoritarians using Donald Trump, one of the most corrupt people on earth, as their stooge and protector. Harris is not the best candidate in the world–I could name 10 politicians I would prefer off the top of my head–but I think she will hold the line on a great many things I care about, which the other side will actively seek to destroy. That’s politics. It’s a disaster that sometimes the best you can do is keep from losing ground, but disasters are a reality of life. If we can get her elected, then we can go apeshit holding her accountable.

Some people I love and admire plan to withhold their vote or, in some rather weird cases, vote for Trump or that self-serving lunatic Stein in protest. As a practical matter, this seems to me all in service of Trump’s election. I tend to think that electing authoritarians because one considers the current crop of democrats insufficiently progressive is a counterintuitive strategy at best. Reasonable people may differ, though I am sometimes not sure how.

Anyways. That’s my position on this election, for what it’s worth. It is not a particularly complex situation: sometimes the simple ones are the hardest to swallow, as they remind us how very hemmed in we are. I try to keep my feelings out of voting, though not out of politics. What follows below is a much longer screed I’ve been writing on my phone when I have a spare moment. Think of it as footnotes for those interested in further reading. Maybe it is of use to some folks on the fence.

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I have noticed lately that the people whose opinions and judgement–political or otherwise–I trust the most have grown quiet. This struck me as strange, and what struck me as stranger was that, upon reflection, I found that I, too, had stopped expressing most opinions.

I think that I’ve grown weary of battling with people on my own team and particularly weary of endless semantic discussions, zero-sum debates, and, above all, of attempting to measure up to shifting purity tests, imposed, as often as not, by privileged people on behalf of the disenfranchised. It’s all very demonstrative, and so many people I know have become the human equivalent of snapping instead of clapping that it has seemed best to me to have political conversations in private, amongst a small handful of friends.

But this too wears thin, can seem a little self-indulgent–is not even, in a meaningful sense, politics at all. One of the sad parts of the left splitting into uncommunicative contingents is that one never has a chance to really present or challenge one’s ideas. The onslaught of jargon and memified twitter-style responses is so instant and so predictable–all of the best propaganda inculcates reflex rather than reflection–that one begins to make mistakes simply because one’s opponents have become zombies. The capacity to see something from a unique angle or to engage meaningfully with the orthodox leftism of the moment has fled the field, so one’s discussions always end, like tic-tac-toe, in a stupid and unproductive draw.

There’s an election tomorrow, and I thought it might be useful to publicly state some of the things that matter to me right now, culturally and politically and to demonstrate the baseline courage of honesty. I do not claim most of this as gospel truth, and I hope to change my opinion when the facts change or my perspective broadens, but this is how I’m approaching the election and the life of a citizen in America more generally at this precise moment.

1) It’s about the kids. Since the boomers, each generation has been shafted pretty hard as the stability (for some) of the 90s gave way to the post 9/11 shitshow and every vile compromise since. I lost years by graduating into the recession. Millennials younger than me don’t really remember anything other than disorder and chaos in America. They have no reason for hope, and they have been trained by Instagram and the like to lionize spiritual prostitution. The newer crop of adults are so phenomenally traumatized by a pandemic-robbed youth and decreased opportunities across the board that they can barely function (and who can blame them). They have retreated into an endless taxonomy of their identities, that being the last sphere over which they have any control. It’s a mess.

All of this can understandably lead to a “I need to get mine” kind of politics, the fruits of which we see in the resentment-based mania of the right. This is a bad basis for voting and a bad basis for thinking. None of us are getting lost years back, and this is not historically unprecedented, by which I mean that we should calm down a bit. Most of us haven’t had to fight in a war, which is damn fine luck in the context of the 20th century. I’ll take a little bit of disillusionment to be born now and escape the mustard gas, thanks very much. What matters, I think, going forward is that the kids working through the system now have some kind of future. An education not based on job training. An open vision of life with options for dignity and meaningful contribution. A sense of justice and integrity. Perhaps some of us could undertake to model a few of these virtues.

2) Precisely because it’s about the kids, adults have a responsibility to respect and make way for the passion and intensity of youth without abdicating the responsibility to exercise judgment. So many of the adults I know live in such terror of falling on the bad side of youth justice movements that they spend their lives chasing the approval of a demographic that, by definition, lacks experience and wisdom. Young people need room to tangle with radical ideas without the adults reflexively and immediately implementing them. If the most intense impulses of my youth had been applauded and aided by the adults in my sphere, I would have done great damage to myself and others, and that damage would have been the adults’ fault. So many of the failures of the left since the pandemic have been the result of well-meaning grownups treating important philosophical conversations instigated by the young as blueprints for immediate policy. Nothing works well this way, and, as boring as deliberation is–and as much as it undercuts the Manichaean impulse towards purity characteristic of the young–we need it to make sure that fresh, important ideas ideas transcend mere slogans and find their way to actual policy.

My conviction that adults need to stop instinctively deferring to the intensity of youthful belief is a reason for my writing all of this. I don’t share the aesthetic obsessions or many of the basic assumptions of the progressive left, though I share almost all of its goals. I know a lot of people like me who roll their eyes at the contradictory statements and the ever-burgeoning terminologies (all recycled) and say nothing. We should probably stop doing that. Sometimes the kids, being kids, will call us painful names. That’s what they do, and we have a responsibility to care about them even when they’re being dicks. For we, too, were once dicks.

3) Global Warming, Climate Change. This is the kids again. Every 10th of a degree we keep the world from warming saves untold lives and prevents untold future suffering in terms of refugees, war-torn nations, and all the rest. We do not acknowledge often enough that real progress has been made, and that the outlook would be far grimmer were it not for the policies of recent years and decades. It’s going to be bad no matter what, but there’s a big difference between “bad” and “unlivable wasteland/Cormac McCarthy novel.” We do not have the right to despair on behalf of future generations. They deserve the best shot we can give them, even if–and this is the hard part–it is not as good as what we have been taught to expect for ourselves. We can’t hang our disappointment around their necks.

4) I will make common cause with anyone of good will, however stupid or amateurish they may be. If they don’t understand trans people or black hair or whatever, I’m not going to send them to Google (how, by the way, has it become an acceptable liberal burn to refer people with honest questions to a search engine run by a giant, wicked corporation?). I don’t say that this should be expected of the relevant black or trans person, although those folks show grace and forbearance often enough in explanation; what I mean is that I’m not going to pretend to be too important or too busy to talk honestly to someone who wants to talk honestly to me. That’s what community is. It is very reasonable for black people, for example, to grow tired of representing their community and fielding questions. Too often, however, this leads white people, straight people, whatever people to feign similar exhaustion. At some point someone has to care about people who aren’t already on the team or who are too busy living, working, or raising children to be on the cutting edge of social justice issues. That should be most of us.

5) The personal isn’t always political, or at least we should strive for a situation in which it is not. Politics should serve the ends of human life, and if those ends are not love, joy, death, grief, shenanigans, and daily human interaction they are nothing. When we make it impossible for people to get through a simple dinner without correction or, in our enthusiasm for ideological rigor, we end up arguing for positions that would reduce daily life to a kind of perpetual political war (all heterosexual sex is rape, as one well-intentioned feminist told me), we are not freeing people–we are telling them that they will always be enslaved. We are robbing them of the basic consolations of humanity. Theoretical frameworks have a habit of turning thought experiments into shibboleths. We don’t need fellow ideologues. We need people with a rough sense of justice and decency and a willingness to learn. I will not seek to enforce theoretical jargon that will be out of fashion by the time it is fully learned. This is cruel. People have to live, and, more often than not, the old words are still the best words.

6) Speaking of language, for the sake of our own brains, we need to pause before taking familiar and useful concepts and reframing them as academic abstractions, particularly when addressing audiences not versed in academic horseshit or who find academic horseshit off-putting (if the only way forward culturally is through advanced degrees and proliferating lingo, then we are doomed). For my money it is often easier–not to mention far more intelligible–to talk about racism or anti-semitism in terms of “original sin” than it is to talk about “systemic injustice.” There are entire swaths of America for whom the distinction would be both richer and more accessible. We speak Academese not for precision, but because we like to hear complex-sounding language come out of our mouths. It is a very harmful form of vanity. George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language will change your life in this matter, and it should be required reading for everyone on the left and everyone who has ever taken a gender studies class (or, God help me, a “literary theory” class).

7) Netanyahu is a war criminal, and the Israeli government is filled with far-right religious lunatics who have no place in civil government and should spend the rest of their lives dead (if you believe in capital punishment) or in prison (if you do not). The United States has the right and the moral obligation to use its financial and military support as leverage to roll back settlement and stop the indiscriminate and cynical slaughter of civilians in Gaza.

8) At the same time, the United States should not abandon Israel, which abandonment is often the real (and rarely honestly stated) goal of those who want us to pressure the Israeli government. It makes no sense that, of all peoples, the oldest and most persistently persecuted should be the only one with no right to a home. It is wrong-headed and dangerous, moreover, to confuse authoritarian religious groups such as Hamas with progressive freedom fighters. The love for Islamic fundamentalism on the left has never ceased to confuse me. People who would consider a moderate evangelical who believes in free speech a mortal enemy manage to fetishize extremist religious psychopaths who would murder those leftists for their very leftism. These folks are not your natural allies, and they are not anti-colonialist or anti-genocide. You don’t get credit for either of those positions if you would colonize and genocide the hell out of your enemies if only you had the power. The same is true, by the way, of the Israeli right. I’m addressing most of this to the people I know on the left, but I have a similar speech for my more conservative friends who think that Messianic right-wing Israelis consider them anything but useful idiots. All religious fundamentalism which seeks state power is evil–whether it be Christian, Jewish, or Muslim.

9) Antisemitism on the left is pervasive and vile. The fact that all other forms of injustice deserve consideration in progressive movements but that antisemitism has become, at best, an inconvenience to tangle with and, at worst, the complaint of “Zionist” villains only goes to show how quickly the left will abandon its own principles if Jews have the complaint. This has been lurking for a long time, and most every Jew in America, I think, can see it.

10) Democratic socialism is a viable thing; it is, realistically, the only thing (Orwell again), but the Democratic Socialists of America are a generalized leftist goon squad untethered from principle or reality. Unrestrained capitalism, on the other hand, is an absurdity–it ends with all the chips in one pile. Communism deserves better advocates than it gets in America, but–like fascism, which it tends to mirror in the long term–goes nowhere fast. This does not change, because you went online and bought (think about that for a moment) an “all I want for Christmas is the means of production” t-shirt.

11) Ukraine is non-negotiable, even if only as a matter of self-interest. What happens there will touch every one of us, and a reflexive hatred for the west/imperialism fails to recognize that Russia, China, and Iran are imperialist ventures. Because the United States is and has so often been criminally wrong does not make our adversaries right, nor do our frequent lapses into authoritarianism justify regimes wholly dedicated to the principle of authoritarianism. To think otherwise is the logic of children. The sins of the West may have led to instability and oppression throughout the Middle East and global south–they may yet lead to World War III. Still, one senses that an uncomfortable number of people on the left are kind of rooting for the end of everything just to prove a point. I’m not sure how to speak meaningfully to those people. But I do think that they should recognize…

12) The people on the left saying maybe we should burn it all down are delusional. In the power vacuum left when our remaining protections are removed, I severely doubt that the members of the far left–with their self-care and “spoons” and accommodations (as important as all of this may be in a country that affords one rights, however spotilly)–are going to be the ones who rise to the top. It seems likely, that they, along with my 40-year-old ass, will be among the fist corpses. It is easy to forget how much we have to lose when we have already lost a lot, but that doesn’t change the facts. There are a thousand rights and protections still hanging by a thread that are worth fighting for and millions of people who would be dead if we engaged in some kind of revolution or bellum omnium contra omnia. The protections that civilization still provides are manifold, so let us be realistic.

13) We need to stop talking about “the media.” It is telling that both sides use almost identical language in this regard. Every single leftist talking point is present in the pages of the New York Times, which I know because I pay for it and read it. But too many of my fellow lefties would rather get their news from screenshots of social media posts and complain about a lack of representation in outlets they don’t read. Also, we should stop sharing articles written by “the media” and then saying that the media doesn’t want to cover the very thing we learned about through “the media.” That’s insane and embarrassing. The odds are that you, fellow facebook user, don’t have a unique line on some underground super-legitimate news source. Pay for your news. It’s better that way, I promise, and there’s not really an alternative aside from state-sponsored media (think about that for a minute) or what we have now, which is a bunch of unfunded idiots creating “content” sponsored by dick pill advertisements and vying for a spot in the “attention economy.” A couple of subscriptions are, moreover, eminently affordable. If you’re going to argue that point, you better not have a Netflix account.

14) We ought to stop hating on religion. Some of you who have known me for a long time know what it means that I say that. Science is a method, not a substitute for meaning, which we all need, and it has next to nothing to say about the fundamental questions that plague and delight us all. There are churches, synagogues, mosques, sweat lodges, Masonic halls, etc. across this country in which the real business of human life is conducted. People live and die in the embrace of these communities, and, for generations, they have spoken more deeply and more consistently to the reality of human experience than the New Atheists or any of the prophets of technology could ever hope to do. Yes, the fundamentalist Christianity we see around us is absurd, laughable, and worthy of our contempt and opposition. But we are fools to stop at what we see around us or listen only to the screechiest of voices. I say this without judgement. I have been such a fool. I think most sane people, after a little reflection, would agree with me when I argue that I would rather a child be raised on the Koran or, say, the book of Psalms exclusively than on all of the anti-racist bestsellers published since 2020. Not to speak of the fucking internet.

15) Speaking of the fucking internet. The whole thing was a mistake. It promised us the future and delivered us pop-up ads, pornography, and industrialized attention span reduction. You can tell it’s a drug by how strenuously its addicts try to tell you that it isn’t. What it has actually done is hollowed out the core of society, killed bookstores, massacred gay bars, and turned us all into commodities for giant companies that do not care about us. It has trained us to be false and shallow and pointless–and to think of our fellows in those same terms. The marginal convenience of having things delivered to us quickly has been purchased with the death of cities and the endless isolation of the young, who burrow deeper into corporate opiate theme parks when they could be skipping class and making out as God intended. We have people called “influencers” for Christ’s sake.

I’m aware that I’m writing this on the internet and how completely sad that is.

16) Unrelated–we should stop ceding ground to conservative whack jobs. When they claim the Bible, we let them have it, even though this would baffle Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Joan of Arc herself. The same goes for the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, “classical” education, sports, freedom, virtue, guns, and the missionary position. We are supposed to be the fun ones, the ones with the books, the ideas, the sex, and the goddamn moxy. Everything good by right belongs to us. Everything stupid and square belongs to J.D. Vance. Why did we let that go? The left in America has become so addicted to performing the same ritualized act of debunking that we’ve given over everything meaningful and pleasant just because the fundies want to cosplay being cool for a minute. We are at very real risk of becoming prissy and orthodox. I left the church long ago to escape that shit, and if we aren’t going to be rock ’n roll anymore, I’m gonna take my leather jacket and go home.

17) We need to acknowledge where we went wrong. We fucked up the pandemic. Liberal cities kept Casinos open and closed churches. Adults, including our much-vaunted teachers, became so obsessed with our own safety that we let children fester alone in front of screens for years, and the damage is incalculable. We indulged the worst impulses of our side: caution, cowardice, self-righteousness, the illusion of safety. I participated in it–to my shame–and now I work in a neighborhood utterly destroyed by those years of neglect, and I watch children whose formative years were stolen walk by in a kind of daze, knowing something is wrong but not quite what.

We on the left have been obsessed with sex when there were other more pressing matters. We have priveleged autonomy over community to our lasting detriment. We have abandoned veterans, because we have half-formed objections to the military, while pretending to support them. We have aided and abetted endless DEI trainings, fad justice movements, and charlatan prophets. We have somehow let the conservatives claim free speech. We have lost our way again and again, and we should be adult enough to own it.

Nonetheless, we are, on balance, right, and admitting where we have come up short does not change that. However passionate (and, let us say it, sincere) the worst forces in this country may be, I’m bullish on old-school liberalism (rights, freedom, education, citizenship) and solidly against this incipient authoritarianism (even, especially, when it comes from the left). Authoritarianism is a kind of despair, a fundamentally cowardly posture, a yearning to return to a childhood where one’s thoughts and actions are directed. I have spoken repeatedly about adulthood here, and that is in part because I think it is something we need to reclaim. Adults make the choices they have to make and, when they have the chance, they work to ensure that better choices will be available down the line. They understand that they may not be able to make the world better at any given moment, but they can sure as hell make it worse by inaction. They take care of the young. They work for community. They long for a country and a citizenry they can be proud of, and they take small daily steps to make that a reality. That is, honestly, a burden, but much depends on you and I being willing to take it on.

I hope to see you at the polls on Tuesday.