Conservative Absenteeism
Criticism
I often get very personal in these posts, telling vulnerable stories about my childhood or past relationships. I rarely delve directly into politics—though there have been some exceptions. Lately, though, politics has been feeling particularly dire and I haven’t been able to think of much else. So, it feels honest to post what’s on my mind about the challenges of this political moment. I hope you’ll humor me.
There’s a lot of discussion right now about how we’re at a tipping point and that we must change the way we engage with people who disagree with us. I’ve been struggling with how “reaching across the aisle” has been presented as a compulsory good. While I agree that communication between the left and right needs to happen, I also think there’s a cost. Therefore, I propose that we strip from “civil discourse” any moral value. If you’re a leftist, talking to a conservative is neither good nor bad. It simply needs to happen.
I have depended, for my own sanity, on using boundaries around who I talk to about what. My stance might be best summed up by a 2015 tweet from Robert Jones, Jr., which is often incorrectly allocated to James Baldwin:
We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.
I’d never read anything that provided such striking clarity about polarizing political issues. I’ve always felt so raw about arguing for “my side,” when my side was simply “please don’t force me to be someone I’m not.” I always thought of Jones’s tweet as a hopeful call. He’s saying that there’s still a lot that we can argue about after we’ve accepted that humans deserve respect even if their race, gender, religion, or sexuality is different from yours.
I’d thought many people adopted this way of thinking along with me: let’s skip arguing about whether we’re equally human. Instead, let’s talk about grittier stuff that actually feels worthy of our intelligence and experience.
I’m starting to feel, though, that not as many people accepted this premise as I’d believed. Trump has won two elections—winning the more recent election by a greater margin—on a platform that vilifies trans people. It’s becoming clear that I opted in on nuanced conversations about gender, sexuality, race, and class—and have abandoned more basic conversations. As I thrilled in my queer theory seminars, conspiracies about gender and sexuality have festered among right-wing critics.
This isn’t an essay about regret. I’ve grown immeasurably from the many reasonable and humane discussions that I’ve been participating in in the decade since Jones’s tweet. It’s important that we appreciate the work done in spaces created on a foundation of basic human dignity.
But some liberals seem to disagree with me, bemoaning time misspent in the echo chambers of academia. In a recent episode of the Ezra Klein Show, Klein interviews Spencer Cox: the Utah Governor who broke most of the national news about Charlie Kirk’s assassination to the country. Throughout the interview, Klein is aggressively collegiate, while Cox repeatedly refers to leftists as dangerous. Klein doesn’t point out how the right has vilified the left, painting us all with a broad brush as the enemy responsible for assassinations. Cox and Klein are missing an important piece of the puzzle: the left aren’t rejecting conservatives out of petty spite, but out of self-preservation.
While I appreciate that Klein is trying to break out of a stagnant political discourse, I think he’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He continuously implies that the left’s refusal to engage with the right indicates defeatism. He learns the wrong lesson from the Jones tweet. He sees leftists as believing that too many political disagreements are already outside of the acceptable range, and that we have already gone through “some kind of national divorce.” The implication here is that people on both sides of the aisle have given up on each other because of the egregiousness of their differences. This is where I part from Klein most emphatically.
I don’t think of opting out of certain dehumanizing conversations—where, for example, I have to argue that I’m not mentally ill for being gay—means that I’ve given up on political discourse altogether. It’s means I’m being selective to maintain my sanity so that I can reserve some good will. People opt out of conversations about race with explicit racists or about transgender issues with explicit transphobes not because they’ve given up trying to win the argument; they’re doing it because they’re trying to survive.
And yet, Klein is correct that if the left doesn’t talk to people like Cox or Ben Shapiro (another recent guest), we’re going to lose a connection to the political world we’re actually dealing with. So, like him, I’ve been renegotiating what dignity can look like for me as hateful people come closer and authoritarian censorship begins to look inevitable. My sense of responsibility has made opting out no longer an option. It’s about being, as John Ganz mentions in a recent powerful political-historical essay, a pain in the ass.
I think I’ve grown rusty at having rudimentary debates where my argument is essentially variations of the golden rule. And yet, that seems to be where we are. Leftists need to think about whether they want to continue opting out of political discussions that insult their basic human rights (honestly a completely reasonable choice to make) or if they want to opt in in a way that recognizes the full truth of the situation we’re in. I want to offer some clarity on why I’m choosing to reenter the fray and suffer these conversations.
I’ve come up with an allegory that helps me balance my simmering frustration with the necessity to engage. I call it “conservative absenteeism.”
I want to make the disclaimer that this is an allegory and I’m not calling conservative activists stupid or uneducated. I’m making classroom allegory because I’m a teacher and this is my lived experience. It’s simply a scenario to help leftists gain awareness and acceptance of the situation they’ll find themselves in should they choose to engage across political difference.
Picture a classroom nearly full of students who are engaging in a rich conversation about the class subject. Some of them haven’t showed up. Then, halfway through the class, the students who have been absent come in, complaining that they’ve been ignored and demanding the teacher take some time to help them catch up.
When she asks where they’ve been, the kids argue that they’ve been kept out of the classroom. That the teacher locked the door to the classroom so that she could talk to the kids whose education she values more.
While she knows she didn’t lock the door, she won’t deny that she didn’t go out searching the hallways for the absent kids. She’s been busy instead talking to the kids in front of her. She feels a tiny pang of guilt that she’s been moving forward with the lessons without the absent kids, but she also feels a certainty that she’d been on the right path: helping the kids who showed up on time ready to learn. The absent kids’ complaints and self-victimizing are annoying and verge on gaslighting. But she’s not going to kick them out of the class. She has to get over her frustration so she can do her job. The classroom is full now, and we’ve got to learn together.
In this allegory, the kids who came in late to the lesson are conservatives, who want to have their “stances” on social issues taken seriously after decades of nuanced discussion that they didn’t participate in. The teacher is a leftist who I could identify with: someone who has been enjoying lively intellectual discussion within a reasonable range of disagreement. She is frustrated now that she has to welcome in a bunch of people who flatten the classroom’s curve of understanding. But frustration is a feeling she’s felt before. She can cope.
It sounds hopeful doesn’t it? We’re all here together, whether we like it or not?
I’m not sure. I feel resentment1 and grief2 when I imagine myself in the teacher’s position. But I can name those feelings, hold them, and have the discussions that need to happen.
My willingness to have these conversations comes in part from my teacherly disposition, but also from my privilege. I’m a cis, white, married gay man. I can tolerate some pain—but I realize not everyone can or should. I’m not asking everyone on the left to be the teacher in the allegory. I’m simply saying that, if you’re looking for a way to engage with political stances that you find reprehensible without compromising your dignity, it’s helpful to picture the classroom that we’re all in, for better or for worse, together.
Resentment, because: how dare conservatives ignore so many fascinating and well researched conversations and then show up and toss it all out so that we can go back to square one? Most of these conversation I’ve had in the context of academia, where I earned graduate degrees, specifically in LGBTQ+ studies. Did my work leave conservatives behind, or did they drop the ball? Where have they been all this time?
The closest to a conservative professor I’ve had was a Faulkner scholar who spoke about race dismissively, in idiomatic soundbites, rather than incorporating more vigorous scholarship into his readings. I really have to wonder, if conservatives wanted to be inside the ivory tower so bad, why has it taken this long for them to get in? Why are they using executive power to bash their way in rather contributing to conversations currently happening?
I recognize this is me bringing my own baggage into the conversation now, since I did so much work as a scholar of LGBTQ+ literature. But it’s hard for me to accept that conservatives get an expedited track into academic discourse when they’ve done nothing to earn it. The conservative demand for a place at a table they haven’t earned sounds a lot like what they hate about DEI: a compulsory inclusion simply because of a demand that difference be represented. Worse than their reading of DEI, though, because the difference, here, is one that is completely self-made—born of their voluntary absence.
Grief, because of my familiarity with the conversations that have happened among progressive thinkers. I love how many conversations on social issues have gained deep and exciting nuance. Here on the other side of the basic question of whether women, people of color, and queer and trans people deserve to be acknowledged as human beings, new discussions have formed around what kind of communities become possible: theories of utopian kinship by scholars like Tim Dean and Jack Halberstam; Afrofuturist fiction by Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Ta-Nehisi Coates; postructuralist feminist theorists like Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, who reorganize gender and sexuality around the assumption that “nature” is a social construct.
Think about how many cool books have been written on topics like these. And now we’re taking seriously people trying to argue that the civil rights movement was a bad thing for America. Of course we can engage these arguments. Of course we can win these debates. We just first have to grieve the blow to integrity and depth that it requires to punch so far below our intellectual weight.
Afrofuturism! YES!