“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” This is a line from Father Richard Rohr which I have on a sticky note on my computer—a reminder to practice vigilance about what I want to be for in the world, rather than who I am against.
It is early days in Kamala Harris’s run for the White House and I am feeling some hope start to come online again—hope, at least, for a different conversation. I love Biden and am grateful for his compassion, care, and civility, as well as his interest in governing for all Americans. I am hopeful that Kamala will carry that forward and offer yet another reset at a time of deep uncertainty and global fear: I’m daring to hope that she can make a compelling case to Republicans that our Venn diagram of shared values is much vaster than we’ve been led to believe, that a majority of us truly are somewhere in the middle. I think that’s certainly the reality, as evidenced by the desire for common sense gun laws and access to abortion and action on the climate. There are a lot of excellent options on the list of VP candidates that are floating around—Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, and more—though my fantasy would be a split ticket, a gesture from Democrats that there is still decency and sound policy amongst the Republicans, even as their party has been horribly obscured by the far right and terrifying propositions like Project 2025. (I’d love someone like Adam Kingzinger or Mitt Romney, though I recognize this is a delusion.) Trump had the opportunity to choose someone moderate and signal a difference in his worldview, and he did not, which suggests that if he wins, he will drag us on an inexorable death march where we will lose more rights, and sow more hate and division.
We need something new—a platform that includes as many of us as possible, to end this era where it feels (and sometimes is) unsurvivable to be governed by the other party. To go back to Father Richard Rohr, we need to stop practicing “A Politics of Expulsion,” which I would also call a politics of exclusion. I love reading Rohr on politics because he offers a sound critique of both Democrats and Republicans, highlighting our blind spots in a way that feels honest and true. Because friends? This is not working.
As Rohr writes in The Wisdom Pattern, “An awful lot of activists on the left and reactionaries on the right have no positive vision, nothing they believe in, no one they are in love with. They are just overwhelmed with what’s wrong and think that by eliminating the so-called ‘contaminating element,’ the world will be pure and right again. That is the major illusion of people on both left and right. In different ways, they are both into a politics of expulsion. It’s just the object of their expulsion that is different. One day, the mainline Christian movement will itself recognize that Jesus was never into expelling or excluding—only transforming and integrating.”
In many ways, The Wisdom Pattern foretells Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which I’ll get to in a minute, as Rohr too writes about the Shadow Lands we find ourselves in when we assume righteousness and project all “badness” onto the opposite party.
Here’s Rohr on LIBERALS:
The way of fight is what I’ll call the way of Simon the zealot, and often the way of the cultural liberal. These folks want to change, fix, control, and reform other people and events. The zealot is always looking for the evil, the political sinner, the unjust one, the oppressor, or the bad person over there. The zealot permits himself or herself to righteously attack them, to hate them, even to kill them. When they do, they think they are “doing a holy duty for God” (John 16:2).
It is a general rule that when we don’t transform our pain we will always transmit it. Zealots and contemporary liberals often have the right conclusion, but their tactics and motives are frequently filled with self, power, control, and the same righteousness that they hate in conservatives. Basically, they want to do something to avoid holding the pain until it transforms them. Because of this too-common pattern, I have come to mistrust almost all righteous indignation and moral outrage. In my experience, it is hardly ever from God.
“Resurrected” people prayerfully bear witness against injustice and evil—but also agree compassionately to hold their own complicity in that same evil. It is not over there, it is here. It is our problem, not theirs.
Here’s Rohr on CONSERVATIVES:
It gives us, strangely enough, a very false sense of control and superiority, because we’ve spotted the evil and, thank God, it’s over there. As long as they are the problem and we can keep our focus on changing them, correcting them, expelling them as the contaminating element, then we can sit in a reasonably comfortable position. But it’s a position that the saints called pax perniciosa, a dangerous and false peace. It feels like peace, but it’s not a true peace. It is the peace of avoidance, denial, and projection. The peace of the Crucified comes from holding the tension; the dangerous peace comes from expelling it elsewhere or denying the pain. Yet, to the untrained, the latter feels like peace.
It has taken us a long time to realize that we cannot afford to hate because we become a mirror or disguised image of the same. Once we let the other determine the energy and agenda, we can only react to it, and soon we are using the same energy and the same agenda, but we can’t see it.
This leads us to the second diversionary tactic: the way of fight. This is the common path of the Pharisee, the uninformed, the falsely innocent, and often the conservative type. They deny the pain altogether. They refuse to carry the shadow side of anything, in themselves or in their chosen groups. There will be no uncertainty, no ambiguity. There will be no problems. It is a form of narcotic, and sometimes probably necessary to get through the day.
Does this sound familiar?
I am not perfectly politically aligned with Naomi Klein, and I loved Doppelganger—I too, am obsessed with doubles and shadow projection, and Klein is clear-eyed about how this mechanism works in our culture, and how it shows up in ourselves. Because if we can’t see what we, ourselves, are up to, we are lost—and we lose each other.
If you haven’t read Doppelganger, it focuses on Naomi Klein’s double—Naomi Wolf, a former feminist icon and author of books like The Beauty Myth. Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf are frequently confused and conflated because of their names and what were similar politics and paths at one time—but Wolf was canceled in 2019, and veered far right, into Steve Bannon land. Doppelganger explores this phenomenon of projection and alienation. As Klein writes, “When someone is pushed out of progressive conversations or communities because they said or did something hurtful or ignorant, or questioned an identity orthodoxy, or got too successful too fast and was deemed due for a takedown, their absence is frequently met with celebration, as Wolf’s exile from Twitter was. But these people don’t disappear just because we can no longer see them. They go somewhere else. And many of them go to the Mirror World: a world uncannily like our own, but quite obviously warped.”
When I go home to Montana and talk with conservatives there, I’m always struck by two thoughts: “We feel the same about most things.” Followed by, “How is she/he not a Democrat? How have we lost so many people?”
I think it’s largely from playing a politics of expulsion—and of making people “bad” by auto-assigning them labels like “privileged” and telling them their language is wrong, that they are beneficiaries of white supremacy, that their existence is oppressive, and so on. When we morally exclude people as a practice, we put them on the defensive and send them to the other side. That is how this mechanism works—there is no mystery there. Humans want to belong. We need to belong. Our survival depends on it.
Here’s Klein again:
“On the democratic socialist left, we favor social policies that are inclusive and caring—universal public health care, well-funded public schools, decarceration, and rights for migrants. But left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive nor caring. And in contrast to Bannon’s courting of disaffected Democrats, we also don’t put enough thought into how to build alliances with people who aren’t already in our movements. Sure, we pay lip service to reaching out, but in practice most of us (even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police) spend a lot of time policing our movements’ borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller, not larger.”
And then she really cooks with gas: “When entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender, and labeled “privileged,” there is little room to confront the myriad ways that working-class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order, with left-wing movements losing many opportunities for alliances that would make us stronger and more powerful. All of this is highly unstrategic, because whichever groups and individuals we kick to the curb, the Mirror World is there, waiting to catch them, praise their courage, and offer a sympathetic ear.”
There’s still time for us to switch gears. I know many of us are angry. Many of us are terrified of what a second Trump term might mean for us and our children—but while we resist that possibility by turning out the vote and rallying around the only sane and reasonable option—let’s not presume that everyone on the other side of the party lines is “bad.” We know this isn’t true.* Resist the urge and rhetoric to morally exclude half the country. Choose hope, optimism, and love instead—and every opportunity to “include and transcend.” This country is not only big enough for all of us, but this world contains all of us. Let’s find ways to move forward together. Turn down people in your feed who sow division; turn up people who are trying to bring us together. (Klein also writes about people who have built vast personal brands “at the forefront of divisions”—there’s definitely a lot of Dark Triad personality traits in that group.)
*If you want a fantastic read on choosing optimism, please pre-order Jamil Zaki’s Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. It’s gorgeous and compelling and a fast read. We spoke earlier this week about some of the stunning revelations in his book for a podcast episode during release week. For now, here’s one image from the book. The top represents how we actually feel about immigration—the bottom is a response to the question: “How do you think someone on the other side feels about immigration?” Our perception is a U—the reality is somewhere in the middle.
(Meanwhile, does anyone think there’s any chance that Trump won’t be on the ballot either? I don’t think we’re through the weirdness quite yet.)
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I loved this! It is a huge opportunity for self reflection. I try really hard to witness without judgment the posts and opinions of people I don't align with politically so that I can practice taming that natural inclination to shut them down. It is not always easy but I agree that more connects us than divides us and if we just stopped judging each other, we would open up the opportunity for dialogue.
"The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better." This is GOLD. Loved this post and also feeling hopeful. x