Julie Kohler's Criticism of Better Angels

A few weeks before the Better Angels convention, the Washington Post published an editorial by Julie Kohler of Democracy Alliance, "How Calls to 'Love Your Enemies' Enforce the Status Quo." She starts by quoting Joe Biden, who vowed never to "demonize" opponents and rejected the notion that the angrier candidate wins. Kohler then points to what she calls a "politics of love" that calls for Americans to be less angry, to have calmer conversations about politics, and generally be nicer to each other. She tags Better Angels as an example of this trend.

Her case against love-thy-neighbor politics parallels many of the concerns I've been voicing in recent posts. Love politics, Kohler argues, idolizes means--civility, politeness, respect--in place of ends, specifically "truth and justice." Love politics, in her view, frames systemic, institutional, and historical problems as simple matters of interpersonal misunderstanding, as if polite enough conversations would redress centuries of white supremacy and patriarchy. She notes how many of love politics' primary interlocutors are conveniently white and male, giving their calls for civility a condescending, Can't you be a little less angry/shrill/hysterical? overtone.

Kohler allows for the importance of empathy (citing stories of conversion from neo-nazis), and she credits the Movement for Black Lives with embracing a grander sense of love. But she rejects "love politics" as espousing an abstract, passive "depolarization" uncoupled from acknowledgement and redress of systemic injustices.

I echo many of Kohler's concerns about depolarization initiatives. But, as is often the case in  ultra-short opinion pieces, the trend she offers for criticism seems a bit caricatured.  Little in her essay suggests that she has much first-hand experience with the Better Angels, at least.  I get the sense that (and I'm judging only by what I see in the piece) she's heard of Better Angels, maybe glanced through the website, and decided that it belongs in the same box as Biden and the other examples she mentions.

In any case, I wanted to put down three quick responses to the points Kohler raises.

First, Better Angels doesn't operate from "love." Despite the organization's Precious Moments-sounding name, no Better Angels meeting, workshop, or training I've experienced ever called for participants to love each other--or love anything beyond a workable democratic process. I've never heard them mobilize "love" as a frame. BA instead champions "patriotic empathy" and "accurate disagreement." Their strongest arguments for these values aren't (just) how unpleasant or hateful it is to demonize people. No, their most potent argument involves pragmatism. So long as US politics stops short of permanently vanquishing one's political opponents after an election, we're stuck dealing with the brute fact that a third-to-a-half of the country seriously disagrees with us. Affective polarization, BA contends, just doesn't work in such a context. It deadlocks government, breaking the primary mechanism for realizing and sustaining a society-wide vision of truth, equality, freedom, and justice for all. If we want those ends, we need the means of something like patriotic empathy

Second, love isn't the opposite of tense confrontation. I wish Kohler had taken more space in her piece to distinguish the "love politics" she critiques with what she describes as the more expansive love of, say, Black Lives Matter activism. Some of the negative attributes she assigns to love politics don't resemble love at all. She levels three main criticisms: "Love politics flattens anger"; "[l]ove politics is ahistoric"; and "[l]ove politics holds no one to account." Perhaps there are politicians and pundits who espouse such a Hallmark view. But I've never read any mature, experience-based account of a loving relationship that doesn't incorporate some anger, hurt, and accountability.

To the contrary, speaking from a place of rage, confronting history, and embracing responsibility are all acts that presuppose some level of mutual care and respect. Who can check me when I've screwed up better than those who love me? With whom do I experience the greatest fury, the deepest wounds, the most profound disappointments if not those I love? Or consider couples who brag that they never fight or disagree. Think how that admission reads as trouble to most experienced couples. Can you really be said to love someone you can't be angry at, hurt by, or disappointed in occasionally? Love, after all, isn't a matter of warm, fuzzy feelings; it's a pattern of priorities extended over time. I put you--I put us--before other things, even and especially when we've hurt each other.

Finally, I'll stipulate that a politics of "love" (in a simplistic, conflict-avoidant sense) gets us nowhere, but neither does a politics of un-love. We're in a cultural moment that celebrates anger, outrage, and righteous indignation. To a certain extent, it's long-overdue corrective. We've endured centuries of oppressive civility in which the marginalized (e.g., women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folk) were not at liberty to voice their pain and anger openly to those who wronged them (e.g., men, white people, straight-cis people). It is certainly not for me as a white, cis-male, middle-class, US citizen to dictate some appropriate amount of anger from marginalized and formerly marginalized people. (All right, you've been angry long enough! Now get over it.)

It never feels super-pleasant to be held accountable for one's actions, attitudes, or status-based privileges. It will always feel like you're being criticized too much, too harshly, too unfairly. Learning to absorb difficult truths about oneself or one's social group with grace and humility--not dismissing them, not diminishing them, and also not collapsing into a navel-gazing ball of guilt or self-pity because of them--takes time and work. Privileged folk of every axis--and we're all relatively privileged on some axis--have to learn how to take those criticisms and act to redress them. 

It is unfair--flat unfair--that such learning requires time. But I don't see a viable alternative (at least, none that sustains some minimal view of human rights and dignity).

If we want to fix the systems that harm people, repairing or replacing the institutions that create and preserve unequal distribution of social goods, we will need durable buy-in from a democratic majority. It's not enough to win the next election with 51% of the vote; that just guarantees a whipsaw regression with the other side wins. No, we have to make our view of the world becomes more or less the political common sense of the society (a state which Gramsci called hegemony).

To do that, we have to garner lasting support from most folk. And, for better or worse, that "most folk" usually includes those who currently benefit from the current system's injustices, who perhaps are responsible for creating and sustaining that unjust, unequal system. Anger at them may be natural, healthy, and understandable. But at some point we need at least some of those people on our side if we want to achieve stable change. The message can't only be You've done this wrong thing; it must also be You can help us make this right.

I don't think we've perfected a politics that delivers both messages effectively. Certainly the kind of watered-down, puppies-and-rainbows politics that Kohler criticizes falls short. But so too does a politics of pure, vitriolic us versus them, a politics where the other side has passed beyond reach of reason and morality. At least within a democratic imaginary, such affective polarization renders us forever powerless. I can think of few surer ways to uphold and enforce an unjust status quo than to sanctify activist strategies that guarantee deadlock