On anti-political projects

I was recently on the Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em podcast to talk about, among other things, this article from the Bulwark — and more specifically, the unflattering description of me contained therein.

It's been nearly six months and yeah, I'm still pretty mad about this — not just because it isn't true, but because it seems to have emboldened a bunch of really irritating internet people to call me "anti-anti-Trump" all the time, always with the obvious intent of either insulting me, impugning my character, or emotionally blackmailing me into a defensive stance where I have to somehow prove that I don't secretly love Donald Trump and want to have his babies.

Have I been lured into that trap more than once, yes; is it entirely possible that I'm in it right now, also yes. But as the song says, it's my party and I'll cry (or write newsletters, or cry while writing newsletters) if I want to.

The rise of "anti-anti" as a concept strikes me as a new, horrible sublevel in the hell known as Fandom Politics. It's like at some point, instead of having opinions or policy preferences or even just a core set of principles, everybody decided it would be way more fun to have oppositional defiant disorder. You will be defined by your antipathy for whatever you're against, or if that's not readily apparent, by other people's antipathy for you.

To be clear, everyone does this (including, as of this writing, the present occupant of the White House; indeed, few are doing it with more enthusiasm.) But god, it is all so incredibly stupid. And it is making the discourse stupid.

This was true when the civil rights movement rebranded as anti-racism; it was true when former champions of free speech repositioned themselves as anti-woke warriors. Being anti- things is not an ideology; it is ideological impoverishment. There's a reason why the phrase "blinding hatred" exists: if you only ever look at a landscape through one narrow scope, the better to sight the thing you want to destroy in your crosshairs, you are seeing neither the landscape nor the thing clearly.

Which brings me to this: as best I can tell, the type of person who uses the term "anti anti Trump" unironically has decided to draw a line that divides all the writing and commentary in the world into two topic categories. In Column A is writing that argues, in very particular terms, that Donald Trump is bad. In Column B is… literally everything else.

And if you don't spend enough time contributing to Column A — or if, heaven forfend, you admit out loud that you don't think contributing to Column A is your job, or the best use of your time, or even as interesting as exploring Column B? Well, you're either with us or against us. And we all know what that means.

I genuinely have no idea how to explain to someone like this that the reason I write with passion about left-coded topics — feminism, free speech, and civil liberties, not to mention sex and books and movies and television— is not because I want to destroy the liberal project from the inside, but because I think these things are interesting and valuable I have interesting things to say about them. (This as opposed to politics, which have never remotely interested me except insofar as they intersect with culture, something Republican politics until recently rarely did.)

And while I'm intrigued by the notion that I'm engaged in some sort of five-dimensional chess strategy where I pass up multiple opportunities to argue openly for the MAGA agenda I allegedly really want — for a highly sympathetic audience and for a lot (and I mean a lot) of money! — in favor of writing galaxy-brained thinkpieces that result in half the internet calling me a fascist and the other half calling me an unfuckable cat lady… sorry, but what exactly is supposed to be my endgame here? I've been doing this for a decade. At some point, I kind of think you need to accept that the mask you're so convinced I'm wearing is actually just my face.

But these are just my personal gripes. The reason why this matters, in the cosmic sense, is how incredibly corrosive it is to social trust. Nothing good comes from forcing people to choose sides in a conflict they want no part of, or whose contours they may even be struggling to fully understand. Nor from the notion that nobody ever really says what they mean — that indeed, every public statement a person makes is just a false front for the giant cache of secret terrible things they truly believe but are too smart or scared to express. It's exhausting, and isolating, and it turns us all into frightened little crab-people, scuttling through the world in a defensive crouch with our phones held out in front of us like talismans meant to ward off the devil.

To that end, the thing where people who can't be readily identified as members of whichever political fandom will have a tribal ideology non-consensually assigned to them — whether it's anti-anti-Trump or crypto-woke or something else — makes sense to me insofar as loss of trust makes it very, very hard to tolerate ambiguity. If you perceive yourself to be at war, the person who declines to join the fray and instead stands off to the side painting pictures of the battlefield makes you nervous in ways even your enemy does not. You may hate the guys on the other team but at least you know what team they're on. This other guy, though — who says he shares your values, and who keeps wandering through your camp, but who won't pick up a weapon and won't sing the war songs and seems more interested in criticizing your battle strategy than in shellacking your allegedly mutual enemy? Not only is he suspicious, he's annoying.

And unlike the enemy, he's both unarmed and standing right next to you, which makes him awfully easy to hit.

But just because this dynamic is understandable, that doesn't make it good. And so I'll end by doing the only thing I know how to do, which is to say what I sincerely believe to be true: I don't have a political project, and more than that, I don't really think a political project is something most writers should have. Our job is not to effect policy change or get certain candidates elected. If that latter thing is what you want, activism and politics are right there! But writers? Our job and our gift is to describe and understand the world, to find meaning in it — and hopefully, to help other people find it too.