COMMUNITY AS RESISTANCE: an open letter to my daughters

My dearest loves,

You are not alone.

These are the words your mom and I both woke up with this morning. Not like we slept much. How could we? Last night’s news—that more than half our country had enthusiastically united behind a xenophobic, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pathologically dishonest, cruel, petty, vengeful, narcissistic would-be dictator—brought us both near the brink of despair. I know it has done the same for you as well, my darlings, and my heart is breaking because of it.

How on earth could this happen?? And what on earth do we do now??

As I lay in bed last night, drifting in and out of a fitful sleep, feeling the dread and desolation coursing through my veins and heart, I agonized over these questions. And then the words came, faintly at first, but then more clearly: you are not alone.

And, my sweet loves, you really aren’t alone. Just practically speaking, nearly half of your fellow Americans are probably feeling the same sense of fear and desolation that you are today. And I expect that pretty much all of them are now more determined than ever to find ways to push back against the rising tide of hatred and intolerance. But even more than that, the seven of you also have something incredibly precious that most of your fellow Americans don’t: you have each other. In your sisterhood you have a built-in community of the most profound kind of kinship imaginable. I mean, even if you didn’t like each other, this would still be a rare thing. But you all like and love each other intensely. You are all deeply involved in one another’s lives. You are all deeply sympathetic to one another and deeply aligned in your values. And this is something truly extraordinary, especially in today’s ionized, displaced, and disembodied world. This is a treasure of the highest order.

But herein also lies the problem. I think that, in some way, the sense of belonging and community that all of you have known since childhood is the exact thing that so many of the people running after Trump—as well as those standing against him—are starving for right now. And this lack of community is wreaking havoc on our country and on our world.

It’s well known, to the point of being a truism, that many of the Trump faithful come from rural and small-town America. Living as many of them do in dwindling farming communities or deteriorating post-industrial towns, these folks seem to be fueled by a sense that the modern world has left them behind, stripped them of their culture and values, devalued them and impoverished them, and bequeathed their inheritance to strangers. Their once-thriving towns have, in so many places, become wastelands populated largely by the aging and infirm, the poor and drug-addicted, and people who don’t look like them or talk like them. All the while, their best and brightest run off to more liberal cities and college towns and get reshaped according to ideals they don’t understand or agree with, and then proceed to look back on them with embarrassment and shame. They feel isolated, forgotten, and judged. And so, when someone tells them that he’ll give them back everything they’ve lost, give them back their place in the world, give them back their lost prosperity, give them back their communities, give them back their families, they listen. And it’s not hard to understand why.

Another huge swath of the MAGA movement seems to be the proverbial “angry white men,” many of whom are, by all accounts, young, single, and lonely. These folks too feel forgotten, hopeless, and unwanted—especially by women—and they seem to be casting about for someone or something to blame. And, since so many of their actual communities either don’t appear to want them or don’t even exist anymore, they gather in online spaces. There, in the midst of algorithmically sorted “anger communities” and echo chambers, they find a measure of connection and purpose in discussing their shared miseries, sketching out visions for how to claim (or reclaim) their rightful inheritance, and, at worst, plotting how to revenge themselves on those who they think stole it from them. It was probably only a matter of time before a rich, skillful, and unscrupulous angry white man, supported by other rich and unscrupulous angry white men, would come along and channel their resentment and isolation into a source of real political power. And come along he has. And while I personally react to this demographic with a kind of deep revulsion, I also can't help but sympathize with their anger and pain. There really doesn’t seem to be much room in today’s world for these men, at least not on the face of it. And, as a white man who could easily have become one of them but for the loving community I have around me, I find this heartbreaking.

There are clearly lots of other people who turned out for Trump yesterday that don’t fit the above stereotypes—there had to be. Even women, people of color, immigrants, and many others that his movement has directed its hatred against, voted for him in significant numbers. Though I personally can’t imagine why they would have done so, I’m sure they all had their reasons. And I’m sure I might learn something from them if I took the time to hear their stories. But I’m also equally sure that Trump has deceived them too, as he’s done to the rest of his loyal followers.

The common theme in all this, it seems to me, is that all of these people are looking for community, connection, and a sense of belonging. The fact that a lot of them appear to find some of what they’re looking for in religion, and in conservative Christianity in particular, seems to be no safeguard against their being taken in by Trump. We know from our own bitter experience how much conservative Christianity—for all its talk of love and acceptance—is all too often just another exclusionary and divisive ideology, centered on separating the righteous from sinners, the sheep from the goats, seemingly unable to resist pronouncing eternal judgment on all those it deems unworthy. We also know, again from bitter experience, how much conservative Christianity believes itself to be under threat in the modern age. Under threat, in more abstract terms, from the forces of diversity, tolerance, liberalism, feminism, “wokeism”, and “the gay agenda”; and, in more concrete terms, under threat from the fact that the towns and neighborhoods that once materially supported them are now slowly disintegrating, both economically and demographically. As a result, many conservative congregations wind up feeling isolated, hopeless, and disenfranchised on an institutional level in much the same way that the MAGA faithful do on an individual level. So I think it’s little wonder that a cynical demagogue, who comes along portraying himself as God’s chosen servant who will lead believers into a promised land of righteous theocratic rule, manages to get conservative Christians to follow him, despite the fact that his own personal life and character run contrary to nearly everything they claim to believe in.

And why should this be? I think it’s because, again, what people are really looking for is not ideology or faith per se, but a meaningful sense of community and real human connection. And Trump seems, counterintuitively, to be offering them a path to that.

What’s so frustrating is that, in some ways, he is offering them a path to that. The power of his movement is that his followers are actually more united than those of us who oppose him. The election results are living proof of that. And I think the reason for it is quite simple. Just like it’s a great deal easier to draw a map of the world when you leave out most of the complicated geographical details, it’s likewise a great deal easier to create unity when you decide to exclude anybody that thinks, looks, believes, loves, or talks differently from you. Building consensus from a broad range of experiences and agendas is hard. Building consensus from a group that is, for the most part, already ideologically and culturally aligned—or at least willing to endure a good deal of cognitive dissonance—is comparatively simple. And so Trump took a very predictable shortcut, as every autocrat before him has done. He built a movement around excluding or controlling everyone that his base sees as complicating factors—women, immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone else who refuses to fit their mold—and thereby managed to build a remarkably unified movement with astonishing speed and facility.

Obviously, though, you see the fatal flaw. Time and again, both history and common sense have proven that the kind of unity you can build from a diverse range of perspectives and experiences, and with an unfaltering respect for truth and human autonomy, is vastly stronger than the alternative. The trouble is, as I said, that this is really difficult to do. It takes time. It takes creativity. It takes patience. And it takes a LOT of careful negotiation. Doing it the other way is just so much easier and faster. As the old saying goes, “a lie can get around the world before the truth can get its pants on.”

And all this assumes that we’re even doing the work of building consensus to begin with, which I’m really not convinced we are. Not for lack of trying, though. I think people just don’t know how to do it. I also think that some of those who believe in liberalism have forgotten that diversity is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a deeper and stronger kind of unity. Diversity is merely a fact. It’s the world as it is, in all its richness and complexity. Yes, ignoring facts and simplifying things so that they fit into our rigid framework is absurd and harmful. And yes, liberalism therefore rightly demands that we maintain a commitment to accounting for a multiplicity of facts—a multiplicity of people—as we find them, and not as we wish them to be. But even if we’ve diligently crafted a vision informed by a diverse array of perspectives and experiences, we still have to decide what to do.

So, my dearest loves, I return to what I asked at the beginning: what do we do now?

Well, I think we start small, and we start with what we know. If people are searching for community and connection—us included—then let’s create it in the ways that we know work. Let’s gather. Let’s make a plan, let’s all work together to realize it, and then let’s eat, read poems, tell stories, dance, and sing. In other words, let’s have parties. And let’s have them with everyone who wants to join us, casting our net as wide as may be, provided people are willing to play our game, remain open-minded, and be respectful of others’ differences.

We know from experience how effective this can be at building community. However, I propose that we do this not just as way of creating community for its own sake, but as a conscious and deliberate form of resistance. Resistance to the rising tide of intolerance. Resistance to isolation. Resistance to despair. Resistance to arrogant self-assurance and stubborn narrow-mindedness. Resistance to divisiveness and hate.

Even before the spectre of a second Trump era loomed over us, we as a family underwent our own sort of ordeal by fire, gradually getting pushed out of our home and livelihood of fourteen years by an eerily similar intolerant Christian agenda. And even though we were judged and censured for forging connections with people outside our narrow religious fold (yes, seriously, that’s why your mom and I lost our jobs at St. Tikhon’s), we gathered anyway; we built relationships anyway; we sang, danced, ate, drank, and told stories anyway; and we thus created a far bigger and more loving community for ourselves than we ever could have done had we played just by their narrow rules.

Now that clouds seem to be gathering, not just over our family and friends, but over our whole country—our whole world—we need to redouble our efforts, now more than ever. We need to have gatherings that celebrate people’s unique gifts and identities; gatherings that comfort people in their griefs and relieve them of some of their guilt, shame, and fear; gatherings that help us all tell the stories of who we are and why we each matter; gatherings that help us realize that we are not alone.

So even as I sit alone in my office, my loves, grieving the news of the day and struggling to cling to the glimmer of hope I had yesterday, I know in my heart that I am not alone. And I am deeply grateful. I’m grateful for your mother, grateful for our family, grateful for our friends, grateful for you. And I’m also deeply proud of each of you and the amazing women that you’re becoming. The women that you have become. I’m sorry that you have to face this darkness today, my loves—I wish I could have done more to protect you from it—but I’m so glad that you don’t have to face it alone. Because you are not alone. You know that. Now let’s help other people know it too, and maybe together we can make the darkness just a little brighter. We at least have to try.

Whatever happens, though, know that I love each and every one of you with all my heart and soul.

Dad

November 6, 2024