I have a good story for you

Deeply awkward, unexpectedly wonderful political conversations were among the best surprises of my year

Most forms of civic engagement have felt repellent to me this year because I believe in the value of communal life but am not sure if the options I have for expressing this value will accomplish anything real. I still vote and call my representatives and volunteer—occasionally— because I think these are good things to do. I just feel agnostic about the efficacy of these actions, which makes picking up a phone or mailing a ballot require more activation energy than they have in previous years. 

I was skeptical about the invitation that arrived in my inbox a few weeks ago, asking me to dialogue with a few people in my city about ways to help young people engage the complex, difficult questions raised by the year’s headlines. This is exactly the kind of opportunity I used to jump at, which now only makes me roll my eyes.

The meeting agenda read, amazingly,

• Gender

• War

• Elections

With the closing “please come ready to discuss.” 

Would this meeting become the site of a communal trash can fire? A civic miracle? I would probably have to attend for professional development purposes, so I texted my group chats and asked everyone to pray for me. 

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I’ve attended many, many events aimed at helping people hone their approach to contentious topics, and they have only been occasionally satisfying. Most of the time they have been annoying, and this is probably because I am usually with people in activist progressive circles, activist evangelical circles, or the tiny, intense area of overlap between the two. 

Hardcore progressives are intense, hardcore evangelicals are intense, and they have made up the entirety of my friend group and professional network for most of my adult life. I think our interactions tend to be well-intentioned but pedantic, and so attuned to the slightest gradation of difference between our opinions that they fragment endlessly into stupid, kaleidoscopic disagreements that rarely accomplish anything real. 

I am probably the most irritating person in these settings because I talk so much and love to win. I know this about myself, so I have taken a multi year break from events that promise to raise awareness or promote dialogue. Not only do they achieve ambiguous results, not only do they turn people into the most gratingly self-righteous versions of themselves, they usually lead me to behave in ways that I end up being ashamed of, and make me sad about the apparent difficulty of looking at the world in all its complexity, and coming up with good ways to respond to it. 

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I attended the meeting and showed up with a bad attitude. I hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before. I was wearing the only clean shirt I had available that day and it happened to be ugly. I could see someone in front of me carrying political literature that already looked annoying, introducing the possibility that we would soon get in a fight, and that I would leave in a terrible mood.

Most of the people in the room were older than me. Some of them were my parents’ age. They were, judging from the small talk I overheard, representative of a range of political affiliations, from deep conservatism to assorted progressivisms, a few of them immigrants whose ideologies didn’t map onto Western spectrums. 

All of them, however, were years or decades deep into their work with local communities. When the meeting began there was none of the endless theorizing I am used to hearing at these kinds of events. Everyone had a specific group of people in mind that they intended to go back to and care for afterward, which meant every part of our conversation was forced to answer the question of what we could do, immediately, with the conclusions we had drawn.

It was a pragmatic and remarkably polite two hours. There were several moments where I felt conflicted about the terminology we were using, particularly when it came to preferences that differed by age group and political affiliation. A few years ago I would have wanted to litigate our word choices, but I think being constantly directed to consider the practical application of our ideas stopped me—given a choice between curating a perfect group vocabulary and listening to a grandparent who has served in Chinatown community centers for three decades, I have a greater likelihood of doing something worthwhile if I choose the latter.

There is obviously a place for rigorous, extended, theory-laden dialogues. America is a complicated place and I am suspicious of any call to collective action that is not accompanied by serious thinking. A few days after this meeting, however, I was trying to identify why it had felt so remarkable to me, and realized that it had provided something that has become hard to find in our political climate: a conversation about what we should believe and what we should do, inextricably tied to who we were responsible to care for.

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In his critique of market capitalism, Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi argued that our economies become corrosive once they are disembedded from other features of our society. Think of a community filled with institutions and goods that have no market value, but enormous cultural or religious significance. Ideally, these things would be worth preserving for their relationships to the people within the community. However, if the market becomes the dominant arbiter of value, it can override these kinds of considerations. If the market becomes increasingly independent, it will operate in a way that satisfies its own logic, with less and less concern for the other priorities that shape its surroundings. 

This is not a perfect illustration, but the dysfunction of the disembedded market seems comparable to the dysfunction of disembedded political conversations. 

There is no shortage of commentary delivered in every medium, no end to the number of hot takes accessible on the internet, but most political content seems performative, low stakes, self-satisfied, and therefore useless. There are a number of high-profile local elections in my city but a number of them seem to involve money from outside sources, putting even local decision making at a remove. Our politics can seem like a closed system, much like the disembedded market, which begins to act for its own sake without consideration for anything else in its environment. 

Given this context, it felt miraculous to watch a heterogeneous group of people talk through their disagreements while remaining beholden not to their political affinities, but to the communities they wanted to answer to. 

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During this election year, I have been thinking every day about my faith in an incarnate God. I used to wonder if Jesus’ choice to take on flesh was a purely aesthetic one. Maybe it would have been odd for him to get to know people while wandering the earth as a disembodied spirit; maybe it was better for God to be wearing something as he dwelled among us.

Obviously there is more to his choice than that, as a million divinity students could probably explain to me. The rationale, and the eloquence, of his decision have only recently become intuitive for me, in part because of the ludicrousness of our politics. How can anyone possibly make an argument about what is best for a group of people while standing at a remove? Jesus’ message included the declaration of a new, unimpeachably good Kingdom, and he made it a point to articulate this as a human being fully embedded, even fully vulnerable, to the world.

I think I made myself sick of politics because my primary motivator was a desire to feel some control over my environment—to feel a degree of distance between me and the problems endemic to my surroundings—and the behaviors I participated in reflected this. Imbibing political content can make me feel like I’m doing something, becoming more informed, but in the end, no situation in the world is changed by what I consume. Getting into a debate about IVF with a group of people who do not plan to have children is a fun intellectual exercise that quickly becomes silly and vain. Posting about my convictions on social media is not worth discussing. Voting is still fine.

Most of these behaviors, with the exception of the last one, are about enjoying the sensation of asserting myself, and about lowering the stakes of doing so. There is zero pleasure left in this for me, because all evidence points to the destructiveness of politics enjoyed for its own sake, on my own terms.

Earlier this month I went back for another round of this meeting with community workers, and it was not the form of civic engagement I am used to. Everyone wanted to ask each other what they had done with what we last discussed. Everyone wanted to ask what our actions had accomplished. To my irritation, and my relief, nobody asked me what I thought.