WEST BRATTLEBORO — Progressives are fighting so many battles these days. Income inequality, poverty, addiction, and homelessness; sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia; and the existential threat posed by climate change - all compete for attention and commitment.
Simply to follow the news is overwhelming, let alone to know how to fight the force of hatred and evil that reigns in the White House
I care about these threats in equal measure. It is impossible to prioritize one above another for me, at least at a rational level. They all require my attention.
Arguably, they require the attention of all of us, and I think it is important not to turn away. When I try to convince my students how important it is to follow the news, no matter how upsetting it is, I tell them that even if they're not reading the news, the news is reading them.
We all care about these issues, but our personal connections to dimensions of the struggles we face are various. I have dear friends for whom climate change is the central issue, and I have had a long-running discussion with one of my oldest friends whether race or class is the place to start addressing change.
At the visceral level, racism, sexism, and homophobia matter to me the most. I am married to a black American woman, and many of our friends fall into the categories of identity most under attack these days: people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community.
My reporting for The Commons over the past year has helped me to feel how deeply pernicious economic inequality is, and how it has made this nation sick or homeless, or struggling to stay above water.
Reporting the stories of people on the margins of the economic world is hard, when all you have to offer is the promise that you will try to tell their story as well as you can.
It is easy to see social inequality in abstract terms when one is removed from it, but confronting it face to face is different.
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Last week, the occupant of the White House made it clear that he will run his 2020 campaign on a platform of racist and xenophobic hatred. The three-word chants he inspires in his adoring crowds have changed, from “lock her up” to “build the wall” to “send her back.”
Who knows what the next chant will be? Fill in the blanks.
There is nothing hidden about Donald Trump's plan to divide the Democratic Party between center and left and use hatred and fear as the motivating factor to turn out his base.
Anyone who thinks Trump is stupid has not been paying attention. He is not intelligent and he does not - or does not know how to - read. But he is extraordinarily cunning and skilled at what he does. There is a reason he occupies the White House.
Trump's skill is to use hateful rhetoric to consolidate the ignorance, fear, and hatred that has always existed in the United States as the engine of his power. His megaphone let the cages open, and now the dogs of hatred are running loose.
As a political strategist, he has an uncanny instinct for dividing his opponents and diminishing their stature. If at any point during the 2016 primaries the traditional Republican Party, which no longer exists, had united behind a single figure, Trump would not be president.
Now, his strategy is to do the same thing to the Democratic Party. He knows the obvious rifts in the party and that the only way he will be defeated is if the center and left of the party join behind a single ticket that can win back the votes that Clinton lost in 2016.
It is far too early to speculate what will happen with the Democrats, although the potential for a circular firing squad seems obvious. Who will emerge standing from the bruising primary battle is a question without an answer. We'll see.
It seems obvious that if Trump wins re-election, the nation we know will be changed for the worse, in ways that may never be eradicated.
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As I see Trump double down on his racist rhetoric and the way he has used “the squad” - four first-term Democratic congresswomen of color - as the foil for his hatred, I wonder somewhat helplessly what anyone can do to stop him. While we wait for Democratic leaders to emerge from the pack, what is our role as progressive citizens?
I think about the ways the issues - of racism and climate change, sexism and economic inequality, xenophobia and homophobia - can divide progressives.
We are basically on the same page, but because of how these issues are prioritized within our own systems of beliefs and values, we can wind up in reasoned arguments about which issue or issues should be our highest priority.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders can send “stay out of Vermont” messages to Joe Biden, while supporters of racial justice can note how little Sanders has ever focused on that issue.
Harris calls out Biden on race and gets a boost in the polls, but her racial background won't help her in New Hampshire. If Warren comes close in Iowa and then New Hampshire, how will she do in South Carolina?
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I've been pondering for a long time about how the various issues we face can somehow be organized into a single stance, one that is united rather than divided.
Politics in our contemporary social media world is about forms of identity and market position, message, and reach, and these sorts of divisions are natural.
At the same time, they really are not very useful.
In fighting a political tide based on fear and hatred, the only option is to respond with confidence and love, and to build on that platform a force similar or greater in power to the power that confronts us now.
This requires a sense of community, that we all are in this together, and a willingness to listen as well as talk - and to learn from one another.
In towns as small as ours, it is hard to know how anything one might do can have an actual impact on the massive forces to which we are subject at the global and national levels.
One thing we can do is lead our lives and engage in the world without fear and hatred, then see how the concerns we share and the different political priorities that divide us have a common root in the hatred and destructive power of the current administration.
It would also be good if we accounted honestly for the ways in which hatred and destruction did not start with Trump but are woven through our nation.
We could welcome and embrace the ways in which his malign administration has made stunningly evident the deep stains that have marked our history from the time of genocide and slavery, as evident now as they were at the time of the Civil War.
Perhaps for some of us, like me, a child of white privilege, this is a time of reckoning, like in that great union song, “Which Side Are You On?”
Perhaps we can imagine what it means to be a good citizen of the United States. What kind of acceptance and welcoming of difference would that mean? What kind of civic engagement?
Perhaps we can imagine what it would mean to celebrate the 4th of July without a burning sense of irony.
The great poet W.H. Auden wrote “We must love one another or die.” Brattleboro is a good town. Maybe we can be no more than a stone in the river of history, but we could be a strong stone, united against the tide sweeping on us in these days.