Right before the election, I wrote a post on Facebook about how I planned to handle any post-election tumult, regardless of the result. I was going to act with love towards everyone, even those whose politics have offended or alienated me in the past. This was a massive change in direction for me, as I so often burned bridges just to breathe in the smoky scent of my own perceived righteousness.
In fact, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, I made a conscious choice to cut ties with many Trump supporters. I felt that if I couldn’t influence the election, at least I could signal my disapproval of their choices. It was part of a broader pattern in my adult life where I made politics the primary value in my life- over friendship, over family, over relationships with colleagues. This time around, with all that I’d lost through my own choices, I was going to change direction and do everything in my power not to lose anyone else over a process- politics- that had brought me nothing but misery my entire life. In my post, I described how, even though I had drifted from that perspective, I was ready to return to a value from my innocent younger days, when I aimed for the Christian ideal of acting with love towards all regardless of their choices.
The post got positive feedback for the most part until a few days after the election, when a man who I’d attended a high school summer program with- let’s call him Carmine- chimed in with this comment. “I’m not sure what the world needs right now is another straight, white, cisgender Christian man who is convinced of his own rightness. Look at who in your feed is struggling with your words and your approach,” Carmine wrote. “Perhaps listening to people who are marginalized- now more than ever- instead of deciding to do things your way because you are convinced you were right has some merit to it.”
I was in a bit of shock when I read it. The implication was that I was not listening to people who were hurting. Not only did I hear them, I had spent a lifetime fighting for those marginalized voices. And now I was expected to be silent even as I was hurting, marginalized in ways he could never perceive by just cherry picking my superficial identity. How had my post calling out my own past self-righteousness attracted this reaction? Was this performance art intended to prove my point?
I waited a couple of days and then responded, and he, a self-anointed champion of inclusion, blocked me after that of course. My post about maintaining contacts with people I disagree with remarkably led to my world getting a little bit smaller. In fact, more than a little bit, as I felt I would not be welcome at future reunions of this high school group. My intent was to be inclusive, and I ended up being excluded.
Carmine is white and cisgender himself, and he makes a good living in corporate America just like me. But because he happens to be gay and not Christian, he is convinced that he is more entitled to opine than I am, even though I have devoted my life to fighting for the same causes that are important to him. He used my identity as a weapon to exclude me from the righteous few who had a right to feel things about the election. Carmine’s in-group was diverse in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and creed but it was homogeneous in its thinking, excluding others for no other reason than how they were born. When we start to define who is included by whether they meet our definition of morality, we in turn define an out-group that we can morally justify excluding.
The next week, at a meeting of the local youth baseball league’s board of directors, we had a spirited debate about whether the more experienced and talented “travel” players should be required to be play in the “open to everyone, talents may vary” rec baseball league in the spring. This is a pretty massive conflict in youth sports right now, between those who want to make interest in baseball as broad-based as possible and those who want to focus on only the elite from the earliest of ages.
Those of you around my age might remember that youth baseball used to revolve around a recreation season in the spring, where players from your town were divided into teams and played a season. Some of the most talented players would then go to play at an “all-star” level in a league where they represented the town against nearby towns in a travel league. Now, that dynamic has been reversed, and travel is a year round phenomenon starting from age 7, where a kid could be 9 years old and fully left behind from the game if they don’t commit to at least three nights a week all year round. The rigor and professionalization of youth sports is destroying broad-based love for the game and separating kids into winners and losers before they hit puberty.
Travel-first advocates were taking a very old school, Nietzschean approach to defining the in group and the out group. These travel-only advocates would argue that we are wrong to move away from valuing heroism and power of the individual and towards valuing humility and compassion for the group.
Strict identitarians like Carmine and travel-only baseball advocates might not seem the likeliest of allies, but both were seeking to construct the world in a way that the group they supported were included and others were excluded. One acted from a position of dominance and strength and the other arguably from a position of compassion and concern for the forgotten, but they ended up in the same place. Carmine was using the power of his identity, ironically as part of a group that was traditionally excluded, to exclude me from the right to comment on something. And the travel advocates thought it was simple logic that the most talented athletes should only care about and associate with each other, thus excluding everyone else.
We can trace the story of our times to the ongoing struggle between in groups that are accepted into some form of coalition and out groups that are not. In groups embrace exclusivity to perpetuate their winning hand and out groups seek inclusivity to reverse their losing hand. You can reduce almost all of the conflict in our society to this struggle, how these groups are formed, how they gain power, and what they do to retain or expand their power. The powerful seek to extend their power by setting conditions that validate their power, and the powerless struggle against these conditions in the hope of changing them.
Isn’t it interesting how we perceive different versions of the word “exclude”? To “exclude” someone or something has a negative connotation, but to be “exclusive” makes something desired and well regarded. The lesson might be that we revolt at the act of being excluded when we are on the outside looking in, but we all desire to be part of the in group that is “exclusive.” This contradiction is the heart of this issue.
As I was putting these thoughts together, I ended up reading an excellent essay entitled “Does Morality Does Us Any Good?” by Nikhil Krishnan in The New Yorker which reviews the new book “The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality” by the German philosopher Hanno Sauer. The creation of “in groups” can be simplified to a form of cooperation, which Krishnan notes was our way of compensating for our vulnerability when facing predators. As Krishnan explains, “the history that made us into creatures capable of cooperation also gave us the capacity to hate one another in the aggregate.” And while my current thoughts overlapped with but did not mirror the essay, the essay did lead me to think more crisply about how the choices we make about inclusivity are in fact a reflection of our conceptions of morality. We see these struggles in the policy world, in our professional lives, and in our daily interactions.
Policy debates are largely about defining in groups and out groups. Who will be included in the benefits that government offers and who will be excluded? Who will be expected to pay a fair share of taxes and who will instead be included in special classes that don’t have to pay those fair shares because of their status? Who will be welcomed into this country and who will not? What countries will we defend against aggression and which will we ignore? Billions of dollars are spent fighting over these issues, both in elections and in the policy debates that follow. Right now, the billionaires are the ultimate in group, and the working class are fully excluded as the out group.
Political movements that seek to level the playing field do best when they are inclusive of everyone. In a democratic system, forming majority coalitions is the ultimate currency. So a movement that seeks to lift up the poor and vulnerable shouldn’t exclude some of those poor and vulnerable because they don’t check boxes about what the in group of that movement considers to be morally righteous views. Coalitions are complicated and contradictory, as we are seeing right now in the debate about H1B visas among the far right wing crowd.
Exclusion has become a hallmark of politics. In my area, certain local political leaders shortsightedly build coalitions that only include their allies and permanently exclude adversaries who share similar political goals from the process. They define their coalitions narrowly enough to maintain a fig leaf of power over the party but not broadly enough to ever win any elections. And one of the most potent tools in their arsenal is gossip- the ultimate malicious source of exclusion. If you don’t support the leader, you must stand contrary to the group’s values, and you are no longer welcome to be a part of that group. In general elections, they bleed 20 percent of potential voters just by being exclusive.
More broadly, the Democratic Party has often defined itself in relation to the identity groups that support it and their interests, and some of the more radical factions of those identity groups now seek to actively exclude people who are not members of them or unambiguous allies of their views. That exclusion has allowed the reactionaries on the other side to build a coalition in opposition to the scolding identarian faction of Democrats, one that somehow has convinced so many out groups to support an in group which has policies which will continue to exclude them. You might counter that Republicans have done the same, and that’s not untrue, but those coalitions have proven large and motivated enough to win elections.
There’s no doubt that the battle to be included certainly incorporates issues of meaningful rights for which we must continue to fight. The original sin of this country was allowing slavery, the ultimate evil exclusion from basic human rights. From there, the country spent its first 175 years excluding persons of color and women from political participation. Today, we still see people excluded based on their identity all the time. But over the past generation, exclusion based on identity has begun to cut both ways. Just like what I experienced with Carmine, there is an assumption on the left that straight cisgender white Christian men are naturally suspect. To be clear, a person can recognize and reflect on the advantages of their identity and can try to reckon with the very real implications of their privilege without being expected to self-flagellate.
Krishnan notes this phenomenon in his essay: “The civil rights struggles of these decades have had an urgency and an excitement that. . . make their supporters think victory will be both quick and lasting. When it is neither, disappointment produces the ‘identity politics’ that is supposed to the be the essence of the present cultural moment. . . . Our new sensitivities . . . guide us as we begin to scrutinize the symbolic markers of group membership more and more closely and to penalize any non-compliance.”
This impulse to scold and attack anyone in these majority groups continues to drive people away from allyship and undoubtedly contributed heavily to the rise of Trumpism. If there’s one lesson that the past decade has taught me, it’s that no one wants to be scolded, and scolding almost never educates. Instead, it almost always alienates. When you’re trying to build a coalition to overcome oppression, how is that wise?
The dangers of exclusion are not just political. We also see this sort of thing all the time with my daughter’s autism. A summer camp doesn’t specifically exclude her but it sets conditions that make her participation impossible. A swim lesson program at a local gym doesn’t prohibit her from participating but it conveniently fails to call back when you follow up on lessons. My daughter specifically and our family generally are constantly being excluded unwittingly, and I don’t even blame the people who do it most of the time because I would have done the same before living with someone facing Sam’s challenges. Life is hard enough- why make it harder by being inclusive?
The example of Sam teaches that exclusion often isn’t intentional, and I know for certain that supporters of travel only baseball programs aren’t thinking about or intending to exclude these rec players from meaningful participation. Instead, they are just thinking about what’s best for the people in the in group. By trying to decouple the travel players from the rec program, the rec program would lose its best talent, and the other players would lose the opportunity to learn from and improve by playing with these athletes. In creating this exclusionary approach, the rec program would be sure to suffer, both in talent and participation. But of course that wouldn’t be apparent to be people who understandably are only looking out for their own interests. And in reverse, I almost certainly have blind spots about the challenges travel programs face as an advocate of rec participation.
I said above that these tensions between in groups and out groups have always existed, but this feels like a particularly dangerous and fraught time, as in groups define themselves more and more narrowly to hold selfishly onto all the advantages- whether financial, reputational, or something else- leaving more and more people on the outside with nothing.
Such exclusions create reactionary movements. The Donald Trumps and Elon Musks of the world are currently wholly insufferable in their self-satisfaction about holding all the power in our society, but eventually their decisions to benefit only those who share their wealth and identity will start to cause real harm to a lot of other people. And ultimately, that harm will become so great that people will start to work outside of a system they believe to be rigged against them to remedy their exclusion. Even as we deplore murder, you can’t avoid the perception that the United Healthcare killing was a primal scream against a broken health care system that excludes too many. The more that people are excluded, the more these things will happen.
Look for that fire to burn brightly when it comes to housing as well. Communities have set up exclusionary zoning restrictions to deny the opportunities to others that they enjoy. Their intention is not to exclude, but to protect the benefits of those who are already included. But these decisions have repercussions that reverberate, from obscene housing prices to growing homelessness. Eventually the people who can’t afford homes through no fault of their own are going to revolt against the land-owning class that sets these exclusionary rules.
Part of my identity has always been railing against exclusion, and particularly unfair exclusion. It makes my blood boil that talentless, utterly reprehensible nepo babies like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., despite horrendous grades and multiple arrests, are welcomed with open arms into elite institutions of higher learning and eventually into positions of significant leadership. What a warped way to define the in group! But I have to acknowledge that my instinct to rail against exclusion was based on my own exclusion from the institutions that welcomed Kennedy when I believed I had a right to be there. (Using the meritocracy to measure in groups versus out groups is a debate for another day.)
We should be looking to build the best results for the greatest number of people regardless of what effect it has on us. Krishnan defines this as the standard conception of moral progress as popularized by philosophers like Peter Singer. Let’s build baseball programs that give opportunity to everyone. Let’s not police who can or can’t talk about politics based on identity. Let’s not lecture and scold and gossip about people until we drive them out of our potentially broad-based coalition.
The concept of the “veil of ignorance,” first developed by political philosopher John Rawls, is instructive. It teaches us to consider what the best result would be if we didn’t understand our own individual circumstances. That requires a higher plane of dispassionate reasoning, and I’m not sure we can get there right now in these emotionally charged times, but every step in that direction would be a positive one. Would building more affordable housing be better for society, even if it didn’t benefit me specifically? Would requiring travel players to participate in the rec program make the overall baseball program stronger and also benefit the long term health of the sport, even if it inconveniences me? Would welcoming people who don’t share my beliefs or friends into a broader coalition help to make the world a better place, even if it forced me to withdraw my personal grievances? Making identity preeminent would seem a lot less reasonable if you engaged in this thought experiment and had no idea what your own identity was.
Let’s also look for points of solidarity, the things that bring us together and include the most people, rather than excluding them. We should value efforts to include everyone, even as we understand that finite resources won’t always make total inclusion possible and tough choices will need to be made. Excluding people based on their identity is always wrong, regardless of what that identity might be.
If we don’t act soon to become truly inclusive, the reactionary movements will only grow. People will name their villains, and sometimes they will be right and sometimes they will be wrong. But when people don’t trust the institutions that guide society to be fair about arbitrating winners and losers, the losers will rise up and reject those rules. And I fear we aren’t far away from that.
As Krishnan notes, while some look forward to a world where there are no more in groups or out groups, “the real lesson . . . may be that we’re just not built that way.”
But that negative note isn’t the right one to end on. Instead, I return to my post from just before the election. I was on the losing end in that election, and I feel more excluded from the political in group than at any time in my life. The easy thing to do is hate and plot your own exclusion of members of those in groups when you have power. That’s exactly what men like Trump and Musk do. Instead, I am going to continue trying to be better about loving everyone and finding the good in them, even if they’ve excluded me, either by choice or by circumstance. It might not change the world, but it might just heal my soul.
