How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself

There are Enemies, and then there are Cowards.

Enemy, Coward, Debatable. (Photo: Getty)

Tapes of Richard Nixon in the White House reveal that, two years after launching the “War on Drugs” in 1971, he said to aides that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.” Nevertheless, it would take another 50 years to begin undoing the damage that was done by the harsh criminalization of marijuana that Nixon had launched. He, of course, never said publicly while he was president that his approach might have been a mistake.

In 1996, Bill Clinton, an Ivy League-educated cosmopolitan who doubtless had many gay friends, signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned same-sex marriage. Barack Obama, another cosmopolitan, Ivy League-educated liberal, said when he was running for state Senate in Illinois in 1999 that he supported legalizing gay marriage. In 2004, when he ran for US Senate, he changed his mind, saying that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. In subsequent years, though still opposing gay marriage, he says publicly that his thoughts on the issue are “evolving.” In 2012, he finally comes out in support of the right to gay marriage. The main thing that actually evolved over that time was the polls.

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The summer of 2024 was the hottest one on record. Last week, a paper published by an international team of scientists said that unless we rapidly bring down our use of fossil fuels, billions of people on earth will be pushed outside of the range of safe and sustainable living standards by 2050. Kamala Harris, a well-educated liberal, knows this. When she ran for president in 2020, she supported the Green New Deal. But now, as she runs for president, she has come out in support of fracking. Pennsylvania is a swing state.

These are just a few examples of a phenomenon that you can find in every single presidential administration, and, indeed, at all levels of elected politics: Officials doing things that they know are bad or wrong, because those things will benefit them politically. These are not little white lies. These are demonstrations of the fact that for elected leaders, everything is on the table to be traded away. Nixon traded away the freedom of thousands of people, who he was happy to throw in prison in order to appear tough on crime. Clinton and Obama traded away a basic human right for a marginalized minority, because the consensus of public opinion at the time was in favor of oppressing that group. Harris will trade away an opportunity to treat the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves—to demonstrate the political courage that will be necessary to mitigate vast destruction of living standards for billions of future humans—in order to cater to a narrow band of voters in a single state. All of these presidents or potential presidents are doing things that they know are morally wrong, that they know will cause widespread harm, because doing otherwise would be, at a particular moment, politically unpopular. These decisions have caused and will cause significant harm to significant numbers of real people. Such behavior is cynically taken for granted by many voters, but it is good to look it squarely in the face.

Some people expect politicians to be heroes, and treat them as such. They pick a team, and they embrace a candidate, and they fawn over them, and idealize them, and treat them in the way that fans treat celebrities, or that medieval peasants treated kings. Not only is this unhealthy for the fabric of our civic society; it is unrealistic. You cannot be a fully moral person and be elected president of the United States. They all oversee awful things. John F. Kennedy, the most celebrity-esque president of the 20th century, perpetuated a Cold War that brutally oppressed and murdered peasants across the world. Barack Obama, his 21st century counterpart, was drone striking faceless foreigners in the name of American imperialism, when he was not smiling his way through the act of stabbing his gay and lesbian friends in the back. You can make your own list for every president.

I am bringing this up because, every election year, millions of politically concerned Americans struggle with this cognitive dissonance. People want heroes as leaders, but you must swallow an enormous dose of bullshit in order to fawn over a major party presidential candidate. Typically, the way that we deal with this is to ignore and wave away the bad things that our preferred candidates do. People have a hard time accepting the fact that they will be voting for someone who will certainly do evil things. What does that say about us, the voters? Others deal with this by deciding not to vote or to voting for purist protest candidates, which, in our unfortunate two party system, effectively helps the candidate furthest from their own preferences. “Everything is fine!” some say, putting on blinders. “I can’t possibly support this candidate’s position on XYZ,” others say, maintaining their own sense of morality while, in the material world, helping to elect the worst possible person. Both of these choices are flawed. Yet we all find ourselves here, over and over. What to do?

Bipartisan accomplishment.

Untangling this ethical knot is, I think, a matter of perspective. It comes down to the way that you think of what politics is. For the most part, it is wrong to think of elections as contests between “good” and “bad” candidates. With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests. Embrace the idea that we are simply pushing to elect the cowards, rather than the enemies. Why? Because the true work of political action is not to identify idealized superheroes to run for office. It is, instead, to create the conditions in the world that make it safe for the cowards to vote the right way.

Under this framework, you can set aside the tedious feelings of disappointment that come with holding moral views while also supporting any politician. Will your favorite candidate do something bad? Almost certainly. After all, they are cowards. The onus is on us to give the cowards a soft path to the moral choice. The education necessary to equip citizens with the facts; the persuasion necessary to move public opinion to the right place; the organizing necessary to mobilize people to fight for the right thing. These things are the substance of “politics.” Elections can be seen as just another organizing task, one in an endless procession of efforts necessary to arrange the chess pieces of power in a way that will, eventually, produce the righteous outcome. If Kamala Harris, the coward in this particular presidential race, is too scared to use her platform to boldly lead America to a sustainable climate future, it is an indication that all of us who understand the urgency of this issue must continue to educate and persuade and organize the people of this country until the coward feels safe standing in the correct place. This is true for every issue, and for every election. This is a perspective that describes politics as it actually functions, while allowing you to avoid falling into an overwhelming sense of cynicism that will accomplish nothing except ceding the terrain to your enemies.

Let me hasten to add that this way of thinking about politics is not meant to let politicians off the hook. I do not deny that politicians have agency; I just know, from experience, that the vast majority of them will behave, to some degree, as cowards, rather than as heroes, and that it is therefore most useful to view them in that way if your concern is to try to actually accomplish things. I can think of a small number of elected officials who exhibit true moral courage while fighting for their beliefs even when they are unpopular. I can think of a much larger group of politicians who may think of themselves as good people and who love their families and volunteer in their communities and are nice neighbors and who espouse good solid Democratic Party values and who probably try to do the right thing when they can but who are willing to make morally horrific compromises if they think it will make it easier for them to win elections. This is, in fact, Most Democrats. This is how, for example, Senators who maybe you have really liked and admired in certain situations, who maybe have come to your picket line and said something nice to you at some event and supported your pet community project, will acquiesce to helping Israel blow up thousands of children with our bombs. That is the politically easier path for them right now.

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You do not need to allow this glaring inconsistency in their approach to human rights to paralyze you, as you try to assess them. Nor do you need to deny that this contradiction exists. You just need to understand that they are cowards. The willingness to overlook certain morally indefensible things is something that most people accept, in their own hearts, when they go into electoral politics. If there is a hell, I expect that many well-liked and popular Democratic politicians will end up there. But here in the material world, we are trying to achieve tangible things. The cowards, unlike the enemies, can be moved into the right place. That is why we vote for them, when faced with the choice of the two.

In general, it is better to think of even the politicians on your own side not as role models to be admired but rather as basically disreputable figures who are necessary to deal with but who should always be looked down upon and forced to prove, through action, that they are not pieces of shit.

So cease your valorization of political candidates, and cease also your tortured moral struggle over “supporting” a candidate who has done something awful. The first feeling leaves with an illusion about the world, and the second leaves you unable to act effectively to bring about the world we need. Accept that all we will get from the next election is someone who can be made to do the right thing under pressure, rather than someone committed to doing the wrong thing no matter what. There are many heroes in this world, and very few of them are politicians. Our job is to get so strong and organized that the cowards will have no choice but to come along with us. The real action in politics is not in Washington. It is right where you are.

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Related reading: Why Would Dick Cheney Endorse Kamala Harris?; Remaking the Coalition; The End of Liberal Institutionalism; Adult Babies.

This Thursday, at 7:30 pm at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn, I’ll be in conversation with the author Brigid Schulte about her labor-esque new book, “Over Work.” Later this month, I have three upcoming events about my own book about the labor movement, “The Hammer.” I would love to see you all there. Those events are:

• Wednesday, September 25: St. Augustine, Florida. I’ll be speaking at Flagler College at the Ringhaver/ Gamache-Kroger Theatre at 7 pm.

• Thursday, September 26: Gainesville, Florida. At The Lynx Books at 6 pm. In conversation with labor activist Candi Churchill. Event link here.

• Sunday, September 29: Brooklyn, NY. At the Brooklyn Book Festival—3 pm at 250 Joralemon Street. With Astra Taylor, Deepak Bhargava, and Max Alvarez. Event link here.

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