Cutting Contact With Democracy

The time has come for a much clearer separation of the personal from the political.

If you frequent liberal online spaces I’m sure you’ve seen the above cartoon.  A woman in blue and a man in red embrace.  To the woman’s left stands a trans person, a gay person, and a black person, while on the man’s right stands a Confederate Flag-wearing gun nut, a Klansman, and a police officer.  The moral equivalence of law enforcement with the Confederacy and the KKK harkens back to the height of “Defund the Police” mania of 2020 when I first saw the meme posted.  But it has recently come back with a vengeance during the fallout after November 5th, when Democrats took to Facebook to declare their intention to cut off all contact with friends, family, and acquaintances who cast their vote for a second Trump presidency.  The cartoon answers the hypothetical question “Can’t We Just All Be Friends?” with an expletive-spiked “No.”  While memes are always provocatively reductionistic, the “Can’t We All Just Be Friends?” cartoon accurately captures the spirit of a growing movement by liberals to sever personal contacts as a form of political activism.

It is no surprise that liberals would regard ending personal relationships as sound political action in response to a devastating Trump victory.  A defining feature that marks the shift away from the Old Left in the 1960s is the New Left’s embrace of the mantra “the personal is political.”  While that mantra may have its roots in Second Wave Feminism (the phrase gained traction after being used as the title of a 1970 essay by Carol Hanish) it has become a broader organizing principle of modern liberal politics that emphasizes the importance of the individual over the collectivist focus of the Old Left.  From the Soviet repression of the Prague Spring to the nightmarish fanaticism of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the old boy’s club of union bosses and machine politicians dominating the post-war Democratic Party, the Baby Boomers who led the New Left had good reasons to fear the oppressive collectivism of the Old Left and recenter political action around the interests of the individual.  The successes of the Women’s Liberation Movement, advancements in LGBTQ rights, and the ability of the Democratic Party to expand its appeal to more educated and affluent classes affirmed the soundness of a strategy that equated the personal with the political.  The victory of Barack Obama in 2008, seemingly confirmed the belief that as the electorate became younger, more diverse, and more educated, liberal hegemony was guaranteed without any appeal to the impersonal collectivism of traditional Leftism.  

Trump’s victory on November 5th, fueled in part by a rightward shift in Gen Z voters and racial minorities, casts a dark shadow on the assurance that all liberalism needs to prevail is for the electorate to become younger and less white.  While grappling with this depressing realization, liberals have doubled down on the mantra of “the personal is political,” using the threat of cutting contact with personal relations as punishment for unsavory political choices.  But how effective will this punitive use of “the personal is political” strategy be at a time when Trump voters outnumber those who voted against him?  

The personal and the political are undoubtedly deeply interconnected, but they are not one and the same.  Political decisions can impact us on the most personal level, a fact readily attestable by women suffering miscarriages in Texas, the first transgender Congresswoman hoping to use a gender-affirming bathroom in the Capitol building, or a migrant family facing deportation from their home.  But even though they are intertwined the personal and political are conceptually different.  What is personal is by definition specific to an individual while the political involves combining the will of multitudes to shape the contours of power in society at large.  Saying the “personal is political” is like saying “the particular is the general.”  Of course, we cannot have the general without a multitude of particulars and we cannot define something as particular without being able to contrast it with a broader category defined as general.  This redefinition and deconstruction of concepts can make for an interesting philosophical exercise.  But when it comes to the personal and political the inability of liberals to meaningfully differentiate the two concepts may have devastating consequences for mobilizing the collective action needed to thwart Trump’s agenda.

Let’s return to the simplified world of the “Can’t We All Just be Friends?” meme to ponder the political consequences of the blue-dress liberal lady cutting all personal contact with the red-shirt Republican guy.  In the cartoon, this liberal woman is literally standing between at-risk minorities and menacing forces of hate.  If she severs the last social link between the left and right, is there any hope that those on the right could empathize with the trans, gay, and black figures on the left?  After being ostracized by his last liberal friend, how do we expect the Republican guy to overcome his own prejudices let alone gain the courage and knowledge to moderate more dangerous elements of the right?   To make matters worse, with law enforcement now defined as the enemy, who will wield the coercive power needed to protect vulnerable minorities from extra-legal violence?  By prioritizing the ideological purity of her social circle, the woman in blue has shrunken her political influence and thereby increased the vulnerability of the people she thinks she is protecting.  Is cutting contact with Trump voters really political activism at all or is it rather an act of political surrender, a retreat to liberal safe spaces, cleansing our personal lives of those we might be able to bring back into political alliance once they realize the hollowness of Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again?

All things being equal, purging and shrinking our personal network weakens our ability to project political power.  But in saying that severing cross-party social connections weakens our political influence I am not suggesting people should suffer undue personal trauma to advance a broader ideological agenda.  Separating the personal from the political allows us to more clearly weigh the political costs of cutting contact against the personal gains of ending toxic relationships.  Women should not have to interact with men declaring “Your body, my choice,” even in online spaces.  A transgender person might be better off skipping Thanksgiving rather than endure dead-naming and mockery of their pronouns by a right-wing uncle.  A black academic subjected to relentless racist trolling on the social media hellscape Elon Musk calls X may be perfectly justified in taking his talents to the liberal-friendly Blue Sky platform.  The personal gains from ending these relationships might dwarf the political cost of shrinking one’s sphere of influence, especially if the psychic energy devoted to these toxic interactions can be channeled toward more open minds across the ideological divide.  But this trade-off should not obscure the underlying truth that our personal well-being and our political projects are distinct, often with contradictory and competing interests.  By pushing against the liberal truism “the personal is political,” the left can become more psychologically resilient, knowing that they can engage in political struggle but retreat when necessary to protect their personal lives.  

Separating the personal from the political should also give the left a better appreciation of how depersonalization served as a driving force in liberation politics over the past 250 years.  Ben Franklin used the image of a severed snake to encourage colonists to set aside their personal and cultural differences to “Join or Die” in a fight against Great Britain.  The French Revolution drew strength from dissolving the personal, regional, and feudal differences created by the Ancien Regime, reshaping the people under one common identity of “citizen.”  The Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement made their greatest gains when racial and personal distinctions were deemphasized and the people marched arm in arm for a greater good.  The progress that the left craves has never happened without breaking down our personal and cultural differences to fight for a greater collective concept like “the Republic,” “the People,” or “the Proletariat.”  The left only wins when the political allows us to transcend the personal by struggling together for something greater and more enduring than our mortal, individual selves.  

“Politics is tough,” Donald Trump told Joe Biden during their November 13th meet-up at the White House.  Biden congratulated Trump on his victory, a surreal display of chumminess given the fact that the Democrats had lost an election they billed as a “Battle for the Soul of the Nation.”  I hate to admit it, but in this case, Donald Trump is right. Politics is a tough business.  It’s tough to knock on doors for a Democratic candidate and to have people scream “baby killer” at you with no idea of who you are as a person.  It’s tough to engage in a heated political debate at a Town Hall meeting with someone you might see in the CVS Pharmacy line the next day.  But the fact that politics is tough is all the more reason why the left must re-inscribe lines of separation between the personal and the political.  Liberals viewing every element of their personal lives as having political weight and regarding every political issue from a personal perspective has resulted in a fragile and fragmented Democratic alliance that finds itself out of power in all three branches of the federal government.  We don’t have to endure personal harm for political ends and we don’t have to all be friends with the most toxic elements of the MAGA movement.  But if liberals continue to confuse cutting personal contacts with a strategy of political action it will be a long time before the Democrats ever return to power.