The Power of the Shrug

A certain amount of hand-wringing and lashing out is understandable after a set of election results as awful as the results Americans got in 2016. I do not blame people at all for being furious, or depressed, or bewildered.

I do want to ask left-wing people to stop lashing out at our political allies. I’ve seen articles yelling at people for wearing safety pins, yelling at people for supporting Bernie Sanders, yelling at people for brainstorming ways to get white working-class voters to vote for Democrats, yelling at people for engaging in peaceful protests, yelling at people for considering violent protests…and it’s ridiculous. Enough. We’re on the same team. If you’re angry about Trump’s election and you’re sincerely trying to either help Trump’s victims or limit Trump’s power, then you’re on my team.

If you’ve lost your cool and you want to vent your anger by yelling at Republicans, fine. If you have a polite, concrete request that you want to make of another left-wing group, like “please don’t serve in a Trump administration” or “please don’t tell me everything will be OK,” fine. But stop yelling at other progressives as if progressives were the problem. No matter how disappointed you are in your allies, we still have so much more in common with each other than we do with Trump, and we have so much power to lose by shredding the goodwill that’s internal to the progressive alliance.

We as a country and as a political movement are in for a tremendous amount of shit. There will be endless outrages to be concerned about, fight back against, publicize, and cope with. We do not have the time or the energy to elevate intra-party conflicts into additional sources of outrage. Priorities are like hands: anyone who tells you they have more than a couple is either crazy or lying. Right now, the left’s priority needs to be containing and minimizing Trump, not feuding for control of the left’s own internal messaging. We do not control the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, or the state legislatures. There is no guarantee that we will control any of those bodies in two years, either. We are a small voice right now. If we waste any significant part of that voice on yelling at ourselves, we will not be able to make any contribution at all to the national discourse.

So when another left-winger says something that strikes you as stupid, or misguided, or offensive, or selfish, or inadequate, ask yourself: is my ally’s speech more of a problem than Trump’s latest press release? If not, consider shrugging. Don’t correct, don’t condemn, don’t educate — just shrug. We do not have to agree with each other in order to serve our country. We just have to get out of each other’s way.